Tag: Word

The Light Coming Into the World

Photo: David Beatz, Unsplash

The true light that enlightens every man was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world knew him not. — John 1: 9, 10

God’s entry into the world in the Gospel of John begins with two powerful metaphors: the Word and light. The author plays with these metaphors, turning them this way and that, like a craftsman looking to join two pieces of wood with mortise and tenon rather than nails and glue.

Words, the building blocks of meaning, stack up behind us in the long histories we come from, and we pull them down to make anything out of something, a trick we’ve perfected over eons. But the original magician of words is He who creates something out of nothing with the Word alone, who morphs an idea into action and the ineffable into flesh.

The Word, according to John, becomes flesh and lives among us. The Word lives among us in grace and truth; we see his glory, the glory of God reflected somehow through the lens of a human being, a human being in whom all the fulness of God dwells. This is a mystery too deep for us, a treasure we leave buried in our field for a later time.

As Lewis Carroll wrote in Through the Looking Glass, “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”

Does the Word mean what we want it (Him) to mean? Is it a screen upon which we project whatever image fits our mood? Or is this metaphor one so rich in variant meanings that it becomes — in the way Paul characterized himself — “all things to all people”?

We read these verses of John’s gospel, especially within this Christmas hour, as we might read the letter of a relative who, long ago, writes to a friend about her love for another. We are witness to this love through her words. We ask ourselves if ‘glory’ could be a form of love. The letter falls into its remembered folds; we follow in a reverie as the traffic of our lives passes blindly before our eyes, but we see only what we are longing for. We see it wordlessly, the Incarnation of Emmanuel, God with us, the Word, logos, become flesh.

In some readings, the Logos is that energy of life which pours through the universe and is expressed within every molecule and sinew. The resonance of that expression — glory compressed into vulnerability — creates a new reality of kenosis, an emptying out and a pouring in of God to birth.

The poet Anne Ridler places birth in the context of Christmas:

To bear new life or learn to live is an exacting joy:

The whole self must waken; you cannot predict the way

It will happen, or master the responses beforehand.

For any birth makes an inconvenient demand;

Like all holy things

It is frequently a nuisance, and its needs never end;

Freedom it brings: We should welcome release

From its long merciless rehearsal of peace.1

That the Word is life and can call forth life is deeply embedded in the Christian tradition. From the creation of the world to the healing of a leper to the awakening of faith in a person, the Word, in the form of Jesus and in the words of Jesus, has been the content of character for those who have awakened through the Spirit.

***

For many people, Christmas is a memory formed of light. In the deepest, darkest, engulfing days of the year, we raise our lights and are drawn to them. In our churches, our cathedrals, in our windows, and even around our public squares, the lights go up as in no other time of the year. At Christmas, we are drawn into these overlapping circles of light that show us a way forward, like stepping-stones across a river of light. We are drawn out of our darkness to them because from within our darkness we cannot not see them.

But it remains a question whether the light defines the darkness as all that is not light or if the darkness actively resists the light. Therein lies the mystery of evil and suffering.

“The people who were sitting in darkness saw a great light,” Matthew says, paraphrasing Isaiah. “They were sitting in the land of the shadow of death, and the light dawned on them.” 2 Isaiah’s wording, by contrast, is that the people were ‘walking in darkness,’ stumbling their way toward the light of dawn. Matthew’s people are no longer even walking; they’ve given up. They’re huddled in darkness in a country that lies under the shadow of death.

We may feel this way too. The darkness comes for us in different guises, but it comes for us all. It may come in a diagnosis of cancer, or the death of a loved one at the hands of a drunk driver or the pitiless drip of poverty and the daily gusts of discrimination and racism. At Christmas, for those who are alone, the darkness can seem impenetrable and its weight all the heavier for all the brightness seen in other people’s windows.

W. H. Auden concludes his famous poem, For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, written soon after he converted to the Anglican faith, with these lines.

He is the Way.

Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness;

You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures.

He is the Truth.

Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety;

You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.

He is the Life.

Love Him in the World of the Flesh;

And at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy.

God can be found, suggests Auden, in the Land of Unlikeness, in the Kingdom of Anxiety, and even in the World of the Flesh. Roger Housden, whose For Lovers of God Everywhere, quotes this excerpt of Auden’s, muses that in the midst of the glitter and gifts of a commercial Xmas it may be difficult to perceive the redemption of the Incarnation, but in the “confusing and uncertain world we live in from day to day . . . in the drab period of the year that follows” Christmas, we find the light we need.

Can we sing the Lord’s song in the dark times as well as the light? We may not have the words, but the Incarnation means we can sing, even if only about the dark times.

But the dawn comes! It comes whether we are walking toward it or whether we can no longer walk or even remember what the dawn looks like. Christmas, with all its lights, reminds us that the dawn comes with power that is beyond our imagination. It is a gift from the Father of lights, the one in whom we may trust, against all odds.

A birth in the midst of death and dark forces is a tragic commonplace in our world, but in this wildly improbable tale, this Christmas story of God the Word becoming Light and Life in a manger, there is a touchstone for millions. Yet, the gospel storyteller reminds us that He who is Light shines on in the darkness and the darkness will never eclipse it — a message for all of us who find ourselves in a country shadowed by death.

  1. Ridler, Anne. “Christmas and the Common Birth.” ↩
  2. Mt. 4:16, The Four Gospels, Richmond Lattimore, translator. ↩

The Worlds We Make

WorldsDawn:lydia-shi-735079-unsplash

We can have words without a world but no world without words or other symbols. — Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking

The first line of the Dhammapada, a collection of the Buddha’s sayings, is, “All that we are is the result of what we have thought.” With that, the Buddha signals that thought precedes action and mind shapes character. This is in common with the words of another sage: “As a man thinketh, so is he (Proverbs 23:7),” a maxim which suggests in its context to beware of the stingy who insincerely invite one to share a meal. They are not to be trusted, for the hidden thought will be exposed in the interplay between the two.

So, I am here quoting those who once lived upon this earth, people we know only through their words. The gulf that lies between the utterance of those words in time and where we stand today is not just about the millennia that have passed between us, but about the worlds those words brought into being and the worlds that arise when we read them today. Are they the same worlds?

We create worlds through our words, says Nelson Goodman, in Ways of Worldmaking. In a few pages of closely reasoned arguments, Goodman shows that the frames of reference we construct to describe what we experience are systems of description; they are not that which is being described. We never truly apprehend the object of our experience, only the description we construct to talk about it.

An example: If we say, “The sun always moves,” and “The sun never moves,” both statements are equally true and equally at odds with one another. Goodman asks if these statements describe different worlds— whether there are “as many different worlds as there are such mutually exclusive truths?” No, rather we make accommodation by saying that under this frame of reference this statement is true and with another frame of reference the other statement is true. “Our universe, so to speak,” says Goodman, “consists of these ways rather than of a world or of worlds.”

I find this both invigorating and disconcerting. In a way, Goodman is playing games—language games—to make a point: there is no irrefutable foundation for all truth, only descriptions that are more or less right for their context. The fact that we construct these descriptions out of what we find in anthropology, physics, psychology, literature, philosophy, theology, and other disciplines, means that we are constantly remaking our worlds of thought. “Worldmaking as we know it,” says Goodman, “always starts from worlds already on hand; the making is a remaking.”

***

Here are some materials at hand that we can make a story out of, a description of something and someone that matters a great deal to us.

Jesus is crucified about 33 CE and the first gospel, generally thought to be Mark’s gospel, is written about 70 CE. That is a gap of about 40 years—a whole generation—without any written source of Jesus’ life. The people who gathered each week in small groups to remember the Lord were those who had had first-hand knowledge of Jesus. The boy who gave over the loaves and fishes that Jesus fed five thousand people with would have been a man with children and grandchildren of his own. Lazarus, raised from the tomb and given a second life, would have passed on by this time. The disciples, men with families when Jesus chose them, would have grown old and scattered, some to Rome, others staying in Jerusalem, Thomas (as legend has it) making his way to India to establish a Christian community, and Philip probably down in Ethiopia. All of these people lived and died on the stories that were told and retold about Jesus, as they met together in upper rooms, sometimes in a wealthy person’s home, sometimes on the run, often over a meal with song and celebration. They were people, quite literally, of the word, the Word that came and lived amongst them.

Think of the stories they told, the anecdotes tenderly passed down through the family chain like pearls of great value. From the sayings of Jesus to the signs he performed to the parables he told, these narratives sustained these groups through their days and eventually formed the web of Mark’s gospel.

In his breathless and rustic style, the author of Mark’s gospel creates a narrative—a world!—that Matthew and Luke break down to use in the remaking of their individual worlds. Later, around 90-100 CE, comes John’s gospel, a parallel universe to the previous gospels, converging at points, but drawing its own course through its orbit. It closes with these tantalizing words:

“But there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.”

These gospels are the Gospel, the good news about Jesus who came into the world and “the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him (John 1: 10).”

***

We read these words today, millennia away from their creation, in the awareness that the bone and sinew, words and meaning of their author and the person of which he wrote come down to language and symbols, marks on paper or pixels on a screen. Despite the billions of words devoted to this Jesus, the stories that could be told have no end because these words, having been written, continue to produce new stories in the strength that “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it (John 1:5).”

Instead, we may become accustomed to these stories to the extent that we no longer take in their meaning. Our eyes pass over the letters, we register the shape of the words as we would the silhouette of objects whose outlines against the light are familiar only because of the form of their darkness.

“This world, indeed,” notes Goodman, “is the one most often taken as real; for reality in a world, like realism in a picture, is largely a matter of habit.”

“Language can create faith but can’t sustain it,” says Christian Wiman in Ambition and Survival. I’m not so sure. When I read of the Buddha holding up a flower before his gathered disciples and one of them—only one—smiles, and Buddha says the equivalent of “He gets it!,” something in me thrills to that imagined scene. When Jesus begins with “The kingdom of heaven is like . . .,” it’s “Once upon a time” all over again. We’re hardwired for stories: good, bad, mediocre, we pick them up, and turn them over and over in our hands until we find the seam that opens them. From these we fashion a world that we can live in.

“To have faith in a religion, any religion,” continues Wiman, “is to accept at some primary level that its particular language of words and symbols says something true about reality.” That I can agree with.

He goes on: “This doesn’t mean that the words and symbols are reality (that’s fundamentalism), nor that you will ever master those words and symbols well enough to regard reality as some fixed thing. What it does mean, though, . . . is that the only way to deepen your knowledge and experience of ultimate divinity is to deepen your knowledge of the all-too-temporal symbols and language of a particular religion.”

Separated as we are by thousands of years and the innumerable worlds of language and imagination between us and Jesus, these slender figures on our pages are the portals between our worlds. The path to the divine remains, astonishingly, through the darkness and light that is our world.

Photo: Lydia Shi, Unsplash.com

The Light

LightWorld:aziz-acharki-285336

In the beginning was the word, and boy, was it ever a good word!

That word came from the Wordmaker and the Wordmaker was God, and all the words that rose up from the Wordmaker’s mouth did what they were meant to do, and the world sprang into light and that light was the light of the world.

There were times when the light could be seen like lightning from the east to the west and—truth be told—there was one who saw something like light falling from heaven, but no one saw where it plunged into the sea, if it did. It may still be falling far below that line on the horizon where the sea and the sky blur up together.

There came a time when the light burned low, like the light in a cat’s eye, and you’d have to be looking in the right place to notice it. It held there, but then it was flickering and wavering and almost guttering out and I remember in that moment that the one up ahead of us suddenly cried out, “My God, why have you forsaken me!” just as it fizzled and went out with a pfft.

It seemed an eternity in a darkness so absolute you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face—and there was no sound—the words had simply been crushed with a heavy hand across the mouth. Then—glory!—the light curled up and Someone cupped it close in a hand and it rose like a plume, almost perfect, and we held our breath, but it steadied and jumped and suddenly we had our own lights, each of us, above our heads, like a breath of benediction.

And you may be wondering just now why the light of the world is not a torch thrown high showering sparks, or like a pillar of fire by night or—hell, let’s go for the brass ring—why the light of the world is not a towering inferno for all the world to see.

That is a good question.

This is what we’ve pieced together: the light has come into the world to shine in the darkness and it lights up everyone who wants to be lit. No towering inferno, just many little lights flickering through the darkness. They coalesce, move together at times, split into streams, and come back together. Sometimes you’ll see one light way off, bobbing and dipping, and then joined by other lights. And it may be a trick of the eye, but rarely does one light remain alone for long. Light calls to light. Two become one and then many spring up out of the one. These lights are like a good word in due season.

There’s even a song about it with a line that goes:
“I see my light come shining from the west unto the east.
Any day now, any day now,
I shall be released.”

So, let your light shine in the world.

(Photo: Aziz Acharki, Unsplash.com)

Elaborated Spontaneity #2