Words

I got to thinking the other day while reading Robert Bellah's essay, "Communion in a Scientific Age," in the current Commonweal. Actually, I've been thinking these thoughts from the first time I started asking questions.

Bellah's first two words were "Charles Taylor." I tried to read his masterpiece earlier this year, A Secular Age, but it was over my head. I couldn't understand the words. Even as Jews and Gentiles in the middle of the first century couldn't understand the words Jesus had spoken before he died.

For example, in the patriarchal society of the middle east, Jesus spoke of God as "Father." In a matriarchal society, he would probably have used "Mother." The word "Son" was attributed to him. But, oddly, no human figure's name was given to the Paraclete. That didn't bother the first theologians who created a new word "Trinity", three persons (a human term) "Father, Son, and Holy Ghost," omitting the obvious that ghosts are not human persons. Later, that term was upgraded to "Spirit."

What the poor, bedeviled – not beangeled? – thinkers and writers who were spreading the Good News had to do was take the words of God become Man and fit them into the vocabulary of the languages of their own times. The only words they knew then. They had never heard secular words like protons, neutrons, quarks, bosons or Large Hadron Colliders.

As far as I know, they had never heard or read the word "Trinity" either. They most likely made that one up as a name for a Three-in-One God. Could have better left it alone, but they had to make sure that Jesus was Good News as God Incarnate, here on this earth, walking, talking, living, dying, and not some remote and pagan god like Zeus or Jupiter from the literature written in Greek and Latin. Why they just didn't upgrade the God of the Old Testament is a mystery, but maybe because that God wasn't Three. Just One. Which might have meant that Jesus was not God, nor was the Paraclete either.

Theology took off real quick then. And as the early Church moved west toward the rim of the Mediterranean Basin, into Egypt and Greece, Rome and Lyons, it used words from Greek and Latin culture more and more often, readily, quickly, and built up a cohesive library which poured forth doctrine and dogma. Power took over quickly, too, when Presbyters and Elders moved up a notch to Priests and Bishops. And took charge. The people, who could neither write nor read paid heed. And believed. The words.

Over in the Orient, Far and Near East, religious, a/k/a spiritual minded leaders were using words from their culture to share what their meditations had given them of that which is greater than themselves: Nirvana, Satori, Emptiness. They differed from the Middle Easterns and the Westerns, tied down in Latin and Greek, because their heritage was Chinese, Japanese, Hindu, Tibetan, the polyglots of Asia. And their "Greater-than-Mere-Humans" were neither persons nor things nor objects nor space nor anything at all. Just Emptiness. For which there were no words, other than "Nothing", i.e. "No-thing."

Words. The bugaboo of us modern men and women, still questing, as did our ancestors two thousand years ago. A couple of words that foment wars are not considered holy words, and those who use them are anti-religion, anti-Church, anti-Catholic. "Modernism" and "Secularism." "Modern", of course, means what is going on around us right now, as opposed to 50 or 100 or 500 or 1000 or 2000 years ago. And if you go back into one of those years, then what was happening was also "Modern." Modernism and Secularism (synonymous, I think so} have always been condemned by Rome, every single year over the past two thousand or so. The words themselves trigger passions in hierarchs: fear, dread, fierce, unrelenting anger, terrorism.

"Secularism" gets the same treatment, considered as it is by the same hierarchs as just a synonym for "Modernism," except it has a more up to date, worldly sort of flavor to it. It's bad, though, because both "Modernism" and "Secularism" are anti-Catholic, just as Catholicism itself was anti-Greek mythology and anti-Roman pantheons. Judaism was barely mentioned, some sort of linkage admitted, as it were, because Jesus' mother was a Jew. In the minds of hierarchs and their thinkers and writers, the theologians, whatever hindered the spreading of The Good News was automatically heretical and had to be suppressed, condemned, and banned, not even to be spoken or written, and those who spoke or wrote it were to be burned. Religion is no touchy-feely way of thinking and writing and maintaining absolute control.

These words we use as Catholics have always bothered me in both their denotation and connotation. Particularly because there is such a vast difference between what a Catholic Churchy word denotes in a dictionary and what it connotes to a Pope or Cardinal or Bishop. I grew up memorizing them, paul-parroting them back to nuns and parish priests, earning proud pats on my head, and a bishop's slap on my cheek when I was 12.

I wasn't smart. I just knew the right words, even if I had no idea what they meant. Dad was my father. He was no God. Just a great guy, a little tough on discipline, pretty gushy when emotional, like when I'd get a reading prize in the sixth grade, or make a good play in little kid's touch football. And he protected us, threatening to beat up the man next door who swung a rake at my little brother who had spit at him. Dad was our father. God was not. But we said over and over and over, "Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name . . ." Even as kids, we knew were imagining something, made up by somebody else with more creative imaginations than ours.

So, we gave God a beard, a white one because he was obviously ancient, not just old, and always pictured him sitting down on a throne. God never walked or ran or jumped up and down. He just sat there, smiling, frowning at times, always hallowed. We avoided the God of the Old Testament. He was a mean and angry one. Favorite word was "smote."

We knew, of course, even as kids, that we were making it all up and we used to wonder how come our parents and uncles and aunts were swallowing all the malarkey. It was so funny to see Dad kowtow to a young parish priest, twenty years younger than he and call him "Father." Weird. I think that's why we never called our fathers "Father." They were always "Dad," sometimes "Pop," casually, "My old man." God, though, was always, relentlessly, "Our Father, who art in ....."

In the seminary, I hit three other words: Poverty, Chastity, Obedience. The names of the three vows that constituted us as religious beings instead of human beings, clergy not laity. I wondered then, as I do now, why those three? Of all the possible ones, why those three? Why not Decency, Compassion, Forgiveness, or Consistency, Courtesy, Courage, or maybe the old favorites, Faith, Hope and Love? Those last three were super special, you see, not just ordinary virtues, but "The Three Theological Virtues." Never saw a Fourth, or more than Three, I think. Creative theology at work with words. What it meant, we were taught later when we could understand grown-up definitions, was that Faith, Hope and Love were gifts given by God. No Pope or Cardinal or Bishop could bestow even a smidgeon of any one of them. Though they commanded land demanded them all the time, as if they were the products of intellectual assent and will power. Weird logic there in that theologic.

I think what bugged me was: How come poverty is better than living comfortably, not hoarding, but earning and sharing? How come chastity is better than holding hands with your girl friend and, daringly, kissing her – on the cheek – after the movies? When we found out how babies are born, we wondered why sexual intercourse was so horrible, lowly, dirty, inhuman, especially when chastity was so golden and pure and absolutely so high it was out of reach, once loins began responding and questing.

As for Obedience, well that one was simple. The best way to get, enforce and keep control, without police, military, imprisonment, execution, was by demanding obedience. What a neat trick. Just a vow. And everybody lies down and rolls over and sits up. On command. And did the hierarchs and religious superiors milk that vow of Obedience, while letting Poverty and Chastity slide along by themselves, almost like forgotten neighbors or troublesome children. Words. Clever use of words. No questions allowed.

There is a word in and of our times which I really like: Secularism. That's my time, my home, my job, my play, my neighborhood, my country, my world. It is not so terribly wrong about being human in a human's world. We aren't angels out in space, heavenly space. We are autochthons, born of a mother and a father, out of the earth, in one particular place, here. And what is so beautiful is that God made it so. God loves secularism. So do I.

And that's how Bellah helped me understand a little more clearly Charles Taylor's A Secular World. Bellah said that Secularism is not the fall and decline of Rome, the end of the Church, the death of religion. It is a change in conditions in which we are to find new words for the ineffable, a modern and secular way of talking about the quest that is in us, whether we are religious or secular.

God may be human. God might be a being. God might be a thing. God might be energy. God might be nothing. God might be in a Black Hole, might even be a Black Hole. God might be a subatomic particle. One of the bosons scientist postulate must exist, though not yet caught and seen and measured, is the "Higgs Boson."

Guess what science has given it for a nickname. "The God Particle." Now, there's a secular use of words. The Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator, went online earlier this month to smash particles in an imitation of the Big Bang, and thus discover the Higgs boson. Think they'll discover God?

Hierarchs and Theologians were terrified at the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Library, so unbelievably fearful that the applecart of theological dogma and doctrine was about to be overturned. They are just as terrified now as the worst enemy Rome has ever met is out to discover the God Particle. And that enemy is science.

Except, science is no enemy. It is the best friend we have. Better, many think, than any or all of the religions put together. Science doesn't wear blinders or rosy-colored glasses with which to view and inspect the modern, secular world around it. It faces our world squarely, eyes wide open, minds equally open and receptive, and keeps on questing. Scientists use minds steeped in mathematics, philosophy, chemistry and physics and biology and astronomy and working machines like Hubble telescopes and Hadron Colliders. And when they find something new in this secular world of ours, they give it a name, not an old Greek or Latin word, but a new kind of word like "boson," "quark," "expanding universe," "subatomic particle," "space-time continuum," or a homey buzz word like "Big Bang."

At my current age, it's easy to accept and live by the Zen way of seeing and doing and being. Kind of get tired reading and studying and pondering and trying to figure things out, and worse trying to write about it all, instead of just sitting there and being still. The words of theology are but limping, oh! such human attempts at discovering God, when down deep in our souls we know simply and clearly that the spiritual quest within us is outside scriptures, does not depend on words, is a direct pointing at being human, seeing into our own nature and thus acquiring wisdom.

We know this in our mind, our body, our heart, our gut. It is beyond words.

So are we.

And so is God.

With a slight difference.

God, you see, has no father or mother.

 

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