Prophets with Honor

a sermon delivered at the Annual Convocation of the Brotherhood of St Gregory, at Mt Alvernia, Wappingers Falls NY 

Although Wisdom is but one, she can do all things, and while remaining in herself, she renews all things; in every generation she passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God, and prophets.

In one of the Elizabethan period episodes of Rowan Atkinson’s Blackadder, the principal character, plagued with a personal problem of Shakespearean proportions, sets off to find help. One of his goals is to find a wise-woman, and in that quest he meets one of those annoying gnomes who litter quest stories and add plot elements by giving cryptic directions or posing ridiculous riddles. This particular gnome gives the advice, “Two things must ye know about the wise woman. First, that she is wise. And second, that she is a woman!” Our hero departs with this useless bit of guidance, cursing under his breath.

Well, today we get to hear about not just one, but count ‘em, four wise women. And two things must ye know of Elizabeth, Amelia, Sojourner and Harriet: They were wise, and they were women! More importantly, they were wise, and persistent in their wisdom, in an age when the powers and principalities rarely expected wisdom in women, and regarded their persistence as obstinacy or worse. Some few recognized their gifts in their own time, and today we honor them as prophets.
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One irony with which this presents us is summed up in the reading from Proverbs. Here we have a hymn of praise to Wisdom with a capital W, portrayed as nothing other than a woman. The irony is that this tribute comes from a culture that generally did not honor women, or give them much of a place in the councils of leadership or authority. That same book of Proverbs also goes on and on about that other sort of woman, no better than she should be, the harlot who uses her wiles to trap unwary, foolish men to their destruction. One woman offers wealth and riches and is herself more precious than gold and jewels; the other — well, with the other as the saying goes, You pays your money and you takes your choice. This is, of course, part of the well known male view of womankind as either on the pedestal or in the gutter, a pure virgin or a dirty whore.

In their day, Stanton, Bloomer, Truth and Tubman were seen by many men, and probably some women, as of this latter sort — hussies and harlots, harridans and harpies, sluts and slatterns and slags, skanks and skags, bitches and witches: and isn’t it interesting that English provides us such an array of colorfully nasty names for women — and I challenge you to think of some nice nouns for good women when you have the time — and to reflect on how our language shapes our perception of reality. I don’t know if it is true that the Inuit (The People Formerly Known as Eskimo) have forty words for snow, but English has a huge lexicon of nasty names for women, and precious few nice ones.
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But back to our four prophets: There were some few, of course, who saw these women for their virtues:their persistence in seeking justice, their commitment to the betterment of the world they lived in, and their wisdom. And some would call them prophets.

But what is a prophet, after all; and what is wisdom? I would start with another Shakespearean word, soothsayer, which is someone who predicts the future. That’s one way to understand a prophet — one who can accurately predict what is going to happen. In fact that is the test of a true prophet, given a word from God, recorded in Deuteronomy 18:22: If what the prophet predicts in God’s name comes true, they are a true prophet. If not, not. Simple.

But is the prediction itself always so easy to understand and verify — that is, what is being predicted? You may recall the soothsayer from Julius Caesar, who warned, “Beware the Ides of March!” Beware of the date — or what might happen on that date? This prediction didn’t help poor Julius much, but the soothsayer was proved right, in that always 20/20 hindsight. Successful soothsayers, like the oracles of old, and those annoying gnomes in quest stories, owe part of their retrospective success to giving such general or ambiguous warnings. Because human beings are pattern-seeking critters, seeing castles in clouds and faces in inkblots, you can be considered a true prophet if you cast your prediction as vaguely as the oracles or soothsayers of old.

Or you could use the cynical technique Nikos Kazantzakis described in his novel The Last Temptation of Christ. In the vision in which Jesus comes down from the cross to live an ordinary life, one of the apostles returns home and tells Jesus, “I’ve learned the secret of prophecy! When things are going well, tell people they are going to get bad, and when they are going badly tell them it is going to get better! It always works!” It still works for politicians of every sort.
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But I am less interested in the flim-flam men of old, or of now, when we have such excellent women before us. What I want to stress is that soothsayer and prophet at base mean, not “One who predicts the future,” but “One who speaks the truth.” And there is a lot of wisdom in that, for an accurate assessment of the present is the best way to think about and plan for what is possible in the future. A firm and discerning grasp of the present rules out impossibilities for the future, and allows one to focus on the range of what may be most probable — as that other famous wise guy, Sherlock Holmes, observed, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” A chess master is a master precisely because of the ability to focus on the state of play at each moment, to see only the range of possibilities for the next sequence of moves, eliminating impossibilities to weigh the optimum possible outcome and urge it into the best actual move.

So the real wisdom lies in understanding that the truth — what is — is not just possible, and is never improbable, as strange as it may seem. It just is. And as I’ve often said, Reality is our friend. And engaging with reality, persisting in discernment, asking the questions, searching for answers, knocking at the doors even to wake the sleeping and embarrassed friend (for Reality is sometimes drowsy and often embarrassing, and unknown until known) — these actions of asking, seeking, and persisting in knocking at the door of Reality are the tasks of the wise.
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This is all the more true for those who worship the God who goes by the name The One Who Is, the Great I AM! Those who engage with Reality at its deepest levels, who plumb the depths of Holy Wisdom, become, as Proverbs says, “friends of God and prophets.” We have such friends before us today: Elizabeth, Amelia, Sojourner and Harriet — one of them even known as Truth! You can see their image and read their story in the handy Office app, so I won’t repeat it here. Suffice it to say that they were wise, and they were women — in times and places where few associated those categories.

But they persisted in the quest — not so much as those sought out, but as seekers themselves. And what they sought was justice, charity, equality, and truth. They knocked on the doors of Reality, and a sleepy and reluctant world roused and still rouses itself to respond with like justice, in all charity, and by and for the truth. May God give us strength to do the same, Soli Deo Gloria — to the glory of God alone. In the Name of The One Who Is, whom we know as our Maker, Defender, Redeemer — and Friend.

— Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

Spectrum of Norms and Customs - And Laws

Early morning thoughts led me to thinking about the range of how norms and customs -- and even laws -- might be expressed in adjectives. This is what came to mind:

Forbidden
Deprecated
Tolerated
Allowed
Encouraged
Expected
Required

Obviously many synonyms could be lined up next to, or in-between, several of these, but the nice spectral number of seven seems just right. It also seems to me that most norms and laws fall somewhere on the ends of this spectrum, but many customs lie closer to the middle. And all of these move about a bit as time passes, custom stales and norms and even laws fall into desuetude.

Anyway, such were my early morning thoughts.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

NT Wright: Wrong Again

NT Wright is a distinguished scholar in the area of New Testament studies, but when he gets off his primary topic and into the muddy waters of the marriage equality debate he does not serve either himself or his reputation well, particularly when his comments are off-the-cuff in an interview. That being said, it should be expected that any competent scholar would be able to avoid the shoals of error upon which Wright founders in this conversation.

And a strange conversation it is. Wright begins by launching into an ill-informed and curmudgeonly argument about the meaning of the word marriage. His claim is that applying marriage to a same-sex couple is a total novelty — not just in English but across all cultures — and implies that the effort to give it that meaning is similar to word-torture by Nazis and the Politburo. Marriage, he claims, has “always been male plus female.”

He is obviously wrong when it comes to English; perhaps he is to be forgiven for not having heard of the 19th century “Boston marriages” in Durham. But as a scholar he is distressingly ill-informed when it comes to the language of Scripture. It has to be admitted that the Hebrew and Greek texts do not have a simple word for the concept of “marriage” — or for “husband” or “wife” for that matter, as the common words are simply the words for “man” and “woman” or (in the case of men, the equivalent of the word “lord.”) The Hebrew words for “marriage” normally revolve around the concepts of taking or carrying off — a relic of which still exists in our marriage rite as each spouse “takes” the other. And this language was applied to same-sex couples in the rabbinic tradition: it is used in Sifra Aharei Mot 8:8 in its interpretation of what Leviticus forbids in terms of the practice of the peoples distinguished from God’s people. “A man married a man and a woman a woman, a man married a woman and her daughter, and a woman married two men.” The word translated “married” here is the same used in Scripture in Ruth, Ezra, and Nehemiah. So the Hebrew mind was capable of wrapping itself around the notion of same-sex marriage, even while disapproving of it. Whether such marriages actually were a part of the Egyptian and Canaanite societies is beside the point, though if they were that would undercut Wright’s thesis as well.

So Wright can assert his counterfactual on word usage as much as he likes, but marriage not only has been used to refer to same-sex marriages for millennia, but it is now part of civil law in many countries. His response: “Simply at that level, I think it’s a nonsense. It’s like a government voting that black should be white. Sorry, you can vote that if you like, you can pass it by a total majority, but it isn’t actually going to change the reality.” Obviously he is also unaware that the English word “black” derives from the Anglo-saxon blæc — meaning “white.” (Think “bleach”). But let that pass.

More serious is Wright’s assertion that what he calls “complementarity” of “pairs that work together” lies at the heart of the created order. But it seems very odd to talk of “heaven and earth” and “sea and dry land” as “working together” in the way a man and a woman do. I have no doubt that the narrative shows a man and a woman working together — but I do not see any evidence that heaven and earth or sea and dry land “work together”; to say nothing of the many other “binaries” in Genesis 1: light and dark, fish and birds, plants and trees — to say nothing of the triads such as the sun, moon and stars. Wright is either just straining to read something into all of this to support his exclusion of same-sex pairs (which, after all, are also pairs who work together!) or indulging in a reading that would be more appropriate to the I Ching, which does indeed conceive the cosmos as being built up from opposites.

Moreover — and again Wright should know this but his antipathy towards marriage equality appears to have induced some biblical blind spots — the “marriage” portrayed in Scripture is not complementary or balanced. The institution of marriage in both Testaments is tilted strongly towards male privilege and power. This is why in the allegories the husband figures God or Christ, and the wife the people of God or the Church. It is true that there are some passing descriptions of real marriages where some sort of mutuality is enjoined or enjoyed, and the Pauline tradition attempts gingerly and modestly to even the scales ever so slightly, but when it comes to imagery the balance tips to the man, away from the woman.

In the final section of the interview Wright show all the signs of frustration at a lost cause. I can almost hear him holding his breath at the end, after a final foot-stomp. He compares the movement for equal marriage to the pressure towards war in Iraq (and why is it that all of his comparisons are violent and over the top). He seems to think that being on the wrong side of history is a statement about trends and pressures. History doesn’t force things, it records them. In this interview, Wright is wrong about history as well as being on the wrong side of it.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

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How You Know Things Are Changing

The surest sign that things have changed is when people insist they haven't or they can't.

Whenever I hear someone claim that the "definition" is what is important, I quickly remind myself that on the contrary it is what is defined that is important -- and that words change their meanings as the world they describe changes. Few things have changed as much as "marriage."

Thus it is interesting to note that some in the Roman Catholic Church are aware that a new wind is blowing, and things are changing. The fact that some in the RCC now seem to be able to tolerate "civil unions" but hold firm at the word "marriage" indicate that this is the final phase of the logomachia, and the wind of the Spirit, which sometimes must — perhaps always does — start with the world instead of the church, is blowing the change that will turn a settled and intolerant world upside down.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

Meaning and Intent: Porneia in the Apostolic Fathers

Peter Carrell of Anglican Down Under (and Hermeneutics and Human Dignity) and I engaged in what for me was a fruitful discussion a while back. I hope it was for him as well. It grew out of his response to my book Reasonable and Holy and my efforts to answer some of his concerns and questions about my method and conclusions. One of these involved my reliance on rabbinic sources to try to come to an understanding of the meaning of the porneia word group, in response to the assertion by some, such as Robert Gagnon, that Jesus’ use of the word must necessarily include condemnation of same-sex relationships. This derives in part from the paired assertions that the word and its relatives refer both to any sexual behavior forbidden by Scripture (with particular reference to Leviticus 18) and that it had a broad and imprecise range of meaning, covering any kind of sexual immorality, as a few lexicons claim and a few versions of ancient texts translate. All of this stands in contrast to the understanding that relates the word to harlotry ("whore" being the meaning of the root), and the evidence that the overwhelming use of the word-group in the Hebrew texts refers either to (1) prostitution or (2) figuratively to idolatry.

My goal was to assess the accuracy of the assertions and translations, and discover what the word and its relatives actually would mean to hearers in those contexts, and if it is was as broad and inclusive as some lexicons suggest, or rather designed as a more limited category, and if so, what. Peter further wondered why, in my search for answers, I turned to the rabbinic texts rather than looking more to early Christian texts. In addition to offering an explanation, I will take the opportunity to do just as Peter suggests at the end of this exposition.

First, though, I wish to establish one basic principle, which I hope goes almost without saying. However, I had better say it just to be clear. And that is the evident truth that words change their meanings — both the meaning intended and the meaning conveyed. A word may have an explicit meaning in the mind of the speaker, but if it is capable of conveying a range of meanings, a listener may well misunderstand the speaker's intent. In normal conversation one can correct such misapprehensions, but when the "speaker" is a "writer" and the text some centuries old, other tools for understanding need to be employed. This is a particular challenge to translators of ancient texts, if they are to convey to modern readers a sense of what the ancient author intended.

So an accurate translation of a text or definition of a word requires the translator or the lexicographer to be immersed in the world and culture of the time in which the texts were written. Those familiar with the Hebrew Scriptures or classical Greek or Roman literature should not be surprised to know that there are human activities, some of them sexual, that were considered moral or morally neutral, or perhaps even virtuous, in those cultures that we now consider definitely immoral; and vice versa: there are actions considered serious breaches in Leviticus and the Pauline Epistles that scarcely raise an eyebrow in these latter days. Thus, to translate porneia (or its Hebrew equivalents) as vaguely as “sexual immorality” fails to take due notice of distinctions that careful study reveals would have been made by the speakers or writers, and easily allows a modern reader to think the ancient author may have been condemning something that we find offensive but which the author may have found neutral or even acceptable. (It may well be that this broadening has come about second hand through a broadening given to the word fornication — a standard translation for porneia. Originally a fairly narrow category, this word came, in popular speech, to be used as a synonym or euphemism for any sexual act, including between married couples!)

A case in point is some lexicons’ suggestion that porneia means “adultery.” The fact is it can be used to mean adultery as we understand it today, but this blurs an important distinction from the times of the writing. Our modern equality-of-the-sexes understanding of adultery does not match the double standard of the cultures of the biblical period. Under Jewish law a man was free to have intercourse with unmarried women (prostitutes), or to take another wife. Under Roman law, though monogamy was the rule, a man could have a mistress or concubine, or freely resort to prostitutes. Given the inequality of the sexes, married women did not have these options. Male adultery meant violating another man’s marriage, female adultery meant violating her own. In Hebrew Scripture the word for adultery (na’af) covers “sexual intercourse with the wife or betrothed of another man,” in contrast with zana, “illicit heterosexual relations but not necessarily in violation of the marriage vow,” the latter being the equivalent of porneia and so translated in Greek. (TWOT, na’af) The Greek word for adultery, moixeia, is used in the Greek version of the Hebrew Scriptures and in the New Testament.

I would venture an even more precise distinction, however. There is a clear overlap with porneia and moixeia when it comes to women: a woman who strays from her husband is "playing the harlot." But a man who visits a prostitute or has a mistress is not legally guilty of moixeia — though we would consider him an adulterer, the ancients would not have done so. If they wished to cast opprobrium on such a man — and they often did, particularly under the influence of growing moralist movements in rabbinic Judaism, Christianity and Greek and Roman culture under Stoic influence — he would be tagged precisely with porneia. This is why the two words often appear together in lists of immoral behaviors, to condemn both men and women who are guilty of sexual relations in violation of marriage — but specifically to bring men under the same moral standard that applied to women, which moixeia alone did not accomplish.

See, for example the passage in Hebrews 13:4, “Let all honor marriage, and the marriage bed [be] undefiled, for God will judge the pornous and the moixous” — that is, those who are violators of their own or others’ marriages. This same pairing occurs in 1 Cor 6:9 where the employment of the pair to cover both categories is even clearer, as the words are separated by a disjunctive ou construction: neither porneia nor moixeia are acceptable. Similar pairings of the term occur in other Biblical texts, and in the early Christian writings, about which more in a moment)

But first I want to explain my primary reason for expounding the rabbinic evidence on this subject, rather than the early Christian usage. That is: the nature of the rabbinic discussion. While early Christian writers make use of the words porne and porneia, the rabbis actually engage in detailed discussion as to what the words (the Hebrew equivalents zonah and z’nut) mean, and what is included under the various shades of meaning. In short, while the meaning of the word has to be gleaned from verbal and cultural context in the early Christian sources, the rabbinic texts go to great pains precisely to define exactly what they meant — as fine points of law (halakhah).

Which brings me to the Apostolic Fathers and my other reason for not bringing them up: they add little to the discussion. The use of the porn- word group in the Apostolic Fathers is consistent with that in the canonical scriptures, though the words of this group do not appear very often. The most frequent use is paired with moixeia, in order to include men who have sex outside of marriage with an unmarried woman (whether a prostitute or a concubine). Again,this conflicts with our modern understanding of adultery as including extramarital sex by men or women, a notion foreign to the biblical and imperial Roman double-standard culture; hence the pairing in order to provide the equivalent of the modern inclusive concept of "adultery." This is, no doubt, what the lexicons mean when they say that the range of meaning for porneia includes adultery; it is adultery in the modern sense of the word, rather than in the sense that moixeia is used in those cultures. The point is that we no longer have a word that corresponds directly to what the ancients meant by moixeia, because we no longer maintain that double standard. I am reminded of the telling phrase my Hebrew professor, Dr. Richard Corney, used to cite: Traduttore traditore — to translate is to betray [apparently even this phrase!].

Some details from the Apostolic Fathers:

The root word porne occurs once, in 1 Clement 12.1, with reference to Rahab the harlot. This is the normative use of the equivalent word in the Hebrew scripture, referring to real or virtual (i.e., idolatry) harlots or harlotry.

The derivative words of this group occur a handful of times, always in conjunction with or paired with adultery. Hermas Mandate 4 1:1 gives a good example of the thinking behind this usage (note the use of fornication in these translations):

“I charge you,” said he, "to guard your chastity, and let no thought enter your heart of another man's wife, or of fornication, or of similar iniquities; for by doing this you commit a great sin. But if you always remember your own wife, you will never sin.”

This is clearly designed to rule out both adultery (as understood in the period) and resort to prostitutes or concubines.

Other examples include “vice lists” (Didache 5:1, Hermas Mandate 8 1:30) in which porneia and moixeia are paired. A twist on this in Hermas Mandate 4 1:5 deals with the case of a man with a straying wife and refers to her persistent “porneia” — which if a man tolerates makes him a “sharer in her adultery.” A similar note is struck in Didache 3:3, which is reminiscent of the proverbs concerning youth staying clear of loose women: “My child, be not a lustful one; for lust leads the way to fornication; neither a filthy talker, nor of lofty eye; for out of all these adulteries are engendered.”

Polycarp’s Letter to the Philippians 5:3 similarly quotes 1 Corinthians 6:9 as a particular counsel to youth to avoid being pornoi, as well as malakoi or arsenokoitai. This mention of the porn- root in conjunction with, though distinguished from, words commonly held to refer to male same-sex behavior (most likely prostitution or pederasty, as these were tolerated under Roman law), is echoed in the remaining uses of the word group. Barnabas 19:4 includes this trio: “You shall not commit fornication: you shalt not commit adultery: you shalt not be a corrupter of youth (paidophthoreseis).” This is echoed in Didache 2:2, which includes a long list of forbidden behaviors, including theft and murder. As I have noted before, these lists appear to indicate a distinction (even when not separated by “ou = nor” as in Didache 2:2 or 1 Corinthians 6:9) between the various items in order to include all possibilities. Ultimately, if the word porenia already included these possibilities as a kind of catch-all for any sexual indiscretion the lists would be superfluous.

It is thus clear that the early Christian use of the term and its relatives was closely related with prostitution and concubinage, equated with adultery by women, who were also classed as guilty of porneia by virtue of their straying: which for men we would call "adultery" but which the ancients distinguished from adultery on the basis of their legal codes.

To apply it to any form of sexual immorality (so judged either by the ancients or by us) is a translational step too far.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

In Decline

It is interesting to see the Internet, primarily via Twitter, beginning to restore what amounts almost to declensions — or at the very least appositive particles — to finesse on-line language in the byte-sized space of tweets.

How fascinating, for instance to find the use of the hash-mark (#) adapted to serve function analogous to the Japanese ga or wa — as a topic or subject marker.

More sinister is the use of the at-sign (@) as a substitute for the old vocative “O” — imagine that! O tempore! o mores! The problem is that as many tweets and blog-comments devolve, talking at is replacing talking to, for which the ready symbol is the trusty numeral. So, 2myreaders, might I suggest even better that we talk with one another, and apply the friendly ampersand (&)? Are you &me?

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

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Way With Words

A cow is an adult female bovine, a boy is a human male child. A cowboy is neither. A cowboy is an adult human male who herds steers or steers herds.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
inspired by an earlier discussion of the slipperiness of language, and the importance of context for meaning.

One Word

An Address to Provincial Synod II
Albany NY • May 7, 2009
Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

Bishops and Deputies, ladies and gentlemen, I have to admit that when I first heard the theme of the next General Convention was going to be ubuntu, my heart sank a bit. Though a language major in college, and having picked up a few languages since, I have to confess my fluency in languages spoken in Africa is limited to English and French.

I can be glad ubuntu is not one of those African words with a disconcerting click in the middle. That click is represented by an exclamation point, but I prefer my exclamation points at the end of the sentence.

I know I’m not alone in my concerns about pronunciation. Like most Americans, I want to pronounce foreign words correctly. The French, as was observed in My Fair Lady, don’t care what they say in French so long as it is pronounced correctly. When it comes to foreign words and phrases, the French, like the English, don’t really give a hoot and pronounce them as if they were just French or English words, giving us things like Cervantes’ Don Quichotte and Byron’s Don Juan. But we Americans tend to want to pronounce foreign words correctly — at least until we adopt them as names for our cities, like Des Moines Iowa or, even closer, Delhi New York.

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Of course it’s not the word or its pronunciation, but the concept to which it points, that is important. And it is handy to have a convenient word or phrase in which to pack an ungainly concept. Words standing for concepts is, as Helen Keller learned in her breakthrough moment, the very heart of language itself — that this collection of letters stands for that — ushering her into a new world of meaning, a world from which she had for so long been isolated. And it is no accident that the first word she learned was water.

American English is so thirsty for words that we regularly sip, lap or chug foreign ones, especially when they handily capture a concept. We already have one of the worlds largest vocabularies — accumulated as the English colonial and imperial venture absorbed world languages better than a Sham-Wow — and the American enterprise continued it in the years of our own expansionist escapades. And we haven’t finished, as we continue to adapt or adopt words for concepts for which English doesn’t quite have le mot juste. That being just one example.

We’ve borrowed extensively from the French; I mean, where would we be without savoir and laissez faire? But the Germans have also made their contributions, from Gemütlichkeit to Schadenfreude. All of this in spite of the fact that neither the French nor the Germans are interested in a verbal fair trade agreement — the French Academy keeps other languages at bay; and the Germans prefer their own twelve-syllable word-monster rather than a shorter one on loan!

New Yorkers, of course, also lay claim to more than our fair share of Yiddish: with schmaltz, schmuck, and schmutz; drek, schlock and tchtochke, and the now widely used kibbitz — which has even made its way to the very Episcopalian House of Bishops and Deputies listserv. Oi! Or am I being too down-state?

Well, I know in this group I’m safer with the vocabulary without which the church would be at a loss for words; Latin and Greek words in particular. We can barely worship without speaking in tongues: from the Venite (there’s that English pronunciation again!) and on through the day to close with Phos hilaron, Magnificat and Nunc dimittis — we are hedged about with borrowed language: Kyrie eleison; alleluia, amen!

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Now, it is also obvious that we haven’t borrowed quite so many words from Africa. It is fitting, however, given the growth of the church on that continent, that we take note and heed those voices, and borrow a well-turned word to learn something new or say something more clearly. For it is a time-tested truth that words do not only convey meaning, but actually help us to think new things — it is no accident that creation itself owes its existence to the Word going forth at the beginning, as the formless deep was given meaning under the creative breath of God. As with Helen Keller, that involved water, too.

So, assuming that how I say ubuntu is close enough, we have this new word to help us think and act in new ways. So what does ubuntu mean? We have a shorthand definition in the theme for General Convention, echoing Jesus in his Last Supper banquet speech: “I in you and you in me.”

A longer definition, as given by Archbishop Tutu, concerns how one cannot truly be oneself without others — being is about relationship. It takes a village not just to raise a child, but to be a person, a city to be a citizen, siblings to be a brother or sister, children to be parents and parents to be children — and the church to be a Christian.

Think of that old figure and ground drawing — you may recall we used it as a logo in the Decade of Evangelism — is it two faces or is it a chalice? It depends on what you see as figure and what you see as ground. Neither is what it is without the other.

This relational understanding of existence is not just about our perception of creation, however. It is a revelation of the Creator, too. For we believe in God who although One is not alone — even within the Godhead there is this community of persons, defined by relationships of begetting or procession.

This same God, at the creation, saw that the human creature was alone — and that it was not good. Creation itself was not complete until that creature had another— an “other” — to relate to, and thus fully to be, both of them, who they really were.

And so, ubuntu means “being in relationship” — a handy new term to remind us what the church — and the world — is about from its beginning. I say “remind” because the concept is not new, is it? It lies at the heart of the biblical Hebrew hesed — the mercy of God, in Jewish mysticism pictured as God’s right arm, the power of God’s outgoing action in the world, the word which Myles Coverdale so beautifully translated by a new English compound word lovingkindness.

In the Christian context, it is what lies behind and within the mystery of agapé — what the Latins called caritas and which in English became charity. That last word lost much of its meaning by shrinking to cover only a subset of loving actions. So our modern translations light on another word, pull out all the stops and assure us that it is “love” which “never ends.” Love is the thing, at base — the essence of relationship. And love is really all you need, as John and Paul have written — Lennon and McCartney, that is.

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Far more importantly, the other John and Paul long since assured us that love is all we will ultimately have: when at the last the church is swept off its feet by its bridegoom and carried across the threshold of the life of the world to come — into that house with many mansions, a loving Father’s wedding present — and at last we know as we are known, and love as we are loved. What did Paul remind us of? Only three things endure, faith, hope and love — and love is the greatest.

And I will go further, relying on John as well as Paul: when we come at last to the end — when faith is fulfilled, and hope sees what it has so long hoped for, only love will remain — just as at the beginning it was love springing from within the community of God’s very self that first spoke the Word that called all else into being — the Word in the form of God’s own unspeakable name — “Y’hi” — as Being Itself calls out to each created thing, speaking words of wisdom, “Let it Be, Let it Be.” For there is no being without being in relationship, without being in love, without ubuntu.

This is why we become most truly ourselves when we set our selves aside for a time to embrace others, to do to others as we would be done by. There was every reason in the world for Jesus to cast his ethical message in such a relational form, mining the rich soil of his tradition for that precious gold, refined and purified in a simple summary: to love God with your whole being, and your neighbor as yourself. Note those relational words, those ubuntu words, upon which it all hinges: to love God with ourselves and our neighbors as ourselves — the vertical and horizontal relationships neatly echoing the sign of the cross — a sign by which we become who we are when we are marked as Christ’s own forever. That involves water, too.

This is a good message for the church, which is, after all, called in the meantime to be the Body of the Incarnate God at work in the world. One Body formed by one Baptism, nourished with one Bread in One Lord — One, yet not alone, through the peculiar arithmetic of ubuntu, or agapé, or caritas, or love: in which one plus one plus one still equals one — the mathematics of the faith reflecting multiplication rather than addition, as one is raised to the power of infinity by God — and yet is still one.

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Sadly, rather than multiplication, we have seen more than our fair share of division lately, haven’t we? Of course, there has been division in the church from the beginning, as Paul’s testy correspondence with the Corinthians and Galatians attests — not everybody was happy with the decisions of the council at Jerusalem. Some in those days stood firm on requiring circumcision for Gentile converts; and Paul himself seems not to have been entirely sold on the importance of not eating meat offered to idols — though he counseled the Corinthians to indulge the tender-minded by exercising restraint for a season. Some things, it seems, never change, and perhaps they never will, if we are to be in relationship, that is.

In a way, division is part of the human condition, for without it our original loneliness could not have been healed by relationship — we are, after all, individuals, each of us. And while it takes two to argue, it also takes two to tango — and the choice to fight or to dance is ours to make.

We carry our individuality in our bodies, in our race and our sex, and our social standing, in part inherited, in part carved out through our own struggles. And this has been true from before the days of Jew and Greek, and slave and free, and just after the primal division of our ancient parents, the primordial male and female.

Yet we also know that in relinquishing our focus on these and other distinctions and divisions, in setting them aside for a time, in our encounter with others, we become ironically more truly ourselves — as we relate to others, dancing instead of fighting. Our true likeness is slowly revealed as we become more recognizable as kin beneath it all, more alike in our resemblance to that original likeness, and yet also more truly who we are. Love, made possible through division mended by relationship, ultimately unites us in bonds that surpass mere affection.

In the long run, there is no such thing as a solitary Christian. There is no Christian without the church, no church without Christ, no Christ without God. For as we believe that God is love, there can be no love without relationship. This love divine, all loves excelling, is the ultimate compassion — feeling-with — the love that embraces the other, that gives itself for the life of the other, that becomes itself in losing itself, saving its life in losing it. This is the embodied love of the Incarnation, the love that died on the Cross, the love that rose again from the dead, and in whom we will one day be raised: love that becomes so united with the beloved that the old categories that ruled the world — Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female — are overshadowed by the love which passes all understanding, yet shelters our hearts and minds under the shadow of everlasting wings.

For there is in the end, behind and within ubuntu, caritas, agapé, hesed and all the other words in which we have attempted to capture the divine compassion — one word borrowed in every human tongue, one word that is foreign to us all, and yet comes to our lips as native-born to it — or born again to it, when by water and the Spirit our citizenship in God’s realm is granted. There is one word utterly strange, and yet intimately familiar; divine and human, yet without confusion. It is the Word of God — Jesus, our Savior and our Lord, our ubuntu with God.+

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Mything Persons (3)

Myth is not only the native language of faith, it is the native language of language.

By that I mean that all language, however blunt or pointed, however plain or simple, consists of symbols, in which this is not that but stands for that. Who can forget the eloquent enactment of this in The Miracle Worker — the breakthrough into a new world of meaning, when Helen Keller finally grasped the concept of concepts and their signification — and gained entry to that human and humane world from which she had been isolated. And it is no accident that the first word she learned was water.

Language itself is then a kind of mythology in miniature, a world of symbols as rich and mysterious as that of nature, which Baudelaire described as a murmuring forest. The very act of saying that chair — this smudge of ink on a page, or flashing and impermanent illumination of patterned phosphors (or more likely, diodes), can stand for the thing I sit upon — or, if you are French, for the very substance of your body (a word made flesh indeed) — is a minor act of mythmaking.

Which brings me to the reminder that the world came to be through the Word, who was in the beginning — source and font not only of all that is, but of all the ways and means by which we grasp after reality with our minds. All of theology is finding words for God, as Bishop John Robinson reminded us, of finding the logos for theos. And that act is in itself a form of symbolic myth-making, for no word can contain the Word who is God.

I am also reminded of the Hebrew roots in all of this: that dabar means “thing” as much as “word” — and the power of God to create was manifest as God spoke the world into being.

Which brings me back to myth and magic: the favorite spell of the stage magician, abracadabra, is a corruption of the Hebrew, “I create as I speak.” As poets have long known, language can build a world in the imagination, but it can also constitute a world in reality, and make the real world a better or a worser place, enriched or impoverished as the case may be.

To think we can (or should or would want to) live without myths is a fable.

— Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

 

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Include Me In

In opposing the use of inclusive or expansive language to describe God, some have expressed themselves in ways which a cooler temper and more reflection might have prevented. For example, reference is made to our “understanding of God” and “language which changes the nature of God.”

The first is over-broad — few can claim to understand God. The second betrays a kind of platonic attitude towards language, one which is not uncommon in some circles. This attitude treats words as having, rather than conveying, meaning. It also imbues language with a kind of magic power. It is as if our describing a wall as blue made it blue. The wall, in fact, is what it is, however we perceive it or describe it.

Of course, those who say these things (with a few exceptions) do not really mean them literally. They mean something like, “If we change language about God people will come to have ideas about God that don’t fit the revealed knowledge we have.” And so far, so true. The question is, How useful is the revealed knowledge of God, and is such revelation — given the fact that God has depths we can never plumb — at an end?

A balanced picture

If we turn to the revelatory text (the Scripture) we find that things aren’t quite as monochromatic as the critics of expansive language suggest. In fact, as I examine the Psalms and the Prophets in particular, I find that the Hebraic use of parallelism — a multiplicity of metaphor and image — quite often pairs images about God: male and female, human and nonhuman. And this is exactly what the new inclusive or expansive language liturgies are designed to do: not to remove all male imagery, but to supplement it and enrich it with other language. For examples of such parallel passages, see Deut 32:18, Prov. 1:8, Isa 42:13-14.

I could also note that insistence on an all-male vocabulary for God is a departure from the will of God, who seems opposed to the use of images to represent divinity:

Then the LORD spoke to you out of the midst of the fire; you heard the sound of words, but saw no form; there was only a voice... Therefore take good heed to yourselves. Since you saw no form on the day that the LORD spoke to you at Horeb out of the midst of the fire, beware lest you act corruptly by making a graven image for yourselves, in the form of any figure, the likeness of male or female... — Deut 4:12,14-16 (Emphasis mine)

Unnatural history

But what is the source of the tendency towards emphasizing the “maleness” of God, and the predominance of this image? My belief is that the attribution of maleness to God is a result of misapplied natural history concerning God as the source of life. This is an anthropological theory, based on human experience. In earliest times, Mother Nature (Mother Earth) seemed simply to bring forth life. Women likewise were simply fruitful, and the Goddess held sway. With the rise of agriculture and animal husbandry (why isn’t it animal wifery?) there was a general shift in analogizing how things came to be born, and the seed — the vital principle deriving from the male, was perceived (somewhat mistakenly analogized from agriculture) to be the source of life, with the female reduced to the passive level of good soil. This cultural passage into an agricultural world is recorded in Scripture as the expulsion from Eden. The Mother of all Living (Eve) comes to be treated just like the land — someone to be subdued and subordinated. And so, while the female was reduced to a role of nurturing — passive, nourishing, protecting, but not creative, the male came to be seen as the human source of creativity and life. It is during this period of human history our Scripture was given its form: and so God, as Creator, came to be seen (metaphorically, and predominantly) as Father. But that did not mean that God was male.

Of course, there were many corrective voices along the way, alerting people to the fact that this was metaphorical language: “I am God, not man” (Hosea 11:9); as well as the patristic warnings not to attribute such human qualities to God. Still, even today there are some who seem not to appreciate this distinction between what God is as God is, and what we call God. It is those who insist that God must always be described as male who are neglecting the wealth of the biblical and ecclesiastical tradition, and the commandment to avoid placing our understanding of God in the place of God.

Tobias Haller BSG

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