s t g e r t @ x t r a t y m e . c o m Forest City Minnesota 320-693-7801
Mailing address 31608 650th Ave., Litchfield, MN 55355
Good
Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Because we live in a fast pace world and people are becoming more and more computer savvy, I thought a way to reach our younger people in our faith community is to devise a way for people to have a common experience and then come together to discuss it. This is my first attempt at this and since having a common experience of reading is easy on the parish budget, I invite you to read, reflect and respond. If things go well we can get together in person at one of the local restaurants. You can share this link with friends.
I hope to hear from you soon.
In Christ's peace, Mike McNeil
Religious Language as Icon
2009-08-30
Before Henri Nouwen wrote the book that became his signature work, Return of
the Prodigal Son, he went to The Hermitage museum in Russia and sat for whole
days contemplating Rembrandt's famous painting on the return of the prodigal
son. He was given permission to bring a chair into the museum and he would sit
for hours, studying the painting from various angles and letting it speak to him
in his varying moods. The result was one of the finest commentaries ever written
on both Rembrandt's painting and on the meaning of that famous parable in the
gospels.
What Henri Nouwen did with Rembrandt's painting is what we need to do with a lot
of the classical language of scripture, the creeds, and dogma. The language
there is more iconic than literal, more the language of metaphor than of
ordinary life, deep image rather than video-taped history. This doesn't mean
that it isn't true or that it's "Alice-in-Wonderland" mythology. It is deeply
true, so true that we hang our very lives on its truth. But it is meant to
studied, contemplated, meditated, knelt-before and prayed-with, rather than
taken literally.
Allow me an example: Consider the language and image surrounding the death of
Jesus as paying the price for our sins.
Scripture, our creeds, and our Christian tradition have a certain language
around this. Among other things, we say: "He paid the price for our sins. We are
saved by his blood. He paid the debt of sin. We are washed clean in his blood,
the blood of the lamb. He is the Lamb of God who takes away our sins. He
restored us to life, after our death in Adam's sin. He conquered death, once and
for all. By his stripes we were healed. He offered an eternal sacrifice to God.
He is our victim. He opened the gates of heaven. He stripped the principalities
and Satan of their power. He descended into hell."
Accepting the truth of this language is one thing, explaining in within the
categories and language of ordinary life is something else. About Jesus' death,
we have a language but we don't have a vocabulary. We know its meaning, but we
can never adequately explain it.
What exactly do we mean by these statements? How does Jesus' death save me from
being accountable for my sins? How does his death vicariously substitute for
human shortcoming, including our own, through the centuries? Why does God need
someone to suffer that agonizingly in order to forgive me? How does Jesus' death
open the gates of heaven? Why had they been closed? What does it mean that, in
his death, Jesus descended into hell?
Literal explanations come up short here. The words are more like an icon, an
artifact that highlights form to bring out essence. The language of scripture,
the creeds, and our dogmas put us in touch with something that we can know but
struggle to conceptualize and explain. It is meant to be grasped at levels
beyond the just the intellect. It is a language to be contemplated and
knelt-before more than a language to be understood literally.
Some years ago, Time magazine did a cover story on the death of Jesus. Among
other things, they interviewed various people and asked them how they understood
the blood of Jesus as washing them clean. One of those interviewed was JoAnne
Terrell, the author of Power in the Blood? The Cross in the African American
Experience. For her, the question of how Jesus' blood saves us triggered a deep
personal search. Sitting in a seminary classroom and studying the death of
Jesus, she began having flashbacks: As a young girl she had seen her mother
murdered by a boyfriend. She vividly recalled the blood-soaked mattress and her
mother's bloody fingerprints on the wall. And so her search was very much a
search "to find the connection between my mom's story and my story and Jesus'
story."
For her, the language around the death of Jesus, its blood and heartbreak,
became an icon to be contemplated for meaning. Like Henri Nouwen she began
moving her chair around to look at it from various angles and to see how it
spoke to her in her life-situation, to the blood in her own history. The
language of redemptive blood gave meaning and dignity to her mother's blood.
We cheat ourselves of meaning whenever we treat scripture, the creeds, and the
dogmas of our faith as simple statements of history, newspaper accounts in
literal language. They have a historicity and they are true, but the language
surrounding them is not the language of the daily newspaper. They are anchored
in history and we risk our very lives on their truth, but they speak to us more
as does an icon than as does yesterday's newspaper. Their language is meant to
be contemplated, knelt-before, and absorbed in the heart as we experience more
and more of life's mysteries.
An atheist, someone once quipped, is just another name for someone who doesn't
grasp metaphor.
This
article comes from
http://www.ronrolheiser.com/ Ronald Rolheiser, a Roman Catholic priest
and member of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, is president of the
Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas. He is a community-builder,
lecturer and writer. His books are popular throughout the English-speaking world
and his weekly column is carried by more than ninety newspapers worldwide.
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