On Common Ground

So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.

2 Corinthians 4.16-18 NRSV

Words are odd and slippery things. We need them to communicate, obviously, and we actually seem to need them to think. The discipline of psycholinguistics is all about this, which I find fascinating. (It’s one of those subjects which, had I another couple of lifetimes to hand, I might like to study formally.) It seems that words – language – are deeply embedded in the structure not only of our thinking minds, but of our physical brain. Perhaps it is not surprising that, since we are in some way made “in the image of God”, there should be in the very pattern of our making something to correspond, like a tiny model almost, with the opening words of St. John’s Gospel:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.

John 1.1-3 NRSV

Of course this has, at least potentially, profound implications for how we read Scripture. We are not to read it like a set of instructions for, say, a washing machine. God is not telling us to do all the things the people in the Bible thought he might, throughout the long history of the people of Israel and beyond, be telling them to do.

One of the great tragedies and errors of the way people have understood the Bible has been the assumption that what people did in the Old Testament must have been right ‘because it’s in the Bible’. It has justified violence, enslavement, abuse and suppression of women, murderous prejudice against gay people; it has justified all manner of things we now cannot but as Christians regard as evil. But they are not there in the Bible because God is telling us, ‘That’s good.’ They are there because God is telling us, ‘You need to know that this is how some people responded. You need to know that when I speak to human beings things can go very wrong as well as very wonderfully.’ God tells us, ‘You need to know that when I speak, it isn’t always simple to hear, because of what human beings are like.’

Rowan Williams, Being Christian

We are capable, though, of hearing. There is something in us that responds directly, at a level somehow other than conscious reasoning, to these words of Scripture, this Word, in a way that actually doesn’t seem to occur in the same manner with other texts. This is seen most clearly in the practice of Lectio Divina. (The Wikipedia article here is very well worth reading.) The reader moves through the stages of Lectio, reading, meditation (in the sense of “pondering”), prayer and contemplation, of which last the Catechism of the Catholic Church states:

Contemplative prayer is silence, the “symbol of the world to come” or “silent love.” Words in this kind of prayer are not speeches; they are like kindling that feeds the fire of love. In this silence, unbearable to the “outer” man, the Father speaks to us his incarnate Word, who suffered, died, and rose; in this silence the Spirit of adoption enables us to share in the prayer of Jesus.

There is something going on here far more than meets the eye. We are dealing with things we cannot really understand, though we may touch them by faith. Jennifer Kavanagh writes:

Faith is not about certainty, but about trust… Not knowing is not the same as doubt (though they may co-exist). We may not know what, how or why, but our not knowing may co-exist with a firm knowledge that! And where does that knowledge come from? It comes from a different kind of knowing. A knowing that comes from experience.

So by the presence of the Word, words become experience. Something happens, far down perhaps in the nature of being human, that corresponds to the nature of being itself. We may see and understand not more than temporary things; but there is that in us that responds to, resonates with, “what cannot be seen” – and here God meets us on common ground at last.