A New Language for Holy Things
Day 19
Buechner acknowledges the limitations of “formal religious language” and offers a possible way forward.
“It’s difficult to help people see that the Bible isn’t really a book of moral platitudes, full of plaster saints and moral exemplars and boringness, as the rather dreary format of the Bible and also the dreary way which it is presented so often suggests. It’s difficult to speak of holy things through the traditional language of doctrine and the language of biblical faith, trying to re-animate it, trying to get people interested in it, trying to see that it’s not quite as bankrupt as they had been led to believe, very often led to believe by people who themselves loved it but weren’t very good at conveying it. And that is certainly one of the languages in which we speak about religion—the formal religious language.
“But the trouble is, of course, that for many people the language of doctrine, the language of Zion, the religious words, the biblical categories and so on are like coins that have been handled so long that the images rub off. You don’t know what they are, you can’t read them anymore, they’re rubbed smooth. You don’t know what they’re worth. You’ve heard these words, and you’dve heard them, and heard them, and heard them to the point where they lose their currency. They don’t have the power they once did. So don’t be surprised if you find yourself asking, Isn’t there some new language for speaking of holy things? Of course there is, and there are also nonverbal ways. Like when Maya Angelou stood on the stage after her lecture, and out of the audience rose up that little bearded white Episcopal priest who walked up on the stage and embraced her, and she him, and everybody wept in that room. What more wonderful language could you find than that nonverbal language to express a great deal of what we mean about almost everything - love and the kingdom of God and so on.”
Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, pp56-57.
To help you reflect…
When have you encountered the holy through nonverbal language? When has art, music, silence, touch or something else entirely communicated the holy to you?
In what ways has religious terminology been “rubbed smooth” and lost its currency for you? See what other language - verbal or non-verbal - might communicate the underlying themes or ideas in a fresh way. What do you notice in yourself as you turn these new “words” over in your mind and soul?
