“We
(humans) weave our lives into a web of words, like spiders who spin their
creations from within themselves and trap reality in these very meshes – from moment
to moment, in both silent monologue and social discourse, and across the divide
of time, as we learn about the past and communicate it.”[i]
It
may be impossible, but give this a try.
Imagine you are outside your own life, looking in at it, as an
observer. If you were a fly on the
kitchen wall, observing your life, watching the interactions with family
members, seeing from all points of view, hearing every phone conversation,
watching emails and texts read, what would you see? It’s hard. We don’t observe our own lives, we
live them. This is akin to asking a fish
to be consciously aware of the ocean.
But try it.
What
are the words that you use to make sense of the world in which you live? If you were looking at our house, hearing the
back-and-forth between my wife and me, you might hear one of us say in a mock
old man voice, “I’m freezing,” or, “get off my lawn.” Usually this is followed up by a giggle. You have no idea what we’re discussing or
what we mean by this phraseology, but here’s hint: it has little to do with
temperature or grass. Maybe
you’d pick it up from context, maybe not.
Based on circumstance, tone, and past experience, Candy and I understand
one another perfectly with such phrases.
These are a part of the web of words in which we live, a web we’ve woven
over 15 years of marriage.
In
the case of these two phrases, which are used interchangeably, we’re alluding
to a memory of something that gave us a lot of needed chuckles. She and I have numerous phrases and
mannerisms like this that make up our web.
You do too.
What
words in our webs are destructive, put-downs that are nothing other than
mean-spirited? How often are 4-letter
vulgarities included in our webs of words?
How often are these harmless, and how often are they indicators of a
soul that’s quite sick and in need of radical treatment?
How
many of the world-defining words that make up the building blocks of our sense
of reality are God-words, God-glorifying words, or words born of God’s
light? The web is not just the words we
most often say. It includes the first
words that come to mind when we unconsciously react to the world. When we’re trying to make sense of what’s
going, we reach for our web of words because those words are
world-defining. When the new happens,
good or bad, we have to put it in a context we are able to grasp. We have to take all stimulus into our web of
words.
“Theology,”
writes Michael Fishbane, “has the primary duty of serving God alone.”[ii] Whatever God ideas we speak, we speak out of
faith because God cannot be known by scientific inquiry nor can God be reduced
to measurements. Fishbane says the “vastness
of existence” is impinging upon us at all times,[iii]
and God is in that vastness, before and after it, and beyond it. Theology is not an intellectual exercise even
though it is often treated that way and exercised that way. Theology is belief. It is faith.
It is God-talk, God-thought, and God-colored composition.
As
a matter of faith, the church guides the members of the church family into
reconceiving the web of words, the meaning-makers by which we live, so that God
is at the heart of the weight-bearing strands of the webbing. God holds it all together. We grow in our sense of God to the extent
that our natural tendency is to look to God in all things. We become so faith-minded, our lives would not
make sense apart from God.
I
am now in a season in which I am going to look at my life, try to see myself
from outside myself, and then attempt to reweave my webs (we all have more than
one). I am going to study the world
around me, paying special attention to perspectives very different than my
own. And I am going to read and reread
and reread a book of the Bible, Hosea.
In all these examinations, I will listen for God’s voice. I will try to listen in such a way that my
listening will create meaning and then I will live in the meaning I’ve been
given.
Would
you join me? The first two tasks,
examining your own life and studying the world around you, are the same for you
as for me. We study ourselves and the
world in which we live. The third task,
narrowing focus to one book of the Bible, is unique to each person. There are 66 books to choose from. God speaks in all of them (even those where
God is not directly named). Let these
three tasks be intertwining threads that make up the strands of the web of
meaning you’re weaving. Read yourself,
read the world, and read the Bible. And
reflect and pray, and then reconstruct your sense of reality based upon what
you hear God saying.
[i]
Michael Fishbane (2008), Sacred
Attunement: A Jewish Theology, the University of Chicago Press (Chicago),
p. 15. Fishbane is the professor of
Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago.
[ii]
FIshbane, p.39.
[iii]
Ibid, p.39.
