 This page is an archive from the previous version of The Row Boat, which is why it doesn't look and work the same as the current version. However, these archives are fully functional and integrated with the new system.
Why does this site permit advertising?
Powered by Little Logger |
The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." * The word and the Word5/19/2005 16:30:03In a 3 a.m. conversation with a friend after the wonderfully mythical new Star Wars, she admitted years of frustration with her Protestant tradition's lack of a love for the precise words of their text, so lost as it is in accumulated translations. I, for one, fear to memorize translated passages of the Bible, preferring always to paraphrase based on several sources. Specifically, though, we were talking about the recent outrage in Afghanistan over alleged American abuse of the Qur'an in Guantanamo. In Islamic tradition, and often the Jewish as well, the words of the text themselves are from the mouth of God. Certainly there are Christians that inhabit this extreme (i.e. "If English was good enough for Jesus Christ it's good enough for me"), but contemporary textual criticism forces most of us to take our texts to some extent as inspired windows rather than verbatim truths. When she made this distinction, and expressed her regret with not so possessing the sacred words, it occured to me that the predicament of translation, the fog on our window, has its uses as well. The Christian revelation might be read as the moment of separation from the law consisting entirely in words on pages. A movement to spiritual Words, senses, to The Word, as John's Gospel defines it. Where before text was mediation with the divine, and for practical purposes the text was the whole of the divine, Christian spirituality offers the divine through a person, through a relationship. Texts are merely a rough beginner's guide (to borrow from St. Benedict) to the person and the God whom Christians must spend their whole lives becoming humanly acquainted with. Christian scriptures are disorganized, contradictory, and oddly proportioned. Nevertheless, the story that they teach reveals deeply coherent spiritual truths. The truths themselves do not reside in words. Whereas a Jew beautifully preserves every slip of paper on which the name of G-d may possibly have been written, a Christian must sometimes beautifully let all those texts simply be meaningless paper, clinging instead to the unspoken Word. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
|
| |
