Tag: Literature

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Naming the World, Naming God: A Tip of the Hat to Seth Wieck

My friend Seth Wieck has recently started a newsletter, which he fills with his drawings, his writings, and his insights . It is lovely, and you should subscribe.

In his most recent newsletter, Seth links to an interview he did with the writer Nathan Poole. (Here is a link to the full interview.) The section of the interview that Seth highlighted in his newsletter is particularly striking for many reason, but especially around the theme of naming:

“There was a moment in my life, when I was out walking my dog, that I suddenly became aware of the fact that I was surrounded by trees, but that all I had to understand them was a singular category, “tree.” As in there’s a tree, and there’s another tree. It made me sad. And yet, in spite of the fact that these life forms were not only sustaining life on our planet, and the most ubiquitous form of life there is, I had no way of differentiating one from the next. It occurred to me that I would like to be able to call them by their names.

In many ways, this is the experience of Christians in the South, where the culture is saturated but not centered, in religion. They are offered one modality of faith, and it flattens the world. It propagates and prosecutes willful blindness, in the same way I once looked out onto a forest and just saw trees, trees, more trees. It’s not that I have a problem with the word “God” but that I wanted the experience of God to not be essentially gnostic, as in, God is in heaven and I need him in order to get there. I wanted to understand all the facets, the various ways God can be experienced, here and now.”

Poole’s remarks about knowing the names of things put me in mind of the beautiful children’s book The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane.

The book’s poems and illustrations seek to recover lost words, words for the natural world, especially certain words that had been removed from the Oxford Junior Dictionary. The book is a vivid reminder to children and to adults alike that to lose the name of a thing is to lose something of the thing itself. And such losses can be devastating indeed. The implication of Poole’s line of thought is that to know the true names of things might help us better know God.

And indeed the conviction of much of the Christian contemplative tradition is just that, namely that contemplative receptivity of the world as gift in all its particularity can be a means to receiving God himself, to learn the name of God. If this is even remotely true, then to lose our sense of the world is to lose God, a claim that Balthasar makes again and again throughout his work on theological aesthetics.

To move a step further, it should not be surprising that at the heart of much mystical theology centers on meditation on the divine names of God. Dionysius the Aeropagite’s endlessly frustrating yet beguiling book of mystical theology is called just that The Divine Names. Such seeking, seeking after the name of God, is not fanciful. It is dangerous business indeed. The revelation of God’s name to Moses shakes Sinai, and Moses’ face radiates the glory of even the merest glimpse of that unveiling.

Seeking the names of things can also be our own search for name, a quest to find a place within the world we are at pains to name. Adam’s loneliness is made more acute by his naming of the animals because he sees that there is not yet one for him, and his naming of Eve after the fall, is a kind of receiving of himself. Jacob wrestled with God, and in his travail he sought a blessing, but received a name instead. To be named by God is the blessing beyond all blessings.

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Once Upon a Time vs. In the Beginning

Once upon a time…

A recent article by Maria Konnikoiva examines the enduring power of these four little words. As she notes, some variation of the phrase appears in most languages, pointing to its near universal use and appeal. But why is the phrase so powerful? What makes stories, especially fairy tales, so affective? Konnikova argues that the phrase offers us both distance and vagueness by placing us in another time in an upspecified place. Such psychological distance allows us “the possibility of comprehending far more about reality than can come from reality itself.” And such vagueness allows us to insert ourselves into the story, to try out different lives and scenarios. Such stories, then, offer a kind of virtual reality in which we can process our own stories. As Konnikovia says,

“The world of once upon a time is not reality. It is a creation of make-believe. It is an invitation for fantasy and imagination to take the stuff of real life and do with it what they will—and perhaps, to translate the newfound truths back from story to actuality. In the realm of the imaginary, anxiety doesn’t become less anxious, nor tragedy less tragic. But in that world, you can make sense of it all from a distance. It can’t touch you in quite the same way—and yet it can lead you to a much deeper understanding and feeling of realities that would be too impenetrable without those four magic words at the fore.”

Konnikovia argues that stories, especially fairy tales, have psychological value because they give us a place to ennact pieces of our own lives and a means to process our own anxities. And while I don’t want to deny this pscyhological function of stories, because I have experienced it myself, I do want to contrast it with what I take to be a Christian understanding of story.

Take the way the Bible begins. “In the beginning…” pulls us into the narrative in similar way to “Once upon a time.” But while “In the beginning” gives us a sense of distance, it is only a chronological distance, more akin to “Once upon our time.” No matter how far back those words stretch, we are placed firmly within our own time and space. Whatever one thinks about the historiticity of Genesis in general or of chapters 1-3 in particular, the Bible wants us to know that this is our story and this is where we came from.  

As another example of Biblical storytelling, consider the opening of Samuel. It begins, “There was a certain man…” Such a phrase offers us neither distance nor vagueness.  Here we have a specific man in a specific time with specific wives and and specific problems. We are not distanced from this man, Elkanah. Rather we are thrown into the middle of his family sorrow–his beloved wife Hannah is barren. Yet in the midst of all the specificity, fairy tale like things happen. Against every odd, Hannah conceives a child. Even in our age of fertility doctors and artificial insemmination, the reversal of barreness is a kind of miracle. And the song Hannah sings in exulatation to the Lord has all the sweep and force of epic poetry, cataloging a host of reversals: the rich become poor, and the poor become rich, the proud are cast down and the humble are exalted, the fertile become barren and the barren become fertile. Indeed, one of the great tropes of stories is reversal–the unexpected the rise of the unlikely figure, and it is one of God’s favorite tropes. We need only look to the incarnation and crucifixion to see that God loves reversal and that he knows how to tell a story.  

To put the contrast another way, while Konnikovia’s approach rightly affirms the benefit stories have for our understanding of reality, the Scriptures point to something even bigger–the narrative shape of reality. It is one thing for us to examine our lives by means of other stories. It is quite another to affirm that reality itself is a kind of story and to thereby conclude, whether consciously or not, that there is a storyteller. From my bias, one reason fairy tales are powerful is that for all their fancy, for all their distance and vagueness, they point to the narrative shape of reality. Indeed, even when stories aren’t “true” they inevitably speak to the narrative shape of our lives by pointing to true things. This is because we live in the world of “in the beginning” where God spoke or “narrated” everything into existence.  In the God narrated world, we cannot help but place ourselves in stories because we cannot help but see our lives as part of his story. 

I suppose a merely psychological understanding of narrative would say that natural selection is telling the story. If so, then one reason I believe in God is for completely aesthetic reasons–I think a creator God who narrates the world and who is bringing reality to its ultimate conclusion makes for a better story than Darwin and the Big Bang.