Isaiah 6:1-8
Today is the Eve of Trinity Sunday, so there are extra readings, including this one from Isaiah. Trinity Sunday is one of the wonkier named Sundays, in that it commemorates a theological idea and not an event in the Bible or church history. I guess it’s there to remind us of this concept, which is not necessarily high on the minds of a practicing Christian and probably one that creates low level confusion. You have one God with three forms. The father, son, and spirit, the creator God, Christ the redeemer, and the Holy Spirit that sanctifies people and flows through and among them. It is most decidedly not a three God pantheon, but then there’s all this talk of God sending His Son, and that sounds like two beings.
The father-son-holy ghost formulation is of course gender specific language that is part of what makes it hard for people I care about to get interested in Christianity. The Presbyterian Church issued a study last year that argued for opening up the language we use for talking about the Trinity. Makes sense to me. Of course, this comes as the Presbyterian Church tries to not to talk about homosexuality, so this study came across in part as poking the more conservative folks without getting back into the debate on gays again. “Hey, you won’t let us ordain gay people, but we’re going to start referring to God as a girl.”
To me the gender issues in the Trinity aren’t that hard. God the Creator, this God is well past gender. Infinite and beyond human categories. We can talk about it as the Father, but I see no reason not to refer to the Mother also. The Bible refers to God as He, which is about what you would expect, but I don’t really see why we need to limit ourselves to those gender terms in our own talking about the Christian God. When God decided to become incarnate, God had to choose a gender form, so we ended up with male Jesus. Again, given historical context, it’s not surprising the choice was male. I’m not sure Jesus’ maleness matters that much. Jesus is an action, the action of divine incarnation, sacrifice, and human redemption. And then there’s the Holy Ghost, and I don’t think anyone worries about gender there.
But that’s not what I wanted to talk about. I’m radically unqualified to get into this. What I needed to talk about was this wild stuff from Isaiah. The writer describes a dream (“In the year King Uzziah died”—don’t we all do stuff like that to remember the date for events as the years go by) in which he goes before the Lord in a kind of audience, but he is worried that he is unclean and should not be seeing the Lord. So one of the attendants takes care of things:
“Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. The seraph touched my mouth with it and said ‘Now this has touched your lips your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.”
It’s a strong image, an angel touching Isaiah’s mouth with a red hot coal. And it reminded me of the imagery in a Björk song, “Crabcraft” on Vespertine:
“I have a recurrent dream
Every time I lose my voice.
I swallow little glowing lights
My mother and son baked for me.
During the nights
I do trapeze work
Until they lie in sky
Right above my bed.”
(Apologies on the words and line breaks. This is how I transcribed it from the recording.}
I think the similarity in images is pretty obvious, and both are accounts of dreams/visions. It made me think about what kind of text the Bible is if you see it as similar to a songwriter like Björk. Like a lot of great songwriters and poets, her words (and music and stage craft) depend on a strong intuitive drive that allows her to fetch unlikely images and ideas and put them together. Even when she doesn’t set up a lyric as a dream, it may have dream-like qualities—image condensation as well as surrealistic free association. You may try to puzzle out the meanings of these images, but ultimately there’s no definitive reading, lots of hermeneutic loose ends, and part of what you need to do is just take the image in and accept it, let it operate on your consciousness in unanticipated ways. Just accept the pleasure of the words and images.
With the vivid imagery in the Bible, there is more pressure to interpret it to within an inch of its life. The Bible is God speaking to us, so the assumption is that we must push ourselves to understand the message God is delivering in each passage, each sentence. But think about Björk. Why would God not also speak to us with the tools of poetry, through indirection and rich pools of meaning made possible by ambiguity.
I’m not trying to claim that one can find Christian themes in Björk. I don’t see that she is inclined that way or particularly needs it. What she offers is a different way to experience the rich and exceedingly complex text that is the essence of our religion. Rather than always try to explain the words, allow ourselves to let them linger in our mouths and exist as flavors and textures, and not always be in such a rush to find the message. Enjoy the oddness of the language where it occurs.
No comments:
Post a Comment