Excerpt from The Second Miracle.
There is an old childhood rhyme that goes, “Sticks and stones can break your bones, but names can never hurt you.” The implication is that words, if we refuse to let them bother us, can do no harm. But the real danger of words is not whether they are employed to do harm, but in the nature of the consciousness that does the naming.
One day, as I was sitting on the balcony of a room just above the sand, about sixty feet back from a calm ocean, a large bird glided past, its wing tips gracefully skimming inches above the water surface. Abruptly it dropped a foot, splashing almost clumsily into the water and began to thrust its long beak down, hunting for food. Not only was the beak long, but a sack hung from beneath it. It was a pelican.
P-e-l-i-c-a-n. A word. A name.
The name tells us so much. It makes us conscious of the unique thingness of this creature. Now the pelican stands out from the background of unconsciousness and takes its place as a conscious object that can be analyzed and evaluated. We can describe the mating cycle, the migratory pattern, and place the pelican within a larger context of existence. But in giving us a sense of familiarity and knowing, paradoxically, it also stops another process. That same morning I heard a child’s enthralled cry. “Daddy, daddy, look! Look at the wonderful bird. Daddy, Daddy, it’s so close to the water. Ewwww!” Here is wonder and delight, not just thingness.
The price we pay for words is the risk of exile in First Miracle consciousness. This is the great gamble being played out by creation on our planet right now.
There is an old adage: familiarity breeds contempt. The word contempt means “to cut, divide, or decide.” In other words, what we become familiar with, we tend to cut away from its wholeness. We divide it from a larger field of connection, thereby inadvertently disconnecting it from its blood supply. We decide its nature, forgetting that, in the deepest sense, this is at best only an approximation.
The very act of naming does this. When we say, “my wife,” or “my house,” “my dog,” and so on, we make them other. They become things devoid of their is-ness, their mystery, and begin to die. Inexorably, we fall—no, not “fall”—we slip almost imperceptibly out of love. And slowly from childhood to adulthood we gain the world through the symbol, through words… and lose our souls. Paradoxically, words bless us and curse us. They bless our intellect and curse our immediate, sensual connection to the world within and without. The word is a symbol; it represents the object. But it is never the thing in itself.
We must come to better understand how language makes us conscious at one level and unconscious in another way. The poet, Rilke, railed against the arrogance that says, “my house” or “my wife” Obviously, in casual usage all of us speak in this way, but subconsciously we reinforce the objectification of the other. In divorcing each thing, in itself, from its unique subjectivity, it loses its God-essence. For it is God, in the infinite sense, that is the Indwelling Mystery, the unlimited potentiality for participation, change, and evolution that is the essence of our universe and everything in it. Take Infinity out of the listening and naming self and all that we perceive becomes forever frozen, forever without the possibility of change and growth. This is why turning our attention toward God as the infinite referent that can never be objectified is the Prime Directive. We must learn to counterbalance the ego’s endless tendency to objectify, especially in our attention to what we say and how we use words.
If we unconsciously let our God become an object-of-consciousness, everything else becomes an object: our wife, our neighbor, the trees, the Earth’s minerals, and so forth. What happens then is plain for us to see. When we are referent to infinity, God is present in/as all objects. Now “my wife” is a mystery irreducible from her God-essence that cannot belong to me; she can never become someone I ultimately can define or “know.” In this sense our relationship paradoxically brings us closer in essence and makes us individually more alone. Relationships at this level are infinitely renewing; this level of ourselves does not fall out of lore.
The intensity of feelings and sensations commonly equated with love by the First Miracle mentality begins by respecting the God-essence in another “falling in love” is itself a brief window on infinity-but the inevitable objectification of the other eventually trespasses on this essence. In our Second Miracle natures this respect is ever-rediscovered. Even the very sensations and feeling characteristic of love, as well as sexual intimacy, become infinitized, doorways of discovery rather than finite, familiar ends in them-selves. And these doorways do not open to their fullest mystery merely because we can name them; they open only when each moment is approached with attention, deep respect, and genuine unknowing.
In our bodies, our feelings, our whole organism, the rich sensual dimensionality of love must be rediscovered anew over and over again. Infinity guards Her secrets, demanding absolutely everything. As T. S. Eliot wrote:
“To pursue the intersection of the timeless with time is the occupation of the saint. No, no occupation either, but a lifetime’s death in love, ardor, self-sacrifice, and self-surrender.”
Barring this compelling urgency to submit ourselves to love when we have reduced a person to labels, even positive labels, love is already doomed. And so are we. No matter how exalted or defamed, an object in itself is always barren. And in this way of seeing we have become barren within ourselves. We may believe we know ourself and the other person, but this very familiarity is itself a form of contempt. To live in such assurance is to live a shadow of real life. Then we are the dead, as Jesus says, who must bury their dead.
Pelican Image: Image by Ingo Jakubke