There are very important truths that cannot be translated from one language to another. When white male clergy imagine they are taking the Bible literally they are often attempting to reduce very rich ancient cultures down to their own European-American culture.
For example, the word “Lord” means all kinds of things in Hebrew and Aramaic; but, in English, the word usually conjures images of a white guy sitting on a throne. Therefore, when European and Americans Christians “take the Bible literally” in English, when they “worship the Lord,” they may be worshipping a European model of hierarchical power that says a lot more about their own western culture than the kind of world Jesus seemed to have in mind.
Many western analogies are derived from objective observation. Not all experience can be captured in visual mental images. The meaning of life is not something that can be understood at arm’s length. In addition to symbols derived from vision we need to learn from our hands, ears, skin etc.
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When a bee dances to let the hive know where they will find pollen it is using a vocabulary that nouns and verbs cannot capture. When Sufis and Wiccans dance they are feeling what cannot be said in human speech.
When Thoreau settled in at Walden he lived less and less in his thoughts and more and more in his unspeakable experiences. He began to hear nature through all of his body, not just his intellect.
He said:
“All perception of truth is the detection of analogy; we reason from our hands to our head.”
Each part of our body gives us wisdom in a different language. Each plant, animal and mineral speaks its own language that we must learn to decode without trying to imprison them in our web of language.
Religion should open us to all kinds of “decoding.” We vastly enrich our lived experience when we stop trying to capture nature in our culture’s web of nouns and verbs. We learn to hear the cosmic hymn when we realize that some truths have to be danced to be understood, others touched, others sung.
Sometimes our hands understand what our eyes cannot.