Faith is the Space between Words

Religion, if nothing else, is a bridge between cultures that transcends any other connection, similarity, or affinity - linguistic, culinary, historical, etc.

There is something very humbling in realizing that at any one moment, millions are uttering the same words your are, while talking to the very same person.

How can you aim a gun at that person? How can they aim one at you?

Faith is the gap between the big idea and the action, the untraveled ocean between shipping lanes, the grass between sidewalks, the space between words.[1]

And, as good friend Jacob Michael recently pointed out, the gap between "born of the Virgin Mary" and "suffered under Pontius Pilate." (He was echoing NT Wright.)

It's where longing lives, and why some Christians in my tradition will say "Even so, Lord Jesus, come quickly," and others, in addressing Mary the mother of Jesus, say "I thirst for you."

[2012-10-23]

c0

Same topic, different insight, one day earlier...

It may very well be true that religion is an emotional necessity to manage pain and anxiety, just another evolved psychological tool along the lines of horror movies, cemeteries, or ghost stories told around the campfire.[2]
Even so, as I've written elsewhere, one thing may appear to be like another, but be very different.

If we didn't have religion, we'd have to invent something very much like it.

[2012-10-22]

c0

[1]
Imagine language as a tree. The leaves of the tree are sounds. The stems on the leaves are the meanings of the sounds. The thinnest branches define how sounds are allowed to combine into semantic units. As the branches get thicker, they represent how semantic units may combine into words, words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, etc.

When you get to the trunk, you have the confluence of rules, but not the rules themselves.

Religion operates like the trunk of the tree.

This is my own analogy, I don't know if anyone else has said something similar. If you turn a cognitive-stratificational linguistics diagram upside down, it would resemble a tree.

The world we occupy is relationships between things (not the things themselves), from subatomic particles to people.

[2]
Social anxieties are reflected in popular culture; eg, post-WWII monster movies with mutants (Japan and the atom bomb) or invading aliens (Russians).

Most folks my age had what we called "nuclear dreams" during the Reagan era. These dreams were really nightmares and invariably involved a mushroom cloud and the destruction of our homes, families, towns, etc.

I do not dream about terrorism, that is a fear that may plague younger people.

c0