THE RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE NEWSLETTER

Volume 1, Issue 5 -- September/October 2000
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The Religious Language Newsletter is written and published every other month by Suzette Haden Elgin, Ph.D. (linguistics), from the Ozark Center for Language Studies (PO Box 1137, Huntsville, AR 72740-1137 USA, e-mail OCLS@madisoncounty.net). It's available by e-mail only, in plain text, and is free to members of the Lovingkindness Network (annual dues, $5.00). For more information, contact OCLS; thanks to a generous donation, all issues are posted at http://www.forlovingkindness.org.
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IN THIS ISSUE: Editor's note; The Religious Fiction Phenomenon; Book Note; Altars and Altar-Making; Network Input; Quotes & Comments.

EDITOR'S NOTE:

I've had a network query asking whether donations to Lovingkindness are tax-deductible. The answer is yes; we are a 501c educational organization, with all the necessary bells and whistles. Among the items covered by donations are: the costs of the LK website; purchase of materials for the LK library; postage and copying costs for LK materials that are requested; and a _lot_ of free counseling and consulting by phone and e-mail. All labor is volunteered; we don't take any salaries here. And (with just one exception, during an emergency years ago) we do no fundraising; I sincerely hope we never have to.

THE RELIGIOUS FICTION PHENOMENON

1. The "Left Behind" series -- identified as "a wildly successful Christian thriller saga" -- has crossed over and gone mainstream. The seven titles in the series so far have sold roughly 18 million copies, which puts them neck and neck with the Harry Potter books. The writing is very bad, the preaching is omnipresent, and still they sell 18 million copies. Does this tell us that the public starvation for religious fiction is so intense that readers don't give a figleaf whether it's decently written or not? Maybe. On the other hand, let's be fair. Let's consider the marketing, on which publisher Tyndale Press will spend $3.5 million this year, and which has been generous in previous years: "To 'brand' the series, in 1998 Tyndale began creating a series of products -- videos, CDs, children's books, and even a radio drama..... -- associated with the books to create additional hype." [From "Bible-based thrillers enjoying secular success," by Jose Cardenas, recently. Forgive me for not having a specific reference for you; this newspaper clipping arrived without one.]

Religious writing, including religious fiction as a subcategory, is the second most popular category in the mainstream market. Although it most certainly doesn't logically follow, I would like to believe that three million or so spent marketing some religious fiction that _is_ decently written would sell even more copies.

2. The 11/8/99 issue of _Publishers Weekly_ , pp. 32-33, had an article saying that Christian fiction "has grown from an ugly ducking into a beautiful -- and very profitable -- swan," with mainstream bookstores calling up those who sell the "Left Behind" series and asking them what else they've got. According to Bantam editor Pat LoBrutto, religious fiction "has been out of fashion for a while, but it is coming back again and is being taken up by people who are not necessarily blindly faithful." (On page 33) Nor is it just Christian fiction. _Wandering Stars_, edited by Jack Dann, published by Jewish Lights, is "a collection of science fiction stories by Jewish authors writing about Jewish protagonists who deal with Jewish religious issues (one story is titled "On Venus Have We Got a Rabbi?"). That title has sold 3700 copies so far..." My thanks to Frances Green for the copy.

3. I must confess that I would never have thought of Stephen King as a religious fiction author. The idea that you could pair Stephen King and C.S. Lewis never crossed my mind. But I have two stories here in front of me....

First: an interesting story by Steve Lansingh titled "The Gospel According to Stephen King," has as its intro blurb "The world's most famous 'horror writer' is also one of its most spiritually attuned novelists." Sample, for _The Green Mile_: "The mainstream press has called King's story an indictment of capital punishment, a tale of grace and beauty in ugly places, and an examination of how pride distances us from our neighbor -- all true. But for Christians, the book and the movie...strike a far more personal nerve; since Coffey is a clear Christ figure in the story, Paul's torment embodies the torment we each feel for the role we played in putting our Savior to death." Lansingh says that you could explain the Gospel message using just King's stories. You'll find this piece at http://www.christianityonline.com/ct/current/9C16/9C16a.html. Along with a quote from King in the "Related Elsewhere" section saying (of people who object to his religious content), "I'm thinking to myself that these guys have no problems with vampires, demons, golems, werewolves and you name it. If you try to bring in a God who can take sardines and crackers and turn it into loaves and fishes, then these people have a problem." [I hope King has been misquoted a tad and is aware that sardines are fishes, but the point is clear.]

Second, the 3/6/00 issue of _Christianity Today_ has a story by Paul F. M. Zahl on page 82 titled "Stephen King's Redemption." It opens this way: "Christians who like the genre of fantasy fiction have become increasingly sensitive to friendly themes in the novels of Stephen King. In his 1989 preface to _The Stand_, King summarized his epic apocalypse as a 'long tale of dark Christianity.' His novel _Desperation_ (1996) turned on the meaning of 1 John 4:8 [sic] for a boy who had just been converted through a Methodist minister." Of _The Green Mile_, Zahl writes that "King has written an imaginative and dense parable of the triumph of sacrificial love over wickedness and false accusation. Christians should be thankful for such a film being released just before Christmas in 1999."

BOOK NOTE

Some time ago, Nancy Burnett sent me a copy of a small book by Neil Douglas-Klotz titled _Prayers of the Cosmos: Meditations on the Aramaic Words of Jesus_, published by HarperSanFrancisco in 1990; the ISBN number is 0-06-061995-3. Douglas-Klotz is from the Institute for Culture and Creation Spirituality; his thesis is that we cannot properly understand the words of Jesus unless we examine them in Aramaic, and that (on page 8) "there many be many 'literal' versions of the same passage in Aramaic." The book is composed primarily of his versions of the lines of the Lord's Prayer and the Beatitudes, illustrating this thesis. On page 4, discussing his presentations of the Lord's Prayer, he says:

"First, each line of the prayer is rendered according to the root meaning of the words, but from several different points of view... Second, textual notes are given so that the reader may begin to understand the richness of the Aramaic roots and make his or her own connections or alternate translations (the metaphorical level). Third, I have added open-ended meditations or 'body prayers,' which point toward an experience of the words of Jesus in one's body and life. ... the basis of these body meditations stems from work passed on orally in the native Middle Eastern tradition for thousands of years. I have modified and reworked these for us by people today."

When a book like this contains lines of such poetic splendor that they take your breath away, it can be said to stand alone as a work of art, and can be judged on that basis. Most of the renderings in this book, in my opinion, fail to reach that standard. When that happens, the next basis for examination is scholarship and linguistic accuracy; to make a judgment on that basis I would have to know vastly more than I do know about Aramaic. I am not competent to say anything along those lines. I can say only that the book is an interesting approach and will repay careful reading, and that its structure is an ingenious solution to a difficult problem of presentation. Your input would be welcome, especially from those of you who _are_ competent in Aramaic.

ABOUT ALTARS AND ALTAR-MAKING

I keep seeing more and more material in the media about altars and shrines (and of course, labyrinths, which I believe grow out of the same movement, whatever it is). This month's issue of my favorite art journal has page after page of photographs of magnificent altars/shrines, made by artists from wooden boxes standing open on their sides and beautifully filled. Every social science publication I pick up seems to have something about the roadside shrine movement that is now called simply "shrining" and/or the public impulse to create huge shrines at the sites of disasters (wreaking havoc in the lives of law enforcement officials and those in charge of public spaces). And there's this: "An altar is the outcome of many separate acts of attention, all close up. Making one affords noble, wild prospects for the soul as an expression of the way we arrange things." That's Suzi Gablik talking, in an article titled "Altar States," on pp. 24-30 of the 6-8/00 issue of _Noetic Sciences Review_. The first sentence in the quotation is one of those mcluhanesque sequences that sounds _so_ deep that it immediately inspires suspicion; you know instantly that it's either very important or just very clever wordplay. The second sentence makes it worse. (Both are on page 24.)

Gabik is a middle-aged woman who, having grown dissatisfied with her whole life, decides to make and tend an altar to the Black Madonna, doing this _as if_ it were truly important, and behaving _as if_ that act were going to help. And who is pretty shaken up when it "works." "One of the more dazzling aspects of having an altar is how unendingly alive it can be," she tells us on page 27. "Adding a new object can act like a mind-expanding drug, revealing odd layers of subliminal influence and adumbration to the plot. Whether it is the folded prayer bundle from Tibet, encased in colored yarn, or the droll little elf in a pea-green witch's hat, sitting on a silver mesh moon, playing the cymbals -- my favorite Christmas ornament -- I treasure every scrap...."

I have never been without an altar, even when I was a small child and had to hide it in the woods. After sixty years of altar-making, I can tell you one thing with absolute confidence: The continuum from awesome to kitsch and back around to awesome is the third rail of altar-making. You always have to ask yourself whether this intriguing object you're tempted to add honors _any_thing -- even the most neutrally-imagined Anything, like a "life force" or a "ground of being" -- or is just a symptom of your own bad taste; and then you have to ask yourself whether your decision that a given object represents your bad taste is just evidence that you're a snob. Gabik's description of her altar makes it clear that it is either magnificent or abominable; I wish she had included a picture. Recommended, if this particular aspect of religious language interests you at all.

NETWORK INPUT

1. From Sally Lloyd: "Walter Wink's image of 'praying the future into being' is...quite possible. We should get right on it. At the same time, taking physical action to make the future a better one is not a lesser way to go. Some are called one way, some another, some to both. This is a Quaker-flavored outlook -- Quakers believe in the perfectability of the world, rather than Original Sin..."

2. About my _Peacetalk 101_ , Maryell Cleary writes: "I just read the whole story, not intending to do it all in one sitting, but I got involved.And I loved it! I've saved it so I can reread it, especially the stories and the rules. I have one problem with it. I know a little girl whose grandmother died a couple of years ago. She pictures God as both all powerful and all good. So why did he take her grandmother away, and why won't he let her come back for a second chance (not to smoke this time)? Seems to me your story feeds that picture of God."

I'm not sure I understand what "that picture of God" means, exactly. I try in that story to make the metaphorical case that in the same way we human beings unhesitatingly slaughter bacteria by the millions, confident that we are doing the right thing when we use antibiotics and antiseptics and detergents and so on -- never concerning ourselves for an instant with the possibility that bacteria might have plans and purposes of their own -- we have to assume that God proceeds in a similar fashion when the deaths of human beings are involved. It's not that we have callous contempt for bacterial organisms; we just know best. Presumably God is as distant from us cognitively as we are from bacteria; presumably God knows what God is doing. Presumably God is in charge; all powerful, all good -- and all competent. I don't mean that just in the "God moves in mysterious ways" cliché sense, where the assumption is that we should accept everything without question. I mean that when we are faced with unspeakable horror -- the Rwanda genocide, for example -- we have to stop and reason together about how that could possibly happen and there still be an all-good and all-powerful God. And the explanation I try to give in _Peacetalk 101_ is the only one I have to offer. [_Peacetalk 101_, rules and all, is online for free reading and/or downloading at http://www.forlovingkindness.org.]

QUOTES & COMMENTS

1. "In a bid to identify widely accepted spiritual principles, [Psychologist Douglas] Vakoch assembled 10 people from a variety of religions and asked them to classify 66 statements, such as 'No one's education is ever complete.' The exercise enabled Vakoch to create an experimental 'taxonomy' of spirituality which, he hopes, will eventually make it easier to turn a few basic, fuzzy principles into concrete, alien-friendly terms." Vakoch is part of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute, which is "working on a way to communicate spiritual principles to extraterrestrials, should the need arise." [Source: "Gimme That E.T. Religion," page 1743 of the 3/10/00 issue of _Science_; my thanks to Tia Johnson.]

2. On the subject of returning good for evil..... "There is nothing sentimental or the least bit easy about any of this. There is not even a guarantee that it will work, but one thing is for sure: When we repay evil with evil, evil is all there is, in bigger and more toxic piles. The only way to reverse this process is to behave in totally unexpected ways -- blessing the persecutor, feeding the enemy, embracing the bully -- breaking the vicious cycle by refusing to participate in it anymore." That's Barbara Brown Taylor, preaching in _God in Pain: Teaching Sermons on Suffering_, Abingdon Press 1998; on page 40.

3. "Little Bear, former director of Native American Programs at Harvard University, said he and colleagues have studied many of the great physicists of the 20th century, including Bohm, who wrote the groundbreaking book, _Wholeness and the Implicate Order_. ' " When they read Bohm's books, Little Bear says, they started to say "Hey, his ideas and some of the general ideas contained in quantum physics, quantum mechanics, are very similar to Native American ideas and Native American concepts." This is from "Scientists, elders delve into physics, Native American beliefs," a report by Anthony DellaFlora about the 2000 "Language of Spirituality" (not "Language of Physics") conference in Albuquerque, in the 8/6/00 issue of the _Albuquerque Journal_. Dan Moonhawk Alford (who DellaFlora claims coined the term "quantum linguistics") announced the conference on Linguist List on 7/3/00, saying, "Since the early 90s these meetings have helped some of our greatest contemporary minds grapple with the nature of reality from a parallax view, forming consensus around the following principles of the 'unseen realm': everything that exists vibrates; the only constant is flux; everything is interconnected in part/whole relationships; and there are no things to hang nouns on. Come join our sacred hoop of minds...."

I'd very much like to attend one of these conferences, especially in the context of the ongoing debate about whether there _should_ be any attempt at mingling science and religion. For a typical example, there's physicist Hans Frauenfedler of the Los Alamos National Lab, quoted in "Physicists Wary of Science-Religion Dialogue" -- a story about a possible science/religion link at the American Association for the Advancement of Science -- saying, "I'm against any dialogue in AAAS about religion and science." [The source is on page 1587 of the 3/3/00 issue of _Science_, in Constance Holden's "Random Samples" section.]

4. "The Bible's and Baptist's dim view of women starts with Eve, who had the best situation anybody ever heard of, but couldn't let well enough alone, and goes all the way through to the Whore of Babylon in 'Revelation.' Only two of the Bible's 66 books have women as title characters... The fact is, just about everybody who amounted to anything in the Bible was a man. ... There was a good letter in the daily paper about this issue the other day. It noted that while women can be missionaries and go overseas and get raped and murdered and suffer all manner of privations and indignities for the faith, that nonetheless doesn't qualify them to stand up on the plush carpet behind a polished walnut pulpit in an air-conditioned church and rant and rave about love-offering shortages and what's on TV. That's man's work." [That's a fuming -- mildly fuming -- Bob Lancaster, in "The Baptists put women in their place," _Arkansas Times_, page 62, 6/23/00.]

5. My thanks to Claudia Camp for a copy of "Religion, Health, and Healing," by Kirk Kicklighter, pp. 9-13, _Duke Magazine_ for 5-6/00. Much of the article is about the work of psychiatrist Harold Koenig, who "has led more than twenty-five research projects and published scores of articles on the effect of religious life on health," and has recently completed a systematic review of more than 1,100 such projects. Koenig is quoted on page 11 proposing that (in terms of survival and longevity) "Religion may be as significant as not smoking."

The question is of course why -- if that's true -- it should be so. The answer isn't obvious. Many studies have shown that even when you allow for the benefits of a religious life that come immediately to mind -- a strong social network, the likelihood of a lifestyle free of drug abuse, and so on -- the health advantage still remains and is substantial. I like very much what Kicklighter says about this issue on page 11: "(R)esearch also indicates that sincerely religious people tend to view events in their lives as part of a pattern -- not as accidents. ... Israeli psychiatrist Aaron Antonovsky, a prominent researcher into the effects of 'meaning-making' in health, says such a mental template applied to everyday life results in a protective 'sense of coherence' for believers, a belief that life has reason and purpose to it." That makes very solid sense. Coherence is one of the Four C's of wellness; it's part of having a grammar of life instead of trying to wing it.

[As long as we're here....those Four C's are: Commitment -- the willingness to involve yourself in what you do, and to take part in things rather than just observing; Control -- the feeling that even when things aren't going well you're not a helpless victim but have things you can do and choices you can make; Challenge -- the ability to perceive a stressful event as an opportunity; Coherence -- the ability to perceive the world and the demands the world makes upon you as making _sense_ .]

6. Finally, I want to mention an article -- a rather difficult article -- on pp. 39-54 of the 9/98 issue of _Harper's_: "Beyond Belief: A skeptic searches for an American faith," by Fenton Johnson. Johnson begins with a vivid description of a religious meeting attended by an astonishing assortment of people representing faiths from all around the world, and all of them monastics and contemplatives -- believers from monasteries and convents and abbeys of all kinds. And then he says, on page 40, that he wonders if perhaps the encounter "may hold the key to a legitimately American faith." Monasticism, he says, is "the archetypal manifestation of the impulse to mystery, an institutionalized response to the intuitive need to construct and dwell in sacred time. ... (B)oth Western and traditional Eastern monastics leads lives...addressing the three great obstacles to faith, the cornerstones of secular culture -- money, sex, and power." (Page 42.) On page 50: "In an enclosed national community bounded by two oceans and two nations, increasingly composed of races and faiths different from the white Protestant power elite, we must see ourselves less as exploiters and more as citizens. Toward that end monastic life offers an ideal, at least, of social conduct." As I said, the article (billed despite its length as an essay) is difficult; hard to follow and not easy to read. I think, however, that what he's suggesting is that Americans should take the monastery as their metaphor; and I think he's suggesting that the result should be not the traditional monastery we've all seen in the movies but a very _new_ monastery that evolves from the blending of Christian and Buddhist and Jewish and Muslim (and other) monasticism.

I recommend wading through the article; Johnson may be right, and if so, we're in for a rough patch. What it makes me think of is the struggles we white mostly-Protestant elite Americans had in the 60s (and of course in other periods of history, but the 60s struggle is the one I can remember) trying to live in egalitarian communes. Always, we foundered on the question of who would do the dishes. When there's no boss to decide that question, and no boss to "motivate" those who aren't willing to take a turn -- and when anyone who tries to just go _do_ the dishes gets accused of guilt-tripping the rest -- how do you keep the whole group from dying of food poisoning?? Sloth, that's the sin that most threatens the idea of an American community. Sloth, and (for the industrious) the pride-born idea that some work is truly important and some work, though it may need doing, is beneath you.

Just a few days ago I saw -- in a Protestant evangelical book catalog -- a recommendation for a book called _The Family Cloister: Benedictine Wisdom for the Home_, written by David Robinson and published by Crossroads. The editorial review of the book at amazon.com (where it's selling at a respectable midlist figure) says Robinson is a Presbyterian minister and the father of three teenage boys.

Copyright © 2000 Suzette Haden Elgin
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E-mail newsletters by Suzette Haden Elgin include The Grandmother World Newsletter, The Language in Health Care Newsletter, The Women & Language Newsletter, The Linguistics & Science Fiction Newsletter, The Religious Language Newsletter, and The Verbal Self-Defense Newsletter. Information and sample issues by e-mail from OCLS@madisoncounty.net.