Meaning is a funny thing.

A boy, when asked to draw something that reminded him of Christmas, draws a stick figure character (apparently) of Jesus Christ. The boy is promptly sent home and sent off for psychological evaluation. It was a reaction that had even some of my atheist friends crying “overkill.” Was this political correctness gone mad? An extreme action to enforce some sort of separation between church and state? An appropriate response from a concerned teacher (in a nation with a particular history of school shootings)?

Who knows… Infact the more you dig into the story, the more confusing it becomes. But what interests me here is religion and it’s symbols. It is one thing to associate Jesus with Christmas, but why the crucifix? I mean, don’t misunderstand me; the cross is an important part of the Jesus story. It is symbolic of the sacrifice God made obtensibly on behalf of all of humanity. But it is the domain of the Easter story. Christmas is more concerned with baby Jesus, the immaculate virgin birth.

Or is it?

Clay Nelson on Christmas, Theologies and Billboards:

To make the news at Christmas it seems a priest just has to question the ‘literal-ness’ of a virgin giving birth. Many in society mistakenly think that to challenge literalism is to challenge the norms of Christianity. What progressive interpretations try to do, however, is to remove the supernatural fluff and delve into the deeper spiritual truth of this festival. Christian fundamentalism believes a supernatural male God who lived above sent his sperm into the womb of the virgin Mary. Although there were a series of miraculous events surrounding Jesus’ birth – like wandering stars and angelic choirs – the real miracle was his death and ressurrection 33 years later.

In the Fortean Times 1993 Diary, compiled by Paul Sieveking and Val Stevenson, there is an interesting note on the 21st January (incidentally my own birthday). It reads:

The day of St. Agnes, patron saint of sheep. She is probably the Roman-Jewish version of Agna, an incarnation of the Ewe goddess Rachel. Like the Virgin Mary, she came from ‘immaculate’ parents. In spite of being pre-Christian, not to mention closely connected with sacred prostitutes, her relics are preserved in Rome and constantly adored by the faithful. Unfortunately for her credibility, Agnes is said to have been martyred in the reign of Constantine – when Christians were not persecuted.

Two thoughts occur to me. Just how rare were ‘immaculate’ births; and how problematic such tales must be if we cannot confirm the circumstances of a person’s death (what with dying – unlike immaculate conception – being an observed and documented phenomena)?

Of course these things are just the tip of a much more problematic iceberg. It is the kind of iceberg that Clay Nelson alludes to. It is this underlying conflict between literalism and non-literal readings of texts within the same traditions. Even listening to Nelson’s sermon for the first time I wondered why some sections were (as he puts it) “supernatural fluff” and others were “miraculous.”

Increasingly I encounter religious proponents who stress the importance of not taking religious texts so literally. Take for example Brian McLaren’s take on the Book of Relevation:

My background, before becoming a pastor, I was a college English teacher, so my background was literature, and that’s been something of an advantage to me in approaching the Biblical text because when you study literature, one of the first questions you ask is ‘What’s the genre of this piece of literature’ and the Book of Revelation is in the genre of Jewish apocalyptic literature. We had dozens of examples of this genre from about the 2nd century BC to the 1st and 2nd century AD, and when you put the Book of Revelation back into that genre, just like putting Jesus back in a setting, you put that document back in a setting, you read it completely differently. It stops being a prediction about the end of the world and it becomes a way to talk about what was going on at that moment.

Now there are two theories about the Book of Revelation. One is that it was written in the 60s and the other in the 90s, but either way it was written under a period of intense persecution of Christians by the Roman Emperor, and they were being killed and brutally persecuted and blamed for all kinds of things. And under that regime, the Book of Revelation says ‘Don’t give up hope, don’t give up your faith, in the end it will triumph.’ But it uses subversive language to do that, and what’s happened is, without being aware of the rules of the genre, people have interpreted it to say all kinds of outrageous things.

Genre and historical context should help with understanding religious texts, but I suspect where these things aren’t known to the reader, the meaning becomes a very open ended thing. This is what it says, and this is what it means.

I am reminded of a musician and composer I once worked for. She had released an album of mostly improvised piano pieces. She was set to play one on live television. “Is that how long it goes for?” a segment producer asked. She answered the question with yet another question. “How long do you want it to be?”

Merry Christmas!

Dr. Jane Turner speaking recently on Radio National’s Encounter program:

Certainly there’s been quite a lot of work about the ages of children and how they cope, and also after bereavement. There are loosely three stages that cover the issues: so the first stage is up to about 8 years of age, and up to about 8, children believe in magic. We give them a birthday cake; we put candles on and tell them to blow out the candles and make a wish, you know, we’re encouraging them to believe if they want something and wish for it, they can make it happen.

Now the corollary of that is young children don’t believe things happen by accident. So if something bad happens, it’s their fault. It’s because they bit their sister or they were naughty or they played outside when they shouldn’t have. They are also very fearful. They’re the centre of the universe, you know, the moon comes out at night to give them pleasure. And if bad events don’t happen by accident, they become very fearful that if one parent is ill, maybe the other parent would be ill. Who will be there to look after them?

The whole episode, Give Sorrow Words: Cancer and Communication, is deeply moving, both sad and strikingly beautiful, and I highly recommend you check it out. But this one particular section of the program stood out. Infact it provided a lot of clarity, and a lot of developmental concern. I realised on some level that I hadn’t grown out of this belief, that in a real sense I do tend to assume if something goes wrong that I am being punished. Still. Even now as a twenty-something… If the car breaks down, if the feedback is crummy, if the relationship implodes, I ask myself, “Why me?!” Not merely in the spirit of frustration, but with a genuine expectation that there is a reason, that there is a cause for this effect.

[ad#adsense250]This is surely why I am so preoccupied with ideas of predestination versus free will. I can’t make a compelling case for predestination on the page – I really can’t, but it still dominates so much of my worldview. It just seems that life is a confusing combination of things I can control and things I can’t control, things that can be reproduced and things that cannot. The planet is subject to natural laws and seasons, there is a certain ebb and flow to all kinds of thing, a sense of order. And when things are going well it can be deeply comforting to think there is some rhyme or reason to it all, some force steering things. Of course, as Dr. Turner notes, what is comforting during the good times can be perplexing, even devastating, in the bad.

It doesn’t help though that sometimes things happen that seem so profoundly unlikely as to be laughable. The kinds of ‘series of events’ you would include in your novel except that nobody would believe them, even though they happened. Strange impulses to go to places you wouldn’t normally go to and do things that you wouldn’t normally do. I find when I take these impulses, inexplicable things happen. (Like the time I felt this strong impulse to go to a cafe I never went to because I felt awkward and out-of-place with their regular clientile; I didn’t have time to look at the sandwich board before I heard ‘John!’ and an old friend I hadn’t seen in a year appeared. The perplexing part isn’t the encounter, so much as the feeling that preceded it. I could’ve easily invented a meaning after a chance meeting, but that the feeling came first, the feeling inspired the action. The action was severely out of character.)

I feel as though I am deeply rooted within my creative work. I usually have to work at the things I produce. I have an understanding of my own sense of ‘voice’ and personal conventions. But there have been times when work seems to have originated from outside of me, things that I would re-read and go, “Huh? I wrote that?” Things that I would scribble down onto pieces of scrap paper feverishly as if I was performing some sort of impromptu personal exorcism. I have had a third party evaluate one such piece and he suggested that it was a metaphor for a part of my life. He went on to suggest that perhaps the trauma associated with the experience prompted my subconscious mind to ‘cloak’ the output. I can’t dismiss this theory, but still I wonder…

Most of the creative materials I encounter encourage belief in some sort of external factor or force. This can be as abstract as the idea of ‘inspiration’ or as scientific as the untapped power of the subconscious mind. It can be associated with religious ideas, belief in a God (“the great creator”) in a literal sense, as in the case of Julia Cameron’s work. Elizabeth Gilbert proposes a similar idea, not because she believes it is necessarily true that there are paranormal ‘muses’ but for more practical purposes. She explains that this helps artists disassociate from their work, when the work is bad they can’t take all the blame and when it’s good they can’t take all the credit. This keeps us grounded in process rather than fixated on product. It is interesting that here we are citing paranormal forces to shield us from fear and hubris. We’re still expected to believe in magic, this time as adults, but to derive a different meaning from it.

That’s probably the chestnut here. Believe in whatever won’t drive you crazy; believe in whatever works (even if it isn’t technically true, or can’t be proven). Embrace the placebo effect if it results in your symptoms vanishing.

Meaning…

• Sesame Street Podcast
• Money, Mission and Meaning: Passion at Work, Purpose at Play
• “The Hunger for Depth and Meaning” Talks on Christian Meditation
• Compass (ABC TV)
• The Meaning of Life… dougnuts
• Don’t Waste Your Life (Desiring God)
• Inside CNET Labs
• CAG Foreplay
• APM: Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippett
• Meaning of Words on The Moncriesff Show on Newstalk 106-108 FM
• Living Dialogues: Thought-Leaders in Transforming Ourselves…
• Purpose-Centered Life: A Plan for Authentic Living
• Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day
• Prayer at Rumayla: A Novel of the Gulf War
• Mysticism, Meaning and Life: Classic Sinai Podcast (Judaism)
• Inner Perspectives: Guideposts for the Spiritual Journey
• Free Talk Live (News & Politics)
• whollyscrap’s Podcast (TV & Film)
• Birth Download (Health)
• The Secret Beyond “The Law of Attraction”
• Shaman Drums, The Rhythm and Sound of Healing
• Afternoon Thoughts from IamACIM.com (A Course In Miracles)
• Tajweedpodcast’s Podcast (Islam)
• The New Man: Beyond The Macho Jerk
• The Meeting House Videocast (Christianity)
• A Course in Miracles (ACIM) – Truly ‘Extreme’ Spirituality
• Jabez: Conceived in Pain, Delivery in Victory (Literature)

The first page of podcast search results in the iTunes directory for the word ‘meaning.’ I guess best summarised as below.

• Literary/linguistic/educational/scientific meaning;
• Religious/spiritual/metaphysical/self-help/self-improvement ‘meaning’;

In short, the meanings we derive from things in our environment and the meanings we attribute to ourselves. And I suppose if I am being honest it is the latter that prompted the search in the first place. I’m sure you’re about as sick of hearing me bang on about this in this humble blog as I am sick of hitting my head against the table or the writing the wall. One of those… I forget which.

I guess what I’ve been wondering lately is… why do I even care? If this is all there is (and there’s a good chance it is), why should that bother me? If anything it is practically permission to go out and be completely hedonistic. Why not ‘live it up’ while we are indeed alive? I haven’t even studied philosophy at university, I don’t even have the academia to back up this kind of existential angst. Though perhaps therein lies the folly. Perhaps had I bothered studying philosophy I would have some sort of framework with which to hold these nagging feelings at bay.