The Missing Pieces
Irn shrpns irn s n mn shrpns nthr Proverbs 27:17
Shrpns – Can you read this verse? It’s only missing the vowels, but vowels are the units of the sound system of a language that form the nucleus of a syllable. You can’t speak without them. But you can read. Why? Because you read the vowels into the consonants. The consonants are merely the framework for engagement. They hold up the house while you go about living in it. And the reason you can read the verse is because you already know what it is supposed to say. If I gave you a sentence that you didn’t already know, you probably couldn’t read it.
“Vd l cff pr n cff,” for example, is the Italian, “Vado al caffé per un caffé” (“I am going to the cafe for a coffee”). But because Italian is not your native language, you don’t know where the vowels are supposed to go, and so you can’t read the sentence. You see the problem? The Tanakh is written without vowels. So, the only way I know what it says is if someone tells me what it says before I read it. In other words, I have to know what it says before I can read what it says, and that means it must first be transmitted to me orally, just like my native tongue was transmitted to me before I could read it. Language is essentially relational. It does not find its true home in the text. The real home is in the conversation that the text invites you to enter—speaker and one spoken to. It is first personal, oral, flexible, and these qualities are the mystery of communication. It takes life to read the text; life that comes from someplace other than the text.
This has an amazing implication. Well, actually it has many amazing implications, but we’ll concentrate on just one. (The other one we won’t mention is what this means for translation. Writing the vowels turns the text into frozen streams. Translation turns these frozen streams into glaciers. But we won’t mention this.)
Buechner helps us see something else, quite startling:
“Like the Hebrew alphabet, the alphabet of grace has no vowels, and in that sense his words to us are always veiled, subtle, cryptic, so that it is left to us to delve their meaning, to fill in the vowels, for ourselves by means of all the faith and imagination we can muster.”[1]”
Just like the Tanakh, if you want to know what God is saying in your life, you will have to dig for it! You will have to bend and struggle and question and pry and meditate and ruminate and experiment and evaluate. You’ll have to read it with one set of added vowels and then read it with another set of vowels until, at last, you know what it says.
Oh, and there’s something else about this inherent ambiguity in God’s Word and in God’s word in you.
“To do for yourself the best that you have it in you to do—to grit your teeth and clench your fists in order to survive the world at its harshest and worst—is, by that very act, to be unable to let something be done for you and in you that is more wonderful still. The trouble with steeling yourself against the harshness of reality is that the same steel that secures your life against being destroyed secures your life also against being opened up and transformed by the holy power that life itself comes from. You can survive on your own. You can grow strong on your own. You can even prevail on your own. But you cannot become human on your own.”[2]
Could we reverse the analogy? You can think you know what the text says by steeling yourself to all criticism. You can clench your theological fists and refuse to look at any other vowels. You can survive that way, sheltering yourself in the cocoon of like-minded doctrinal sycophants. But you can’t become human that way. Since the text is inherently ambiguous, it requires a community of explorers to understand it. It demands to be filled in by all those who engage it. And only where we let others see it differently will we learn what it might really say.
So, what does your life say? And who can tell you what it says? Try some new vowels and see what happens?
Topical Index: vowel, life, Buechner, Proverbs 27:17
[1]Frederick Buechner, Listening to Your Life(HarperOne, 1992), p. 4.
[2]Ibid., p. 13.
C.S. Lewis writes in Mere Christianity “But what man, in his natural condition, has not got, is Spiritual life—the higher and different sort of life that exists in God. We use the same word life for both: but if you thought that both must therefore be the same sort of thing, that would be like thinking that the ‘greatness’ of space and the ‘greatness’ of God were the same sort of greatness. In reality, the difference between Biological life and Spiritual life is so important that I am going to give them two distinct names. The Biological sort which comes to us through Nature, and which (like everything else in Nature) is always tending to rundown and decay so that it can only be kept up by incessant subsidies from Nature in the form of air, water, food, etc., is Bios. The Spiritual life which is in God from all eternity, and which made the whole natural universe, is Zoe. Bios has, to be sure, a certain shadowy or symbolic resemblance to Zoe: but only the sort of resemblance there is between a photo and a place, or a statue and a man. A man who changed from haying Bios to having Zoe would have gone through as big a change as a statue which changed from being a carved stone to being a real man.
And that is precisely what Christianity is about. This world is a great sculptor’s shop. We are the statues and there is a rumour going round the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.”
All life comes from beyond us. So does all truth. So does love, for that matter. Aren’t these what flesh out the transmission of meaning between us? The word “Babel” means “confusion”. That’s us without meaning. What’s the text without the Spirit of it? Probably about like a statue without Zoe. How many people, independent of that Spirit, have attempted to establish an ‘independent’ interpretation of that text? Just so many hammers wearing themselves out on that great Anvil. If that Word does not live (act) in me, I have no access to the meaning of it. Conversely, if it does live in me, the text is not necessary. So many people on this planet without access to that Word are living out what it says, spreading the good news it contains, and dying for it, too. If we, who hold the entire Book in our hands, are not doing as much, can we even say that we know (experience) what it really means? Truth is not something that we can move ourselves into, after all. A person who is the walking, talking truth is a living target to the world, All the rest of us, sadly, are probably still in perfect disguise in that world: we look just like it because “the truth is not in us”. No matter what we think the words say. I am, sadly, talking to myself in the mirror this morning. Sorry, y’all.
Yes Skip I did recognize the verse and before I read much further I thought to myself ha ha I’ve got the answer !…but that’s not where this TW is going . my daughter-in-law sent me a text last night about a discussion that her son our grandson of 12 years had just before bed…he asked her is God real? Not like santa is real . Her response was interesting in that it fits into the context of today’s TW she personalized the relationship with saying that mostly the emphasis was upon the individuals perspective a very western Greek paradigm . he also added I know that grandma and grandpa Believe God is real . This question that he asked about God being real comes in the midst of a year and a half into a very painful divorce for him his mom and our son .you talked about stealing oneself against the realities of life the pain of life unto and into the presence of Yahweh our father but also using these life painful situations to expand our relationship with those around us I know that many of us in TW are intimately aware of the painful experiences of life but as I say that I also know the joy of his presence
Skip writes “it takes life to read the text; life that
comes from someplace other than the text.”
That reminds me of what Yeshua once said:
“The words I have spoken to you are spirit
and they are life.” Jn 6:63
Agreed. The life that comes from someplace else
is from the Spirit. “When he, the Spirit of truth, comes,
he will guide you into all truth.” Jn 16:13
His words of spirit and life are daunting, unparalleled,
and uniquely coined to be minted by us all. Paul cautioned
Timothy about ‘quarreling over words” as it “only ruins those
who listen.” Then Paul writes: “Do your best to present yourself
to God as one approved, a workman who does not need to be
ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth.” 2 Tim 2:15
Words to live by. And to live by together.