What does religious language convey?
I make little plans these days choosing to wait and see how the day unfolds. I decided I would go to the London Quaker event about language.
Alan York spent his professional life training teachers in Philosophy and Maths, teaching them how to bring their values into teaching and understand the logic of what they were teaching.
He recalled reading a children’s version of, ‘A Christmas Carol’ to a group of children at a children’s meeting. One of the children asked where the ghosts in the tale real. It was from this he spoke about allegory and that most if not all of our religious language and readings are allegorical. I haven’t quite worked out if that applies to all language whether religious or not. It raises questions about so-called factual language such as perhaps how scientific writing is perceived is that equally allegorical?
He was not against words as they convey something of our experience. He did not exempt God from allegory. We have an experience a spiritual experience and then we attempt to explain ‘the uncommunicable’, ‘the ineffable’ in the best, many of us have, words and language. He did reference the below article which highlights how art can do this. The article records the experience, in words, of an observer whilst viewing a Vermeer painting,
‘One of the most vivid experiences on my part was sitting quietly for at least an hour before a picture by the Dutch painter Vermeer.’ He describes his feeling and adds: ‘Something was given to me that I can only describe as, literally, a transcending of the normal everyday world. This quite simple secular act was for me a truly worshipful experience.’
George Gorman In Quaker faith & practice 21.34 George Gorman
York spoke of religion being communal whereas spirituality is individual. He asserted that the mystics of all religions have a universal experience of a sense of being one with everything. It was on this basis he believed there are universal experiences that we name, ‘spiritual’.
Religions could, therefore, be seen as schools to teach the spiritual though ultimately it is for everyone to have their own experience.
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