Stop Making Sense

For WUOM - Commentary Submitted August 17, 1997

On the radio the other day, I heard this scientist say that a volcano she was studying had a "warped sense of humor."

She was talking about the big one in Hawaii, which she had been working on for years and which had just recently swallowed a bunch of her scientific equipment.

So the volcano has a sense of humor! It was refreshing to hear a scientist express this most primitive and unscientific aspect of the human imagination, the anthropomorphic tendency.

An image flashed in my mind of the scientist holding hands with a Hawaiian priest from the ancient of days, both standing before the superheated, ravening crater. Deprived of her instruments of measurement, the scientist finds her voice in the metaphorical language of poets and priests.

As a priest myself, I suddenly felt hopeful that the false divisions between science and religion might yet be overcome.

We all do it, of course. We all talk about inanimate objects as if they had personalities: my computer is temperamental; my Honda Civic is loyal; my house has a soul.

But when religious people indulge the same impulse by talking about God, they're often dismissed by folks who seem to think poetic speech should be limited to cars and household appliances. I speak of my God as a loving Mother, and the critic says, "Oh, you're just anthropomorphizing," as if that were an ultimate put-down.

But it's really a kind of put-down of the ultimate, proving only that the critic has been to college. I mean, of course I was anthropomorphizing! What better way to describe a relationship as passionate and complex as my relationship to the highest power?

There's nothing wrong with a little anthropomorphic speech -- because it makes new ways of relating to our world possible. Whether it's volcanoes or Vishnu, Jeeps or Jehovah, it allows us to love what we would otherwise merely observe.

But of course, it's dangerous, too. After all, it's one thing to speak of a volcano's sense of humor; it's another thing to believe that throwing a virgin into its crater will appease its wrath. Religious people are always confusing the metaphorical and the literal, and the heartbreak of that confusion, found wherever fundamentalists of any faith rise to power, is enough to turn a lot of us away from religion forever.

And so we cast off the childhood Bible stories as if they were fairy tales; and while we might, once in a while, imagine that our cars have personalities, we never allow ourselves the same luxury with respect to the ground and abyss of our being; until we become alienated from an entire universe of ultimate meanings and transcendent truths.

That's too bad; because anthropomorphic language helps us enter into a relationship with the ultimate; a relationship that can transform our lives and lift our hearts and cure what ails us; a relationship that is only possible when we entertain the primitive hunch that the universe, even more than our car or our favorite armchair, has a soul.



The Rev. Matthew Lawrence
Chaplain, Canterbury House
Director, Institute for Public Theology