[SB] Scrambling towards Zion: Terminology (March 9)

[Molly Wolf]

Terminology

At my age, I really should have less trouble with any part of the word "no." I am a retired editor, which is rather like being a retired border collie; give me a manuscript and I will scramble up on my arthritic hind legs and lumber off in pursuit of the straying phrase or the inconsistent use of hyphens. But it makes me grouchy these days, does editing, and that's why I should have said "no" when this project came along. Except it was an author I'd worked with before and rather liked, and it was a bittie little job, two new chapters and a preface for of a revised edition, no big. It would take me an afternoon or two and help pay for the sewing room furniture.

I should have remembered that bit about grouchiness.

The author is a good soul, and I know what she means when she talks about the problems presented by intentional or unintentional additives to food that may mimic hormones and affect weight gain or cause other problems. I do understand. But she persists in calling them "chemicals", and that turned my crank. (I have let her know this in a note, but it's her book and if that's the term she wants, she can use it.)

Chemicals simply*are*. In normal amounts, some of them affect us positively (calcium, in everything from teeth to wallboard to eggshells), some of them are neutral (helium), some of them are harmful (arsenic). Mostly, it depends on what form the chemical is in and how we respond to it; oxygen is great in dihydrogen monoxide (water) and not so good making the rounds as a swingin' single (free radicals). So using "chemicals" as a synonym for "bad stuff" -- stuff for which the music of "Jaws" would be entirely suitable -- is apt to crankify* anyone with a knowledge of science.

The same goes for words like "organic" and "natural".  Botulinum toxic, lethal in tiny amounts, is organic; so are curare, nicotine, rattlesnake venom, formaldehyde, and carbon monoxide.  "Organic" simply means something that's based on carbon fixed by photosynthesis, plus hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and a few other elements.  Some organic compounds are good for us, others bad, some just smelly (anything with a thiol group).  Perhaps Americans tend to be a little more idealistic about nature than Canadians; we have, after all, far more biting bugs (and bears). But nature is neither guilty nor innocent, good nor bad; it just*is*. We can objectify it for good or for ill, but it's still objectification.

It's a human thing to invest single words with whole freights of meaning based on a limited understanding or a misguided usage or on our own projections; look at what's happened to that perfectly honourable word "Islamic." Neither "liberal" nor "conservative" has four letters, and when we use them as dirty words we lose something essential in their full meaning. An editor gets cranky about this because editors are fusspots about meaning and precision, and heavily freighting a word can warp it right out of shape. Behaviour like this sets us yapping, snarling, and nipping at heels.

Two such crankifying terms are "spiritual" and "religious." Most people who say "I'm spiritual but not religious" would, I think, have a hard time answering the question "What do you mean by that?" Rejection of traditional religious institutions, like church, is the easy part of the answer.  There's no doubt in my mind that churches are apt to fade from the horizon, possibly within my lifetime, almost certainly within my kids'.  I don't know what will happen in other faith traditions, but I don't think too many are flourishing, at least in North America.

But what about the big ceremonies -- weddings, baby-namings, funerals, solemn occasions? These are times when communities draw together to do jointly some sort of organized, formal special event that's set aside from the dailiness of things and that involves a celebration or commitment or something else ... well, holy. How can these occasions be "spiritual but not religious" unless they're free of all rites and traditions? No vows, for example; no presentation to the community; no dedicatory words. Uh-huh.

And how do we deal with our sense that there really is an Otherness, a something that cannot be reduced to the Lego blocks of the periodic table of elements? That is, perhaps, what people mean by "spirituality." They try to find places other than the traditional pew to park it in, and that isn't something I can criticize.  I am a cradle Episcopalian, an adult Anglican, a preacher's kid, a church adherent for most of my life now, but I'm not stupid and I can easily see where my Christianity, just like all other faith traditions (Marxism and Social Darwinism included) has royally FUBARed.

But that doesn't warrant a split between religion and spirituality.  The great world religions all have mystical traditions in which the soul meets one-on-one in prayer and meditation with Whatever's Out There/In Here; and all of the ancestrally wise spiritual traditions involved religious rites, some of them quite messy. This split between "religion" and "spirituality", like that between "chemical" and "organic" is very recent. It is (I suspect) really a sort of waffling -- a way of touching base with the soul-ish side of things without commitment and without laying oneself open to attack by people who think anyone who believes in God is as dumb as a sack of hammers. It's a soft option.

It is, however, also creating an artificial divide, like the divide between "chemical" and "organic," that's based on a human need for villains and heroes, not on Creation as it exists.  That particular word-fission is a variant on TEAPOT ("those evil awful people over there") -- substituting substances for people.  But it's just the names we give things. Citric acid is what makes lemons taste sour; malic acid is in apples. Adenosine triphosphate is the essential coinage of energy transfer within living systems. Sacrifice is giving something up for a greater good out of a sense of a Greater Good. Liturgy is the work of the people; CHNaO3 is sodium bicarbonate is good ol' baking soda.

My own faith needs belief the way a laundry line needs poles to keep it up when it gets saggy.  Yours may be different; your soul is your business, not mine. It's hard for me, however, to imagine spirituality without faith and belief of some sort. Isn't that as fugitive as mist? How can that nebulous unvoiced wisp of feeling sustain a soul when the weather gets heavy and the hard winds commence to blow?

God is out there in the sunset and the Navajo flute tune and in here, struggling to get through my mind and fingers into a computer and out through the electrons, and in church and synagogue and ashram and temple and mosque. God is in mitosis and meiosis and the spaces between atoms and galaxies. We're the ones who split things up and slap labels on them. Not Creation. Not the Creator.

For Deborah and Linda

* Recovering copy editors are permitted the invention of vernacular neologisms. It's part of the healing process.

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