In the week that has passed, a story coming out of the Phoenix area made national headlines about the sacramental life of the church. For many of us, the decision made by the Roman Catholic Church is, perhaps, confounding. At a surface level, we might think that the variable creating the waves in the church is so small that we, as the Church, would not really need to worry about it. It is a question about language and the limits of human language to communicate something about the boundless nature of God’s love at work in the world. Does the use of the pronoun “we” instead of “I” really make that much of difference? And while we might be tempted to jump onto the bandwagon of social media posts declaring the decision of the Roman Catholic Church silly or ludicrous or lacking in pastoral judgment, it might be that we are entering into that age old folly of pointing out the splinter in our neighbor’s eye before first removing the log in our own. 

Instead, it might be helpful for us to wrestle with the limits of the human language and in particular the limits of pronouns within our language to fully encapsulate and stand in for a particular noun or person. One of my favorite poets and theologians, Pádraig Ó Tuama writes in his poem The Word Became Stretched and Crept Among Us, “It is the tense vocation of language to contain and constrain meaning.” There is something to that line that evokes an understanding of the limits of human language and how human language ultimately fails at grasping the fullness of the mystery of God. The use of language helps us to make meaning, but the limits of language also brings with it the constraining of the meaning that we make. We have to take the time to push our imaginations beyond the limits of the metaphor of language when we are talking about the sacred mysteries that we can only enter into and there find something that approximates a fuller understanding or meaning of the mystery of God’s love. After all, when we are talking about God, language can only be understood as metaphor that has limits and ultimately crumbles at the edges. It is not possible for human language to contain the fullness of the meaning of God’s love because of the infinite nature of God and the finite nature of human language. We are, it seems, presented with quite the challenge. We have to find a way to speak about God despite the fact that the constrained meaning of human language will fail at grasping God’s fullness. 

And perhaps this is where we get into trouble with pronouns. The church has grappled with pronouns for a long time and how to use them well in relation to our understanding of who God is and how we wish to speak about God. When we use certain pronouns to speak about God, we might find ourselves stretched beyond imagining. The tense vocation of language enters the picture time and again as we seek to say something about God. But, perhaps all of this is a bit too esoteric. Perhaps it would be helpful for us to think about this through a more concrete example. 

In the last meeting of The General Convention of The Episcopal Church, our church wrestled with the question of language and how to speak about God within our liturgy. There was, and I think still is, a desire to craft our liturgies with more expansive language so our liturgy was more easily entered into by folks who might not understand God only through masculine pronouns. The church was seeking a way forward within our liturgical life that would remain faithful to the traditions and prayers we have inherited down through the ages while also creating a more meaningful worship experience for a broader cross-section of humanity. Needless to say, the trial liturgies that were approved did not go far enough for some while also going too far for others. In certain places within the liturgy, we changed some of the “he” pronouns to “Christ.” We took out specific use of the word “Father” in some of our prayers - like the post-communion prayer at the end of the Eucharist. The debate around the expansive language liturgies was fraught with theological consequence, and the people tasked with making a decision wanted to come to a faithful way forward. 

Another example that we might look towards within our liturgy is the use of the Nicene Creed. In the Greek, the word for Spirit is pneuma, which is a feminine word in the Greek. The corresponding pronoun is a feminine pronoun. We see this in other romantic languages like Spanish. A feminine word gets a corresponding feminine pronoun. It is reasonable for us to think about using a feminine pronoun in the English if we want to remain true to the Greek. Thus, we might understand the Spirit as a she instead of us a he in the Nicene Creed. And of course, because we are Episcopalian, we will continue to recite the Creed as it appears in the approved liturgies of the Church, but we also might be able to stretch our imaginations to more fully understand how God includes the fullness of human gender. 

One more place that challenges us with the Greek to English parsing is in the Benedictus, which Father Steve has mentioned before and is included in our Eucharistic liturgy every week. In the Book of Common Prayer, the English appears as “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” If we go to a Greek New Testament, we will find that a literal translation of the Greek would be “Blessed is the One who comes in the name of the Lord.” Again, one choice or the other contains or constrains the meaning. “He” might not be offensive if we have in our mind the person of Jesus who walked on earth as a man, but it also constrains our imagination from thinking about the Second Person of the Trinity who exists before the beginning of creation as part of the Godhead.

The tense vocation of language invites us to contain meaning and to stretch beyond the constraints of the metaphor of language in order to reach a greater understanding, a deeper understanding, a faithful understanding of the boundlessness of God. Perhaps, the problem is that we reach the edge of words far too soon when we are thinking or speaking about God or about the sacramental life of the church. Here, I find Rowan Williams’ thinking about the edge of words quite helpful in his book “The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language.” 

Though it has been a while since I read his book, I remember him offering to the Church a way of talking about God by coming to the edge of our words. Without the book in front of me, I am not able to pull quotes, but when I read it, I was inspired by the idea that the edge of our words is where we might begin to speak faithfully about God and how we experience God in our lives. In reaching the edge of our words, we are challenged to stretch beyond the containers of language, to stretch beyond the constrained meaning we find in language, and to find new words, or perhaps old words put together in a new way, to say something new but also remain faithful to our understanding of God’s boundless love. 

Time and again, human language is going to fail to grapple with the mystery of God’s love. We will have to continue to wrestle with the language that we use in our worship and our dialogue about God in church, in formation classes, in conversation, and in prayer. We will find times in which we reach the edge of our words despite wanting to say more about God. The edge of our words will present us with the opportunity to enter prayer not through more words but through silence and through meditation. We will be invited to sit with God in that space and to wait: for God to move us to new spaces, new understanding, new containers of meaning that will ultimately constrain our understanding. 

Today, we are invited to sit with our language and the ways that it fails to include the fullness of the infinite mystery of God’s love. We are invited to pray, for and with our siblings across the Church, as we wait for the Holy Spirit to gift us the wisdom we hunger for as we reflect on the meaning and movement of God’s love in our midst. And so, as the Anglican priest and poet R.S. Thomas writes in his poem Kneeling, 

“ Prompt me, God;

But not yet. When I speak,   

Though it be you who speak   

Through me, something is lost.   

The meaning is in the waiting.”

In Christ,

Hunter+

References:

1. Ó Tuama, P. Sorry for your troubles.

2. Williams, R. (2014). The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language. Bloomsbury Continuum.

3. Kneeling by R. S. Thomas | Poetry Foundation. (2022). Retrieved 18 February 2022, from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48946/kneeling-56d22a97b5917

4. Baker, A. (2021). Leaving Emmaus. Baylor University Press.