Punctum Saliens

One of my daughter’s favorite movies is The Incredibles. Since I work at home and watch her most of the time, it’s very convenient that I, too, enjoy this movie because we watch it over and over and over. I’ve started paying attention to some of the dialog and there are some very good lines. One is when Helen Parr, aka Elastigirl, visits Edna to see the new supersuits she made. Helen is unaware of everything which precipitated Edna’s making the suits and so is totally lost as Edna starts talking about them. Edna then says:

Yes, words are useless! Gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble. Too much of it, darling. Too much. That is why I show you my work. That is why you are here.

Thomas Merton, talks about the same thing in Echoing Silence:

True communication on the deepest level is more than a simple sharing of ideas, of conceptual knowledge, or formulated truth. The kind of communication that is necessary on this deep level must also be “communion” beyond the level of words, a communion in authentic experience which is shared not only on a “preverbal” level but also on a “post-verbal” level.

The “preverbal” level is that of the unspoken and indefinable “preparation,” “the predisposition” of the mind and heart, necessary for all “monastic” experience whatever.

Now, perhaps I’m stretching the point, but I would consider some religious experiences — the Eucharist, for example — to be “monastic” experiences since these are reflective, contemplative, personal, yet shared and participatory. Merton continues (with emphasis added):

This demands among other things a “freedom from automatisms and routines,” and candid liberation from external social dictates, from conventions, limitations, and mechanisms which restrict understanding and inhibit experience of the new, the unexpected. The monk who is to communicate on the level that interests us here must be not merely a punctilious observer of external traditions, but a living example of traditional and interior realization. He must be wide open to life and to new experience because he has fully utilized his own tradition and gone beyond it. This will permit him to meet a [disciple] of another, apparently remote and alien tradition, and find a common ground of verbal understanding with him. The “post-verbal” level will then, at least ideally, be that on which they both meet beyond their own words and their own understanding in the silence of an ultimate experience which might conceivably not have occurred if they had not met and spoken. This I would call “communion.” I think it is something that the deepest ground of our being cries out for, and it is something for which a lifetime of striving would not be enough.

Language is limiting. Language is controlling. Edna was unable to describe to Helen the experience and wonder of making the supersuits because there was no common ground of understanding. Helen might as well have been talking a different language altogether. Her biases and assumptions did not allow her to understand. It didn’t fit into her mental model of the world. But that does not mean that Edna’s experiences were invalid or wrong or false. There was no language that could bridge the two world-views. But the experience itself could.

And this is exactly where the trouble lies in religions. Looking at the words, it may seem, for example, Islam and Christianity are mutually exclusive. And so we use these incompatible words as dividers between the two. We demand that they say the right words about their experiences of their God. That they describe their God with just the right adjectives — the same adjectives that we use to describe our God: “God cannot be God unless God is a Triune God, eternally existing in three persons …” Only then, is their experience of their God “correct.” Furthermore, if they don’t use the correct verbiage then they are heretics and eternally damned and sometimes worse.

But let’s take the very trite example of two people witnessing an event taking place in this physical world. You will get different stories, different explanations, different emphasis. In short, incompatible, mutually exclusive words. In fact, this very idea is often used to defend the Gospels. Just look at the resurrection story and see how many “different” accounts there are and how these “different” accounts for merged.

So, if we cannot agree on the words to describe an event in this physical world, how much less can we agree on the words to describe the ineffable, numinous experience of God?? And how can we hold others at fault for using their own words which make sense to them but not us? The key is to go beyond our own traditions and meet in non-verbal communion.