7 posts tagged “metaphor”

"As a younger person, I would have loved to enter a Tolkien-esque world (and could easily pass for a hobbit too!), and some of the imaginary worlds I was drawing as a teenager, but I don't really have those kind of escapist longings any more. More and more I see fantasy worlds - as in The Arrival - as a way of tapping into the real world, of trying to understand reality better through a speculative lens. If I was to visit that world, I would immediately lose my bearings, like entering a metaphor without its real-world anchorage. I prefer to visit using only a pencil on paper."

-Shaun Tan

I posted this on a message board.  I think it's pretty scattered, but it's got some good stuff from Joseph Campbell in it, so I figured I'd post it. :)

*****

Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor

Joseph Campbell

There was one part of the book that I thought would make for some good discussion here. He explains the significance of the two trees in the Garden of Eden and what it could mean. To do this, he also brings in the Buddhist myth of the gates that lead to Nirvana. Some might object to that saying you have to work only within one tradition, but I think considering all religions as a piece of the puzzle can lead us to a much much better understanding.

Anyway, here we go:

"What is that tree of immortal life? Even after examining it in depth the rabbinical discussions of the two trees in the Garden, it remains something of an enigma.

"Look closely and you may see, as I do, that they are the same tree. You are in the Garden and the tree is the way out. The way out is through learning of good and evil, a process that is symbolically expressed by eating the fruit of that tree. It is as if you are walking from a room where all is one into a room where, as you pass the threshold, all is suddenly two.

"Look back at the gate of the Garden where stand the two cherubim with the flaming sword between them, and you are out, in exile from the place where all was one.

"What is the way back? The idea appears to be that God is keeping us out of the Garden, forbidding our reentry. In the Buddhist tradition, however, the Buddha says, 'Don't be afraid, come right through.'

"But what does that mean?

"Of the two guardians in the Buddhist theme, one has his mouth open, and the other has his mouth closed: they are opposites. One represents fear, the other represents desire.

"The fear is that of death and the desire is for more of this world: fear and desire are what keep you out of the Garden. It is not God who keeps us in exile, but ourselves."

He goes on to say that people are converting to the Eastern religions all the time these days because it's obvious that the meaning and relevance to their daily lives is right there. Christianity....not so much. But that doesn't mean we don't have that meaning...it's just hidden underneath so much literalism and historicism.

"This is what the story of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden is all about. It is not about an historical incident but about a psychological, spiritual experience, a metaphor for what is happening to us right now."

We make an unconscious decision to leave transcendence when we are very very young. And it's in our nature. We live in a world in which transcendence doesn't really matter if our goal is survival. Especially in the modern world, where transcendence has been all but sapped out of everything in our daily lives. And yet the way in is the same as the way out, only reflected as in a mirror. We have to see that the world is more than just opposites, but we're held back by our fears and our desires. It's our very feeling of separateness that keeps us separated.

We distinguish between heaven and earth, good and evil, right and wrong, up and down, pretty and ugly, mind and body etc. The whole world is made up of pairs of opposites for us. That is the world we live in where all is suddenly two. To get back to the Garden, we have to realize that all is also one. That the opposites are really the same thing. That is why God is often described in paradox. God is this and God is not this. God is both, for he transcends our pairs of opposites, and for him all is one. There is no other physical place where we will go to be in the Kingdom of God. That's thinking in opposites again. It's something that's already here, and yet is on its way. Heaven and Earth are one.

"The Kingdom will not come by expectation. The Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth, and men do not see it." - Gospel of Thomas

and

"With the moon walk, the religious myth that sustained these notions could no longer be held. With our view of earth rise, we could see that the earth and the heavens were no longer divided but that the earth is in the heavens. There is no division and all the theological notions based on the distinction between the heavens and the earth collapse with that realization. There is a unity in the universe and a unity in our own experience. We can no longer look for a spiritual order outside of our own experience."

We have to find things that open us up to transcendence and let us see the world beyond the pairs of opposites. If our symbols are failing us, we must find new ones...or breathe new life into the old ones. If our religious laws aren't serving us and helping us to reach towards God, we can't cling to them. For the Law was made for man, not man for the Law.

And we've got so much. The world is literally littered with shattered symbols. Ideas and myths that once structured society lie in ruins all around us...including parts of our own traditions. If we search and pick up the pieces and put them together, perhaps we can regain that sense of transcendence that is all too rare in our day in age.

I wonder if that whole thing didn't make any sense. I wish I was better at explaining things in more common language.

Mulholland Drive

Taken from Lost on Mulholland Drive:

Pay particular attention to the beginning of the film: at least two clues are revealed before the credits.

1. Jitterbug contest: Betty wins. Irene and her companion cheer her up.

   • The dance contest had been a stepping stone for Diane to move to Hollywood and pursue an acting career. We hear again of it at Adam's dinner party.

   • Betty is shown bathed in the spotlight as the scene fades into Diane's bedroom. We see images of dancing pairs while Betty, aside from the two old people, is seen without a partner. Irene and her male companion are apparently a manifestation of Diane's good/innocent side.

   • In order of appearance, the credits list Betty well before Diane. This means that the partner-less jitterbugger we see is Betty. This fact is supported by someone shouting "Betty, Betty" off-screen right before the scene fades into Diane's bedroom. Does this mean that Diane is spinning a yarn when she tells us that she won a jitterbug contest? Or was the contest real, but just represented to us differently than how it happened?

   • Though people still jitterbug today, those are clearly supposed to be people from back in the day. Everyone is wearing vintage clothes. At present day nostalgia type sock hop most people would be wearing current clothing and maybe a few would be wearing contemporary versions of typical jitterbug attire. Are we supposed to believe this is all a throwback to the good old 50s or before (the time when Aunt Ruth was young) and not a jitterbug contest that Betty/Diane was at? (Also consult clue #10 F)

   Related: Jitterbug Contest

2. Right before the camera zooms in on the pillow it seems to focus on the area of the floor where the blue box later disappears at Havenhurst.

3. We here a noise that distinctly sounds like cocaine being snorted followed by the sound of someone breathing hard, falling into the pillow.

   • Somebody is falling into a (drug-induced?) sleep - a dream is about to begin.

   • We later see the same green blanket and red pillow when Diane wakes up. It's her dream.

Notice appearances of the red lampshade.

Another clue to the viewer that we have at least two alternate realities.

1. In Diane's dream the red lampshade appears at the end of a phone-call chain, in the middle of Hollywood's Byzantine conspiracy. The call is not being answered. Possible interpretations:

   1. It's a visual clue to us, the viewers, that Betty/Diane is the last in this pyramid scheme of Hollywood behind the scene operators. This is reality poking its head in Diane's dream reminding herself that it was she who arranged the accident, both literally (when she arranged the hitman to kill Camilla), and figuratively (when she created a better version of Camilla in her dream). The phone goes unanswered because Diane is unwilling to acknowledge that she is, indeed, the one and only creator of such machinations; the viewers themselves only make the connection hours later, when we see another shot of Diane's phone. 

   2. The call is meant for Diane Selwyn in the fantasy sequence, but it remains unanswered as her body lies decaying at Sierra Bonita.

   3. They call for real Diane Selwyn. Since the Hollywood underworld controls the movie business, Diane would idealize acceptance in this world. "The girl is still missing" refers to Diane holing up in her apartment for weeks, imagining Hollywood to be clamoring for her.

   4. It's a replay of the call to attend the dinner party, only with Mr Roque as the initiator and Diane avoiding the call. It's her pathological way of dealing with reality. Diane feels that she should never have come. She should never have picked up the phone when Camilla called that night.

   5. Mr Roque's line "The girl is still missing" is referring to Rita. There is a shot of her sleeping under the kitchen table before the phone call sequence starts, establishing that she is the girl who's still missing... from the crash scene. Was she on her way to a liaison with Mr Roque?

Related: Phone call chain

2. When Diane Selwyn wakes up and thinks of Camilla, we learn that the phone by the red lampshade is actually her own home telephone. When she answers it, Camilla invites her to 6980 Mulholland Drive.

3. More red lampshades:

   1. inside the corner shop at Pink's. In connection with the prostitute who looks like a doppelganger of Diane it could symbolize Diane being subjected to prostitution. Is she a call girl living a double life?

   2. another red lamp shade is visible at Havenhurst on first floor above Aunt Ruth's apartment. 

   Related: Red Lamp Shade

There's a blue lamp shade on the table in Mr Roque's room. Blue/Red as a yin/yang symbolism? 

Can you hear the title of the film that Adam Kesher is auditioning actresses for? Is it mentioned again?

Another hint that we deal with alternate realities.

1. We hear on the set that Adam Kesher is auditioning for the leading role in the "Sylvia North Story"
   (stagehand saying "The Sylvia North Story, Camilla Rhodes, take one." just about when Blond Camilla walks in). 

2. This movie title is mentioned again by Diane at Adam's dinner party. Wilkins tells that Bob Brooker directed the "Sylvia North Story" and Camilla was great in it.

Judging from the title, "The Sylvia North Story" is presumably a tragic story of a fallen starlet, for which both Diane and Camilla were auditioning. Irony to their tragic ends.

An accident is a terrible event... Notice the location of the accident.

On the way to 6980 Mulholland Drive, at Adam Kesher's house. It is the place where Diane is picked up by Camilla following her hand in hand up through the secret passage. Diane thought maybe Camilla was interested in reconciling with her after all, but did not know about Camilla's surprise announcement for later that night. The party turned out to be a horrible humiliation for Diane, so in her rage and jealousy she orders a hit on Camilla. Later she feels remorse about it. 

In Diane's dream Rita is getting high-jacked on her way to Adam at the same place, but she escapes hit & accident.
Possible interpretations: 

1. The messed up hit both prevents Camilla from reaching her destination (the dinner party?) and allows Diane's guilt to be assuaged as the hit fails. This way Diane wants to undo her terrible crime.

2. If an accident is to be taken figuratively and not literally, then the dream accident of Rita on Mulholland Drive is just a stand-in for Diane's accident - an unexpected and traumatic event (dinner party) where her illusions shattered. 

3. In Diane's dream the hit on Camilla was initiated by the shady consortium of producers who decided to not have her in their movie. They ambush Camilla on her Mulholland Drive ride in the same way as Camilla set Diane up, bringing her to the party.

Watch for the reprised line "What are you doing? We don't stop here!" by Rita and Diane.

Who gives a key, and why?

• Coco: from Aunt Ruth to Betty...to enter the "dreamworld".
• The Hitman (blue key): To confirm the deal is done.

Who gets the key?

• Rita: in her bag with the hit money. Diane wants to transfer her guilt; there is no way Betty would carry it in the dream.

• Diane: on her coffee table. Probably she retrieved it from somewhere else.

Observations: 

Only one key is given in the film. The key that Coco gives to Betty. The hitman doesn't give a key. He *leaves* it for Diane. Moreover Betty doesn't touch Rita's blue key either.

There's a sleight of hand going on here. The viewers are lured to focusing on the blue keys. But neither is ever "given". Betty is given the key to Aunt Ruth's apartment because Aunt Ruth is dead, just as Diane is given another key because Camilla is dead (see clue #10). So if the Coco key is a clue, then Coco's relationship with the two main protagonists needs further examining.

Notice the robe, the ashtray, the coffee cup.

These are chronological narration elements used for time references in the "real time" scenes. 

Robe:

• Ruth's: (precious, purple) at Havenhurst, with the note for (Bitsie) Betty. Betty uses it to cover Rita.
  Rita is wearing it the first day around. »here
  It was almost regal and it was clearly meant for Betty, but only Rita wears it. Betty is never able to put it on. When you look at these clues you begin to see that Diane envied Camilla because she was enjoying the success that Diane had wanted and had been dreaming of since her days in Deep River. 

• Rita's: (distinctively red robe with a black collar) on second day during the rehearsal scene with Betty. »here

• Betty's: (hot pink) at rehearsal. »here

• Diane's: (shabby, white) when Diane remembers the flashbacks in her apartment. It looks like a faded version of her dream robe. »here
  When Diane is wearing the bathrobe we are in 'realtime' (neighbor scene, suicide), when she is wearing hot pans it's a flashback (couch scene, masturbation).

Related: MD Costumes

Piano ashtray:

• When the piano ashtray is there it is a flashback (love scene on couch with Camilla), when it is gone it's the present (neighbor picking up, Diane alone on couch having flashbacks, suicide).

• The piano ashtray is there with Diane and Camilla on the couch. Diane obviously swapped apartments before ordering the hit on Camilla (respectively prior to the dinner party).

Ashtray with cig butts:

• On the table by the red lamp we see an ashtray filled with butts of filter cigarettes. One of them has a mark of red lips stick. Since Diane is not shown to be a smoker, those butts could be from Camilla or her neighbor.

Related: The ashtray

Coffee cup:

• Diane brews herself a coffee in a cup similar to those at Winkie's. This could be a clue
    - to her being employed at a diner (waitress Betty/Diane?) respectively being a kleptomaniac
    - a clue to Diane's dream incorporating personal objects. If so, are we to take the hitman scene at Winkie's likewise as fantasy and not based on a real-life event?

• The cup changes into a glass of Whiskey in the couch scene with Camilla. 

• At the Ryan Board conference Luigi orders a cup espresso.  

• At the pool party Diane sips coffee from a cup that has SOS written on it. This echoes the "help me" cry of Vincenzo Castigliane at the meeting. The cup sports the same colors but different style and pattern as Luigi's espresso cup earlier.

What is felt, realised and gathered at the club Silencio?

• Felt: Love, unreturned love, pain, tears, spasm, loss, fear, compassion.
• Realized: All is an illusion. The Dream wasn't reality. Lies. Hollywood is fake. The dream is over.
• Gathered: Betty gets a Blue Box with a triangular keyhole in her bag.
  

Did talent alone help Camilla?

Which one?

• Blond Camilla Rhodes is pushed by the Castigliane brothers to get the lead in The Sylvia North Story.

   

  Possible interpretation:
  The  conspiracy is Diane's rationalization for why she never became famous in real life. She believes that she's done everything right, played by the rules, yet outside forces have plotted against her, resulting in her failure. Bottom line, Diane refuses to accept responsibility for losing the lead part.

• Raven-haired Camilla

  1. Camilla had an affair with the director. She probably used her sex appeal and was willing to sleep around to get ahead. Note the look Coco is throwing over at Camilla and Adam, when Betty said at the dinner party: "Anyway, Camilla got the part", seemingly knowing of how Camilla used to further her career.

  2. Or did Diane and her money helped too? The assertion here is that the money seen ready to be handed over by Diane to Joe in the Winkie's scene is not a payoff for a contract to kill Camilla, rather it is money paid to Joe to in some way influence the casting of Camilla in a film – starting her off on the road to stardom.

Note the occurrences surrounding the man behind 'Winkies'.

• Dan meets the face of this God-awful feeling. He dies from an heart attack after seeing the "monster".

• Near the end of the film, after the hit on Camilla is settled at Winkie's, we see the monster again. Only it's not a monster anymore. It's a pathetic bum, stripped of everything, sad and disheveled. We see that he is just one more person transformed into something else by Diane's dream. But wait! The homeless man is a monster in her reality too. He is unleashing the miniatured couple of old people who then drive Diane to commit suicide. Though Diane wished she'd never have seen his face outside of her dream, he has been there all along.

• After Diane's death, we see the monster superimposed on top of the smoke. And then we see his face fade out while Betty's/Diane's face fades in. This last appearance of this "man" is especially instructive because with the connection between his face and Diane's face we are being told that this monster is yet another persona of Diane. 
  And so we realize that it is not a "man" at all. He is a she.

Where is Aunt Ruth?

• In Diane's dream Aunt Ruth is redeemed and shots a film in Canada. She is letting Diane stay in her apartment.

• In reality, as we learn from Diane at the dinner pool party, Aunt Ruth is dead, but left her an inheritance. Clue? There's a  black hat popping up in Aunt Ruth's bedroom, resting on the bureau in the scene where Rita gets undressed. Does is belong to a funeral outfit? Note: There is an old joke in movie business, "acting in Canada" is "being dead".

• Ruth shows off in the Havenhurst apartment right at the end of the dream, after Rita vanishes. She is dressed the same way as she left in the beginning. Possible interpretations: 

  1. It's Aunt Ruth's ghost, somehow interacting with Diane's fantasy in the same way that Louise Bonner and Dan at Winkie's could.

  2. In her lucid dream state Diane tries to rewind the dream. It has broken down with the disappearance of Betty and Rita. But her mind apparently doesn't want to let go of the fantasy. Its almost like she's picked up the story from the point of aunt Ruth coming back to her apartment for something at the beginning of the film. The message we are being given is that Diane is not looking forward to going back to her real life.

  3. Diane dreams of her aunt coming home from Canada to find her (Betty) disappeared. Just as in the beginning when Ruth and Betty missed another at Havenhurst, it symbolizes Diane's yearning for her beloved Aunt that can never be resolved because Ruth died before Diane arrived in L.A.

  4. Ruth comes into the room to separate dream from reality. It substantiates for us that there is no blue box on the floor, or in other word that is was a dream, or that the dream is ending. So, her presence is sort inaugurating reality, even if we are still in the dream. Further, if this scene reflects actual reality, then, can we even consider this woman to be Diane's aunt? Aren't we let to believe this apartment is rather owned by somebody else and merely served as a canvas for Diane's dream? It was all... an illusion.

  5. That final scene is a flashback to the time Aunt Ruth was still living. She is hearing a ghostly disturbance of her own.

  6. The movie is actually placed in the 50s. Betty/Diane is Aunt Ruth in her young years. It's her story. Thus about when Rita opens the blue box Betty disappears. She rematerializes as Aunt Ruth an instant later as to indicate that her dream is over. »more

• The last of David Lynch's clues asks "Where is Aunt Ruth?" and the last scene of the movie presents us with the Blue Haired Woman. Is she Aunt Ruth in her afterlife? »more

Mulholland Drive

First off, let me say that virtually none of this was discovered on my own.  I greatly admire those of you who put in the time and the thought to figure it all out on your own, because as soon as I turned off the TV I went straight to the computer to research. :)

"Like so many others, I thought the movie Mulholland Drive was an inspired work. The power of it does not just emanate from its eerie and mysterious atmosphere, its taste for conspiracy and intrigue, and its poignant love story which ends tragically in betrayal, murder and suicide. The force of the movie comes across in the way most scenes are able to communicate on many different levels at the same time. This, in effect, challenges you to tease apart the significance of the multiple layers if you are to really understand the message at the subtext of the story. And just as the metaphorical structure at the subtext of the story is difficult to grasp, the context of the story at the surface level is also a complicated and puzzling challenge. As in other works by Lynch, there are serious plot twists and shuffled timelines that force the viewer to do some work to decide what the chronological sequence of events in the story really was. But this movie doesn't stop there. Even with a reasonable chronological story line, the logic of the events is still very illusive. The true genius of Mulholland Drive is in the way that it employs an intricate language of symbolism and metaphor that would give even a complex novel a run for its money."

The most popular theory is this:

"Diane Selwyn is a struggling actress in Hollywood. She moved to L.A. from Deep River, Ontario after winning a Jitterbug competition that inspired her to become an actress.

We descend into the pillow at the start of the film from Diane Selwyn's point-of-view. From now, until the moment we see her wake from the bed, Diane is dreaming. She dreams that she is Betty, a fresh-faced actress arriving in Hollywood. She dreams that Rita stumbles into her apartment after an accident, having lost her memory. She dreams that she wows the various assembled showbiz people at her audition. The dream climaxes with the haunting Club Silencio, the disappearance of Betty, and the opening of the blue cube back at Havenhurst. 

A knocking on the door awakes Diane from her bed, and she raises herself from her slumber to answer the door. The scenes that follow are intended to illustrate the breakdown of a relationship between Diane and Camilla and subsequent mental collapse of Diane. Tricky thing is that Lynch presents them to us in a non-linear style.

It's up to you to decide the chronological order of these scenes (help here), but the crux of this interpretation is that it is inferred that Diane hires a hitman to kill Camilla. So from this point of view, the flashbacks can be seen as Diane's attempt to justify the murder in her mind, and the dream as an attempt to re-live and re-imagine Diane's life since her arrival in L.A."

That said, here are some other common theories (out of 27 that exist!), divided up into a few different categories.

Dream/Reality

Camila is not dead.
Diane was sexually abused.
Diane didn't kill herself.
Diane was murdered.
Diane had an abortion.
Schizophrenia.
Drug trips.

All Dream

A dream within a dream.

All Real

The dream was a movie.

Metaphysical

Afterlife Theory
Mobius Strip
Parallel Universes
Deal with the Devil.

And that's just some of them.  Find more here.

And if you're really willing to put in the time, here's a very well written (and quite long) essay from Alan Shaw.

Stay tuned for a common explanation of Lynch's ten clues!

Here we go! First up, this month's movie is Mulholland Drive by David Lynch:

Mulholland Drive

From wikipedia:

Mulholland Dr. is a 2001 Academy Award-nominated psychological thriller written and directed by David Lynch. It stars Naomi Watts, Laura Harring and Justin Theroux.

The plot is structured around an aspiring actress named Betty Elms (Watts), who befriends an amnesiac (Harring) whom she finds hiding in her aunt's apartment when she arrives in Los Angeles, California. The film includes several other seemingly unrelated vignettes, which eventually connect in various ways, as well as other surreal scenes and images which are all involved in the cryptic narrative.

Strongly acclaimed by many critics, but only a moderate box-office success, the film has achieved the status of a cult classic.

David Lynch:

Lynch has received three Academy Award for Best Director nominations for The Elephant Man (1980), Blue Velvet (1986), and Mulholland Drive (2001). He has won awards at the Cannes Film Festival and Venice Film Festival. Lynch is probably best known for Blue Velvet and for being the creative force behind the successful Twin Peaks television series. In 1992, Lynch was named "the Most Influential Filmmaker" by Time Magazine. Producer Stuart Cornfeld once called Lynch "Jimmy Stewart from Mars", due to his peculiar style and focus on the American psyche. Over a lengthy career, Lynch has employed an unorthodox approach to narrative that has become instantly recognizable to audiences and critics worldwide. Lynch's films are known for surreal, nightmarish and dreamlike images and meticulously crafted sound design.

*****

And for our book, we'll read both Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard (since they're both relatively short and build upon each other).  You can buy them separately, or you can buy the Annie Dillard Reader (pictured below).

Annie Dillard Reader, An

Annie Dillard

1 comment

Someone asked me to explain the power of metaphor, so the first thing I did was run over to Laura's blog and look it up. ;)

I found her post on Joseph Campbell, and linked them to it (I hope you don't mind!).  Then, I stumbled on this documentary about him and I just had to share it:

Beautiful.

The Heart of Christianity Rediscovering a Life of Faith

It's funny, because I picked up Borg's book The Heart of Christianity, just three days ago.  I'm more than halfway done with it, and I haven't had much time to read it.  As I started reading, it felt incredibly familiar.  You know that class that I loved more than anything in college?  The professor (a Jesuit priest), had been teaching us this new paradigm, and had even called it that, but it never felt like an attack on our old way of thinking.  That course lit me up in a way nothing ever had.  The second chapter of Borg's book felt exactly like one of his lectures.  It kind of felt like coming home. :)

So here goes.  A simple comparison of the earlier paradigm (what we think of as traditional Christianity) and the emerging paradigm, as written by Marcus Borg, with additional information from my college coursework:

First of all, all who claim to be Christian must adhere to these three things:

1. There is a God.
2. The Bible gives us a way to know God.  It also gives the Christian faith a sense of identity.
3. Jesus is the word made flesh. He is the perfect example of how to put the word of God in action in our own lives.

Everyone good?  I know I know, atheists reject the first tenet and therefore all three.  Just hang in there. :)

What is a paradigm shift?

The best way to explain a paradigm shift is by example.  Generally, a paradigm is a way of seeing things.  A viewpoint, a worldview.  Our worldview is shaped by the religious, cultural, and scientific environment in which we are born and/or live in.  A paradigm shift happens when some piece of information is given to us that changes the way we look at *everything.*

How about we look at Copernicus, the man who first proposed a heliocentric universe.  The earth is one of many planets that revolve around the sun.  It seemed like merely a scientific revelation, but it affected the whole world view of the people in that time.  It did change the whole field of astronomy and astrophysics, but it also changed the common person's view of their place in the world.  They'd gotten used to thinking that they were the fixed center of things.  All of the sudden the meaning of their lives had changed.  This was met with great resistance, as all paradigm shifts are.

No objective facts changed.  The world remained the same as before, but their understanding of it was different.

All of that said, here are the differences between the earlier paradigm and the emerging paradigm:

Faith

Earlier Paradigm:  Faith is about "belief"; it mainly concerns matters of the head.  If you can't hold certain tenets as fact, then you have no faith.  You are a non-believer.

Emerging Paradigm:  Faith is about trust, fidelity, and seeing the world in a certain way.  It is a matter of the heart.  The opposite of faith is anxiety, idolatry, and seeing reality as either entirely threatening or completely indifferent.

There are traditionally four definitions of the word faith.  The first is as I described in the earlier paradigm.  Faith as assent to propositions.  It's an add-on to knowledge.  When you can't know something, you can believe it.  However, it's more questionable than knowledge, giving it a somewhat lesser status.

But this definition is a fairly recent one.  If you look at the etymology of the word, a better meanings are "to trust" and "to love, hold dear."  Another strong meaning is faith as vision.  Faith as a way of seeing things.  Now, instead of faith being an add-on to knowledge, it becomes the lens through which all knowledge is viewed.  It colors everything, and its status is raised at least to the same level as, if not above, factual knowledge.  It's what we give our heart to, it's what we remain faithful to, and it's what determines every single action we make.  In short, faith is a paradigm.

In the earlier paradigm, you didn't have faith if you couldn't accept certain facts.  In the emerging paradigm, losing your faith is very much losing your way in life.  You feel like there's nothing to trust in, and so you scrabble to find anything that can give you the illusion of hope.  You see the world as a place of horrors we must protect ourselves from. Or you see it as a place that is completely indifferent to human interests, thereby drawing a line between humanity and nature.

Doesn't this ring true?  Isn't this type of faith not just richer, but more descriptive of the human experience?  Even many of you who ascribe to the earlier paradigm (notice I do not make distinctions about whether you are religious or not) have probably implemented elements of this type of faith.

I stress that this paradigm is not being "invented."  There are many areas in which we have to go *back* to find the foundations of our faith, not just make them up to fit whatever model we want them to.

The Bible

Earlier Paradigm:  The Bible is the direct word of God.  As such, it is infallible, and it is (at least mostly) factual.  It should be interpreted literally.

Emerging Paradigm:  The Bible is the response of Israel and the early Christians to God.  It is inspired by God.  It needs to be interpreted historically, metaphorically, and sacramentally.

The concept of infallibility is actually a recent one.  It wasn't until the 1600s that biblical infallibility appeared, and it wasn't until two hundred years later that some Protestant groups began insisting on it.  In the Catholic church, Papal infallibility was decided on in 1870.

It also seems to me that the Bible being the direct word of God has a logical flaw.  God couldn't have spoken through someone word for word, because to do so would be to hijack that person's free will.  By God's own rules, the writing is subject to human error and interpretation.

Gospel by candlelight

Even so, in this case the earlier paradigm shows the type of faith it puts in the bible.  If you can't accept the whole bible as fact, you're not a believer.  A matter of the head, not of the heart.

Instead, let's look at the bible as a response.  A human reaction to the experience of God in ancient Israel and the early Christian community.  Doesn't that make more sense?

If the Bible was a reaction to the human experience of God in Israel, then couldn't something like Taoism or Buddhism be the reaction of people in those places to the same experience of the sacred?

As far as metaphor goes, a problem that many people face is the realization that the stories in the bible might be "just" metaphors.  But this denies the power that metaphor holds.  It could be fact.  There are definitely parts of the bible that are fact.  The people of Israel did flee the Egyptians, for instance.  But as soon as we concentrate *only* on what is fact, we are back to the earlier paradigm. Instead, lets think about it in a more-than-literal way.

So now we introduce a different way of thinking about truth.  There is a difference between something being literally true (fact), and something that reveals truth.  Haven't you ever read a particularly good work of fiction?  You know that it is not factually or literally true, but good books usually reveal some sort of truth about the human experience.  They are true in a different way.  A Native American storyteller begins his story "Now I don't know if it happened this way or not, but I know this story is true."

So the bible may or may not be fact.  But we have to stop fixating.  Fact is not the point.  Truth is.  Truth about our lives and the human condition.  Isn't this type of truth much more meaningful?

Some from the emerging paradigm propose things that sound crazy to traditional Christians.  That the resurrection wasn't fact, that Jesus was married, etc.  I don't know if these people are correct or not, but I do think that part of the reason they push their ideas so much is because they want to challenge our perceptions.  They want to shock us into ridding ourselves of our preoccupation with fact, but I think they are actually causing the opposite effect.  What we should be emphasizing is that our faith is not dependent on these facts, but on the truth revealed in the Bible and through Jesus.

God

Earlier Paradigm: Supernatural theism.  God is out there somewhere.  He "intervenes" in our lives whenever He deems necessary.  He is person like, and a God of Law.

Emerging Paradigm: Panentheism.  God is in everything and more.  The whole world is God, but God is not just the whole world.  Divine intervention makes no sense, instead the divine runs through and underneath all things. He is a God of grace.

Some people emphasize the vertical relationship we have with God.  How God is different from us, and we are less than him, and we need something to mediate between us and him.  Others emphasize a more horizontal relationship with God.  That God is everything and we can know him just by looking around or looking into our own hearts.

But the answer lies in both approaches.  God isn't far off watching us and every once in a while moving a piece on the board.  He's still greater than us by far, but he's also in every single thing around us.  He encompasses us.  And so whenever anything happens, God is there.  Not to say that everything is a direct result of God's will, but that God is at work actively wherever anything happens.

Enlightenment

So that means that God is constantly speaking to us.  Constantly prodding and pushing us towards the right way of life.  He doesn't come down from Heaven and make a sweeping miracle (that really, is just an elaborate party trick) to show his power.  Instead he humbly works behind the scenes to push us in the right direction.  And if we really discern what is happening in our lives, we can hear his voice calling to us.

But that is not enough.  We can't just follow our heart where ever it leads us, because the heart is deceitful above all things.  This is where the simultaneously vertical relationship comes in.  We, as Christians, need the Bible, we need Jesus, to show us the path to God.  We need some sort of revealed truth/wisdom.

Another point here is that it doesn't particularly matter what you call God.  Whether it's just the More, Allah, Yahweh, the Tao, enlightenment, the sacred, etc.  As long as it is the same truth of human experience, the same wisdom of the ages, it doesn't matter how it is revealed.

This doesn't lessen the power of God, but rather increase it.  God is in all things and works so hard to reveal himself to us that he inspires people where they are at.  He didn't just establish one church and wait for everyone to find it.  He works with whatever people have to try to bring them the fullness of a life lived near him.

So is God personal?  Incredibly.  He gives his grace to each one of us individually.  It is a free gift.  As soon as we attach conditionals to this gift, it is no longer a gift but a reward.  This will be explained further in the section on the Christian life.

Jesus

Earlier Paradigm:  Concentrate on Jesus's divinity, his miracles, and the facts of his life.

Emerging Paradigm:  Concentrate on the unique combination of divinity and humanity found in Jesus, and take his message and his example as the path to God.

As another consequence of the earlier paradigms focus on faith as "belief" and facts instead of truth, we tend to look at Jesus and emphasize what is different from us.  The divine part.  The part that "proves" that Jesus was/is God.  Again, we focus on the "facts" of his life.  The fact that he was able to perform miracles and healings becomes more important than what performing those particular miracles/healings might mean.  Yes or no, do you believe Jesus turned water into wine, walked on water, etc?  An easy way of separating believers from non believers without ever actually looking at the substance of what Jesus shows us.

This particular area is moving more and more towards the emerging paradigm, even in mainline churches.  More and more, the fact of the miracle is taking a second place to what the miracle means, and that is a very good thing. 

As a consequence of trying to look at the Bible historically, Borg (and most bible scholars) found that many of the things that were written about Jesus and his death were written decades after it actually happened, making the accounts imbued with the meaning his death had for those who wrote about it. I'm not saying, as some would, that this makes them false.  They may or may not, but the point is that the meaning may have arisen mainly as a reaction to Jesus's life.

This has some consequences. Jesus, as we all agree, was about humility and service and love.  Would someone so humble constantly remind people that he is God's son and therefore has authority over how they should live?  I don't think so.  He constantly asks people "Who do *you* say I am?"  To proclaim it over and over would be a form of arrogance.  Jesus didn't want people to follow his authority, he wanted them to follow his example.  Part of his whole message was to stop the current authorities from having a monopoly on God.

Three Crosses at Sunset - horizontal

Jesus's death is also imbued with extra meaning.  In fact, Borg mentions five meanings, some of which we will find very familiar, and all of which make sense.  The first two are mainly political, having to do with Jesus as strictly a human being.  Jesus *was* a political revolutionary, simply because of his passion for God's justice.  The first meaning was a simple rejection-vindication meaning.  The authorities rejected him, but God vindicates him.  A way for the people to show that thought he was executed by man, his place is sacred because of God.

The second was to show how corrupt the powers of domination were at the time.  Also political.  By killing Jesus, the powers of the time showed how corrupt they were.  To kill a man who had done nothing wrong his whole life but get people to start thinking and feeling was horrible.  In his death, he triumphed over them.

The third meaning was to see Jesus's death as a way or a path.  How to get to God.  We have to die to an old way of being and be reborn or raised into a new way.

Fourth, Jesus's death reveals God's love for us.  This one is pretty self-explanatory.

Lastly, Jesus died for our sins.  A living sacrifice. This is one of the most familiar to the earlier paradigm.  But it has different meaning for each paradigm.

The earlier paradigm sees it mainly as a story of sin, guilt, and forgiveness.  We are sinners, and we are guilty.  The only way our sins can be forgiven is if an adequate sacrifice is made.  Sacrificing animals won't do it.  Sacrificing an imperfect human won't do it, as his death would only be enough to forgive his own sins.  So God sent his only son, the perfect human, to die on the cross and appease God's anger for all that would believe in him.

But this is an odd way of thinking about God.  Is God really so limited in his ability to forgive that a sacrifice must be made?  Is his anger really more powerful than his love? Is there really a conditional attached to God's love for every individual?

Back when the gospels were written Jesus as a sacrifice for sin had a very different meaning.  The temples of the time had declared that there are certain types of sin that cannot be forgiven without a sacrifice in the temple.  In this way, they gathered for themselves a monopoly on forgiveness, and therefore on God.  Because of this Jesus as a sacrifice meant a denial of temple sacrifice. The sacrifice has already been made, your sacrifices mean nothing.  Stop thinking you have a monopoly on God.  The ironic thing is that only four hundred years later, the Church would fall back into this practice.

This meaning is not somehow less than the meaning of the earlier paradigm.  It proclaims God's radical grace and accessibility to each person.  No mediating force is necessary.  God is present to everyone and bestows grace and forgiveness without any ifs.  We don't have to do anything to receive God, God takes the first step.  This was an incredibly radical idea, and one that we've forgotten over and over again.

In short, Jesus is the way, the path, the light of the world.  To know Jesus is to know God.  Although it is still important, we need to de-emphasize his divinity and look at the lessons he taught us through word and example.

Christian Life

Earlier Paradigm:  Life is full of requirements and rewards.  We have to do what God says so that we can spend the afterlife in Heaven.

Emerging Paradigm:  Life is about constant transformation and relationship in this life.   We have to follow the path Jesus laid out for us in order to become better human beings (i.e. closer to God).

Because of the sin, guilt, forgiveness model of the earlier paradigm, God is a God of laws.  Of requirements we must follow in order to receive the ultimate reward: to get to Heaven in the afterlife.  The earlier paradigm puts an enormous emphasis on the afterlife, to the point that it de-emphasizes this life.  The only reason to pay attention to this life is to do it "right" so that we can get into the good afterlife with God.

Evangelism has to be spreading the good news that Jesus came to save us, but also the bad news that if we don't accept God's love, we are doomed to an eternity of suffering.  Regardless, it is focused on the afterlife, not on this one.

The emerging paradigm sees Jesus's message as mainly an earthly one.  It is about our life here on earth as finite beings, and how we can transform ourselves through a series of deaths and rebirths and become closer to God here.  God is working in and through and behind each action of our lives, and if we pay attention to the nudging and gentle prodding, we can live our lives in the loving, humble way of service that God wants for us. To reach God, or to reach enlightenment, nirvana, the Tao, or whatever you want to call it. 

There is one world, there is one frame of human experience set in many different cultures.  There is one God and one Way to to get to him/it.  The way, the path, the method looks very similar in all of the religions.  From a Christian frame of reference, Jesus/God are so loving and so present that they reached out to people in whatever culture they were born into.  We all have the same basic struggles, and the same truths are exposed in every human life, no matter where they are.

For atheists, isn't there some sort of unity of human experience?  That all these different and independent cultures came up with a God is not as important as the fact that they came up with a way to better ourselves that looks incredibly similar. 

The afterlife is de-emphasized.  We don't necessarily know what will happen after we die, but that shouldn't be our focus in the first place.  We need to think about where we *are* instead of where we might go after death.  There might be heaven and/or a hell, but if they exist, they probably look a lot different from our cloud and fire images.  The point is that we waste too much time longing for immortality to deal with our finite lives here on earth.  Let's look for the path to God here on earth.

Serpentine Path

Evangelism looks different too.  Instead of necessitating the language of God, Jesus, Savior, etc., we can reach out to people where they are, similar to how God works with us.  It's about helping a person in the context of their life, and helping them find the truth and clarity that runs through it and lies underneath it.  Instead of making them come to us, we have to go to them.  We have to leave our comfort zone and dare to walk the unfamiliar territory of the Other.

This is one of the reasons why, to me, Christian rock and worship music is for the most part (not all of it) superficial.  So much of it is just about hitting buzz words.  The words promote reverence.  We need reverence, but we need more.  We need the substance behind the buzz words.  We need content.  We need to be shown the path, and we need that path explained to us in terms that we can relate to.  We need to be able to see how the path can be implemented in the context of our own lives, whatever that context might be.

Why do earlier paradigm Christians have such a problem with these ideas?

The emerging paradigm is seen as "new" and based on recent historical findings that may or may not be true.

I hope I've shown that the emerging paradigm is only new because it is being compared to the existing paradigm.  Many parts of it involve going *back* to tradition we've lost along the way.  The historical findings of some scholars have influenced the move from the earlier paradigm to the emerging one, but the paradigm has existed before.  The paradigm itself is not based on any of these facts that sound crazy to some of us.  However, this paradigm promotes a way of seeing that does allow for them to be true, or not.  It allows for people to challenge the status quo, just as Jesus did.  It allows it because of the emphasis on truth about the human condition rather than mere facts of history.

It is a perversion of Christianity made to fit today's culture.

Again, I hope I've shown that though today's culture/science has influenced the resurgence of this paradigm, it was not invented by people of this culture.

The core beliefs of Christianity don't matter anymore.

Another false statement.  The core beliefs of Christianity describe a way to imagine the world and a way to live our lives.  We are still true to that.  We only admit that we could have imperfect knowledge of objective facts.  The truth is the same.

Liberal Christianity picks and chooses the parts of the bible they like.

First of all, liberal isn't the right term.  The ideas are progressive, but at the same time they involve a return to earlier ways of thinking.  Hence the term "emerging" rather than liberal or new.  There is no picking and choosing because a paradigm, as described above, affects the *whole* picture.  All of the bible is true, just in a different way then the earlier paradigm pictures it.

You are just grafting your own personal philosophy onto Christianity.

In light of what I wrote above, doesn't it look like it comes from Jesus?  The philosophy Jesus held is what we are trying to expose.  Instead of using symbols as literal truth, we try to expose the truth behind the symbols.  I personally have probably not done a particularly good job of showing how the path I describe comes from Jesus, and so I understand the accusation.  Perhaps there will be another forthcoming essay on the path to God as described by the life of Jesus Christ.  We'll see.

Sorry for such a long entry, but I felt like people were rejecting the idea without really understanding what it was.  I hope this helps.  I believe it to be a much more consistent and whole view of human life and religion's role in it.  But, I am by no means a perfect or complete source for this information.  If you are interested in it, read Borg's book.  Then go read The Way of Suffering: A Geography of Crisis by Jerome Miller for a wonderful description of the transformational power of suffering and "death."  Then go read The Shine at Altamira by John L'Heureux for an account of how God is present even in the most horrible of lives and deeds.

The Shrine at Altamira

John L'Heureux

6 comments

The Way of Suffering: A Geography of Crisis

Jerome A. Miller

7 comments