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"Leaning A New Language"
I heard a delightful story a year or so ago about a mother cat and her three kittens out on a stroll. They suddenly saw a huge, ferocious dog coming their way. The mother cat quickly got the kittens under a nearby porch in a safe little place where they could hide. Then she turned and walked toward the huge dog. She got closer and closer until she was almost nose to nose to the dog. She looked straight into his eyes and went, "ruff, ruff, ruff." With that the huge dog turned 180 degrees and ran the other way. She went back to the porch, crawled into the little space where she had hidden her three kittens, sat in front of the kittens and looked at them and said, "Now I am going to explain to you why I insist you learn a second language."

Perhaps the greatest challenge for the religious folk of our land, is the challenge to learn a second language. Oh, I don't mean French or German or Spanish or Italian. I am talking about the new language of, let us call it, the language of mystery.

We've all learned to speak the language of rationality. We have been taught in our schools, at least for the last two or three hundred years, in the ways of reason and rationality. We analyze things, take them apart, we divide them into their particular sections and parts and reduce everything ultimately down to the atom itself. In this way - rational thinking, we believe that everything can be understood or explained. It's normal for us to go back to Sir Isaac Newton, for example, a man we sometimes call the father of modern physics, as the great teacher of this rational way of thinking. We've all got it. It's all a part of our lives. It has to do with controlling and understanding everything with numbers and statistics, with management systems, with always seeing the ultimate good as that which we can understand or explain in a framework that makes sense. This is for us, just common sense. The common sense of things that are real over and against unreal.

The problem with thinking about unreal things, is that we don't have a place left in our lives for mystery and mystery is the center of religious belief. The mystery of Judaism and Christianity and Islam is that it's built on the presence and power of something that isn't very rational, isn't very explainable, the presence of God. And we have spent most of our lives thinking so rationally that we find it at times very difficult to think in terms of mystery.

One of the real breakthroughs in our lives is the popularity of books about angels, about people who have had experiences beyond death and have seen some sort of light. Some years ago, I picked up a book called Thomas Jefferson's Bible . I wondered, "What is the difference between Thomas Jefferson's Bible and my own Bible?" After thumbing through it, I discovered there was a vast difference. The great American patriot had been so steeped in rational way of thinking that he decided he needed a Bible without any mystery or miracle. So he took a razor blade and cut out, and he pasted together a Bible that had not one miracle, not even the Easter story itself. He had so much trouble with mystery and so reverenced rationality that he created a Bible that was completely free of spiritual mystery.

Our age is different. It might be one of the most exciting breakthroughs of our age; the rediscovery of this language of mystery. By the way, it's hard to learn a new language; as you know, we stumble and struggle. But all across our land there is this intense hunger to learn that language of mystery of the presence of God.

I remember so well in my early days of serving as a pastor, an interpretation of Jesus feeding the five thousand. Now the rational mind, that mind which you and I use every day, that language we speak so easily, cannot fathom this miracle. Imagine this little boy with a couple of biscuits and a couple of little sardine-like fish could have taken that handful of food and had it feed five thousand folks. But that's what Jesus did. My own rational mind says something like this: He probably was so nice and kind and loving to the people gathered on that day that they took their secret satchels of extra food perhaps hidden in their garments and opened them up and shared them with those people sitting on the grass around. So really there was no technical miracle at all. The food was there, Jesus just got them to share it. What happened according to the language of reason and common sense was a normal spirit of generosity and we call that generous spirit the miracle. That explains the idea of the feeding of the five thousand without ever having any mystery but having all logic. That is the rational way to describe the feeding of the five thousand. But the new language that you and I are learning is a language that moves beyond the rational. It asks how do I speak the new language of mystery. For starters, we might ask ourselves who taught me those little bits of this language of mystery that I already know? Yes, I remember a few people who were important in my life who helped me learn a few phrases. Those were not phrases of the enlightenment, with its need for scientific proof and rationality. Those were people who helped me move into a land of poetry, of beauty and of truth; of understanding the presence of God with a language totally different from the language of control, of statistics and numbers, of testing and proof.

Perhaps you know about the new science. It is not particularly new but comes out of the thinking of Albert Einstein almost a hundred years ago. We are helped by the new science in our journey to know this language of mystery. The new physics gives room for mystery.

That tiny sub-atomic world is just full of mystery. It has created its own new quantum language. It not only gives room, it sets forth the very basis of understanding reality as understanding, in part, mystery itself.

As with learning any new language, most everything we attempt in that new language we mispronounce. And most of us are going to mispronounce when we talk about things we can't see but somehow know; things we can't explain rationally but somehow we understand; moments that have happened to us that are so real, but because they are of God we are embarrassed to tell anyone. And we don't have that language to express ourselves. Living with our own mystery and spirituality is like finding ourselves in a foreign land with no knowledge of the language. Some of us have picked up bits of the language from a devout parent or grandparent. Some met a mentor or a teacher or a coach or a summer camp counsellor who knew how to use that language and lifted us beyond the place of the common rational thinking. The movie Jurassic Park is a classic example. It's not just about dinosaurs, but it is certainly about dinosaurs. But to think of the film only in those terms - of gigantic creatures living millions of years ago, then one misses the intrigue of the movie. It's really about two ways of thinking or speaking: the old language of control and the power of domination through technology. That developer of Jurassic Park, that island off the South American coast, said "We can control these reptiles." "No," said a modern mathematician called Dr. Malcolm in the film. Dr. Malcolm said, "There is a new understanding in the world of science that says it will break out, you can't control it. There are elements of mystery and chaos that are beyond your control." That was the point of the movie. The conflict between two languages. The old language of rational control and the new language of mystery and chaos. Of course, the movie turned out to tell us that the mystery and the understanding of chaos in fact won out. The books, the movies, the magazines, they are all pointing toward the need for a new language, a new language that contains ways in which we can express the power of the presence of the holy God in our lives - not expressed with shame or guilt, not expressed with embarrassment or self-consciousness, but a language that opens to all of us the reality of that transcendence we feel but can't express - we know but can't articulate, we trust but cannot convey. That's the journey we're on. That's the new language we're learning. By the way, how are you doing with that new language?

Conversation with Daniel Matthews
Interviewed by Lydia Talbot

Lydia Talbot: Dr. Matthews, you are rector of Trinity Church at the foot of Wall Street. It sits dwarfed by the icons of a market economy. How does the language of mystery that you talk about fit with those twin gods of money and image that seem to dominate American culture these days?

Daniel Matthews: I think that one of the most exciting things happening in the business world today is the new understanding of the mysterious worth of each individual. It's sometimes called teamwork, it's sometimes called collaborative management, but there's a whole new understanding of how valuable our employees are in companies and therefore they are being asked to contribute more and more, out of the mystery of their worth, which we are just beginning to acknowledge.

Talbot:   Understanding of the worth of the individual, you say.

Matthews:   Yes. Rather than saying, "I at the top have all the answers and you, underneath me, do what I say." We're saying there's a whole mysterious world, that God has given gifts to all people, and all sorts, not just to the top executives. And this whole understanding of collaborative management is, in a sense, an expression of this new reality of the mystery of the presence of God and creativity and imagination and beauty all over the place.

Talbot:   Now you talk about modernity and post-modernity. Is the lesson, I guess, for us that the loss of mystery is now there is an effort to try to regain it?

Matthews:   I think we're trying to regain it, but I think more important is that we will not lose what we have learned as a result of the 300 years of the Enlightenment. The rationality that you and I have, we all have, is with us. But now we need to talk in a new way about the mystery of the presence of God without losing the rational. That's a tricky thing. That's a reason it's almost a whole new way of thinking, and talking that we are not yet comfortable with. This is like a frontier. How do you speak about mystery, while not losing the rational perspective?

Talbot:   Now, you tell us that one of the ways to begin speaking that new language of mystery is to remember those people in our lives who have taught us little bits of the language along the way. And I must ask you to answer your own question that you pose. Who are those people, for you?

Matthews:   I'm sure my mother and father were profoundly effective. There was a man at Vanderbilt when I was there, who was an Episcopal priest, who took me sort of under his wing, and he asked me one time, in a conference that we had together, "Who is God?" And I thought, "Oh my land, I have no idea." And I began saying things like somebody on a cloud, or things like that and he gave me a little book, and I went home and read it. It changed a lot of my thinking. And each week he would give me a new book. So, he began to help me use the language of transcendence right where I lived. C.S. Lewis does that for many people today. We're rediscovering him, because he's able to talk about things that are transcendent, in simple, earthy, honest real language.

Talbot:   A religious sensibility, if you will. You're really talking about intimacy, aren't you?

Matthews:   Yes.

Talbot:   And when you discern the difference between the language of mystery, are you really talking about the difference between a poetic mind and a digital mind?

Matthews:   Exactly.

Talbot:   A language that controls?

Matthews:   Right. You see, each of us has much more poetry in us than we know, or allow ourselves to express. When Dag Hammarskjold died, we discovered that book, Markings , that was all, all transcendence! We said, "Could that great international figure have that sort of religious mind?" Because you hide it, you are afraid, you don't tell. There have been studies done about Americans who have religious experiences and never even tell their spouse! Because one doesn't do that. We don't know how to handle it, so people have had religious experiences and they just keep it to themselves. And say, "That was wonderful, but I dare not share it, for someone will think I'm foolish. Because the language of mystery is still foolishness.

Talbot:   And so the biblical seer must be a poet.

Matthews:   Yes.

Talbot:   How does that impact personal relationships?

Matthews:   I think it does the same... You see, what one does in a marriage is try to control the other person. See, we are just beginning to discover, no, I'm not controlling, I let them be free. That's the essence.

Talbot:   To be free. Thank you so much, Dr. Daniel Matthews, for this message.     

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