Speaking properly: Neil Morgan on shaping experience

‘Quakers have been struggling with this for centuries.’

To a Catholic, the eucharist is a supernatural event. Transubstantiation places the host in a sacred – yet at the same time physical – space. Mistreatment of a consecrated host is one of the gravest forms of sacrilege. It means immediate excommunication.

Nevertheless, even many theists have given up the idea of an otherworldly place which finds its way into ours. They feel there is a muddle between the physical and the metaphysical. So, for example, the medieval author of The Cloud of Unknowing writes: ‘Take care, therefore, that you do not understand in a bodily sense what is meant spiritually, even though it is expressed in bodily words such as UP and DOWN, IN or OUT. Given that speech is a bodily activity performed by the fleshy tongue – a bodily organ – it must always be spoken in bodily terms. But does it follow that it must, therefore, be received and understood in a bodily sense? No, but spiritually.’

Quakers have been struggling with this for centuries, attempting to untangle the knot between the spiritual and the ‘earthly’. On one level, our Christian images and rituals are really symbols. Perhaps this is why Quakers have steadfastly done without concrete images – to avoid being drawn into the error of idolatry, as they see it, of taking the thing for what it stands for.

I would like to suggest that our symbols, and our religious truths, are partly our attempts to find a way of making space for our sense of the extraordinary – our sense of wonder, our attempt to grasp the transcendent. What is the relationship between the two? Do we need two physically-separate rooms to place them? Do we need a heaven above us, beyond the ceiling, on some sort of second, spiritual, floor? How, if that was the case, could we possibly get there?

I am not clear about this. It can’t be right. But I feel what is true (for me at least) is that the extraordinary gives meaning, and shape, to the ordinary. It frames it.

Life, if you think about it – ordinary life – is saturated with the miraculous and the extraordinary. Each moment. To be aware, say, of our heartbeat, is an experience almost beyond words – on the edge of them, as Rowan Williams has put it. It seems to me that we do need some way of speaking about this, of separating it from the quotidian or mechanical, of shaping words for the human experience of the extraordinary. These words shape religious truths.

We gain, as humans, from not reducing everything to one level. Plato tried to figure this out. How do we speak properly of love, truth, beauty, justice and the divine? Do they need capital letters? Or a separate place, a special world where they can find their place? Not everyone thinks so. Some want to wipe the slate clean of these words, and eliminate – for me – real aspects of human experience. But how can we speak of these aspects truthfully? Quakers try to find their own words.

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