|
People of all the earth use language to name, to number and to measure; to evoke and to invoke; to guide and to direct; to express and to impress; to inform and to transform. The list of language use to draw on is lengthy, if definite. But what all language use holds in common is the tendency to objectify the This or the That, whichever is its subject matter. Whatever can become the topical focus of its manipulation, receives treatment as a Thing-In-Itself. Everything is graced with such honor; people and places, too. That is, all nouns get vetted by one verb, to objectify: By definition, to give objective form to make concrete; to externalize. Still, notice, imagine doing this much to (say) Boston, or Birmingham. By confining any geographical location to any definite objectification (say, a hunk of dirt) leaves out what's most important about the locus, namely, but only as an example, its culture, that includes as well its language(s), let alone its folk, the people.
Just as important, name a thing you want to objectify. You may find that its concrete form external, is in fact in process of becoming something else, already and always growing, changing. To objectify such a thing, person or place, is to deaden it, to focus on the very aspect of it that is least significant and least influential in the course of human intercourse, even discourse; perhaps Especially Discourse. For a time, for a particular purpose, long enough for a lab experiment, maybe a thing stays a thing, objective enough to be so studied. But what happens to the thing under investigation after the scientist or scholar has left the lab or the study or the site of experimental vetting? Who knows? You would surely want not to leave out the quantum physicist, and not the astrophysicist.
To put all this bluntly, for the sake of the reading self's intelligence and patience, it may turn out to be that no thing is itself at the end of the day, much less at land's end, at the point where all concrete becomes fluid. It may be that no thing lends itself finally to human settlement and measurement if it turns out that all things are fluid, growing in various ways, many directions, and all at once, co-dependently, as it might be said (whether to the better, or the batter, of all, is another question).
Now if all things are fluid in the end, it might not be too much to expect that God is at least as fluid, enough to escape our intellectual grasping, our emotional clinging, our soulful leaning. So the quandary of this wording, where divinity dwells, takes a turn for the better if you notice that God's not a thing among other things and, more to the point, not a thing at all, not in the least. Of course, you might say, Is Too; God's not nothing, God's a something and the something God is, is Spirit. But then, what kind of a thing is that? Certainly more fluid, than solid, more like your breath than like, say, gold; and even gold can get rather fluid under certain conditions. |
|