Presented with the facts, we just turn away and look at what we want to see; listen to what we want to hear; feel what we want to feel.
There's a subconscious power-struggle inside of me, between what I want to write and what I feel like I should write. Neither is really right.
I've never had a format I liked. The only lasting format was when I'd write daily updates and talk about what I did during the day. I can't and won't post daily on here and I wouldn't want to write about what I do everyday. It's probably more exciting than what I did during High School, but that doesn't make it actually exciting.
Because my last two posts were serious and spiritual, I feel pangs of regret that I don't really have the will to do that right now. I feel like I should keep that up. I feel like I should develop a theme and thereby, perhaps someday, develop a readership.
But that's not why I write this. In all honesty, I write this, recently, because I can't think of where to go in other things I'm writing during my designated writing-time each day. I write just to fill up an hour.
That's not to say I didn't mean the last two posts. But they were fabricated out of needing to fill an hour more than inspired by something passionately welling up inside of me. That's not to say, either, that I'm not passionate about what I wrote.
But I'm not passionate about writing theological, philosophical, sociological critiques, analysis, or whatever you wish to call anything in those veins that I might write.
I'm passionate about words; how they fit together and what they express. I don't believe in definitions; I believe in the supple arbitrariness of language, gaged by the understanding of the readers- so I strive for accuracy, but hate when people make arguments based on definition or mis-definitions. Words don't mean anything I don't mean them to because if they did I wouldn't use them as I did. The only reason knowing what a word means means anything at all is just so you can interpret what I'm trying to say. But you'll never quite know because you're not me. Nor will I ever know what you read when you read what I write because I'm not you. Italicized words mean much less when you use too many of them. It would hold then, that an italicized word has no real meaning on its own; just like the rest of language.
I don't know really, what that means for The Bible. I actually change my opinion on that every day it seems. But I do know that the meaning the Bible signifies is the word of God. What the Bible says, however, is a different matter. Most would say you can't divorce the two, but I don't see how to do anything else. If there's not meaning bigger, broader, larger than the words on the page, I don't know if I could believe the Bible as such. It's just another book at that point. Words don't do anything if they're not signifying a meaning apart from themselves.
There's a lot of hubbub about "accuracy" in translations of the Bible, but I don't quite understand why. Actually, I do understand why, but I hate the fact and would rather pretend not to acknowledge it than give it the thought-space in my brain. I don't really care, what the Hebrew says or what the closest English equivalent is or has been. I care what the Hebrew is signifying, and I want the best way to express that to a reader or hearer. But every reader/hearer is different. We're similar enough that we don't need personalized Bibles. But we're different enough that just reading the Bible isn't enough.
And so the circular castle circles back on itself and I've only got one thing to say: It all comes back to community. God created us all in his image and we're not going to find that on our own. He gave us his Bible but we all read it with unique eyes. Our best hope is to go at it together. Our best hope is to go at life together. Then we'll get closer, but not just because we'll know the Bible better together. It's actually a bit different, to some degree. When we're doing that, we're doing what I'll shout to the day I die: we're meant, above all else, to love one another. Love is done best in community. God didn't make language ambiguous because he's got it out for us. He did it because we need to love one another.
-Zack
"I swallow the sound and it swallows me whole"
-Florence and the Machine
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