Love songs to the dead: the liturgical voice as mentor and reminder

Cross Currents, Winter, 1998 by Catherine Madsen

Metaphors are much in demand in contemporary spiritual life. Clergy and theologians have called over several decades for helpful new images to make religion intelligible to moderns or equitable to women, or to serve other urgent causes as they appear. The authors of Common Fire(*) make a similar call for "responsible imagination" (151) on the part of artists, to find a way out of the cultural impasse in which we are trapped. These are all sophisticated and generous people who appreciate the complexities of art; in theory they understand that metaphor is ambiguous and does not appear for the asking. But any artist will tell you: a live metaphor never arose from the urge to create helpful images. The very qualifiers, helpful images, responsible imagination, are faintly inhibiting, monitory; to the wary ear of the artist it is only half a step from there to stigmatizing terms like degenerate art. Words and actions are part of the cure of our suffering; they cannot be harnessed. Even their helpfulness is radically independent, unconditioned, emerging in the most unlikely places and not where the way is made smooth for it: present when it will be present. We belong to a populace from whom the most basic necessities of life and health are being withdrawn; we had better understand just how helpful an image must be even to articulate such a disaster, much less to reverse it. Each sick and destitute person, each child who lives without enough food, each adolescent who lives without hope of education or work, each adult who can find only temporary or part-time work without benefits, each teacher or nurse or doctor or journalist or politician who struggles to work in a decayed and dishonest system, is a whole soul, whose privacy is disrupted, whose will is violated, whose powers are diminished, by the failure of our society to want its members' well-being. It may be that only liturgical irony at its most astringent is sufficient to cope with the anguish. The self-conscious search for new images always settles too soon for too little. Make us an image, said the Israelites at Sinai, we don't know where this Moses has gone, make us a god we can see and touch, we want meaning. No. The imagination is responsible first to its source and only then to the common good. The irony is that this apparent irresponsibility the withdrawal into the cloud, the forty days' absence, the smashing of the tablets upon return- is not individualism but the birth of the law. Moses saw only the metaphor's back, but it was the right metaphor.

One theory of metaphor holds that meaning in the literal sense is never the purpose of imagery: the real function of metaphor is to establish intimacy. Thus the helpfulness of any given metaphor is unpredictable - or rather, depends not on its content but on the candor and humility with which it is offered. We must feel, not that we are being given a meaning that is good for us by someone who knows best, but that we are being trusted to understand. We must feel that we are regarded. We have all experienced the paradox at some time in our lives, that intimacy is the realm of greatest dignity: that the point of utter humility is the point at which we are most truly honored - loved in our nakedness, beyond the possibility of artifice or disguise. Ritual language can do that; it can give back our souls, it can make the best of our privacy available to us in public, it can make us people who remember our worth. Or, in the language of this conference, the people we need.