I’ve been thinking a good deal about language and liturgy lately. That’s due to a paper I’ve been developing on Catherine Pickstock’s incredible work along with William Desmond’s metaphysical approaches.
One of the questions I’ve been fascinated with is the role of human language in our own integral ecologies (not just in the environmental sense but in a broader sense of our being in place, time, and space). Language, in this sense, is a mediator between our own internal self and the concrescence of the world we inhabit and are situated in and responding to with our autonomic as well as intentional senses (to draw from Morleau-Ponty).
Lately, I’ve been returning to the wonderful Merlin app as I pray in the morning under a black walnut tree that we share this property in Spartanburg, SC, with. I’ve also been using the app to help me learn calls from the numerous bird species that share this property. I’ve identified over 30 different species in the last few days, and it’s frankly mind-boggling to consider that so many varieties existed here that I wasn’t aware of in my daily walk and journey. It’s quite humbling as well. In my own sense of being, I try to be while acknowledging their various calls and songs.
Those thoughts take me back to Pickstock and Desmond. What does it mean to call an animal by a name? What does it mean to classify them with Latin and English names that reflect our own human creativity and need for structure?
The need to name something, be it a bird or a part on an automobile, is a deeply intrinsic part of being human.
Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the human should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.’ So out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the human to see what he would call them; and whatever the human called each living creature, that was its name. The human gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field; but for the human there was not found a helper as his partner. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the human, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the human he made into a woman and brought her to the human. Then the human said,
‘This at last is bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
this one shall be called Woman,*
for out of Human, this one was taken.’
Genesis 2:18-23 NRSV
But why and how did we arrive at that liturgical dance of classification? I suspect that deep in our human story, perhaps hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago, we developed an environmental urge to classify things that we could eat, things that could eat us, poisonous things, friendly things, and things we could use to make the tools that would go on to define so much of our ancient and modern classification of ourselves. Perhaps there was a time we shared that information not with spoken language, but with close intuition and dialogue that occurred without the use of our vocal cords as we are so apt to do now as homo sapien sapiens.
Pickstock especially turns my intention towards this contemplation as I suspect that there is something uniquely characteristic of humanity that seeks to find Truth in not just subjective analysis of things or species of birds, but in attuning ourselves towards the sacred re-playing of naming through liturgy (be it the eucharist or morning prayer or a quiet walk on a trail the morning after a thunderstorm).