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Cable of Meaning

The Loss and Discovery of a Common Story

Any careful reader will already have observed that in each of our five-hundred-year hinge times more than religion has been in turmoil. There is a very good reason for that: religion is a social construct. As an assertion so bald-facedly stated, this one is often offensive initially to many people of deep faith. That does not change the truth of the statement. Religion is a social construct as well as an individual or private way of being and understanding.

In its public or corporate role, any established or organized religion is the soul of the culture or society that, in turn, is the body in which and through which religion acts. To go very far into a discussion of the Great Emergence or any other era of re-formation requires us, in other words, to lay aside for a brief while our adherence to a particular faith and consider instead the generic phenomenon of religion as an undifferentiated entity.

A Holy Tether

Looked at as generic rather than personal, religion can be most easily or accessibly described as a kind of cable—a cable of meaning that keeps the human social unit connected to some purpose and/or power greater than itself. Like a little dinghy tethered to a distant dock, the human grouping is secured by that cable. Whether gathered into a tiny, familial grouping of four or five people or into massive ones of tribes and nations, it is always the nature of humanity to turn and ask, “Why?” Life is simply too hard and too painful for us to endure, if endurance is the only purpose. We feel instinctively that there must be more—more reason for our being here, more purpose by which to govern our conduct and inform our choices. More than one philosopher has remarked that if there were no god, we would have to invent one; and the reason is this very thing of existential despair and huge vulnerability.

This does not mean—and even suggest—of course, that all religion is of humanity’s making. It does mean, though, that God-given faith assumes group as well as individual shapes and functions, the most obvious of these being its function as the bearer of meaning and its shape or role as a securing connection to something larger than the dinghy.

That cable, like any more ordinary ones, can be opened and its component parts exposed to our view. The thing itself is enclosed in an outer and, so to speak, waterproof casing that keeps the seawater out and the cable’s interior in good working order. That waterproof casing we call the story. That is, it represents the shared history—mythic, actual, and assumed—of the social unit. It is the ethos, to use a term currently in vogue, that all the members of the unit share, that they hold unself-consciously in common and by which they recognize one another as being alike or of one piece.

Interior to the outer casing of story is a loosely knit, mesh sleeve that, because of its pliable construction, can give and take a bit as the little boat rocks along on the waves outside. That sleeve has various names. It is sometimes called the consensual illusion and sometimes the common imagination and sometimes by combinations of those two. Either way, the mesh sleeve is the common agreement—again often unself-awaredly so—among the members of the social unit about how the world works, about how it is to be imaged and thereby understood. That common and consensual imagining does not have to be factually true at all. It simply has to be the general, operating opinion of the group for whom it serves as both true and actual.

To use a simplistic example, the world was, effectively speaking, flat so long as the majority of our forebears thought it was flat. Its being ovoid was simply not within their illusion or imagining of reality and, therefore, was beyond their engagement. Accordingly, they structured their worldview and their living to accommodate a flat world.

Anatomy of Meaning

Interior to the mesh sleeve of consensual imagination are three strands or lengths of rope braided together into one. The first of these is spirituality. The second is corporeality; and the third, morality.

Of recent years, we have bandied the word spirituality about with such abandon that it almost lacks clear definition by now. For our purposes here, however, it is probably sufficient to say that spirituality means to name those experiences and values that are internal to the individual or to the individuals who compose a society.

By the same process, morality can probably be best defined in this situation as the externalization and/or objective enactment and application of the values and experiences of the individual or individuals who compose a society. In between those two bookends is corporeality.

Corporeality is a ten-dollar word for a fairly simple concept. As its etymology suggests, it means to name all the overt, physical—i.e., “embodied”—evidences that a religion exists. In our time and in the case of Christianity, it refers, for instance, to everything from the collar around a priest’s neck to the established canon of our Scriptures, from a church building and the debt it carries to a hymnbook and the battle over it, from a doctrinal statement and the battle over that to something so painful as a clerical sex scandal. Diverse as that listing may seem, every part of it is, as required by definition, physical and overt evidence that a religion is in place.[3]

Being so constructed, our cable does its job of securing human life to meaningfulness quite nicely so long as nothing threatens its parts. Sometimes something will come along and prick the outer casing of story and the cable will ship a bit of water; but as a rule, the tear will heal itself in a short time, and all will be well again. Occasionally, the interior mesh sleeve of the common imagination will snag a bit on a piece of the center braid, but the rise and fall of the sea generally works it back into pattern without major incident. And so all is well with the cable until . . .

. . . until that fateful time, about once every five hundred years, when the outer casing of the story and the inner sleeve of the shared illusion take a blow simultaneously. When that happens, a hole is opened straight through to the braid. The water rushes in; and human nature being what human nature is, we reach our collective hand in through the hole and pull out the three strands one at a time. Spirituality first, corporeality second, and morality last. We pull each up, consider it from every possible angle, and at times finger it beyond all imagining. (Consider, for example, how many thousands and thousands of Americans over the last fifty years have been vociferously “spiritual, but not religious.”) Once we are satisfied with our understanding of one strand, we stuff it back through the hole and into the braid from which we have lifted it. Then we take on the next strand, worry it to death, in time return it to its former place, and take on the third and last strand.

The Art of Mending

Once we—or the social unit, that is—are done, we always manage to sashay the mesh sleeve back and forth enough to heal the rip in our illusion and by some means—probably more analogous to religious duct tape than to anything else—we manage to reseal the waterproof casing of our story as well. The dinghy is once more secured and its passengers free to turn their attention to matters of fishing or pondering or whatever it is they are about. The interesting thing, for our purposes, though, is that the fishing and pondering are good only for about two hundred and fifty years. That is, the business of winding sufficient duct tape around the casing to make it hold takes us about a century or so, as a rule. It takes that long, because the whole process involves many arguments about how best to do the job, as well as several, usually bloody, encounters with the tools by which we are trying to splice and apply the tape. But at the end of that century or so of contentiousness and just about the time we have settled down into about two hundred and fifty years of thinking that all is at last well and that things are running in their proper order, here comes another century or century and a half in which the casing and the sleeve once more begin to both be bombarded and, eventually, to pock at the same time. To give that third part of the process its more dignified due, we refer to it, of course, not as a time of pocking, but as a peri-reformation. Regardless of the wording, though, the effect is the same, and the cycle has been kick-started all over again.

The Great Emergence is the result of time’s most recent kick-start, just as it is in perfect consonance with an apparent cycle in Christian affairs that well may be a cycle in human affairs in general. Having defined where the Great Emergence fits by type or pattern into the greater scheme of history is not enough, however. We want also to understand where it is going and where, in its going, it is taking us. To do that, we must look at the particularities and peculiarities of this re-formation of ours and at how it came to assume its present shape and trajectory. But to look interpretatively and profitably at one’s own times with confidence in the result, it is usually wise to look first at the particularities and peculiarities of analogous times. Then, with both the perspective of history and an understanding of the interplay of all the parts of religion firmly in hand, we will be ready to look in some detail at the accumulation of events that birthed, and now sustain and shape, the Great Emergence.