effing it up

(Posted on the old blog on Sunday, April 19th, 2009 at 1:41 AM)

There is a conflict between the subjects of this blog and the act of writing about them. Nearly every post touches at some point on the ineffable. Bloggers, however, must “eff”.

Just as Kabuki theatre uses the convention of stagehands dressed in black to designate invisibility, I use some conventions, when I must use words, to designate the ineffable.

One of those conventions is to constantly change what I call… well, that which can’t really be named at all. I do feel very strongly that one cannot name the Divine. To say anything is to say something far too complicated and cluttered and  distorted to apply to that which it is intended to designate. By never settling on one name for the Ultimate, but instead switching terms constantly, I am using a convention to indicate that these words are not names, but ordinary words, and that the subject of the words forever remains unnamed.

On a related note, whatever you do don’t take a word I write too seriously. I’m not a theologian, I’m a spiritual-not-religious mystic. Theology is to mysticism what a description of a holiday meal is to Thanksgiving dinner. The theologian describes the proper way to cut a turkey; I eat, and drip gravy on my shirt and get my sleeve in the the cranberries, and I don’t care. I’m not interested in getting my doctrine right. I don’t even have a doctrine to get right. I try to get my experience of spirituality right, and leave it to others to get their descriptions right.