Saturday morning of Convention, and Ingrid and I attended Jackie Cameron’s workshop, intriguingly called “Of Angels and Eyeballs: How our Bodies can Help us Make Sense of Life in a Changing Church.” This was the workshop’s synopsis:
So many areas of our lives are undergoing upheaval these days. And when life gets complicated, we often turn to the Church for a sense of stability and reassurance. But over the past several years/decades, the Church seems to be undergoing upheaval as well. St Paul referred to the Church as the Body of Christ . . . so let’s take his image seriously and ask: how can a deeper understanding of how our own bodies work— particularly with regard to our senses— help us begin to make sense of changing thoughts and attitudes in the Church? How do we see . . . and not see? Or hear . . . and not hear? How do we faithfully and generously listen to each other? How might we begin to try to see from another’s viewpoint? Come and see!
One of the first things Jackie said that caught my attention was this: “All metaphors are wrong but some are useful.”
That caught my attention because I had just, within the past 48 hours, read this in Brian McLaren’s book Everything Must Change:
“Metaphors help us see invisible or unfamiliar things by comparing them to visible and familiar things. They help us grasp intangible things by rendering them as tangible things. They help us leap from the known and familiar to the unknown and unfamiliar. For all the help they give us, they do not give us exhaustive knowledge of the thing they seek to explicate. . . . So we should remember that the most helpful metaphor can give us a false confidence, and we should use metaphors with appropriate caution” (page 53).
Jackie then gave this definition for perception: “The product of the brain’s abstraction and elaboration of sensory data.”
The brain abstracts sensory data because it can’t possibly absorb all the sensory data which continually washes over and around us, and the brain elaborates sensory data because, among other reasons, sometimes we need to act quickly based on partial sensory data. For example, out of the corner of an eye we may see a partial outline of something in motion, and if the brain waits for complete sensory data the charging lion may be our last sensory datum!
In fact, because we lack 360-degree vision, we never see the whole of anything at once.
If that’s true of our physical sight, then how do we perceive God? How is God revealed to us?
For Anglicans, the answer has traditionally been the three-legged stool of Scripture, Tradition, and Reason.
Excursus: Jackie said that she listed these three legs in the order she had been taught. Here’s what Richard Hooker, the great apologist of the Elizabethan Settlement, actually wrote in his masterwork, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, 1594-1597:
“What Scripture doth plainly deliver, to that the first place of credit and obedience is due; the next whereunto is whatsoever any man can necessarily conclude by the force of reason; after these the voice of the church [tradition] succeedeth.”
Of course, this discrepancy between what Jackie (and I and so many others) had been taught and what Hooker had written, proves her central and developing argument about the “ingredients” of perception. (And what were the motives of the first teachers who moved tradition into second place and relegated reason to the end of the line?)
Back to Jackie’s presentation.
She noted that more recently some Episcopalians have wanted to add a fourth leg to the stool: Experience. I was impressed by Jackie’s response. We don’t need to add “experience” because we necessarily bring our experiences to bear as we read Scripture, as we reason, and as we reflect on tradition. And she added, our primary experience of God begins with prayer.
Focusing our attention on Scripture, Jackie asked us, “What is your Scriptural lens?” Among the responses were these: “Love the Lord your God, and your neighbor as yourself”; “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God”; and my own, which I was too introverted to offer in time, “The love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” Our Scriptural lens will affect our appropriation, understanding, and actions as Christians.
What affects our physical vision? Jackie suggested three leading candidates: Emotion. Expectation. The Unconscious. She then ran a little experiment. She asked the people on the other side of the room to cover their ears and make noises with their mouths while she told us to imagine we had just been to a jazz club. Next it was our turn to cover and mumble while she imparted information to the other side.
With both sides prepped, she asked us to look at a slide on the screen. After the workshop, Jackie was kind enough to pose for a picture next to that slide, and I have placed it at the end of this post. If you would like to scroll down to the very end of this post, keeping in mind the jazz club, you can try the experiment yourself-- what do you see on the slide?
Jackie proceeded to mention a number of other factors which complicate our perceptions, occasionally using slides with eyeball schematics, including:
The difference between parallel processing (like hearing our clock alarm go off and incorporating it into our dream) and serial processing.
How we are more likely to see things we already know and less likely to see things that are unfamiliar to us.
How memory is also affected by emotion, and how we can rehearse ourselves into “remembering” things that never happened.
Focus and blindness: We don't have eyes all around our heads, so when we focus in on one thing we are probably not seeing something else.
And then some observations:
We have a natural desire for clarity to feel safe. But how realistic is our expectation of clarity?
The modern mindset believes we can see the whole picture; a post-modern mindset recognizes that we can’t see the whole picture.
Jackie also presented three examples of how our expectations and experiences affect our perceptions.
As her first example, Jackie recalled the story of the man born blind from the ninth chapter of John’s Gospel, in which some of the people said of the now-sighted man that he couldn’t possibly be the man they’d know before because blind people cannot be healed.
The second example came from a conversation between Jackie and a friend on the subject of sunrises and sunsets. Jackie couldn’t understand why her friend kept speaking of the beautiful sunsets over Lake Michigan. After all, the sun rises over Lake Michigan! Of course if you live in Chicago, the sun rises over Lake Michigan. But if you live on the shore in Michigan, the sun sets over the Lake!
The third example comes from Jackie’s experiences visiting England. For the British, 100 years is a short time and 100 miles is a long distance, whereas for Americans 100 years is a long time and 100 miles is a short distance!
Applying the insights of physical seeing and perception to theology, Jackie quoted from Owen C. Thomas’ Introduction to Theology: “Orthodox Christology only attempts to indicate where the mystery lies . . . and defend the mystery against attempts to resolve it into a neat formula which would distort it.”
As a result, said Jackie, “We need our differences in order to avoid distortion.” So when anyone asserts that “It’s just a matter of simple Justice” or “It’s just a matter of simple Holiness” or “It’s just a matter of simple Obedience,” etc., it isn’t. It’s never simple. And yet, although we are always working with incomplete information, we have to act anyway.
(Perhaps this would be a good place to add to the Excursus above, with the Collect for commemorating Richard Hooker:
O God of truth and peace, you raised up your servant Richard Hooker in a day of bitter controversy to defend with sound reasoning and great charity the catholic and reformed religion: Grant that we may maintain that middle way, not as a compromise for the sake of peace, but as a comprehension for the sake of truth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. [emphasis added])
Jackie concluded with a provocative quote from Ronald Rollheiser: “Spirituality is about what we do with our unrest.”
After the workshop we held our Convention Eucharist, which included a Renewal of our Baptismal Vows complete with asperges by, among others, these young parishioners from one of our newest congregations.
When lunch ended, the Convention resumed its legislative work. Running if not always controlling the meeting are Canon to the Ordinary Scott Hayashi; the Venerable Elaine Bellis, Archdeacon; Bishop Jeffrey Lee; Chancellor Todd Young; and Bishop Scantlebury.
After the Convention adjourned, I took this picture of St. Gregory's delegation: Ingrid Roberts, David Schaper, and Kathie Heidenfelder.
(Today, in the midst of preparing this post, a link to this article about hammerhead sharks showed up in my daily BBC Wales email. As you read it, you will see its relevance to this post.)
Here is the picture of Jackie and the jazz club slide.
Do you see the saxophone player? No surprise if you kept the jazz club in mind. The other side of the room, however, had been prepped to keep a Hollywood starlet in mind. Now what do you see?!
