Honest Rituals, Honest Sacraments

Letting Go of Doctrines and Celebrating What's Real

Martos

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781532640476
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Buddhism

Honest rituals are ceremonial actions that celebrate what is actually happening in people's lives. Religious rituals, however, often celebrate beliefs and doctrines (e.g., the birth of Christ, God's forgiveness of sins, or the gifts of the Holy Spirit) that have little to do with people's experience.Martos argues that early Christian rituals were grounded in experiences such as conversion, community, commitment, and self-giving. Lacking a vocabulary to name such experiences, the authors of the New Testament and other early documents resorted to metaphors such as baptism into Christ, receiving the Holy Spirit, forgiveness by God, and the presence of Christ during worship. By the fourth century, however, those metaphors were taken to be unexperienced metaphysical realities rather than experienced realities. The medieval schoolmen developed philosophical explanations of what went on in church rituals, and the Catholic Church continues to teach that its sacraments are automatically effective despite growing evidence to the contrary.What if religious rituals were to regain their original authenticity? What if the guiding value in designing church ceremonies was honesty rather than liturgical correctness? After liberating the reader from doctrinal constraints, Martos invites Catholics into a re-visioning of the traditional sacraments and a reawakening of ritual imagination in non-Western cultures.

1

Symbols and Meaning

Imagine your life as a robot.

With your camera eye, you could see what you are looking at. And with your microphone ear you could hear any sounds in your vicinity.

The difference is that you would not know what you were looking at, any more than a camera does. Nor would you understand what you are hearing, any more than a listening device does.

Ordinarily, we do not allude to the fact that we understand what we are seeing, and that we comprehend what we are hearing. There are exceptions to this, of course.

You might go into a museum and see a piece of abstract art on the wall, and you ask, “What is that?” Of course, you understand that it is a painting, but beyond that, what you are seeing is meaningless to you.

Similarly, your car might stop running, so you get out and lift up the hood, but when you do, all you see is a jumble of mechanical parts. You understand that they are what make the car run, but beyond that, you do not know what you are looking at.

If you were a camera, you would not even understand that much. It would be all totally meaningless.

The same is true of hearing. You might hear a strange noise and wonder what it is. You realize that it is a sound of some sort, but beyond that, what you are hearing is meaningless to you.

Similarly, you might overhear a conversation that does not make sense to you. You realize that you are listening to a foreign language, but beyond that, you do not know what is being said.

We could repeat this imaginative exercise with examples using the other senses: a smell that you cannot identify, a taste that is strange, an unexpected itch or pressure on the skin. But you get the point. Seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching are sense experiences which, in themselves, are just that. They are just sensations unless they are also understood.

Usually we understand, at least vaguely, what our senses are sensing. But I have invited you to perform the little thought experiment to help you notice the difference between sensing and understanding.

If you were a robot, you could sense colors and sounds, for example, but you would not understand what you are seeing and hearing. (Let’s not get into the notion of artificial intelligence or robots that might someday be able in the future to understand just as humans do. Talking about AI would take us off track.)

*

Welcome to the world of meaning.

Everything that we “see” and “hear” above and beyond the raw data of colors and sounds is meaning of one sort or another.

The names of things are meanings. The uses of things are meanings. The benefits and dangers of things are meanings. This is the case not only with regard to what things are but also with regard to how they look. Colors, sizes and shapes are meaningful qualities. A camera could see them without understanding them. Every time we name, describe and discuss something we are talking about meanings. We understand what we are talking about because understandings and meanings are roughly the same.

Take a look at some of the things around you. See if you can discern the difference between the bare data that your eyes see and the meanings that your mind perceives.

Our understandings of sounds are meanings. If you hear someone speaking to you in English, what you pay attention to is the meaning of what is being said. The only time you pay attention to the sound is when the meaning is not coming through. For example, you might be listening to someone on a bad phone connection, and every now and then you fail to understand what is being said. At that point, you might say something like, “I can hear you talking but I cannot understand what you are saying.” Your ear is picking up sounds but your mind is not perceiving any meaning.

Something similar happens when someone is singing and we cannot make out the words. We hear the sounds, but not the meaning.

The same is true when someone speaks to us in a foreign language. We hear the sounds they are making, but we are not able to understand what the person is trying to communicate. We don’t get the meaning.

Language is not the only source of intelligible and unintelligible sounds. Walking in the woods, we can hear many sounds that we cannot identify. Someone who has learned to identify bird calls, however, can hear the same sound that we do and give it a name. In other words, birders can identify the sound and give it meaning. Likewise, we can be driving in our car and hear an unfamiliar noise. We don’t know what it is, so we take the car to a mechanic who listens to the noise and tells us the car needs more power steering fluid.

Identify in your own experience times when you have heard sounds but did not know what they meant. Now reverse the thought experiment and remember a time when you explained the meaning of a sound to someone else, or interpreted a foreign language for someone.

*

Words have no meaning in themselves.

We usually assume that words have meanings, and that the meanings are in the words. This is because, when we read, the meanings of words and sentences come into our heads while we are looking at the physical words. Likewise, when we listen to something that is being said, the meanings of the words and sentences come into our heads while we are listening to the sounds.

The printed words or spoken words appear to be meaningful—or not, in the case when we do not understand what is written or spoken.

While you read these words on this page, the meanings of the words are occurring in your mind at the same time your eyes are looking at the words on the page. This simultaneity gives the impression that words have meanings, that words somehow contain meanings, and that the meanings are in the words.

However, we have already discussed how what the eye sees and what the mind understands are two different things. One is sensed and the other is understood. The same is true of what the ear hears and what the mind understands. One is a sound and the other is a meaning.

That words have no meaning in themselves is clear from the fact that we sometimes see words that we do not understand, and we sometimes hear words that we cannot interpret. That is, we have the appropriate visual or auditory sensations, but we do not know what they mean.

*

Words are symbols.

A symbol refers to or points to something other than itself. The word “car,” for example, refers to a machine on wheels in which you can travel. You can ride in a car, but you cannot ride in “car.” That is, you can ride in what the word refers to, but you cannot ride in the word. The word symbolizes or refers to, in this case, a type of machinery.

Here is another example. My name is Joseph Martos. The name refers to someone who is a certain age, who can think and feel, and who can enter into relationships. The name, however, is not necessarily as old as I am, since my father had the same name. Moreover, the name cannot think or feel or enter into relationships. But I can. That is, what the name refers to can do those things, but the name cannot.

To make sure this idea is clear to you, come up with some of your own examples of things or people on the one hand, and the names that refer to them on the other hand.

The symbolic nature of words is easiest to illustrate with nouns that refer to concrete objects, but it also applies to verbs, adjectives and adverbs.

Growing is something that living things do, but the word itself does not grow. Any material object has weight, but the word “weight” does not weigh anything. A tall flagpole has a certain height, but the adjective “tall” cannot be measured. If I walk slowly, my walking speed can be measured, but the adverb “slowly” cannot.

If the difference between words and their referents (what they refer to) is not clear to you, try to make up some examples of your own.

*

Symbols, like words, have no meaning in themselves.

We are used to thinking that symbols have meaning.

We travel to Europe and the road signs are different. We see signs like these:

We wonder what they mean, so we ask someone to explain the meaning to us. We get the feeling that the signs have meaning but we don’t know what it is.

Looking at a road sign and not knowing what it means illustrates the fact that the meaning is not in the sign. Meanings are in human minds, not in symbols. But if we know what the road sign symbolizes, when we see the sign, we think the meaning.

Art, too, is sometimes symbolic. There is a famous painting by Jan Van Eyck of a man and woman being married.

Read an art history book about this painting and you will be told that it is full of symbolism. The woman’s hand is in the man’s, symbolizing that her life is in his hands. Both the bed and the woman’s pregnancy symbolize fertility. The dog symbolizes fidelity, as does the man’s hand raised as if taking an oath. The way they are dressed, the room’s appointments and the oranges on the table (an exotic fruit in those days) are symbols of substantial but not excessive wealth.

If you were not told which elements of the painting are symbolic, and if you were not told the meaning of the symbols, their meaning would not be apparent. The meanings were in the mind of the artist, and then in the mind of the art historian, and finally in your mind when the painting is explained to you. But the meanings are not in the painting. Only oil paint is in the painting.

*

Some things are more important than others.

Thus far we have come to realize that much of what we take for granted in the world around us is meaningful. What we see and hear (and smell and touch and taste) are things that we understand to a greater or lesser extent. In fact, things that we don’t understand are likely to be things that we don’t even notice.

We can say, then,...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Symbols and Meaning
• Chapter 2: Metaphors and Metaphysics
• Chapter 3: Schoolmen and Science
• Chapter 4: Religion and Reality
• Chapter 5: Ritual and Honesty
• Chapter 6: Honest Sacraments
• Conclusion
• Suggested Reading