Posted on in Word in Language

Word in Language (11): Father (1)

So now we are diving down into the depths of language and discovering that language has a lot to tell us about the meaning of human life and about the world we live in. We are here to count down from the ego, I, to God, O, as we saw in words like LIVE and LOVE, SIN and SON, CHRIST and CROSS. Christ himself, who is God and has no need to count down, came down to earth so that he could show us how to do this. He came down and was incarnate in order to translate for us the meaning of life. He did this by means of parables, writing for the spiritually blind.

 

But we have also seen that the world is a spiritual womb in which the body of the Church is being formed until the end of time. Just as we have physical and spiritual blindness, so we have a physical and spiritual birth. Sadly, many of us in this life focus solely on the physical side of things, to the detriment of our spiritual growth. We must open not only our physical eyes, but also our spiritual eyes. This is why ‘I’ and ‘eye’ sound the same. Because an open I is O.

 

God does not let us dive for too long. We must come back to the surface for air. And just as God separated the waters from the waters in order to create the dome of the sky (Gen 1:6-8), so we see that air is extremely important to us. We started this series of articles by talking about the Coronavirus, which has currently got us practising social distancing, something that was foreign to our way of thinking just a few months ago and is now ‘the new normal’. Viruses make it difficult for us to breathe, they precisely attack our air supply, as if we were divers in the water and our air supply was getting low or the connection with the bottle was faulty. We cannot gulp air as we would like to, and we realize how tenuous our connection to life really is.

 

The ancients spelled ‘air’ like this: ‘aer’. This is how it is written in Latin and Greek, and I find this extraordinarily significant. Imagine yourself on the surface of the sea, this line in creation where so many creatures live, criss-crossing the line in their search for food or to escape predators. A gentle breeze is ruffling the surface of the water, creating an effect like a desert, like pimpled flesh or a crinkled crisp. Our breathing is shallow, barely noticeable, just enough. We are on the line between two frighteningly different elements. And yet for nine months in our mother’s womb the element of water was normal to us and we breathed.

 

We have already seen how oxygen is present in water, so they cannot be altogether so different. Indeed, if we apply the alphabetical pair r-s, we will see that AER in reverse reads SEA. Just a step in the alphabet, that line we were talking about, a murmur in the ear (oh, EAR is obviously connected as well).

 

And we may notice that AER is in WATER if we take away the w and the t, thus confirming what we said about oxygen being in water.

 

AER is also in BREATH, another of the elements of speech/creation, but where does it come from, this element that we breathe? Where does the wind arise? Where is it when we wait in the heat of the day and it seems to have disappeared? Only the other day, I stood in my room and a cold current of air came in through the window, just like the current you sometimes get in Greek seas (off the west coast of Corfu), chilling your feet, providing welcome refreshment.

 

I can only assume that air, breath, comes from the Father, who breathed into the newly created human being the breath of life. Isn’t he the source of life, the source of all creation? Wasn’t it the Father who separated the waters from the waters in Genesis chapter 1? Hang on a moment, though, at the beginning of that chapter I remember there was a wind that swept over the face of the waters. Can that wind somehow be connected to the Holy Spirit? On the day of Pentecost, didn’t the Holy Spirit descend ‘like the rush of a violent wind’ (Acts 2:2)? Didn’t Christ himself breathe the Holy Spirit on his disciples (Jn 20:22), not because the Spirit proceeds from him, but because they are both part of the Holy Trinity and their lives are intertwined? WIND contains the numbers 0, 1, 2, 3 – a reflection of the Holy Trinity, which can also be found in words like GOD, WOOD and ONE.

 

But AER is in other words as well, for example FEAR. When fear assails us, we find it difficult to breathe, our breathing becomes rapid, we hyperventilate. What is fear? Well, it can be unfounded when it relates to our predictions for the future. In fact, I would say it generally is unfounded. And yet it can have a profound effect on our behaviour and make us RAGE (alphabetical pair f-g). Another kind of FEAR is SAFE (alphabetical pair r-s), the fear that makes us cling to our Father, what Metropolitan Athanasios of Limassol describes as awe, love and reverence in our hearts.

 

And what is it that pumps the air, the oxygen, around our bodies? The organ called the HEART. AER is there also. If our heart stops, so does our air supply, just like divers in the water (though there is AER in WATER as well). We saw that HEART is connected with EARTH, and I would say that AER is the main characteristic that we associate with the earth – the ability to breathe.

 

We are beginning to see that AER is a crucial component of language. It is in SEA and WATER, it is in BREATH (which as the letter h is also in water or its chemical formula H2O), it is in FEAR and HEART (see how these two words are connected – isn’t this where we feel fear most keenly, when it strikes dread into our hearts?).

 

But interestingly enough we cannot only live by breathing. We must also eat: BREAD. When we are babies, we are reliant on our mother’s milk, which fills our bellies and provides us with protection: BREAST. BREATH-BREAD-BREAST. All three words contain AER and are sources of nourishment. How curious that they should be so similar!

 

BREAD is connected to WATER by the phonetic pair d-t and the ‘eighth’ phonetic pair, b-v-w, which we talked about at the end of the previous article.

 

And ‘breath’, if we apply the physical pair b-d, gives ‘thread’. Breath is like a thread, the thread that the Fates are waiting to snip. It is air – isn’t it? – that provides the continuum to our lives. We are alive inasmuch as we are breathing. This is why we can see that ‘breath’ is connected to ‘birth’ if I use the front vowels (a-e-i), but also to ‘death’ if I use the physical pair b-d and remove the r.

 

Breath is the thread that links birth and death. All this information is contained in language.

 

I open my mouth. Breath emerges from my mouth. God knows where it has come from. If I add voice, I can speak. I can imitate the Father in the act of creation (CREATE also contains AER). After all, I am made in his image and likeness (Gen 1:26).

 

There is the Father again, the source of all things, who begat the Son, who gives rise to the Spirit, who created us human beings and all that we can see (and cannot see).

 

He emerges from the shadows ‘at the time of the evening breeze’. There is AER in him as well. AER is in FATHER, just as BREATH is, EARTH and HEART, FEAR (FAITH) and WATER.

 

Air carries water; air is in water. We associate air with the letter h, but also with oxygen (O2). Perhaps that dividing line is thinner than we thought. Certainly creatures like gannets and flying fish think so.

 

Jonathan Dunne, http://www.stonesofithaca.com

Posted on in Word in Language

Word in Language (10): Father (0)

What do we know about the Father? Perhaps we know about him as much as our ability to love. He is generally portrayed as an old man with white hair and a white beard, next to his Son, with the Holy Spirit hovering above. We may associate him in particular with the act of creation and the Fall in chapters 1-3 of the Book of Genesis. According to Orthodox tradition, all appearances of God in the Old Testament are by the Logos, the Word of God, that is Jesus Christ. The New Testament is associated with the earthly life of Christ, his birth, teaching, crucifixion and resurrection. And the Holy Spirit is associated with Pentecost, the beginnings of the Church. The Father can remain in the background. Certainly, we cannot know his essence, and of God’s qualities St Maximos the Confessor says that it is only infinity that can be grasped fully by the intellect (see the end of his First Century on Love).

 

In an earlier article, I made the connection between TREE and THREE and put forward the analogy of the Father as the trunk and the Son and the Holy Spirit as two branches, as in a child’s drawing, the Son begotten and the Spirit proceeding. This is why in the Orthodox Creed it is said that the Spirit proceeds from the Father – not from the Father and the Son, as is erroneously stated in Western Churches – because otherwise the Spirit would have to be a sub-branch of the Son, making for a lopsided drawing. This doesn’t make sense.

 

Christianity is the only religion that professes God the Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This is shared love, which crucially involves a third person, otherwise it could be construed as being exclusive. This love among the three persons is not jealous. It is like love in a monastic community – it professes love for the brethren, but also welcomes pilgrims, newcomers. The arrival of newcomers can be very unsettling, but somehow we have to find a place for them, to see that our reaction is immediately, naturally, spontaneously, one of love.

 

You cannot have the Father without having a Son. His first characteristic is that of being a Father, which immediately places emphasis on relationship. The Holy Spirit can be seen as a kind of conjunction – and – that welds the love together. I have already stated that this little conjunction, AND, contains the name Alpha and Omega (A ’N’ O) and spells DNA in reverse. It is a crucial word in language, and barely a sentence exists without it.

 

I would like to suggest that there is proof in language for the existence of the Father. This doesn’t surprise me, for from him all things come. The Son is begotten by the Father, the Spirit proceeds from the Father, and we are his creation. We saw in the previous article how the world is a kind of spiritual womb, from which the body of the Church is in the process of being born. We make the mistake of thinking that life in this world is all there is and our birth has already taken place, but I don’t think this is quite true – our physical birth has taken place, sure enough, but our collective spiritual birth is still happening, which is why for me St Paul writes, ‘We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now’ (Rom 8:22).

 

The first indication that the Father is who we understand him to be – the source of all life – can be found in the alphabet. But we should sound a note of caution: if we can find proof for the existence of the Father in language, shouldn’t that point us in the direction of the Holy Trinity? Shouldn’t that suggest that the Father is truly behind and in his creation, just as we make him out to be? How else could he be in language, a set of words we ourselves have come up with in order to communicate, a set of letters which we use to write these words down? This should give us pause for thought – if we can find proof for him in language.

 

Language is made up of three elements. The first of these is breath. Breath forms the basis of all language. There can be no language without breath. Without breath, we are in effect dead, and we are not going to communicate by means of our bodies. Breath is represented in the alphabet by the letter h, a very important letter since it represents the basis of all speech, and yet (or because of this) it is dropped in dialects like Cockney and not pronounced in languages like Spanish. That for me is a sure sign of its importance.

 

If all we do is huff and puff, we are not going to make much sense, and so, as anyone who has been present at a childbirth knows, the next thing that comes along is voice, the vowels. We breathe out (the baby breathes out) and add voice (the baby bawls – loudly), and now we have sound. We also have words – words like a, I and o! We can even put a vowel before breath and exclaim, ‘Ah!’ We have the beginnings of speech.

 

If we hold a vowel for long enough, as when we visit the doctor’s, water will collect in our mouth, and this is because vowels are like a river – they flow. We can see that FLOW and VOWEL are connected by the phonetic pair f-v, addition of e. But the vowels do not emerge from our throat, where language originates, in the same order that they appear in the alphabet. Actually, they emerge in the following order, from the back of the mouth to the front:

 

u – o – a – e – i

 

forming a V-shape as they do so. This means that the first word the human apparatus is capable of pronouncing is breath (h) plus the first vowel to emerge from the throat (u): hu (I am assuming that breath on its own does not constitute a word, which I don’t think it does).

 

You might wonder, ‘So what?’ Well, this little word hu is from Sanskrit and means ‘invoke the gods’. So the first word a human is capable of pronouncing is an invocation of God. It is also the root of our word God, as any good dictionary will tell you. This is extremely interesting, but it doesn’t stop there.

 

Have you noticed that we are human? The science of etymology, which studies the evolution of language over time and, like all science, is limited in its vision (only faith is not limited, which is why we need it), will tell you that human derives from the Latin word for ‘man’, homo. Yes, maybe. But word connections – which are the study of language outside time, and hence far more interesting – will enable us to see that HUMAN is a combination of HU and MAN. It seems that God stamped us with his seal when he made us. We have already seen how MAN contains AM and AN.

 

But we still haven’t seen any proof for the Father. Let us continue. If all we had was breath and water, h and the vowels, we would do a lot of whining and exclaiming (some people do that, it is true). But to form words, real words, we need to obstruct the passage of air with our lips and tongue to form the consonants. Now we get proper chunky words. The consonants, as I have explained, can be divided into seven phonetic pairs:

 

b-p     d-t     f-v     g-k     l-r     m-n     s-z

 

depending on where in the mouth they are pronounced and which piece of flesh – the lips or tongue – is used to obstruct the passage of air when they are pronounced.

 

That accounts for twenty letters, but the English alphabet has twenty-six. Three of the remaining letters are semi-vowels – that is, the passage of air is only partially obstructed. The semi-vowels j and y correspond to the vowel i; the semi-vowel w corresponds to u (think of the name of the letter).

 

And the other three are what I call redundant letters. We don’t need them. They are c, q and x, all of which can be written using a combination of the letters k and s: the letter c is pronounced either k or s, q is pronounced k and x is pronounced ks. And yet they serve a purpose, because the double pronunciation of c as k/s enables me to make word connections through both these letters (we will see an example in a moment).

 

That accounts for the whole of the English alphabet: h, five vowels, seven pairs of consonants, three semi-vowels and three redundant letters. The letter h corresponds to breath, the vowels to water and the consonants to flesh.

 

What is very interesting is that the exact same three elements – breath, water and flesh – correspond to the act of creation in chapters 1 and 2 of Genesis. Remember that a wind (breath) swept over the face of the waters (Gen 1:2). Remember that to form the sky (air/breath) God separated the waters from the waters (water) (Gen 1:6-8). Remember that God then gathered the waters under the sky into one place and formed the land (flesh) (Gen 1:9-11). Remember that man was formed from the dust of the ground (flesh) (Gen 2:7) and God then breathed into his nostrils the breath of life (breath).

 

So the same three elements of breath, water and flesh are involved in the creation. But why should we be surprised, given that we know that God spoke the world into being? Doesn’t almost every paragraph in Genesis chapter 1 begin, ‘And God said’?

 

Do you remember how the letter c can be pronounced k or s? We might now see a connection between SPACE and SPEAK.

 

We might also see that WORLD contains LORD and WORD. The WORLD is a combination of LORD AND WORD:

 

world = lord + word

 

Hence those three words that are constantly repeated in Genesis: ‘And God said.’

 

But we still haven’t found proof for the existence of the Father in language. You need to know that there is an ‘eighth’ phonetic pair (and it isn’t even a pair): b-v-w. These letters are closely related. In Modern Greek, b is pronounced v; in Spanish, v is pronounced b. In Latin, v is pronounced w; in German, w is pronounced v. This enables me, through v, to connect b/w with f (the partner of v according to the phonetic pairs), and many word connections are made using this combination.

 

Now we will begin to see that the three elements of breath, water and flesh – the elements that make up speech, a daily occurrence, and also the creation of the world we inhabit – have one word in common. I am not making this up because I am obeying phonetic rules, so it is in language (not in my imagination!).

 

BREATH is clearly connected to FATHER by this combination I talked about, f-b/w.

 

WATER is clearly connected to FATHER by the same combination, f-b/w, addition of h (one of the two most commonly added letters).

 

FLESH is clearly connected to FATHER by the phonetic pair l-r, the alphabetical pair s-t, addition of a.

 

The elements of speech and creation have the word FATHER in common. That is remarkable and ought to make us bow our heads in worship. The next time we open our mouths to speak, we might be a little more respectful of what we are doing and remember how the Father is in the elements of speech, in our very human being.

 

Jonathan Dunne, http://www.stonesofithaca.com

Posted on in Word in Language

Word in Language (9): The Fall

The story of the Fall of humankind is related in chapter 3 of the Book of Genesis. It is generally understood to mean that the woman, Eve, was tempted by the serpent and persuaded Adam to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which the Lord God had told the man not to eat from or else he would die. The serpent – a representation of evil, or the devil himself – tells Eve that they will not die, but their eyes will be opened and they will be like God, knowing good and evil. The man and the woman eat and then become aware of their nakedness, which causes them to hide when God comes visiting ‘at the time of the evening breeze’. The Lord God asks Adam how it is he knows that he is naked, and he replies that the woman gave him fruit from the tree to eat; she in turn blames the serpent. God pronounces their punishment, and the man and the woman are expelled from the Garden of Eden.

 

I should perhaps point out one of the most remarkable word connections you will ever find, and that is when we rearrange the letters of GARDEN OF EDEN. I used to do this, sitting down in the early morning (between 6 and 8) while the house martins screeched around on a level with my eighth-floor apartment in Sofia, Bulgaria – rearrange the letters and see what I could find.

 

GARDEN OF EDEN gives DANGER OF NEED. This is surely a coincidence, language telling us something.

 

Adam and Eve were in danger of need. But what exactly is wrong with having a knowledge of good and evil, and why should that cause them to die?

 

I would like to suggest an alternative interpretation, one I thought was unique to me until I discovered that it had been offered and accepted before. This interpretation – which is only that, an interpretation – gives rise to several conclusions, which I would like to list at the end of this article.

 

I imagine Adam and Eve playing in the Garden of Eden, in innocence, as children do, without a care in the world and with not much to do except to admire God’s handiwork in themselves and the animals and plants that surrounded and delighted them. They must soon have become friends. Life must have seemed like an ‘Eden’ to them – no great responsibilities, no great amount of work, no aches and pains to bother them. Just an eternity of today.

 

Except, as children do, they began to grow, to become sexually mature, and their curiosity must have been piqued. Eve began to have these bumps on her chest; Adam began to grow hair around his genitals and his long thing got longer. And they must have begun to experience the first sexual stirrings, perhaps in the night, when they were asleep, lying among last year’s fallen leaves. Perhaps they began to experience pleasure and to wonder what pleasure lay in the other.

 

There is an obvious correlation between the serpent and the man’s penis. The snake has traditionally been associated with the penis and sexuality. So perhaps it was the man who, feeling aroused, suggested they acquire carnal knowledge, knowledge of one another. Certainly carnal knowledge can be for good and evil – good in a loving, committed relationship and in the procreation of children; evil when it treats the other as an object and seeks only its own satisfaction. Undoubtedly, in the history of humankind, sex has been a force for good and evil – on the one hand, a demonstration of love, two people coming together in wonder and amazement; on the other, an abuse of the other person when it is not consensual or merely pleasure-seeking, seeking a meaning where none is to be found.

 

So we have identified the serpent with the man’s penis, but what of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the apple? The apple can be related to the woman’s breast, that object that mystified the man and that he is now suggesting they eat of. After all, a fruit has flesh. It also has ‘the seed in it’, as we read in chapter 1 of the Book of Genesis, in the first creation account.

 

God had said that if they ate of the forbidden fruit – had sexual intercourse – they would surely die, and this is true, but bear in mind that the verb ‘die’ has two meanings: to expire at the end of our earthly lives, but also to expire in orgasm. This latter meaning is well documented.

 

What is the connection between these two meanings, and again why should the knowledge of good and evil be such a bad thing?

 

I think the answer is to be found in an article by a Greek bishop and theologian, Metropolitan John Zizioulas. In ‘The Consequences of Man’s Fall’, he writes, ‘In beings with organs – especially mammals – the ageing cycle begins from the moment that the organism reaches the point of reproductive maturity.’ So when we reach sexual maturity, we begin to die (in both senses of the word).

 

And this ties in with a teenager’s behaviour, because a child who reaches sexual maturity changes somewhat. They become more bashful, more private, they are no longer prepared to appear naked in front of their parents. Isn’t this exactly the behaviour of Adam and Eve when God comes looking for them ‘at the time of the evening breeze’? They hide themselves. They have become aware of their nakedness. And what is it they use to hide their nakedness that now causes them such shame? Fig leaves! Figs are another symbol of sexuality and the male organ.

 

So they have acquired carnal knowledge, they have slept together, and now they do not want God to see them because they are ashamed of their nakedness and they know that he will see it in their eyes. Their eyes have been opened.

 

But if sexual maturity coincides with the beginning of the ageing process, there is no other way to have children. So God – who so often is seen as inflicting punishment, as being vindictive, something that is as far away from his nature as it is possible to be – performs an act of charity, of love: he banishes them from the Garden of Eden in case they eat of the tree of life. He wants them to have children (I’m quite sure he knew perfectly well what was going to happen, just as any parent does), but he doesn’t want the ageing process that comes with sexual maturity to last for ever, that would be terrible, so he sends them out of the Garden of Eden to till the land they came from.

 

He does this in order that we might have children. In order to have children, we must die. This is the meaning of death – it is so that we can have the unparalleled blessing of procreating, of giving our life to another, who is then ‘the apple of our eye’.

 

This is a great thing – ‘Greater love hath no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends’ (Jn 15:13) – but it also serves another purpose: it builds up the body of the Church. It prevents God from having to create all the creatures, all the men and women, himself. He involves us in the process (albeit our involvement is slightly different, because life passes through us, it does not begin with us – we are translators, not authors).

 

In this sense, the earth is a spiritual womb, it is a womb in which a spiritual body – the body of the Church – is being formed, just as we are formed in our mother’s womb. We have not realized this. Just as there is spiritual blindness as well as physical blindness, so there is spiritual birth as well as physical birth. We are still in the womb, but now it is not the body of an individual that is being formed, it is the collective body of the Church, a body made up of many members (in 1 Corinthians 12 and Romans 12, Paul compares us to the different members of the body, each performing his or her own unique function, with Christ as the head).

 

And this is where we get into the realm of Christian paradox: life passes through us when we receive life from our parents and pass it on to our children; but we also pass through life, in the sense that we are not here for ever and we move on. We form part of the body of Christ, the body of his Church, but in the sacrament of communion it is his body and blood that form part of us. We lose our life and find it. I begin to think the Christian message is true precisely because it is paradoxical.

 

Is there an indication of the world as a spiritual womb? I think there is, because if we read the first creation account in chapter 1 of Genesis, we find that God created the day on day one (already we have the progression AIO in the word DAY, remember the correlation between O and D and between i and y) and then, on day two, he created the dome of the sky by separating the waters from the waters. Doesn’t that sound like a baby in its mother’s womb, surrounded by water? Perhaps this is why SKY can be connected to KISS and SICK, because for procreation to occur there must be a kiss, but sexual maturity is also the beginning of the ageing process, of what makes us sick.

 

Is there anything in language to connect the serpent and the man’s penis, to connect the apple and the woman’s breast?

 

Well, if you allow fluidity to the vowels and change one front vowel for another, you will find that PENIS is in SERPENT, with the addition of r and t. And applying the phonetic pairs b-p and l-r, you will find that APPLE is in the first four letters of BREAST, with the addition of s and t.

 

This interpretation – and it is only an interpretation – has three consequences:

 

  1. The Fall was a good thing. Otherwise, we couldn’t have children and the body of the Church could not be formed.

 

  1. Perhaps the woman is not entirely to blame; in fact it would seem that Adam was the prime mover in response to his sexual desire. We could at least speak about shared responsibility.

 

  1. While in the Church great emphasis is placed on monasticism, on abstinence and asceticism, it would appear that the purpose of life on earth is to have children, and this would give the option of marriage far greater importance than it is sometimes credited with.

 

So Genesis, that most remarkable book, is not just the story of the creation of the world and the Fall of humankind, but also the story of each one of us, of human life. We are born, just as the world (the body of Christ) is. We reach sexual maturity in order that we might give that life to others. We then have to die (we have now fast-forwarded to the Crucifixion) because it is the only way to give life – to die, to expire. But there is a greater mystery here. This is not the last word.

 

The word ‘die’, if we apply the physical pair b-d (a pair of letters that look alike; in this case one is the mirror image of the other), clearly contains ‘I’ and ‘be’. It is a very life-affirming word. The word ‘live’, if we remember the closeness between b and v, contains two ‘I’s and ‘be’ – this may refer to our physical and spiritual selves, to our human and divine natures (the latter acquired by grace in a process known in Orthodoxy as theosis), or to our fallen and resurrected selves. Anyway, it is manifestly not the end.

 

If we could only see this world for what it is, a place of spiritual growth (not a place to make money!!) – a spiritual womb – we might realize our connectedness. Having been born from our mothers, we are now – all of us, outside the constraints of time – in the process of forming another, spiritual body, one that has Christ as its head and one that will last for all eternity. The world is a spiritual womb. We must die in order to have children, participating in this way in the formation of the Church. And having died, we have no choice but to be born again, but this time without the straitjacket of corruption, without the ageing process. We will be ‘like angels in heaven’ (Mt 22:30). With one great difference: we will not be alone.

 

Jonathan Dunne, http://www.stonesofithaca.com

Posted on in Word in Language

Word in Language (8): Economy

In our modern society, we tend to think of ourselves as highly civilized because we can travel large distances by plane, we have made medical advances – the discovery of penicillin, non-invasive surgery – or we can access information on the Internet, but all these advances are technological, they have nothing to do with the morality of society. In fact, I would question whether we are highly civilized at all. Our modern Western society, the one that has been most successful in spreading its model, is based on two concepts: democracy and economy. Neither of these has to do with what I would consider the two criteria for civilization: love for God, love for neighbour. The first asserts the individual’s claim to property; the second asserts the individual’s right to money (even at the expense of his fellow man or the environment); and both are in direct opposition to the Church, because the Church is not democratic, it is hierarchical, and it is not based on the concept of economy (though ‘economy’ has another sense in the context of the Church, the Eastern Church in particular, which is to bend the rules according to the individual’s needs). The Church is just about the only ‘shop’ you will find where you will receive your ‘goods’ for free – namely, the sacraments of confession and communion, the greatest gifts of them all, because these will lead you into eternal life. The Church does not charge for these, and it is the only place I know not to do so. So our modern society and the model of the Church (love for God, love for your neighbour) are in stark opposition.

 

The word ‘economy’ itself means the law or management of the household – domestic matters. This is very telling because it focuses on the self (‘domestic’) instead of on the foreign (the other). In fact, the aim of countries in our international community is precisely to defend their own interests. That is the remit of diplomats the world over. What would the world be like if countries set out at the first to defend the other’s interests, if diplomats bent over backwards to improve the lot of foreigners – wouldn’t that change the world enormously?

 

Unfortunately, this ethos of individual success is drummed into our children from an early age at school, where education is cerebral and success is gauged by exam results, and where, as I have mentioned, we teach our children to start counting from 1, the number that relates to the human ego, I, instead of from 0, the figure that relates to God and would place us on a surer footing.

 

I would go so far as to say that, for me, the word ‘economy’ is the law of the ego, and we can see the connection in the phonetic pair g-k (the c in ‘economy’ is pronounced k). It is remarkable that in all these years, after all these generations, we have gone no further than to lay claim to what is freely given to us – the products of the earth – to package them (to dress them up) and then to sell them. This is the extent of our moral advancement – not love for God, not love for our neighbour, which is something we may do in our free time. The main occupation of man is to make money, but we should beware because language has something to say about this.

 

First of all, ECONOMY, apart from being the law of the ego, can be read MONEY & CO. if we jumble the letters. And what about the word MONEY? Well, if we change one mid vowel for another, we will see that MONEY is connected to ENEMY, but more telling perhaps is when we read the word in reverse, using the physical pair (pair of letters that look alike) v-y. Then we get the word VENOM. VENOM is MONEY in reverse, with one small change, and certainly it is a cause of great conflict, great suffering – not just the fear that everyone endures at having to have enough to get by, but also the conflicts that arise in the battles to lay claim to territory so that we can make more of it. Where does this need to lay claim to what has been freely given to us – the land and its products – come from? It comes from the Fall and the placing of the ego before God, the self before the other (who is God). But we are deluding ourselves because in this life everything, from food and air to life itself and meaning, passes through us, in a two-way process whereby we effect a change on the things that pass through us and they effect a change on us. So we are translators, not authors, because things do not begin with us, they do not proceed from us, we are not the source of anything, we are – or we ought to be – simply vehicles of God’s love.

 

LOVE, as you would expect, is a major word in language. It is connected to OTHER by the phonetic pair l-r, the alphabetical pair t-v, addition of h, and OTHER is connected to the Greek word for ‘God’, THEOS, by the alphabetical pair r-s, so we have:

 

LOVE – OTHER – THEOS

 

which is the message of the Christian Gospel: love the Lord your God, love your neighbour as yourself. This should come as no surprise because Christ is the Word, so it is normal that language should confirm what he is saying.

 

But LOVE is also connected to MONEY by the succession of letters in the alphabet l-m-n and the physical pair we saw earlier, v-y. LOVE is in MONEY, and that is why Christ warned us that we cannot love God and mammon, it is one or the other. Love for money is the individual’s wish to keep his money for himself, not to use it for the benefit of others, and I think that banks worldwide will attest to this inclination.

 

Of course, for someone to be rich, someone else has to be poor. Sometimes it seems there is always someone willing and able to lighten your load (the desert fathers, hermits in Egypt in the fourth century, when coming back to their cells and finding robbers with camels unburdening them of their belongings, would rush to help them, there is even the story of one monk who, on seeing that the robbers had left behind a stick, went running after them in order to hand it over – a different understanding of our place in the world).

 

If we apply the phonetic pair b-p, we will see that the reverse of ROB is POOR. Meanwhile, the reverse of SELL is LESS, perhaps because we have somehow gone against the commandment of God to love him and to love our neighbour by using our neighbour to make a profit. If our concern was placed always and only on the other, we would feel no need to attach a value to our own exertions, and this would indeed represent a step forward in terms of civilization. But we continue to pay attention to PROFITS instead of listening to those Old Testament figures the PROPHETS, marginalized figures, a bit like translators, who tried to bring people to their senses. We are not here to make a profit out of anybody, we are not here to treat people as a potential market for our product, we are here to do good. Money is an illusion of the devil, as the connection MONEY-VENOM indicates.

 

And note that it is the packaging of the products we sell that then causes untold damage to the planet and the creatures that inhabit it, especially plastic. We take what was freely given to us – we might have adapted it, turned it into something else, translated it in our own way, but the basic ingredients will have come from the earth because we cannot magic anything into existence – and instead of allowing the tap to flow, as the earth does, we turn it on and off to create supply and demand, we package it, we take what is an incessant stream (uncountable) and make countable nouns, individual items that can be processed at the checkout. Often these items are wrapped in plastic, the result of our definition, and it is this plastic causing damage to the world. PLASTIC contains the word CAPITAL.

 

The other thing we sell (or claim to own, which is the same thing) is PROPERTY and again, if we apply the phonetic pair b-p (remembering that there is also a strong connection between b and v in language), we will see that PROPERTY contains POVERTY. When we amass property – which doesn’t really belong to us and never will, because we are not responsible for the land or its materials, they were made by someone else and given to us to steward – instead of giving and receiving meaning, which should be the norm in human relationships, we find that we give and receive poverty (those who cannot afford a property, those who are burdened with mortgages or high rents, our own spiritual poverty).

 

This is an important concept. This is why it is so important to recognize that we are translators, not authors, and things pass through us, they do not belong to us (except for our love for one another). If we accept that things do not truly belong to us, they are only entrusted to us for safekeeping, we will loosen our grip, tension will decrease, we will have a better chance of giving and receiving love. After all, it is well known that suffering is caused by the inability or unwillingness to respond to the other’s love. That is the definition of hell. Heaven is to participate in the other’s love, which is why there are three persons in the Trinity, so that the love can be inclusive.

 

God brought us into the world to translate. He made the creatures and brought them to us to name (to translate). But we have taken the creatures, the products of the land, the plants and trees, and gone to MARKET. That is the extent of our civilization. We have got no further than this. I would say that we ought to be ashamed. All these years, and nothing much has changed. If anything, it has got worse, because it is now possible to make a lot of money almost without coming into contact with the products themselves. The richest people work with their heads, not with their hands, moving products around, sometimes without even seeing them.

 

And what word is connected to MARKET? CREMATE. We are burning our bridges, we are burning what unites us, creating societies that war with one another and argue amongst themselves. Let go of the so-called right to property, the foundation stone of our system of democracy, and the need to fight goes away. After all, we are not here forever, we are only passing through, which begs the question whether our wish to assert our claim to property is not in fact a wish to evade our own mortality, to somehow make ourselves out to be permanent.

 

The only place where I find a different model being practised is the Church: the doors are open, entrance is free, the focus is on God and our neighbour. True life, therefore, for me is in the Church, the body of Christ. This is why I prefer concepts like aristocracy (I believe in virtue), monarchy (Christ is my king) and hierarchy (I believe in spiritual growth) to democracy, because to say that power rests with people is to make ourselves out to be authors, and that is a false premise.

 

By turning to God and placing him at the centre of our existence, the MARKET loses its appeal, the word CREMATE begins to sag in the middle, the edifice topples, the two sides being held apart by an abyss fold together, and we are left with CREATE. Our nature is divinized – though not through any merit of our own, but through participation in God’s energies, which occurs by grace and is therefore a free gift.

 

GRACE, as far from the economy as you could wish to go, because it is freely given, is connected to another word in English, which symbolizes the tripersonality of God. That word is SHARE (the c in ‘grace’ is pronounced s, g-h is an alphabetical pair). We participate in the shared love of the Trinity, and all competition, all profit at the expense of the other, is seen for what it is: a perversion of our true purpose, which is to give and receive love, to be in relationship.

 

Postscript: Another story from the desert fathers. Two brothers wanted to live in love. They achieved this, each carrying out the will of the other, until the devil appeared to one as a dove and to the other as a raven, causing them to see things differently and to argue. They fell to blows and were parted until they realized that what was driving them apart was a distorted vision of the same thing – what separates us is not the thing itself, but our perception of it. Arguments arise from different perceptions of the same thing. This story is told by Abba Nicetas in The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, trans. Benedicta Ward, Cistercian Publications, 1984, p. 157.

 

Jonathan Dunne, http://www.stonesofithaca.com

Posted on in Word in Language

Word in Language (7): Time

Let us look at time. We live in time, our lives on earth have a beginning, a middle and an end. When we learn our own or a foreign language, one of the first things we learn is the tenses: past, present and future. So our lives are very quickly conditioned by the concept of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Everything in this sense is linear, and indeed the word ‘time’ is connected to ‘line’ by the phonetic pair m-n and by drawing a line through the letter l to make t (I call this a physical pair, because they look alike).

 

Teachers of English, of which I was one, teach the tenses by going up to the whiteboard and drawing a horizontal line with their marker. On the line, they mark three crosses to represent past, present and future, but the fact is the line is like a loose thread and it exists before the cross that stands for the past and continues after the cross that marks the future, because we cannot be certain about these things – when the past started, when the future will end. It hangs in the air, like a loose thread on our clothing, which we pick up and put in the bin.

 

I remember standing in Wandsworth, London, while teaching an English class, and having a revelation. I realized that the only way I could draw a timeline was by having a whiteboard, without the whiteboard it was impossible for me to draw the line. And while the black of my marker seemed to obliterate the white of the board underneath, the fact is the white of the board still existed beneath the black of the line. This meant that time exists – and can only exist – in the white space of eternity. Time is proof for the existence of eternity because without eternity time cannot exist. There is nowhere to draw it.

 

But what is its purpose? I have already said that I believe time exists to give us a chance to make meaning a two-way process, to offer ourselves to God in the same way that he has offered himself to us on the Cross.

 

Let us take out our toolkit and disassemble the word ‘time’. What do we find? Four letters: t – i – m – e. That is, ‘time’ is made up of a cross – the letter t, which we saw earlier resembles the letter l with a line drawn through it – and the words ‘I’ and ‘me’. So it seems the first thing about time is crucifying the self, our egotistical impulses. This is the meaning of the Greek word for ‘love’, agape – we overcome our own will, our own selfish inclinations, in order to love the other, however different he or she may be, because God has already loved that person and because, by loving them, we will learn to discern what it is in them that makes them worthy of God’s love and gives them value, something we may not have been able to see when our spiritual sight was obfuscated by our own concerns and ambitions. We have already seen that when we draw a line through the self and form a cross, the letter t, we also form a plus-sign, +: in laying down our life for the other, we find our true self, the one that is meant to live, the one that exists in the white space of the board and is not conditioned by the tenses (I am born, I live, I die).

 

But we can go further than this, because, by changing one of the vowels (remember that y corresponds to i) and applying the phonetic pairs d-t and m-n, we see that TIME is connected to two words: MEET and DENY. That is, our sole purpose in this life is to turn towards God or to turn away from him, to embrace him or to reject him, to enter into the personal relationship that is represented by the Holy Trinity or to turn in on ourselves and enter into a relationship that is inward-looking and ultimately futile. We can see a similarly stark choice in the word LIVE, because LIVE in reverse reads EVIL, but if we take the ego in LIVE – the letter I – treat it as a number (1) and count down, we get LOVE. So in LIVE we are faced with a similar choice: to do EVIL or to LOVE the other (God and our neighbour – they are one).

 

If we take steps in the alphabet, we will see that TIME is connected to LIVE (l-m, t-v), but it is also connected to DIE if we apply the phonetic pair d-t and take away the letter m. Again, the stark choice between allowing space for God in our lives or leaving him outside. The connection TIME-LIVE involves keeping the letter m, a letter which, when upended, resembles the number 3 (the Holy Trinity). If we keep the number 3, we live.

 

It is certainly true that from the point of view of this world our lives have a beginning and end, and time itself is no different. It came into existence and it will cease. We see this if we apply the phonetic pairs d-t and m-n, because ‘time’ is connected to ‘begin’ (here, the d has been reversed to make b, and we have added the letter g) and to ‘end’ (here, we have omitted the letter i and read the word in reverse).

 

Put simply, time is a space in which we are given the opportunity to grow. It cannot go on for ever, just as our childhood cannot go on for ever, because at some point we must become spiritually mature, realize our limits and seek another meaning that is not the simple gratification of our needs. Time is a teacher. It is like an enclosure in which the damage we can do may appear great, but it is limited. Take time away, and you have boundless space. Lift up the veil of time (I think those two words are connected), and you will reveal the twitching nose and arching whiskers of the white rabbit of eternity beneath, the one we have been grasping at, the one we knew was there all along, if only we could believe it. TIME, in short, is a MYTH (same three letters, addition of e/h), a story, the story we tell our children when we put them to bed, the story we read to ourselves as we get older. It is a myth, but we take it to be reality, and the one who is – namely, God – we take to be a myth.

 

There is another word connected to TIME, and that word is SIN (alphabetical pair s-t, phonetic pair m-n, addition of e). Time is an opportunity to sin – only God is without sin – but by sinning we learn from our mistakes and reach spiritual maturity. We take the opportunity to MEET God rather than to DENY him. We learn to LOVE rather than to do EVIL. We become a child of God – a SON – by taking the I in SIN and counting down, as we did before, from I to O.

 

We have learned to place too much emphasis on our reason, to make an effort and to expect the corresponding reward for our exertions, for everything to have a price (though how that price is fixed in this world is questionable, to say the least). Salvation, however, will not come to us through our own intellectual acceptance of God, our keeping our side of the bargain. It will not come to us through MERIT (a word that contains TIME). It will come to us when we open ourselves to the grace of God and participate in his energies, when we align our will to his.

 

We do not get to heaven by our own efforts, just as we cannot know God through an act of our own will. We can strain as hard as we like, bang our heads against a brick wall. God has to reveal himself to us. The ball is in the other’s court, I’m afraid. But we can invite this revelation, this participation in his energies, by showing mercy. MERCY is the counterpoint to MERIT – they are only a letter apart, but the connection is hidden so it won’t be immediately visible. The letter c is pronounced s, s-t is a jump in the alphabet, y corresponds to i. MERCY-MERIT. Two ways of viewing the world. MERIT: you get what you deserve (this is patently untrue). MERCY: we humble ourselves and – at this point, yes – by an act of will we do violence to ourselves and force ourselves to embrace our enemy, to understand him, to say a good word to him on the road instead of hurling abuse.

 

TIME, like a screen, a partition, a stage set, a loose thread, is whisked away, the board rubber comes out and eliminates the black line in time for the next lesson, the bell goes, people’s attention turns to other things, what lesson is next, what the other person thinks, and ETERNITY is revealed.

 

The letter y corresponds to i. Phonetic pair m-n. ETERNITY has TIME in it, just as the whiteboard showed us.

 

And the word ‘eternal’ – if we juggle the letters around, rotate or extend the letters (phonetic pair m-n, physical pairs f-t and i-l) – spells ‘I am free’.

 

Jonathan Dunne, http://www.stonesofithaca.com

Posted on in Word in Language

Word in Language (6): Chemistry

God is no one, just as he is nowhere. NO is the result of the progression from the name of God in Exodus 3:14 – AM – through the selfish I’M to OM if we apply the progression AIO that we studied in the last article. OM is famous as a mantra, but I actually understand it to refer to the Holy Trinity if we rotate the final letter, m, and make it into a number, 3: O3.

 

This is because God, who is often represented by the eternal figure O, is made up of three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. If we then apply the phonetic pair m-n to OM, we get NO, the reverse of which, with the addition of final e, is ONE: NO ONE. This is why I can say that God is no one, just as he is NOWHERE, which we take to mean that he is nowhere to be seen, but which also has the meaning NOW HERE.

 

If God is no one, the translator is no man. He does not exist, he is ignored, he is paid little or late or not at all, his name is often omitted (sometimes deliberately) from the texts that he has translated lest we realize that what we are holding is not original. Yes, but everything we are holding is not original, only God is original, and we cannot hold him.

 

The translator does not believe in the line that separates people and things. So what does he do? He goes to live on this line that he does not believe in and, like a tireless spider working in the night, he stitches the line, criss-crossing it until it is healed.

 

The translator is no man. He lives in no man’s land, between the opposing forces who have laid claim to the land. He doesn’t lay claim to the land, he spends his time endeavouring to stop the fighting, he raises his arms, he puts himself in the firing line, just as Christ did on the Cross. Christ is God, but he also became a translator when he assumed our human nature. By living on the line, which is how time is represented, the translator acknowledges the line, yes, but his attention is placed on the space underneath, the whiteboard, which represents eternity and without which a timeline cannot be drawn. That is to say that time cannot exist without eternity because otherwise there is nowhere to draw it.

 

God is no one – O1 – but in chemistry the subscript 1 is not normally included, so we can say that God is O. We see this in the Greek word for ‘God’, which is theos. In modern Greek, the final s is often omitted, as it is in the vocative case, when we call someone’s name. If we omit the final s of theos, we get THEO and, if we introduce a space, just as we did with NOWHERE-NOW HERE, we get THE O. God is ‘the O’.

 

The word ‘God’ itself is made up of three Os: G O D. All three letters resemble a circle. And here is a remarkable discovery, because if we add the letter W to the beginning, as we did in the previous article with HOLE-WHOLE, we find the word WOOD. WOOD is made up of three Os, with the number 3 representing the Holy Trinity at the beginning. The relevance of WOOD to Christianity is obvious, I think.

 

In fact, in an earlier article, we talked of the connection between TREE and THREE (addition of breath or h) and how a simple child’s drawing of a tree will show a trunk and two branches, which can be likened to the Father (the trunk), the Son (begotten of the Father) and the Holy Spirit (which proceeds from the Father). In this analogy, we see the incorrectness of affirming in the Creed that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, as is done in Western Churches – this would make the Holy Spirit a sub-branch of the Son, which it is not, and would make the drawing a little lopsided. The Holy Spirit proceeds only from the Father, as is correctly stated in the Orthodox Creed. All three share the same essence (in this analogy, that is WOOD).

 

Church Fathers sought an adequate analogy for the Holy Trinity. St Spyridon, whose relics are in Corfu Town, at the First Ecumenical Council in Nicaea in 325 is said to have demonstrated how one can be three by taking a potsherd or a brick and squeezing it. As he did so, fire rose into the sky, water dripped down to the ground and only clay was left in his hand. Thus he demonstrated how the three constituent elements – fire, water, clay – could be one, and one could be three.

 

St Gregory the Theologian, at the end of his famous Fifth Theological Oration, likens the Trinity to an eye, a fountain and a river, but is ultimately dissatisfied with the analogy. St John of Damascus, in his Exposition of the Orthodox Faith (I.8), likens the Trinity to three suns ‘cleaving to each other without separation and giving out light mingled and conjoined into one’.

 

But I wonder if language has something to teach us about the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, which is said to be three in one. Three in one.

 

How can there possibly be three in one? We will have a better idea if we write ‘three in ONE’. Do you see how the only number that ONE does not contain is itself: 1? It contains 0, 2 (on its back) and 3 (back to front), but it does not contain the number, 1, that relates to the ego. This is because, as I have already mentioned, the subscript 1 is omitted in chemistry.

 

In this analogy of the number ONE containing the three numbers 0, 2 and 3, God the Father is O(1) – or no one; God the Son is O2, the chemical formula for oxygen, what we breathe; and God the Holy Spirit is O3, the chemical formula for ozone, the layer that protects us from the Sun’s heat.

 

So the Holy Trinity is literally three in ONE: O(1), O2, O3.

 

We may also notice that these three letters – ONE – resemble the letters that appear in icons of Christ Pantocrator – O WN – the Greek Septuagint translation of the name of God in Exodus 3:14, I AM. We only have to rotate one letter.

 

This is normal, we should expect it, because Christ does nothing without the cooperation and agreement of the other two persons in the Trinity, the Father and the Holy Spirit. They are one.

 

We may also notice the correspondence between SON and SUN. Christ is not only the Word that we speak, not only the oxygen that we breathe, he is the light that fills our world and enables us to live. You might think that I am making this up. One of the phonetic pairs – pairs of consonants that are pronounced in a similar way in the mouth – is b-p. There is a similar correlation between LAMB and LAMP. And if we observe that the c in Christ is pronounced k and apply the phonetic pairs g-k and l-r, we will find that LIGHT is in CHRIST – just as CHILD is (phonetic pair d-t) – with the addition of the letter s.

 

It is St John the Baptist who, seeing Christ approach, declares him to be the ‘Lamb of God’ (Jn 1:29). We have already seen how he is the confirmation of the Old Testament when he declares, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life’ (Jn 14:6), because WAY is I AM.

 

Here is further proof that Jesus Christ is who he declares himself to be, because if we take the name of God in Exodus – ‘I am’ – and join the two words together, we get ‘lamb’ (I have changed capital I into lower-case l, the two are practically identical; the final b of lamb is silent). The word ‘lamb’ is the logical continuation of ‘I am’.

 

Language is genetically encoded. It contains information about God, about human life, about the environment. It is a question of putting it under the microscope and obeying a simple set of rules (the seven phonetic pairs, changing letters according to their position in the alphabet or their appearance). That is all, but most people, if I talk about this, give me a nervous look and start to edge away. If I talked about etymology, the academic science of the evolution of words over time, they would nod sagely and feel themselves to be on safe ground. But etymology will teach us far less about God and the meaning of life than word connections. It is just a question of belief, because faith in Christ cleanses our spiritual vision. In Orthodoxy, great emphasis is placed on vision, as it is on deification, the process of becoming gods by grace through the acquisition of humility and the alignment of our will with God’s.

 

SON-SUN, LAMB-LAMP, CHRIST-LIGHT. Christ warms us by day and reflects his light at night. How so? If God the Son is O2 and God the Holy Spirit is O3, then we can see that they combine to make the MOON (2 on its back, 3 on its front). The Holy Spirit is often likened to breath. Christ breathes the Holy Spirit on his disciples in John 20:22 – he is able to do this not because the Holy Spirit proceeds from him, it does not, but because he is the Word and breath forms part of speech. The letter for breath is H. If we combine this symbol for the Holy Spirit with the symbol for Christ, O2, we get H2O, the chemical formula for water. I would say that the MOON and water (H2O) are – literally – a combination of Christ and the Holy Spirit. Without God, we have no life – we will not breathe, eat or drink, language shows us this – but so often we choose to ignore him.

 

We seek fulfilment in other ways, often in earthly ways. We may not even acknowledge the spiritual side of things. And yet language has one last thing left to teach us – language, which is made up of breadcrumbs, fragments of the Word. We have come across six of the seven phonetic pairs, pairs of consonants pronounced in a similar way in the mouth, one of which is m-n. We have seen that it is common to add the letter h in word connections. The letter h represents breath. When we add h, we are literally inflating the word a little, like a balloon, so it will take flight.

 

If we apply the phonetic pair m-n, addition of h, to ONE, what word do we get?

 

HOME. The Trinity – ONE – takes us home. All that searching in different directions, and the answer was right before us. God is NO ONE. He is NOW HERE. All we have to do is open our mouths, shuffle our feet a little, bow our heads – and breathe.

 

Jonathan Dunne, http://www.stonesofithaca.com

Posted on in Word in Language

Word in Language (5): WHOLE

We saw in the previous article that the letters O WN in icons of Christ Pantocrator refer to the verse Exodus 3:14, in which God meets Moses at the burning bush and reveals his name to him:

 

God said to Moses, ‘I am who I am.’ He said further, ‘Thus you shall say to the Israelites, “I am has sent me to you.”’ (NRSV)

 

O WN is the Greek Septuagint translation. It literally means ‘the being’, but in English translations of the Bible the name of God is rendered I AM.

 

I live in Bulgaria. Here, I have seen these Greek letters, O WN, written O WH, possibly because the letter N is written H in Cyrillic. These two letters are closely connected – in effect, the crossbar between the two parallel lines has simply been straightened, H could be a stylized version of N. If we make them lower case, h is simply an extension of n. We find this a lot in word connections – letters that have been extended: h-n, i-l, v-y.

 

But there is another reason for introducing the letter H, and that is because ‘the being’ in Greek has a rough breathing: ὁ ὢν. Do you see that little c atop the letter o (which is the definite article, ‘the’)? This little cup or cap atop the letter o represents the sound h in Greek (though it is ignored in modern Greek pronunciation, which I think is a shame). So actually the correct transcription would be HO WN.

 

Let us look at the alternative spelling, O WH. It is remarkable that as O WN spelled OWN, WON and NOW, so these three letters spell WHO and HOW.

 

The answer to both questions is Christ.

 

WHO? The answer is I AM (the English translation of the name of God in Exodus 3:14).

 

HOW? Christ gives us the answer to this question when in John 14:6 he says, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life.’ WAY is I AM written with the semi-vowel y (and the m turned upside down).

 

So the answer to life’s most important question is contained in language. WHO and HOW. In the act of creation (related in the first two chapters of the Book of Genesis), the question word was WHAT: what is this creature, what will you call it? Today we are in the habit of selfishly asking WHY. WHY corresponds to the demands of the ego, that is I. In WHAT to WHY, there has been a progression from the first letter of the alphabet – A – to I.

 

But it is the wrong question. The right question, the only one that will give us an answer, is WHO. When we ask this question, we get the answer: I AM.

 

In this way, we make the progression from the letter of creation – A – to the ego – I – to O. We count down. The Greek alphabet makes this progression because the last letter in the Greek alphabet is Omega. The Latin alphabet, which we might equate with a more rationalistic, legalistic way of thinking, does not make this progression. It counts up – from I to Z (or 1 to 2).

 

If we write the correct progression AIO but replace the final letter o with the Greek way of writing Omega, w, that is AIW, we find we are back to I AM. AIO (AIW) is the progression of human life, but the Latin alphabet makes the fatal mistake of counting up: AIZ. Once you start counting up, there is no end. You will never reach an answer (and all the time the answer was right behind you, but you have to have humility, you have to turn around, you have to count down, from I to O).

 

AIZ is an act of hubris, AIO is an act of humility. But what do we teach our children in school? We teach them to count from 1, not 0 – starting with the ego, I, not with God, O.

 

I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that this then affects our whole way of thinking: we see everything from our own point of view, in terms of ownership, instead of seeing things as God would have us see them, in terms of service. It is a real wrench to change our way of thinking, but this is what we should be teaching our children. To take a step back, not to affirm the ego (don’t worry, as soon as we lose ourselves, Christ has promised us we will find ourselves again, just as in the act of translation, where the text must disappear momentarily before it reappears in another language).

 

So we make the progression from WHY to WHO. This progression from I to O is found in other word connections. We make the progression from I to O in LIVE to LOVE, for example, instead of turning LIVE around, perverting it, and getting EVIL. That is the choice that is open to us in this life. Another example of the progression from I to O is SIN to SON. We stop sinning, or at least we try to, and become children of God. Even CHRIST made this progression when he submitted to death on the CROSS for our sakes. He counted down (look at the vowels), albeit he is God already, to show us the way. He deleted the I and turned it into a Cross, †, which is also a plus-sign, +. We saw this in the article Alpha and Omega.

 

But the answer only became available with the Incarnation of Christ, that is with the New Testament. The New Testament fulfils the Old. The Old is not enough – it contains the law and the prophets, that is it looks forward to the coming of Christ in human form. We know this because perhaps the most famous name of God in the Old Testament is the Tetragrammaton, YHWH (which is normally transcribed Yahweh). YHWH corresponds to the question word WHY. It has not made the progression to O WH (WHO).

 

Another name of God in the Old Testament is EL. We find this name at the end of the names of archangels, such as Michael and Gabriel. And what happens when we combine this name of God in the Old Testament, EL, with the name of Christ, O WH. What word do we get?

 

EL + O WH = WHOLE.

 

Christ makes us whole.

 

We like to think of ourselves as isolated beings, with parapets around us protecting us from unwanted intrusions, but the fact is we are peppered with holes. They are called pores. Actually they are what permits our skin to breathe, they are necessary.

 

But on a metaphysical level, we feel we have a hole when we are not fulfilled and we might try all kinds of ways, all kinds of substances, to block up this hole – we might seek comfort in drink, in drugs, in anything that takes our mind off the gaping hole at the centre of our lives.

 

Only the Holy Trinity will do this, will supply the answer. The Holy Trinity can be linked with the number 3. When we add the number 3 to HOLE (and rotate the number 3 so that it becomes the letter W), we get WHOLE. WHOLE is HOLE with God (3) at the beginning.

 

And once we have made that change, once we have repented, a miracle takes place. Because what word is contained in WHOLE that is not in HOLE?

 

Word connections sometimes involve the addition of a letter, most commonly h (the letter that represents breath). The letters v and w are closely connected – they are next to each other in the alphabet, and their pronunciation can be confused (think of Latin and German).

 

If we make these changes – v-w, addition of h – to WHOLE, what word do we get? LOVE.

 

WHOLE is a combination of EL and O WH – the New Testament fulfils the Old.

 

It is a combination of our HOLE and the Holy Trinity, represented by the number 3 (or the letter W).

 

And it contains LOVE, which is what happens when we take the ego, I, and count down to O.

 

All of this – all this message – is contained in language, in the words we use every day, but we have no idea. We study language horizontally, in terms of history. We don’t study language spiritually, apart from time. That is why I compare language to the environment. We look on them both two-dimensionally, as put there for our own use, but they reflect their Maker. The environment reflects the Creator, who created it in the first two chapters of Genesis, and gave us the creatures to translate (that is, to name). Language reflects the Word, the Son of God, Jesus Christ. For all we know, the words we use are fragments of him – breadcrumbs.

 

But to perceive this, we need God at the centre of our lives, not ourselves. We need to open our spiritual Is so that they become Os.

 

O is simply an I that has been opened. An eye that sees for the first time, a progression we all need to make in this life.

 

Jonathan Dunne, http://www.stonesofithaca.com

Posted on in Word in Language

Word in Language (4): Christ the Translator

But we prefer to own things. We prefer to draw a line and say ‘this is mine’. We are authors. And yet this is not true. Things pass through us, they do not begin with us. Air, food, words, experiences, even the gift of life, pass through us. We take what we need (meaning) and in the process we give meaning.

 

We are translators. Just as a translator allows the text to pass through him in order to translate it into another language, so the things of this world pass through us. But meaning is a two-way process. It is not only the text that passes through the translator, but the translator who passes through the text. He also is changed by the experience. He acquires meaning himself.

 

So it is with the things of this world – they pass through us, but we also pass through them. Money passes through our hands, for example, but we also pass through a house. Neither of them remains with us, we will leave them both behind. So neither truly belongs to us. What belongs to us, I think, is our reaction, how we use the things with which we are entrusted, how we react to situations. Our reaction – the destiny of our souls – is our belonging.

 

So is there nothing else we can truly be said to OWN? Well, I think there is, but it is not a thing, he is a person. And the process of meaning is the same.

 

If you have ever seen an icon of Christ Pantocrator, you might have noticed that inside the halo, in the beams of the Cross, are three letters: O WN. These are Greek letters and represent the Greek Septuagint translation of a verse from the Old Testament (perhaps the most important verse in the whole of the Old Testament, in my opinion): Exodus 3:14.

 

In Exodus 3:14, God meets Moses at the burning bush and replies to Moses’ question who he should say has sent him to the people of Israel to free them from the Egyptian overlords:

 

God said to Moses, ‘I am who I am.’ He said further, ‘Thus you shall say to the Israelites, “I am has sent me to you.”’ (NRSV)

 

In Greek, this text reads:

 

καὶ εἶπεν ὁ Θεὸς πρὸς Μωυσῆν λέγων· ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ὤν. καὶ εἶπεν· οὕτως ἐρεῖς τοῖς υἱοῖς ᾿Ισραήλ· ὁ ὢν ἀπέσταλκέ με πρὸς ὑμᾶς. (LXX)

 

I have underlined the names of God in the Greek text: ‘I am who I am’ (ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ὤν) and ‘I am’ (ὁ ὢν).

 

O WN (ὁ ὢν) literally means ‘the being’. It is sometimes translated ‘the One Who is’. In reference to this appearance of God before Moses, when he revealed to him his name, these three letters are included in icons of Christ, because according to Orthodox tradition all appearances of God in the Old Testament are by the Logos, the Word of God, that is Christ.

 

But this has meaning in English because those same three letters spell OWN. We could be said to ‘own’ Christ inasmuch as we form part of his body in the Church. He is ours. But ownership in Christian terms is not about exerting control, it is about expressing love. In the same way, he could be said to ‘own’ us. He gives himself to us in the Eucharist; we give ourselves to him unconditionally. It is a two-way process.

 

OWN in English spells another two words: WON and NOW. Christ’s is the victory; with his Resurrection he has conquered death. The end of the world has yet to come (this is for another reason), but the victory is assured, even if it seems at certain points in our lives that the opposite is true. NOW because Christ is with us now. How does the illuminating Gospel of Matthew end? ‘I am with you always, to the end of the age.’ His presence with us is permanent.

 

This, for me, is the meaning of ownership: to own Christ and to be owned by him. It is not to fight over portions of the earth. It is not to draw lines (supine egos) on the ground, around our property (which one day will not be ours). It is to give ourselves unconditionally. The giving the other way round (by Christ) has already been done, and that is the meaning of time: to turn meaning into a two-way process, to make it mutual.

 

The destiny of our souls depends on our reaction, our acceptance or not of Christ, our clinging to the letter of the law or its spirit, its deeper meaning, its greater good. This is ownership: to react with love or anger, to claim for ourselves or for the other, to cling to self-preservation (a futile task) or to lose our life in order to find it. This is why, having found the pearl, the merchant went and sold all that he had in order to buy it.

 

But there is something else – something that points to Christ as the Messiah, the fulfilment of the Old Testament prophets. The name of God in Exodus 3:14 is translated into English as ‘I am’. I think the whole of existence is contained in these three letters. First of all, we should note that ‘am’ contains the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, Alpha and Omega (AW, do not worry that the m has been turned upside down). This name is found for the first time in Revelation 1:8:

 

‘I am the Alpha and the Omega’, says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty. (NRSV)

 

The expression ‘Alpha and Omega’ is contained in the verb ‘am’ – God could have just said ‘am’, and it would have been sufficient.

 

Also interesting is the fact that ‘am’ in reverse gives us the Sanskrit word ma, which means ‘create’. This is because God is the Creator, it is with him that things begin (not with us).

 

And finally the name revealed to Moses in Exodus 3:14 and reproduced in icons of Christ, ‘I am’, gives us two other words in English. The first of these is ‘law’. I think you can see this – a capital I and a lower-case l are practically identical; again, I have turned the m upside down (this is very common in language). ‘Law’ refers to the Old Testament – the law that Moses brought down from Mt Sinai on the tablets, the Ten Commandments, about worshipping the Lord your God and honouring your father and mother.

 

But this law is only a preparation for the law in person, that is Jesus Christ. Of itself, it does not give life, it does not conquer death – only Christ can do this.

 

And we see this when we make the progression from ‘I am’ to ‘law’ to another word in English: ‘way’ (y is the semi-vowel that corresponds to i).

 

In John 14:6, Christ says to Thomas:

 

I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. (NRSV)

 

Note how both ‘way’ and ‘Alpha and Omega’ are preceded by the pronoun and verb ‘I am’. It is as if Christ is extrapolating them, is drawing out their meaning. He is, in effect, teaching us to be translators.

 

Christ came down to earth for two reasons: one is to translate for us the meaning of life, and he does this using Braille (writing for the spiritually blind, that is us). His form of BRAILLE is the PARABLE (another phonetic pair is b-p).

 

The other reason has to do with the second part of that verse from the Gospel of John, ‘No one comes to the Father except through me’, because not only did Christ come to translate for us the meaning of life (which is to believe in him), he also assumed our human nature (we are translators) so that he could later translate us into eternal life. You cannot do this if you are only an author. You must be a translator as well (the two natures of Christ, as defined at the Council of Chalcedon).

 

At the end of our lives, when we reach the end of our translation, of acquiring and giving meaning, we will become the word that best defines us, and that word will be spoken by Christ into eternal life. He will translate us. This is why translation is not inferior, it is not second-rate, it is not dog-eared like a book from the library, it is the essence of human life.

 

The fact that we see translation in a negative way is a reflection on ourselves, not on translation. Our wish to be authors – superior, first-rate and brand-new – reflects our desire to hold on to our lives at all costs. It responds to the instinct of self-preservation. But in the end we will be required to let the Word pass through us – and to pass through him – if we want to inherit eternal life.

 

Jonathan Dunne, http://www.stonesofithaca.com

Posted on in Word in Language

Word in Language (3): Seed and New Life

In the Gospels, Christ is in the habit of saying, after a parable, ‘Let anyone with ears to hear listen!’ When he explains to his disciples that the mysteries of the kingdom are revealed to them and not to others, he quotes the fulfilment of the prophecy contained in Isaiah, ‘They may indeed look, but not perceive, and may indeed listen, but not understand.’ It is obvious that there are different forms of seeing and hearing, of looking and listening. It is not enough to open our physical eyes, we must open our spiritual eyes also.

 

This is the great problem facing humankind because a large majority think it is sufficient to open their physical eyes, this means they are not blind, but we are all blind to some extent and it is only faith that will cleanse our sight and unplug our ears, so that we can hear. It is remarkable that EAR is contained in HEAR, and EYES contains SEE in reverse.

 

It is also remarkable that ‘ear’ can refer to an ear of wheat. We find this in the Parable of the Tares (Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43), where wheat is taken to refer to the children of the kingdom, while weeds (or tares) refer to the children of the evil one. Again, we are saved through hearing because wheat has ears.

 

One of the phonetic pairs is d-t. A phonetic pair is a pair of consonants that are pronounced similarly in the mouth, often with voice and without voice, as in the case of d-t – they are pronounced in the same way, only d is voiced and t is voiceless, as you can see if you hold your throat while you pronounce them. If we apply this phonetic pair to SEE and HEAR, we get SEED and HEART. If we rearrange the letters of HEART, we get EARTH. So a seed is planted in the earth of a person’s heart and it depends on that person’s reaction, their receptiveness, whether they listen or not.

 

We might think this connection between EARTH and HEART is just a coincidence. Well, that’s exactly what it is. Coincidences are hidden roots that come to the surface. But we can confirm this coincidence by looking at another word connection, this time between SOIL and SOUL. Soil is a thin layer around the earth, but it provides untold riches, all the food that we can eat. In terms of economics, we focus on another kind of black stuff, OIL, but I would suggest that it is SOIL that provides the real riches and enables us to live.

 

A seed is planted in the earth. It sprouts roots, which in a child’s drawing always divide into two, and a shoot that breaks through the surface (rather as a tooth breaks through the gum) and divides into three – the trunk and branches of a tree. The branches put out leaves, which photosynthesize, and then flowers, which metamorphose into fruit. So the end result of a seed sprouting in the ground is the growth of a tree and the bearing of fruit.

 

This is the process of life and it takes place right in front of our eyes (though we may not see it). A SEED becomes a TREE. Have you seen the connection? Phonetic pair d-t, alphabetical pair r-s. ROOT and TREE are also connected (we only have to substitute one mid vowel for another). ROOT is also connected to SHOOT by the alphabetical pair r-s, addition of h. And SHOOT is connected to TOOTH by the alphabetical pair s-t.

 

This is because language, like nature, is interconnected.

 

I could go on (for example, how FRUIT contains ROOT, which is indeed the case, without roots there are no chances of the tree bearing fruit). But I would like to focus on two word connections.

 

The first is between TREE and THREE. A tree in a simple drawing has a trunk and two branches. There is an obvious correlation here with the Holy Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Would it be surprising for creation to speak of the Holy Trinity, by whom it was created? For that matter, should we be surprised that language contains information about God and human life, when Christ himself is called the Word? Is it not possible that when we speak, we are handling sacred things, just as when we till the earth? Should this not encourage a sacred attitude to everything around us, inasmuch as it refers us to the Creator?

 

But there is another word connected with THREE, and that is EARTH (we only change one vowel). In fact, EARTH is THREE in reverse (if we keep the consonantal group, th, together). Again, we might see a connection with the Holy Trinity, but it also so happens that the Earth is the third planet in order of increasing distance from the Sun – and it was created on day three, according to the creation account in the first chapter of the Book of Genesis, together with ‘plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it’ (that is so that the whole process can begin again). Earth is intrinsically linked with the number three, and we see some of the other words we talked about – seed, fruit and tree.

 

Yes, but what about ‘plant’? That doesn’t fit your system, does it?

 

Well, actually it does. If we apply the phonetic pair d-t to PLANT and remove the first letter, we get LAND. If we remove the final letter of LAND and apply the alphabetical pair l-m, we get MAN. Language is telling us something – it is genetically encoded, just like plants. If we put it under the microscope, we will discover wonders, because these are not things a single human being in a single generation could have installed in language without our knowledge. We have adopted the kind of speech that reflects our Creator, just as we bear his image and draw our breath from his existence.

 

Why is this so hard for us to admit?

 

Some might also find it hard to admit of the possibility of a resurrection from the dead. How could a body laid in the ground ever possibly return to life? And yet, don’t we have an example of this in front of our very eyes? The seed that is planted in the ground – is it not an example of resurrection? To all intents and purposes, we cannot see it, it is not there. And yet it gives rise to towering trees, microcosms of life that support insects, that communicate in a way we are only beginning to decipher.

 

There is another connection with SEED, but we will see it better if we use lower-case letters: ‘seed’. Do you remember how we took the ego, I, from ‘gold’ and ‘slave’ and got ‘God’ and ‘save’? If we add the ego to ‘seed’ and rotate the letter d by 180 degrees, we get ‘sleep’. Isn’t that what the seed does in the ground? Sleep the big sleep before rising to new life.

 

Jonathan Dunne, http://www.stonesofithaca.com