a grouchy grammarian on religion vs. relationship

So, I think the "It's not a religion, it's a relationship" line is a bit silly. [Edit: If you need it, here's a quick example of what I'm talking about.  But be warned, it will try to play music automatically.  Christians of varying tones (and varying degrees of web-savviness) use similar arguments, but this was just the first thing that came up on a Google search for religion and relationship.]

Part of the insistence on relationship terminology is well-intentioned.  I think it's meant to help reach out to people who have been burned by religion as such, and that's a noble goal.  And I'm also all for emphasizing our relationships with God and other people -- I think that's what it's all about.

However, I don't know that shunning the term religion in favor of the term relationship is always helpful.  Semantically, I think making a big deal of the switch is equivalent to proclaiming about one's life with a spouse, "It's not a marriage, it's a relationship!"  -- Ok, yes, true, it's a relationship.  But that could mean a lot of different things, and our language has all these handy extra words to specify what kind of relationship.

And on the level of interpersonal relationships, we need that specificity because there are different behavioral expectations for different types of relationships -- I have a professional relationship with my boss, which entails reports on how my work is going, and I have a sibling relationship with my brother which entails hugs with a running start (which would knock over any normal person).  Not a good idea to confuse these, even though they're both relationships and that's lovely and all.

Anyway, the point is that religion is a perfectly serviceable English word to denote a particular kind of relationship among many others.  It's a kind of relationship where people worship God and try to figure out what that does to all the other relationships.  Maybe there are some situations where the substitution of terms (relationship for religion) is helpful, but I think it can often mean a loss of clarity.

I think there's even more of a problem, though, in the way people sometimes use this relationship language rhetorically to distinguish themselves from other religious folks -- the implication being that religion is not a relationship and that therefore those professing relationship instead are authentic and are offering something totally different from religion.

Ok, I agree with part of the point here: I think it's true that there are some people who participate in religious activities but are not truly cultivating transformed relationships with God and other people.  This is a legitimate concern.

However, I think the terminology switch doesn't really fix the superficiality problem and can also involve some polemics that aren't fair to other religious people.  The assumption that religion and relationship are mutually exclusive makes it easy to dismiss people whose religious practices are different from one's own (and therefore more apparent as religious practices -- relationshippy folks still have religious practices).  In many cases, these other people would see themselves as pursuing a relationship with God through the elements of their religious practice.  And no, you don't have to agree with others' practices -- but I think that talking about religion as necessarily separate from relationship can often lead to a superficial way of shutting down other groups (often in the absence of their competent defenders) rather than engaging the issues respectfully.

gem of unintentional subversiveness

I'm looking for summer work, and I found a Craigslist job page which (in two places) advertised "hourly wage comiserate with experience." I presume these estimable employers meant to say "commensurate," but it's really better the way it is.

Doh.

So, I'm working on memorizing T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets." I just Googled a quote Eliot uses to see where it's taken from. Here's what I searched:

"on whatever sphere of being the mind of a man may be intent at the time of death"

And Google kindly provided me with this suggestion:

Did you mean: "on whatever sphere of being the mind of a man may be internet at the time of death" ?

Irony is a beautiful thing.

Poetic Self-Mockery in Prose

Last summer I started to write a poem about catching fireflies. It was going to be this ambitious double-meaning thing with a metaphor for learning. I was going to say how you can’t catch them if you only look for the light pulses; you’ve got to learn to see them when they just look like bugs, and (just as a matter of fact – this part wasn’t particularly worked into my symbolism yet) to do that you have to angle yourself so the fireflies are between you and something light-colored. Such tactics I remembered from the summer delinquency of my childhood, and seeing a couple of fireflies in the yard brought it to mind. But I thought I ought to catch some fireflies with this strategy before I wrote the poem. Real-life details and writing from experience and all that.

I couldn’t catch any. I don’t know if there was a firefly plague that summer or what. I didn’t see many, despite frequent predatory dusk ventures. When I did see them, they flew over fences and into bushes and too high. I couldn’t reach the fireflies and only slapped bloody mosquitoes, muttering apologies to John Donne. I still maintain that my firefly-catching strategy is sound. It just didn’t work. So I didn’t finish the poem.

And I don’t think I will, because of what it did to me at the end of the summer. After I had striven for authenticity – yea, shed my very blood for this poem – it deliberately betrayed and humiliated me. I’d just about given up on catching fireflies that summer. I’d gone to bed for the night. I came downstairs for a drink of water. And there, on the carpet at the foot of the stairs, I saw a slow, yellow, pulsing glow. It was dying. I picked it up and examined the real-life details: the shiny black legs, squirmy abdomen, and the translucent orange stripes on its back armor where the light came through. It kept lighting slowly, and I carried it to the back door and shook it out of my hand into the grass.

Now I can’t possibly write the poem because of what this has done to the symbolism. It can’t be about the pursuit of knowledge anymore, because I just stumbled on the firefly; it can’t even be about how true knowledge comes best when you don’t pursue it, because the firefly was dying; and it can’t be about the destructive effects of analysis, because my earlier pursuit had nothing to do with this firefly’s tragic demise. In short, the poem annihilated itself. It spontaneously combusted in a puff of irony, leaving me on the back porch in poemless, pajama-clad chagrin.