14Words, Words, Words

14Words, Words, Words

From Act II Scene 2 of Shakespeare's Hamlet:

LORD POLONIUS:What do you read, my lord?
HAMLET: Words, words, words.

In this scene from Hamlet, Hamlet disparages the power of words to convey meaning or significance. Words, like grains of sand on the beach are just so much noise; although Hamlet cannot rouse himself to action, he prefers action to words. Many, many times, you have heard me speak from this pulpit against the reliance on verbal structures as the cornerstone of religious experience. I thought I had pretty much covered the subject until I ran across this new material from Deepak Chopra, and Nietzsche. I am therefore going to review the subject from a fresh standpoint, with the aid of some new supportive material.

To kick off the sermon I refer, once again to one of my favorite passages, the one taken from the Gospel of Mathew:

Matthew 11:16-17:

"But to what shall I liken this generation? It is like unto children sitting in the markets, and calling unto their fellows, And saying, We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned unto you, and ye have not lamented."

In this passage Jesus is pointing out the hypocrisy of the time, the pitiful play-acting that dominates most religious worship. In addition, He is pointing out how deluded we can become by buying into the street theater that so dominates most of our social interactions with each other, how false these interactions are, how childish, and how transparent these hypocrisies are if seen in the right light.

From George MacDonald's Phantastes, we read:


“But words are vain; reject them all—
They utter but a feeble part:
Hear thou the depths from which they call,
The voiceless longing of my heart.”

Many times we have preferred the irrational language of the heart, to the declusive inadequate claptrap of speech. However, the argument, today, is that speech has a role to play in spiritual experience--that, in spite of its short-comings we must use words to create a context from which the heart may speak its truth.

Let us recall the several discussions we have had of Julian Jaynes' book The Birth of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. I'll be honest, I don't really know whether this idea is actually in the book, or whether I just kind of made it up from what I THOUGHT I was reading, but the idea goes like this: we have two brains, which are perceiving everything all at the same real time moment, but from slightly skewed perspectives;(remember our brains are cross-wired so that the left brain gets its input from the eyes and ears on the right side of the body, and vice versa). Thus, since the sense perceptions of the two hemispheres of the brain are separated by distance, they register slightly different things to our brains--different levels of intensities experienced from different angles. These slight differences in the two-fold perceptual experience of the bicameral mind interfere with each other creating crosstalk or, so-called, diffraction. And with diffraction comes the hologram; remember that a hologram is diffracted light light, bouncing off itself. So the these little waves of mentally generated electrons, projected by the radio transmitter of the bicameral mind, bounce off of each other, and consciousness emerges as a holographic representation of that energetic source.



The language of spirituality, or, we might say the jargon of spirituality can deceive us into thinking we are being spiritual when, in fact we are being merely mindless monkeys parroting back empty words. As Julian Jaynes has reminded us, consciousness consists, in large part, of the language with which we express experience--and if our language is corrupt at bottom, our expressions will convey no truth, only noise.  As we mentioned last week, this is why, even when we seek the spiritual truth of the Word, so that we may transcend the natural propensities of our sinful flesh, we so often fall short of this potential, and remain sinners; we discussed how sometimes, even with the purest of intentions, our literal consciousness mistakes truthful virtue for just another kind of sin in sheep's clothing. 

It goes without saying, that the things our literal consciousness, the ego, needs to function well in daily life, and the things our higher consciousness, the soul, needs to experience HIGHER reality, may not be the same things. This is the problem: we need to learn to distinguish carefully between the qualities of our various experiences, i.e. the literal-dominated ego, and the intuition-dominated heart. As Rainier Maria Rilke says:


"Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.”

As Chogyam Trungpa says:



“Enlightenment is ego's ultimate disappointment.”

Deepak Chopra says:


“The ego relies on the familiar. It is reluctant to experience the unknown, which is the very essence of life.”


I mentioned, at the outset, that I would bringing Nietzsche into the discussion. But, before I do, I wish to insert a disclaimer: I find that Nietzsche is out of his mind with anger, guilt, and paradox; I have read quite a bit of his work lately and find about three fifths of it to be downright dog doo-doo, and about one fifth of it hysterical cacaphony; however, about one-fifth of it (I haven't really done the math) is inspired, intuitive genius. Like other philosophers and psychologists I have referenced from this pulpit, many people are not ALL WRONG, Julian Jaynes, for instance. Kant's reflections on knowing and intuition are brilliantly concise and helpful as far as they go, they just (like Jaynes) don't go far enough. Thus, this quotation from The Joyful Wisdom comes from a drastically skewed point of origin, but, in terms of the psychology of his time, I find it to be decades ahead of other philosophers and psychologists; I find it presages Jaynes by almost a century. The key point, here, is that Nietzsche, a hundred years before Jaynes, is finding that "consciousness" is not the dominant mode of human experience--that there is another resolution of being more powerful and more present than "consciousness". 


[As I read, there will be several key points I will wish to emphasize later--I usually insert sidebars at these points, but the logic flow of Nietzsche is so intensely integral, I hesitate to interrupt his discourse, and will therefore attach my comments at the end:]



The Joyful Wisdom:
"Consciousness. — Consciousness is the last and 
latest development of the organic, and consequently also the most unfinished and least powerful of these developments. Innumerable mistakes originate out of consciousness, which, " in spite of fate," as Homer says, cause an animal or a man to break down earlier than might be necessary. If the conserving bond of the instincts were not very much 
more powerful, it would not generally serve as a regulator : by perverse judging and dreaming with open eyes, by superficiality and credulity, in short, just by consciousness, mankind would necessarily have broken down : or rather, without the former there would long ago have been nothing more of the latter !

Before a function is fully formed and matured, it is a danger to the organism : all the better if it be then thoroughly tyrannised over! Consciousness is thus thoroughly tyrannised over — and not least by the pride in it ! It is thought that here is the quintessence of man ; that which is enduring, eternal, ultimate, and most original in him ! Consciousness is regarded as a fixed, given magnitude ! Its growth and intermittences are denied ! It is accepted as the " unity of the organism " ! —

This ludicrous overvaluation and misconception of consciousness has as its result the great utility that a too rapid maturing of it has thereby been hindered. Because men believed that they already possessed consciousness, they gave themselves very little trouble to acquire it— and even now it is not otherwise! It is still an entirely new problem just dawning on the human eye, and hardly yet plainly recognisable : to embody knowledge in ourselves and make it instinctive,— a problem which is only seen by those who have grasped the fact that hitherto our errors alone have been embodied in us, and that all our consciousness is relative to errors ! 


What does Knowing Mean? — Non ridere non 
lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere ! says Spinoza,
“One should neither laugh at, nor lament the world, but only understand it.” says Spinoza, so simply and sublimely, as is his wont. Nevertheless, what else is this intelligere (understanding) ultimately, but just the form in which the three other things become perceptible to us all at once? A result of the diverging and opposite impulses of desiring to deride, lament and execrate? Before knowledge is possible each of these impulses must first have brought forward its one-sided view of the object or event.

[Sidebar: Posted by chipbruce

"This is consistent with Spinoza’s own rejection of the mind-body dualism of René Descartes. Much later, John Dewey proposes a related notion, that inquiry is reconstructive experience: The experiences, and our emotional responses, come first, but knowing is the reflection and articulation of those experiences, which leads away from simple judging."
Back to Nietsche:]

"The struggle of these one-sided views occurs afterwards, and out of it there occasionally arises a compromise, a pacification, a recognition of rights on all three sides, a sort of justice and agreement : for in virtue of the justice and agreement all those impulses can maintain themselves in existence and retain their mutual rights. We, to whose consciousness only the closing reconciliation scenes and final settling of accounts of these long processes manifest themselves, think on that account that intelligere is something conciliating, just and good, something essentially antithetical to the impulses ; whereas it is only a certain relation of the impulses to one another.

For a very long time conscious thinking was regarded as the only thinking: it is now only that the truth dawns upon us that the greater part of our intellectual activity goes on unconsciously and unfelt by us ; I believe, however, that the impulses which are here in mutual conflict understand rightly how to make themselves felt by one 
another, and how to cause pain :— the violent sudden exhaustion which overtakes all thinkers' may have its origin here (it is the exhaustion of the battle-field). Aye, perhaps in our struggling interior there is much concealed heroism, there is certainly nothing divine, or eternally-reposing-in- itself, as Spinoza supposed. Conscious thinking and especially that of the philosopher, is the weakest and on that account also the relatively mildest and quietest mode of thinking: and thus it is precisely the philosopher who is most easily misled concerning the nature of knowledge. . .

The " Genius of the Species — The problem of 
consciousness (or more correctly : of becoming conscious of oneself) meets us only when we begin to perceive in what measure we could dispense with it: and it is at the beginning of this perception that we are now placed by physiology and zoology (which have thus required two centuries to overtake the hint thrown out in advance by Leibnitz). For we could in fact think, feel, will, and recollect, we could likewise " act " in every sense of the term, and nevertheless nothing of it all need necessarily " come into consciousness " (as one says metaphorically). The whole of life would be possible without its seeing itself as it were in a mirror : as in fact even at present the far greater part of our life still goes on without this mirroring, — and even our thinking, feeling, volitional life as well, however painful this statement may sound to an older philosopher.

What then is the purpose of consciousness generally, when it is in the main superfluous? 
Now it seems to me, if you will hear my answer and its perhaps extravagant supposition, that the subtlety and strength of consciousness are always in proportion to the capacity for communication of a man (or an animal), the capacity for communication in its turn being in proportion to the necessity for communication : the latter not to be understood as if precisely the individual himself who is master in the art of communicating and making known his necessities would at the same time have to be most dependent upon others for his necessities. It seems to me, however, to be so in relation to whole races and successions of generations where necessity and need have long compelled men to communicate with their fellows and understand one another rapidly and subtly, a surplus of the power and art of communication is at last acquired as if It were a fortune which had gradually accumulated, and now waited for an heir to squander it prodigally (the so-called artists are these heirs in like manner the orators, preachers, and authors: all of them men who come at the end of a long succession, "late-born" always, in the best sense of 
the word, and as has been said, squanderers by their very nature).

Granted that this observation IS correct, I may proceed further to the conjecture that consciousness generally has only been developed under the pressure of the necessity for communication -that from the first it has been necessary and useful only between man and man (especially between those commanding and those obeying) and has only developed in proportion to its utility Consciousness is properly only a connecting network between man and man,— it is only as such that it has had to develop; the recluse and wild-beast species of men would not have needed it The very fact that our actions, thoughts, feelings and motions come within the range of our consciousness-at least a part of them —is the result of a terrible, prolonged "must" ruling man's destiny: as the most endangered animal he needed help and protection; he needed his fellows, he was obliged to express his distress, he had to know how to make himself understood — and for all this he needed "consciousness" first of all : he had to "know" himself what he lacked, to "know" how he felt, and to "know" what he thought. For, to repeat it once more, man, like every living creature, thinks unceasingly, but does not know it; the thinking which is becoming conscious of itself is only the smallest part thereof, we may say, the most superficial part, the worst part : — for this conscious thinking alone is done in words, that is to say, in the symbols for communication, by means of which the origin of consciousness is revealed.

In short, the development of speech and the development of consciousness (not of reason, but of reason becoming self-conscious) go hand in hand. Let it be further accepted that it is not only speech that serves as a bridge between man and man, but also the looks, the pressure and the gestures ; our becoming conscious of our sense impressions, our power of being able to fix them, and as it were to locate them outside of ourselves, has increased in proportion as the necessity has increased for communicating them to others by means of signs. The sign-inventing man is at the same time the man who is always more acutely self-conscious ; it is only as a social animal that man has learned to become conscious of himself, — he is doing so still, and doing so more and more.

As is obvious, my idea is that consciousness does not properly belong to the individual existence of man, but rather to the social and gregarious nature in him ; that, as follows therefrom, it is only in relation to communal and gregarious utility that it is finely developed ; and that consequently each of us, in spite of the best intention of understanding himself as individually as possible, and of "knowing himself," will always just call into consciousness the non-individual in him, namely, his "averageness " ; — that our thought itself is continuously as it were outvoted by the character of consciousness — by the imperious " genius of the species " therein — and is translated back into the perspective of the herd.

Fundamentally our actions are in an incomparable manner altogether personal, unique and absolutely individual — there is no doubt about it ; but as soon as we translate them into consciousness, they do not appear so any longer. . . . This is the proper phenomenalism and perspectivism as I understand it : the nature of animal consciousness involves the notion that the world of which we can become conscious is only a superficial and symbolic world, a generalised and vulgarised world ; — that everything which becomes conscious becomes just thereby shallow, meagre, relatively stupid, — a generalisation, a symbol, a characteristic of the herd ; that with the evolving of consciousness there is always combined a great, radical perversion, falsification, superficialisation, and generalisation.  


Finally, the growing consciousness is a danger, and whoever lives among the most conscious Europeans knows even that it is a disease. As may be conjectured, it is not the antithesis of subject and object with which I am here concerned : I leave that distinction to the epistemologists who have remained entangled in the toils of grammar (popular metaphysics). It is still less the antithesis of "thing in itself" and phenomenon, for we do not " know " enough to be entitled even to make such a distinction. Indeed, we have not any organ at all for knowings or for "truth": we "know" (or believe, or fancy) just as much as may be of use in the interest of the human herd, the species ; and even what is here called  "usefulness" is ultimately only a belief, a fancy, and perhaps precisely the most fatal stupidity by which we shall one day be ruined.

As I indicated. above, I will now comment and amplify several sections of the Nietzsche excerpt:


"Consciousness is the last and latest development of the organic and consequently also the most unfinished and least powerful of these developments."

It makes perfect sense that man, the most highly evolved of all earthly creatures, should possess the most sophisticated speech systems, and therefore the most highly evolved state of consciousness. I hasten to emphasize the term "earthly creatures". The case has been made repeatedly that consciousness is a function of language, and is thus not a spiritual state but a one-higher-than-animal level of carnal existence. I wish to emphasize that the sense of self, the ego resolution created by consciousness, is not the TRUE self, the eternal self, but merely an extension of that higher consciousness into the physical world, no more or less significant than the operation of sense organs like hearing or seeing.

"Before a function is fully formed and matured, it is a danger to the organism."

Here again, Nietzsche is expressing contempt for the conscious mode of being; as he states later, it is the APPROXIMATE character, the AVERAGE character of consciousness that introduces lack of specificity into our thinking, thereby contaminating all our conscious thought with ERROR. The danger to the organism through erroneous thinking is obvious, witness wars, insanity, hate, envy, and greed, all created by bad thoughts (bad words).

There is a famous story about Felix Mendelssohn: when asked if he felt deprived by the lack of specificity of the musical language (meaning the inability to express precise verbal meanings), Mendelssohn replied that he could make much more subtle and specific distinctions with the musical language than he ever could with words. Thus, the spiritual component of music gets closer to expressing the essence of the soul than the best prose. Poetry is another matter, of course, because there is no poetry without music.


 
"This ludicrous overvaluation and misconception of consciousness has, as its result, the great utility that a too rapid maturing of it has thereby been hindered. Because men believed that they already possessed consciousness, they gave themselves very little trouble to acquire it— and even now it is not otherwise! Non ridere non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere!” “One should neither laugh at, nor lament the world, but only understand it.”

There is more embedded in this paragraph than meets the eye. He is saying that the maturation of consciousness had been hindered because man has taken to it too easily, and has therefore been less than diligent in extending and refining its capacities. How does Nietzsche know that consciousness is overvalued? How does he know that its maturation had been hindered through inattention? It must be because he has developed sensitivities in himself of a super-conscious quality, a meta-conscious quality that can perceive more than the symbolic approximations of language. This is the heightened sensitivity to spiritual energy that I have been developing in myself, and have been recommending from this pulpit. By saying, “Because men believed that they already possessed consciousness,” Nietzsche is indicating both that most men are kidding themselves about how consciousness they truly are, and that he, Nietzsche, in order to say this, has attained higher levels of literal and/or spiritual consciousness than most men. It is an arrogant posture, indeed, but it must be admitted that in order to point this out, it must be true.

“Nevertheless, what else is this intelligere (understanding) ultimately, but just the form in which the three other things (to deride, lament and execrate) become perceptible to us all at once?”

Here, we now take a sideways flight into the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas; while I was composing this sermon, I ran across a section on the subject of IDEAS. Surely, an idea must be considered in its aspect of a verbalization, and therefore bears closely on the subject at hand:

“Augustine says,"Such is the power inherent in ideas, that no one can be wise unless they are understood."  

“It is necessary to suppose ideas in the divine mind. For the Greek word is in Latin "forma." Hence by ideas are understood the forms of things, existing apart from the things themselves. Now the form of anything existing apart from the thing itself can be for one of two ends: either to be the type of that of which it is called the form, or to be the principle of the knowledge of that thing, inasmuch as the forms of things knowable are said to be in him who knows them. In either case we must suppose ideas, as is clear for the following reason: 

In all things not generated by chance, the form must be the end of any generation whatsoever. But an agent does not act on account of the form, except in so far as the likeness of the form is in the agent, as may happen in two ways. For in some agents the form of the thing to be made pre-exists according to its natural being, as in those that act by their nature; as a man generates a man, or fire generates fire. Whereas, in other agents, the form of the thing to be made pre-exists according to intelligible being, as in those that act by the intellect; and thus the likeness of a house pre-exists in the mind of the builder. And this may be called the idea of the house, since the builder intends to build his house like to the form conceived in his mind. As then the world was not made by chance, but by God acting by His intellect, as will appear later, there must exist in the divine mind a form to the likeness of which the world was made. And in this the notion of an idea consists.”

St. Thomas Aquinas is making a fine distinction between different types of forms: there is the type of form that represents a thing as a similitude, or an approximation of something existent in the physical dimension, as mentioned above; but there is also a form as it exists in the mind of God, which is a form IN PRINCIPLE. We have previously referred such forms as “archetypes”, and we have referred to stories told with such archetypes as “myths”. The transition of a verbal expression from the world of sense to the world of archetype, is the transition from mundane existence to spiritual existence. St. Thomas also distinguished between expressions that spring from nature, and that spring from the intellect; this would be the same distinction we have just made between the mundane and the archetypal. Thus, in the theology of spirit, “intellect” is not necessarily linked to what we commonly refer to as “consciousness”; the Mind of God is characterized by a mode of intelligence far above and beyond the expressive boundaries of verbal consciousness. Nietzsche gets close to this idea in the following brilliant sentence:


  
“The problem of consciousness (or more correctly: of becoming conscious of oneself) meets us only when we begin to perceive in what measure we could dispense with it. . . the thinking which is becoming conscious of itself is only the smallest part thereof, (not of reason, but of reason becoming self-conscious). . . indeed, we have not any organ at all for knowing or for "truth.”

Notice the expression, “reason becoming self-conscious”: here we have another veiled reference to the mind of God, to a meta-level of intelligence—reason as distinct from consciousness. The Will, or the I Am Presence, is an entity that defies the ego’s power to approximate or to encapsulate; still it, the I Am, has a sense of self, and this sense cannot help but filter down into the mundane consciousness in some FORM that may be appreciated to some extent by the human mind. In an elegant aphorism, St. Thomas Aquinas says it all in these two brief sentences:

"Truth and falsity exist in the intellect. The will wills the intellect to understand."

How much clearer distinction between Higher Mind and lower mind could there possibly be? In many places in the Summa Theologica St. Thomas implies that there is a faculty of consciousness that is beyond intellect, but which is linked to and operates through intellect. We simply must sensitize ourselves sufficiently to be able to reconcile the messages of symbolic representation in the lower mind, with the archetypal representations of the Higher Mind.

It is the nature of this connection of higher Mind, to lower mind, that I wish to clarify in the remainder of today's sermon. Indeed, the following quotation from Deepak Chopra’s book God was the inspiration for the message. The scene is a conversation between the saint Sanchara and Mandana, a righteous man; they are involved in a contest to see which one can convert the other to his way of thinking about God:

 
"God is beyond reasoning," declared Mandana.

[Sidebar: This is the mantra we have pronounced many, many times--but the fact that God is beyond reasoning does not mean He is without reason. There is definitely something weird about the hypocrisy of standing up in church every Sunday and using words to declare how full of crap words are. Even admitting their inadequacy, there is something to the search for truth in verbal structures.]


"God is beyond reasoning," declared Mandana.

"If that were true, then any jumble of words could be called scripture. Nonsense would be divine if all that is needed is lack of reason. Madmen would be better than priests. . .

"What does it take to actually reach God?  Two things, knowledge and experience. The scriptures give us knowledge. We are told how to worship, how to perform duties in leading a good life. More than this, we learn how to go inward to find the spark, the essence of God that is inside us. It is our source. Such knowledge, though, is only half the path. The other half is experience. What good does it serve you to know that a rose has a beautiful scent when you have never smelled one?" 



"Mandana Mishra, your house is full of hope for God, as an empty vase is full of hope for roses."


Sanchara is telling us that verbalization is only half the battle for truth, as we have affirmed many times. However, he is also making a place for knowledge in the spiritual environment that leads to enlightenment; he tells us that knowledge, expressed in language, understandable by the mundane mind, is necessary to train the devotee in the ceremonies of worship, in the duties of life in the world, and in techniques for traveling inward. He says that God is NOT beyond reasoning, but the quality of the reasoning used to navigate the spiritual world is different than the reasoning we use to navigate the mundane world.



A few weeks ago we discussed some of the concepts of William Blake; in so doing we mentioned his Theory of Contraries.

"Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil.Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell."


The connection between this theory and the present topic may seem obscure, but the relevance obviates itself when we consider how verbal expressions and archetypal expressions may war with each other, in the exact same thought process, at the exact same time. The battle between ideas of Representation, and ideas In Principle may rage on in our articulate discourses--but the battle is not in vain, and it is not without its successes. Blake is a man of passion and irrational feelings, but he does not take refuge in nonsense; he clearly states:


"Men are admitted into Heaven not because they have curbed & governed their passions or have no passions, but because they have cultivated their understandings. The treasures of Heaven are not negations of passion, but realities of intellect, from which all the passions emanate uncurbed in their eternal glory. The fool shall not enter into Heaven let him be ever so holy."

Thus, Blake, the passionate man, does not vent his emotions in a thoughtless vacuum, but, rather seeks to originate his enthusiasms in the intellect. Therefore, the Mind of God is not only the birthplace of all righteous thought, but also of all righteous action. In this union of opposites, or, rather, in my opinion, union of higher and lower impulses it is possible to make such paradoxical proclamations as:




"The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom."

and:


"The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction"




Hence,  the mixture of physical and spiritual referents in our religious discussions is really the price we have to pay for being human and having our Higher Consciousness plugged into a feeble human brain.

There is an optical illusion I use in my music aesthetic classes that has a bearing on this subject:

                   

At first glance this looks like a picture of a vase, but if you look closer, you can see two men facing each other--the vase is black, the faces are white. The problem, is that you can't see them both at the same time: it is either the vase or the faces, not both. This is how art works: it is sometimes an expression of mundane existence, the picture of a house, the sound of thunder, etc., but then again it exists in a rarefied ideal world in which only ideas about idea exist, and every form is a sacred emanation of divine intelligence. Thus, it is my opinion that all human activities have an artistic component, including the art of philosophy and the art of religion.

Hence, we return, at last to this morning's scripture,

Matthew 11:16-17:

"But to what shall I liken this generation? It is like unto children sitting in the markets, and calling unto their fellows, And saying, We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned unto you, and ye have not lamented."

Clearly, the children's pretensions in the marketplace lack a degree of artfulness, or we WOULD dance, we WOULD lament. The piping and the mourning must have been deficient in the archetypal components that give our mundane lies the resonance of truth--there was not a complete enough fusion of earth and Heaven.


Rudolf Steiner has this to say about the fusion of Heaven and Earth:



"Every moral deed and every physical action in human life is connected in the human heart. Only when we truly learn to understand the configuration of the human heart will we find the true fusion of these two parallel and independent phenomena: moral events and physical events."

In this paragraph, Steiner brings back a concept we have brought out many times: the concept of the "moral imagination". Moral imagination encapsulates today's discussion in a single expression:

"moral", meaning spiritualized action originating in the mind of God, and

"imagination" meaning "to make an image of".

I have seen Hamlet many times, and I always look forward to the "Words, words, words," episode because Hamlet usually does something funny; Kevin Kline rips out a page of his book, licks it, and pastes it to Polonius' forehead. But Hamlet's frustration with the limitations of words has a light at the end of the tunnel: if we open our minds and invite, into them, the light of divine illumination, we will always think the truth and speak the truth. Thank you Jesus!

Let us pray: Jesus, we acknowledge the difficulties in making this life make sense. We appreciate your willingness to whisper the true meaning of our stuttering lips, into the ears of our hungry hearts. Amen.