Difficulties in understanding
“What we’ve got here . . . is a failure to communicate.” —The Captain, in ‘Cool Hand Luke’.
It is a truism in current American society that we are having difficulties understanding each other. And not just problems with comprehension of the “I’m not quite getting it” sort, which I’ll freely admit I experience when viewing Kandinsky’s work, above; all too often, though, we’ve got just what the famous line from Cool Hand Luke says: a flat-out failure to communicate.
Confusion, miscommunication, incomprehension, misunderstanding, and all their kin are not new; at least one legend has it that it’s been this way since the Tower of Babel. Others take it back further. I like to think God, finding Adam and Eve suddenly aware of and seemingly embarrassed by their nakedness, and trying to hide it with fig leaves, harangued them with “What part of ‘Don’t eat from that tree’ did you not understand? It was a simple command. I’m pretty sure I said it clearly. And yet . . . here we are, you two trying to cover up what you’re pretty soon gonna be calling your ‘naughty bits’, embarrassed by the birthday suits I gave you, and thinking at the same time that somehow you’ve gained all kinds of knowledge so as to ‘Be like me’ when all you’ve really learned is that you really, really shouldn’t have eaten the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. ‘Cause now you’re stuck with it. And frankly, you’re not ready for it. Never will be. Now I’m gonna have to design a way of saving you from yourselves.—No, no, don’t worry, I’ve got it covered. But it still means that instead of nothing but sweetness, joy, and light, you’re gonna find yourself living with suffering, pain, illness, and even death, with evil, with danger, and now with a nature blood-red in tooth and claw. Hey, ya know, I kinda like that last one. Might give that to someone to use down the road a bit. But for the moment: What were you thinking, huh? The Lord God, Almighty Creator, gives you the most beautiful, wonderful, bountiful garden imaginable to live in, and you get to name all the other creatures, and all I ask is one simple thing, but ‘No-o-o, we can’t do that. We’ve got to, quite literally, muck up perfection.’ . . . Sheesh. Sometimes I think I shoulda just been content with hovering over the waters.”
Regardless of the details, it’s pretty clear that difficulties with communication have been with us for a very long time. And it’s not getting any easier. Think about it. If anything, we have even more—and more complicated—things to be miscommunicating about. Back when everyone was impressed by Cicero’s oratory skills, the Romans had an empire, sure, but they never once had to call a cell phone company’s customer service line. And yeah, they had taxes—render unto Caesar, and all that—but they didn’t have 75,000 pages of federal tax code, regulation, and guidelines to try to understand. Nor did they know much about science, nature, math, and all that. They had some pretty decent geometry, mostly borrowed from the Greeks, and they had Aristotle’s notes about science, but algebra? Nope. And don’t even think about calculus, the finer points of matrices, Newton’s laws, Maxwell’s or Schrödinger’s equations, evolution, the vast majority of modern chemistry, quantum mechanics, the rules of cricket, modern art, or the difficulty of finding a reliable plumber on a holiday weekend. Indoor plumbing is great until you’ve got a foot of water in the second-floor laundry room. Then there’s the challenge of trying to figure out which streaming service is carrying what cool new show, or what happened to traveling calls in the NBA. There’s a lot of complicated stuff in our world, and we are constantly struggling both to understand it and communicate about it. And failing. Often astoundingly miserably.
Which is why I like dogs.
Dogs have been working at trying to improve us humans for twenty to thirty thousand years. Which is even longer than I had to stand in line at the United customer service counter the last time I missed a connection in Denver. A good dog is loyal, friendly, helpful, obedient, and all those other things I used to recite in the Scout Law back when carburetors were the most complicated things under the hood of a car. A bad dog is usually the result of a series of mistakes by one or more humans. Dogs are smart, but not so smart that they think they’ve got it all figured out. Which, paradoxically, might make them smarter than we are.
Think of dogs like the Dude from The Big Lebowski, but with slightly more fur, and a bit more willingness to put up with urine odor on a rug, even (or especially?) when the rug really pulls the room together. They know that the world is a complicated place, full of randomness and chaos, with its ups and downs, and a helluva lot of sideways, and they just kinda roll with it. Sometimes they even roll in it. And after rolling with it, in it, on it, or just kinda somewhere around it, they’ll joyfully look up at us as if to say, “C’mon in, the water’s fine!” Dogs are, like, always together, man.
Canines are also very good at understanding what needs understanding, as long as we’re not crossing wires, giving confusing signals or contradictory commands, and generally giving chaos a bad name. Robie, our Australian shepherd, knows probably a dozen or so commands, plus some hand signals, whistles, and behavioral cues, all of which have very clear meanings in his canis mentis. He’s also pretty good at communicating to me his wants and needs. I understand probably a dozen or so of his ‘requests’, plus some signals, sounds, and behavioral cues, all of which have pretty clear meanings, even in my cluttered human mind. We never fight, and hardly ever have serious disagreements, except when it comes to just why it is he can’t destroy the neighborhood cats that are allowed to roam at night, even when they invade his domain, aka the back yard.
One of the things I love most about dogs isn’t that we—dogs and I—always understand each other. We don’t. Between me and every dog I’ve ever met sits a hurdle making understanding difficult, often impossible. Instead, it’s this: we try. Robie, when he doesn’t understand, looks straight at my face, and I can see the gears turning, the eyes searching, the mind whirling away, trying to grasp what it is I’m wanting, what I’m doing, where I want to go. This, by the way, is a lesson I’m working on—a lesson from dogs about communication and understanding. That understanding very often requires persistence, patience, work, focus, and real, honest-to-goodness listening, not just once but again, and again, and another time, once more, trying to feel one’s way in that dark cave of incomprehension until there’s light, then the satisfaction, often mixed with joy, of mutual understanding. When you’ve put in the hard work and finally enjoy understanding, you feel, inside, that urge to jump and bark in celebration.
Sometimes we don’t get there, though. All kinds of effort, mounds of patience, repetition and variation ad nauseum et ad lassitudinem, don’t bring us to that eruption of joyful understanding. So we take a break, do some simpler, reassuring, comfortable things. We sit and enjoy birdsong and clouds drifting across the sky. Maybe play a little fetch, or chase. And when we’re ready, we try again.
I recently was reading Mark Helprin’s Winter Tale. (Which, by the way, is an incredible experience. There are moments of transcendence captured in that book that cannot be adequately described, but must be experienced. To say that I highly recommend it is kinda like saying I recommend looking at a beautiful sunset, or an owl in flight under a silver moon, or listening closely to Joshua Bell and Edgar Meyer and friends play Short Trip Home. Just, please, do it.) But let’s get back to why I bring up the book.
In Helprin’s novel, characters are often acknowledging incomprehension, in various ways. Many of the same characters are also shown recognizing and acknowledging, in one way or another, beauty, love, or mutual understanding. Occasionally all three at once. Much is taken up by the struggle of understanding, and the vast importance thereof.
They cried because of the magic and contradictions; because time had passed and time was left; because they saw themselves as if they were in a photograph that had winked fast enough to contradict their mortality; because the city around them had conspired to break a hundred thousand hearts; and because they and everyone else had to float upon this sea of troubles, watertight. Sometimes there were islands, and when they found them they held fast, but never could they hold fast enough not to be moved and once again overwhelmed.
A glimpse is all I’ve shared. To understand, start at the beginning, and read, trusting the author like a dog trusts his loving owner.
The theme herein is difficulties in understanding, and, at least to some extent, how said difficulties might be overcome. It is necessary to understand that the difficulties vary in nature, presentation, durability, size, and more. Thus it further behooves us to understand that dealing with them is no simple, single type of job, in which we simply reach for the Difficulty Removal Tool™ and apply it according to the easy-to-follow instructions supplied in the package, on the obverse of the sheet with the limited 90-day warranty. Difficulties in understanding can arise from language; were I writing this in Sanskrit, Oppenheimer’s ghost would be able to read it, but most of you would find it gibberish. They can come from culture; talking about whale hunting with a Mongolian goat-herder might be difficult, even disregarding the language barrier. They can come from religion; I don’t “get” the Hindu-cow relationship, and if you’re not Hindu, I’m guessing you don’t, either. Closer to home, I’ll admit that the praying-to-Mary thing apparently common in the Catholic church (and yes, I know that the prayers in question are merely intercessory prayers) is at least a little beyond my ken.
Religious differences, including, of course, those between flat-out atheists and any sort of god-beholder, can be cause of more than just wee hiccups in conversation. This is a statement of the obvious, of course, but it’s important to acknowledge nonetheless, because the problem isn’t going away, though there are of course those who’d like to see it go away by means of the elimination of one side or the other from public discourse.
Vitriol isn’t restricted to relationships between the diametrically opposed, however. Sometimes the harshest opposition, and the greatest difficulties in understanding, arise in those who are the closest. Let me share a specific example of which I was reminded very recently. (This next part runs a bit long; no hard feelings if one wishes to scan quickly or skip entirely. The TL;DR is that disagreements and misunderstandings of holy writings are common things, and that differences should be respected.)
I was raised in the Lutheran church—more specifically, the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS), a conservative, evangelical denomination more or less of the “high church” variety, common in the midwest. The LCMS, being conservative and high church, has prescribed lectionary readings “arranged according to the Church’s calendar and are intended to be read at the regular, weekly gathering of God’s people.” The weekly readings comprise an Old Testament Lesson, a Psalm, an Epistle (New Testament letter) reading, and a Gospel Lesson. This past week, the Gospel Lesson included Matthew 13:44, a one-verse parable I remembered from childhood:
“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.” (English Standard Version).
It was in church, or perhaps Sunday School, that I learned, in association with explication of this verse, that in ancient times it was common for people to hide their valuables—money, jewels, etc.—in holes near their homes—often in fields they owned. There were no banks, no wall safes, no regular means by which to secure from thieves a family’s “treasure”. Also, then, as now, if the owner of a field were to find buried treasure, it was the property of the field’s owner, unless there was some preceding contract holding otherwise.
This makes interpretation of the parable, for me at least, ummm . . . problematic. Given that the man who finds the treasure in the field presumably knows that this is how people hide their valuables, he also presumably knows that the first assumption to be dealt with is that someone put the treasure there for its saving, its protection. That is, the treasure belongs to someone. Yet instead of covering it and leaving it, or perhaps going amongst the other people of the village, group, or whatever, searching for the rightful owner, the man covers it, goes and liquidates his other possessions, and buys the field so as to possess the treasure. It is to be assumed by the hearer of the parable that the treasure is very highly valuable, of course—probably well beyond the relatively meager value of the total of the man’s possessions theretofore.
I still react much as did the child that I was back then. Why is it not wrong for the man to behave as he did? We’re taught that if we find a wallet without identification but with lots of money that we should make at least a reasonable effort to find the owner of the wallet and return their “treasure”. How does this parable make sense?
The most commonly offered explication, in my experience, is that the parable is meant to indicate that the treasure (here we’re told it represents “the kingdom of heaven”) is so highly valuable that it’s “worth far more than any sacrifice” (as the 2007 version of the ESV Study Bible puts it) the man might make in order to have it. This is nice, sure, but it doesn’t deal with my objection. Even if it represents the kingdom of heaven, doesn’t it represent someone else’s possession of the kingdom of heaven—perhaps, or even probably, maybe necessarily, their actual salvation? In which case the man is depriving someone else of salvation?
The second explanation I’ve been offered, described as more “Christological”, is that the man in the parable is actually Jesus Christ, the treasure is the hearer of the parable (eliding the explicit simile given, that the treasure is “like the kingdom of heaven”), and that Christ gives all to save the treasure/hearer. It’s even more of a stretch, and, frankly, I’m not buying it. Even though it manages, more or less, to evade the problem I identified, it does so at the expense of wildly twisting the verse about to achieve a meaning deemed acceptable.
[Sigh.]
But wait, there’s more. The prescribed reading comprised not just this verse; it was all of Matthew 13:44-52, in which Jesus is speaking in private with his disciples. Let me share the entirety:
44 “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.
45 “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls, 46 who, on finding one pearl of great value, went and sold all that he had and bought it.
47 “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and gathered fish of every kind. 48 When it was full, men drew it ashore and sat down and sorted the good into containers but threw away the bad. 49 So it will be at the close of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous 50 and thrown them into the fiery furnace. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
51 “Have you understood all these things?” They said to him, “Yes.” 52 And he said to them, “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house, who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.”
I’ve got a teeny, itsy-bitsy problem with that “Yes” in verse 51. If we go backwards in chapter 13, in verses 24-30, we find Jesus telling the crowd that had gathered to hear him “the parable of the weeds”, along with a few others. Finally, done sharing parables with the public crowds, in verse 36 he “left the crowds and went into the house. And his disciples came to him, saying, ‘Explain to us the parable of the weeds of the field.’” So, we see that the disciples were in need of explanation of one parable. Did they not see the challenge(s) presented in those shared immediately thereafter? Did they not listen to the parable of the scribe-trained-for-the-kingdom-of-heaven and go, “Huh?”
Understanding was a difficult endeavor for the disciples, indicated not just here but commonly elsewhere in the gospels. Understanding for modern readers isn’t any easier, of course. And explanations aren’t always quite, well, explanatory.
Combine all this with the common evangelical declaration that the Bible is, as I’ve been frequently told, “the complete and inerrant Word of God”, and we find ourselves in a bit of a pickle, and of the sour, dill variety, nothing sweet about it.
When, in conversation or argument (friendly and congenial or otherwise), I have persisted in claiming not to understand how items like Matt. 13:44 can satisfactorily be explained within both evangelical theology and context of their writing or utterance, I am often reminded that now we “see through a mirror, darkly”, etc., etc. Which, after a while, I tire of, and am willing to say that if the Bible is meant to be the complete, inerrant, instructional and fully communicative word of God, it’s a mystery to me as to why even Christians commonly disagree about what it says about some pretty important things, and why such as the simple objection I raised above doesn’t give reasonable people justifiable cause to say, “Wait a minute. Maybe this whole thing isn’t quite what some of us think it is. Let’s talk this out.”
There we have it. Perhaps even a full-blown “failure to communicate”. And some might say that I’m an example of the sort of man that, according to the Captain in Cool Hand Luke I quoted at the beginning, “just can’t be reached.” But I’m also assured that God knows me intimately, knows where I am, what I’m doing, etc., etc. So I figure he can reach me if he wants.
Difficulties in understanding can be a real *&%^# ∞9¶≠™ to overcome. But, as Garrison Keillor once said was “Lutheran philosophy”, “Well, you have to try.” And we do have to try, or else just give up on our own species.
There’s a little of the hither-and-thither to this post, but it’s a big topic; it turns out that many, if not most, problems in life have their beginnings in difficulties with understanding.
Please share this with friends and others you think may be interested, and, if you haven’t subscribed, please do so. I promise there’ll be more on dogs, and I haven’t even started on fishing yet.
You have mistaken this to be a forum in which to investigate my salvation or some such, and proselytize. It is not. Nor do I need any real estate advice. I would thank you to look elsewhere for souls to save.
O this is mighty wonderful, Perry!
A seeker seeking understanding
Thank you for sharing your dance
with this passage of scripture
The more we dance with each other
and with God
the more we understand
Fortunately words are never inerrant
but our desire to hear and be heard is