Letter #171: Words in the Thunder

What do you see?

Mystic Dad,

You ask if we’ve lost the knack for seeing angels—a hard question. William Blake said he saw them as a boy, and his father almost beat him for it. The conviction that such things can’t happen makes it very hard to examine whether they do. C.S. Lewis, at the opening of his book on Miracles, told the story of a woman he knew who saw a ghost. “And the interesting thing about the story is that that person disbelieved in the immortal soul before she saw the ghost and still disbelieves after seeing it. She says that what she saw must have been an illusion or a trick of the nerves. And obviously she may be right. Seeing is not believing.”

John’s Gospel illustrates this problem with the story of a voice that came from heaven to answer Jesus’ prayer. “The crowd that was there and heard it said it had thundered; others said an angel had spoken to him.” In modern terms we would say that the same material event occurred for everyone—the same motion of air particles, the same vibration on the eardrums. But the modern terms might be precisely the obstacle that keeps us from seeing what are really two completely different events: Those who believed heard a voice and picked out a sentence. Those set against the miracle heard the inarticulate rumbling of thunder. Belief sets the range of acceptable possibilities, like an alphabet that defines which shapes we can and can’t interpret as words.

Exactly like an alphabet, in fact. The language we speak defines which sounds we’re able to experience as meaningful. But other things do that too. Maybe you know about the viral clip that sounds like either “yanny” or “laurel” depending on which range of pitches you can hear. Our brains are always sifting through the mess of signals we receive, selecting and organizing what seems significant. Sometimes it’s voluntary, sometimes it’s involuntary, sometimes it’s in between. But our ideas about what’s possible are hard-coded into the filter we use to interpret our experiences.

Back to your dream. You’re conditioned to read it in your native language, the modern language of material causes. The only thing it “means” in that language is that you took an antibiotic the night before. Just like the crowd that hears a rumbling in the sky and interprets it as a chance of rain. But you have a second language now, the language of the spirit, in which the dream contains information from outside time and space. You can discern words in the thunder.

Like all speakers of a second language, we moderns speak the language of the spirit more haltingly than that of the flesh. We’re more apt to make mistakes. But that doesn’t mean no one is speaking, and it doesn’t mean we can’t learn to understand better with practice. We might have to. As any polyglot knows, some languages have words for things no other tongue can express.

Love,
Spencer