[A Homily of Fr. Matthew Kelty, OCSO. for the 18th Sunday of the Year (B), Aug. 4, 1991, Jn 6:24-35)]
 
 

It is well enough known that those born deaf need the earliest possible development of a mode of communication, often enough by way of signs with other deaf. One of the more amazing endowments of human nature is the inbuilt ability to use sign and symbol as the way to communicate with another. To all appearances, we talk naturally and naturally create language. And talk, of course, is the use of symbol. A French priest of the last century is credited with first taking seriously the ability of the deaf to construct a language by sign. He codified it, tried to generalize it, ended up founding schools to teach it and to prepare teachers for the same purpose. Sign language so became general and very effective, and continued until some decades ago when an attempt to replace it in favor of speech took over. There is now a return to sign and a lot of interest in it. The source of major interest is that sign is a language, a mode of communication through shapes and movements of the hands. It is not English or any language translated into hand action, as our Trappist sign language tended to be. It is language every bit as much as speech is language. And it is founded on the human situation: that as body and soul we communicate not directly, but through sign and symbol. Angels do not need signs. We do.

When deaf people do not learn early a language — a mode of communication — they do not develop mentally but remain as it were retarded. Perhaps the origin of our relating dumb to stupid.

I do not think it too brave a step to say that no human develops fully or normally who does not see symbol as an inbuilt dynamic of life. It is not that we communicate only through speech, the most obvious sign or symbol, and its companion, the written sign of word. It is that the whole world is sign and symbol. It is in some way God communicating with us. We need to know that sign language too.

We usually reserve to poets the cultivation of such ability, but since poetry appeals to all, it seems clear that interpreting the signs ought to be a common right and privilege.

There is no way to understand Jesus without an ability to see the meaning of parable, simile. His use of symbolic action. The Church continues enamored of symbolic communication. When we are not developed in this capacity, religion becomes cerebral, all in the head; creed and code and cult neatly drawn up and preached and practiced. It will not wear. It will fade out in a generation.

One of the ailments of our times may be a weakening of a capacity for symbol, the more so in religion. This is a consequence of the cult of noise and distraction, unending input, the flight from silence, the fear of quiet. For it is in quiet and peace that the double nature of reality comes home to us. In psychological terms, we perish without relation to the unconscious. In poetic terms, we wither with no reference to the heart. In religious terms, "the world is filled with the glory of God" [Hopkins].

Edna St. Vincent Millay is right: "O God, I can push the grass apart and lay my fingers on Thy heart. My soul can split the sky in two and let the Face of God shine through." To live bereft of insight into the hidden reality of all that is, is to be dumb willfully, for it is a capacity we all have, since we are made for such a dialogue: so function, so operate. It is not alien to us, it is proper to us. Body and soul constitute the human and the human relates as body and soul.

Jesus, dealing with bread today, is a simple example. He plays on the many meanings of bread, daily bread as sustenance for mortal life and for immortality. In doing so, Christ was not being strange. He was being perfectly human. We do not speak any other language than sign language, for language is sign, and everything created speaks. We are not dumb, but return in kind and so take part in the dialogue between God and us. It would seem to me that the monk by vocation is a specialist in this area. As the world needs poets, priests, dancers, dreamers, artists, singers, prophets — all of them devotees of sign and symbol — so too monks who live in touch with reality. This in turn becomes both model and inspiration for all caught in the materiality of the material, out of touch with the hidden glory that is all around us.