Expansive vs. Restrictive - No. 52
As I write today, I am surrounded by the beauty of nature on every side. No houses in sight, just mountains and water. The essay I have been working on in my head the last few weeks is about expansive versus restrictive language. Today I find myself sitting in the midst of a perfect example of this topic. Pictures can’t do justice to what I am seeing all around me. I keep trying to capture it, but when I compare the pictures I am taking to the beauty around me, they aren’t even close. I could try to describe it to you with the best words I can find, but that wouldn’t work either. What I am experiencing right now can not really be fully captured in a container like words and pictures. If I were to try, then all I would be able to do is help you begin to imagine it for yourself. My words and pictures wouldn’t really contain the beauty of nature; they would simply be a starting point for your imagination.
If I saw you later and started showing you pictures and telling you about the beauty of this wild place. What I told you would be true and accurate, but it would be very incomplete. You would have to come here and experience it yourself in order to really understand what I am saying. So the words I would use would only be words that help point you in the right direction. The gap between the words I used and the reality of what you would experience if you came here yourself is immense.
Restrictive Communication
Most of the language that we use and the way that we use it in modern culture is restrictive. We have a very hard time thinking and communicating in expansive ways. I envision a funnel; when we use restrictive language, we are reducing something big into something small. When we use expansive language, it is like a reverse funnel; we are taking something small and making it much bigger. Think about how we culturally define what it means to be a man. We reduce it to physical gender and social roles. It would be hard for us to reduce it any more than that. Most cultures throughout history had a much more expansive view of what it means to be a man. As I wrote about in my book, masculinity is spiritual, multi-generational, and requires a journey of becoming. Our definition of what it means to be a man should be so expansive that it grows in meaning and significance the longer we pursue understanding it. That is what has happened to me the more I have studied the topic. The same can be said about what it means to be a woman, a child of God, a father, mother, friend, husband, and wife. Those titles are not simply job descriptions or social roles, they are so much more than that.
I believe we gravitate to restrictive language as a byproduct of scientific thinking. Science is mostly interested in defining what something is on its most foundational level. As a result, so much of our language is really focused on defining what things are by clearly communicating what they are not. For instance, if you asked me to tell you about my house, I would probably start by talking about the square footage, the number of bedrooms, bathrooms, and where it's located. This is interesting because what's most meaningful to me about my house is not the size, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, or location. What's most meaningful to me about it is the life that we live as a family in and through our house. If you ask what I do for a living, I'll tell you in the simplest way possible. That definition will leave out almost all of what I love about my work. The same could be said of almost everything in our lives. How do we tell each other about our kids, spouses, friends, adventures, hobbies, projects? We immediately look for the simplest and most reduced definitions, and we start there. That is very helpful when your goal is to be efficient, but it does almost nothing to help people see, touch, and taste the reality, beauty, and mystery of those things. Culturally, we use language to reduce things, not expand them.
If I were to try and tell you about our house in a way that was expansive, you wouldn’t know many specific details about the house, but you would start to actually begin to understand in some small way the life that we live there. For instance, I would talk about how our life at home revolves around our family being together as much as possible. I would talk about how much I love the quiet mornings before everyone wakes up, drinking coffee and spending time with God. I would tell you that I love the first couple of hours of work early in the morning and how deep my focus can be. This time of connection with the Lord in the morning and beginning work always feels like a special time and the part of the day I feel closest to God. I would talk about the joy I feel when the first kid to wake up comes crashing through my office door with a million things to say and crawls up in my lap. My point is that if I were to try to tell you about our life in an accurate way, I would have to communicate expansively. Like the beauty surrounding me as I write, words and pictures can't do it justice. If words and pictures can't capture and contain the beauty of nature, then how much more will words and images fall short when it comes to communicating spiritual things?
We would benefit from being more aware of when we are using restrictive language to communicate expansive things. But usually we aren't aware, and we keep using restrictive thinking and language for unimaginably big things. Almost all of our interest in spiritual matters is an attempt to reduce them to things that we feel we can understand. It seems that we don't like expansive things because we cannot understand them. We want control, so we want to know what things are in a way that we feel we can fully understand. And herein lies one of the biggest problems with modern thinking and spirituality. We inadvertently reduce spiritual things to such an extent that we keep ourselves from them.
Ego, control, and fear of the unknown
This is all ego-driven. We are uncomfortable with things we can’t understand so we instinctually reach for control. This is where religion comes from; we attempt to reduce a glorious unknown into a definable and measurable model built on rules for behavior. The world’s greatest wisdom teacher, Jesus, continually invited us out of restrictive thinking about ourselves, God, and others. He was always using words to expand our thinking. When He said, “No one can come to the Father except through me,” or, “unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God,” that is the opposite of restrictive. How can we simplify, reduce, or fully understand something like that? We can’t. He was using words to paint a picture and point us in the right direction, but we must experience it for ourselves to really understand what He was talking about. Consider when He said, “Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” That is wildly expansive. We ponder His words and His definitions, and the more we do, the bigger they get to us. We can spend the rest of our lives going deeper and deeper into His words, and instead of fully understanding them, we just become transformed by them. There is this modern idea that the more we learn about something, the less there is for us to learn. In spiritual matters, it is the opposite: the more we learn and grow, the more aware we become of how little we know.
Brian Schroller says that most people would choose a miserable known over a glorious unknown. Jesus was constantly inviting us into a glorious unknown. In fact, it is what we are made for. So what keeps us from that life? We are afraid, afraid that we are not enough and there is not enough. That fear leads us to want control. It’s not logical; it's primal. In any situation of uncertainty, the default human reaction is control. We want to take matters into our own hands in different ways to protect and provide for ourselves. That makes slightly more sense when it comes to practical matters like food, shelter, and physical safety. It makes no sense at all, though, when it comes to our spiritual lives. Why would we ever want to reduce our thinking about God and thereby cut ourselves off from Him? We are searching for control. We want to be right, certain, good, and we desperately don’t want to be wrong, alone, and broken. We crave control and certainty. The problem is that the only way to control our relationship with God is to reduce Him to a set of ideas and behaviors and to avoid truly relating to Him altogether.
Restrictive language is always founded in an impulse for control. Expansive language is inviting us on a journey into a glorious unknown. The more men of wisdom I am blessed to spend time with and read their writing, the more it becomes clear to me that the further we go into the glorious unknown, the less we can clearly define, but the more we are transformed. Instead of knowing how to describe what love is, we become someone whose life is a demonstration of love. Instead of having perfectly defensible theology, we become people whose lives are momentary glimpses of the goodness of God. That is a big statement. You might wonder what it means and how it works. Unfortunately, there is no clean and simple definition that meets our Western standards. Instead, what we get is an invitation to follow in the footsteps of the great teacher.
I believe that the crux of our spiritual lives is how we respond to Jesus’s invitation to us: “Come and follow me.” Do we try to reduce His teaching to religion, acting like we fully understand, or do we embrace the adventure of the glorious unknown and allow every day of our lives to be a mystery of death and rebirth? On that journey, we get to the end of our lives, and instead of having lived a life of believing we are right, perhaps we will have lived a life where others felt and saw God in us. When we become transformed, we lose interest in being right or judging what is wrong or reducing things to the level of our finite imagination and become consumed with a desire to become more like the one who shows us the way.
We can’t afford to allow our cultural ways of thinking to reduce the mystery of God to the level of our understanding. Instead, let’s surrender control and allow God to expand our hearts and minds.
- John Walt
If this note was shared with you and you want to get future notes, you can sign up here.
