The Third Meaning (Le troisième sens) – Roland Barthes

About the Work

This is a book about meaning — how human beings come to possess it, how they lose it, and how those who work with young people might help them find it. It belongs to a particular moment and a particular institution: it was published in 1965 as a double issue of RISK, volume I, numbers 3 and 4, the journal of the Youth Departments of the World Council of Churches and the World Council of Christian Education, based in Geneva. The cover design is credited to John Taylor. An epigraph drawn from The New Delhi Report of the Third Assembly of the World Council of Churches (1961) frames the whole enterprise with a question: does love of God constrain Christians to press against the limits of inherited traditions, and does it require a willingness to take “responsible risk”?

“In this situation are we not consirained by the love of God to exert pressure on the limits of our own inherited traditions, recognising the theological necessity of what we may call ‘responsible risk’ ?”

The book is credited to Ross Snyder, an American religious educator, and the Preface notes that he has spoken far more than he has published — this volume is an attempt to get some of that speaking into print. The Preface also describes the book as belonging to a school of thought that treats textbooks as preliminary tools only, insisting that real communication happens where thinking and speaking persons meet. The editors of RISK present these chapters as among the best material the world can receive from the American Christian education community, and they celebrate education as an event rather than the transmission of knowledge. They admit that producing the book was itself a risk, for three reasons: the budget, the author’s habit of continually changing his manuscripts, and regional restrictions on distribution.

The Introduction lays out the governing conviction. A human being must make sense of the experiences and events of life, discerning which way leads to life and which to destruction, hoping that one’s life means something. No one can be handed a meaningful world; each person must organize one, with his own risks and intentions, transforming raw event into interpreted event. Christians can offer this as a ministry, and a church can be a center of such transforming and interpreting. Snyder wrote three chapters on the function and ministry of meanings, emphasizing a new mode of human consciousness, and then records ways of helping meanings be born and nurtured. Students at Chicago Theological Seminary who contributed experiences are named in the Introduction: Gerald Fargo, Russell Foris, Ray Gillis, James Ingersoll, Jesse Jackson, James Paton, Virginia Ramsey, Robert Schwartz, and David Trask. The book is thus not a solo treatise but a composite — part essay, part transcript, part anthology of the young.

Context

The book sits at the intersection of several currents that were converging in the mid-1960s. One is the revolution in communications. Snyder argues that electronic media — television, radio, the flood of images — have produced a new species of human consciousness, one that processes diffuse wholes rather than linear print, that lives simultaneously with events around the globe, and that finds its habitat in the world ecumene rather than in the church or the nation. He cites the televised mourning of President Kennedy’s death as an example of how a whole people can live an event at once, and a televised night of violence in a single small town as an example of how perceptual learning can shift moral conviction across a country.

A second current is the civil rights movement. The book’s dialogues are saturated with it. One extended interview concerns a decision to travel to Selma, Alabama, in 1965; the respondent, a Negro student among twenty-one white students who agreed to go, describes the moral crisis that preceded the decision, the challenge to nonviolence when one is “standing in a pen of dogs,” and the way the black-white framework dissolved when white students chose to risk their lives. The prophet Amos, justice and righteousness held in tension with love, the responsibility of whites for barriers they did not personally erect — these are treated not as abstractions but as the raw material of meaning-making.

A third current is the theological conversation of the period. The book draws heavily on Martin Buber’s I-Thou philosophy, on Dietrich Bonhoeffer as a model of contemporary authenticity, and on Søren Kierkegaard’s insistence that Christendom has abolished Christianity. These are not decorative references; they supply the book’s vocabulary for encounter, for the “merely phraseological,” and for the difference between admirers and followers of Christ.

A fourth current is the youth culture of the time — folk music, the search for authenticity, the suspicion of institutions, the sense among young people that they were marking time. The book quotes high school students describing their lives as running in circles, and it treats their metaphors as serious data. The whole project is addressed to adults who work with the young, and its tone is neither alarmist nor sentimental. It assumes that young people are hungry for meaning and that the hunger is being badly fed.

Structure of the Book

The book opens with a Preface and an Introduction, then unfolds in five named parts. Part I, “The Rationale, the Operating Theory,” contains three chapters: “Meanings Create Human Existence,” “The New Mind we are Working With,” and “The Ministry of Meanings.” These establish the theoretical foundation — that meanings are what make human existence human, that a new mode of consciousness is emerging, and that ministry to and with youth is a mutual ministry of awakening and deepening meanings.

Part II, “Nurturing Experiencings into Meanings,” turns from theory to practice. Its chapters cover interpreting self-in-world, a conversation with a young person named Andrew, metaphor, folk music, existence clarification, and the effort to draw total sense out of life. This is the most concrete section, full of transcribed dialogue, student metaphors, and group exercises. The chapter on metaphor is particularly detailed, offering dozens of examples of how young people compare their experience of parents, church, and self to toads on lily pads, chandeliers in modern rooms, and goldfish affirming identity in barracuda colonies.

Part III, “Contemporary Authentics as Sources for Creating Meanings,” presents living or recent figures as resources. It treats Martin Buber’s “I-Thou,” the thrust of Bonhoeffer, what it means to exist as a Christian, and other contemporary authentics. The Bonhoeffer chapter is built around a conversation with a high school senior, and the Kierkegaard material on contemporaneousness, followers versus admirers, reduplication, and Christian suffering is woven in as the theological spine of the section.

Part IV, “The Paradigms of Civilized Man,” is the longest. It turns to the “great Christian paradigms” — the meaningful experiences that have shaped life over centuries — and works through them one by one: life as hero journey, freedom, dialogue (“Our Cross Experience”), loneliness, members of one body, the adult guarantor, “I Rebel,” becoming a truth, the meaning of sexual intercourse, ample conscience, the person next to you, and encounter and depth via Bible paradigms. The hero journey chapter is structured as a myth in four acts, beginning with “Leave the ghetto / Leave the crowd / Break out” and moving through demons and giants, valleys of darkness, and the battles that follow.

Part V, “Celebration,” closes the book with a single chapter on celebration. The final movement of the book is thus from theory to practice to sources to paradigms to celebration — a deliberate arc that ends not with analysis but with a mode of being.

Inside the Book

Front Matter and the Case for Responsible Risk

The volume opens as a 1965 issue of RISK, published in Geneva by the youth departments of the World Council of Churches and the World Council of Christian Education, with a cover designed by John Taylor. An epigraph drawn from The New Delhi Report of the 1961 Third Assembly asks whether love of God compels Christians to press against the limits of inherited traditions, acknowledging the theological necessity of “responsible risk.” The table of contents lays out a Preface, an Introduction, and five parts: the rationale and operating theory of meanings; the nurturing of experience into meaning; contemporary sources such as Buber’s “I-Thou” and Bonhoeffer; the paradigms of civilized man, from the hero journey through freedom, dialogue, loneliness, rebellion, and sexual intercourse to encounter and depth; and finally celebration.

The Preface presents the book as the Youth Department’s offering on youth work, noting that Ross Snyder has spoken far more than he has published. It belongs to a school that treats textbooks as preliminary tools, since real communication happens where thinking and speaking persons meet. The editors regard these chapters as among the best material the American Christian education community can offer, celebrating education as event rather than the transmission of knowledge. Producing the issue was itself a risk, for three reasons: budget, the author’s habit of revising his manuscripts, and regional restrictions.

The Introduction argues that a human being must make sense of life’s experiences and events, discerning which way leads to life and which to destruction, hoping that one’s life means something. No one can be handed a meaningful world; each person must organize one through his own risks and intentions, transforming raw event into interpreted event. Christians can offer this ministry, and a church is a center of such transforming and interpreting. Snyder wrote three chapters on the function and ministry of meanings, stressing the new mode of human consciousness, then records ways of helping meanings be born and nurtured. Students at Chicago Theological Seminary who contributed experiences are named: Gerald Fargo, Russell Foris, Ray Gillis, James Ingersoll, Jesse Jackson, James Paton, Virginia Ramsey, Robert Schwartz, and David Trask.

Meanings Create Human Existence

The first chapter opens with a quotation about others seeing and understanding what one does not, living in a different world. It laments half-alive living, foggy stupor, crowd existence, prattling instead of communicating, empty words, loneliness, and being led by unexamined words and distorted meanings. The great words—freedom, love, compassion, justice, truth, democracy, man, God—have been corrupted. Many never consider life’s questions: what truth one is meant to be, what to dive into, what the Journey is. People owe it to each other to shock each other out of this condition. Richness of meanings lets one see penetratingly, select what to address, and tune into the Kingdom of God hidden in each moment; meanings unite conscious and unconscious, yielding wisdom, flexibility, spontaneity, freedom. Deeds without meaning are animal. Meanings must come to each person; nobody can give a meaning. Meaning begins with encounter and experiencing, then felt significance; memories of similar experiences connect, words become organizers of minds, and pictures and ideas organize meaning into one’s system. Thus one becomes MAN, living as culture rather than biology. “Culture” means sharing a corporate mind, a “meaning society” or “reference community of interpretation,” minimum size about five though beginning with two. People tune into each other, existing in a common “I-Thou.” The whole earth is the household of God. Snyder proposes that leaders embark on programs: talking with young people individually, informal conversation, a new purposeful “Great Conversation,” intensive periods focused on one elemental of Christian existence, dealing with news and current issues, existence clarification through art forms, and training experiences. Young people should create culture, not merely use it: “Create! Create! Create!”

The New Mind We Are Working With

The second chapter argues that we are in a formative period of a new era, and that a new species of man is being produced by history and the communications revolution. A new mode of consciousness arises with electronic communication, contrasted with print, face-to-face communication, and first-hand experience. First comes the primacy of a new mode of sensing the life world: wisdom comes with seeing-hearing, flooding all the senses at once; the brain handles diffuse, ambiguous wholes, news, documentary, dramatic story; sound becomes an important carrier of meanings. Snyder stresses that this concerns the human brain and mind being produced, not mass communications as such. Perceptual learning becomes the basis of conviction; a television broadcast of a terrible night in one little town changed moral conviction throughout the United States. Man’s consciousness searches for incoming stimuli; justice must be at the crossroads, gospel in event, church in webs of decision, liturgy in daily news. Second comes a new mode of organizing the world: consciousness is a single global village; only world history exists; man lives simultaneous with events, as all over the world people lived the death and funeral of President Kennedy; he needs an “on-the-fly” theology of history-making; the world ecumene, not the church, is his habitat. Third come new self-governance habits: the electronic consciousness resonates and decides.

The Emerging Consciousness and the Ministry of Meanings

The passage treats this new, emerging consciousness as something to work with rather than lament, though its weaknesses and corruptions must be acknowledged. The task is to assemble the “offer of life” one wants to make, to intensify the dialogic nature of manufacturing meanings, to keep inviting people to possess their own experience, to recognize that the chief weapon is image, and to preserve the good that came with print consciousness. What the new consciousness means remains unknown; only that a “ministry of meanings” is more important, larger, and more possible than ever dreamed, and that necessary inventions must be pursued.

The Ministry of Meanings

Effective ministry of and with youth is defined as a mutual ministry of awakening meanings, deepening meanings, and coming to fullness of “I mean.” Man as person lives in a world of meanings, not merely in a world of energetic atoms, biological nuclei, or social causes. The human is characterized primarily by a will-to-meaning, and only secondarily by a will-to-pleasure or a will-to-power. Young people, until blunted and doped, have an intense hunger for meaning and cannot live well on a poverty-stricken or putrefying diet of meanings. Feeding them information, “how to do,” or even “this is what the Church believes” is inadequate education, because they sense an electronic machine can excel them at such functions and resent being treated like a computer and a storehouse.

It was once thought that freeing young people from sexual repressions was the main help counselors could give; generations of college students imagined that coming of age in the bushes of Samoa would perfect them, or, as twelve-year-old girls in an industrial city confided, that having their tubes tied off would let life really begin. Later, the neo-Freudians discovered man’s chief suffering came from scars and anxieties of diseased human relationships, moving from biological satisfaction to healing man-outside-communion—the despised, rejected, evasive, “submit or dominate” personality. Parents and leaders then assumed the main ministry to adolescents was help in human relations.

Today it is asserted that man’s productive life is within some frame of orientation and devotion, and that he knows how to reflect upon himself, truing up his history. Many young people feel emptiness about the meaning of themselves, their present schedule, their probable future, and life itself. Quoted high school students express running in circles, not knowing what they are preparing for, marking time waiting for something real to happen. A high school boy symbolized his predicament with a quicksand parable: initially delightful floating, then futile efforts, sinking, crying for help, ropes thrown from darkness with voices crying “grab on to this one,” and the desperate question of which rope to grasp. This desperate reaching is a general condition including adults; many have given up the struggle for meaning, seeking only momentary escape into a dream world of super-delights, with the judgment that they belong to a stream of history but doubt much will come of it.

Forty million readers of Confession Magazine in America, mostly girls in their late teens and young women in their twenties, regularly feed on stories whose theme and world view is that the world is chaotic and brutal, that little can be done, so one should be realistic and make a virtue of adjustment; that sex is an uncontrollable urge, possibly unsavory, tragic, fearsome, but women must accept rough behavior from their man, though punishment follows the path of least resistance.

Due to pervasive “electronic communications,” every young person has in the back of his mind an anonymous reference group purporting to be a world public opinion. This liberates him from provincialisms and leads to awareness beyond geographical boundaries; his life is no longer space-bound but exists in time, simultaneously with people all over the world.

The Argument About Being Used

The dialogue opens with one speaker recalling an earlier conversation about the “using of people,” which he suspects may be a key to much else. His irritation, he admits, comes from wanting to be certain he is not being used, and he believes others feel the same; yet worrying too much about it breeds confusion and blocks any free response, leaving a person unable to say what he actually thinks or feels. He whistles and hums, then presses the other to explain what he meant “the other day” when he said he wasn’t ready. The other first denies having said anything, then repeats it: he set himself up to be used, and is a first-class chump and a jiver. It is up to him; he can lead his life as he wants.

The first speaker notes how completely the other has changed mood in about two hours, playing the clown. The other answers that he picks the wrong times for whatever he does—there is a time for joking and a time for seriousness. He explains that whenever something is on his mind he begins to joke about it, though not to be clownish. The other objects that he doesn’t have to run it down to him; he insists it is the truth. The other says he comes out of his bag in all kinds of ways at any time, and he agrees this is his way of changing moods or of not knowing how to respond. Both accept that a person cannot stay the same forever and must change; the first calls it “almost a big change. One big change,” while the other doubts its size, knowing only that change happens. The first is confused, because they were talking about changing from one hour to the next, and now the other seems to mean something else.

The other says he will leave it up to him and let him take it from there, warning that he can’t get anywhere by being a clown and should act “hip.” Asked whether this means being ready to talk seriously to anybody, he affirms it, and says he never thought the first was ready—proof that he doesn’t really know everybody as he thinks. The first says one of the important and hard things in life is that people must get to know each other better, including why they act as they do at certain times. The other nods disagreement and repeats that all there is to life is to live and be left alone. Pressed again on what he meant by “not ready,” he says he is only telling him as someone should; the first replies that this means he wants more than he says he wants. The other says he can figure it out as he wants; he just said it.

The first says he can take it any way he wants, but that doesn’t make it the truth. The other says it is up to him to decide whether it is true, not up to him. The first says the other is saying each individual is alone; the other says no, it is up to both of them. The first says he doesn’t want to be bothered, and the other points out his inconsistency: sometimes he says he doesn’t want to be bothered, other times that he does, and he expresses wanting to by saying the other is not ready. He says he is doing him a favor, trying to break it off even, and figures he owes him something. Asked if he means just as a friend, he says yes, just as a friend; the first says then he owes him something too. The other asks whether he doesn’t believe they have to be together; the first says he doesn’t want to say that. The other confirms he is alone and would like it that way. The first says he doesn’t know if he believes him; the other says he will be the one fooling himself, not him. The first notes the other has taken the most initiative and asks what led him to want to be alone. He says one is better off that way, with no complications, the easiest way out, and he doesn’t want anything too rough.

The first observes that when a person comes to this view—and many people have it—the other interrupts that it isn’t a lot of people; he is just himself and wants to be like himself and nobody else. The first says a person comes to this way of thinking because of experience with people; the other says he must be tired of people then. The first wonders what experiences led him there. The other asks whether, if he wants to be alone, he wants to talk about it. The first says they have talked about it and that they want to talk with each other anyway. The other says he has his logic all wrong. The first asks whether he can really say he doesn’t want to; the other again leaves it up to him. The first says his whole philosophy will be proven right, as if he wants to prove it otherwise, and says he does want to talk. He proposes they make the talk a different kind of basis, figuring themselves out better—the other why he accepts what he does, himself likewise. The other calls himself lazy, “the typical Negro,” and says he doesn’t feel like digging up anything and wants to leave well enough alone. The first notes he has been working ever since he was a kid and asks why the other got the job. He says just to have spending money, not to develop himself; he sits back and escapes. The first argues that even getting a job is different than when he was a kid; the other disputes this. The first cites the three years he has known him; the other says he quit, then went back, and has the same things. The first asks whether he means he hasn’t—

Killing Under the Same Conditions

A brief exchange closes the scene: one speaker says that under the same conditions he would kill someone if pushed, because of a quick temper. “Rs” replies that he would then be dead. The first answers, “So what? Everybody has to die some time.”

Metaphor and the Group

The book turns from the dyad—an individual working over experience in conversation with a respected adult—to the group, which can profitably surface shared attitudes toward common objects, events, and experiences. First, though, each person must discover what lies deep within, below logical intellect and surface talk. Manufacturing metaphors serves this purpose, letting everyone’s metaphor and the feeling behind it emerge and interact with others’ in a revelatory moment. Metaphor and imagery, the text asserts, are the mind’s most encompassing function: we comprehend only by comparing the unknown to what we know, constantly saying “this is somewhat like that other thing,” which raises the voltage of compared experiences and organizes the mind into unity. This production of metaphors is basic to all growth of meaning and should be trained, especially regarding the powerful objects and events in a young person’s world. The “you” matters: not hearsay, but one’s own vivid experience and imagery.

Completed comparisons to parents include a baby toad on a lily pad in the middle of the Pacific, an ant beside an elephant, a twig of a totally different tree, a wanderer, any teen-ager who hasn’t figured them out, and a lovely glossy grape unaware it will soon be a withered raisin. These symbolize the complex-tension nature of life with parents and communicate better than paragraphs of explanation; young people are present in a metaphor more fully than in logical talk. Metaphors for the life of the mind include deep waters of a great churning ocean and a trip with occasional plazas of light, food, and fuels, or trains arriving and departing on many tracks with thousands of travelers and many voices. A metaphor is a unified complexity. Three teen-agers’ answers on the Christian church in our time: a hippo mired to its belly, almost getting both feet on the bank but slipping back; a beautiful ancient chandelier in an otherwise modern room; the only board within reach of a drowning man. A metaphor is a condensed parable hiding a truth. For joining the church: becoming a fine dancer whose every motion points one way; a swing from a high tree; coming home to a non-frantic family life.

Metaphors express mixed tensions so that actuality previously unsymbolized is seen and contradictions no longer ignored: taking a course in the youth culture of my school is like a man in the desert constantly blinking to dispel the mirages; standing up for justice is like a goldfish affirming its identity in a barracuda colony. Metaphor work enables sudden realization of one’s existence situation—lived life steps up to testify. “At my best I am like”: a rose, a nut, a ground hog, a meek little kitten. “At my worst I am like”: the devil, a witch, a hurricane, a retarded child having a fit of anger, an irritating, ugly, self-centered brat of about four, a person refusing to see the other side, a quiet shy creep, a space capsule, a rebel without a cause, someone else covering up loneliness, a selfish, ungrateful slob.

Contemporaneousness with Christ

The argument turns on the claim that becoming a Christian requires contemporaneousness with Christ rather than historical distance. Every generation must begin anew with Christ and present His life as the paradigm. Christendom instead interprets the relationship merely historically, letting Christ be dead and then triumphing. Since then Christendom has grown in numbers because people eagerly join parades where nothing is required but triumph. Being a Christian in Christendom differs from being a Christian in contemporaneousness as much as paganism differs from Christianity. In Christendom everything is confused until Christianity has become paganism; sermons perpetually concern what happened after Christ’s death, how He triumphed and His disciples conquered the world—sermons that might end with “hurrah” rather than “amen.” Christ’s life on earth is the paradigm, and each Christian must strive to construct life in likeness to it. Christendom has abolished Christianity while wanting to inherit Christ and His great name, appropriating the consequences of His life as its own meritorious achievement, making us believe Christendom is Christ.

Followers Rather Than Admirers

A fundamental change came with the triumphant church and established Christendom: Christ obtained admirers, not followers. Christ constantly uses “Follower” and “Disciples,” never speaking of wanting admirers or adherents; followers follow a life, not a doctrine—a life without adventitious marks of loftiness. It is the humiliated Christ who speaks. In Christendom people admire and worship Christ with the strongest expressions while their lives express the opposite of Christ’s lowly life. The admirer claims an excellent cover: more surely cannot be required than to worship Christ admiringly as the truth. To admire Christ thus is the false invention of a later age via exultation; in contemporaneousness there was no occasion to admire, for Christ offered only the same conditions—to become as poor, despised, scorned, and mocked. The distinction: a follower is or strives to be what he admires; an admirer holds himself personally aloof, not discerning that the admired object claims him. The admirer forgets himself; where admiration is not in place, one thinks solely of oneself, and the other becomes a claim, a prick in the soul, an arrow wounding forward. In one case the admirer vanishes into the admired object; in the other the other is taken in like medicine, swallowed, given out again as reflection, and the self grows greater by resembling Him. Wanting to admire instead of follow is the flabby invention of the “better sort” of weak men who hold themselves aloof, related only through imagination, treating the admired as an actor on stage while demanding the theatre’s privilege—sitting safely without real relationship to danger, yet reckoning to their credit that they admire, presuming a cheap claim to share his merit. If his life ought to be a claim upon them, they will not understand; if he understands it should be, their admiration ends, for conversing with Him amounts nearly to an examination—his life silently examines theirs. The follower lives in dangers; the admirer holds aloof. Both acknowledge Christianity in words. The admirer makes no sacrifices, gives up nothing worldly, reconstructs no life; he is inexhaustible in affirming how highly he prizes Christianity. The follower aspires to be what he admires and, even in established Christendom, encounters the same danger once involved in confessing Christ. Through the follower’s life it will be revealed who is the admirer, and admirers will become embittered against the follower; even presenting the situation as here presented will embitter many, who must belong to the class of admirers. Sermons about following Christ only confirm admirers or win new ones; the admirer is in the strictest sense no true Christian. In Christendom this self-deception has become general through misuse of Christ’s exultation. People show indignation at the unrighteous opposition a follower suffers, but with restriction: they shield themselves against danger, choosing apartness for their indignation—the cozy security of the parlor, with the admired one and trusted intimate friends, where without unpleasant consequences one can thunder and pound the table heroically at the world’s paltriness.

Reduplication

Truth in Christ’s sense is not a sum of sentences or definition of concepts but a life; truth in its very being is the reduplication in me—in you—of the truth which was in Christ, for He was the Truth. The teacher is more important than the teaching; where the teacher is essentially involved in the teaching, there is reduplication—the teacher is part of it. Where reduplication exists, communication is far from direct paragraph or professor communication. Being reduplicated in the teacher by existing in what he teaches is a discriminating art. Our time makes everything abstract and does away with everything personal; it has done away with Christ, cast Him out, taken possession of His teaching, regarding Him as an anonymous author—the doctrine is the principal and whole thing. Taking Christ’s teaching and doing away with Christ means doing away with Christianity, for Christ is a person and the teacher more important than His teaching. Our age knows no other communication but the mediocre way of lecturing; people have forgotten what it is to exist. All communication regarding existence requires a Communicator—communication is the reduplication of that which is communicated. To reduplicate is to exist in what one understands.

Christian Suffering

Christ was and is the truth. If one can love Him only in His exultation, that signifies one can love the truth only when it has conquered, surrounded by power, honor, and glory. It is as essential for truth to suffer in this world as to triumph in another. Christ Jesus is the same in humiliation as in exaltation.

Paradigms of Civilized Man

The text proposes turning from “contemporary authentics” to the “great Christian paradigms”—meaningful experiences that have shaped life over centuries. These paradigms are described as poorly understood, necessitating a “ministry in their behalf to the mind and decision center of modern man.” A partial list of paradigms is given: Life as a journey thru wilderness, Freedom, Our Cross, Loneliness, Members of one body, Guarantor, Rebellion, Struggling to become authentic, Conscience, and Person-perception. In a paradigm experience, the meaning of life “breaks through,” becoming an organizer and basis for interpreting all other experiences. Paradigms recur, though in different detail, and become the dynamic, structure, and character of a whole people as well as of an individual. The psyche of a person or folk is organized by paradigms. The task is to understand the paradigm experiences of Civilized man, intensify them, and put them into contemporary forms.

Life as Hero Journey

Journey or Pilgrimage is called the probable root metaphor by which Christians see the whole of life; “personal evolution” is offered as another way of saying it. The chapter begins the paradigms with the “over-all grasp of the crucial experience-journey of any person on the way to adult-hood.” Legends and stories across all peoples attempt to describe the journey of one human life. Advertisers, the “gods and goddesses” of mass entertainment, governments, and organizations constantly offer such stories. The question is not whether one will have a myth of life, but which one. Believing a myth of life allows hidden possibility to break through into the everyday, arousing power to imagine and expect futures, and enabling particular crises, situations, and disasters to be understood, digested, and handled. Without a “story of my life,” one has no identity and gets lost in the labyrinth; the self is fragile and disappears. Everyone needs an over-all story-drama suggesting possible plot, critical and testing episodes, moments of truth, chief characters, and style of movement. A danger exists that people want to remain in “sleepy dreaming and undifferentiated friendliness,” thinking life consists of impulse release of the hunger for pleasure, so that no strength of character ever happens. A myth found in the folk wisdom of many peoples holds that this is a precarious world: to become man means to become some unique and tested particularity that can offer life freshly to those about him. This contrasts violently with popular “folk myths” that proclaim adulthood arrives with sex experience, owning a car, or doing as one pleases.

The Four Acts of the Myth

The myth has four acts. Act I: “Leave the ghetto / Leave the crowd / Break out.” In initiation rites, the adolescent leaves the village and goes into unknown territory, facing the unexpected and powers he fears. Today, to become powerfully human, the adolescent must leave familiar supporting life, leap beyond childish patterns, gain his own faith rather than live off his father’s and mother’s, say “count me out” to the stupidities of the present adult generation, sometimes disagree with his peer group, refuse to be walled in by ghettos and provincialisms, and start toward NEW TIME and the making of a world. At points, he must rebel. Separation is not comfortable. Reasons for leaving include: a severe problem making old ways fail; becoming so fed up that his “stomach belches”

The Guarantor and the Adult Who Affirms Us

The teacher’s confession opens this stretch: teaching is less like lighting a candle than awakening a spirited existence. The wish is for each student to become a personal truth—sensitivity, freedom, potential taking shape as significant form, a work of art evoking other works of art, and a tenacity in the good that resists prevailing opinion and conflict, becoming a sense of direction that creates the future. As a teacher, the speaker’s feelings combine exulting and despairing.

A new discovery is announced: a fundamental relationship with a Guarantor—not with one’s own age group, nor with an authoritarian father-mother or boss. This relationship is especially relevant to the adult worker with youth, modeling trans-generational dialogue. Young people seek it and should know they do; it too is a paradigm.

A guarantor is a significant other, farther along in life, who establishes us with a co-personal world. He cannot live our life for us but affirms us as true and gives us entree—both the main course of the feast of life and the right and freedom to enter. He is not a parent substitute but an adult with a respected place in an activity we value, who notices us personally, talks to us as an equal, and by his dependable image of us enables us to feel that being the kind of person I am, I will make it. He enjoys us, thinks us worthy of being listened to and understood—a person we click with. Whatever our age, we need a guarantor when entering the inner circle of a new enterprise and becoming a new person: a reference point of identity and a source of courage, for we can stand up to change only if something remains throughout. The relationship continues us, firms expectation against wispy dreaming, and introduces us as weavers of the social fabric—accepted not for what we are but because someone has said both parties can be trusted and something interesting may happen.

Recognition, Intimacy, and Awakened Potential

How does it happen? First, recognition: out of the blur of hurrying social paramecium, a human face emerges. The person becomes credible, earns the right to be heard—an insider who has been places, knows the score, came through the struggle, is no phoney, talks honest, will not run when the going gets rough. But that is only half: this person notices and recognizes us, spots us as somebody worth noticing, invokes our presence, invites us into relationship. Being the socially valid strength he is, his recognition is affirmation.

Second, manly intimacy: a certain intimacy arises emphasizing both polarities of I-Thou. A smothering, possessive intimacy weakens rather than guarantees and introduces basic insecurity. The young person’s final fate is not to be a satellite; the overlap of personality must not be too much. Each person’s own territory to conquer and civilize, own lonely outpost, own area of freedom, maneuverability, playfulness, originality, expertness, own center of decision and responsibility must stand out. The young person can struggle with the adult, not give in quickly, sometimes win; the adult has the same freedom to disagree, have differences, be his own integrity. The relationship has distance between which each is to fill; the co-personal world is rough and elemental like sky, mountains, evolutionary life. Each can be an opportunity for the other of testing himself against reality.

Third, the guarantor plunges us into situations which awaken our potential, which we develop at our pace and control. He sees potential in us and sanctions work in which we discover our name and powers of creating. He is in love with growing things; like a freshman football coach, solely concerned to help us make the team—not the varsity coach concerned that we win a game for him. He is loyal to us as architect, not as a hewer of wood performing assigned tasks; he sees us as a potential skilled craftsman in the workshop of humanity. Often he helps bring into being around us the basic societal cluster of about five people committed to a common enterprise, seeing things about the same way. He senses us at the point of our life vocation. We are birthed by meeting the quality of his existence, exposed to where he lives; we commune more with his consciousness than his conclusions. Around him we are more than usual, and over time we are generated. He helps us understand ourselves and grow experiences into meanings; less than the usual person is he interested in analyzing, criticizing, judging. We are received and reborn in his understanding, particularly in peak moments, decision moments, or dark moments of despair and resentment. In conversation he offers his own experiences and convictions when most relevant but does not try to sell them or insist we believe as he does; he enjoys the play of mind upon mind. When pressed, he is—

Becoming a Truth, and the Meaning of Sexual Intercourse

The speaker hopes young people want at least one adult who seriously strives to be a Truth, and one or two adults who keep growing, so they are freshly a truth rather than the same old dim, encrusted one. Such adults would give young people a surrounding life enabling them to move toward becoming a Truth. This is what the staff wanted to leave with the reader; they believe it and say it is somewhat inadequately the direction of their own lives. The major training effort of any youth leader is at this point of becoming a religious truth, so his life has a deep-down meaning—there is a flame. This sets the direction of their own growth and of leadership education programs, and raises the question of how those in local-church leadership relate to each other so that being part of a church staff is this experience of becoming a truth.

Becoming a truth is not just expressing feelings. There is a Truth Christ revealed about the nature of man; He reveals man’s nature as well as God’s. It does not mean merely being what you can think you ought to be. There is an essential nature of man, hidden by God himself as a potentiality within each person. Becoming a Truth is saying yes to this potentiality and being a good friend of it. That potentiality includes: a desire to be manifest and not remain hidden in this world; a wisdom that interprets life; a love that can be a presence to other people; and a commitment that even suffering cannot turn back. This is at least part of the Truth Christ revealed, and the call made to them as leaders of youth, hoping they may awaken the same potential within the young.

Chapter XXII turns to the meaning of sexual intercourse. Everybody sexes, but only those interested in making money from it talk much about it. Adults don’t know well how to talk about it with young people; the crux of conversation must be its meaning, not just its biology. Teen-agers plead: leave off the introduction, begin at the middle and go on from there. This endeavor would be preceded by intensive consideration of Martin Buber’s I-Thou, Marcel’s Creative Fidelity, and a Protestant doctrine of marriage.

Sex is located in the context of creation; its inner purpose is the creation of new life. While bringing a child into existence is the most startling form of creation, intercourse has other creative purposes. As a relational event, sexual experience endeavors to break through the walls of flesh to direct union of the all of us with the all of the other. Two individual centers of awareness, held apart by individual experience and physical body structures, seek direct naked union. The warm embrace, vigorous kiss, and deep penetration evidence the intensity of this desire for union with the other’s inner core. Every person is an aloneness—a loneliness unbearable apart from constant striving for some uniting. Matthew Arnold is quoted at length, expressing the longing like despair sweeping through men who realize each person is an island separated and estranged from all others. Self-conscious man experiences life as this ultimate aloneness, surrounded by a hint of other existences, and is driven to experiences breaking through into direct immediate union with another person. Each person must again and again discover there is enveloping life that receives him, that there is warmth to the world, that the world is not just cold bare physical event. Men and women keep coming to the sex act hoping to discover such a world is available.

Only a certain kind of person can give convincing evidence that the world is not just impenetrable physical activity, can provide the warm world enabling us to become human and stay that way. Only when the world comes as a person who knows and embraces us is our aloneness forgotten and overcome. To be embraced anonymously—without being recognized for who we are—is not healing but destructive. Not knowing the nature of that which embraces us leaves us puzzled and uncertain in an impersonal world. The deeper the knowledge of each other, the farther from being a thing. But knowledge alone is not enough: unless we respect the enveloping life embracing us, the experience is ambiguous, repulsive, driving us back to hoping to be alone and damning the tension that brought us together. So the intimacy of sex has to do with a frame of orientation and devotion.

The Group Study Method and the Art of Listening

The method resumes with a warning about how easily a group can go wrong. If members plunge straight into their own translations, the loudest voices take over, the quieter depths stay hidden, and no one learns what the text calls the difficult art of creatively listening to another person. Nothing is more corrosive than passing judgment on whether a translation is good or wrong; the aim is development, not debate, and the growth of each person’s grasp of Christian faith.

Once every person’s “aliveness” has been received and nurtured around the circle, the group moves into more ordinary discussion: agreeing on the passage’s major thrust and the basis of its translation, and bringing in personal experience—without which, the text insists, discussion stays abstract, irresponsible, and incapable of transforming anyone. Fresh insights are then tested against the situations of common life and against what it calls unique inwardnesses.

The group returns to a forum where a few striking translations may be read aloud, but the forum’s real work is a shared struggle with whatever elemental question, or “possibility for us now,” most deserves attention. Someone present should have studied the passage as Biblical scholars understand it, so that the depth of original word meanings and the situation in which it was written are available; the leader should also bring contemporary writings wrestling with the same problem. The forum must never become an excuse for a lecture or for correcting and silencing everyone else’s thought—responsibility for coming to terms with this elemental of Christian life stays with each person, and the group’s search must not be destroyed. This depth and encounter takes at least an hour and a half: roughly fifteen minutes for writing one’s own translation and reflecting on experience, forty-five for receiving and nurturing, and thirty for the forum.

Fashioning the Meaning into Significant Form

If a depth-and-encounter enterprise is genuinely underway, further sessions follow the first. Six to ten pages of a written report by a contemporary living and thinking in an originative way may be read by the whole group, with a forum on what that writer contributes; the passage chosen must deal with experience and thought related to what the Bible lifted up. One person or a committee could then compose a working paper on this elemental as a basis for life, defining what it is and what vitalization of common life it offers. It might first appear as a sermon with an accompanying litany, meditation, or poetic prose, but it should finally become a document treated as a working basis for life here and now. If the fuller range of Bible selections suggested later is used, an exciting pattern for contemporary living could be organized out of such working papers.

Encounter and Depth as Distinctive Method

To encounter is to meet another person in such a way that both discover where they stand. The method’s primary purposes are threefold: to meet the Holy Spirit as he communicates through the Bible’s words; to encounter ourselves, becoming present to ourselves as we are and are meant to be; and to meet, in honesty and freedom, the depths of the other people in the group, so that each grows. Encounter does not always happen at once, but over time it does, and those moments become treasures.

It is depth study, first, to the degree that it helps a person put into words the vague stirrings of his spirit that normally never occupy the center of his attention. Until a person thinks and talks these stirrings into symbols—words, described experiences, images of himself in the world—he does not possess them and is not present to his own experiencing; until they sit at the center of his attention, their significance never seeps through his whole life. In thinking and talking with a friendly, receiving group, a person may come to possess his deeper experiences and awakenings.

Second, it is depth study to the degree that a ministry of relationship goes on alongside the study: deep calls unto deep, and some depths of human existence are experienced only in the I-Thou mode of meeting. Whenever a person offers an experience or hope meaningful to him and it is received with understanding but not handled with softness, he stands in the presence of the Holy. Third, it is depth study to the degree that the group descends through levels of penetration into the Bible: the words of the translation read; the tremendous experiences and visions underlying those words; the person speaking in the verse—Paul or Moses—who shines through; and finally the words, experiences, visions, and persons becoming transparent, revealing the God who is the Depth of depth.

Selecting the Bible Passages

The verses that lend themselves to this study are those with rich living content, allowing concentration on a single elemental of Christian existence; those peculiarly relevant to the moment of history and the tensioned lives we lead; those offering a “possibility for me,” coming like a breath of fresh air. Among the examples given are Matthew 9:36, on compassion as a fundamental of Christian love and how easy it is to live alienated from the multitudes; Colossians 3:15, on the fulness necessary to digest tension, conflict, and evil—and to do so as one body; John 6:32-36, on knowing truth to the degree that we participate, since information alone never saves; Ephesians 4:15-16, on hiddenness, pretense, and duplicity as a horrible sickness; and Luke 12:29, on the prophetic existence.

Main Arguments

The book’s central claim is that human beings are characterized primarily by a will-to-meaning, not by a will-to-pleasure or a will-to-power. Man as person lives in a world of meanings, not merely in a world of energetic atoms, biological nuclei, or social causes. Young people, until they are blunted and doped, have an intense hunger for meaning and cannot live well on a poverty-stricken or putrefying diet of meanings. Feeding them information, or “how to do,” or even “this is what the Church believes” is inadequate education, because they sense that an electronic machine can excel them at such functions and they resent being treated like a computer and a storehouse.

From this follows the argument that no one can be given a meaning. Meaning arises in the person; it cannot be handed over. The proper function of the adult in conversation with the young is that of a midwife, not a preacher or a judge. The midwife helps in the birthing process, but the child belongs to the parent; powers resident within parent and child must bring it forth, or it will be still-born and premature. The adult can talk about the great words of the religious heritage and try to connect them with experience, but the meaning itself must emerge from the young person’s depths — in encounter with another thoughtful person.

A third argument concerns the new mode of consciousness. We are in a formative period of a new era; a new species of man is being produced by history and the communications revolution. This new consciousness has three features. First, a new mode of sensing the life world: wisdom comes with seeing-hearing, flooding all the senses at once; the brain handles diffuse, ambiguous wholes; sound becomes an important carrier of meanings; perceptual learning becomes the basis of conviction. Second, a new mode of organizing the world: consciousness is a single global village; only world history exists; man lives simultaneous with events; he needs an “on-the-fly” theology of history-making; the world ecumene, not the church, is his habitat. Third, new habits of self-governance: the electronic consciousness resonates and decides differently. The task is not to lament this but to work with it, to assemble the “offer of life” one wants to make, to intensify the dialogic nature of manufacturing meanings, and to preserve the good that came with print consciousness.

A fourth argument is that meanings grow by conversation — between two people, five people, a whole unit of youth culture. The basic unit of nurturing meanings is face-to-face conversation with just one other person, a dyad. Taking a ministry of meanings seriously means more man-to-man conversations with individual young people in every church. The greatest depth and honesty of communication is possible when just two people talk with level eyes. More of “invocation” and confirmation of the other as person is possible in a twosome; they need not hide behind crowd opinion, and each is the only expert present on his experiences and the one who finally must make sense out of his life.

A fifth argument concerns the adult’s self-revelation. For a full ministry of meanings, the adult ought not always just be a creative listener, and certainly must not remain hidden or an enigma. Young people want to know who they are talking to; they do not want a face-less non-entity. If the conversation is not to become a prying exclusively into their life, they properly expect us to reveal something of how it is with us. But usually the adult’s contribution is done very badly, seen as a subtle attempt to instruct, control, or determine ahead of time the outcome; the young person then quits his journey into meaning, his mind sits down, a chill comes into both persons, and life slides back into the “Bog of Boredom.”

A sixth argument is that metaphor is the mind’s most encompassing function. We comprehend only by comparing the unknown to what we know, constantly using metaphors. This production of metaphors is basic to all growth of meaning, so it should be encouraged and trained, especially regarding events and powerful objects in a young person’s world. The “you” is important: not hearsay, but one’s own vivid experience and imagery. Metaphor work enables sudden realization of one’s existence situation; lived life steps up to testify.

A seventh argument, drawn from Kierkegaard, is that becoming a Christian requires contemporaneousness with Christ, not historical distance. Every generation must begin anew with Christ and present His life as the paradigm. Christendom instead interprets the relationship merely historically, letting Christ be dead and then triumphing. Since then Christendom has grown in numbers because people eagerly join parades where nothing is required but triumph. Being a Christian in Christendom differs from being a Christian in contemporaneousness as much as paganism differs from Christianity. Christ obtained admirers, not followers; Christ constantly uses “Follower” and “Disciples,” never speaking of wanting admirers or adherents. A follower is or strives to be what he admires; an admirer holds himself personally aloof. The admirer makes no sacrifices, gives up nothing worldly, reconstructs no life; he is inexhaustible in affirming how highly he prizes Christianity. The follower aspires to be what he admires and, even in established Christendom, encounters the same danger once involved in confessing Christ.

An eighth argument, drawn from Bonhoeffer, is that Christian revelation is concrete, not propositional or verbal; the Christian message always comes through being incarnated in somebody’s actions. One does not first have the gospel and then ask what to do with it; the gospel is in the doing. Bonhoeffer had an intense horror of the “merely phraseological” — people who just talk. From his father, a psychiatrist, he acquired this horror; all his life he almost hated people who, instead of really living, poured out a flood of words. In a letter home from prison, he writes of a pastor who had preached wonderful sermons on resisting a horrible thing but who went to pieces when Allied bombers came over the jail; Bonhoeffer thought such a fellow should be thrown out of the church. Regarding the Jewish problem, he said only he who weeps for the Jews has the right to sing Gregorian chants.

A ninth argument concerns the paradigms of civilized man. The great Christian paradigms — life as journey through wilderness, freedom, our cross, loneliness, members of one body, guarantor, rebellion, struggling to become authentic, conscience, person-perception — are meaningful experiences that have shaped life over centuries. They are poorly understood, necessitating a ministry in their behalf to the mind and decision center of modern man. In a paradigm experience, the meaning of life breaks through, becoming an organizer and basis for interpreting all other experiences. Paradigms recur, though in different detail, and become the dynamic, structure, and character of a whole people as well as of an individual. The psyche of a person or folk is organized by paradigms. The task is to understand the paradigm experiences of civilized man, intensify them, and put them into contemporary forms.

A tenth argument, developed through the hero journey, is that everyone needs a myth of life. The question is not whether one will have a myth but which one. Believing a myth of life allows hidden possibility to break through into the everyday, arousing power to imagine and expect futures, and enabling particular crises, situations, and disasters to be understood, digested, and handled. Without a “story of my life,” one has no identity and gets lost in the labyrinth; the self is fragile and disappears. The myth has four acts: leaving the ghetto, battling demons and giants in valleys of darkness, and two further movements that carry the journey toward its conclusion. This myth is deep in religious tradition: Abraham going out, he knew not where; Moses forsaking Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king; Adam having the good fortune to be driven out of Paradise so he could cease trying to be an angel and become a man.

Key Concepts

The ministry of meanings. The book’s organizing concept. Effective ministry of and with youth is defined as a mutual ministry of awakening meanings, deepening meanings, and coming to fullness of “I mean.” It is not the transmission of information or doctrine but the midwifing of meaning in another person.

The will-to-meaning. The claim that the human is characterized primarily by a will-to-meaning, and only secondarily by a will-to-pleasure or a will-to-power. This is the anthropological foundation of the whole book.

The new mind / the new mode of consciousness. The claim that electronic communication has produced a new species of human consciousness, characterized by perceptual rather than print-based learning, by global simultaneity, and by new habits of self-governance. Snyder stresses that this concerns the human brain and mind produced, not mass communications as such.

The dyad. The basic unit of nurturing meanings: face-to-face conversation between two people. The book insists that the greatest depth and honesty of communication is possible when just two people talk with level eyes.

The midwife. The model for the adult’s role in conversation. The midwife helps in the birthing process, but the child belongs to the parent; powers resident within parent and child must bring it forth, or it will be still-born and premature.

Metaphor as a unified complexity. The mind’s most encompassing function. A metaphor is a condensed parable hiding a truth; it communicates better than paragraphs of explanation, and young people are present in a metaphor more fully than in logical talk.

Existence clarification. The process by which a young person, through conversation and metaphor, clears up the Self which he is, becoming acquainted with parts of himself he had not seen before.

The reference community of interpretation. “Culture” means sharing a corporate mind, a “meaning society” or “reference community of interpretation,” minimum size about five though beginning with two. People tune into each other, existing in common “I-Thou.”

I-Thou and It. Drawn from Buber. Subject-object relations draw on others’ abilities, talents, feelings, and emotions to serve one’s own ends. Life cannot be lived without regarding others as objects. However, only I-Thou gives meaning to the world of It. I-Thou is an end not reached in time but present from the start, originating and carrying through. One’s whole world of “It” takes on meaning because of the experience of an I-Thou — a fleeting moment of full encounter.

The merely phraseological. Bonhoeffer’s term for people who just talk, who pour out a flood of words instead of really living. The book treats this as a central temptation for Christians.

Contemporaneousness. Kierkegaard’s term. Becoming a Christian requires contemporaneousness with Christ, not historical distance. Every generation must begin anew with Christ and present His life as the paradigm.

Followers versus admirers. Kierkegaard’s distinction. A follower is or strives to be what he admires; an admirer holds himself personally aloof, makes no sacrifices, gives up nothing worldly, reconstructs no life. The admirer is in the strictest sense no true Christian.

Reduplication. Kierkegaard’s term. Truth in Christ’s sense is not a sum of sentences or definition of concepts but a life; truth in its very being is the reduplication in me — in you — of the truth which was in Christ, for He was the Truth. The teacher is more important than the teaching; where the teacher is essentially involved in the teaching, there is reduplication.

Paradigms. The great Christian paradigms — life as journey through wilderness, freedom, our cross, loneliness, members of one body, guarantor, rebellion, struggling to become authentic, conscience, person-perception. In a paradigm experience, the meaning of life breaks through, becoming an organizer and basis for interpreting all other experiences.

The hero journey. The mythic structure of life, presented as a myth in four acts, beginning with “Leave the ghetto / Leave the crowd / Break out.” The journey is deep in religious tradition: Abraham, Moses, Adam.

The adult guarantor. One of the paradigms. The adult who provides a stable presence and a guarantee of meaning for the young.

Ample conscience. One of the paradigms. A conscience large enough to hold complexity, rather than a narrow rule-following.

Celebration. The book’s final concept and final chapter. The mode of being that closes the arc from theory through practice to paradigms.

Themes

The deepest theme of the book is the fragility of meaning in modern life and the conditions under which it can be recovered. The opening chapter laments half-alive living, foggy stupor, crowd existence, prattling instead of communicating, empty words, loneliness, and being led by unexamined words and distorted meanings. Great words — freedom, love, compassion, justice, truth, democracy, man, God — are corrupted. Many never consider life’s questions: what truth one is meant to be, what to dive into, what the Journey is. People owe it to each other to shock each other out of this condition. The book is an extended attempt to do that shocking.

A second theme is the crisis of modernity as it appears in the young. The book quotes high school students expressing running in circles, not knowing what they are preparing for, marking time waiting for something real to happen. A high school boy symbolized his predicament with a quicksand parable: initially delightful floating, then futile efforts, sinking, crying for help, ropes thrown from darkness with voices crying “grab on to this one,” and the desperate question of which rope to grasp. This desperate reaching is a general condition including adults; many have given up the struggle for meaning, seeking only momentary escape into a dream world of super-delights.

A third theme is the corruption of meaning by mass media. Forty million readers of Confession Magazine in America — mostly girls in their late teens and young women in their twenties — regularly feed on stories whose theme and world view is that the world is chaotic and brutal, that little can be done, so one should be realistic and make a virtue of adjustment; that sex is an uncontrollable urge, possibly unsavory, tragic, fearsome, but women must accept rough behavior from their man, though punishment follows the path of least resistance. Due to pervasive electronic communications, every young person has in the back of his mind an anonymous reference group purporting to be a world public opinion. This liberates him from provincialisms and leads to awareness beyond geographical boundaries, but mass communications and mass education also destroy his confidence in his own experiencing and reflections, inserting a fog of manufactured images between himself and the realities of his life, so he no longer knows what is real and becomes deeply anxious.

A fourth theme is race and responsibility. The Selma dialogue is the book’s most sustained treatment of this. The respondent argues it would be improbable to speak with white Alabamians about a common American dream, because they do not see themselves first as Americans; the flag on the Montgomery Capitol and on police cars indicates they see themselves first as Confederate or Alabamians. Regarding Christianity, when an integrated group tried to participate in worship at a church there, a layman was quoted saying, “You can’t come in, you’re not going to make a mockery of our religion.” The respondent describes a real cleft or barrier between whites as a whole and Negroes, and says one cannot pull out as an individual and disclaim responsibility. Since one shares in building these barriers, it is important to participate in breaking them down; Selma was that opportunity. The respondent holds the definite belief that God is active in the Civil Rights movement and that as a Christian one ought to respond to His call to become involved.

A fifth theme is loneliness and the difficulty of trust. The dialogue between Speaker A and Speaker B circles around being used, readiness, change, and aloneness. B says one is better off alone, with no complications, the easiest way out, and does not want anything too rough. A observes that when a person comes to this view — and many people have it — B interrupts that it is not a lot of people; B is “just me” and wants to be like me and nobody else. A says a person comes to this way of thinking because of experience with people. B says B must be tired of people then. The exchange is unresolved; it ends with A asking whether B means B has not changed, and the reader is left with the question hanging.

A sixth theme is the difference between abstract ideas and personally achieved truth. The book insists on the distinction between ideas held abstractly and personally achieved truth: “This is me, and this is the world I have to deal with. This is an experiencing I have had.” The prime tool is not logic but re-lived and reflected-upon experiences and events. Such conversation is not just an exchange of viewpoints; an exchange is of something finished, in which we may communicate but neither expects to think, feel, and see differently, and no development or transformation occurs. Conversation which goes deeper requires some break in the familiar routine of our feeling, and someone has to come in with something freshly felt and experienced.

A seventh theme is the church’s predicament. The book is written from within the church and to the church, but it is sharply critical. The church is described as a hippo mired up to its belly almost getting both feet on the bank but slipping back; a beautiful ancient chandelier in an otherwise modern room; the only board within reach of a drowning man. The book’s final movement toward celebration is not a denial of this predicament but a response to it.

An eighth theme is the possibility of celebration. The book’s final chapter is titled “Celebration,” and the movement of the whole book is toward it. The song by James Paton, “val-ley of the sha-dow,” with its stanzas about finding the lost sheep in the valley of the shadow of death, is the book’s most extended image of what celebration might mean. The narrator says: “Perhaps when the tin cans of existence are cleared away and we stand not alone but in deep solitude, feeling the pulse of the world, the church finds her risen Lord at work in the deepest passages of the inner world.” The word “victory” usually means armies marching into conquered cities, crowds cheering, confetti thrown. But there is a different kind of victory, a Christian victory like a shadow born in the night, the victory the church has always seemed to know though little is said of it anymore: the victory of life even when life seems defeated.

The Author’s Conclusions

The book does not end with a set of propositions but with a movement toward celebration. The final chapter, “Celebration,” is the book’s conclusion, and it is deliberately not a summary. The arc of the book — from the rationale of meanings, through the nurturing of experiencings, through contemporary authentics, through the paradigms of civilized man — arrives at a mode of being rather than a doctrine.

The song by James Paton that runs through the later pages gives the book its emotional and theological conclusion. The narrator, whose father has been operated on for a cancerous brain tumor, describes a “usual unusual night” and the deadening sorrow that outlasts tears, “like a subtle toothache where there are no teeth.” The narrator picks up a guitar and a new strum and chord variation emerge, and the song is born. The narrator says: “