On Names and Naming: When the Word Stands In for the Thing
Say the word “God” quietly to yourself and watch what comes up. For a lot of people it’s an old man on a cloud, or a church smell, or a parent’s voice telling them to sit still. Almost nobody gets the thing the word was invented to point at. A second-century Christian writer noticed the same problem and wrote it into a gospel. The Gospel of Philip, one of the books buried near Nag Hammadi, spends a surprising amount of its length worrying about words. I touched on this in my walk through the Gospel of Philip, but it deserves more room, because the teaching turns out to be something you can practice on an ordinary Tuesday. ...