Water Creatures

I chose the title “Water Creatures” because it elicits the flexibility of symbolic thought, which is the subject of today’s message.

“Elicits from where?” you ask.

From within you.

“Water” followed by “Creatures” causes you to imagine living things in a liquid world where slippery creatures wiggle through water more elegantly than birds through the air, occasionally bursting through the barrier that separates their world from our own. We see them briefly above the waterline.

Symbolic language allows your listener to personalize your story and participate in it by supplying details that you did not include.

Symbolic language gives you access to the thoughts and beliefs and hopes and dreams and suspicions that lie deep in the hearts of your listeners.

This is what people are talking about when they speak of “listener engagement.”

John Steinbeck describes this process in his preface to “East of Eden.”

“The reader will take from my book what he brings to it. The dull witted will get dullness and the brilliant may find things in my book I didn’t know were there.”

Symbolic language causes the subconscious to become active.

We did this together last week when we alternated a series of non-rhyming lines from unrelated works of literature and then layered those lines like a lasagna to see what they would say to the subconscious mind.

After each line is read, I will inject my own reaction.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.

(a desire to cross a barrier)

Darkness settles on the city

(the world grows dark)

of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit.

(disobedience and fruit)

Children playing in the garden.

(innocence in a garden)

To be, or not to be, that is the question.

(Life? Or Death? A choice.)

Winter brings a bit of sadness.

(Loss of light and warmth)

Silence covers hidden places.

(Silence and hiding)

When those random lines are considered collectively, I am reminded of an ancient story in the third chapter of Genesis.

(And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.

Then the Lord God called to Adam and said to him, “Where are you?

Adam said, “I heard Your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; and I hid myself.”

God said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you that you should not eat?”)

Those random lines triggered the third chapter of Genesis in my mind. Your reaction may have been been entirely different.

We take from the story what we bring to it. This is the nature and the wonder of symbolic language.

Bob Dylan won a Nobel Prize for it.

Do you doubt me?

Let’s look at the lyrics of Dylan’s greatest hits. I believe that you will quickly recognize their flavor to be a reduction sauce of symbolic thoughts created by a master chef, a concentrated liquid as dark as the deepest waters.

How does it feel, how does it feel?

To be on your own, with no direction home

A complete unknown, like a rolling stone

Ah you never turned around to see the frowns

On the jugglers and the clowns when they all did tricks for you

You never understood that it ain’t no good

You shouldn’t let other people get your kicks for you

You used to ride on a chrome horse with your diplomat

Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat

Ain’t it hard when you discovered that

He really wasn’t w