Walker Percy's The Message in the Bottle

I've been reading a very challenging and esoteric work by novelist Walker Percy. It's not a novel but a collection of essays, written over a twenty year period, attempting to deal with some nagging questions that Percy was never able to shake. In one section he has this dialogue with himself:

"A boy has just come into the naming stage of language acquisition and one day points to a balloon and looks questioningly at his father. The father says, "That's a balloon," or perhaps just, "Balloon."...But consider....The balloon is not the balloon out there. The word balloon is not the sound in the air..Where, what is the word balloon?...The boy does not understand the particular sound balloon - which his father makes and which enters his ear - to mean the balloon. For it is precisely the nature of the boy's breakthrough that he understands his father's utterance as a particular instance of the word balloon. Where is the word itself? Is it the little marks in the dictionary which you point to when I ask you to show me the word balloon?

"Charles Pierce said the word balloon is not a concrete thing at all but a general one, a law.

"What about the balloon itself? Cannot one at least say that what the boy is pointing to and "means" is that particular round red rubber inflated object?

"No! It is precisely the nature of the boy's breakthrough that the object he points to is understood by him as a member of a class of inflated objects. A few minutes later he might well point to a blue sausage-shaped inflated object and say, "Balloon."

Percy moves on from this extended linguistic and philosophical exercise to make a point about language and the fact that it is our language that makes us humans distinct from all other creatures. But I couldn't help but think about Percy's balloon excursion in theological terms. Haven't we, as people of faith who talk a lot about God, tended to mistake our words about God as God Him/Herself? In our struggle to articulate what we believe about the invisible, indescribable Deity, haven't we constantly lost sight of the fact that our words are NOT the Thing itself, but limited, faulty expressions of God?

This false equating of our words or our favorite theologian's words with God Him/Herself or with eternal truth itself has led to countless wars, schisms, and divisions. We become entrenched in our religious views, which are nothing more than words uttered in attempt to express the inexpressible, and we do battle with each other as if somehow God or Christ Himself is at stake. But in truth, it is only our words about God that are at stake. God is unmoved, unshaken, above the fray.

As my friend Nanette Sawyer put it in her interview for my new book, The Way of Jesus: Re-Forming Spiritual Communities in a Post-Church Age,(now available at www.booksandbridges.com) "All our talk about God is but a calculated verbal idolatry." Maybe if we remembered that, along with Walker Percy's balloon musings, we could get beyond our constant bickering about the faith and get on to the business of living the faith!