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A Rose by Any Other Name

Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis
August 16, 2009, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill

Genesis 2:4b-9; 15-19
Revelation 22:1-5

"So out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name."

According to Carol Kaesuk Yoon in this week's Science Times, the science of taxonomy is dying. "Outside of taxonomy" she goes on to note, "no one is much up in arms about this, but perhaps we should be, because the ordering and naming of life is no esoteric science. The past few decades have seen a stream of studies that show that sorting and naming the natural world is a universal, deep-seated and fundamental human activity, one we cannot afford to lose because it is essential to understanding the living world and our place in it."

“If as numbers suggest” writes Bill Bryon in A Short History of Everything to give you a sense of the magnitude of this crisis, “we have perhaps 100 million species of insects to find, and if our rates of discovery continue at the present pace, we should have a definitive total for insects in a little over 15,000 years. The rest of the animal kingdom may take longer.”

The most striking evidence for Yoon's claim is to be found in the damaged temporal lobe of a man who had lost the ability to recognize living things. Nonliving objects he could name: a flashlight, a compass, a kettle, a canoe. But he could not say what a parrot or an ostrich was. He could not distinguish between a kangaroo, a mushroom or a buttercup. This man's woes and the woes of others like him "would be of little interest to our own lives" Yoon goes on to say, "if they had merely lost some dispensable librarian-like ability to classify living things. As it turns out, their situation is much worse. These people are completely at sea. Without the power to order and name life, a person simply does not know how to live in the world, how to understand it. How to tell the carrot from the cat-which to grate and which to pet? They are utterly lost, anchorless in a strange and confusing world. Because [she repeats] to order and to name life is to have a sense of the world around, and, as a result, what one's place is in it."

The article sent me directly to Genesis and the curious details that appear only in the second story of creation. You will recall that the second story says nothing of seven days but speaks only of the one day when the Lord God makes the earth and the heavens. On that day the earth is dry and without plants or herbs because there is not yet water nor are there any creatures around to tend the as-yet-uncreated flora and fauna. So out of the dust of the ground ('adhamah) God forms man ('adham) and breathes into his nostrils the breath of life; and he becomes a living being.

Narcissists one and all, we have taken the second creation story to mean that we were first in the order of creation: prior and powerful over all living things. But Yoon's theologically-laden claims for taxonomy found me noticing instead our earthy origins ('adham from 'adhamah); noticing that we were formed "out of the ground" we have in common with all living things; noticing the world around and our place in it with humility.

Having made a being to serve and protect creation, God now plants a garden and gives Eden (meaning "place of delight") into 'adham's keeping. Still we might surmise from the perspective of the taxonomist that 'adham has yet to see the world around or understand his place in it. Not until the Lord God parades the beasts of the field and the birds of the air before him "to see what he would call them" does 'adham distinguish himself as a human being. I imagine a wry grin on God's formless face as language begins to tumble out of 'adham's mouth:

Naming, of course, is not over. The day is not done. Adam may have been the first taxonomist though he is equally a mythic metaphor for the poet, for the purveyor of language we were created to be. "The Poet," wrote Emerson, "is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty." I think it no coincidence that in the century when taxonomy got its start with a Swedish botanist named Carl Linnaeus, scientists (philosophers of nature as they were called) and poets were closely allied. According to Freeman Dyson, the scientists of that age "started their lives as brilliant, unconventional, credulous, and adventurous amateurs" who were as Romantic as the poets. In fact, says Dyson, their discoveries were as unexpected and intoxicating as the poems of Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge at the start of the age, of Shelley, Keats and Byron at its end.

For poet and scientist alike in the 18th century, saying and naming presupposed a knowing that involved more than an everyday glance. I think again of the two ways of seeing we considered a few Sundays ago: the one way a prying and analyzing; the other way a letting go that sets us swaying before the thing transfixed and empty. Naming strikes me as a third way of seeing that brings to speech the nature of the things God parades day and night before our very eyes.

In this regard, an uncanny consistency of categories is to be found in folk taxonomies gathered from 188 languages: "fish, birds, snakes, mammals, wugs (.creepy-crawlies), trees, vines, herbs and bushes..There appears to be such profound unconscious agreement," says Yoon, "that people will even concur on which exact words make the best names for particular organisms." From the beginning we apparently have had it in us to intuit a name's "birdiness or fishiness" so that, clean contrary to post-modern claims, the signifier turns out to be inextricably bound to the nature of the signified!

Therefore to name is not to bestow an identity as we think we do when we read Genesis and conclude that our place in the world is a place of power over all other creatures. Rather to name a thing truly is to wrestle with its reality (like Jacob wrestling all night with the angel): to see it and set our gaze on it until it gives up its name. "To name things properly is to celebrate them in their ultimate singularity," writes poet Kurt Brown. Such names do not impress us, he says, they overwhelm us. "The hair on the back of our hands.stands up. Our experience .electrifies us, forces us to take notice, as though our own semi-conscious, half-apprehended inklings were objectified finally in words of uncanny [truth] and power."

But unlike 'adham and ever since the Enlightenment, we join those who have been born into the named world and into an age when the scientist and the poet have parted ways, when the right brain does not know what the left brain is doing, when our dominion over the things of the earth has come home to roost. "Poetry," notes Freeman Dyson, "the dominant art form in many human cultures from Homer to Byron, no longer dominates." Science does. But the scientist, says Walker Percy who is himself scientist and artist, "cannot utter a single word about an individual molecule, thing, or creature in so far as it is an individual but only in so far as it is like other individuals." This is taxonomy without the wonder, the awe, the amazement that amateurs once brought to Adam's task. We are "post-Darwinians," says theologian Stephen Web, "[who] name animals because we know we are the same."

The story in the second chapter of Genesis knows otherwise, holds that as the sayers and namers of creation we are other than the animals we were born to tend and our otherness has something to do with language. To get at this difference, Walker Percy found himself revisiting Helen Keller as she first apprehended the world around and her place in it. On that day she had walked to the well-house with her teacher Annie Sullivan. There someone was drawing water and Sullivan placed Helen's hand under the spout. "As the cool stream gushed over one hand, she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motion of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten-a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that "w-a-t-e-r" meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!"

Until that moment, eight-year-old Helen had been a well-behaving animal "which behaviorists study so successfully," noted Percy. In that moment she became "the strange name-giving and sentence uttering creature.a rejoicing symbol-mongering human." "It would have been difficult to find a happier child than I was as I lay in my crib at the close of that eventful day and lived over the joys it had brought me, and for the first time longed for a new day to come." In a word, Helen had gained a sense of the world around and of her place in it.

What, then, of this generation that inhabits a world bereft of wonder and a time when the language of once human beings is difficult to distinguish from the grunts of the great apes, when more and more our failure to apprehend the world around and our place in it has put the beasts of the field and the birds of the air at risk? Surely the task of 'adham must again become our own. To wrestle anew for the nature of things; to suddenly feel a misty consciousness as of something forgotten; to speak in such a way such that "the corrupt, inexact, approximate language of the fallen," of "the world not revealed but obscured, dressed in borrowed rags.so that we see only the dulled reality of a socialized mind" [Brown] is redeemed from insignificance [from words that signify nothing] by the God who made us for a garden where nothing accursed is to be found. "As we returned to the house," wrote Helen later, "every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me." Put theologically, the Word that was in the beginning and became flesh in the fullness of time as the second 'adham, that living Word had awakened her soul like a light in the darkness of Helen's human being.

"No wonder," Carol Yoon concludes, "so few of us can really see what is out there. Even when scads of insistent wildlife appear with a flourish right in front of us, and there is such life always-hawks migrating over the parking lot, great colorful moths banging up against the window at night-we barely seem to notice..Happily, changing all this turns out to be easy. Just find an organism, any organism, small, large, gaudy, subtle-anywhere, and they are everywhere-and get a sense of it, its shape, color, size, feel, smell, sound.and meditate, luxuriate in its beetle-ness, its daffodility. Then find a name for it..To do so is to change everything, including yourself."

Says the second of Genesis, we are the creatures given this incredible gift of language by a God who has waited and wondered over the ages what words we will borrow to give glory to our Creator for "dappled things--/For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow/For rose moles all in stipple upon trout that swim/Fresh-charcoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings/ Landscape plotted and pieced-fold, fallow and plough." God is waiting still to see what name you will give to the life God has given into your keeping, for to name the world around is to change everything, including ourselves. Thanks be to God!

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