A World of Adjectives

Elsewhere, I quarrel with the notion put forward by a prominent doctor that we live in “a world of molecules.” Of course molecules exist, but they do not, on their own, convey the direction or meaning of things. Reflecting on this theme, Dr. R. Maurice Boyd, the pastor of The City Church, New York, citing authors from the Greeks to C.S. Lewis, put it better than I did. Leave aside molecules for a moment, he said. In the most important sense, we do not live in a world of nouns. We live instead in a world of adjectives, in which everything seen and known describes and points to something beyond itself.

Listen to Peter L. Berger define an essential trait of personhood itself as a “signal of transcendence”: “In the observable human propensity to order reality there is an intrinsic impulse to give cosmic scope to this order, an impulse that implies not only that the human order in some way corresponds to an order that transcends it, but that this transcendent order is of such a character that man can trust himself and his destiny to it.” 

Sound abstract? Berger makes it concrete by reflecting on a mother comforting her child: “A child wakes up in the night, perhaps from a bad dream . . . beset by nameless threats. At such a moment the contours of trusted reality are blurred or invisible, and in the terror of incipient chaos the child cries out for his mother . . . It is she (and in many cases she alone) who has the power to banish the chaos and restore the benign shape of the world . . . She will speak or sing to the child, and the content of this communication will invariably be the same - ‘Don’t be afraid - everything is in order, everything is all right.’ If all goes well, the child will be reassured, his trust in reality recovered . . .

Is the mother lying to the child? . . . ‘Everything is in order, everything is all right’ - this is the basic formula of maternal and parental reassurance. Not just this particular anxiety, not just this particular pain - but everything is all right. The formula can, without in any way violating it, be translated into a statement of cosmic scope - ‘Have trust in being.’ This is precisely what the formula implies. And if we are to believe the child psychologists . . . this is an experience that is absolutely essential to the process of becoming a human person . . .

[Yet this] representation can be justified only within a religious (strictly speaking a supernatural) frame of reference. In this frame of reference the natural world within which we are born, love, and die is not the only world, but only the foreground of another world in which love is not annihilated in death, and in which, therefore, the trust in the power of love to banish chaos is justified. Thus man’s ordering propensity implies a transcendent order, and each ordering gesture is a signal of this transcendence. The parental role is not based on a loving lie. On the contrary, it is a witness to the ultimate truth of man’s situation in reality.”

A mother reassuring her child that everything is all right. That’s quite an adjective.

Sources: Peter L. Berger, A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 61-64.

First published Winter 2000.