Daddy Wisdom

This kind of delicate, barely-comprehensible-by-human-mind approach to God shows up in Eastern religions, too. I think they might give it a somewhat more thorough treatment.

I've mentioned this before on this blog, but it's worth mentioning again that my Dad wrote a "translation" of the Tao Te Ching the year before he died. By "translation," I mean that he read a bunch of translations and then tried to recast the themes of each poem in his own words. Though my knowledge of the Tao Te Ching is pretty much limited to his version, it seems like it wrestles a lot with the relationship between language and God.

Here is Dad's version of Lao Tzu's first poem in the Tao Te Ching.

1. The Tao

The way that can be named is not the Way.
The name that can be called is the wrong name.
No one can know from whence Creation came,
But new names are created every day.

Then let the world be with us; not too much,
Lest that our wanting consumes us in fire,
But some, so that the sweetness of desire
Be not surrendered vainly. There is such

A sameness at the root of differing things.
From Big Bang all the way to kingdom come,
A single source for myriad minds, as from
A single body grows two arms, two wings.

Amazing is the charted path of history;
Still more so the Ineffable Mystery.

--Lao Tzu (Written for English by William C. Bolinger)