Silence, Metaphor and the Communication of Religious Meaning Part I

Extract

In his important study of The New Era in Religious Communication, Pierre Babin offers a startling juxtaposition of two very different thought- world. First, he introduces us to the practice, among some Indian tribes living in the Canadian wilderness, of plugging children’s nostrils and covering their eyes soon after birth, the better to attune them to the noises of the forest in which they will have to survive. Then, in stark contrast to these “hyperauditory” individuals, made alert to the subtlest natural sounds: the whisper of snow falling on the leafless branches of aspen and birch, the footfalls of deer in soft summer mud, the long indrawn breath of a hibernating bear and so on, Babin invites readers to consider a modem American adolescent reared in front of the brash sights and sounds of the TV screen. Such an individual will have logged some 20,000 hours of viewing by the age of sixteen. How, Babin asks, can these two individuals be supposed to have the same reference range or to have a similar idea of God and the transcendent? Is it possible that their sense of the holy could follow even remotely similar contours or be effectively explored or addressed by a single method of approach?

To some extent, the hyperauditory Indian and the media-saturated American can be taken as representing two forms of consciousness and communication which Babin spends much of his book outlining. On the one hand there is the linear, analytic, and alphabetical mode.