In the course of an unusually angry article on poverty in Northern Ireland which appeared in the Times of 18 March this year, it was pointed out that in a region already suffering the highest cost of living, the highest unemployment rate (17.3 per cent) and the worst housing shortage (32,000 families homeless) in the United Kingdom, the social security system is passive and waits for people to find out what benefits they might be entitled to and to claim them. Moreover, the claim forms are “impenetrable to all but the well-educated and practised claimant, a contradiction in terms”. And the fear of scrounging has seriously interfered with the system’s ability to meet the crying need. In the UK as a whole £500 million welfare benefits remained unclaimed in 1978. Ulster was well represented. Meanwhile, the Government is pouring the balance of £70 million into a factory making luxury sports cars for the American market in the middle of a world energy crisis, for the sake of 1000 jobs.

On 6 April, the Guardian reported that more than 1000 new investigators have been appointed to save an estimated £50 million in social security frauds, while at the same time it has reduced the staff of the Inland Revenue and Customs and Excise dealing with tax frauds, which cost about £5,500 million. As the number of security fraud officers is increased so less and less time is given by benefit officers to ensuring that claimants receive their full entitlement. And more and more people are frightened to seek their legal rights. Moreover, “home visits have been reduced and officers have been told not to help claimants to work out the intricacies of various benefits in order to decide which was the most advantageous”. Meanwhile, it is not known what arrangements the Inland Revenue have to reclaim the vast tax arrears of the Vestey business empire, which paid no tax for decades on its highly profitable chain of butcher’s shops.

In this paper, I am concerned with some of the ways in which religious language resonates with our sense of being a self, and especially a bodily self. At present we often tend to counterpoise language to the biological and we stress the conventional even arbitrary aspects of language. Religion, however, tends to give language a force that is comparable to that of biology. It is not only that words are creative in that flat which makes the world, or the word which Mary hears as the conception of her son. The whole pattern of the Judaeo-Christian tradition is a pattern only because similarities of meaning have historical force, as the sacrifice of Isaac is linked to the sacrifice of Christ for instance. Things of similar meaning tend to be taken as linked in actuality, either by historical causality, or by being seen as different manifestations of a basic underlying pattern. In general, religious language tends to give a real dimension to linguistic usage that we would tend to say is ‘only metaphorical’: T was in the seventh heaven’, ‘Christ is present in the Eucharist’. Those religious traditions in which the issue of such language being ‘only metaphorical’ has arisen, have rejected it as a sufficient account of what they mean. There is no question of our being able to translate religious usage into metaphorical or poetic usage in any easy fashion. But attention to meta even if we cannot always take it as comprehensible. Thus consideration of what it means to be ‘lost in thought’ may help us to understand a little more what someone may mean when they say ‘whether I was in the body or out of the body, I know not’.