Discussions of hermeneutics can be both complex and dull. But I do not want what I say here to be lost or passed over as irrelevant because I believe it is of crucial importance to the task of chaplaincy. Thus rather than just launch in with what might appear as abstract argument, we shall begin with a story, a true story.
When I was fourteen or fifteen my mother bought me a bicycle. I had, following my grandfather already exhibited a keenness for cycling, and now needed a larger bike. So it was that I became the proud owner of a Puch Prima 5 speed touring bicycle. I used it extensively until it fell out of favour when I learnt to drive. A number of years later, finding myself a postgraduate in Oxford, it came back into everyday use. I enjoyed the business of restoring it and in the process converted it to a 12 speed (oh the joys of a double chainring!). In this guise it was used regularly for four years and then less and less frequently as I was seduced by mountain bikes.
Not so long ago, my Puch having remained with me long unused in the garage, I decided to get it out a take it for a spin. To my delight, all that was necessary was a little air in the tyres and a little oil for the chain. But my experience of riding the bike was not at all what I expected, my bike was not the same; it had changed.
Now it is vital to my story that you appreciate that mechanically and materially my bike was exactly the same as in those Oxford days. Its material reality (give or take a few atoms of corrosion, and fresh air and oil) was identical. Yet the reality I experienced and could access was quite unfamiliar. What had happened? While the bicycle itself had not changed, almost everything else had. I was no longer the same person and the context in which bike was now being ridden had changed remarkably. In a world predominantly inhabited by hybrids and mountain bikes, commonly boasting 27 or 30 gears, my drop handlebared 12 speed now felt out of place. And because it now sat amongst a different set of signifiers, its meaning has shifted also. Thus even while my Puch pleasurably links me to a remembered past, it itself is not the same; its meaning has changed and so, therefore, has its reality.
What my story illustrates, I think, is this: there is no meaning without interpretation. Interpretation is not an added, external extra to reality; it is only through the act of interpretation that reality accessible, that is, capable of being experienced. Humans are symbolic animals, so adept at handling the semiotic process of interpretation, that we no longer notice what we are doing. It takes an experience of shock to jolt us into recognition of what is going on all the time of without our conscious recognition.
Another arena in which the same phenomenon becomes apparent is in knowing the history of something. A guitar pick genuinely used by Elvis Presley does have a different reality from an identical one bought from a shop. A car once crashed, even if repaired perfectly, is never the same.
It is, however, decisively not the case, that any interpretation will do. We are not here in the realms of runaway relativism. Applying the interpretive category ‘food’ to a metal tool will lead to disappointing thin results. Things appear to have a recalcitrant nature and will ‘fight back’ against erroneous interpretation. Rather there emerges a hermeneutic spiral between that to be interpreted and the framework of interpretation applied. And this takes its place in a mutually correcting network of interpretations that are tested, and revised, over time.
If it is through interpretation that we have access to reality, and if interpretation shapes our experience of reality, then, to understate the subject, interpretation really matters. It is nothing less than a quest for what counts as real. Sometimes this can take the form of a battle between competing alternatives. But it can also be a matter of living with alternative modes of interpretation that can comfortably sit alongside each other as complements. As in the famous optical illusion of the same picture that can be seen as both a young and an old woman, or Wittgenstein’s well-known image that can be viewed as both as a duck and a rabbit, interpretive frames need not always be a case of either/or. Thus, for example, it is possible to appreciate the remarkable description of the world provided by science and at the same time see that world as profoundly spiritual, as carrying intimations of the presence and activity of God (c.f. Marham, 2010, p.63).
The chaplain then, as the one who offers a theological vantage point from which to view, reassess and interpret the familiar, has an irreplaceable role to play in a university, especially one with a Church Foundation. Offering an alternative perspective is nothing less than offering the opportunity to see reality differently. To view the world as creation, to understand one’s life as gift and oneself accepted and loved, to discover an assurance that life triumphs over death, in other words to see the present in the light of the promised Kingdom of God changes reality. And this includes the reality of education. Not everyone, of course, will be willing, or able, to see reality in this particular way. The chaplain must therefore be prepared to experience something of the women and men of faith who lived as strangers within the Promised Land (c.f. Heb 11:13-16). But be assured; interpretation matters.
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