Trees, Wells, Forks in the Road

By Bobby Neal Winters

Yogi Berra is supposed to have said, “If you come to a fork in the road, take it!”

If you go over that sentence, parse it carefully, and analyze it, you will wind-up frowning with your whole face.

I understand it perfectly however.  That is to say, I’ve got my own interpretation. “If you come to a place where there is a choice to be made among multiple alternatives, make a decision and proceed apace. Don’t suffer from paralysis by analysis.”

That way of saying it is more amenable to pedantry, but it doesn’t pack the rhetorical heft of the Yogiism.

True, there might be other interpretations of what Yogi said, but that just makes it better. 

That’s because there are ways of thinking and there are ways of thinking.

Right now we are in the age of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.  They like to call it STEM. We do love our acronyms in this age.  We love the precise, mathematical language.  We love to reason with axioms. We love to reason with data.

And it’s good. Logic and math, science and technology, have cleaned up the water supply, cured smallpox, given us central heat, provided us with little boxes to stare at over dinner instead of talking to family members.

It is a good language to speak in.

But it’s not the only language.

There is another language that is ancient and far more ingrained in us: let’s call it the language of stories.

We could also call it the language of dreams, but that is going to turn off my audience.  You hear “the language of dreams” and you heave a sigh so heavy as to knock down trees and take the roofs off houses.  

“OH. One of those,” you say.

And I get the point.  The people who talk only in the language of dreams are every bit as tedious in their own way as those who speak only in the language of logic.

I understand because I have heaved my share of heavy sighs.

Yet, I’ve come to admit there is something there, and my reason for saying so is that it has improved my reading of the Bible, it has enhanced my enjoyment of literature.

I’ve said it’s the language of stories and the language of dreams, but perhaps it’s best described as the language of symbols. Let me give you an example.

In “A Christmas Carol,” Dickens describes Scrooge as being “as solitary as an oyster.”  Certainly, an oyster is alone within its shell. Oysters don’t share shells.  But the oyster is a symbol. The shell is hard; it offers protection; it keeps the oyster from being hurt. Scrooge has cut himself off from the world because he doesn’t want to be hurt. He’s been hurt by people before, and he doesn’t want it to happen again.

All of that, in a symbol.

We run into all sorts of symbols in the Bible.  Let’s keep it simple to begin with, and if you have the sense of humor of a middle school student, I ask you to put it in a box for the next few minutes.

Trees and poles are masculine symbols. I don’t think I need to put a finer point on it as it were.  Wells and bodies of water are feminine symbols. That is fairly clear as well, but in addition to whatever else you might be thinking, water is the stuff of life. It gives life just as women produce life.

In this way of thinking, the feminine is creative and the masculine is structured.  The two are necessarily complementary; they are parts of a greater whole.

In the Old Testament, you have a lot of men meeting their wives at wells. If we carry this to the New Testament, it brings a new lens to the story in the Gospel of John where Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at the well.  We later read that the church is the bride of Christ, we could interpret that the church is made up of sinners such as this woman.

When Jesus is crucified, the women are at the foot of the cross. The Cross is a masculine symbol, and the women at the base are a feminine symbol.  From this we can interpret that something new, a new world, is going to be born from this.

As I’ve said, this is not everyone’s cup of tea. But it’s real. It has opened up a new level of interpretation to me. And the thing is, it’s not new. This is the way the Rabbis interpreted scripture before Christ; it’s the way the Church Fathers interpreted scripture.

And it’s an Art: I make no bones about that. It’s not STEM; that’s for sure. But keep an open mind, not to let your brains fall out, but to let some beautiful light in.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.