I am working on two sermons this week, one on the Emmaus road story, the other juxtaposing (or sort of) Matt 13: 44-46 (buried treasure and valuable pearls) with 2 Cor 4:7 - 8 (treasure in clay pots).  These are familiar stories, and therein lies the danger, I come at them with a whole heap of preconceptions, and notably some mental images that are thirty to forty years old.

'The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field, which a person found and hid again and out of joy goes and sells everything he or she has and buys that field' (Word Biblical Commentary translation, p395.)

'The kingdom of heaven is like a pirate's treasure chest, filled with gold and jewels, half-buried in the middle of a field,where a jolly man, clad in mid-twentieth century attire, is walking.  Spotting the treasure chest, he goes to investigate.  Realising what he has found, he looks around to check no one else has spotted it, hastily buries it and rushes off to buy the field which is, conveniently for him, for sale.' (Catriona's mind)

Recognising that this mental picture was dominating my thinking, I began to ask questions of my mental image:

How did the treasure chest get there?

Surely it belonged to the pirate (!) or land owner, not the finder

Was the field actually available for purchase?

How come the owner of the land was oblivious to the existence of the treasure?

What was the jolly man doing in the field anyway?  Was there a public footpath (as per my childhood image) or not?

In asking myself these questions, I knew they were not relevant to understanding the parable, which was about the worth of the treasure not the ethics of its acquisition, but they did remind me how blindly I often read familiar passages.

Deconstructing mental image is one thing, filling the void is another.  And actually, although I know that a first century story cannot have implied a pirate's treasure chest, I'm not sure there is anything fundamentally wrong in imagining it as such, so long as that mental image does not preclude me from seeing more that is 'hidden' in the story.

'The kingdom of heaven is like...' Well, what image might work in our context?

After yesterday's funeral, one of the mourners discovered she had lost her poppy and began to search for it.  Whilst I thought this was a bit excessive, it clearly mattered to her, and I was pleased when she found it.  She explained that each year she kept her poppy to put on the Christmas tree, recalling a young man from our village (to whom she was, presumably, related) who died in Iraq nearly three years ago: this year there would be three poppies.

A powerful, but quiet remembering.  Not overwrought or mawkish, just a red flower nestling amidst tinsel and fairylights as a relative remembers.  I was reminded of the words in Matthew's gospel as Mary received a gift of myrrh: 'a sword will pierce your heart also.' I imagined a shudder running through her young woman's body as new life and hope were already tinged with death and fear.

I am sure that the woman who rescued her lost poppy, and carefully smoothed its battered petals, will enjoy her Christmas celebrations; I am struck by the simple symbols of remembering that will prevent it being a denial of the realities of the broken world into which a Saviour is born.

I made it to the end of the Heidegger chapter!  Hurray.  At that point I opted to call it a day, and save Gadamer for my text reading slot.

Towards the end of the chapter, I found a sentence that was worth pondering, both in relation to biblical hermeneutics and hermeneutics of historical artefacts:

'Prior to every interpretation, the hermeneutical manifests itself as "the bearing of message and tidings."'

Jean Grondin, Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, New Have, Yale University Press, 1994 p. 104

citing Heidegger, On the way to Language tr. Peter D Hertz, New York, 1971 p. 29

Whilst not every 'message' or 'tiding' is 'good news,' and there presumably can be kakangelion (is there such a word?) as well as euangelion, this simple phrase seems to point to something important in interpretation - that it is concerned with releasing/realising the message (meaning and doing perhaps) of a text (or object, film, image, piece of music, set of data, etc).

Hermeneutics as euangelion - as gospel - liberating the message of hope - seems a good thing.  Maybe it balances, in a good way, the ubiquitous 'hermeneutic of suspicion' I have heard of to the point of tedium.

I was so going to be a good girl this evening and read a whole introductory chapter on Heidegger's contribution to philospohical hermeneutics.  And I tried so hard to make head or tail of 6 whole pages before I gave up trying to discern from context the meaning of one word central to making sense of the whole chapter.  And then I gave up and opted for Wikipedia for a starter for ten!  Clearly, and demonstrating I maybe grasped 0.01% of the words I read, my "fore-understanding" was inadequate - I did not have a subsumed interpretive framework to understand the German word, never mind its purpose: I didn't know what 'Dasein' meant or did, any more than a Martian would have known what 'door' (an example of fore-understanding cited) meant or did.  Having re-read the six pages three times and still not found a definition, or even a hint, I feel vindicated in my stupidity, but please nice kind author in an 'introuction to...' book, please define your words at first useage!

For the record, wikipedia and online dictionaries think it means 'existence' or 'presence' - a kind of 'being there' - and it probably doesn't translate very well into English.  Philosophy is hard enough when I understand the plain meaning of the words.  When I'm trying to get my head around how people understand understanding and interpret interpretation if I don't understand the words what hope have I got?!

Now I'll be good and attempt a few more pages before bedtime!

Over the weekend a new piece of civic art appeared in Dibley.  As a sculpture, I like it, though alas the local un-culturate have already climbed over it and adorned its facial features with lipstick.  It is, I suspect meant to mark the start of the village - except that it's about quarter of a mile too far south, being located on a large grassy triangle where it is indeed a prominent (potentially crash inducing) feature.  So what is it, you cry?  It seems to be a polar bear, a bear anyway, pinning a man's jacket to a tree stump, and is ostensibly the legend of how 'Dibley' got its name; it is also the biggest example of etymological twaddle I have ever encountered.

There are various versions of the story in circulation, but basically a bear, possibly a dancing bear kept in the cellar of the pub opposite my house, possibly called the first part of the real place name, managed to trap a man in a bearlike-embrace (another alleged possible source of the first part of the name).  In order to escape, the man wriggled out of his jacket - and so the name of the village was born.  Or not.  Not IMHO.

Fact or fiction, and the attractiveness to me or vandals of the statue aside, one does wonder how much was spent on this piece of carved stone and whether there might have been a more purposeful use to which at least some of it might have been put.  Afterall, the twaddle legend will always be with us...