I am convinced that God often speaks to me through my obsessions.  No, not through an obsession like my need to have a root beer float every day in the summer.  I am talking about my obsessions to understand particular things — like my current obsession with the word hermeneutics  (which, by the way, auto-correct wants to turn into “therapeutics”, a linkage I find totally amazing).

This is normally the place where I would put a link to some wonderful article explaining the idea of hermeneutics, but I decided instead to give you my own definition, mostly because of the fact that when I searched the term I found some pretty scary definitions.  The truth, however, is that there is nothing that scary about hermeneutics — we all use the ideas contained in that more academic term every single day, when we do anything, anything at all, to make a choice about something or when we ponder the idea of what is meaningful in our living.  Turns out, hermeneutics does not just apply to our reading of the Bible and our faith.

It is, however, most often heard in settings where the Bible is studied as an academic discipline, or maybe in a general philosophy department.  The funny thing is, however, that I cannot remember ever discussing the idea of hermeneutics as an overall thing at any time during my seminary education.  So, here I sit, obsessed, and reading everything that I can find on the topic.

The best metaphor that I can find for this thorny academic word?  Lens.  Or filter.  Or maybe mirror.  Filter or lens, those are the best.  You see,  this fancy $10 word (my mother’s language) really just means the way in which we view the world around us — a view that is colored by our life experience and the context and time in which we live.  Everything about us becomes part of that lens — our family of origin, the community in which we were formed, the things that have happened to us, the places we have visited and the places we have lived — I think that you get my meaning.