Digging for Meaning in Isaiah 6 (ii & xx)

18th c. Russian icon of Isaiah

In my last posting, I started a series of posts on Isaiah 6 (here) by virtually discarding the questions of its historicity whether from a historiographical or a biblical literalist perspective.  What matters most, here at least, is not whether or not the events recounted in Isaiah 6 "really happened," whatever that means.  What does matter is the meaning(s) contained in the chapter.  In a sense, this second posting is a also the twentieth posting in the series I have been doing on Thich Nhat Hanh's LIving Buddha, Living Christ, which began a month ago (here).  Thich Nhat Hanh urges us to put away our dependence on beliefs and concepts and to focus instead on the living experience of our religious tradition.  He acknowledges the reality of the historical Jesus, the Son of Man, but for him the crucial reality of Jesus is as the Christ, the Son of God, who lives in us.  He would have learn, I think, from the story of Isaiah's vision for the sake of our own experience and practice rather than fixate on "notions" about its historicity.

Let me confess that this approach to a biblical story is also rooted in something of an old-fashioned postmodern perspective that proclaims the independence of the reader from the author.  Each reader takes over the written document, the "text," and makes of it what she or he will—to a degree.  In effect, the reader and the writer enter into a dialogue that is controlled by the reader.  It is important to note the complexity of the text as we read it today because it originated about 28 centuries ago and has passed through many hands and several renditions during its journey down the hallway of time to November 2011.

So, what I'm heading into here is a dialogue with the prophet (we'll assume it was Isaiah), the scribe (who wrote down this story), the generations of editors of the Book of Isaiah (who reshaped it into what we have today), and the various translators (who rendered the ancient Hebrew into contemporary English).    My task is to treat the story and its long history with respect but not pretend that I can find in it the meanings of the original, which has long been lost and to acknowledge, again, that Isaiah's original audience would have heard the story in different ways even at the very beginning.

What we have in Isaiah 6, in sum, is a story recounting a religious, spiritual, even mystical experience of an individual who claimed that he saw God.  I assume that this story began with the 8th century B.C. prophet Isaiah without feeling any need to prove the "fact".   It's easier to use his name than to keep saying "the author, whoever he (or she) might be." What was Isaiah's experience, and what can we learn from it for the practice of our faith today?  Those are my questions.  Put another way, I want to take this story away from the historians, the biblical literalists, and the "non-theist" agitators and recapture a little of the inherent beauty and truth of a story about one man's life-changing encounter with God.