By: Jim Taylor

  Every couple of years or so, our choir sings Gordon Light's song "Cana Wine." The chorus goes:
Cana wine, Cana wine,
                        working on my heart and mind,
Flowing free, filling me,
                        'till I lose all sense of time.
Cana wine, pure and fine,
                        from the fairest of all vines!
                        Come sit down, and we'll share
                        some Cana wine.
           It may be Gordon's most delightful and insightful tune, about the intoxicating experience of an encounter with Christ.
           But every time our choir sings it, I have to offer a windy explanation about metaphors and figures of speech, to forestall the narrow-minded literalness that hears the song's words only as promoting alcohol consumption. I've done this talk, by my recollection, five times now.
           And after my explanation, someone typically says, "Why didn't he just say so?"
           He didn't, because language is not just to convey information. Reduced to bits of pure information, language looks something like this: 00010100 10010101 01001010 10101001.
           If all you want is information, go read accounting statements.
           Language also conveys feeling, emotion, passion. That's probably its primary purpose. Good writers move people; poor writers merely inform them.
           Language achieves that purpose by juxtaposing ideas and images. By using metaphor, simile, alliteration, onomatopoeia - all those high-falutin' words you hated when your teacher made you dissect poetry in high school. Which is unfortunate. Because the techniques of poetry are the tools writers use to stimulate your imagination to sing along.
           To create this particular song, Gordon Light wove together two biblical stories.
           In the first, Jesus was attending a wedding in the village of Cana, in Galilee. The host ran out of wine for his guests. So Jesus turned some jugs of water into the best wine those people had ever tasted. About 120 gallons of wine, according to some biblical scholars.
           So it's just possible that a few guests may have suffered hangovers. But that's not what the song is about.
           In the second story, Jesus described himself "the true vine." I'm sure he didn't mean that he was made out of wood. Or planted in the vineyard below Grey Monk Winery.
           Calling himself a "vine" is a metaphor. A figure of speech. A way of conveying something more than mere fact. In this case, it illuminates the relationship Jesus had with his disciples.
           By blending the two stories, Gordon Light invites us to imagine the spirit of Christ coursing through our veins, altering our perceptions, freeing us from inhibitions, intoxicating us with sheer joy - the way wine sometimes does.
But not with the purpose of getting stoopid drunk, until nothing matters. Just the opposite - it's about starting life with a fresh outlook, with new eyes, new insights, so that everything matters. It is (to use evangelical language) about being "born again" with a new spirit.
           Joseph Joubert (1754-1824), a French essayist, wrote that "Imagination is the eye of the soul."
           Language without poetry is dead.
           So is religion without imagination.

If you have comments or questions about Jim's column, write to him directly at jimt@quixotic.ca