After the Rupture: Choosing to Heal, Essay II, Part B

Since 2006, Meijer Gardens has been home to Spanish artist Jaume Plensa’s “I, you, she or he…,” a gift from Fred & Lena Meijer. The work includes a composition of three figures seated on boulders, whose shells are made of stainless steel letters.

AFTER THE RUPTURE:

CHOOSING TO HEAL

The Reconstitution of Self, Spirit, and Sacred Language

[ A Post-Lacanian Analysis ]

ESSAY II, PART B

by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT-5

We are beings shaped by language

yet never finished in the process.

Selves which are continuously shaped

by new grammars of presence,

beauty, and worth.

- re slater & chatgpt

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II. Constellations of Meaning: How Language Re-Weaves Reality

When the symbolic order cracks, meaning does not vanish - it rearranges within us. What once felt like a linear path of understanding becomes a sky of scattered stars loosed against our imagination and feeling of lostness. And yet, if we stand long enough in the dark, we may begin to see patterns emerging which we hadn't noticed before.

In a phrase, "meaning, after rupture, becomes constellational."

Not a single story.
Not a single system.
Not a single map.
But a field of relations that only becomes intelligible when viewed with patience and openness.

Language itself shifts from being a rigid structure to a flexible topology.
Words become vectors for new relationships and resonances.
Sentences become pathways.
Concepts become clusters of possibility rather than containers of truth.

In this sense, meaning isn’t given - it takes on new patterns unseen before.

It is woven across our relationships,

our memories,
our sufferings,
our beliefs and hopes,
our everyday choices to stay present.

It is why healing requires a new language.
Trauma, pain, and suffering shatters our internal coherence;
but healing can begin to reassemble it -
but never back into the same shape as it once was.

Practically, this shows up as:

• finding new words for old pains
• reframing memories to make space for new concepts rather than constriction
• speaking and acting differently toward those we love
• discovering that meaning is not inherited but co-created
• seeing that our identities are not fixed but relationally composed

Constellational meaning allows the self to re-organize without requiring a return to what was.

It gives us permission to say:

“I am not who I was -

I am becoming a new me;

that the loss(es) I have experience -

are not the end but the beginning;

without those losses I would not have grown -

not have been rebirthed;

that this new configuration of presence -

of experience, is a major new beginning;

that with new language, it may be reassembled -

with care, with (divine) help, with patience;

that the loom on which healing is woven -

can be the loom of which imagination begins.

- re slater

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III. We Are People Formed By Language

(With direct reference to the sculpture images above)

Stand before a human figure composed of letters -

its limbs shaped by language,

its torso a lattice of phrases,
its entire being porous, permeable,
open to the world.

This is not a metaphor.

This is the beginning

of a new anthropology.

We are, in a real and profound sense,
reimagining linguistic beings.
Our memories are narrated.
Our emotions are patterned by vocabulary.
Our identities are forged in the stories we tell and are told.
Our futures are imagined through the syntax we can hold.
The self is not a fixed essence.
It is a linguistic ecology of growth
and transformation.

 We are continuously shifting fields of:

• inherited phrases,
• cultural scripts,
• personal metaphors,
• affective tones,
• narrative fragments,
• relational articulations.,
• lived experiences.

And after rupture, this ecology becomes fertile again:

• Rigid identities loosen.
• New articulations sprout in the softened soil.
• New metaphors grow roots.
• New forms of meaning take shape like small green shoots.

This is where healing begins:
not by repairing the old self,
but by giving language enough space
to assemble a new self, a new purpose,
a new destiny.

In practical terms:

• A person who once carried guilt and shame learns a new vocabulary of personal worth.
• Someone raised inside fear discovers a grammar of erased boundaries and new courage.
• A survivor of religious harm reconstructs a sacred lexicon that no longer grants wounds.
• A politically fragmented citizen learns to speak in relational, not combative, rhetoric.

Identity becomes less a fortress
and more a conversation.
Less a monument of impervious stone
and more a movement of flesh and blood.

This is what the sculptures above reveal
as they sit in conversation with one another:

We are made of words, ideas, concepts -
that we may transition from old architectures
that had once imprisoned our past selves -
to be released to relearn how to speak in new
forms of presence and experience; in new words
of Renewal. Rebirth. Genuine transformation.

Words of freedom and liberation unbound from
past rigid words which could no longer bend
nor understand. Which refused life and
liberty not only to ourselves but to those
around us.

We are no longer caged birds captured -
but free to fly, to wander, to explore and
examine as we deconstruct our past
and reconstruct our present moment
towards more fulfilling, imagined futures.

We are ever-and-always people of language -
bound in script and verse, song and event.
Cautioned to be careful in transformation;
to use our words aright, that they be good,
nurturing, generative, and healing.

- re slater

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IV. Re-Spiritualizing Language: Theopoetics After the Break

Every spiritual tradition begins with language that once had felt alive, that had once made sense - and then, over time, hardened and encaged. Words meant to liberate begin to constrain, become rigid. Metaphors meant to open the heart had become treated as literal claims about a unreal reality.

It is here, when our sacred vocabulary ossifies, that we either flee to rebuild or suffocate.

For without ruptures and living wounds, nothing remarkable can become possible;
but with misgivings, heart break, senseless living and beliefs,

may come the fertile grounds of learning to re-speak the sacred again.

Not discarded. Not returned to. But re-spoken.

This new language may be held in the language of theopoetics
(as shown here in these sections)...
Theopoetics is not a decorative form of theology;
it is the recognition that sacred meaning
is always a living articulation
that breathes, shifts,
deepens our conversations
with one another;
that adapts to new forms of understanding,
refusing rigidity -
because the divine itself is never rigid,
caged, imprisoning,
but always relational, freeing, unbinding.

A reconstructed sacred language must:

• honor complexity without drowning in abstraction
• open the heart without denying intellectual integrity
• move with good science rather than against it
• speak of God without reducing the divine to a cosmic taskmaster
• offer presence rather than fear
• cultivate liberation rather than hierarchy

In process terms:
the sacred is not elsewhere -
but ever in the relational field.

In metamodern terms:

faith is not certainty or cynicism -

it is a felt oscillation between awe and inquiry.

Practically, this looks like:

• replacing punitive spiritual narratives with relational ones
• reconstructing prayer as attunement rather than continual petition
• speaking of God as presence, not as severe authoritarian personhood
• adopting a sacred grammar rooted in healing, justice, and co-creation
• allowing oneself to return to mystery without returning to fear

Re-spiritualizing religious language becomes the site where the divine is encountered:

Not as dogma but as presence.
Not as a claim, but as a relationship.
A whisper.
An attunement.
A resonance with reality.

And it is from this renewed sacred vocabulary
that healing deepens and may generously spread -
through families, communities, and eventually closed societies....

~ continue to Part C of Essay II ~