LUCY IN THE SKY WITH DIAMONDS: MEANING VS. SIGNIFICANCE
Picture yourself in a boat on a river with tangerine trees and marmalade skies;
Somebody calls you; you answer quite slowly – a girl with kaleidoscope eyes.
Cellophane flowers of yellow and green, towering over your head;
Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes and she’s gone.
Lucy in the sky with diamonds…
Somebody calls you; you answer quite slowly – a girl with kaleidoscope eyes.
Cellophane flowers of yellow and green, towering over your head;
Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes and she’s gone.
Lucy in the sky with diamonds…
According to John Lennon, who penned the song, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” was inspired by a picture drawn by Lennon’s little boy of a friend named Lucy. But suspicious observers, noting the initials “LSD” in the title, claimed the song described a drug trip Lennon experienced.
It would seem that Lennon, being the songwriter, is the most qualified to tell us what his own words mean. Unless he was lying, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, is an imaginative child’s fantasy and nothing more.
What, then, of the idea that “Lucy in the Sky” describes a drug trip? Might it remind an observer of a hallucinatory experience? Might it accurately describe someone’s drug trip? It might, and some might relate strongly to the song in that way. It is thus a significance originating outside of the song in the listener which is brought to the song. It is not the meaning of the song.
The meaning of a thing and significances that may be found in the same thing are two different things and the distinction between the two must be maintained and not confused. What a word or thing means is not necessarily the same as “what it means to me”.
I recently wrote about hands raised in worship. Since ancient times raised hands meant the symbolic lifting of something to God, usually a prayer. I noted, however, there is no difficulty in applying this meaning to songs offered to God. That is what raising one’s hands during a song means.
What concerns me is when people respond: “Well, to me raising my hands means…” and then go on to describe something other than lifting an offering to God. What it “means” to you may be a “significance” for you, but it is not the meaning of the raising of the hands. To infer “What I feel a thing means to me is what it means” is to confuse the meaning of a thing with its significance for you.
I am less concerned with whether or not we raise our hands in worship (a trivial matter) than I am with this method of interpreting reality (a crucially weighty matter).
Significances that different people may find in the raising of their hands are personally significant, but they are not what raising the hands means.
The important thing is how closely a significance correlates with the true and original meaning of a thing. The closer the correlation, the greater the validity of the significance. Fewer, looser, and more distant connections between meaning and significance indicate may suggest that we are missing the Spirit’s point in the Word altogether and may be merely following – or perhaps misled by -- our own hearts.