Tag: Metaphors

How’s Your Day?

Your every day has its beginning, when you wake up, and its end, when you fall asleep. So it is with life itself—its awakening is birth, and its falling asleep is death.
   So, in that sense, how’s your day? How’s it going? What stage are you at? What’s the weather like? Are you comfortable? Are you full of pep and energy? Are you exhausted, worn out, or discouraged. Are you so tired you want to go back to bed?
   Were life but one day, what time is it for you now? Daybreak? Early morning? Mid-day? Late afternoon? Evening? Night fall?
   You can’t answer all these questions, nor can I, since we don’t know what the day has in store for us nor how long it will last.
   Speaking for myself, I think it’s probably later than Evening, probably Night fall. I’m slowing down, in need of rest, and things don’t seem so very clear anymore as the day darkens.
   As I get older, many a night I’m fighting against falling sleep, less attentive to what I’m watching on television or reading. Strange behavior, no? Why not embrace the chance to rest and relax instead of resisting; why not trust God’s love and providence?
   It’s not that I’m afraid that my day is over—even though my behavior may seem to give the contrary impression. And, I really have no clear idea whether my day is done or whether the Lord has some night work for me.
   Life’s like that. Even slowing down, you never know how much more is still in store for you nor when the day will end.
   Anyway, as Shakespeare put it, we strut and fret our hour upon the stage, until we are heard no more.
   Truly, we each have a part to play in the plan of God, although we may hardly ever think of it or realize it. It’s only were we to see the whole work complete that we could see where and how we fit into the great design that includes all things and all of us.

   Longevity should not be our goal, and it is no guarantee of our successful development or contribution.
   Jesus was crucified in the late morning, barely mid-day, of his life—yet even so, he lived long enough to change the world forever.
   If we seek to be counted among his good followers and disciples our life may be rich, complex, and long or as brief as that of Jesus or even shorter.
   No matter! Length of time is not the main point. Your day may be relatively brief, but that’s all the service asked of you. And, even if the day seems long, hard, and maybe fruitless, so be it.
   The “well-done, good and faithful” servant, may have a short span of life or long. It matters not, only that “Thy will be done,”
   So, how’s your day? It’s a tough question to answer, for the day is still not over.
   So far, so good?
   Muddled and difficult to decide?
   Confused and confusing?
   Clear or clouded over?
   Satisfying or frustrating?
   Wonderful, beyond understanding?
   Too long or too short?
   You know, we don’t know and can’t know the final answers to these questions. We can’t accurately assess our lives while we are so busy living them. Our greatest achievement may have slipped by relatively unnoticed—or its day has not yet come.
   Not being God has serious disadvantages and limitations—but if we at least purr in his presence or wag our tail for joy while seeking to follow him wherever he leads us, we might just possibly, unlikely and difficult though it may seem, have a great day!


26 March 2023

Inactive, Dormant, Dead

…it is the hour now for you to awake from sleep. For our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed; the night is advanced, the day is at hand. Let us then throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.     (Romans 13:11-12)

   Sleep. It is a strange thing we do for more or less one-third of every day of our lives. It involves the suspension of voluntary bodily functions and of consciousness. It also is a vital necessity; without this resting, we die.
   Sleep also has metaphorical meanings. When we’re careless or not alert we seem to be allowing our vigilance or attentiveness to lie dormant. We also use the word to describe lying in death.
   In his letter to the Romans, St. Paul is sort of switching meanings of the word. He consider the living of our present lives as being asleep (night) and death as an awakening to the fulness of life (day).
   Further, still using this metaphor, he urges us to truly wake up—to cast off the lingering remnants of our night’s dreams and get dressed with the armor of light, ready to live the new, great day.
   It’s beautiful imagery. But, it’s not merely imagery, it’s the confidence, in faith, of our real destiny, of God’s ultimate plan for our lives.
   St. Paul is not giving a technical, scientific explanation of a kind of metamorphosis. But he is asserting what he believes to be a certain fact.
   It’s a familiar process, in a way. We know many things for certain, even if we have hardly any idea at all of how to explain them. We trust the knowledge, integrity, and truthfulness of others all the time.
   Some would relegate faith to the category of wishful thinking, imagination, or impossible dreams, but it, too, relies on the knowledge, integrity, and veracity of others.

   When St. Paul says, “the night is advanced; the day is at hand,” he’s talking about the end of our present, limited stage of life and about our future one, when we wake up to the fulness of life God has in store for us.
   Look, if you know you’re leaving very early tomorrow morning for a wonderful vacation, you’ll certainly try to have your bags packed today before you go to sleep and the clothes you’re going to wear tomorrow selected and ready.
   Shouldn’t we do the same when we remember that “our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed”?
   Why is it that we are so illogical about the awaking from the sleep that St. Paul is talking about? Any day could be our last day before we die—that is, any day could be the last day we are asleep until we awaken to the wonder of what God has in store for us.
   So, so to speak, always have your plans made, your bags packed, your travel documents in order, and everything in readiness for a great departure as soon as you wake up!
   If all you worry about and plan for are details of things you want or feel you need to do tomorrow that you couldn’t complete today, you’re actually just rolling over and asking to be left alone to sleep some more—and missing out on all that could have been, if only you had remembered what the really new day was offering.
    We know not the day nor the hour, but the end of the night (of our present lives) always may be sooner than we expect or have planned for. That’s why our best course of action is to do the best we can every day of our lives, and treat every day of our lives as though it were the last.


9 January 2022

Darmok

Growing up, I always was an avid reader of all kinds: fairy tales, fantasy, adventure, classics, murder mysteries, westerns, history. Probably my special favorite was science-fiction.
I was always drawn to science and its discoveries, and I really liked good science-fiction—that is, solid speculative projections based on what we already know. (Not fantasy at all.)
That’s why I loved the science-fiction TV series, Star Trek. It was engaging, realistic, had interesting character development, and was fundamentally optimistic about the future.
Many of its plots were almost parables. It was a very value-rooted show, basically imagining how, in spite of human weaknesses, humanity was gradually growing up and getting better and better.
Among its many successor TV series, Star Trek: The Next Generation really stood out for me. Although with an entirely new cast of characters, it continued in the same spirit and with the same challenging originality of the first series.
An episode in its fifth year was especially original and challenging: Darmok.
The plot line was unique: The crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise encounters an alien civilization and, no matter what, can’t communicate with them.
Their language appears to be unintelligible —it seems to be constructed of historical references to episodes and events of their unknown history and culture.
The two captains meet on a mutually unknown planet, are faced with common deadly threats, and ultimately begin to understand and collaborate with one another, even though the alien captain dies.
The Enterprise Captain Picard discovered why it was so hard to communicate—the aliens spoke entirely with metaphors.

We face a similar challenge in our religious communication. We use metaphors and references to episodes and events in religious history and culture that are becoming less and less familiar to the majority of people of our day. Our religious language can be almost unintelligible.
Here’s an example: St. Paul wrote to the Romans (6:3), “. . . are you unaware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” To understand what he means, you need to know that:
– “baptize”, originally a Greek word, means to immerse or bathe.
– John, called the Baptist, preached the need for a spiritual cleansing and renewal in preparation for the coming restoration and establishment of the kingdom of God that was symbolized by a ritual immersion and washing in the Jordan river.
– The early Christians retained a similar symbolic immersion and washing ceremony as part of rite of initiation to celebrate the decision of new recruits who had embraced the teachings of Jesus and wished to become part of the community of his disciples, the church.
– The plunging under water and rising from the immersion anew is also symbolic of Jesus’s having been plunged into death and rising from death anew.
Paul is communicating that a disciple of Jesus symbolically has been washed from and died to a former worldly way of life and now shares in the hope of resurrection to a new and eternal fullness of life.
We’re used to using many such religious metaphors—and we don’t always realize how hard it is for others to understand us!


16 August 2020

In Seventh Heaven

“In Seventh Heaven” probably doesn’t describe how we feel right now, even though we’re still celebrating Easter.
It usually means a state of perfect happiness, but, when you think about it, it’s literally a curious expression. It dates back a long, long time and refers to the highest level of heaven, the one where God and his highest angels are supposed to dwell.
In ancient times most people imagined the world to be almost endless but flat—its major divisions were the deep waters, the dry land, and the sky above. And, they had their subdivisions. The sky, the heavens above had seven levels, and the seventh level was the highest.
St. Paul the Apostle, presumably referencing a mystical experience he himself once had, wrote, “I know someone in Christ who, fourteen years ago (whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows), was caught up to the third heaven.” (2 Cor 12:2).
The non-canonical Second Book of Enoch imagines the third heaven as a location “between corruptibility and incorruptibility” that contained the Tree of Life and from which two springs flowed down into the Garden of Eden.
This notion of levels of heaven is found in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
In 1961, the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to journey to outer space and orbit the earth. Allegedly, Nikita Khrushchev commented about his journey, “Gagarin flew into space, but didn’t see any God there.”
That sarcastic statement has a very odd ring to it—it echoes the ancient concept of a flat world. We, too, sometimes still use very old, “directional” religious language:
God is “up” in heaven.
Jesus “ascends” (goes up) to the Father.
We sometimes exclaim, “Saints above!”

“Heaven” or “Hell” in the sense of a place of our ultimate destiny isn’t “up” or “down”; in fact it isn’t quite a “place” in the usual sense of the word at all—even though we imagine it that way.
What is Heaven then?
First of all, we really don’t “know” in the way we know something within our lived experience. Heaven names a state, a condition, a stage of life that is still relatively unknown to us and yet to be experienced.
In theological terms it is a “mystery”, part of the great mystery of God’s love and providence for each of his creatures.
All this is pertinent to how we describe and understand the last of Jesus’ earthly life, what we traditionally call his “Ascension”.
In the Bible, it’s depicted in various ways. For example, in the end of Luke’s Gospel (24:51) it says, “As he blessed them he parted from them and was taken up to heaven.”
However in the beginning of Luke’s Acts of the Apostles (Acts:1:9), there is a subtle but very important difference—it says, “When he had said this, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him from their sight.”
The key word here is “cloud”. It’s not a description of the weather; it refers to Jesus’ final appearance before he was gathered into the luminous cloud of the divine presence which our eyes cannot penetrate.
The imagery may vary, but the underlying fact and faith are the same—the last stage of Jesus’ earthly life was to be gathered into the glory of God.
So, don’t worry about the “direction” of your life so long as it’s the same—Godward!

17 May 2020

(Available in
Spanish translation)

A Mighty Fortress Is Our God

Metaphor  a figure of speech in which a term or phrase is applied to something to which it is not literally applicable in order to suggest a resemblance.

Without the salt of metaphors, speech and writing can be pretty bland. (This very phrase uses a metaphor.) What would great literature, poetry, Shakespeare be like without vivid and elegant metaphors? The very stuff of the Bible requires metaphors, for to speak of God is almost impossible without them.
And, here’s the rub: many of the biblical metaphors, and the religious discourse that uses them, no longer have the dynamism and clarity they had originally in their (different) culture and time.
Once they were striking to their hearers and stimulated a new way of thinking; for many of the hearers or readers of today they are archaic and have to be learned to be fully understood.
For example, the beautiful Letter to the Hebrews, so deeply rooted in Old Testament thought and practice, utilizes a fundamental and unusual metaphor: Jesus as the high priest of the new dispensation, forever, according to the order of Melchizedek.
The letter overwhelmingly uses the notion of temple sacrifice—a familiar and important part of Jewish religious observance until the destruction of the Second Temple—to explain and give meaning to the horrible death of Jesus on the cross—Jesus as the priest-offeror and at the same time Jesus as the sacrificial victim.
It was a meaningful and evocative metaphor for the early Jewish disciples of Jesus as they wrestled with the scandalous death of the Messiah, but for other Jews and Gentiles, without the insight of the metaphor, Christ crucified defied belief.

The inscription-charge on the cross said, “Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews”. Jesus’ followers saw profound meaning in the title (construing it metaphorically); his enemies were outraged by it (taking it literally).
Kings and queens still exist, and we’re used to history books and imaginative stories about them, but they’re no longer governing and ruling hereditary monarchs with great powers. So, even though the metaphor of king for Jesus is somewhat familiar, it still is of another era and needs interpretation to redeem its original force.
In Jewish and Christian tradition God is described with diverse other metaphors and images: e.g. warrior-leader, shepherd, cuckolded husband, maker, rock, father, redeemer, savior, judge, destroyer, eagle, vital force—as well as mighty fortress.
Some of our religious metaphors are transcultural and enduring, but many are dated and no longer so self-evident nor meaningful as they once were.
It’s like speaking with esoteric, technical, or archaic words—either the speaker explains them as part of the discourse or else fails to communicate effectively.
One of the challenges of contemporary evangelization is to find additional, new metaphors to communicate perennial truths more dynamically and effectively.
Regarding this, the first Star Wars movie is provocative: Luke Skywalker is taught about the Force by Obi-Wan Kenobi: “It is an energy field . . . It surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together.” Luke has to learn not to use the Force but to allow the Force to use him.
A modern metaphor for the Holy Spirit?


7 April 2019

Misunderstanding Religious Language

A few weeks ago, I was invited to talk to a group of visiting Middle East Muslim scholars, rabbis, and Christian leaders in the Lady Chapel of New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral about our common religious traditions and devotion to Mary.
It was hard to find the right words to use, because the three traditions have such different religious vocabularies.
What came to mind was the well-known quip of George Bernard Shaw about the British and the Americans being “one people divided by a common language.”
This refers, of course, to the fact that sometimes the British and the Americans use entirely different words for the same thing. And, sometimes they use the same word to refer to entirely different things.
A similar observation could be made about Jews, Christians, and Muslims: one family of believers in the one and the same God divided by religious language.
For example, Allah. Allah is simply the Arabic word for God (with a capital “G”). Prayers in the Arabic language, whether Christian or Muslim, naturally use this word. However, often you hear some Christians speaking erroneously about Allah as though this were the proper name of some kind of pagan divinity.
The Jewish Scriptures do tell of the one God revealing his proper name to Moses. This name is so holy that a devout Jew will never speak it, always substituting some other word, such as Lord.
Another example, Son of God. In the Jewish Scriptures, a holy person is sometimes called a son of God. For the first Christians Jesus was preeminently such a person and more. In the Gospels he is frequently referred to as the Son of God (with a capital “S”). Over the centuries, this has been the subject of much Christian theology and prayerful reflection.

Christians are so familiar with this expression and accustomed to hearing it that they have no idea how outrageous “Son of God” can sound to Muslims, and sometimes to Jews.
The Muslim Scriptures specifically state that God “has taken neither a wife nor a son” and that “God has no female consort, no son.”
Of course, this presumes that the expression “Son of God” means the product of intercourse between God and a human person — a very common idea in many ancient pagan mythologies. If it truly meant that, Christians would indignantly join Muslims in denying it as well.
On the other hand, Muslims always refer to Jesus as “Jesus, son of Mary.” Normally in Arabic the son’s name is followed by the name of his father. The way Muslims speak of Jesus testifies to their belief how special he is and that he has no human father.
Similar misunderstandings arise with Muslims when they hear Christians speak of Mary as the Mother of God, even though Muslims do have a great veneration for and devotion to the Blessed Mother.
The way we use religious words often stretches them far beyond their ordinary meaning. Struggling to speak of the mystery of the nature of God and his love, we lamely use the best words we can think of, even though they hardly can bear the burden of all that we wish to say.
Religious language soars beyond the ordinary. To speak of the things of God, we often need poetry more than prose. And in poetry it is heart that speaks to heart, more than head to head.

(Published
with some slight differences
as “Religious Language” in
one, 31:1, January 2005)