Friends,
On Monday my phone jangled out the announcement of an incoming tweet from Alameda County’s emergency notification system. “It’s gonna be cold,” warned the words on my phone’s screen. “It might even snow.”
I walked outside and had a look at the two volunteer daffodils that, over the weekend, had popped up in my back yard. They were in full and glorious bloom. To be looking at a blooming flower while thinking about the possibility of snow is something that should have surprised me, but it actually made me feel normal and comforted, because I was experiencing winter and spring at the same time, and it felt like a good metaphor for what happens to me in life. More than once I have been happy and sad at the same time. I have been homesick while relishing adventures. I have been lonely while enjoying much-needed solitude. I have experienced a deep connection to God while at same time doubting God’s existence. All of this makes me feel a little bit confused and out of whack, but then we live in a world where daffodils bloom twenty four hours before the onset of a February freeze. So maybe inconsistency, juxtaposition, and contradiction are the way of the universe. Maybe the way I live my life is in harmony with creation. Maybe I’m not the crazy one.
This is why religion needs to speak in the language of metaphor: I’ve known for a long time that people’s lives are marked by emotions, ideas and inclinations that don’t fit into tidy, linear categories. We all sit with feelings that confuse us, but simply stating that truth does not have the power to comfort me in the same way I am comforted by the daffodil that bloomed too early and the storm that came late. Metaphors are messy and can fill in the gaps between logical propositions.
But no metaphor is perfect, and that’s the rub. I have found that some folks get uncomfortable with metaphors that aren’t perfect, that don’t fit an idea described with a hermetic seal. So, for example, a person might say that my winter daffodil is not a metaphor for mixed emotions or conflicting inclinations (as I understand it) because the daffodil only bloomed early thanks to global warming, and that what I have observed is not a lesson in health but a description of a dying planet.
Which might be true, but even so it still can be a metaphor, because the beauty of metaphors is that they don’t have to be perfect. They are an approximation we can use so that when we speak of spiritual mysteries we don’t have full knowledge of what we cannot fully know anyway.
So here’s a tip for a healthy spirituality: use imperfect metaphors and be patient with those metaphors that don’t describe everything completely. If someone uses a metaphor for God (Father, Mother, Creator, Ground of our Being or whatever) that is not perfect, don’t sweat it because no metaphor for God is perfect. Just respond by using your own metaphor that also is imperfect. If someone speaks of the new life one finds through faith they may say something like “Christ is Risen!” Or, “I’ve been baptized by fire!” or “I’ve been born again!” These metaphors are imperfect, but that doesn’t make them bad, we just have to add metaphor to metaphor so that we can do a better (but never perfect) job of describing mystery.
So three cheers for metaphors, and three cheers for the daffodil in winter that reminds me that springtime and February can abide in the same back yard.
God’s Peace,
Ben