Insight And Metaphor

Understanding is achieved through struggle. It is gained when the seeker braves some chaos armed with proven meanings, a willingness to embrace the confusion, and the patience to discover a metaphor for its inner pattern. Consider this struggle to understand: Michael has an active mind and a playful imagination. He likes to know and understand. He does not like not knowing. Not to know is uncomfortable. I usually know when Michael is uncomfortable or bewildered over an idea: he will bite into a confusion like a bulldog with lockjaw. Not angrily, mind you, but with intense interest and determination to taste a mystery and "know."

I was teaching in a Sunday school class with a mixture of children ranging from 1st grade to 6th grade. Michael had just finished 4th grade. Our class was a summer-long learning lab centered on the theme of God's good creation and our partnership with God to care for t. There were centers around the room that encouraged discovery about the world through several simple science experiments, art projects and learning centers. Michael liked to learn about the planets, magnets and motors. On one occasion we began the class with a prayer. Several children contributed by thanking God for their pets, family and life. One child prayed that God might make her cat well (it had been injured in a fight). After the prayer, I noticed Michael had that bulldog look about him. He went to the library shelf and looked up something in the dictionary, went to the Bible search table and found a passage he wanted, then sat. Near the end of the class, he was still sitting. I sat with him and asked what was on his mind.

I don't get it!" His voice was raised. "God has laws. You get in the way [of them] and you can get hurt, like April's cat. Why should God fix her cat? I had a dog that got run over! He died. If I had prayed, would God stop the world and fix him? My mom said that accidents just happen and God is sad when they happen, but He can't change the rules every time a bad accident happens. If that cat gets cured, I'm gonna be mad! I like to pray, but I didn't think it was supposed to be magic. And if it is, does God only care about the things that we pray about? Mom says praying isn't like a Santa List."

I listened a few minutes (Michael doesn't have trouble expressing himself). Then, I asked him what he had found when he looked in the books earlier. "The dictionary said prayer was an 'earnest request.' Mom says it is talking to God. When I pray, I tell God what's up, you know, what's oon my mind. Sometimes I tell him I am glad, or scared or, mad. I ask for his advice and stuff, but I don't beg. The Bible passage you showed us was about Moses arguing with God in that tent. This is confusing." The class was over and we agreed to talk more about his confusion at a later time.

Next week at prayer time April thanked God for her cat getting better and Michael sat silent as she told about the trip to the vet and the bandages on her cat's leg. When April finished telling her story, Michael simply said, "It was the Vet." He still had the bulldog look as he went to the magnet center.

About five minutes later I heard a yelp from among the magnets and Michael called me urgently. "Look here!" He was wide eyed. Michael shook some iron filings out on a sheet of construction paper. "A mess," he said pointing at the black shavings. Then from underneath he brought a magnet up against the paper. The shavings shifted into the pattern of the lines of the magnet's magnetic field. "All together!" The bulldog was gone. In its place was a pint sized Moses after an encounter with the burning bush. I was still in the dark about what he saw on that paper. "What does it mean Michael," I asked?

I am the iron filings. The magnet is God. When I pray, I bring my messy thoughts into God's magnetism. I share them, I share ME and the more I talk, the more I get straightened out, the more...." His insight still did not have words to carry it. "Harmony?" I suggested. "YES! and shape, and I feel like me!" he affirmed. "God is my magnet!"

"What about April's cat and your Dog," I asked? "The vet and the car," he said. The Vet healed the cat and the car killed my dog. I'll talk it over with God and let you know," he teased. The cured cat and dead dog were not the problem any more. Michael had discovered prayer for himself. Understanding is achieved through struggle. It is gained when the seeker braves some chaos armed with proven meanings, a willingness to embrace the confusion, and the patience to discover a metaphor's inner pattern. Michael understood.

Metaphoring

At the heart of the understanding process is this thinking strategy: the compulsion to compare, contrast, and make metaphorical connections between what we are familiar with and what we seek to understand That was what happened to Michael. It happens to all of us as we learn and comprehend. The patterns and meanings we already know serve to trace an outline around a new experience making it accessible to our world of meaning. Call it "Metaphoring." It is a cognitive program that kicks in as soon as we begin to receive the world sensually at birth. It serves us all our lives making conceptual learning and modelling possible.1

It happens like this:

Imagine that you are a child that has never experienced a dog. You have stuffed animals called Bear, Beauty (a horse) and George (a monkey), but you have had no experience of a living, wiggling, jumping dog.

Then, one day you are made a present of a puppy, a real one. Your brain takes in the phenomenon "looking" for a memory that can be attached to it. The puppy is the size of the stuffed animals you have. It has the color of the monkey, the eyes of the bear, and the coat of the horse. It has four legs and a tail. Perhaps it is one of these. But it moves by itself, like you do! It makes its own sounds, it eats, makes messes, licks and can bite. What is it?

You are told that this stuffed animal is a Dog. You then are requested to give it a name. Like so many pet names (Sergeant, Happy, Spike, Killer, Fluff) a metaphor is chosen to define the pet. When you jump, run, make noise and messes, your parents call you "Little Dickins." This quality seems to be at the heart of this dog, so it becomes "Dickins." You are the metaphor for the Dog. The other stuffed animals participate in the identification of the pet as well. Dickens belongs to the class of "pets" to which the stuffed animals belong.

The new experience is understood as it is identified as being LIKE something already in memory. As you grow older, Dickins will serve as a metaphor for new experiences. What the dog is to you was built on memory and will become a new building blocks for future understanding.

So natural and ever-present is our urge to make metaphorical connections that we can do it with things that are, on the surface, nonsense.2 For instance, look at see Figure 7.1. Which shape looks like "maluma" and which looks like "tukatee?" Almost everyone asked connects "A" with "Maluma" and "B" with "tukatee."

The sounds are metaphors for the shapes and vice versa.

This is a powerful cognitive strategy. We seemed to be born with it already in place. I call it "Metaphoring" because of the comparing/contrasting that is at the center of the process. When a word or description is exactly like a new experience, it is a definition or an equality (eg., Human death is the irreversible secession of all brain functions), not a metaphor. But when this new experience is almost like a memory but on a different scale, it is the metaphorical connection we can call an analogy. (Death is the "Big Sleep"). When this experience or idea shares similar qualities but are different in obvious ways, it is a metaphorical connection we can call an allegory, figure, image, parable, or symbol (Death is but" The quenching of a flame").

The word "metaphor" comes from two greek words: meta, meaning 'with,' 'over,' 'beyond,' and 'on top of,' and about a dozen other spatial ideas; and pherein , meaning to carry. Literally it means to be carried over or on top of. (As with so many of our wwords, it is a metaphor of a concrete activity applied to an abstraction).

We constantly use physical metaphors to build ideas which are not physical. For me to say to my daughter "you are my sunshine" is to join my experience oof Sarah with the experience of sun light. I have "packaged" my experience and memory of her into a single name, Sarah. I then affirm something of what she means to me by comparing her to sunshine. The comparison and joining makes it simple for me to use aspects of the physical, experiential world to illuminate the meaning of the meta physical world. In fact, most (maybe all) of our analogies and metaphors find their beginning in physical experience and link the physical world with the meta physical.

We humans can't help but make such comparisons where the world of ideas get attached to things that can be experienced with the senses. Our language is strewn with examples: An unsophisticated, innocent young person is "not dry behind the ears."

If two people seem to like each oother and get along well together, they are said to "cotton to each other."

A person who seems to discourage joy and celebration in others by his or her presence is thought of as a "wet blanket."

Sometimes the metaphor may originate from a time too far removed from our present experience and the connection gets "fuzzy" but the meaning remains.

I like this one:

"Three sheets to the wind." This means, of course, falling down drunk, reeling from too much indulgence in strong drink, somewhat more tipsy than "half-seas over." Like many other common expressions, the phrase dates back to the times when ocean navigation was entirely by sail. But in nautical use, a sheet is not a sail, as landsmen are accustomed to suppose, but the rope or chain attached to the lower corner of a sail by which the angle of the sail is controlled. In a strong wind the sheet may be loosened and is then said to be "in the wind," flapping and fluttering without restraint. If all three sheets are loose, as in a gale, the vessel staggers and reels very much like a drunken person.3

In each of these examples, a more abstract or elusive idea is made accessible with the help of a comparison with familiar, concrete experience. Look back over this chapter at the bold face words. Literally and by themselves, those words usually refer to something concrete. In the context of the ideas of the paragraphs, they serve to bring meaning to a concept, or depth to an experience. We cannot communicate or understand without the help of metaphors.

With a few simple experiences serving as building blocks and with rudimentary strategies for seeking and storing meaning serving as mortar, each new person begins to build great structures of meaning at birth. The perceptions and sensations of every moment recorded in the brain of an infant are like bricks stacked and cemented one on another to form names, descriptions, categories, ideas and models. These meaning structures first refer to concrete things and experiences. As the child experiences more and gets a more complex model of the world, he or she uses these words to describe more intangible experiences. It is a developmental process well documented by behavioral scientists like Jean Piaget and linguists like Julian Jaynes. The process is more like building a pyramid as opposed to paving a road. The structures of meanings are cumulative.

The Power of Metaphor

So what? What difference does it make for us to know of this process of meaning making? Simply this: If we are about the task of assisting others in the building of ideas and meanings that model God's creation, then let us do it in concert with what each of us does naturally when we think and understand. After all, this metaphoring process is powerful. Let us tap into that power.

Metaphorical thinking is powerful in at least these ways:

1. Metaphors and analogies clarify and illuminate chaotic experiences.

2. They are powerful tools for communicating experiences to people who do not know what we know.

3. They serve to direct attention and rearrange value.

4.They can effect physical and psychological health.

5.They can help put experiences into perspective.

6.Metaphors facilitate cognitive leaps, creative insight and intellectual growth.

7.They gather and "chunk" lots of information oor an unwieldy experience into a whole that is more easily remembered and used.

8. They are meaning building blocks that can stand in for full and "complete" knowledge until the fuller knowledge is discerned.

Consider each of these in turn along with some teaching-learning implications for religious education.

Metaphors and analogies clarify and illuminate chaotic experiences.Michael pushed back some of life's chaos with his new found metaphor. The magnet comparison shed for him eye opening light on prayer. Cognitive scientists are coming to see that instead of being peripheral to problem solving, this metaphoring strategy is at the core of thinking: we naturally think and decide based on analogy rather than formal logical operations of deduction or induction.4 We can use logic, but we come to understand something more often by metaphoring. The natural way is for an old model or memory to give meaning to a new experience.

We naturally thrash around searching for relationships between the known and the obscure that are either qualitative ("My love is like a red, red rose"), quantitative ("More laughs than a barrel of monkeys") or a combination ("I'm feeling higher than a kite"). When we discover these parallels, something of the old helps us grasp the new. For Michael, his metaphorical discovery brought order back to his religious world.

Order making metaphors do not have to be words or memories. Nor do they have to be parallels that can be easily described. They may happen as unutterable "resonances" from art, music, nature or from who knows where. I offer this personal example: My father died in the fall of 1992. After years of heart trouble, smoking and alcoholism his old body just quit. I had grown closer to him in the last years of his life since he had gotten sober and began to help so many others into the twelve step program of AA. At the funeral, though, I was detached. I didn't feel much of anything except annoyed at all the euphemisms and cliche expressions of sympathy. Actually, I think I was just a bit angry. Angry and what else, I didn't know. Now and then someone's authentic expression of sadness and loss would get to me, but mostly I was unaffected.

What I experienced after the funeral was a general sort of dis-ease and irritability at nothing or no one in particular. I was just anxious and fretful. I remember not being able to concentrate for very long and not being able to get excited or enthusiastic about anything. That was my condition for days on end.

I was travelling home from a meeting one night about two weeks after the funeral. The radio was tuned to a classical station that was playing Joaquin Rodrigo's "Concierto De Aranjuez" for guitar and orchestra. The middle movement is a slow adaqio filled with the passion and simple minor tones that Andeluvian Spain generated and Rodrigo reclaimed. The plaintive music caught me unprepared. It was as though the emotional pollution that had circulated in me since my Dad's death was filtered, purified and poured over me like standing under a bucket. It was sad and sorrowful music that gathered my sorrow and me with it in a bath of tears and sadness that made me stop the car, listen and cry. The emotional chaos of the past weeks had found form and the limbo I had been in vanished as the orchestra and guitar found me and called me.

That music was the metaphor for grief. This amount of grief was new to me. I needed some instruction, some clues about what it meant. I don't think words could have purified my muddle, only this music. What is grief like? It is like the adagio from Rodrigo's "Concierto De Aranjuez." What did it do for me? It cleared out my emotional chaos and allowed me to miss my father. I know I had to do some flailing and thrashing around with my confusion. I am grateful that the music was in my way so I had to stumble on its redemptive meaning.

Metaphors can reach us through all our senses, can be delivered through any medium and touch our minds at any level. So, religious education ought to promote some form of "thrashing around" by providing three conditions for pilgrim learners to wring religious meaning from confusion. What I have in mind is not very neat. Actually, classrooms, groups and events that offer this metaphoring space may seem only a step or two this side of chaos. But that's alright, for the shining example of creating and shaping meaning is the first chapter of Genesis where God's expression of meaning was fashioned out of void and chaos.

We can promote the necessary thrashing around and discovery by guaranteeing three conditions be present in a learning setting: 1) the space for discovery, 2) opportunity for reflection about those discoveries and 3) a spiritual intersection where life concerns, religious ideas and metaphors can collide. These conditions will need to be prepared with the age and abilities of the students in mind, but every one of us, regardless of age, need them to get on with meaning making. Consider each one:

1. The space we provide can be any where. Like the Tabernacle that was pitched each time the Hebrews found a new grazing land, so we educators need that sort of mobility that allows us to pitch a classroom anywhere. And when it gets pitched, we are the ones responsible for outfitting it with the tools, toys, texts, props, costumes, nature, crafts, media, stories, music, art, excursions and artifacts that provide rich resources for discovering metaphors. Thus we create a space for metaphorical discovery.

2. In addition to the space to discover, learners need opportunities for reflection wherein a person can think about and test insights. I am again influenced by Dr. Ross Snyder. Although Snyder did not develop his approach to religious education from cognitive science, his insights about metaphors and conceptual learning are consistent with this approach. In a collection of his papers published by the World Council of Churches in 1961, he described an approach to youth ministry that had meaning making and modelling at its center. The papers were collected as The Ministry of Meaning.5 Dr. Snyder described three essentials to reflection and meaning making: The Dive, Mating and Celebration.

A Dive is a strategy that encourages a student to think about a fresh insight alone. For Snyder, the role of the teacher at this point is to encourage the strategy with tools and leading questions that might reveal the depth of the idea or experience. He suggested that these "dive" times be occasions to write, compose, draw, sculpt, mold and construct the emerging idea so it might be physically put out in front of the student as a fresh metaphor or work of art.

The second step in the reflective process Snyder calls "Mating." It refers to the strategy of connecting individual ideas and insights with those of other people. It is a group process of show, tell, and revise. The skilled teacher will encourage the kind of interaction that allows critical thought in the context of acceptance as each student reveals a newly created part of their world to others. The courageous student will welcome the comment and reflection of others.

Finally, suggests Snyder, learners ought to have the chance to lift their metaphors, insights, commitments and unanswered questions in celebration. So the teacher needs the skills of priest as well, encouraging students to sing, bless, and dedicate their worlds of meaning to what is at the heart of all meaning. Take a look at a sampling of reflective techniques in see Table 7.1. Let it remind you oof other ways of encouraging reflection.

3. The third condition that can facilitate metaphorical religious thinking is the creation of a "spiritual intersection" where life concerns, religious ideas and metaphors can mix and collide. I have in mind classes, rooms, groups and experiences that brings students and their daily joys and struggles in juxtaposition with religious culture. This meta-physical intersection could become dangerous, threatening, or bewildering. Thus, it is essential that it take place within the care of redemptive community. Where grace, love and respect are the norms of relating, groups can be like hothouses for sprouting ideas and associations. In the context of such an redemptive ecology, reflection can happen unmolested by fear and authoritarianism.

Metaphors are powerful tools for communicating experiences. The second way metaphorical thinking is powerful is as a way of revealing to others what is on our minds. It helps us communicate. We experience life internally and privately. Yet we crave the opportunities to spread out our private worlds of meaning so our companions can know what we know. Two things make this possible: common biology and shared culture. Because groups of people share history, language, symbols, experiences, media, gestures and the like, there is a collective world of meaning to start from. Because we share the same biology, we share an abundance of experience. But the culture and experiences we share serves only as a table upon which to spread our inner worlds. We still must constantly discover ways to make the details of our lives accessible to the ones to whom we choose to reveal ourselves.

Metaphors can be as sublime as a Japanese Haiku or as obvious as a slammed fist on a table. They can be as beautiful as a love song or as ugly as spitting. They can be pictures ("I felt as old as Whistler's Mother"), diagrams ("Follow the blue line on this map."), visual imagery spoken or sung ("Like a Bridge over Troubled Waters"), sounds ("an explosion of laughter"), formulae ("I hear you 5X5"), smells ("The place smelled like a barn."), emotional metaphors ("angry clouds"), mathematical metaphors ("As simple as 2 + 2"), spatial metaphors ("Down in the dumps"), social and role metaphors ("as close as sisters"), etcetera.

The more of culture and history we can expose ourselves and students to, the more metaphorically literate we will be, and the more effectively we will communicate what is on our minds. It is a matter of exposure. It is a matter of offering opportunities for a student to try all sorts of metaphorical expression. Encourage students to put their budding thoughts in a picture, sculpture, diagram, a piece of music, a gesture/dance, into poetry, or in a story. Their ideas will become clearer and their ability to share them will be more effective.

Metaphors serve to direct attention and rearrange value. Ideas, groups, institutions, and people can become so identified with a metaphor that the metaphor develops into a symbol or emblem for the idea, group, institution or person. We are surrounded by them: A country's flag, the gesture of the peace sign, a cross, the Star of David, a raised fist, a company logo, a team mascot. Most times the symbol has a metaphorical reminder in its form that calls to mind some of the meaning of the thing it represents. For example, the cross reminds the believer of the crucified and risen Christ. The cross is also a metaphor for the willingness of God to suffer even death to demonstrate love and grace. It is both an emblem and a metaphor.

Human beings have been symbol makers for as far back as archaeologists can reach. Some of the oldest artifacts with which humanity has littered history have been emblems and tokens of faith. These faith metaphors have made it possible for us to make affirmations and declare loyalties without having to say a word. We pack into a single thing both ideas and passion.

Instantly, these metaphors for family, clan, religion, nation, company, or cause communicate a culture, focus attention and can motivate action. With the sight of a single gesture, flag, or sculpture, a person's world of meaning is brought to mind, takes center stage and pumps our bodies with the chemistry and vitality of devotion.

The more we can communicate to students the "language" of emblems and symbols, the more we assist students to evaluate them, and the more we encourage the fresh creation of symbolic metaphors for what they believe; the more we do these things, the more deliberate and faithful will be their commitments.

Metaphors can affect physical and psychological health. Twice a week a small group of cancer patients gathered in the parlor of a church in Westwood. They called their organization "We Can Do." Their philosophy was simple: to support each other in the battle to defeat their disease. One of the weapons in their arsenal for defeating cancer was "imaging." Their leader would guide the patients in meditations wherein they would imagine the cancer cells to be enemy invaders trying to destroy the body. In a typical imaging exercise they were instructed to imagine agents of the immune system, white blood cells and healthy tissue as soldiers passionate about defeating the cancers in an all out war.

The results of this kind of daily imaging is unmistakable. From personal testimony of members of groups like "We Can Do" coupled with experimental studies of imaging it is clear that there is a link between thinking and healing.6 The link is not unclouded or predictable, but preliminary studies show that imagining is a hopeful tool for restoring health. Using simple metaphors indeed effects the immune system positively. Hope really seems to be the dynamic part of the connection between health and thinking. The Metaphor is a tool which allows the patient to experience hope. Some oncologists believe that the nature of the metaphor is important and so they fashion their guided metaphorical journeys to be very close to the way the immune system works.7

The implication is that if we want our classroom and educational events to carry the redemptive, healthy virtues of trust, hope, freedom, purpose, care, love and vitality, then the environment ought to carry the signs, stories, symbols and metaphors of those virtues

Metaphors can help us put experiences into perspective. When I was twelve, my family and I moved from North Carolina to California. In Arizona we stopped at Meteor Crater near Flagstaff to view the hole left by a meteor which had slammed into the desert a few thousand years ago. I was overwhelmed by it's size as I looked over the lip down into the center of the half mile deep bowl. I will never forget it.

Two years later we returned to North Carolina for a visit by plane and flew over the crater. The pilot alerted us to it and banked our DC9 for a good view. There below about the size of a quarter was my awesome crater. I was underwhelmed and I will never forget it. My internal experience of the crater depended on the perspective I had on the phenomenon.

Like that crater experience, the metaphors we use to describe our world and share it with others put the experience in some sort of perspective. If I describe our place on the earth as like that of an ant in central park I am implying something of the immensity of the world. But if I describe it as like that of passengers on space ship, I imply a perspective of altogether different proportions.

The metaphor can put an idea into a perspective. Perspective is no small matter when it comes to the way we model the world. How many of us hold a theology of God's transcendence because we were so often told that God was "King of Kings, Lord or Lords, Mighty Counselor." Or, on the other hand, to what degree does our model of God reflect the more intimate metaphor of "Shepherd," "mother," "Father," "Hen," or "Suffering Servant?"

Both perspectives carry something of the truth of God's nature. Therefore, it is not fewer ways of describing oour worlds of meaning that students need, but more. I am glad to have memories of the awesomeness of the Meteor Crater as well as its insignificance. Both are part of the reality of that place. Likewise, I am glad to have images of God's transcendence and immanence. Both are part of the reality of God. Since the metaphors we use have the power to shape perspective and meaning, let us use them liberally as a part of the learning environment while encouraging students to find their own perspectives. Let us also be careful that those perspectives do not encourage racist, sexist, or other bigoted perspectives to which humanity clings.8

Metaphors facilitate cognitive leaps, creative insight and intellectual growth.

A nineteenth century German scientist named Friedrich August Kekule von Stradonitz devoted his professional life to deciphering the molecular structure of solvents and new chemicals. He had hopes of manipulating them to synthesize other compounds. Benzene had him stumped. He could not imagine how six atoms of carbon and six atoms of hydrogen could join to make a chemical with the properties of Benzene. One dead-end after another kept him from making sense of the compound. Then one evening he settled into a chair in front of a fire to relax. In a half sleep, he dreamed. Here is his account of what happened:

I turned myself toward the fire and sank in a reverie. Atoms danced before my eyes. Long chains were firmly joined, all winding and turning with snake like motion. Suddenly, one of the serpents caught its own tail and the ring thus formed, whirled before my eyes. I woke immediately and worked on the consequences the rest of the night.9

The dreamed metaphors of the snakes allowed him to make a cognitive leap that could explain how carbon could hold on to other carbons and hydrogen at the same time. Subsequent experiments proved him right and from that metaphorical insight, the field of organic chemistry developed with blinding speed. Albert Einstein turned metaphoring into a strategy for imagining how the universe works. He called the strategy "Gedanken experiments," thought experiments. In one such thought experiment he imagined he was riding a train at the speed of light passing others and asking if they could see him. Now I don't pretend to understand the intricacies of the Special Theory of Relativity, but Einstein's playful metaphorical stories of light, trains, mirrors and such opened up new ways of thinking about the universe. The result was an explosion of creative thinking and insight about curved space, black holes, the "big Bang" and time travel.10

Philosopher Mark Johnson explained that the way the metaphor informs understanding is that the "entailments" (the necessary attributes) of the familiar half of the metaphor (what Julian Jaynes calls the "metaphier") get transferred to the new half (Jaynes calls this the "metaphrand") with all the implications of the first.11 Take the example of the first line of the 23rd Psalm: "The Lord (metaphrand) is my shepherd (metaphier)." Shepherding and the role of the shepherd is descriptive of something essential about God. In Judeo-Christian experience, realizing this association can be a liberating leap of faith. These meaning associations can advance our understanding instantly. Think about Michael again. He will never again think of prayer in his old way. He reached a new intellectual level helped by the stairway of a metaphor.

When these insights accumulate, not only does understanding jump ahead, but the way one thinks grows forward as well. Piaget's description of the way people develop cognitively is consistent with this pyramiding model of intellectual maturation. According to Piaget, a person's intellect develops through six stages of growth.12 The drive to accomplish this climb of increasingly complex structures of thinking is genetic: we are born ready to develop intellect. But, to make the climb successfully, one needs good health, rich metaphorical, tactile and sensory experiences, chances for challenge and discovery, and an ecology of emotion and spirit that is encouraging.

Metaphors gather and chunk lots of information or an unwieldy experience into a more manageable chunk of meaning.13 To say that I weigh 190 lbs is a symbolic representation of what it feels like to lift me. If you really want to know my weight, let me sit on your shoulders. I can represent that experience wwith the figures "190 lbs." I can use that representation or analog in conversation as a way of compressing the experience of my heaviness into a single expression. "190 lbs." crunches the experience of my mass into a manageable chunk. In theology, I can speak of God as "Tri-une," or as a "Trinity." By so doing I have crunched my experiences of God as incarnation of Love in the flesh, God as creator and judge, and God as spiritual presence into a single word. The word can then be used in liturgy, songs and discourse in a more manageable way than the description of the term.

In religious institutions we use all sorts of metaphors and analogies to collapse big ideas and large amounts of information into something "portable." They are crunched bits of meaning that can be experienced as metaphors without having to unpack them of all their implications. Yet at some time in a person's spiritual journey they must be unpacked and repacked personally like a sky diver taking responsibly for his or her own parachute. Consider the list of "crunched" meanings in table 7.2. It is nowhere near complete. What meaning chunks are essential to you? Make your own list.

Metaphors are meaning building blocks that can stand in for full and "complete" knowledge until the fuller knowledge is discerned. Here are two examples:

Freud's idea of an unconscious mind that does not speak but shapes our thoughts and actions was a provisional attempt at describing something true about personality and thinking that could not be directly observed. The "Unconscious" has served as a helpful metaphor for the elusive aspects of human mentality for the century or so since Freud. It has served as "place keeper" until clearer analogies and descriptions were found. Today, Freud's metaphor may be thought oof as standing for the many cognitive operations (especially the operations of the right cerebral cortex) we carry on while we concentrate on our conscious thoughts.14

Likewise, "light Waves" was the way physicists described the propagation of light from source to eye. It served as a place keeper while better descriptions could be found for how light worked.

Today, another more accurate metaphor has taken its place. Physicists now speak of packages of photons or "quanta" of light moving through space. This metaphor seems to be a more useful way of characterizing light.

The same thing happens in our faith thinking just as it does in physics or psychology. Thanks to provisional faith metaphors, the people of the past have sent on their tentative understandings of God and the world. Let us not receive them so dogmatically that we fail to notice the "commas" implied in words like "Creator," "Lord," "Master od the Universe," or "Rock of Ages." That which is at the heart of things can only be suggested in our languages. Let us encourage each other to continue the work of imagining God and the world in metaphors but with comas instead of periods.

Notes for Chapter Seven

1 J. Jaynes,The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1976): 52-56

2 M. Hunt, The Universe Within (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982): 292

3 C. Funk, A Hog On Ice (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1985): 168

4 Hunt, 142

5 R. Snyder, The Ministry of Meaning (Switzerland: Youth Departmentsd Council of Churches, 1965)

6 M. Samuels, N. Samuels, Seeing With the Mind's Eye (New York: Random House, 1975): 209-236

7 M. Samuels, N. Samuels, 209-236

8 S. McFague, Models of God (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987): 181-187

9 Hunt, 274

10 H. Gardner, Creating Minds,(New York: Basic Books, 1993): 104

11 Hunt, 291

12 J. L. Phillips, The Origins of Intellect: Piaget's Theory (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1969): 26-51

13 J. Anderson, Cognitive Psychology and its Implications (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1986): 69

14 C. Hampden-Turner, Maps of the Mind (New York: MacMillan, 1981): 102