The Metaphor Made Me Do It

This world is a mosaic of metaphors.

And I like pretentious opening sentences.

Anyone who knows me well will know that I love metaphors – in fact, they may possibly be a bit sick of me constantly going on about them – but there's a good reason for my obsession. Metaphors make something make more sense, they make your understanding of it richer and more vivid, by showing you something else that's a bit like it. (Yes, English Lit friends, it is more complicated than that, but go with me for now.) And actually, we pretty much rely on them for good communication, especially when we want to describe something that was somehow astounding or powerful or strange:

You should have seen her, she fought so hard, I was so proud

He just looked at me, and there was that fire in his eyes, you know?

You've got no idea, she was like a mother to me all those years

And yes, I know that last one was a simile, but technically a simile is a type of metaphor! Anyway, they're really useful because some things are just hard to communicate in precise, technical language – we need to paint pictures instead. And that's so much more true when it's something that actually invisible – a feeling for example – or when it's something that's difficult to understand, like when you teach some weird mathematical concept by visualising it. Or does anyone remember being taught how atoms 'want' a full ring of 8 electrons, or a multiple of 8, so they react with things to get that? For 5 years of Chemistry at my school we always talked about what atoms 'want' or don't 'want', because it's such a helpful metaphor that we barely even notice it's there. 

We need metaphors, because without a good metaphor, we can barely understand or communicate anything worth understanding or communicating! And what's more – and this is why I'm so thoroughly obsessed with them – even God needs metaphors. In fact, he especially needs them, because he is on such a fundamentally different level to everything else we know – being, of course, the Creator of everything else there is to know – that actually, if he didn't use some metaphors it would be pretty much impossible for us to really get much about him at all. I suppose in a sense he could give us a kind of point by point, precise philosophical explanation of his being – although there's probably a decent argument that even the most precise language is just a different kind of metaphor for him – but if it was all just bare, technical fact I think we'd struggle to know how we felt about him, how we related to him.

So because God loves to communicate with us, because he loves to relate to us, he loves metaphors. And the Bible is full of them, rich, complicated, powerful metaphors, or sometimes delightfully simple ones. But he doesn't stop there – the whole world is scattered with these beautiful rays of metaphorical light, these bits of existence that show us a new angle, that paint a new picture of what God is like or what it's like to follow him. And again, anyone who's spent a fair bit of time with me will know that once you start looking, I reckon you can see these all over the place – and I love 'em.

But sometimes it goes a step further. Sometimes I find myself realising that I could create a metaphor – that I could do something that would be a picture of something that's true about God – and that is an offer that it's pretty difficult for me to resist. I moved house and job for seven months once, mostly because of the metaphor. So I'm going to do a few little blogs now, about some of the things that the metaphor made me do. I hope you enjoy them.

To Be Continued...