June 24, 2006

Metaphor

It has been said that literature is a metaphor for the writer’s experience. Life is story. We are the metaphors, the writers that tell it. Jesus was his own parable, a puzzling metaphor told so that only through the risk of faith could another understand and respond with one’s own.

God created “man” and created “him” male and female, a notion not all that easily comprehended [Gen 1.27] by the literal-minded. Like the song in “Damn Yankees,” you gotta have heart if you’ll make heads or tails of it. Metaphoric heart, that is. Without the other, the one with valves and pulse and rhythm, one needn’t bother to ask.

Mystery is altogether like this, especially the mystery this church of ours might well consider being more stewardly about. Remember, Jesus didn’t much care for the way Jerusalem treated the prophets. Let’s not leave him weeping over Columbus.

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