Metaphor images the divine

This column wraps up several of my previous columns focusing on the essential role metaphor plays in our imaging of the Divine.

We have seen the continuing Christian tradition dating explicitly from the second century with roots in both the New Testament and in Philo of Alexandria, a contemporary of Jesus. We are taught that the essence of God is eternally unknown to us, but that we do know God in God's energies manifested in the totality of creation and, supremely, in humankind. How to reconcile this intriguing paradox?

My proposal is through the analogy of juggling. We juggle the essential unknowability of God with God's energetic knowability, i.e. the negative and positive poles or the non-image and the image of the Divine in an eternal balance of creative tension. This dynamic births the full truth that is ever evolving.

To break this positive/negative flow by grasping in one hand any image of the Divine (We've got it!), results in an unholy idolatry, or worship of a static image, which leads to intolerance and violence. This is a failing too well known to religions. The locking into the other hand and the adamant refusal of any valid image, engenders cynicism and despair.

The truth lies in the interplay, the artful juggling of mutually creative opposites, which alone produces the "electricity," or better, the divine, creative energy born from the inexhaustible fertility of the ineffable womb.

Here, Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Hinduism join chorus in mystical harmony that expresses itself in strikingly similar terms. Are we aware of this? Hinduism, in particular, has much to teach us. She reverences lila or the metaphor of divine play in which, as Pratima Bowles puts it, "creation means a spontaneous self-projection of the divine, out of sheer joy and fullness of being, into multiplicity in order to savour itself in manifold ways--and this creative activity is called sportive because, like a sport, it is its own purpose and indulged in for the pleasure of the activity itself--and not for an extrinsic purpose." In this glorious metaphorical light, "God is an artist and creation is a work of art," which humans made to the image and likeness of God, are called to join.

Shiva Nataraja, or Shiva Lord of the Dance, is a revelatory image unique to Hinduism. It is a divine and human creativity accepting all natural processes, dissolution and creation, as the lila of the Lord--"mysterious in nature, but not devoid of intelligence and love."

In this cosmic dance, Shiva juggles the polarities, uniting them in a wondrous paradox. But the question arises: how can we love a God, who essentially is beyond human comprehension? Theologian Father Francis Tyrrell points out that the "absolute mystery of God is the goal and objective toward whom our every act of knowing is ultimately pointed. Therefore, his (sic) reality is what our knowing and loving mean and intend, even while our conception and thematization of him are doomed to be eternally inadequate." Hence, St. Thomas Aquinas recognized the paradox and rose above it in his hymn, in honour of the Blessed Sacrament: Adoro te devote, latens Deitas (I adore you devoutly, O hidden God.

Tyrrell adds that St. John of the Cross intuited that "so Other was the One whom he encountered than any reality he could categorize that (he) felt compelled to call him 'Nothing' (Nada)." Tyrrell comments that this bold address "is the response of the mystics in almost all traditions."

In agreement, Pope John Paul II warned the faculties and students of Pontifical Roman Universities in 1979, that "the fundamental conviction with which theologians must approach their work" is that "whatever they may be able to say about God, it is always a question of the words of human and therefore of tiny finite beings, who have ventured upon exploration of the unfathomable mystery of the infinite God."

All of which brings us back to Cambridge biochemist and theologian Arthur Peacocke's modest definition of metaphor, as "a figure of speech in which we speak of one thing in terms suggestive of another," never exhaustive. We are constantly spurred on in our search for new images and metaphors born from discoveries made in our own unfolding time and place.

These beliefs sprung from West and East require the respect of mature mediation, not an easy accomplishment in our world of increasing hustle and bustle, but well worth the cost for the wisdom they bear.

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