Tollbooths and Tummy-Dwelling Jesus

I'm plagerizing myself to offer something I've written previously. Enjoy some thoughts on metaphor.

Tollbooths and Tummy-Dwelling Jesus

Three-year-old me in my booster seat, buckled into the middle bench of the minivan, watched my mom quizzically as she threw quarters into the tollbooth coin-collecting bin. I heard the change jingle down into an unknown abyss before we drove onto the New Jersey highway.

“Where does the money go?” I asked.

“To keep up the roads,” Mom replied simply.

I kept quiet. And scowled. I remember vividly being thoroughly annoyed with the adult world’s stupidity. Why would they use money to keep up the roads? They could just use dirt ! What a lot of wasted coins buried under the highways!

Children don’t get quite enough credit for their reasoning skills. They think more logically than adults give them credit. Their tendency to interpret metaphorical speech as literal makes for amusing anecdotes, but it also creates valid critiques of things which adults take for granted. Talking with a child certainly means taking metaphors seriously.

My younger brother, Brian, had metaphorical confusion that was more in the realm of the religious. He was three or four when he “asked Jesus into his heart.” Shortly after his happy invitation, we went to an IMAX showing of a documentary on the human heart. A tiny camera traveled through an athlete’s bloodstream, giving the audience an inside-out view of the circulatory system.

The camera came to the valves and ventricles of the heart. Brian’s eyes widened.

“So that’s how Jesus gets in there!”

So here’s my question: Is it a bad idea – or even harmful – to use metaphorical language to teach about God? Is there a serious danger in using metaphor to speak of God to children or people not versed in Christianeese?

My answer, which I’ll flesh out a bit below, is a resounding “No.” I’d rather have slightly confused but metaphorically-thinking students and children than a bunch of little systematic theologians who think they can put God in a box.

Metaphorical thinking is entirely possible – and certainly beneficial – for young children. The woman giving the children’s sermon in my church once brought in several items from her garden: a rock, a stick, and a seed. From the way she introduced her mini-lesson, it was clear to the adults in the congregation that she wanted the children to understand that the rock and stick were dead things but that the seed was going to live and grow. (I don’t quite remember what point of theology this was going to elucidate.)

“What can you tell me about this rock?” she asked the children, holding up the small gray stone.

Christopher, a bright three-year-old, piped up. “Well,” he declared loud enough for all to hear, “some people say that God is like a rock because he is our solid foundation and won’t ever change and he’s really hard.”

Though I’m not quite certain what to make of a God who’s “really hard”, Christopher was right on track. He was thinking metaphorically, thinking about how we can use concrete items to help us understand the divine.

For most of history, educators have understood the value of metaphor as a teaching tool. Aesop’s fables, fairy tales, and object lessons have a much longer history than the type of pedagogy which insists on giving children “only the facts”. The poetry unit in lit. class becomes boring when students have to study the rules of form and structure instead of meditating on the ambiguity and mystery of the poet’s images.

Why do we increasingly teach about God in the same ways that we mis-teach poetry? Why do we teach faith as though it were merely about facts, memorizing questions, and spitting out answers? Isn’t faith about relationship, about restoration, about worship, about the holy and ineffable? How can we touch on any of those aspects of faith using formulaic catechisms instead of psalmic and prophetic imagery?

Speaking in theological metaphor allows us to attain what John Keats calls “negative capability.” He defines that as “being capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

It is not that fact or reason are unnecessary or unimportant, but reliance on these aspects of theology alone leads to God-in-a-box thinking. When everything is black-and-white (and do please note I’m not saying that nothing should be), people end up in either the super-liberal or super-fundamentalist camps. Their truth has to be expressed literally , in scientific proofs or “inerrant” words.

But is this even how Scripture is written? Certainly, Scripture speaks about Truth. But it does so recognizing mystery (1 Corinthians 15:51; 1 Timothy 3:9). It does so in language purposefully ambiguous so as to recognize the holiness and otherness of God (see Ezekiel 1:1-28, where the prophet sees not God, but “the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the L ord .”) Scripture speaks of Truth in parable (note much of Jesus’s teaching) and poetry packed with wordplay and metaphor (one-third of the Old Testament is poetry; when Paul gets really excited, he bursts into snippets of early church hymns).

God is holy and other; God is beyond all our expression. God is mysteriously incarnate in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, and we can hear his words and relate intimately with the transcendent L ord through the cross and empty tomb.

This Jesus has promised to be with us. How are we to contemplate that? How are we to embrace this promise? Is it really so terrible for my little brother to understand Jesus as physically living in his tiny heart, there swimming in his red and white blood cells? Perhaps he is closer to Jesus than the ivory-tower scholar who spends his time writing long treatises on the concept of transubstantiation in twelfth-century literature.

Metaphor incarnates knowledge of God into our lives. It makes the ineffable tangible, it allows us to focus on the areas of Truth that are too fuzzy – or, rather, too majestic and glorious – to be defined by systematic theology.

Some of the most beautiful passages in Scripture are also the most metaphorical. And the most scandalous, the most prophetic. The book of Hosea is a shocking metaphor (and all the more appallingly poignant because God describes the metaphor through Hosea’s life ) of God as cuckolded husband and Israel as adulterous wife. The passion of God – his jealousy and his love – are expressed in very human, even sensual ways: “I [God] will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her… I will betroth you to me in faithfulness. And you shall know the Lord ” (Hosea 2:14, 20).

The images of Jesus as salt, light, bread of life, living water, temple, good shepherd, and vine (particularly see the book of John for most of these metaphors) have historically been and still are some of the most moving and beloved depictions of Christ. They are metaphors which we dwell on individually and hold to simultaneously. Jesus is both salt and light, but meditating on these ideas one at a time gives us different (though not conflicting) understandings of the truth of his identity.

In Matthew 23:37, Jesus refers to himself in a surprising simile: as a chicken: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brook under her wings, and you would not!” This particularly maternal image is powerful and stimulating – and comforting. It is an image which, by its unconventionality, shocks us into the knowledge of the truth of Christ’s love.

Metaphor reveals that which is hidden and allows the listener to, as poet Kathleen Norris writes, “relax, listen, and roam.” But it is most valuable in its dangerous and shocking forms. Prophets knew (and know) that the necessary point of good metaphor is to reveal and to introduce new ways of speaking about timeless Truth.

Norris asks thoughtfully, “Isn’t ‘new life’ the point of the religion? And don’t we get there by a mixture of experience and metaphoric exploration? Not by ‘adding’ or ‘taking away,’ but by continually reinterpreting what we’ve been given? And aren’t metaphors part of that given, allowing Jesus to describe the kingdom of God in terms of mustard seed and yeast?”

How are we to teach about God? Do we start by giving children Aquinas’s Summa Theologica ? Or by reading them The Chronicles of Narnia at bedtime?

Will they remember the 107 questions and answers in the Westminster Shorter Catechism? (And, even if they do, will they learn about what it means to be in relationship with the Creator through such a repetitive exercise?) Or will they be more likely to memorize the question-and-answer about the lion Aslan in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe ?

[Lucy:] “Then he isn’t safe?”

[Mr. Beaver:] “Safe? … Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”

I’ll take dangerous Aslan over the systematized pseudo-Jesus of modernist thought any day.

Metaphor makes us uncomfortable when it means to exhort us to action and brings us peace when it means to show us God’s love in new ways. It is a catalyst to meditation and worship. It is confusing and truthful.

And important.

My youngest brother, Chris, knew that the metaphor of Jesus “in his heart” was so important that he could thoroughly disturb his nine-year-old evangelist sister by misusing it. When Chris was three, I’d ask him if Jesus was in his heart.

A mischievous smirk would spread across my stubborn baby brother’s face. “He’s not in my heart,” he would explain, horrifying me. “He’s in my tummy !”

When taught through metaphor from an early age, children are better able to explore the possibilities of “negative capability.” Faith is understood as a process, worship is viewed as alive. God – outside-the-box – is known more intimately and complexly.

Jesus was in Brian’s left cardiac ventricle and Chris’s tummy. Both of them have grown into solid (like a rock? I’m not sure) young Christian men; I doubt that their contemplating the imminence of Christ in their bodily organs did them any harm.

I, on the other hand, still have trouble believing that using my laundry quarters is the best way to keep up the roads. But I’m just meditating on the metaphor.

Quotes from Kathleen Norris are taken from her book, The Cloister Walk , 1996.