Some Comments On Metaphor

SUN., SEPT. 19, 1982, 5:21 AM
FARM, STUDY

You knew, o son, that you were to get up early this morning and seek a teaching, even though you have another legitimate task that should be done this morning. You were awake before the alarm, as you should have been. It surprises Me, however, that you didn’t consider, last evening, that I would use this time to comment on the experience that is more relevant to Me… the evening spent on study about the Psalms… and about metaphor. I do have some words that you should find interesting.

“I am a metaphor”. You heard this idea, even as a title, so let Me shed some light on this first. It is true in the ultimate sense that I am everything you can name or describe. This is My world, and I AM in all of creation. So, “I am metaphor” says that, whatever metaphor is, I, truly am it… and “I am a metaphor” says though I am Essence, though I am Reality, I also am a Metaphor. It is simply another description of Me… the Lord God, Jesus the Christ, and the Holy Spirit.

The concept of metaphor applies to Me, also, in that you can easily think in terms of “God is like…” You know you can never completely describe Me, except in terms so vast that they are meaningless. Yet it is appropriate to describe Me through attributes, such as “The Holy Spirit is a teacher.” Such a term is also reality for you because of this that We do together, but for most Christians it is more metaphor than fact. They have some faith that I am a teacher, but descriptions of how I actually educate tend to be ethereal, spiritual, abstract. The same can be said about “The Holy Spirit is My Guide… One who consoles in time of trouble…” Not quite as metaphoric as “The Lord is the shade upon My right hand”, but in the same vicinity.

Most people, even those rather well educated, could not give a very lengthy, academic description of metaphor, but, as you observed, everyone learns to use metaphor early in life, in thinking and in speaking. Without careful, cautious thought and word selection you cannot describe something important without shading into or blatantly using metaphor. It can aid communication because it seeks to tell how something not known is like unto something the learner does know.

One particularly interesting use is when the metaphor uses two concepts of which the learner has some but incomplete knowledge… such as “Marriage is like the relationship between Christ and His Church”. What you know about marriage can thus increase your understanding of the Church, and what you know about Christ and His Church (Me and My Church, too) can help in the understanding of marriage.

The difficulty with this comes in making the metaphor mean more than it should. If you know that, in your culture, some marriages that seem to be truly entered into, with faith and hope and My blessing nevertheless “come apart” and seem to die, does that mean that the same thing could happen with Christ and His Church? Do some churches begin hand in hand with Me and then break away? Or do I leave them? Is marriage the same as Marriage? Is every church an aspect of the Church? You see that the metaphor can be confusing BUT it can also stimulate thought and even understanding.