487 - Language, Metaphor, And Pastoral Theology

Language, Metaphor, And Pastoral Theology

By Belden C. Lane

"Metaphor is a particular form of language-play in which the familiar, commonplace, and down-to earth is used to speak in a striking, often shocking-- though incomplete and indirect--way, about the unfamiliar.... The processes involved in pastoral care and spiritual direction may be very different from those of psychotherapeutic intervention, but the creative--even shocking--use of metaphor in effecting change is quite similar. "

Pastoral theology is perennially concerned with the whole linguistic process by which truth is "carried over" (metaphora) from systematic reflection. How are meanings transferred from ideation to praxis, and back again? This is the essential function of metaphor in provocatively superimposing one set of meanings over another. What it may lack in strict precision is gained in the creative mixing of disparate images. Novelist Walker Percy was well aware of this delightful, if also troubling, feature of every metaphor-that, strictly speaking, it is "wrong." It asserts of one thing that it is something else. Yet the peculiar scandal of metaphor is that "it is wrongest when it is most beautiful." ¹ It provokes where it most delights. This imaginative openness of language is what finally makes possible the relating of theology to all the ambiguities of lived experience. Our concern here will be to argue for the theological indispensability of metaphor and to suggest four characteristics of this figure of speech which make it particularly adaptable to the tasks of pastoral theology.

Metaphor may be understood as a form of playing with language. Cicero said that an important mark of a metaphor is its giving of pleasure, and the Scriptures make it clear that God takes great delight in playfulness with speech. ² Metaphor is a particular form of language play in which the familiar, commonplace, and down-to-earth is used to speak in a striking, often shocking-though incomplete and indirect-

Belden C. Lane is Associate Professor of Theological Studies at Saint Louis University. He also serves as Editor at Large for The Christian Century. His cassette tape series, Storytelling: The Enchantment of Theology was published in 198 1. An earlier article, The Spirituality of the Evangelical Revival, appeared in the July 1986 issue of THEOLOGY TODAY.

¹ Walker Percy, The Message in the Bottle (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1954), pp. 65-66.

² Cf. Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 198 1), pp. 46, 156.

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way, about the unfamiliar. It forces a constant interplay of experience and preconception in the process of "naming" one's world a virtual dance of mixed meanings by which the Spirit gives life.

I

When Jesus said that the expected Kingdom of God was a thief coming in the night, he certainly left an extremely partial description of the total reality encompassed by the notion of God's Kingdom (Matt. 24:42-44). The genius of the metaphor was not that it summarized systematically every nuance of the kingdom motif, but that it raised in the minds of listeners a cluster of intensely specific images-memories of sounds in the night, the stealthy movement of a strange presence, and the wide-eyed fear of the unexpected. Its indeterminacy thus forced the listener to make new connections of meaning and, subsequently, to adopt new ways of acting.

This is why C. H. Dodd once said that parables, as Jesus used them, were often left intentionally incomplete. Far from being carefully finished stories, they had an open-ended quality that unnerved as much as they piqued the imagination. "At its simplest," Dodd wrote, "the parable is a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into active thought. " ³

As people listened to the stories of Jesus, they never knew exactly what he meant. In fact, he was reluctant to speak with a clarity that might forestall the listener's thought and participation. Only with chagrin did he occasionally explain the parables to his disciples (Mk. 4:13; 7:17-18). According to his usage, a parable or metaphor wasn't so much a noun as a verb. It wasn't something he threw out in the form of a complete, finished idea (something to be swallowed like a pill), but it was a process that caught people up in its mystery. So we can speak about the experience, not simply of listening to parables, but of being parabled-of being seized and twisted into new form by its very incompleteness. ⁴

Flannery O'Connor sought something of this same transformation through the grotesque and unfinished characters of her own stories. She knew a sense of mystery to be central to the writer's craft. "Mystery isn't something that is gradually evaporating," she said. "It grows along with knowledge." ⁵ But many of us find that disconcerting-in literature as in life. Such abandonment of final competence and mastery cuts against much of the grain of modern consciousness. The ready resolution of successive puzzles has been the benchmark of our age. We continually

³ C. H. Dodd, Parables of the Kingdom (New York: Scribner's, 196 1), p. 5.

⁴ John Topel, "On Being 'Parabled,'" The Bible Today (December, 1976), pp. 1010-17.

⁵ Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Vintage, 1980), p. 489.

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amaze ourselves by the increasing clarity brought to every field of inquiry. Yet, in the process, we remain poor in the possession of genuine mystery. Our training teaches us to view mystery as a mere function of research not yet carried to completion. This naturally transfers to our use of language as well. Exhaustive description becomes the laboratory apparatus of expanded knowledge. As a result, the deliberate indeterminacy with which Jesus communicated truth leaves us extremely uncomfortable. His is the irresponsible air of the poet, leaving meaning to seek its own tenuous center in the vast space between utterance and understanding.

By contrast, we seek always to be as thoroughly complete as possible. After all, professional competence has been the thrust of most ministerial training. Wanting to say everything, we leave no loose ends, no free space for the listener's imagination. Too often we have in our minds an exact idea that we want to see duplicated in the minds of our students or clients or parishioners. No room is left for the imagination to take its own leave. This can be particularly deadly in pastoral care and spiritual direction, as one imposes neatly preconceived notions of spiritual health upon the person being counseled. The work of the Spirit is virtually precluded altogether. Ironically, we fall into this trap of being so complete and exhaustive, because of our having been taught to be such good communicators-clear, exact, and thorough. It is almost too much for us to accept the idea that Jesus actually ministered in such an incomplete, metaphorical way. To think he would be that sloppy and nondirective seems almost irresponsible.

Yet the problem with the reception of religious language today is its insistence on being so exhaustingly thorough. Paul Van Buren describes the dilemma of contemporary theological discourse in his study of The Edges of Language.

For many Christians today traditional Christianity or what they take traditional Christianity to be, and as it is often presented by those who think themselves competent to speak of it, is not so much wrong as too explicit. There are those who judge it to be simply false, of course, but for many it is not so much wrong as too presumptuous . ⁶

In a similar way, Wittgenstein urged the importance of "being silent whereof one cannot speak," suggesting that presumption in language may be the cause of the linguistic sickness we sense among us. ⁷Metaphor, then, with all its suggestive incompleteness, can point us toward that semantic humility which may be our salvation.

There is a great economy to metaphorical speech-it resists telling it all, convinced as it is that nothing engages the reader so much as a tale half-told. Metaphor makes the responsibility for understanding what is

⁶ Paul Van Buren, The Edges of Language (New York: Macmillan, 1972), p. 9; italics added.

⁷ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), discussed in John Dominic Crossan, The Dark Interval: Towards a Theology of Story (Allen, Texas: Argus Communications, 1975), pp. 21-24.

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said a matter equally shared by author and reader, speaker and listener alike. It insists on a hermeneutical process that is reciprocal. The eighteenth-century British novelist Laurence Sterne asserted that:

No author, who understands the just boundaries of decorum and good breeding, would presume to think all: the truest respect which you can pay to the reader's understanding, is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself. For my own part, I am eternally paying him compliments of this kind, and do all that lies in my power to keep his imagination as busy as my own. ⁸

This is accomplished by leaving a certain degree of incompleteness in the communication we attempt. Virginia Woolf gave praise to Jane Austen by observing that "she stimulates us to supply what is not there. What she offers is apparently a trifle, yet is composed of something that expands in the reader's mind."⁹ This is particularly the case with the use of metaphor. It incorporates all that the reader brings to the text (all that the client introduces to the clinical setting), as it invites-even demands-the involvement of the listener.

Wolfgang Iser speaks of this process in terms of the principle of indeterminacy. As the exact meaning of the communication is left somewhat indeterminate, gaps are opened and a free play of interpretation made available for the reader/listener to build their own bridges of understanding. This is why Thackeray once said that the unwritten parts of books are always the most interesting. Indeterminacy "is the switch that activates the reader in using his own ideas in order to fulfill the intention of the text." ¹⁰

Accordingly, the use of stories in pastoral care will necessarily follow the example of Jesus, as opposed to that of Aesop. A certain inconclusiveness is always basic to the success of a metaphor. Jesus spoke in parables because he knew all language, but especially metaphor, to be a matter of masking as well as revealing. It forces the listener to work as well as the storyteller, not releasing its gifts until each have claimed responsibility for its completion. Hence, even in the hearing there can be a not-hearing (Matt. 13:10-15). The metaphor is finally fulfilled-if at all-in the imagination of the one who actively receives it. Aesop, however, was never content to let the story stand with that uncertainty of reception. He always added a little moral on the end, unable to resist closing with discourse what he had just made open with story. The effect was to imply that the "point" of the tale could indeed be extracted from the narrative, which served merely as window-dressing. Sadly, this tendency to dissolve the metaphor into a fixed meaning continued as a

⁸ Laurence Sterne, Tristam Shandy, 11, 11:79, quoted in Wolfgang Iser's The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1974), p. 275.

⁹ Quoted in ibid., p. 275.

¹⁰ Wolfgang Iser, "Indeterminacy and the Reader's Response in Prose Fiction," in Aspects of Narrative, ed. J. Hillis Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 197 1), p. 43.

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dominant form of Christian preaching and moral instruction for centuries.

Throughout the Middle Ages, the single most popular collection of such morally-punctuated tales was known as the Gesta Romanorum. These so-called "Deeds of the Romans" included certain stories of saints and heroes at the time of the Roman Empire, but it contained other narratives as well. When first translated into English in 1824, it was given the more accurate subtitle, "Entertaining Moral Stories; invented by the monks as a fireside recreation, and commonly applied to their discourses from the pulpit." ¹¹ The book served as a clerical vade mecum in the medieval period, a handbook and constant resource for use in spiritual direction and the preparation of homilies. With each of its 181 stories, however, it circumvented the effectiveness of the extended metaphor by attaching a suitable moral lesson that supplanted all which had gone before. This paint-by-numbers approach to pastoral care gave the illusion of imaginative ministry, while actually suppressing the creative impulse of teller and hearer alike. Incompleteness was eliminated, as both parties knew in advance exactly how the story should end. An easily-summarized and comprehensive solution, requiring no further participation, was thus provided for the faithful. The problem was (and is) that frequently the very quality of indeterminacy is what nurtures growth.

Paul Watzlawick, in his intriguing book on The Language of Change, reminds all those involved in the process of therapeutic change to consider the hypnotherapeutic rule of the unresolved remnant. This, in the language of psychotherapy, is what the Gesta Romanorum and its modern sequels have often overlooked. It elicits an extraordinary readiness on the part of the healer to offer only proximal answers.

In essence, this rule states that one should never aim at the complete, total solution of a problem, but only at its improvement or lessening; for instance, that the patient will feel less pain, or that he will sleep a little longer, or that he will probably always experience a measure of discomfort in an elevator, but that it will be tolerable. The effect of leaving an unresolved remnant is twofold: It lifts the whole idea of change out of the all-or-none utopia of either complete success or total failure, and it enables the patient to go, on his own, well beyond the change that the therapist seems to consider possible. The patient thus leaves treatment with a much greater confidence in his own capabilities and much less dependence on the crutches of therapy. ¹²

What is said here of the psychotherapeutic process may be even more important for pastoral ministry. Spiritual directors or pastoral counselors are reminded by the incompleteness of metaphor that their own efforts at grasping the truth are always incomplete. It is God alone who directs and heals.

¹¹ Trans. by Charles Swan, revised and corrected, W. Hooper (London: George Bell and Sons, 1877).

¹² Paul Watzlawick, The Language of Change: Elements of Therapeutic Communication (New York: Basic Books, 1978), p. 73.

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II

Jesus often used language against language. His parables had a way of subverting the structures of thought and speech by which his listeners ordered their world. He repeatedly surprised them into the truth, breaking through their expectations by a new alphabet of grace. Using what was least probable in a given context went even further than incompletion in forcing listeners to question the purpose of such iconoclastic language.

John Dominic Crossan suggests virtually a linguistic Bolshevism as underlying the ministry of Jesus, who seemed at times consciously to attempt to confuse. Far from following sound homiletical and rhetorical procedure, he appeared intentionally to "make strange" the truth when one would expect good communication always to aim instead at "making familiar" what is said. Russian literary criticism has coined the word ostranenie (the idea of "making strange" a given concept) in the effort to define the proper nature of poetic language. Formalist critic Victor Shklovsky argues that the chief goal of literature is the occasioning of an utterly novel view of the world. ¹³

According to this theory, the human imagination is provoked into action much more by what doesn't fit one's expectations than by what does. As discomforting as it can be, linguistic confusion is often highly creative. It forces us to reach for unanticipated meanings. The use of shocking parables by Jesus was part of a total program of second-order change-the initiating of metanoia by metaphor. Pressed to discover some thread of similarity amid great dissimilarity, the listener is engaged in a fervent quest for meaning that reorients the whole of life.

In certain ways, Jesus functioned almost as Zen master, using the language of koan to disrupt the dependence of listeners on their ordinary, left-brain ways of thinking. Many of his sayings strike the mind with the same offense as the classic Zen question, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" It makes no sense. Neither does it make sense to be told that people who work all day in the field be paid the same amount as those who work only one hour. Or that the prodigal son be welcomed back with more joy than the faithful son who never left. Such stories create an assault upon justice, if not upon reason. Crossan says that our unexpressed response to many parables found in the Gospels is the feeling, "I don't know exactly what it means, but I'm sure I don't like it." ¹⁴ The language of Jesus disrupts. Into settled situations, it brings not peace but a sword.

¹³ Cf. John Dominic Crossan, Raid on the Articulate: Comic Eschatology in Jesus and Borges (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), p. 91. Shklovsky pointed to Tolstoy as an example of an author making good use of "defamiliarization,"-one who "refuses to recognize... familiar objects and describes them as if they were seen for the first time." Quoted in Victor Erlich's Russian Formalism: History-Doctrine (The Hague: Mouton and Co., 1955), p. 151.

¹⁴ Crossan demonstrates the resulting tendency in the process of tradition for the parables of Jesus to be stripped of their offense and turned into example stories or allegories of the history of salvation. Cf. Crossan, The Dark Interval, pp. 108-119.

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In his excellent study of the language of the Gospels, Norman Perrin uses the parable of the Good Samaritan as a way of comparing various approaches to parable research in general. ¹⁵ He observes that the title attributed to this tale was a complete contradiction in terms in first century Judaism. The story attacked every sensibility of an orthodox Jew. The Samaritans-racially impure, rejecting the Temple at Jerusalem in favor of Mt. Gerizim, grossly misinterpreting the Mosaic law-could be expected to be anything but good. Jews, therefore, would cross the Jordan two times on their way between Judea and Galilee to avoid having to go through Samaria. According to one rabbinical teaching, accepting alms from a Samaritan would even mean delaying the coming of Messiah. It was within this context, then, that Jesus' shocking metaphor was cast. The surprise was as great as if the Jew who fell among thieves had been a wounded Israeli soldier on the road from Beirut to Haifa, and the one who helped him a member of the P.L.O. Crashing together in the listeners' imagination would be the oxymoronic contradiction of a "good terrorist." Under the ordinary usage of language one never would have thought to entertain together such entirely opposite ideas.

Yet repeatedly this is the nature of the language of the Kingdom. We fail to grasp its shocking quality today only because of the natural tendency of metaphor's offending edge to be blunted through time. We have come through over-familiarity with certain New Testament texts to think of Pharisees as hypocrites and publicans as extraordinarily nice people. As a consequence, we miss the scandalous character of the parable in which two men went into the temple to pray. Crossan recovers the initial shock of that tale when he offers the contemporary paraphrase: "A pope and a pimp went into St. Peter's to pray." ¹⁶ The jolting surprise is that the one whose prayers would most be expected to be heard is not heard at all.

Ernst Fuchs argues that, in adopting such unusual semantic constructions, Jesus has created what he calls a "language event." In a language event, something new is brought into being that wasn't there before the words were spoken. A new possibility-a new, alien world-is created, in which listeners are invited to participate. They're led to say things in their minds that they never could conceive of themselves doing or saying in reality. But because they've said it-because new grooves have been cut in the cerebral tissue-there is now open the possibility for doing it. Having uttered the unutterable, there is now a new reality. This is the power of language, as it not only describes, but actually even creates reality for us. ¹⁷

¹⁵Norman Perrin, Jesus and the Language of the Kingdom (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976), pp. 89-181.

¹⁶ Crossan, Raid on the Articulate, P. 108.

¹⁷ Ernst Fuchs, in his Studies of the Historical Jesus (London: SCM, 1964), p. 210, insists that language "imparts"; it is a "giving... that assimilates and acquires through its taking place."

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Metaphor as shock and surprise is illustrated in a book by Dr. Seuss, On Beyond Zebra. A young scholar named Conrad Cornelius, o'Donald o'Dell prides himself on the fact that he knows every letter the alphabet holds-from "A is for apple" to "Z is for Zebra." Confident that "Z" is as far as the alphabet goes (and that he now knows everything anyone knows), he's shocked when another child, the story's narrator, suggests an expansion of language beyond anything he had imagined.

Then he almost fell flat on his face on the floor
When I picked up the chalk and drew one letter more!
A letter he never had dreamed of before!
And I said,
"You can stop, if you want, with the Z
Because most people stop with the Z
But not me!" ¹⁸

Such new letters, the narrator goes on to explain, are needed to speak of a vast new world of creatures wholly indescribable unless one reaches beyond the usual twenty-six letters that limit speech. One alphabet isn't enough for speaking of some of the most important things. Such is the surprising extension of language that the playfulness of metaphor often affords. It intentionally shocks, juxtaposing as it does the most unexpected things.

Examples of the use of metaphor to shock and disturb are readily found in stories from Kierkegaard to Kafka to Borges. Kierkegaard's pseudonymous use of "Johannes the Seducer" to challenge his readers to a passionate existence, Kafka's haunting study of professional asceticism in his story of "The Hunger Artist," and Borges' eerily poignant description of "A Theologian in Death" all engage the reader on multiple levels at once. ¹⁹ They evoke an unfamiliar spirit and brooding sense of change.

Sometimes such imaginative tales can function as a virtual "dream in reverse," to use the language of Paul Watzlawick. In this way, what may be "consciously unacceptable material camouflages itself into the language of images in order to by-pass the censorship of the left hemisphere." The disarming quality of metaphor is able thus to suspend one's usual way of arranging meaning. It forces a reorientation of being.

A skilled therapist like Milton Erickson may deal with a patient anxious about the problem of frigidity by ignoring the malady altogether and focusing entirely on a secondary metaphor. Using either hypnosis or his own characteristically slow and repetitive manner of speech, he would have the patient imagine in utmost detail the way she would go about defrosting her refrigerator. The thawing process, the discovery of

¹⁸ Theodore Seuss Geisel, On Beyond Zebra (New York: Random House, 1955).

¹⁹ Soren Kierkegaard, "Diary of the Seducer," in Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, trans. David Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), I, pp. 251-371; Franz Kafka, The Penal Colony: Stories and Short Pieces (New York: Schocken Books, 1948); and Jorges Luis Borges, A Universal History of Infamy (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1972), pp. 103-105.

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neglected items on a bottom shelf, the order by which things would be returned to their place-all this would be rehearsed without any reference whatever to sexual problems. As a result, the mind's despaired resistance to any new solution would be subverted by the metaphor's apparent irrelevance. And, simultaneously, imagination would have been goaded into making new connections. ²⁰

The processes involved in pastoral care and spiritual direction may be very different from those of psychotherapeutic intervention, but the creative-even shocking-use of metaphor in effecting change is quite similar. One scarcely thinks of John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, written from Bedford's jail in the seventeenth century, as a shocking text. Yet so did the writer conceive of it, appending even an apology to the work so as to ease its way into the reader's hearing. Defending his use of "types, shadows, and metaphors," the former tinsmith inquired of his cultured readers:

Art thou offended? Dost thou wish I had
Put forth my matter in another dress,
Or that I had in things been more express?

He went on to vindicate his choice of "dark and cloudy words" as not only following the example of Holy Writ, but as being more psychologically effective in prodding the reader's imagination. He insisted that the storyteller, like any fisherman, must engage all his wits,

Also his snares, lines, angles, hooks and nets.
Yet fish there be that neither hook nor line
Nor snare nor net nor engine can make thine;
They must be groped for and be tickled, too,
Or they will not be catch'd whate're you do. ²¹

The snares and lines of human reason are often insufficient. Only the tickles of surprise that metaphor allows can hold the fancy of fish not caught by other means.

Bunyan proceeded to adopt the metaphor of the journey as a primary means of describing the Christian life. By-passing all the intellectual subtleties of justification and sanctification, he gripped the reader at the level of everyone's fascination with travel maps and adventures on the road. Without being fully aware of what is happening, the reader is absorbed into what David Clines describes as the double motion of travel stories-the desire of the unsettled to be settled and of the settled to be unsettled. ²² Whether seeking the comfort of the Celestial City or avoiding the false luxury of Vanity Fair, the Christian as pilgrim is thus launched into process. The normal spiritual life is conceived not as

²⁰ Watzlawick, op. cit., pp. 62-63.

²¹ John Bunyan, "The Author's Apology for His Book," in The Pilgrim's Progress (New York: New American Library, 1964), pp. 9-14.

²² David J. A. Clines, "The Theme of the Pentateuch," Journal for the Study of the Old Testament (1978), p. 107. John Navone further contrasts the inner journey of personal transformation that often accompanies the outer journey of the travel itself in his Towards a Theology of Story (Slough, England: St. Paul Publications, 1977), pp. 69f.

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arrival, but as movement. One is put into a position of not being able not to change.

III

In II Samuel 12, the prophet Nathan is faced with an extraordinarily delicate problem in spiritual direction. His is the proverbial task of "belling the cat," of having to confront the king with his sin involving Bathsheba and her murdered husband Uriah. He accomplishes the task by metaphorical indirection. The story he tells apparently has nothing to do with David the king. It is some innocuous tale that might as well have occurred in, say, Latin America. An indigent farmer's milk-giving sheep, wandering through the barrio, is claimed unfairly by a wealthy landowner. The story is safe. David, as listener, can freely enter into it without threat of personal implication. In fact, he quickly becomes engaged, as the story's blatant case of economic oppression exercises his sense of justice. He finally interrupts the prophet and completes the story himself, insisting that the landed aristocrat be executed by the state and the poor campesino recompensed four-hundred percent. Then, suddenly, David finds himself having walked into a trap as the steel doors of the story slam shut behind him. He has been "suckered" into the truth far more deeply than he ever anticipated. The tale was not about distant oppression in a remote banana republic. It was about himself.

Ironically, the distance afforded by the story-evoking, as it does, a cluster of foreign and remote images-is what occasions the deeper participation of the listener. David is put in the position of overhearing the truth, of receiving it "as if for someone else." Only subsequently does he realize he had been hearing it for himself.

Fred Craddock's excellent study of preaching and teaching, Overhearing the Gospel, emphasizes this power of hearing in the subjective mood, "as if" for someone else. ²³ We periodically find ourselves hearing things in the way we would expect others to hear them. There is a substitution that occurs in our minds. What is heard, then, is consciously related to the situation of that other one for whom we listen, yet there is also unconsciously a subtle transference of meaning for ourselves. Our defenses are down. We don't expect to be personally involved. We are dispassionately able to enter or leave the world created by the extended metaphor-a world that relates, after all, to someone else.

This happens regularly in children's sermons. Invariably adults will be more moved by the sermon for children than by the homily directed expressly at them. This is the one part of the service where they are specifically not addressed, yet curiously it can become the most meaningful to them. Often the children go up to the chancel to be told a story. The adults listen only from a distance, reflecting on how quaint and charming the whole scene may be. Yet, unconsciously, the setting invites

²³ Fred Craddock, Overhearing the Gospel (Nashville: Abingdon, 1978).

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them to toy with the idea of hearing the tale as one of the children might hear it. As a result, they may inadvertently find themselves deeply addressed by what is said.

The same dynamic can also be observed at weddings and funerals. The pastor is speaking primarily to the bride and groom or to the grieving family. Everyone else is simply "overhearing" what is said to them. Yet the bride and groom or the grieving family are the last ones likely to hear the words spoken to them in that context. Totally absorbed in their joy or grief, they characteristically remember very little, if anything, of the service. Again, it is the people not directly addressed who are most moved by what is said. This is why even perfect strangers so often weep at weddings or at funerals. Through the subtlety of indirection, they are enabled very meaningfully to reaffirm their own marriage vows or deal with their own unresolved grief-at second hand, as it were.

What is learned obliquely by intimation and insinuation is most often what is learned best. Such is the force of indirect communication, whether found in hypnosis, liturgy, storytelling, or casually-overheard conversation. Each of these demonstrates the influence of semi-hypnotic suggestion-as the imagination is invited into someone else's structure of expectation, thereby indirectly to conceive the world anew. Suggestiveness is one of the most compelling attributes of metaphor. Unable to contain an adequacy of meaning in a single image, it offers two at once. Amid the resulting clutter, it then occasions a great deal of unconscious learning.

Perhaps this psychic function of metaphor should be conceived after the model of an iceberg. What appears on the surface is a given play on language, a juxtapositioning of intersecting images. But under the surface is a vast free area made open to the unconscious, where meanings are sorted and applications made to existing frames of reference. At this level, metaphor operates in its most creative way. Bruno Bettelheim understood this when he said that fairy tales are most effective when they are left unexplained. To interpret to a child why a fairy tale is so captivating would destroy the story's enchantment. What binds us to the tale is the fact that we don't quite know why we're delighted by it. ²⁴ From this perspective, hearing a story is an act of submission whereby one yields oneself to the metaphor and the behavioral conditioning it may suggest.

The indirection of suggestive metaphor can be so effective because of our over-dependence at times upon the pointed directiveness of propositional speech. A truth that is seldom received as people are consciously beat over the head with the obvious can readily be absorbed when it is allowed to creep up on them, sideways and indirectly. As Shakespeare put it in a different figure, "You may ride us, with one soft kiss, a thousand furlongs, ere with spur we heat an acre." Metaphor is the kiss

²⁴ Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), p. 18.

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that accomplishes what the spur of rational discourse could never achieve.

Julian Jaynes, in his provocative study of bicameral consciousness, offers several examples of the way such unconscious learning occurs. He tells of a psychology class which experimented with the power of suggestion in a small college. Convinced by Robert Burns that "luve is like a red, red rose," they proceeded quietly to compliment everyone wearing red in the college cafeteria. Within a week, the cafeteria was ablaze with red, without anyone having any idea what they had learned. In another example, a class having been introduced to the idea of unconscious suggestion, tried it on the professor himself. Everytime he moved to the right side of the classroom during the lecture, they paid rapt attention, took meticulous notes, and roared at his jokes. But when he moved to the left, they became bored and inattentive. The consequence was that, without his even being aware of it, the professor learned increasingly to move to the right. The students could almost have trained him right out the door, if they had chosen. What we learn unconsciously, we learn extraordinarily well. ²⁵

It is intriguing how much we are creatures who learn more readily by suggestion and innuendo than by exhaustive and direct explanation. We are attracted by what teases our minds into drawing further conclusions. ²⁶ Perhaps that helps in understanding why gossip is so irresistible to us. It's not simply because we wretchedly enjoy relishing the mistakes of others, but because gossip-by its very nature-is partial, ambiguous, suggestive. We overhear it in a second-hand fashion. It teases the imagination. Somehow we learn very quickly in a situation where we overhear a part of something, where we are left a bit confused and provoked into putting answers together in new ways for ourselves. Accordingly, nascent Christianity spread so quickly in the first century because it was passed by word of mouth as gossip, as a truth gained by indirection.

Augustine once argued that the need for a language of "signs"-for metaphor, symbol, the clumsiness of gesture-is "the result of a specific dislocation of the human consciousness." Human beings require such tropes to trigger the imagination because, in the Fall, they have passed from direct knowledge to a knowledge that is indirect at best. Metaphor is thus a concession to fallen humanity-a twisted form of knowing made available to minds unable to endure the unveiled majesty of truth. ²⁷ That may or may not be so. All the communications of God are

²⁵ Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), pp. 34-35.

²⁶ Walter Ong suggests that, "generally speaking, in matters of deep philosophical or cultural import, the more totally explicit a principle or a conclusion is-that is, the more its total meaning is a matter of purely conscious apprehension without proportionate unconscious implications-the more likely it is to be trivial." Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 198 1), p. 31.

²⁷Cf. Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), p. 261.

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an accommodation to our limits of. understanding, To that extent, figures of speech are a concession to our weakness. But, in another sense, metaphor may be not so much a result of the Fall as an indication of that richness of knowing which preceded the Fall. Karl Barth suggested that when the angels sing en famille, they always play Mozart. I suspect as well that when God and the saints converse most intimately, they always tell stories. Metaphor is endemic to our created being.

IV

Metaphor is also a form of language ultimately demanding humility. It makes no claim of precision, but offers only varied angles of vision. No single metaphor is able itself to command the whole of truth. The theologian's first lesson in modesty, therefore, is forced by the limits of speech. How can any language fully express the greatness and incomprehensibility of God?

Barth insisted that doing theology is like trying to paint a bird in flight. It's too marvelous a thing ever to capture and pin down. The great mystical writers, in exploring the upper reaches of language, have always found themselves driven to the multiplication of metaphor. Some have spoken of the interior castle and mystical marriage; others of the dark night of the soul or ascent of the mountain. Each is an effort to speak in an only partly adequate way of the manner in which God is known, No one image alone can contain the mystery. Augustine knew that the one among us who says the most about God is but dumb, lisping as a little child.

For this reason, the Bible warns against the making of any single graven image of God-whether carved out of stone or written upon it. "To whom will you liken me?" asks Yahweh. "Who is my equal?" (Isa. 46:5). Where is the one analogy that fully comprehends God's wholeness? To avoid the idolatry of any given image, the Scriptures flood the imagination with a multitude of images and metaphors of the holy. God is rock and fortress; yet also midwife, mother, and friend. God is beggar and king, lover and judge, thundering presence and a still small voice. There is an intentionally polymorphic and redundant excessiveness in all of this. It prevents any individual image from being absolutized, and singles out for preference those analogies most open to a fullness of meaning. The multivalence of metaphor makes it a prized form in the language of the holy. If, in the parlance of chemistry, valence is the capacity of a particular chemical element to combine with others, then what is implied by the "multivalence" of metaphor is its high level of combinability with other (and even disparate) images.

Paul Minear's research on the Images of the Church in the New Testament led him to identify no less than ninety-six different metaphorical figures used to describe the mystery of ecclesiology in early Christianity. ²⁸ In, the history of interpretation, certain of these meta-

²⁸ Paul S. Minear, Images of the Church in the New Testament (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960).

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phors have tended to become dominant-some even assuming the role of larger, conceptual models in Christian consciousness, as Avery Dulles has observed. ²⁹ Yet the aliveness of theological language depends upon its ability periodically to substitute alternative metaphors for those which have become overused or resistant to further combination. Such is the nature of growth in theology as a discipline. Sallie McFague charts one of the contemporary edges of this growth in her book on Metaphorical Theology. Observing what many women and men find today to be a restrictive and incomplete description of God as "Father," she underscores an alternate biblical image of God as "Friend" ³⁰ Again, here is the recognition of the provisionary character of all metaphorical speech.

In the area of pastoral care and spiritual direction, certain dominant metaphors have traditionally dictated practice. Shepherd and prophet motifs have vied for preeminence, as the need of the gospel to comfort or to challenge has been variously stressed in ministry. The role of the spiritual director has been alternately understood as that of wise authoritarian or soul friend. The practice of prayer has followed tendencies toward either the kataphatic (with its focus on meditative images) or the apophatic (with its search for God in the absence of all analogies) ³¹ . In each case, there is a sense in which the given model is at once both valuable and inadequate. God is tellingly known in a placid sunset over Puget Sound, yet the sunset tells me nothing of that God who was for Jeremiah an awful fire in his bones. In every metaphor, there is a "yes" and a "no"-a sense in which it does speak the truth and it doesn't.

Paul Ricoeur defines this as a tension basic to the form of metaphor itself-the fact that simultaneously it "is" and it "isn't. The tension may be native to the binary consciousness of human thought-a function of the way we contrast reality as raw and cooked, burnt and moist, high and low. ³² Metaphor augments the tension, fascinating the mind with

²⁹ Avery Dulles, Models of the Church (Garden City: Doubleday, 1974). For further discussion of the role of metaphor and model in theology, see Max Black, Models and Metaphors (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962); Ian Ramsey, Models and Mystery (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order (New York: Seabury, 1975); and Sallie McFague, Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982).

³⁰ McFague, Metaphorical Theology, pp. 145-192.

³¹ Historical and contemporary models of pastoral care and spiritual direction are found in John T. McNeill's A History of the Cure of Souls (New York: Harper & Row, 195 1); Katherine M. Dyckman and L. Patrick Carroll, Inviting the Mystic, Supporting the Prophet: An Introduction to Spiritual Direction (New York: Paulist Press, 198 1); Harvey D. Egan, "Christian Apophatic and Kataphatic Mysticisms," Theological Studies 39 (September, 1978), pp. 399-426; and Kenneth Leech, Soul Friend: The Practice of Christian Spirituality (New York: Harper & Row, 1980).

³² Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975), pp. 255-256. Claude Levi-Strauss, "The Structural Study of Myth," Structural Anthropology (Garden City: Doubleday, 1967), describes the binary tensions in human cultures that are reconciled by mythic language.

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the juxtaposition of things similar and dissimilar. It, therefore, demands psychic engagement. In the Eucharist, the celebrant takes bread and repeats the words, "This is my body," to which we respond in a double fashion. We know that it is, in terms of Christ's real, mysterious presence. But it isn't, in the sense that this is common, ordinary bread, baked by someone in the church. Bread is God; but it isn't. The power of the metaphor is that it strains the imagination in a frantic quest for meaningful connections. By its very structure, it provokes an association of ideas that simile never could.

A simile inevitably softens the tension by suggesting that one horn of the dilemma is merely "similar to" or "like" the other. The mind isn't forced to grapple with the frustrating doubleness that metaphor creates. Yet the very doubleness of metaphor, provocative as it may be, accentuates the final inadequacy of any single such figure of speech. It can succeed only in multiplicity. Metaphor is a witness to the limits of our ability to understand. Only a rich profusion of metaphorical images does justice to the truth we serve. And, in turn, only a multiplication of models in pastoral care can meet the varied situations of the people we serve. We are creatures driven to a myriadness of understanding and expression.

One of the most gifted voices in the current revival of storytelling across the American landscape is that of Jackie Torrence. Echoing the depths of her own black tradition, she calls forth tales that speak to Everyone. One of her stories may serve to summarize in metaphor itself much of what has here been said. I had the opportunity recently to ask her what was the most moving experience she could remember in her years as a storyteller. Without hesitating, she said it occurred at the very beginning of her career. Still struggling to survive after giving up her job in a library, she was two months behind in rent-the landlord increasingly losing patience. About that time, she was invited one night to tell stories at a church dinner. It happened to be the same church her landlord and his family attended. In fact, the landlord had a severely retarded child, so disabled that he had to be tied into a small chair that could be pushed around on its back wheels. After dinner, the child was rolled up to the edge of the circle where the other children gathered, even though no one expected him to understand what would be said.

Jackie told a story that night that is one of her favorites-an Appalachian tale called "Sody Soliratus." It has a large bear in it that speaks in a very gruff voice, and Jackie noticed that whenever the bear growled, the retarded child's eyes would roll into the back of his head. Then, to her horror, she noticed that the child's nose began to bleed, his shirt soon covered with blood. She ended the tale as quickly as possible and spoke to the parents of her concern for the child. They, too, were surprised-but for a very different reason. They were thrilled with joy, because, they said, bleeding was the only way the boy could show that he was excited, that he understood. Bleeding was his only means of expression; he had no other. His blood, then, was a sign-a sacrament-

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of his yearning to live. Jackie Torrence says that never has she been so moved in the telling of a story. In fact, she adds that the child now knows all of her records by heart and has improved immensely through the years.

Metaphor, so it seems, is a form of language as dance. It stretches us into making new connections, reaching always beyond the limits of language to the land where growth occurs. In using metaphor in therapeutic change and spiritual direction, we invite people to enter with us into this dance of language. And a St. Vitus dance it is, in which our bodies and minds are extended to express what is too great and wonderful ever finally to be put into words. Whitehead spoke with deep insight when he said that "expression is the one fundamental sacrament." ³³ Out of the random choreography of our gestured speech, it is ultimately the holy that seeks utterance. We are inexorably thrust into a meaning that is mimed and troped-whispered, danced, and tapped on walls in the dark of night. Every impulse is to speak, Language truly is the house of being.

³³Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making (New York: Macmillan, 1926),p. 131. Reflecting on the generative nature of language, Whitehead adds: "The expressive sign is more than interpretable. It is creative. It elicits the intuition which interprets it" (pp. 132-133). God speaks through us in imaginative praise.