Metaphor is the only possible language available to religion because it alone is honest about Mystery.
Interpretation
Metaphors are essential in religion as they convey deeper truths about the unknown and mysterious aspects of existence.
Richard Rohr's quote emphasizes the importance of metaphor in religious language, suggesting that it is the only way to express the profound and often ineffable mysteries that lie at the heart of faith. By acknowledging the limitations of literal language, metaphor allows for a more honest exploration of spirituality, revealing layers of meaning that might otherwise remain obscured.
In practice
A speaker addressing a spiritual retreat might use this quote to explain the significance of metaphor in understanding divine mysteries.
My scientist friends have come up with things like 'principles of uncertainty' and dark holes. They're willing to live inside imagined hypotheses and theories. But many religious folks insist on answers that are always true. We love closure, resolution and clarity, while thinking that we are people of 'faith'! How strange that the very word 'faith' has come to mean its exact opposite.
The gift of darkness draws you to know God’s presence beyond what thought, imagination, or sensory feeling can comprehend.
I cannot illustrate huge differences between male and female spiritualities except in their starting points, style and fascinations along the way. This is significant, however, and has huge pastoral implications: men must be challenged in the world of doing; women must be challenged in the world of relating.
Much of the Christian religion has largely become “holding on” instead of letting go. But God, it seems to me, does the holding on (to us!), and we must learn the letting go (of everything else).
We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.
I've had the good fortune of teaching and preaching across much of the globe, while also struggling to make sense of my experience in my own tiny world.
Genteel women suppose that those things do not really exist about which it is impossible to talk in polite company.
Every human being is called to solidarity in a world battling between life and death
Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier
So we must lay it down that the association which is a state exists not for the purpose of living together but for the sake of noble actions.
What should we suppose must naturally be the consequence of our carrying on a slave trade with Africa? With a country, vast in its extent, not utterly barbarous, but civilized in a very small degree? Does any one suppose a slave trade would help their civilization?
My principal motive is the belief that we can still make admirable sense of our lives even if we cease to have... an ambition of transcendence.
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