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.
I believe we create our own lives. And we create it by our thinking, feeling patterns in our belief system. I think we're all born with this huge canvas in front of us and the paintbrushes and the paint, and we choose what to put on this canvas.
When...we, as individuals, obey laws that direct us to behave for the welfare of the community as a whole, we are indirectly helping to promote the pursuit of happiness by our fellow human beings.
It is impossible, in principle, to explain any pattern by invoking a single quantity.
Politicians - power itself - are abject because they merely embody the profound contempt people have for their own lives. One should be grateful to the politicians for accepting the abstractness of power, and ridding others of its burden. This inevitably kills them but they get their revenge by passing onto others the corpse of power.
Science will never be able to reduce the value of a sunset to arithmetic. Nor can it reduce friendship to formula. Laughter and love, pain and loneliness, the challenge of beauty and truth: these will always surpass the scientific mastery of nature.
All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent.
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