This, from Richard Rohr’s “Immortal Diamond” (chapter 4)
Much of our life we are trying to connect the dots, to pierce the heart of reality to see what is good, true and beautiful for us.
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Since the Enlightenment […] we have been satisfied with facts, clear evidence, objective science, or things provable by that one excellent discipline and method called science. The hope is that science gives us objective truth; religion, however, gives us personal meaning or personal truth. They should not be seen as contraries.
How we search, however, will determine what we find or even want to find. I suggest that we should be searching primarily in the universal and wise depths of recurring symbols, metaphors, and sacred stories, which is where humans can find deep and lasting meaning - or personal truth. That is what we mean by the Perrennial Tradition and why George Bernard Shaw said, “There is only one religion, and there are then a thousand forms of it.” The best religious metaphors, like resurrection, assert not just a truth held by Christianity but a universal truth too. (Don’t panic, fellow Christians. I am not denying the bodily resurrection of Jesus by calling it also a “metaphor”; in fact, quite the contrary. Please read on.)
Metaphor is the only possible language available to religion because it alone is honest about Mystery. The underlying messages that different religions and denominations use are often in strong agreement, but they use different images to communicate their own experience of union with God. That should not shock or disappoint anyone, unless they are still kids shouting, “This is my toy, and the rest of you can’t touch it!” Jesus, who is always using metaphors, says, for example, “There are other sheep I have that are not of this fold, and these I have to lead as well. They too listen to my voice”. He is quite obviously talking metaphorically by calling people sheep. He is also saying that sometimes the outsider to the “flock” hears as well as the insider.
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The goal is never to overcome all differences, since God already made us different in a hundred thousand ways. Differences are not the same as otherness, or at least they need not be. Through clever metaphors such as sheep and flocks, unity and yet differentiation, Jesus resolves the complex philosophical problem of “the one and the many.” He uses clever metaphors to teach unclear spiritual truths. He himself calls them parables, and Mark even says, “He would not speak to them except in parables” (4:34), which means he was willing to risk misunderstanding in hopes that some would get a much deeper understanding (4:33).It is impossible to get his strong and important messages here if we do not honor metaphor. Maybe that is exactly why we have missed so much of his core message - just the opposite of what fundamentalists fear. Metaphor is invariably more meaning, not less. Literalism is the lowest and least level of meaning.
We must never be too tied to our own metaphors as the only possible way to speak the truth, and yet we also need good metaphors to go deep. That is the inherent tension …