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.
Should you ask me what is the first thing in religion, I should reply that the first, second, and third thing therein is humility.
Do you see the slightest evidence anywhere in the universe that creation came to an end with the birth of man? Do you see the slightest evidence anywhere out there that man was the climax toward which creation had been straining from the beginning? ...Very far from it. The universe went on as before, the planet went on as before. Man's appearance caused no more stir than the appearance of jellyfish.
He was a clot looking for a place to happen, a splinter of bone hunting a soft organ to puncture, a lonely lunatic cell looking for a mate - they would set up housekeeping and raise themselves a cozy little malignant tumor.
We may not be responsible for the world that created our minds, but we can take responsibility for the mind with which we create our world.
To listen to some devout people, one would imagine that God never laughs.
Legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property... Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise. Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right.
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