Poetry and Metaphors.

I go back and forth and across w/ being a stress case, not caring (procrastinating), loving, praying, working, stressing, not caring, loving, praying

and in the middle, there's the crying over stuff that my classes have been bringing up.

Seminary is awesome and horrible and hard and great

and brutal and beautiful.

It's a gift and a curse. I listened to a sermon about knowing, not knowing and not knowing what you don't know. There's a great deal that I don't know, but much, much more that I didn't know I didn't know. That seems to imply that there are more things that I still don't know that I don't know. Sometimes it rather hurts my head to try to think about.

Have you ever tried to ponder God in many different ways all at the same time and then realize that you're going to be graded on how well you learned someone's perspective of who God is? It's not something that I can do dispassionately.

I'm not generally poetic, but seminary makes me want to try. I can't do the regimented rhyming or counting stresses in syllables, but I can work on using descriptive words and metaphors.

I was really moved by the paper by McFague about metaphors for God. All the words that we use to try to represent God are metaphors, since no human words can entirely encompass who God is.

An extremely effective metaphor for me about the difficulty of describing God and God's kingdom is about the fish in the pond. All of the other fish aren't interested in anything beyond the pond, except one. This fish swims around and around the very edges until he has enough speed to be able to burst out through the surface and jump up to see what's outside and above the pond. He sees trees and cattle grazing, but he doesn't know what they are. He sees birds flying and doesn't have words to describe what they are doing.

When he comes back down into the pond, he is very excited about what he has seen. He tries to describe the trees without the words for tree or trunk or branches or leaves. He points to the marshy grasses that grow up from the bottom and continue up past the top of the pond. He says that these large objects are like this, but thicker and solid, not moving with the wind. They have more than one part, also solid, and end with rounded flat bits that move.

He has no words for the cattle, since there are no 4-legged mammals in the pond, and so on.

It's difficult to describe what we have seen when it is so different from our experience that there are no words.