Mid-faith Crisis 315: Mandatory biblical metaphors

There’s a lot about metaphor in this week’s show triggered, partially, by my latest irritation with a worship song, but also by a heartfelt email about the patriarchy in religion. Metaphors are, of course, vital. Apart from mystical moments of direct revelation, they are the only way we have to talk about God. As I say on the show, God exists in translation. Without metaphor we are up the creek without a paddle. Metaphorically speaking.

But metaphors only work if they are understood as metaphor. Once we start turning them into concrete fact, then they form systems. And in thinking about scripture, so often, what we want to do is impose mandatory biblical metaphors on our worship. The song I talk about in this episode has a chorus which goes

Is anyone worthy? Is anyone whole?
Is anyone able to break the seal and open the scroll?
The Lion of Judah who conquered the grave
He is David's root and the Lamb who died to ransom the slave

Somebody has been reading Revelation haven’t they? ¹ The point is that, unless you have been reading Revelation, and unless you understand what these metaphors conveyed to the first century audience, you’re lost. You’re just singing things which sound holy. (What I called ‘I can’t believe it’s not the Bible’ in my book And Now Let’s Move into a time of Nonsense.)

This is, frankly, lazy writing. It’s Lego worship, you simply select a pile of biblical metaphors and stack them together like bricks.

The writer’s task – and the song-writer’s task – is to find meaningful metaphors. That’s a very hard task – one of the most difficult aspects of writing. To find the phrase which is helpful, which is fresh, vivid and powerful, takes a lot of work. It means listening to people and understanding why some symbols and metaphors need to be rethought.

Clive James in his Poetry Notebook begins with the difficulty of defining what a poem is. He talked about how poets are after ‘concentrated meaning’, but that, so often, modern poets ‘were less interested in meaning than in just sounding significant’.² This is exactly the problem with worship songs. Or it would be if most of them weren’t actually insignificant as well.

I don’t want much. I just want something meaningful. Something which makes me pay attention, for the right reasons. Something which unlocks truths about God, rather than merely repeating clichés. Something – anything – which I haven’t heard a thousand times before.

Our job, as writers, is to make people take notice. Few of us achieve it very often. But at the very least we have to try.

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