“Metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with.” Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“A metaphor is not merely an ornament; it has communicative power that transcends literal language.” McCartney and Clayton, Let the Reader Understand
Though you may not have consciously thought about metaphors since high school English class, and even then perhaps only reluctantly, you live with metaphors every day. Take love. Love catches us so off-guard and throws us so off-kilter that we describe it as falling. Or take time. Time is not money, and yet how many are slaves to both watch and wallet because they believe it is?
And this makes metaphors dangerous because metaphors are often stealth. They sneak in and imprint themselves like a thumb on the cortex, changing the way we think. How many lives have been destroyed because people operate with the metaphorical understanding that sex is power or that people are animals? Conversely, and beautifully, how many lives have been enriched by the thought that life is a story? Donald Miller, in A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, uses this metaphor to powerfully shape and ultimately change his life. Read the book. Without the animating metaphor of life as story there would have been no movement forward.
Movement is actually one of the best ways to think of metaphors. Metaphors are a way of moving our thoughts and language from one place to another. Standing on the edge of a lake, I might be able to describe the other shore. But I need a boat to take me to that shore. In the world of language, metaphors are the boats that move us from one shore to another. With literal language, I can look over the edge of a cliff, but with a metaphor I can repel down its face. Literal language is a still shot of a cityscape. Metaphor is a sweeping crane shot through the streets.
All of this is a way of answering the question—how do you describe a vision of God? How do you describe the one who dwells in everlasting light? How do you give form to the invisible one? The simple answer is metaphor. You trace the face of the ineffable with metaphor and simile, and all the other tools of poets. It is no accident the prophets of Israel are also the poets of Israel. Without a poet’s sensibility of sensory language, without a poet’s feel for the metaphorical, what the prophets wrote could not communicate the beauty, depth, and power of what they saw.
This is not to say that the metaphors contain God or grasp him. They are still at best approximation; they are just the best we have. We must stretch language as far as it can go in our effort to honor God, but we must also fall down in worship before him, knowing that no language can fully contain him. Ezekiel may have been an exile on the shores of the Chebar, but without metaphor and poetry he would have been language’s exile because he would have had no words, however feeble, however approximate, to describe his experience. And without metaphor we too can become language’s exile.
Ezekiel is so overcome that he uses the word “like” eighteen times to try capture the vision. What he sees is so overwhelming, so other, that he can only pile up approximations. He must use metaphor. The sights are “like the appearance of lighting” and “shining like awe-inspiring crystal.” The sounds are “like the sound of many waters” and “like the sound of an army.” Here we see the metaphorical in all its glory, because here metaphor becomes an act of worship. Let us be as Ezekiel. Let us be overcome–“Such was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord. And when I saw it, I fell on my face, and I heard the voice of one speaking” (Ezek. 1:28).
Read through Ezekiel 1-3 with all this in mind. Read it like you might read a poem. Don’t try to understand every detail or explain the imagery. Instead let the utter strangeness and beauty wash over you. Be as Ezekiel-slack-jawed and stunned that God would appear. Be overcome.