The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [65]
My experience with Diane and the clergy is one of many that confirms my suspicion that if you’re looking for a belief in the power of words to change things, to come alive and make a path for you to walk on, you’re better off with poets these days than with Christians. It’s ironic, because the scriptures of the Christian canon are full of strange metaphors that create their own reality—the “blood of the Lamb,” the “throne of grace,” the “sword of the Spirit”—and among the names for Jesus himself are “the Word” and “the Way.”
Poets believe in metaphor, and that alone sets them apart from many Christians, particularly people educated to be pastors and church workers. As one pastor of Spencer Memorial—by no means a conservative on theological or social issues—once said in a sermon, many Christians can no longer recognize that the most significant part of the first line of “Onward Christian Soldiers, marching as to war” is the word “as.” (The hymn has been censored out of our new hymnal by the literal-minded, but we sing it anyway.)
The gulf between poets and Christians has long struck me as one of the fine ironies of the late twentieth century, and I’ve noted with a mix of amusement and distress the way that the war on metaphor reveals itself in the new Presbyterian hymnal. Verses of hymns employing language that suggests that faith might require struggle, particularly anything that uses military metaphors to convey this, have been excised. The awesome sense of struggle and victory (and even exorcism) in “A Mighty Fortress” and “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence” are still in, but I wonder for how long. This metaphoric impoverishment strikes me as ironic, partly because I’m well aware, thanks to a friend who’s a Hebrew scholar, that for all of the military metaphors employed in the Old Testament, the command that Israel receives most often is to sing. I also know that the Benedictines have lived peaceably for 1500 years with a Rule that is full of terminology, imagery, and metaphors borrowed from the Roman army.
One difficulty that people seeking to modernize hymnals and the language of worship inevitably run into is that contemporaries are never the best judges of what works and what doesn’t. This is something all poets know; that language is a living thing, beyond our control, and it simply takes time for the trendy to reveal itself, to become so obviously dated that it falls by the way, and for the truly innovative to take hold. I had great fun one afternoon going through the 1952 Presbyterian hymnal, looking for what would have seemed its most daringly modern hymns when it appeared. My favorite was “Remember All the People” by Percy Dearmer, a hymn I’ve never even heard; apparently it faded fast. In promoting Christian mission among the peoples of the world, Dearmer gives us “the endless plains / where children wade through rice fields / And watch the camel trains,” and also, most memorably, those who “work in sultry forests, where apes swing to and fro.” At least these images are vivid enough to have brightened up some youngster’s Sunday morning; I can’t say the same for a cutesy benediction I once found—“Go in peace, and not in pieces”—that I believe is from the 1970s, or the drearily abstract version of the Lord’s Prayer that liturgical scholar Gail Ramshaw has dredged up from the 1960s, “Our Father, who is our deepest reality.” God is merciful, and most of us can now grasp how vapid these prayers are.
Metaphor is valuable to us precisely because it is not vapid, not a blank word such as “reality” that has no grounding in the five senses. Metaphor draws on images from the natural world, from our senses, and from the world of human social structures, and yokes them to psychological and spiritual realities in such a way that we’re often left gasping; we have no way to fully explain a metaphor’s power, it simply is. What I find offensive about some new Bible translations is the way in