More on Truth and Fact in the Bible

Michael's sermon from this past Sunday. We are on vacation, so I didn't hear it (which is a shame, because Michael is nothing if not a preacher, and he writes to be heard), but I think it's quite nice.

A Guest Sonnet and Sermon for a Belated Conclusion to My Advent Blogging

The Christ-child has arrived again, and so ends my Advent daily blogging challenge to myself. I count this Advent discipline to write (almost) every day a perfect success in that it really got me writing again; and while I most certainly won't be writing every day through Christmas and Epiphany, I do plan to be focusing more on my writing this winter. So stay tuned. And thanks to all of you who are my faithful readers (and an especial welcome to any of you who became faithful readers during my Advent blogging!) It still feels like a bit of a paradox to offer one's writing with humility, on the one hand, yet to be so eager to be read on the other. All of you smart, kind folks out there who read me and say thoughtful, generous things make it somehow feel like less of a paradox.

But enough of my sappy reflections. I know I punted several days in Advent, and failed entirely to post on Christmas Eve, so I offer a couple beautiful things as penance.

First, you may have noticed on the right a link to my Facebook profile (I have SO drunk the Facebook cool-aid; if you are inclined, please send me a friend request letting me know you're a blog reader, and it would be my pleasure to "befriend" you!). There is also a link to Old First's Facebook fan page (go ahead, become a fan -- you'll find a delightful mix of silliness and seriousness! But please note you can read the page even if you're not officially a fan.) Here I offer you a link to Michael's wonderful Christmas Eve sermon called Isn't It Ironic? about the dynamic tension between tradition and change at Christmas time. I loved it; I hope you will too. So, I hope that makes up for my absence on Christmas Eve.

And, for those two or three (four or five?) lame days in Advent when I technically posted but not really anything worth reading, here is a sonnet more worth reading than any that I've noodled around with this Advent (though I have to say thanks to Shannon for getting me hooked on writing sonnets; it's been super fun, and I doubt I'm done!) This is written by a friend at Old First, highlighting once again what an insanely talented and thoughtful bunch we are. Marjorie and I are are not, as far as we know, related, though we do share a last name and a Michigan birthright (among other things), so who knows? I hope you enjoy her Advent Sonnet as much as I do:

Advent Sonnet

The hurried mind is kin to Advent dreams

And darkness does to ghost’s what angels hope

Would be their mission; crafting fear, it seems.

Ghouls hearken now and meld their lifeline rope

To spirals, hoping errant sheep might wind

Along its tendrils; some might lose their way.

Preoccupied is Gabriel; her find

Is pure, while others’ load is apt to sway

Beneath the burdens of this season’s press

Archangels’ work is frantic in the stars

And shepherd’s crook is gentle herd’s redress

The infant’s cry is fertile balm for wars

If lamb were general and ghost be pawn

Then angels’ charge is nothing more; ‘tis dawn!

Marjorie Rose

December 24, 2009

Christmas Menu: A Sonnet

Of brie and gouda, comte, let us sing!

Of marinated mozzarella balls!

Oh kalamata! Ascolano calls!

For French baguette our peals of joy shall ring!

Oh turkey stuffed with Cajun pepper bread!

Bring potch* and corn and roasted Brussel sprouts!

Pour wine and cider, winter ales and stouts!

Come one, come all, that none shall go unfed!

Rejoice! Key lime -- oh cranberry delight!

Corn muffins, macaroni and (good) cheese!

This tart with pear and frangipane will please!

Let cream puffs, coffee, tea round out the night!

Oh glorious day! Oh silent night of joys!

Upon the island of the misfit toys!

edited to add: *potch (not sure if this is how it's spelled) is mashed potatoes and rutabaga, which Aunt Beth brings every year

"If you're afraid of butter, use cream." ~Julia Child

Last summer we made our second -- and hopefully annual -- trip to New Hampshire to visit Suzanne and her family at their vacation home where they spend the summer. We swam across beautiful clear lakes, we kayaked, we hiked, and of course we ate lots of really good food. We also went to see Julie and Julia, which Suzanne and I just loved. We loved it so much, in fact, that we made a date to cook Boeuf Bourguignon a la Julia Child on my birthday in September.

It was perhaps the best birthday ever. We watched an old episode of Julia Child cooking Boeuf Bourguignon, and then started cooking. While the stew simmered in the oven, we watched Sense and Sensibility, because another of our projects together is to work our way through all the Jane Austen movies (I know, it's a hard life, but someone's got to life it! As Suzanne noted when she posted these photos on Facebook, it's a shame you can't upload the aroma! You'll just have to take my word for it -- this was one divine meal.

We promptly decided we needed to cook together regularly, and chose Italian for our next adventure: pan-fried thin beef steaks cacciatora style with zucchini risotto (also divine, if I do say so myself):

This meal was a little more labor intensive than the beef stew was, so we didn't have time to watch a whole Jane Austen movie. Instead we watched several episodes of Jacque and Julia, including an episode on desserts that featured ice cream filled profiteroles. Our next meal was conceived: a simple tomato soup that would leave plenty of room for the main course:

cream puffs and ice cream filled profiteroles

cream puffs served on a bed of creme anglaise and raspberry jam (below)

fried apple pies

and raspberry souffle.

YUM.

edited multiple times to deal with stupid formatting issues (sorry!)

Photos to Follow?

I'm a frustrated idiot when it comes to technology, and right now I'm especially frustrated because I don't know how to capture photos from my friend Suzanne's Facebook album and post them here. Can anybody tell me how to do that? Because tonight, I wanted to tell you all about my cooking adventures with Suzanne, but by the time I figured out that I had not, in fact, saved the photos to my desktop, and therefore could not, in fact, post them here, I was too tired to write anything worthy of our culinary exploits.

But if you tell me how to post the photos, I will tell you all about the three meals we have made so far (here's a preview: September's meal featured Boeuf Bourguignon a la Julia Child; October's featured pan-fried thin beef steaks cacciatora style and risotto with zucchini; November's decadence was an all-dessert meal of cream puffs in a bed of creme anglaise, ice cream profiteroles, fried apple pies and raspberry souffle. In January we're planning a whole meal of hors d'oeuvres including Julia Child's country pate, gravlax, and maybe some savory puff pastry? We'll see.)

On Meaning and Metaphor (for Mark)

Do you remember back in high school English, when your teacher taught you that a simile was a comparison using “like” or “as,” and a metaphor was a comparison that skipped the “like” or “as”? So, for example, under the heading “Simile,” she might have written on the blackboard (back in the olden days, when we still had blackboards) the phrase “cool as a cucumber,” and also the sentence, “The storm raged like a bull.” On the other hand, she might have written in the “Metaphor” column, “Ted Kennedy was the lion of the Senate,” though that’s probably not one Laura Baker, my high school English teacher, would have written, because she was a staunch Republican. She might have thought, rather, that Ted Kennedy was a jackass, though she probably would have refrained from writing it on the board. But if she had thought it (and she probably did), she would have been using a metaphor. Because Ted Kennedy was, in reality, neither a lion nor a jackass, but rather a human being who had certain qualities of lions … or jackasses, as the case may be. Get it?

So another way of explaining the difference between a simile and a metaphor is that a simile tells the truth, and a metaphor tells a lie. Right? I mean, you could say that, right? To say that someone is “cool as a cucumber” might literally be true, I suppose, and to say that “The storm raged like a bull”? Well, I suppose.

Metaphor, on the other hand, is never literally true, or, to put it another way, factual. On the contrary, it is a fact that Ted Kennedy was neither a lion nor a jackass, no matter what you thought of his politics or his political skill. So you could say that a metaphor does not tell the truth, because it is not factual. And if you care about the truth in that way, you could try to rid your language of metaphor, though you’d have a really hard time. Because most language is highly metaphorical, in ways we often don’t even register.

For example, when a political race is described as being “neck and neck,” it is being compared to a horse race; and if you’ve ever said you could “see the light at the end of the tunnel,” you’re comparing your situation to a train ride. But a political race is not really a horse race, and no matter how relieved you are about the end of a difficult situation, it usually doesn’t actually involve a ride through a tunnel. For that matter, most of the time our kids don’t literally “bounce off the walls”; and even when they do, it doesn’t actually make us “go out of our minds”; and when we’re bored, the minutes don’t literally “creep by”; and when we speak of “the root of the problem,” we’re usually not talking about potato blight. If you’ve ever used the expression “home run,” or “slam dunk” or “knocked it out of the park” outside the context of an actual ball game, then you have used a metaphor, and I suppose you could be accused of being less than truthful. And I suppose you could be accused of telling a lie if you have ever called someone a “straight shooter” who is not, in fact, a hunter; or if you’ve ever thought someone other than a carpenter “hit the nail right on the head”; or if you’ve ever thought that a grown person was a “babe” or that someone who is not, in fact, running a fever is “hot.”

But I would never accuse you of telling a lie in any of those situations, because I think that metaphor, rather than telling a lie, can actually tell a deeper, more evocative truth. When we place two images or situations next to each other that are not, in fact, the same, we can get at a truth that no amount of factual description will ever uncover. Often putting the two images or situations together creates a meaning that can touch us in a more profound way than straightforward reporting can. And in that way, I would argue, through metaphor we often get at the most important truths … even if it is by way of a little white lie (which is not, in fact, white … see? Metaphor is everywhere.)

I offer this scintillating discussion on metaphor as prelude to my answer to Mark’s daily Advent blogging question: “How can the Bible be true if it’s not factual?”

I do not believe every word in the Bible reports in a straightforward and factual way things that actually happened. It seems likely to me that some things written in the Bible are “factual” in the sense that they really did happen pretty much the way the Bible says they did, and that some things are not “factual” in that way; indeed, there’s a group of scholars called The Jesus Seminar who get together to consider the evidence for which among the Gospel stories can actually be attributed to the historical Jesus, and which cannot. That seems sort of interesting to me in the way a logic puzzle can be interesting, but it feels pretty irrelevant when it comes to my faith, because whether something really did or really didn’t happen, its power for me is in the story as metaphor for how I might live my own life. The metaphor is the powerful part for me; whether it’s also factual is sort of beside the point.

So, for example, maybe Jesus really did feed 5000 people with a few loaves and fishes, and maybe he didn’t. But let’s just say for a minute that he really did; let’s just say that story is straight-up, factual reporting of something that happened around 2000 years ago, and that as fact, and not metaphor, it tells us some truth. What is that truth, and what does it mean today? I guess the truth it tells us is that Jesus had supernatural powers. Maybe it tells us that he liked to feed people. It might tell us that 2000 years ago, some fisherman were convinced that he was the Messiah because he had these supernatural powers and used them to feed a lot of people. But what does that do for me, in Philadelphia, in 2009, even if I believe that Jesus had supernatural powers, and that he liked to feed people? Maybe, like those fisherman, his supernatural powers convince me that he is the Messiah, but it seems just as likely to me that I might come to a different conclusion, even if I accept his powers. I mean maybe I believe lots of people have supernatural powers; why should that convince me that Jesus is the Messiah? Or maybe it tells me that I ought to feed people too. But I don’t need Jesus to convince me of that, because I already love to feed people. Or maybe it’s telling me that with enough faith, I too might some day be able to feed a multitude of hungry folks with literally a few loaves and fishes …. but you know what? I’m not so much holding my breath, you know? So I’m just not sure where this story gets me if I treat it as straight-up factual reporting.

On the other hand, if I treat this story as a metaphor for life – if I put this story next to my life, and ask myself what meaning I can glean from the relationship between the two – then suddenly this story is speaking to me (but not literally; that’s a metaphor!) Because this story seems to be about faith and abundance, you know? It seems to suggest that out of our faith in God, we can live abundantly; that we can share what we have, no matter how small, and still have enough; that we can care extravagantly for others, even folks who are strangers to us, without fear that the good things in life will run out. Does this mean that if I literally give away all the food in my house, I can with good faith still expect to feed my kids tomorrow? No. And I would be foolish and irresponsible to do that. But it does mean that I can orient my life toward faith and abundance, rather than toward fear and scarcity, and in doing so I can know that my life will be pleasing to God. To me, that is a far greater truth than the “fact” (if indeed it is a “fact”) that Jesus multiplied a few loaves and fishes half way around the world, several millennia ago.

I know a lot of folks disagree with me about my reading of the Bible. I know a lot of folks, especially fundamentalist Christians, are really committed to the notion that the Bible is “true” in the most literal, factual sense. I think such a reading is not only dangerous, but also probably not what Jesus himself intended. If Jesus had wanted us to have “just the facts, nothing but the fact,” I kind of doubt he would have spent all his time telling stories and talking in metaphors. Right?

I could be wrong. But I’m willing to take my chances. (Which is, of course … yup, a metaphor!)

Church

I’m sitting on Michael’s red leather sofa, in the lime green room of the parsonage that I painted for him before I really even knew him, back in the heady days of summer when we were fast Facebook friends but had only ever spoken in person for twenty minutes, about paint colors. The first time I really spent any time at all with Michael was the day shortly after he moved in when I drove him to Ikea in the mini-van to pick up this red sofa. I hadn’t eaten all day, and we had lunch – meatballs for me and a Philly cheese steak for Michael, and across the table there in the Ikea cafeteria, he told me stories about his ex-boyfriend and was perfectly charming but also perfectly scandalous and I couldn’t quite believe our luck to have called him as our pastor.

Tonight I’m sitting on Michael’s red sofa, waiting for the apple pie to finish baking, watching a snow storm rage outside. Julie just excused herself to Michael’s bedroom (pale yellow – too pale, in my estimation, but it’s not my bedroom, except for tonight); Micah is upstairs, finally fast asleep, in one of the two twin beds in Michael’s guest room. Michael will sleep in the other one, once his sermon is done. Trixie is a few blocks away at Aunt Beth’s.

Tomorrow church will happen, just like every Sunday. But really? This is it, right here.