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“The kataphatic way: praying with metaphor”

“The kataphatic way: praying with metaphor”

Kataphatic is from the Greek for affirmative, and hence this way of prayer is also known by the Latin via affirmativa. It seeks to describe God, and to express what or who God is in terms of what God is like, in order to understand and come closer to God.

We often refer to God as father; God’s relationship with us is in some ways like an earthly father. In other ways, God is like a mother. In Isaiah we read “As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you.” (66.13). Hosea 11.1-4 expresses both the motherly and fatherly qualities of God, and James 1.17-18 turns quickly from “Father of lights” to “he gave us birth”.

And God appears not only as a human parent. As Jesus laments over Jerusalem, he cries out “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings” (Matt 23.37). God’s care for the people is “as an eagle [that] stirs up its nest, and hovers over its young” (Deut 32.11). Most startling is Hosea’s prophecy of God’s treatment of the unfaithful: “I will fall upon them like a bear robbed of her cubs” (13.8).

Elsewhere in the Bible, God is referred to as potter, shepherd, light, vine, rock, shield, fortress, gate, alpha and omega, bread, a drunken warrior with a hangover (Psalm 78) and many other kinds of animal, vegetable, mineral and abstract noun. Among the glories of Advent are the Great O Antiphons, which apply various metaphors from the Old Testament to the coming Messiah.

The kataphatic way uses metaphor as a way of expressing our praise and worship, lifting our hearts and drawing near to God, being surprised, finding consolation, finding strength. Each metaphor conveys a different aspect of God, or a truth about God. So you might find it helpful for a time to chew in prayer over one particular metaphor. Meditate on a particular image or word, and consider what truths it presents to you. For example, what might God as potter mean for me today? Shaping, re-forming or repairing me? Or in a time of need you may turn to metaphors of support and protection, as did the writer of Psalm 61. And in times of peace you might imagine yourself held in the loving arms of God as a father or mother.

But take care. If you find yourself resisting a particular metaphor for God, it may be a call to wrestle with it; there may be an aspect of God you are denying. But when a human relationship has caused harm, that metaphor for God should only be approached with caution. It may eventually be a vehicle for healing, but it may take years or may never be helpful. It may be more generative to turn to others.

Of course, no metaphor can ever contain God. So next month I’ll look at the apophatic way, the via negativa, which recognises that God is beyond all attempts at description.

-oOo-

This is one of a series of articles appearing in Exeter Cathedral’s monthly news, complementing the material I contributed to the “Explore Prayer” section of the Cathedral website. I hope you find them helpful.

Addendum

Only a few days after publishing this, I listened to Krista Tippett’s interview with Walter Brueggemann on the On Being podcast. It’s wonderful and encouraging to know that I’m echoing this great teacher of the Hebrew prophets and communicator of the vitality of prophecy today. Here is the relevant section of the transcript. I thoroughly recommend reading or, better, listening to the whole interview.

Ms. Tippett:
[I]n one of your sermons, you are talking about some poetry, Isaiah [25.1-8] — that offers five images for God. This is just one passage in Isaiah: “A demolition squad,” “a safe place for poor people who have no other safe place,” “the giver of the biggest dinner party you ever heard of,” “a powerful sea monster.” “He will swallow up death forever,” “a gentle nursemaid” who “will wipe away every tear from all faces.” How are normal people, not biblical scholars — how are they to make sense of a text like that? Of who God is?

Mr. Brueggemann:
Well, they’re going to make sense of it if they have good preachers and teachers to help them pause long enough to take in the imagery. But you see, what the church does with its creeds and its doctrinal tradition — it flattens out all the images and metaphors to make it fit into a nice little formulation. And then it’s deathly. We have to communicate to people, if you want a God that is healthier than that, you’re going to have to take time to sit with these images and relish them and let them become a part of your prayer life and your vocabulary and your conceptual frame. Otherwise, you’re just going to be left with these dead formulations, which, again, is why the poetry is so important — because the poetry just keeps opening and opening and opening, whereas the doctrinal practice of the church is always to close and close and close until you are left with nothing that has any transformative power. So more metaphors give more access to God. One can work one metaphor awhile, but you can’t treat that as though that’s the last word. You’ve got to move and have another and another. That’s what I think. It’s just amazing; in Isaiah, Jeremiah, [Hosea], there are just endless metaphors.

Ms. Tippett:
Dwelling with the images, again, is very different from memorizing Bible verses. And it’s even different from reading the Bible.

Mr. Brueggemann:
That’s right. I happen to think memorizing Bible verses is a good thing because then you have the text available that can yield this stuff — because what a metaphor or image does is to invite you to keep walking around it and looking at it another way and noticing something else. It’s a gift that keeps on giving.