Signs and Metaphors I

     It's been a very strange winter, oddly mild and lacking the snow and ice whose bite I seem to feel more acutely the older I get. I don't know about you, but even the mild version of the winter we've enjoyed can still get me yearning for warm beaches and warm water to swim in. My version of heaven includes water I can walk into without shivering!
    
     The days are getting longer, even warmer, without doubt. But there are still enough gray, cold days and nights left that feel oppressive in the anticipation -- and that get me to muse on the sadder or more difficult sides of life. The dean of my theological graduate school once remarked that climates like the northeast were the most conducive to theological thinking. He thought that because we were located in California, our thinking might be watered down because we had it too easy! His point was sort of made that Christmas when I stepped outside my Berkeley apartment to toss a Frisbee. When you're that comfortable, John Calvin or Soren Kierkegaard lack some of their characteristic heaviness. If cloudy, cool days helped produce more than a few solid spiritual thinkers, perhaps these same days have some gifts for us, especially in the areas of meaning and symbol.

     The gardeners and landscapers among us know that this is a season of hidden energy and of expectant waiting. Several months ago, trees and shrubs pushed forward buds that "wintered over," and in the coming spring those buds will become the blossoms and fruit of the high season. Bulbs in the ground need the long, cold and dark "burial" of winter time to become the tulips, daffodils, gladioli and irises we love so much. And the seeds released by so many plants last summer "died" in the soil they landed in to resurrect later this year as the children and grandchildren of those original plants.

     In the Gospel of John, the writer portrays Jesus using a similar metaphor about himself and the death he volunteers to undergo:
        
         "... unless a grain of wheat falls on the ground and dies, it remains
         only a single grain; but if it dies, it yields a rich harvest... " (John 12:24)

Written several decades after the events the gospel describes, these words form part of a tradition of important sayings attributed to Jesus. But they are also meant to comfort and inspire the generation of listeners who first heard them -- that community of believers then facing likely persecution by the Roman authorities and denunciation to those authorities by religious adversaries. Roman arrests, trials, and executions were purposely very brutal and very public as a means of controlling conquered peoples and the general citizenry. The metaphor of the seed of grain that dies to bring forth greater yield would have helped those early Christians cope with what must have been hardly bearable. "The blood of martyrs is the seed of faith," the saying went.

     As helpful as that metaphor may have been, I imagine it would still have been terrifying to those early Christians to face possible arrest, torture and execution as religious outlaws. Bringing it to our time, how do we make sense of the horrors done to others throughout the world or that we could see ourselves facing? How do we deal generally with the wounds to psyche and spirit that life inflicts?  How can we rebound from the worst life can throw at us?

     We'll start to try to answer those questions in the next entry. Peace.