Faith and the Metaphor Muscle

Despite dedicating thousands of hours to teaching and generating creative writing, I still wonder whether writing is worthwhile. These days it’s the environmental crisis that makes me doubt. As cities around the world face permanent flooding and species go extinct, I sit in my big red chair writing a story? Does this really help humans accept responsibility for the world’s brokenness, or find faith enough to create a new, sustainable relationship with the planet?

For writers who share these doubts, Karen Hering’s new book is heartening. Writing to Wake the Soul: Opening the Sacred Conversation Within offers a refreshingly socially conscious approach to writing as a spiritual practice. To grapple well with the big challenges of our times, Hering says, we need to reclaim the language of myth, metaphor, and imagination. This language speaks in poetry and parable, memory and imagination. It is the fabric of our faith traditions; it connects humans around the globe and through time. “With metaphorical thinking we engage reason and imagination together, not to construct a plot or prove a hypothesis but to explore what is out of sight — the unknown or unnamed within us and beyond us,” she writes. To answer unanswerable questions or solve unsolvable problems, we must reconnect with language big enough to hold mystery.

In the aftermath of September 11, when some commentators divided the world between those fiercely religious and those not, the poet Adrienne Rich countered, “If there’s a line to be drawn, it’s not so much between secularism and belief as between those for whom language has metaphoric density and those for whom it is merely formulaic.” She called for us to develop “the great muscle of metaphor, drawing strength from resemblance in difference.”

“Contemplative correspondence,” the writing practice Hering has developed, works to reclaim the language of faith and restore our capacity for metaphorical thinking.

Digging by Olivia Wise.

Having left the conservative church of her childhood and become a Unitarian Universalist, Hering returns in her book to basic, doctrinally neutral words (faith, prayer, sin, love, justice, hope, redemption, grace, hospitality, and reverence) as wellsprings of fresh insight. She uses personal narrative and wisdom literature from a range of traditions to stir up new ways to inhabit these words.

Faith, she tells us, in the early teachings of many world religions, is a verb. In Buddhist texts, the Pali word for faith meant “to place the heart upon.” Because we’re more likely today to use faith as a noun, we’ve lost its active, participatory dimensions, as well as the understanding that faith is a common human characteristic: we all place our heart on something. So Hering invites us to write, listing the verbs that describe faith’s movement in our lives: “Consciously or unconsciously, with each day’s living, we are choosing where, and to whom, and to what we will offer our heart. In this way faith emerges from our daily choices.”

Hering’s practice helps us take these theological terms out of their hard-edged boxes so we can realize their life-giving potential. Words like “sin” can be used as wedges to drive people apart, or they can be opened and unpacked. Paul Tillich warned against using the word sin in the plural; individual sins distract us from the larger conditions that precede sinful action. So Hering asks, “What are the conditions of the heart and the systems of society that cause us to deny or sever our connection to the earth, to others, or to the holy?” By reclaiming the relational, communicative role of language, we begin to repair our world.

The beauty of contemplative correspondence rests in how it harvests universal wisdom from personal experience. Our memories, associations, and dreams aren’t just softening agents for difficult words; they ground us in story, which is where truth resides. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston wrote of her character Janie that “She didn’t read books so she didn...