I’ve had a metaphor for the spiritual journey stuck in my head for nearly a decade and a half. While I spent years attributing it to my favorite theologian, Elizabeth Johnson, when I’ve gone searching for her mention of it in the book I swore it came from, I haven’t been able to find it. Finally, a few years ago, my husband said to me, “Maybe you came up with it yourself?” So now, I claim it as my own—until someone else is able to show me otherwise.
Here’s why I attribute it to Elizabeth Johnson (and also a theology lesson):
Johnson is a feminist theologian whose theology is deeply rooted in a Thomistic (as in, influenced by the work of Thomas Aquinas) approach to God, that is, that the divine becomes known through our experience of the world. However, Thomas said that the divine is never completely known through the way we experience the world, because the divine is, well divine. A quality of divinity is ineffability: God will always remain outside of full knowability, experience, comprehension.
Whatever we say about God, therefore, can really only be metaphor for the divine. Theologians refer to this as analogical, but I like using the language of metaphor because most of us learn what a metaphor is in grade school. Metaphors only partly captures our experience of what we’re referring to. They may help us to better understand, and certainly the more of them you use, the better idea you get about the actual thing you’re referencing, but no matter what we say about the divine—God is father, mother, sister, brother, sun, moon, source of life, wind, earth, source of life—will never fully capture all there is to know about the divine.
Johnson, in her groundbreaking book (and my favorite theological text), She Who Is, uses this idea from Thomas to form for her part of her feminist critique of classical theology and argument for not getting stuck in only male metaphors for the divine. To get stuck on these few ways of talking about God makes us idolaters, worshipers, of the metaphors themselves, rather than what the metaphors are meant to point us toward: divine ineffability. Holy Mystery.
Deeply influenced by all of this myself, the metaphor I use for the spiritual life is swimming in the ocean. Every cleave of the arm through the water is an attempt to name toward the divine. With each stroke, I both name my experience of God and push that experience away. If you stop swimming, you sink, and so each stroke is essential to keep going. Even treading water requires moving water away from you, and back toward you, and again away from you. (I just described this motion to my six-year-old the other day as riding a bike while making a pizza. Am I the only one who learned to tread water with this metaphor in mind?)
The metaphor of swimming works well for me probably because I love to swim. I never swam on a team, but there isn’t one experience I’ve had swimming where I though, “That sucked.” It can be such hard work, yes! But it’s also so enjoyable. It takes coordination and strength if you want to go fast, but you don’t have to go fast. You can play while swimming. You can exercise while swimming. You can even rest while swimming. And there are lots of different ways to swim. It’s a fully immersive endeavor, which I find an appropriate metaphor for the spiritual life.
One of the criticisms Johnson has received for her take on naming toward the divine is that it can foster a sort of agnosticism, making any name for God seem pointless. Personally, I don’t have a problem with agnosticism. I embrace my own and others’ while looking at the naming itself as sort of the actual work of a having a spirituality. For me, being spiritual, being in a constant conversation with or pursuit of something beyond myself is a practice, not an end goal or box to check.
Hence, swimming.
Keep swimming, friends. Especially now, when things are confusing, enraging, demoralizing. When the waves keep coming at you and you don’t know when they’ll stop, keep swimming. When you are tired, maybe lay back on your back and float for a while. Rest and ride the waves. Then get back to swimming. You won’t have all the answers, you may not know where or why you’re even swimming, but keep at it and I promise you won’t sink.
Links:
Speaking of not knowing the source of something in your head, my husband made me listen to this episode of Reply All this week. It’s about a song from the 90s that a no one else but this one guy had heard of.
If you’d like to read some of Elizabeth Johnson’s writing but don’t want an academic text, I highly recommend Creation and the Cross, in which she creatively reimagines a medieval classic by Anselm (framed as Q&As) on suffering and death in terms of modern questions and needs. Or, go straight to the beginning and read She Who Is. I also often recommend Quest for the Living God. Get in touch if you’ve got questions or need someone to help you with some theological terms or tricky concepts.
You could also just read this interview I did with her about that book. (Basically thought I could just keel over and die after having had an hour plus conversation with her.)
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I loved that Reply-All so much. What a satisfying ending.