Metaphor and Meaning
The CBC had a recent Ideas podcast had a recent rerun of a one entitled The Greenest Metaphor. I’ve taken to listening to programs like these at 10:00 pm to wind down from too much looking at screens. All the programs are thought provoking and could actually work against getting to sleep, but I was able to come back to this one in the daytime.
Unless our religious or cultural background is fundamentalist, the place where we probably first encounter and start to understand how metaphors work is in scripture. The Psalms particularly are full of other names for the divine - fortress, rock, shepherd. The story of the Prodigal Son is rich in metaphor and as theologian Sallie McFague notes, metaphors and parables carry much more than a one-to-one connection between two words and their meanings and creates within us an experience that is much broader and rich. Since climate change - now climate emergency - is such a large subject, we are reduced to try and deal with it in a more comprehensive way that single words or concepts can convey.
The Ideas program suggested several metaphors - a race, a sickness, a puzzle, a war - and one more. I don’t recall all the comments on these, but I’ll reflect on my own response..
When I think of a race, I think of a challenge and a contest. The Tortoise and the Hare is a familiar fable. There is a sense of fun and games in a race - and of course, winning. In the case of this fable fable we run into the difficulty that we are already facing. Devastation is coming quickly, so patience is hardly the right response this time. It’s not a matter of fun and games either, but disasters that are destroying us and if we want to stay as the winners - as we have been up to now - it is at the cost of the earth losing. So this one isn’t working so well.
A puzzle is a possibility until we think that some puzzles are so challenging that we tend to give up - or never start. I never try Sudoku like a clever sister-in-law, who does them daily. if it is not the kind of puzzle I like - such as Wordle - now the new family craze - or those regular word puzzles in the New York Times. It doesn’t matter if I can’t solve those on a daily basis - but dealing with climate change does matter. Giving up or not starting - or even saying that I don’t like that kind of puzzle isn’t going to help. There is a lot of not liking the climate change puzzle going around.
We have learned through Covid that sickness is not as straight-forward as we had hoped. Some deny that a sickness even exists and persecute those who believe it. Caring is a good response - but its problem is that we can care passionately without ever doing anything. Taking an aspirin and calling in the morning if it doesn’t work, might not be bad advice for a minor infection, but we now know this is neither minor or simple. This one isn’t going away in a day or two. Pandemic arguments are mirrored in climate change ones. If we do one thing, we risk another. If we stop using fossil fuels, we harm the economy. So there are shortfalls in this one too.
War is a metaphor that is especially popular in North America - the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, the War to end all Wars. It suggests aggressive action and it also suggests that we are protecting ourselves against an enemy that is evil and must be conquered. But doesn’t that reverse the roles? Nature isn’t our enemy. Over the past two hundred years of industrial activity, we are.
And that’s the conundrum - and the urgency of the last of the words in the Green Metaphor that the Ideas program suggested. It was love. For thousands of years people had positive metaphors for the natural world. Matthew Fox has a lovely series right now talking about Father Sun and Mother Earth - ways of understanding that countless indigenous communities had, until western culture decided that the Earth was something to be exploited. We haven’t loved it enough. Love involves some of the metaphors I have looked at already. Earth isthe great teacher. Its own journey has encouraged us to the challenge of the race, as we look at our own challenges. Its complexity has inspired us to puzzle over its enormous diversity. Its caring for us by providing light, food and air and so much else invites reciprocity.
Recent floods and fire suggests to some that earth is now wreaking revenge on us. But that points out the fallacy we fell into many times in human history and we are having to learn anew. We are not the centre of the universe - we are a species of it - one of its more recent creations. We were the last one to turn up - after stars, galaxies, planets, insects, fish, plants and animals. Watch a newborn calf or foal and we realize that we are also the most fragile of creations and are dependent on others to survive. We need to return that understanding to the earth itself - by loving it enough to start to take care of it.