How would you describe God?

What does a pinecone and a foil ball have in common?

Our topic for class this Wednesday was God, specifically looking at metaphors and similes the Bible uses to describe God to help us understand God. Each week I'm trying to incorporate a hands-on activity to open each class and today's activity proved to be mind-bending. 

I brought to class brown bags, each with an object inside. Each student got the opportunity to feel inside the bag and DESCRIBE the object using only adjectives, metaphors, or similes. My purpose for this activity was to reinforce the idea that metaphors, similes and descriptors are human attempts to understand God - at least a little. The dangers we often run into are when we forget that the metaphors themselves are not God, and when we extend a metaphor too far and get carried away describing what we think we know about the metaphor and not consider what we're actually seeing, feeling, experiencing about God. 

While most of the objects in the bags were lighthearted and easy, all of us were surprised at one particular outcome and how solidly it reinforced the theme of our class.

One gentleman put his hand into the bag and right away knew what it was. He began describing both what he felt and also filled in some extra details with what he thought knew about the object he was touching.

"It is oval in shape and pokey to the touch. Definitely metallic with a rough surface." He didn't go so far as to say it was grey in color, since we already discussed not using the sense of sight. 

What a look of shock on his face when he pulled out a pinecone and not a foil ball. 

This intelligent young man was speechless. "That was so weird. I was so convinced it was a ball of foil that I was thinking of how I would describe a ball of foil more than I was even thinking about the actual object in my hand." 

Fascinating.

How often do our own images and metaphors about God limit our understanding of who God is? How many time have we carried a metaphor too far and given God the attributes of our earthly metaphor instead of leaving space for God to reveal Godself to us?

For example, if I have locked God into the metaphor of "Father" and then have a negative relationship with my father, I may push those negative characteristics onto God. Or even with positive examples of fathers around us, I may take on the notion that God is masculine. Our metaphor in both these cases went too far.

Metaphors, similes, and adjectives are all excellent resources to give us handles on understanding the God of the cosmos - but they are simply handles and not a summary of God as a whole. That kind of understanding is too expansive for our understanding this side of heaven.

May we continue to grow in our understanding of God as we provide space for the Spirit to open our hearts and minds to new levels of knowing and perceiving.