Professor C. Jack Orr's Web Site

 Metaphors of Spirit

We experience a dimension of life called soul, spirit or spirituality. Books and blogs increasingly refer to spirituality and education, spirit and work, leadership and soul, neuroscience and religion, awe, transcendence, optimal experience and so forth. These discussions hold in common an inability to define spirit, the very topic of their conversation. 

I am content to let the imprecision stand.  I seek the experience beyond the explanation. Ultimately, the language of spirit is the language of metaphor. On the pages that follow you will find metaphors for spirit from many cultures and stages of life. Prominent among them are symbols of light, seeing, ambiguity and radiance.

Light

"Let There Be Light" 

By birthright  we seek truth, experience beauty and serve a moral imperative. As metaphor, light  expresses the source and experience of our spiritual nature . We are born from the light and live to exude its radiance.

Silverside Church Wilmington Delaware

Quotes

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”

Albert Einstein

"If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear … as it is, infinite"

William Blake

"To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour..."

                                                    William Blake

"God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason. "

Dag Hammarskjold

Radiance

"The light still shines in the darkness. And, the darkness has never put out it out."

 Silverside Church Wilmington Delaware

"I think continually of those who were truly great ... The names of those who in their lives fought for life
Who wore at their hearts the fire's center.
Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun,
And left the vivid air signed with their honor."

Stephen Spender

"The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection."

Michelangelo

"We may skate upon a radiance we do not see because we see nothing else."

John Updike

"i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing breathing any--lifted from the no of all nothing--human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)"

e. e. cummings

Ambiguity

"We see through a glass darkly..."

The light is fractured, fades from expected places and reappears with uncanny surprise. It is our plight and passion to live amid ambiguity

Vision

Silverside Church Wilmington Delaware

"There is no such thing as immaculate perception."

Jonah Lehrer

"I've looked at life from both sides now,
From win and lose, and still somehow
It's life's illusions I recall.
I really don't know life at all."

Joni Mitchial

"A certain minor light may still
Lean incandescent

Out of kitchen table or chair
As if a celestial burning took
Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then --
Thus hallowing an interval
Otherwise inconsequent

By bestowing largesse, honor
One might say love...

Miracles occur.
If you care to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance
Miracles. The wait's begun again,
The long wait for the angel,

For that rare, random descent."

Black Rook in Rainy Weather  Sylvia Plath

"Moments of grace are unsustainable...The light will fade...The principle thing is that epiphanes not be forgotten. The way to ensure this is through the building of memorials."

James Pawelski

"And even if only one good memory is left in our hearts, it may also be the instrument of our salvation one day."

Dostoyevsky