Dr. C. Jack Orr's Web Site

"Inspiration may be understood in spiritual, religious. or secular terms---but its force and role cannot be ignored in the work of adaptive leadership."

Sharon Daloz Parks

 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. Three root

 metaphors are illustrated: metaphors of Light, Sound and Feeling. 

Metaphors of Light

"Let There Be Light" 

By birthright  we seek truth, experience beauty and sense a moral imperative. As metaphor, light  expresses the source and experience of our spiritual nature . We are born for vision, live through ambiguity and strive for  radiance.

Silverside Church Wilmington Delaware

Vision

Illustrative Quotations

“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

Ambiguity

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

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

 "We see through a glass darkly"

Paul

"Acertain 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

  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

  Metaphors of Sound

 "The world wants describing, the world wants to be observed and hymned and there’s a kind of hymning undercurrent that I feel in my work. With writing, or generally with art, we show the world our admiration and express our thanks that we are here. …it’s my intention to describe the world as the Psalmists did.”

John Updike

"Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifing experience."

George Eliot

"We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself."

Virginia Woolf

 "Einstein was a man who could ask simple questions. And what his worked showed is that when the answers are simple too, then you can hear God thinking."

 Jacob Bronowski

"I am a little church (far from the frantic world with its rapture and anguish) at peace with nature-i do not worry if longer nights grow longest; i am not sorry when silence becomes singing."

 e. e. cummings

"This is what I have to say about Bach's life work: listen, play, love, revere--and keep your mouth shut...As to Schubert, I have only this to say: play the music, love --and shut your mouth."

 Albert Einstein

Metaphors of Feeling 

 "If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight."

William James

"There can be no knowledge without emotion. We may be aware of a truth, yet until we have felt its force, it is not ours."

Arnold Bennett

"And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things."

William Wordsworth