Noticing Our Animating Metaphors

What primary metaphors animate your spirituality and inform your vision of life?

Life is ________.

How might you fill in the blank?

As with most other matters, my evangelical upbringing answered with a song.
Onward, Christian soldiers,
marching as to war,
with the cross of Jesus
going on before!
Christ, the royal Master,
leads against the foe;
forward into battle
see his banner go!

What is life? It’s war, and don’t you forget it! Whereas children’s songs taught me this lesson in Sunday school, evangelical authors cemented it in me as a young man. I found John Piper to be the most compelling among them. “For Paul, all of life was war,” Piper claims, “[and] prayer is for the accomplishment of a wartime mission. It is as though the field commander (Jesus) called in the troops, gave them a crucial mission (go and bear fruit), [and] handed each of them a personal transmitter coded to the frequency of the General’s headquarters.”

Notice the cascade of metaphors flowing out of how Piper fills in the blank. Life is war. Jesus is a field commander. God is a general. We are troops. And prayer is a wartime walkie-talkie by which we receive tactical advice and request air cover when needed.

Sounds rather exhausting, doesn’t it?
By the time I reached midlife, I needed a new metaphor. I was drained by the unceasing intensity of a perpetual wartime mindset, and my weary eyes begged for a reprieve from looking at the world through such adversarial, “us versus them” lenses. And this is to say nothing of the lack of intimacy between my soul and God’s. Intimacy isn’t a defining factor, after all, of the relationship between generals and their soldiers.

It’s a good thing I was eventually introduced to the mystics (thank you, Gary Moon!). By the masterful brushstrokes of poets like Hafiz, Meister Eckhart, Rumi, Catherine of Siena, Thich Nhat Hanh, Teresa of Avila, and many others, a new picture of the spiritual life began to appear.

Life is a dance,
which means God and I are dance partners (though She is, as Hafiz once conceded, “notoriously difficult to follow” at times),

and prayer is the often-wordless conversation we maintain as we spin and twirl, the subtle nudges we offer one another to direct our unfolding co-creation, the messages communicated in those sizzling moments when our eyes meet.

Evelyn Underhill well describes those who have courageously abandoned their wartime posts in favor of meeting God at the dance hall. “The action of those whose lives are given to the Spirit has in it something of the leisure of Eternity; and because of this, they achieve far more than those whose lives are enslaved by the rush and hurry, the unceasing tick-tick of the world.”

Spiritual warfare used to be my vocation, but dancing becomes me now. As does poetry. I offer these humble verses in illustration of my experience of life as a dance with God.

May I Have This Dance

It isn’t all bad,

This desire we have
To work, work, work
Toward some grand
Healing of this world.

It’s just rather ironic.

We want to work for God,
While she just wants to dance,
Knowing that healing, without a thought,
Trails her sublime movements like a wake.

All she needs is a partner.

And there we are fretting,
Even scolding the Divine,

“You really need to
Stop all this dancing—

You know?—

And get back to work
Healing the world.”

What a remarkable capacity we have
For missing the point!

So allow me to state it plainly:

It is the dance that heals.

And the look in God’s eye,
Not to mention the deep breath
She just took, tells me
She’s almost done mustering
The courage to ask you,

“May I have this dance?”
--
Richard H. Barry is a poet and spiritual director. His first collection of mystical poetry, Her Name Is Mystery, is available online. His second, God Has a Smoking Jacket, is scheduled to be released in August 2025. He can be reached at rbarry@rhb.pub.


John Piper, Let the Nations Be Glad: The Supremacy of God in Missions, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2003), 45-49.
Evelyn Underhill, The Spiritual Life (Mansfield Centre, CT: Martino Publishing, 2013), 107-8.