God is the mother of all metaphors, Susanne Niemeyer muses. I imagine that many spiritual seekers like her find comfort in poetic metaphors, and delight in reimagining the divine in their daydreams.

But there comes a point when Niemeyer’s restless curiosity presses for more—for something more present and obvious. How do we ever experience God as real and present with us?

In moments of spiritual longing and frustration, she calls out to God—“Show yourself!” “Just sit with me!”

This echoes what Rabbi Toba Spitzer calls that “beautiful moment” in the book of Exodus when Moses pleads with YHVH for a clear sign that God is with him. Moses begs, “Show me your presence!” to which God responds, “Here, there is a place with Me.”

Outside of rare mystical visions, however, metaphors for God are usually all we have. And for Spitzer, this isn’t so bad. The important thing for her is that metaphors aren’t necessarily limited by merely trying to define what something is verbally. They also help make God real and present by opening up actual physical experience. Metaphors come off the page and into our lives because they are, in fact, based in concrete embodied reality. 

When we contemplate something like “kicking a habit,’” she says, we activate that part of our brain that is involved when we physically kick something. This makes the metaphor “real” in a powerful way.

Similarly, the metaphor “affection is warmth” is much more than a comforting turn of phrase, she explains, because it’s grounded in how we first experienced personal interactions. “Our early experience as infants being held by an adult and feeling their physical warmth,” she says, “becomes connected, via neurons, to our emotional understanding of affection.”

Stemming from the work of philosophers George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Spitzer seeks to reimagine, re-enliven, and re-embody the “metaphors we live by”—the metaphors, she says, that are central to who we are, how we act, and how we make meaning of the world around us. 

With this in mind, and body, Spitzer cultivates a spiritual practice out of activating and actualizing metaphors to make God real and present.

In her new book, God is Here: Reimaging the Divine, Spitzer recalls the many and various metaphors for God in the Bible. Steering away from God as some stereotypical kind of superpower entity, like an all-powerful bearded old man in the sky, for example, she draws instead on other age-old metaphors for God from the natural world, and invites us to experience them directly, and intimately, as real and present to us, all around us.

There is God as Water, Rock, Place, Fire, Sound/Silence, and God as Cosmic Flow. Then she offers various suggestions to help us actualize particular metaphors in our spiritual practice here-and-now. 

To experience divinity as “place,” Spitzer invites us to contemplate the “essential sacredness of the very place of our lives—this beautiful planet Earth.” In this understanding, God is not remote, or something far away and “other.” Rather, God is right here, she says, in the ground that supports us.

God is at hand.

“When we pick up a rock,” she says, “we are not just holding a lump of minerals, we are holding a piece of eternity in our hands.”

This reminds me of the lovely book I discovered once on a spiritual retreat—Everybody Needs a Rock, by Byrd Baylor. It inspires readers to reawaken their senses in the important task of choosing a special rock to contemplate and treasure. I think it probably takes the time, space, and silence of a spiritual retreat to really appreciate books and mindfulness practices like this, to really get to know how something like a rock looks, feels, and even smells, and to really know a “place.” But we can cultivate a spiritual practice to bring such awareness and attention into our daily lives, even if only for perhaps a few fleeting moments.

Similarly, Spitzer invites us to take the time to engage creatively and bodily with the metaphor of God as fire. God as Fire becomes for her God as Fire Practice. While gazing into a fire or a burning candle in times of prayer and meditation, for example, Spitzer ponders what might happen if we let ourselves imagine God’s presence within the flame.

“This can be especially powerful to do if you are experiencing difficulty or sadness,” she says. “Imagine that God is right there, in the fire of the pain, calling to you. If you are able to feel the warmth of the fire, take that in,” she says. “If the fire or flame feels like a comforting presence, welcome that as well.”

“Just as the column of fire guided the Israelites on their journey, see where this visual meditation takes you.”

Bringing her imagination and bodily attention and awareness to prayer in this way aligns with creative participatory Ignatian spirituality, which Spitzer acknowledges. 

We can use this way of engaging material reality, this phenomenology, to intentionally focus our attention on essential details of our lived experience that we otherwise might overlook. This helps us to reawaken our imaginations and re-enliven—re-embody—our spiritual lives by the spiritual practice of actualizing metaphors.  

All of this has to do with the practical art or craft of prayer, what T. M. Luhrmann calls “real-making,” in her anthropological quest to understand the creative practice and technologies of prayer in her recent book, How God Becomes Real.

Luhrmann’s interest lies not in “whether God exists, in some abstract, in-principle, out-in-the-universe way, but how to find God in the everyday world.”

Yet, as James Wood points out, “surely prayer can’t be studied solely as a technology or a practice. Prayer is also a proposition. It proposes that God exists and that we can communicate with that God.”

And so, is “real-making” real enough?

Spiritual daydreams are one thing. But what about tending to our most desperate needs in times of serious illness? Trauma? War?

Voices down through the ages cry out to God—Show Yourself!

Why do you stand far off, O Lord? Why do you hide yourself in times of distress?

~ Psalm 10

My soul thirsts for God, for the Living God.

~ Psalm 42

Spitzer reminds us to remind ourselves that God answers our pleas in abundant ways, near to hand, that God is indeed here.

God is near to the broken-hearted, and the crushed in spirit He rescues.

~ Psalm 34

May God be truly real and present to us.

Especially today to the people of Ukraine.

May all who suffer find peace.

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References

Baylor, Byrd (1985) Everybody Needs a Rock. New York: Aladdin.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson (1980) Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Luhrmann, T. M. (2020) How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Niemeyer, Susanne (2019) Was Machen Tagträumer nachts? Von einer, die auszog, neugierig zu leben. [What do daydreamers do at night? By one who set out to live life with curiosity.] Freiburg; Basel; Wien: Herder.

Spitzer, Toba (2022) God is Here: Reimagining the Divine. New York: St. Martin’s Essentials.

Wood, James (2020) “Does Knowing God Just Take Practice?” The New Yorker. Nov. 9, 2020. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/09/does-knowing-god-just-take-practice