god and mystery in words experience through metaphor and drama apr 2008

[...]... such as worship and responses to prayer So in the first volume, God and Enchantment of Place, I explored how the divine has been found not just in pilgrimage and in religious architecture but also in the home and in town planning, in landscape painting and in gardening.1 Again, in the second, God and Grace of Body, it was emphasized how it was not just the suffering figure of Christ on the Cross or great...CONTENTS Introduction 1 I Experience through Metaphor 17 1 Logos and Mystery 22 2 Metaphor and Disclosure 44 3 Hymns and Psalms 73 4 Verbal and Visual Images 110 II Experience through Drama 145 5 Drama and Religion 149 6 Enactment in Music 186 7 Performance, Costume, Staging 222 Conclusion 269 Index 279 This page intentionally left blank Introduction This is the final of three volumes on religious experience. .. sometimes to be found in and through the words In order to explore how this might be so, I proceed by four stages First, I shall explore the competing pressures both within the history of Christianity and outside of 18 Experience through Metaphor it to move in two quite different directions, towards definition and containment in words on the one hand and on the other towards mystery and what might almost... effective in encouraging and deepening a relationship with God Finally, in Chapter 4 two apparently disparate aspects of worship are brought together, the continuing reality of preaching and the now lost tradition of illuminated manuscripts What I want to suggest here is that preaching functions at its best imaginatively through the re-creation of biblical scenes and the bringing alive of its metaphors, and. .. setting to a more specific focus on liturgy This is done twice over in the two halves of the book Part I starts with more general theories about language and the role of metaphor in poetry in instigating experience of the divine before examining more closely how God is communicated through hymn and sermon Similarly, Part II explores the history of drama and modern theories of its relevance before turning... the same time recognizing the inevitable limitations of the analogy Whether symbols are presented directly in specific actions, or indirectly in the painted Experience through Metaphor 19 canvas or the sculpted wood or bronze, the encouragement is there to think through the material into a different type of reality To see in a Renaissance painting the Christ child pricking his finger on a thorn or a... we inhabit, and so hint, however tentatively, at a single enfolding reality that lies in God as their common creator Let me put it another way Fundamental to religious belief is the conviction that, however much the divine has put of itself into the creation, it remains of a fundamentally different order So, in trying to conceptualize God, words must necessarily resort to images and metaphors that in. .. presupposed and the roots thus seen to lie primarily in the opening chapter of Genesis, the claim amounts to something like this: Jesus is like the Father’s words at creation; so he himself and his life are a clear expression of the divine intention for a new humanity in and through him God uttered a word and the old creation began; he utters a new Word, and so begins the new or 24 Logos and Mystery restored... is God in the guts, a drinking of the blood which Jewish law reserved for God alone, and as such a means of relating one human being to one very particular human Other, as well as to all others who participate in the shared communion.26 That is why, although the words 24 For a brief critique of the Book of Revelation, Discipleship and Imagination, 158–61 25 In talking of such metaphors self-destructing,... exists in almost all forms of religion is that between explanation and mystery, between the conviction that something has been communicated by the divine (revelation) and the feeling that none the less God is infinitely beyond all our imaginings That tension can be seen reflected in the two words that head this chapter It is from the Greek for word, logos, that we get terms such as logic and logical, and . been found not just in pilgrimage and in religious architecture but also in the home and in town planning, in landscape painting and in gardening. 1 Again, in the second, God and Grace of Body,.