How many of you have had an "Aha!" experience? As a scientist, its what I live for. An "Aha!" experience occurs when what was unclear suddenly makes perfect sense. Some use the term "insight;" in cartoons its depicted as the light bulb suddenly going on over somebody's head. In school we all struggled with some sort of mathematical concept or grammatical construction and then suddenly the veil lifts, the clouds clear and what was once a total mystery is now perfectly obvious. One of the highest compliments you can bestow in science is to call something "elegant." I've taken this to mean an experiment or concept or a mathematical derivation that is a completely different way of looking at something, but once demonstrated, it is so simple and so obvious that there can be no other explanation for what it is trying to show.

When we started the "Faith Development" class a while ago, the participants were asked to share something about their journey of faith to that point. I have always lamented that I have never had that blinding "Road to Damascus" experience. No burning bushes to mark the point of being "reborn." Instead my journey has been marked by small flashes of insight. Points at which I have looked at things slightly differently and a piece fits into the jigsaw puzzle of my faith.

One such moment occurred ten or twelve years ago when we were studying the book "Models of God" in our adult Sunday school class. The underlying concept, what really grabbed me, was the notion that the way we talk about God, our theology if you will, is made up of metaphors. How do we describe the unknowable? We try to use terms that are familiar to describe the unfamiliar. What image did you form in your mind to associate with the word "God?" For the majority of us it was probably some variation of the Michelangelo/Sistine Chapel image. If your reference points are more contemporary, maybe the picture looked more like George Burns or Morgan Freeman. Was the image male? White? How do we "know" what image is correct?

By definition, metaphors are words that describe the unknown by analogy to things that are known. In my experience, the best teachers are those that are the most gifted in the use of metaphors. It may not be just one metaphor that is needed. A teacher may shuffle through a whole laundry list of metaphors until she sees the light come on in her student's eyes. Scientists are well acquainted with metaphors and models. The forces that hold molecules together are pictured as springs. Atoms are pictured as little solar systems with electronic "planets" orbiting a nuclear "sun." Sometimes we "Assume a spherical cow." (Inside joke, ask me about it later.)

In religion, many people are troubled by the concept of the Trinity. Do we believe in one God or do we believe in three? As a scientist, this has never been much of a stretch for me. The classic example is the description of the electron. Is it matter? Something we could hold in a bottle and determine its weight? Or is it radiation? Something akin to light that we can't bottle up and weigh? The answer is both, depending on the experiment you perform and the property you want to explain. Does this mean there are two kinds of electrons? No, but from our limited perspective we need two different ways of talking about the same thing.

So what makes a good metaphor? First of all a good metaphor requires a familiarity that produces a shock of recognition. In this respect many of our traditional metaphors for God fail miserably. How many of us have a good innate feel for what a King or a Shepherd is? When I gave these terms some thought, I realized that one of the words I use the most often, yet have the poorest concept of, is "Lord." Granted we can make some headway studying the historical context in which these words were used. But isn't a good metaphor like a good joke? If you have to explain it, it probably wasn't very good.

In my brief career as a college chemistry instructor, I had to teach the concept of isotopes. The concept is fairly simple. Two atoms, identical in essentially every other respect, have a different mass. If you take one jar of carbon isotopes, and compare it to a jar of different carbon isotopes, one will weigh twelve grams and the other thirteen grams. Nevertheless, a student cannot grab hold of individual carbon atoms, weigh them, sort them, etc. The concept can therefore be somewhat difficult to grasp. To my delight, I discovered that pennies come in isotopes. I don't remember the numbers exactly, but what I found out was along the line that pennies minted before 1975 weigh 2.5 grams while pennies minted after 1975 weigh 2 grams. I brought a giant jar of pennies into class and we weighed and sorted to our hearts content. Everyone in the class got the concept that, with regards to mass, carbon atoms were like pennies.

This brings us to the second important characteristic of a good metaphor. It should be obvious how your metaphor is not like the object that you are describing. I was reasonably confident that my class understood that carbon atoms were not flat, brown nor did they have a picture of Abraham Lincoln on them. Our most common metaphor for God is "Father." Do we recognize its implications and limitations? Is God male? Are our perceptions colored by our own view of what a father is? Do we form the image of God as a strict disciplinarian? Is my concept of Father different from my children's? What about children who have grown up in abusive or otherwise dysfunctional households? Through common usage we assume that there is some sort of consensus about what a Father is. Further, the usage has become so ingrained that it has been transformed into definition rather than metaphor.

Are you still with me? Can you entertain the possibility that Father, Son and Holy Spirit are metaphors? I don't think anyone has walked out and I haven't seen any smoke rising from anyone's collar. Are you ready to be really bold and examine some new metaphors? I will briefly, and superficially, adapt several proposed by Sallie McFague in "Models of God." Each of these metaphors comprises several chapters in her book. I hope to simply plant the seed by summarizing each in a paragraph. Two comments have stayed with me from when we studied this book twelve years ago. The first was from a woman who demanded to know "What could have possibly possessed me to choose this book?" From her tone and her choice of words it was clear that I could make no response that would justify my actions. The second comment was along the lines of "Aren't we throwing out the baby with the bath water?" Here the reply is that our goal is to supplement, not supplant, the traditional metaphors. Let's think outside the box a little and see if it gives us new insight.

We'll start with the basic assumption that God is Love. This is clearly rooted in most of the New Testament. But it's a little bit of an "Apple Pie and Motherhood" kind of statement. It sounds good but do we really have a good image of what Love is? What image did you form for Love earlier and could you apply it to God? So let's derive some metaphors for our metaphor. We'll choose a different starting point and try to apply the classical Greek descriptions of love; agape, eros and philia. It isn't exactly an accident on McFague's part that these descriptions form a trinity.

Agape is the love that gives, unconditionally and selflessly. McFague doesn't stray too far from the traditional image of Father by proposing Mother. I prefer to be more gender neutral with my metaphor and suggest Parent. The defining activity of a parent is creation. Unlike an artist or a craftsman, however, there is an ongoing relationship between the creator and the creation. A parent is devoted to the nourishment and nurture of the child. The parent loves the child unconditionally, with no aesthetic judgment as to its worthiness. Ironically, the culmination of all of this love and care is to let the child go, just as God has given us our freedom of will.

Eros is perhaps the most difficult concept to grasp. Christian tradition is not exactly overflowing with descriptions equating God's love with erotic love. Can we rationalize God as Lover? If agape is the love that gives, then eros is the love that takes. In other words, God desires us. He wants our love. What is the first great commandment? To love our God with all our hearts, minds and spirits. Because we are desired, we are loved because of who we are, not in spite of who we are. This is one aspect that differentiates God as Lover from God as Parent. Where does Christ fit into all this? God so loved the world that he came and dwelt among us. He desired union with us. He shared our joy and our suffering. This gives a slightly different spin to the concept of salvation. I prefer the alternative term, redemption. We had drifted away, God wants to redeem us, he wants us back. What I am still struggling with is where the resurrection and ascension fit in. For me, God as Lover has not produced that "Aha!" moment.

With philia we are back on somewhat firmer ground. Philia is the love exemplified in friendship. What was your image of a friend? Children seem to instinctively know what a friend is. A friend is someone who is fun to play with. But doesn't this make friendship seem secondary, almost frivolous? Doesn't Paul say, "When I became an adult, I put away my childish ways." C. S. Lewis claimed that of all the human loves, friendship is the least natural, organic or necessary. It has no survival value. He added, however, that it is one of those things that give value to survival. We dislike being alone. We desire a companion to accompany us through life. But if philia is the love that shares, what does God get out of this deal? McFague points out that unlike lovers who are face to face, absorbed in one another, friends are side by side, absorbed in a common interest. We have many friends with whom we share many, sometimes overlapping, interests. These include the church, raising our children, our jobs and our leisure time activities. With God we hopefully share a common vision for the fulfillment of his creation. To feed the hungry, clothe the naked and establish justice.

Parent, Lover and Friend. Just the consideration of new metaphors, let alone these particular metaphors, may be considered radical Christianity. Certainly there are concepts further out on the fringe, but metaphorical theology is undoubtedly pretty far removed from the "God said it. I believe it. That settles it." point of view. But even if your view of scripture leans more toward the divinely written rather than the divinely inspired, I hope you will allow that the best teachers, and surely God is a teacher, use metaphors. At the moment we indeed see only dimly, we see only in part. I invite you to examine your metaphors carefully and critically. If you are bold enough, try some new ones and see if they work any better. And may you all have your own "Aha!" moments.