Seek Wisdom
Seek Wisdom
A Good Life, Part 1. An Interview with Dr. Fred Putnam on Using Metaphors as a Tool to Shape Our Lives and Understanding
I interview Dr. Fred Putnam of Templeton Honors College at Eastern University about the power of metaphor to shape our thinking and improve our lives.
We discuss my new illustrated children's book, A Good Life, which is dedicated to Dr. Putnam and follows the journey of an orphan boy who's seeking a good life and meets ten people along the way who each give him a different metaphor for life.
We also talk about Dr. Putnam's views on education, what's wrong with our predominant education metaphor, and how we can improve it. Dr. Putnam is a popular professor whose classes are always full, and you'll understand why after hearing his views on teaching.
Finally, we discuss how metaphor can improve our relationships, our work, and our lives by making us conscious of our perspective and how it might differ from that of others.
We don't realize that it's hard to talk even for a short paragraph without using probably one out of every five or six or seven words is going to be a metaphor.
Jeremiah Pent:Dr Fred Putnam believes that a basic understanding of metaphors and how they work can help us improve our relationships, our work, and our lives. Dr Putnam is my featured guest on this episode of Seek Wisdom Dr Fred Putnam is professor of Bible and Liberal Studies at Templeton Honors College at Eastern University. He's published several reference works in textbooks on classical Hebrew and has just finished a book on Biblical poetry. He and his wife Emily, have three daughters and live in southeastern Pennsylvania. I met Dr Putnam at a conference in 2008 and later took classes from him in graduate school. Since I dedicated my recent children's book to him, I thought it would be fitting to interview him on the subject of metaphor since it was his teaching on this subject that most impacted me and eventually inspired the idea for my book. I recently flew into Philadelphia and drove to his home where the following conversation takes place. In this first portion of our interview, we discussed the powerful part metaphors play and how we perceive the world. We also discuss how education might be improved by changing the metaphors we use when we think about it. Finally, we look at metaphors that can help positively shape our lives and our impact on others. I hope you'll find our discussion thought provoking in your own search for wisdom, I'm here with someone who's had a major impact on my own thinking and I'm excited to share his insights with all of you today. His name is Dr Fred Putnam, so thank you, Fred, for allowing me to visit you here and your home in southeastern Pennsylvania here in your wonderful library where this interview is being recorded. Thanks, Jeremiah. It's great to be here with you. Before we dive into a subject that I know both, both of us enjoy, I want to address the who cares question upfront for those who've started listening, but who may consider themselves more practical types, who wonder whether things like metaphors are worth thinking about and talking about. So how would you answer someone who says what's so important about metaphors or metaphorical thinking and what difference does it make in our daily lives?
Fred Putnam:That's a great question. Well, metaphors shaped the way that we see everything. They shape our interpretation of what's going on around us, the shape or understanding of what other people are doing and why they're doing it., so here's a really, maybe down to earth illustration., two people come together and, they're going to work on a project, let's say, and one of them lays out a plan and the other one asks a question. While some people view questions as attacks and so immediately become defensive and they have a metaphor that they don't even realize is shaping what's going on. But the metaphor is that because questions are attacks, we're now at war. The conversation is a war. The argent is a war. Another person with a different outlook on what's happening with a different metaphor. We'll say, well, we'll think of it. We'll invite a question and welcome a question and almost see the conversation as a form of dance, perhaps war or partnership. We're working on this together., or an opportunity to explore something. All of those are different metaphors, but they have a very positive view of a question, even a challenging question. Whereas the first person sees that, no, this is an attack. I need to put up my defenses. I need to mark. We use all those words. Right? I'm almost offended that right? Yeah, I'm offended, right? I'm going to defend myself., or, or if we feel like we're, we lose the argent or I'm running out of ammunition or I shot down all his argents, we use all that men and that shapes the way we view the other person and what was going on and can actually destroy relationships. And so if we understand the metaphors that were, we tend to gravitate toward, right? Because of our personality or experience unconsciously, unconsciously. That's, that's part of the point is it's unconscious. If we, if we can understand, oh yeah, I, I do have this tendency to things, see things as an attack. Maybe it's not an attack. Maybe it's a genuine question and I can figure out a way to entertain it positively rather than having to defend myself. All of a sudden we make a lot more progress. Right? Yeah. Yeah. You can go on an adventure together rather than being in a battle together.
Jeremiah Pent:Right, right. Well, let's, let's touch briefly then on, on what prompted this interview., I've recently written and illustrated children's book called the Good Life Online. I subtitle it, and orphan takes a journey and discovers 10 ways to think about life. I dedicated the book to you because it was your teaching and ideas that, that inspired it., but rather than just honor you with a textual mention, I had my gifted artists, Dimitri Morozoff paint one of the characters in your likeness, school masters standing at a window. And I think you did a pretty good job because I think you said your wife gasped when she first saw it. My wife is actually getting the original as an an anniversary present in a few days. She doesn't know about it. Wonderful surprise as excited. Well, so I want to talk about your cameo appearance in the book and what the book's about, but before we do, let's get a little background. How did you come to be interested in the subject of a metaphor? When I, when I first met you, you were already rather deep into it because you were presenting a paper at an academic theological conference and teaching graduate level courses on theology and metaphor. Where did that interest begin?
Fred Putnam:That's a great question and I'll try to answer it in brief. Okay., I was teaching a course in biblical poetry, the interpretation of Biblical poems like in the songs or proverbs. And I realized that an important part of, of poetry is, is metaphor. And so I gave my students that assignment, read this poem, this Psalm, and list all the metaphors you can find. And then I thought, maybe I should do it too. I'm ready for what they say. And in the first verse, there were eight different metaphors for who god is. Wow. Seven of those metaphors were, I can't remember the mall, but a rock cliff, fortress, stronghold, refuge shield. And there were a couple of others. But those all have one thing in common. And I realized, wait a second, these all have something in common., they're all defining God as a place, not a person. And that, that puzzled me. I didn't understand that. So then I started poking around other places and thought, yeah, look at that. The Bible does talk about God as a place and quite a nber, quite a nber of times. And I was very surprised and didn't know what to do with this. Yeah. You have been our dwelling place in all generations, right? Right. Tonight. Yeah, exactly. And, and so I began to develop this theory. Okay, well maybe the idea that God has a place is sort of the foundation. So I called it a foundational metaphor and then it works its way out in these different expressions, surface metaphors. And then I think I called it a root metaphor for a while and, and textual expressions or something like that. And, and what struck me is that the root metaphor to use that term, is invisible. The Bible never says flat out God is a place. Instead it has all these expressions that are the names of places, different kinds of places., but it never, the route metaphor is always hidden. It's always assed. And so then I began to wonder, are there other root metaphors that are hidden and assed and the stbled upon? Yes, yes, yes. And in fact, it became difficult to read, actually became hard to read, the Bible because there were so many of them. I mean, a couple of times I tried to go through something and list every and all the route metaphor and I just, I would run out of space. I mean, it would be pages and pages for even a, just a couple of chapters. I started doing that after I took your class. I would do my Bible study online in a software program called accordance. And I started highlighting, different metaphors and different categories and different colors. I mean, before long it was just, you know, just colors everywhere. Yes. And it was, it was confusing almost, you know, trying to keep, keep track of them. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. We don't, we don't realize that it's hard to talk even for a short paragraph without using, probably probably one out of every five or six or seven words is going to be a metaphor. Well, even when you were describing these assed metaphors behind the metaphors, you were using a metaphor to describe your brain. It has said their foundational, which is essentially saying, you know, a metaphor is a building. You said their root metaphors, which is a metaphor is a plan. So it's, right. Even we described metaphors, we're having to use metaphors. So, yes. Yeah. So keep going. So, so then, I began to wonder if, if perhaps there is a pattern to this and the, the metaphor is mattered beyond themselves. And so, the thing that I stbled across that really, kind of lit my fire, I guess we might say is this idea that, that, you have a God name of God, you have a, is a farmer. And then because there are passages in scripture that say people are like grass. So UVA is a farmer, people are plants., the world is, is called a field. It's actually called a field., the, what we do is called fruit. So are plants that produce fruit. We, and, and this, this metaphor just begin to expand and expand and expand and expand until, until finally it reaches from one end of the Bible to the other. And, and in fact seems to be, and this is, outside my theological tradition, my own background., and in fact, some people in that tradition don't appreciate this, but that seems to be the primary dominant biblical understanding or description of who we are, who god is and how we're related, how the world works. And, and this made me then take one more step, which is maybe, maybe every metaphor belongs to a web of metaphors that if we connect them, so, so for example, God as a farmer, the world is, is a field or a form or vineyard or something. People are plants work as fruit, et Cetera, that sort of thing. Those are all related. It's not valid to take just the idea that God's a farmer and say, oh, let's find all the places in scripture that talk about this, because that's not the whole metaphor. The whole metaphor is actually all these things working together are all connected. And that is actually a theology. That is a way of understanding who god is, who we are, who the world is, what life means. And then, and there are lots of those, lots of them. Some of them are really big like that one. There are others that are really tiny. There's one for example that says God is a, is a smelter. So he smelts or in order to refine it, the only thing that that has in common is that people are, or, and sin is dross. That is the stuff that gets melted away and gets thrown away. That's it. That's the whole, that's the whole, as far as I can find any way. That's the whole metaphor.
Jeremiah Pent:Would the idea of God being a consing fire play into that metaphor in some way?[Fred: That's a destructive fire, not a refiner's fire.] A destructive fire. Okay. Not a refiner's fire. I won't get us off track, then."God and fire" just brought that to mind.
Fred Putnam:So, so really the conclusion that I came to, and I think the conclusion of the talk that you heard, is that it's invalid to say that any one of these metaphors is the only way to do things right. That all of these metaphors in this case, because they're in the Bible, we would say all of them are equally valid ways of understanding who god is and who we are. The Bible doesn't say this is the right way and all the rest are just metaphors. Right? They're all valid. So let's flush that out sort of into and to, our real world experience and how we use some of those. Do you want to call them root metaphors or assed metaphors we can do or, or the length. So this is, I guess the final step is I stbled across, I finally stbled across a book that had been around for about 25 years, called metaphors. We live by, by lake off and Johnson, and, realized that their idea, what they called, they called them conceptual metaphors. Okay. So it's a concept that's defined as a medic by, by means of a metaphor., and then you have different realizations of that, which would be the things we actually say. Okay., and so, conceptual metaphor is kind of the, I've just adopted their language because the wider world of,, metaphor studies would, would recognize that and understand it. Okay. So them conceptual metaphors. But what we mean by that, would be the assed metaphor or the root metaphor or the foundation metaphor that's unspoken. Yes. Behind, our verbal expressions that asse that that's right. So, for example, I remember you, possibly in that talk expounding on this idea that people are plants and how we use that in our conversation all the time. So we say things like, we call people late bloomers. We say that couple is putting down roots in the community. He's a bad seed. The apple didn't fall far from the tree. She's flourishing. Yes, she's is. She's branching out branching out right now. That's right., all of those, asse the idea that people are plants and that would be the conceptual or the roots, right? That's right. Right. That's right. And it didn't, it didn't like often Johnson, was it in there that they talked about those being dead metaphors?, in a sense we think of them as a dead metaphor, right? But they're saying they're actually so that we don't even need to express them or anything, but is there anything with Deb that's right. They're kind of the motor that drives the whole thing. Well, so
Jeremiah Pent:Well, so for the book, with all of that in mind, let's go back to your likeness in my book. Sure., I set the orphan boy on a journey to look for a good life and oddity meets 10 people who each give him a different metaphor for life. One of the people he meets as a school master who strikes up a conversation with the boy when the boy tells him he's looking for a good life. The schoolmaster says quote life as a test, we're put here to learn, to discover and to have our character tested along the way to determine what kind of people we will be in quilt. And though I stand by that metaphor as a good one and helping us think about life., tell us why it was rather ironic that I would use your likeness, stress as a school master to utter the metaphor life as a test.
Fred Putnam:Yes. Because I don't give tests.
Jeremiah Pent:Yes. Which is something that I appreciated about your courses. Yeah. I sent that book to you and kind of surprised you with it and said, I'm coming out with this. I'd like you to look at it. And you mentioned the irony, and I knew that going in. All I can say is I wanted a school master in the story because I knew kids would recognize that character. I wanted your likeness in the story. You're an academic. Most teachers give lots of tests, and so it fit my purposes. So there. Your likeness has been exploited to promote ideologies you're against.[Fred: Literary license granted.] Yes, but let's talk for a minute on the subject of education because I know it's one you're passionate about. How would you describe the predominant metaphor or metaphors we perhaps unconsciously use, in our approach to education in the US?
Fred Putnam:That's a really great question. In fact, I just finished teaching a course on philosophy and history of education in which we talked about that. Okay. One of the things that we do, one of the things that our educational system asses is that, is that people or children are made to be formed in certain ways. If you go back into the early 19th, early 20th century, you find some of the leaders of progressive education and specifically those people who organize the modern American public school system, making that explicit, that's, are there explicit statements that say children are made to be molded into the adults that we want them to be, which is actually a model that the people are clay, if you will, or people are artistic material or something like that. I'm not quite sure what the, what the conceptual metaphor would be., and the teacher is the artist or the craftsman who gets to do with the student whatever he or she wants., as dictated by the school system. And you know, the Department of Education artists, that's a direct, yes. Yes. Right. Right. Commission. Yes. Right. So, so we have this, so what's happened is we've developed, what, Ken Robinson, Sir Kenneth Robinson in one of his ted talks calls, of factory model of education in which he even says the most important thing is the date of manufacturer. Because we group students by age according to an arbitrary cutoff date, and, and say that all these students should be learning the same thing at the same time so that the students are schools actually functional lot like Henry Ford's production lines, which was just coming out, one of his first first assembly lines or major assembly lines., in the first century of the 21st decade of the 20th century, I think around 1909 was, was, went into, went into production at about the same time that, that, Car Burley and Dewey were starting to write about the nature of education, what education should look like, what public education should look like. Their goal was to produce American citizens in light of all these huge waves of immigration that were going on and the concern over, what today we might call a hyphenated, citizenship, right? Like Irish American or German American, right? Whatever. And so they, they wanted to standardize education across the whole country in order to produce citizens. That was the goal, who would be loyal to America and American ideals. And so the, the system was, set up and envisioned as a system of indoctrination, of molding as I said, of, of producing people who would satisfy the needs of a conser capitalist culture. And what a lot of people don't realize that I didn't realize till I started getting ready for this course is that, Rockefeller and Ford and Carnegie and other multibillionaires who had huge stakes in production, we're actually funding a lot of this work. I'm providing their own research and, dictating if I can use that term, what kind of product they wanted to come out of this school system that they were trying to support off of the assembly line as is it worth in order to go onto the assembly line in their plants? That's right. Yeah, that's right. And so, so students the school system and, and, and when I say this, I really need to say this, Jeremiah, this is not a critique of teachers. Right. Okay. This is a, this is a critique of the system. There are lots of teachers who are wonderful people trying cause they love kids. They want to do the best for them, but they're in a system that they have to work with. Right. So this isn't, this isn't personal. It's, it's conceptualize to the root ideas. That's right. We asse. Yeah, that's right. So we have this view. Our, our system really does have a view of children as products., the system itself is a machine as a factory turns out a certain product. And we've even seen that in our own day in the, I don't remember, maybe the 1990s or early aughts, there was a big movement in the, southeast us forget which states, where certain manufacturers who had major plants down there were saying to the schools, we want this kind of student, so we want you to, you, we want your a high school diploma to mean that the student has these qualities and these abilities., that kind of flared up for, it was kind of a popular topic for a couple of years in educational circles and then it sort of died away., but that still is going on right now., with the bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and others who are pouring millions and millions of dollars into educational, change, because they have a particular view of who people are and what students are and how schools should work and what, how that should all work out.
Jeremiah Pent:At the risk of being pretty controversial I guess, because I don't know what you'll say about this, but is the whole focus on STEM a part of that, that push these days and is that problematic to you at all?
Fred Putnam:A little bit. It's, I mean, it's a little bit of a product of that., actually in 1983, a report came out called a nation at risk, which is the famous, the famous phrases. There was a rising tide of mediocrity in our schools., that report is highly, highly flawed. It just, for example, they said Americans, perform on certain,, international exams. Americans are like 14th out of the 14,, industrialized countries. But what they don't say is 75% of all American students take this exam. The top 5% of German students take it. So of course we're going to look low compared to that. A bigger pool of candidates, right? It dilute things. Yeah. Yeah. Hmm. So there's a, so that gave rise to, a lot of panicking, over the, an experimentation over the next 20 years., and then when no child left behind came along, we suddenly have the re or the imposition of not just nationalized standards, but in nationalized testing that has punishments and rewards. So if you're a teacher, if your students don't do well enough, you could get fired. Your school could be closed down, even under no child left behind. That was actually in the, in the act or bill, whatever it was., and so there's this, what's viewed as a problem that America has fallen behind in these areas, and therefore we need to really push in these areas. And, and today it's not simply that we want people to become good American citizens. Although if you read Ed Hirsch, he says, basically he has a book called I think, how to make Americans, which is basically how to use school to produce Americans, American, as they should be., but now this, now the big cry is we need to be international, economically competitive. We need to be innovative, we need to be scientifically competitive and you know, technologically competitive. And so, and so now it's almost that the point of producing graduates is to produce producers who are going to enable us to compete economically, an international internet and the international scene. So would we say that, that may be the, the metaphor that encompasses all that wood would be the factory metaphor or the, the production line metaphor that that applies to the methodology. Yeah. Yeah. It certainly does, but there's a larger metaphor, which is,, it seems to be that, a war metaphor where these other centuries, right? Right, right, right. Yeah. Competition would be the friendly word. And trade war, we use the term be a little more, more militaristic.
Jeremiah Pent:So as I was preparing for this interview and thinking about these issues myself, I thought it was interesting that we initiate children into most school systems., via class. We usually call kindergarten, which is German for I think, child garden., so our metaphorical thinking about education is explicit at the beginning of the process, whether, you know, probably unconsciously these days., but we're bringing new little plants into a garden, feeding, watering, nurturing them so they can flourish., in fact, you know, that's, that plays off of that same people are plants medical and we've already talked.
Fred Putnam:Yes it does. In fact, that comes from, to Germans, especially phrasal and Pestel Losie who, pes Losie has a beautiful paragraph in which he describes children this way. He says, he says, our responsibility as teachers, I'm paraphrasing, is to provide the right environment to give them room for play to provide the equivalent of sunshine and rain and good soil so the children can grow into what they're supposed to be.,
Jeremiah Pent:yes. Is that a, is that in your opinion, a better metaphor than, school is factory?
Fred Putnam:Well, it has one advantages that it sees children as individuals, as people. So it's a lot like Charlotte Mason, who in her, philosophy of education says, the first thing that we need to realize is that a child is a han being is a person., they're not something to be molded, not something to be manipulated. They're to be respected and treated as individuals. Hm.
Jeremiah Pent:I like that plant metaphor. They are, and I, I did a little research and the whole kindergarten, idea background and, and, and saw the quote that you're talking about., but to me that fits so well because you know, when you're doing, when you're running a factory, the important thing is that each piece, you know, let's say we're at a automotive factory, you want to make sure that each piece of that engine part that's coming out is exactly the same as the one previous to it. There's not really any individuality there that individuality is a problem on the, on the factory line a to be solved., whereas the, the plant metaphor is wonderful because I've seen my parents have a farm in Virginia and there's a, this, mammoth white oak tree on that we call the great oak., it sadly died this year, but it's, probably about 18 or so feet around probably, you know, at least two, 300 years old. Yes., so that's always been sort of a fascination for us. I love showing it to my kids, but there was something about that particular place on the farm, that allowed that tree to do something spectacular., that, that, you know, white oak trees are pretty impressive., yes, as a species. But this one, even more so and so, but I know that you could put a wide oak in a different climate or a different setting and it would struggle and maybe not even survive. And so that's gonna be true of, of kids as well. They're going to be some context that you put them into certain kids into where they will flourish. And you'll see all these amazing gifts come out and you can take that same child. But think of a completely different environment and you see them with her. Yeah. That's really plant metaphor., so yeah, I liked that one. Let's touch briefly then on, on theological education because it's interesting. I met you at a seminary. Yes. Which I think the etymology of that term comes from the Latin, which means seed plot. Yes, it does. So a, when it comes to little children and theological education, we use the gardening metaphor regularly. In fact, I think you and I talked about this a little bit. I know that Princeton has even gone, for metaphor to concrete example and started a farm in areas that's, in the last few years. So we have at least one institution that's saying this is more than just a metaphor. There are things our theological students need to learn by getting their hands dirty, working in a garden, thinking about food and et cetera. Well, let's move, well, let me ask you, cause I know that you have strong opinions about this and your own ideas. What is a metaphor for teaching or education that's, that's meaningful to you, that you sort of operate out of that idea other than, you know, life as a test or, or education as education is about testing. Yeah. Yeah.
Fred Putnam:You know, I, I asked my Grad students to do that, to write me an essay before the first class on., what's your, what's your metaphor for you? Are Sofas, a teacher in which you do?, it's very, most of them say they've never thought about that before. Hm. Or how it might even influence what they do. When I, when I go to class, I of myself as just somebody who's going into a conversation and there's this beautiful little book called conversation by, theater. Zeldin is a prophet, Oxford University and in it, page three, he has a sentence. I have it, I guess it's engraved on my heart by this point. He says, the kind of conversation I'm interested in is one that I enter willing to emerge a slightly different person. And, that's really my, how I view teaching and learning is teaching and learning as a conversation. And in my classes, whether I'm teaching, passages, whether it's a passage of scripture or a poem or a passage from a philosopher, then we put the passage in front of us and somebody reads it. And then I'll, I'll often ask a question. Sometimes I'll ask a student to ask a question and then we just sit and talk for a couple of hours. And my intent is that my role in the conversation should be perceived by the students as no different than theirs. The only time that kind of, that role gets broken is when a student asks a specific question about information data that they don't have access to just because I'm old and have read more books maybe than they have. But most of the time we just, we just sit and talk. And what's really fascinating is that this metaphor that, that education is conversation, works, with books because we're having a conversation about a book, but we're really talking about the ideas in the book, which really means that we're touching minds with the author. We're talking with the author, and that author himself or herself is often touching other authors. And so education becomes this process of exploration, but it's an exploration, oral conversation. Sort of like a Socrates said that, paraphrasing, when in a conversation you, you just have to follow the truth wherever it goes. And so we say, oh, he mentions this person who said this, they mentioned this person who said this, and we just begin to explore and, and grow our way out. He comes an adventure, of sorts. Yeah. That's you all. Yeah. It's an adventure. It's, yeah. Yeah, that's right. It can also be a conversation with something, non literary that is non-linguistic. So, my daughter's first,, botany class, they went outside and they looked at, I forget what kind of tree it was, but they just looked at the tree for an hour. They weren't allowed to talk about it or, I mean, I'm sorry, they weren't allowed to write anything down. They just talked about the tree, what they could observe. And they, there were seed pods and they could see the leaves and study it. And then they went back in and, and had to draw pictures of certain aspects of the trees, do sketches. But they were actually having a conversation with the key with the tree. In fact, there's a beautiful passage, my favorite passage in a, in, in one of the books I think every, every han beings should read, by John Holt called how children learn. And this was, this was written right after the Rubik's cube had come out. Yeah. Massive. Which I've never been able to even pretend this all. I remember the craze., he says he was visiting a family and they had two children about, I think like 12 and nine years old. And the boy had figured out how to solve it. Either figured it out or somebody told him, but he could solve it. And he said one day he was, they were in the Living Room sitting on a sofa and it was smer vacations. So they were, there was no pressure to do anything. And he just watched them. This is what John Holt did. He would just watch and he said they were both just kind of turning it and moving it and not, it didn't look like they were trying to do anything. There was no pattern that he could see. But he said it was more as though they were having a conversation with it. And then he says this beautiful statement, he says, they weren't like scientists probing it for answers. They were more like naturalist walking through a field, willing to encounter whatever was there. Beautiful. I thought that's what education ought to be. Hmm.
Jeremiah Pent:Probing for answers versus exploring for insight
Fred Putnam:and listening. Listening, listening. Hmm.
Jeremiah Pent:Not near enough of that. That goes on.
Fred Putnam:Well, you know, people who teach tend to be told that they should be talking. Right.
Jeremiah Pent:Well, let's move on then from that, from metaphors for education to metaphors that you would consider good ones for encompassing our whole lives. In my book, I explore the metaphors life as a garden, a game, a canvas or race, a test, a symphony, a battle, a journey, a story, and a gift. Are there other metaphors for life that are meaningful to you?
Fred Putnam:Wow, that's a, that's really a great list. It's pretty all encompassing for me., I don't know that I've come up with any outside that list. Yeah. I think one of the, the metaphor that's probably, meant the most, is life is a journey. And part of that is, is because of, well I guess as you get older you realize that there are a lot more similarities between journeys in life than, than even perhaps games and other things. Just at least it feels that way. I'm not sure that 30 years ago I would've said that, but Christina Rossetti's poem uphill captures that perfectly to my mind. It's, a series of questions and answers and starts off, does the road wind up hill all the way? And the answer is yes to the very end., will the day's journey take the whole long day from morning tonight, my friend and goes on. And that image, is also very meaningful, and, and powerful because we use it all the time without thinking about it. We say, oh, he's in a dead end relationship. Ah, yeah. Or she or her life really got sidetracked. Or, AH, they're hitting a rough patch right now. Or his life's at a crossroads, or where do you think they'll end up? Yeah, I mean, we just, we just walked the journey. Metaphor other all journey life is a journey is the conceptual metaphor into that. And we don't even, again, we don't even realize that we're thinking that way. That's by the way, that's a massive metaphor in scripture as well., oh, a way through., some people have tried to say, no, it's really life as a pilgrimage, not life as a journey, but, but the difficulty is life is a pilgrimage. We, we make a pilgrimage to a point that we've already determined in advance whether we're going wherever we're going.
Jeremiah Pent:Well, that's the story of Abraham has been, meaningful to me, especially over the last few years because as my grandfather, pointed out when I was young, he said Abraham was a sojourner his whole life. And that, that idea always stuck with me. And then it's come back to me recently., you know, when God told Abraham to leave his, his, you know, extended family and leave his country and he said, go to a place that I will show you. He doesn't even tell him where he's going. Right, right. Which, you know, that is such an, you know, the New Testament, Abraham is pictured as, you know, wonderful picture of what faith is., you know, Abraham becomes a metaphor for what the faithful life looks like. And that idea of going out, not knowing what the destination is going to be, but trusting the person who sends you out.
Fred Putnam:Yes. That this, this, this soldier and then I'm going to send you on is for your own good. And you can trust me that even though you can't see a, maybe even where you're going to be tomorrow, I'll guide you and I'm going to teach you something through this that's going to benefit you. And maybe, maybe that's where some of the things that you and I have talked about, about personality, types, comes in because it, the person who, views life as a battle or life is a war that probably comes out of experiences that they've had, you know, but it also, there are certain personalities that are simply more combative than others. Right?, that's just a life is a battle to be fought an argent to be one. Yeah, that's right. And that's how often that they learn is in that and the hand to hand combat sort of, context where, you know, they learned what pain feels like and they learn what victory feels like. Or they'll even say things like, I really had to wrestle with the material before I got it right. Exact fighting, struggling. Right. And there are other people who, for whatever reason, I guess we would, we all, we would say by the grace of God, they, there have a great deal more trust that their life is not simply random that they are, this is a journey., they may not know where they're going, somebody does. And so they're there on the way. And sure, we all hit dead ends. We hit jobs that we think are gonna last all in. They don't, or relationships that we think will be important that turn out not to be or, or whatever else we faced disappointments. But we also, when we say somebody something like, Oh, I'm just kinda cruising through life right now. You know, things are going well, and there's a, there's an automobile on that journey.
Jeremiah Pent:Right? That's right. It as we talk about, compare that journey to the, to the life as a battle metaphor. I can't help but think of a, I guess would be Abraham's grandson Jacob who wrestled with the angel, possibly some sort of Russell with his own brother in the womb, before their bride. That's right. That's true., and then wrestles with the angel, possibly a manifestation you've got himself, before facing that brother again after the whole deception story., and having been and having wrestled with as his, uncle Laban for two wives and, and, and wages and all kinds of things. So I have found, oddly enough, that metaphor, of wrestling with God, very comforting to me as well because I like the fact that there's precedent in the scripture for an Abrahamic faith that says, I can't see where I'm going. Right. But I trust you. Right. But there's also the Jacob type of faith, which says, I know you have the capacity to bless me and so I'm not going to let you go until you do, which is beautiful in its own right. So that's, that's almost a redemption of the, of the life as a battle metaphor because I, I take comfort in that because my wife and I have seven children and part of the development process of each of them are something that I've relished and had a good time with is wrestling with each of them., you know, down on the floor, living room., and especially our, we have a three year old right now and sometimes before he goes to bed we'll say, Daddy, we need to wrestle. And so I get down to my knees and, usually that right now his, his tactic is just to try to get around behind me and pmel me on the back with his fist., but it's, I've always relished that because you get this sense of, of how they operate, you know, their strengths. For some of them, we have one in particular that he never, he was such a gentle soul that he didn't really enjoy the wrestling thing. He, he would take part in it because that's what everybody did. But when he went to, to get out of brother, sister, you could always tell that there was this massive holding back cause he really didn't want to anybody. So anyway, all that to say these various metaphors for life, so many of which we do find in, in Christian scripture, each of them can be a comforting and challenging in their own right. And they're all valid. That's, that's the thing. None of that. We can't say, oh, that's not a, there's something wrong with somebody who sees life as a battle that that's not true. Right. Do you know there's a, there's a really, it's become a meme now on the Internet., but in, in the 19th, late 19th century, the 1880s, a British newspaper asked a nber of very well known authors to write a single sentence as a Christmas gift to the nation. Hmm. And one of them is Scottish minister, wrote this, wrote this, he said, be pitiful. Every man is fighting a hard battle. It's become meaned as, be kind or something like that.
Fred Putnam:And, and, and what he's saying is that, it doesn't matter what somebody's life looks like, there is something, every, every single person has something going on. Somewhere in there, somewhere in their life, there's a battle going on, whether it's inside themselves with their family, with a dog, it doesn't really matter where it is someplace. And, and so we say, we can't then say, oh, life is a battle. That's not a valid metaphor because for some people, their work is a battle, right? But their home life is not. And so they have different metaphors for, they may even view themselves in their family as on a journey. We're on a journey together, right? But when I go to work, I've got to put on my armor because or, or health crises, you know, such as cancer. We talked about battling cancer, right? Kansas cancer, wrestling with cancer, right? Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, each of them has validity, sometimes simultaneously, in our lives. And there's an interesting example. That's an interesting example because, I read an article, sorry, I can't remember where, but it said that patients who view what's going on when they have cancer, cancer patients who view that as wrestling or war tend to have a harder time recovering from cancer than patients who accept it and who say, no, this is a disease that I have and I, I just need to be patient and work through it. I would think just the opposite. We would think just the opposite. But there's something about the metaphor itself that actually gets in the way or seems to, seems to get in the way of, of healing. Okay. Now I can't say more than that. I'm not, that's fine.
Jeremiah Pent:But when you say, when you said, I need to be patient with this, the thing that pops in my mind is that we call people in hospitals and cancer. We call them patients, call them patient. Do you know the history? I don't know the history of the lab. That'd be, that'd be interesting. Yeah. Well, let's, let's take a break and we'll come back and I want to talk about metaphors and the, in a realm where we might think that they would be invalid or are not useful. And that's in the realm of modern science. Sure., especially neuroscience and even physics. We'll talk about whether metaphors have a place there, and some fascinating articles on how they do. And that brings to a close our first episode of seek wisdom. And our next episode, I'll continue my discussion with Dr Fred Putnam on the use of metaphors and how they affect the way even scientists explain their work and findings. Thank you for joining us. I'm Jeremiah Pent.