Theologian Joy Marie Clarkson (King's College London) discusses her most recent book, You Are a Tree: And Other Metaphors to Nourish Life, Thought, and Prayer.
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We need the world to understand it. Human embodied experience and material life in the world has a profound effect on our thinking—not just poetry and pop music, but our intellectual reflections, philosophical theories and scientific observations, to the most mundane conversations.
Take a closer look at human language and ideas, and we’ll find we are deeply embedded, grounded, and built on a foundation of metaphor. That last sentence, for instance, depends on the metaphor KNOWLEDGE is a BUILDING. But navigating this terrain can be treacherous and we can easily get lost (another metaphor: LIFE is a JOURNEY). But to be a tree planted by streams of water, bearing fruit, flourishing with vibrant leaves, we can allow our roots to sink down into this reality and bloom and reach upward (YOU are a TREE).
Theologian Joy Marie Clarkson joins me and Macie Bridge today for a conversation about metaphor. It’s brimming and full of metaphor itself (that one’s KNOWLEDGE is a CONTAINER), but it’s not too meta.
Joy is research associate in theology and literature at King’s College London. She’s the author of Aggressively Happy: A Realist’s Guide to Believing in the Goodness of Life, as well as her most recent You Are a Tree: And Other Metaphors to Nourish Life, Thought, and Prayer. Her writing has also appeared in The Tablet, Christianity Today, and Plough Quarterly. She is the Books and Culture Editor for Plough Quarterly and hosts a podcast called Speaking with Joy.
Together we discuss: How we see ourselves as human: Are we trees? Are we machines? The beauty of language and the glory of poetry to reveal intangible or invisible wisdom and experience. Joy explains the hidden negation in metaphors and the dance between subjective convention and objective realities. We revel and play with language and its particularity. We discuss Julian of Norwich on Jesus as the source of motherhood. J.R.R. Tolkien on technology and redemption through trees and dark journeys. And we explore the many metaphors that seem to undergird Christian theological reflection on flourishing life.
About Joy Clarkson
Joy Marie Clarkson is research associate in theology and literature at King’s College London. She’s the author of Aggressively Happy: A Realist’s Guide to Believing in the Goodness of Life, as well as her most recent You Are a Tree: And Other Metaphors to Nourish Life, Thought, and Prayer. Her writing has also appeared in The Tablet, Christianity Today, and Plough Quarterly. She is the Books and Culture Editor for Plough Quarterly and hosts a podcast called Speaking with Joy. Check out her Substack here.
Show Notes
Production Notes
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Joy Clarkson: Why metaphors are so powerful is that we're able to have kind of a fuller look at the thing we're talking about. The world is much more mysterious than our capacity to understand it. You are God's poem. You're kind of this living, breathing poem that's drawing its imagery. from the goodness of God. That if God is a creator, that if God invests this natural world that we live in with meaning, with order, with structure, these kinds of patterns that allow us to speak about love and wisdom, that then as we live, when our lives take on the structure and order and form, we can become the poetry in a similar way that creation is a poetry that evokes and speaks of the God in whom all of this is rooted.
Evan Rosa: This This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa with the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. We need the world to understand it. Human embodied experience and material life in the world has a profound effect on our thinking. Not just poetry and pop music, but our intellectual reflections.
Philosophical theories, scientific observations, to the most mundane of conversations. Take a closer look at human language and ideas, and we'll find that we are deeply embedded, grounded, and built on a foundation of metaphor. I mean, that very last sentence, for instance, depends on the metaphor, knowledge is a building or structure, but navigating this terrain can be treacherous and we can easily get lost.
Another metaphor, life is a journey, but to be a tree planted by streams of water, bearing fruit, flourishing with vibrant leaves, allowing our roots to sink down into this reality and bloom and reach upward, that's a glorious thing. And yet another metaphor. You are a tree. Theologian and author Joy Marie Clarkson joins me and Macie Bridge today for a conversation about metaphor.
It's brimming and full of metaphor itself. That one's knowledge is a container, but it's not too meta, I hope. Joy is a research associate in theology and literature at King's College London. She's the author of Aggressively Happy, A Realist's Guide to Believing in the Goodness of Life, as well as her most recent book, You Are a Tree, and other metaphors to nourish life, thought, and prayer.
Her writings also appeared in The Tablet and Christianity Today, as well as Plough Quarterly, where she's the book's in culture editor. She also hosts a podcast called Speaking with Joy. Together we discuss how we see ourselves as human. Are we trees? Are we machines? We talk about the beauty of language and the glory of poetry to reveal intangible or invisible wisdom and insight.
Joy explains the hidden negation in metaphors and that dance between subjective convention and objective realities. We revel and play with language and its particularity. We talk about surprising metaphors like Jesus as the source of motherhood in Julian of Norwich and J. R. R. Tolkien on technology and redemption through trees and dark long journeys.
And we explore the many metaphors that seem to undergird Christian theological reflection on flourishing life. Thanks for listening today and reaching your roots down here for a while.
Joy Clarkson, it is a pleasure to have you on For the Life of the World. Thanks for joining me and Macie. And Macie, great to have you here as well.
Joy Clarkson: I've been really excited about this conversation. So thank you for inviting me.
Macie Bridge: I'm excited to join in.
Evan Rosa: So, Joy, this, this latest book of yours, You Are a Tree, it's a wonderful, provocative title.
You're exploring metaphor in this book. I will have to resist the entire time not calling out the many metaphors that are simply embedded in all of the language that we use on a daily basis. But I wanted to just start by asking you about the motivating force behind the book. What made you notice metaphor in the way that you have?
Joy Clarkson: So, as you might suspect, this is a question I get asked reasonably often when people ask about the book. And I don't actually know that I have kind of like a singular thing I can point to. I know that I have always, well, as the point of the book points out, you know, we speak in metaphors all the time and we all think in metaphors, so it's impossible not to, but I think I've always kind of consciously looked out for metaphors when I was having difficulty describing something that I was experiencing or an emotion that was kind of moving through me or I was moving through.
So I always, I think I just kind of personally had that enjoyment and pleasure in language and desire to be able to put my own thoughts into words. Um, but I think that kind of this focus on metaphor came partially from my own work as a scholar. So when I was doing my PhD, it wasn't actually something that particularly worked its way into my PhD, but I, I noticed how, you know, people love to talk about modernity and disenchantment, this and that, And it can become a little bit tiresome sometimes.
But one of the things that most struck me was the way in which the closer we move to our own times, the more the world and ourselves are kind of described as a machine. We, we think of nature as this great complex machine. It's funny because when it was first described that way, it was very consciously as a metaphor.
Whereas I think now we just kind of actually think the world is kind of this giant mechanistic thing. But also how much that language is prevalent in how we think and talk about ourselves and our relationships. You know, we talk about recharging and updating and downloading information as though we kind of are these, these computers.
And so I kind of had that on the back burner in my mind as kind of an academic interest. But then on a personal level, I was kind of going through a good deal of burnout as people often do near the end of a PhD. And I noticed how much of it was me kind of thinking of myself, not consciously as a machine, but kind of imagining myself in the way you might imagine a machine and feeling exhausted by that, feeling like I'm recharging, I'm doing all things like, why am I not productive?
Why am I not producing? And realizing that in treating myself like a machine, I was kind of buckling under that weight and finding myself exhausted and feeling guilty and taking a step back. and questioning what metaphors I was using about myself and about the world made me realize how inhumane that metaphor was.
And I thought, well, if that's not a good, if that's a less humane metaphor for myself, for human relationships, what are kind of more ancient and sustaining metaphors? And so that was really kind of the inspiration for the book was to meditate on metaphors and scripture and poetry and literature that had kind of stood the test of time to probe these kind of deep human experiences like the desire for rootedness, like the desire to be fruitful, like the search for wisdom and the need for safety.
So that's kind of a rambling way around it, but I think it was some mixture of my own personality, academic interests, and then kind of the crisis of exhaustion in myself that I saw a reflection of the world around me and wanting to kind of seek deeper, more lasting, and more humane metaphors for human life.
Yeah.
Macie Bridge: That's really wonderful. Thank you for sharing that. I think as I was reading, I was really delighting in the way that you invited us into these metaphors that have become such colloquialisms. And not just inviting us to look at them, but to kind of feel that tension that I think you're describing.
And I'm, I'm curious if you would speak a little bit to all your chapter titles are, you are not, or they have these parenthetical not in, in the metaphor that you're focusing on. And I just love the way that that played with my experience as a reader, as I was kind of drawn to think about. Just that tension that you're touching on that came up for you personally.
Can you share a little bit about what that choice was for you as a writer?
Joy Clarkson: Absolutely. Yes. So, so of the seven chapters, all of them have, as you said, kind of this parenthetical knot. So let's see if I can remember them. People are not trees. Wisdom is not light. Love is not a disease. Creation is not birth.
Sadness is not heavy. And life is not journey. And the reason that I put that not in there, it's actually pretty important. Something that is significant about metaphors. So I'll, I'll put on my little high school literature cap on for the moment. So a simile is something that says, you know, this is like that.
So my love is like a red, red rose. And it's just saying, well, that thing has these qualities and this thing has these qualities. They're like each other. A metaphor usually uses the word is, right? So there's a sense that I'm saying, I talked about the Billy Collins poem, which is just an amazing love poem if you haven't read it.
But you are the goblet and the wine, right? So I'm not just saying you're like the goblet and the wine, you are the goblet and the wine. And Aristotle defines that as, you know, the etymology of the word is to, to carry over, um, to pharaon, to carry over properties of one thing to another. So it's to carry over the properties of the goblet and the wine to my lover.
And within that, there's all of these theories of metaphor. But within a metaphor is something interesting because you're carrying it over, you're not just saying it's like it, you're, you're letting kind of the lover be the goblet and the wine. And in doing that, there's always this kind of whispered, they're not really the goblet and the wine, right?
We know that when we use a metaphor, but that's kind of the whispered thing underneath. And I think that that's part of why metaphors are so powerful. is that we're able to have kind of a fuller look at the thing we're talking about. So if we're talking about wisdom being light, we're able to look at more things about wisdom by saying wisdom is light than if we said, well, wisdom is light, light.
It's a, it's a more kind of full hearted thing, but it also keeps in view that this metaphor doesn't say everything there is to say about wisdom. Or saying that people are trees doesn't mean that everything that there is to be said about the human is said in that. And the reasons I think that's important is that, um, the world is much more mysterious than our capacity to understand it.
And you know, this is particularly important when you're talking about God, right? Because if you have the impression that you've really said something finally and completely about God, there's always the chance that you just are wrong or that it's insufficient. And so the special thing about metaphor is that it has this kind of internal negation and kind of puts you in a posture of openness and wonder towards things.
because you always have the sense that you know that people really aren't trees. The sadness really isn't heavy, but this gives you a way to speak about it while also kind of preserving an epistemological humility. So that's why I put the knot in there because all metaphors kind of have that knot hidden in there, but because it also reminds us of the complexity of the world, and the feelings of the people that we talk about, that we have never just gotten it.
And I think that's actually the danger of quote unquote literal language is that we often kind of can trick ourselves into thinking we actually have said the thing finally and completely or that we're not using metaphor. So metaphor kind of puts us in a space where there are better and worse metaphors.
We can say more and less things that are closer or further from the truth. But that kind of bracketed knot helps us have a posture of humility that invites us to pay even more attention to the things that we're talking about.
Evan Rosa: It's kind of a wink. It's a sort of a knowing wink at, at the way that we come at the world.
But I think we should camp out a little bit on this particular question, both with respect to theological language and just the human capacity for language. And I might start there by just pointing out the ways that, for instance, medieval theologians would have nodded toward, you know, we can only speak about God by way of analogy, right?
There's, there's something so other, so, so different. And there is this gap between our words and the world that I think metaphor really richly occupies. And, and we can remind ourselves, not literal, wink. And yet, I really do think like the embeddedness of it and to, to recognize the fact that we arrive having received a language and received a body to interact with that language and the experience of the human condition.
Metaphors occupying a very large space in there.
Joy Clarkson: Absolutely. And I think maybe the difference between a medieval person and, and ourselves, and this isn't to say one is better than the other, but they have this real kind of confidence that there was. some kind of link between the visible, the things that we experience in our bodies and touch and taste and feel, and the interior kind of intellectual things we're trying to describe.
You know, the sense that, that humans could be compared to trees because there really was some kind of spiritual link between them. And something that I found kind of, I found amusing as I was writing the book, and I talked about this in the introduction, was that as I sat with each of those metaphors, I ended up doing what the authors of the medieval bestiaries often do.
So if you've ever, if you've never got a chance, go look up, I'm sure that there's free editions online. One of the medieval bestiaries. They're really fun. They're basically exactly what they sound like. They're written in medieval times by monks trying to like, basically like an encyclopedia of animals.
What's funny about them is that clearly, like a lot of the time, whoever's writing these entries has like never seen the animal they're describing. So they'll, they'll start with kind of, you know, facts about, You know, the, the panther is a multicolored cat and you think, I guess he like looks really close like a crow with shiny, that has sweet breath that attracts all the animals.
And you're like, that's, I don't think that's true, but you know, they describe kind of these so called factual things about the cat and then they always end with, but the true panther is our Lord Jesus Christ. And there's this kind of sense that when you read them, it's very funny. It feels a little like, you know, the old anecdote about.
A kid being in Sunday school and, and someone says, well, what's brown and fuzzy and, you know, collects nuts. And the kid goes, well, it sounds like a squirrel, but I'm going to say Jesus because I'm in Sunday school. And you kind of feel that way when you read the bestiary spot.
Evan Rosa: Christ Panther is just like this new brand in my mind that like, you know,
Joy Clarkson: you've, I know.
I know, the sweet breathed, multicolored Christ Panther. But, but I felt that way when I was writing the book, cause I would, I would stand up and be like, okay, I'm going to do wisdom as light. And I would not have in my mind that eventually I'm going to end up being like, but actually, it's a true light that is wisdom is our Lord Jesus Christ.
But when you press into each one of these metaphors, and you look at kind of the way that it's been talked about in the Christian tradition, or even just in light. There is this sense that, you know, to put it, I don't usually like to put things in Tomas terms, but I'm going to put it in Tomas terms for the moment.
The words we can say about God kind of come from the perfections we perceive and things in the world. And so it makes sense that if we really pay attention to lights, to trees, to, to weight, that in all of those physical things. There might be some kind of divine radiation that we can understand something about God.
So that was one of the surprising things about the book as a writer, was setting out to write about weight or light or disease and often finding without meaning to that hidden in that was some kind of disclosure of the divine. Well, it
Macie Bridge: sounds almost like you've stumbled upon, I felt as a reader, like I stumbled upon a sort of via negativa moments in in the book.
But not in an unnatural sense, in a very organic, like this is, this is just a grounding in our reality of our language does fall short and we sort of trick ourselves into thinking that we have these words that so accurately or
Joy Clarkson: completely
Macie Bridge: bring us to God or bring us into a full understanding of ourselves when really we don't have full language for that.
And that's a really beautiful thing. And that's a mystery to
Joy Clarkson: lean into. Absolutely. It's got a little bit of the Dionysius, the Areopagite, right? When he kind of goes and he'll say, well, God is this. And then he'll describe all the beautiful things about light or whatever. But actually, no, no, he's not actually that.
Sorry. Scratch that. God is this, you know, and that, that's how we come to know things. And it reminds me a little bit, it's not out of a lack of love or knowledge. It reminds me of the Billy Collins poem when he's trying to describe the lover. And it comes up with like 15 different things that the lover is because when we're describing an object of our affection, we need many, many words to be able to evoke that and get close to it and to capture elements of it.
And I think that is. That is kind of a metaphor for us there, this ecstatic abundance that always involves a negation, but that allows us to affirm certain things.
Evan Rosa: There's this also commitment to particularity too, that, that you, you can't seem to avoid. There's something necessarily incomplete about language.
And so whether it's the, you know, an apathetic theology or the via negativa or like theology by analogy. There's always something that seems to be unspeakable. Oh, it's this. Yes, it's that. No, it's not that. There's more. And, and so that unspeakability of certain things, it sort of forces a radical particularity if you want to say anything.
Joy Clarkson: Yes, because there's this nature of being unspeakable, but I think this is one of the things the book wanted to get to. We just really want to be able to say things. Like, I think that's a deep human need. is to be able to put things into words, even though these things can't properly be put into words.
And that's why we, yeah, we must, we must. Yeah. And even unspeakable evil, sometimes a part of the heaviness of it is being unable to speak about it. You know, when we've experienced something, whether it's personal or societal, and maybe sometimes we shouldn't ever be able to speak of it, but there's something a part of the grief is not being able to put into words, the things that we've experienced.
Evan Rosa: Partly because of the interest that you place in it, uh, I wanted to ask you about this passage from Julian of Norwich. And so this would kind of be a little bit by extension going from Christ is true Panther to Christ is mother, you know, there are surprising ways. And perhaps ways that, that expand or stretch the comfort level for, for some people, the way that we might, you know, If you were speaking literally, and if the world were to be carved at the joints around literal reference, literal sense and reference.
then you would be very nervous, right? About like all sorts of things. And we've met nervous people like about language, right? Like, no, it's not quite that. And it really can't be that actually. Um, and this is, this is a, this is one that I think is, is rich. Would you mind just narrating a bit this passage from Revelations of the Divine Love?
Joy Clarkson: Yes. So it's this beautiful section where, you know, Julianne Norwich, whose writing is so Homely is the word she uses by which she doesn't mean ugly, but she means that it's like a home. It's something that invites you in and is affectionate and warm. And it's the section where she talks about Jesus, our true mother.
And she talks about how, you know, everything that is good. I think this is literally how she puts it in motherhood. You know, the, the safety, the nourishment that a mother offers with her very body, the kind of protection and wisdom that mothers offer us. They raise. All of that is what Christ is to us and more.
That's the source of motherhood is Jesus, the source of motherhood. And what's interesting to me, why I included that is that when she's saying that, the way that she articulates it, so metaphors have transference, right? So transferring properties of one thing to another. So if I say you are a tree, I'm transferring the properties of tree to you.
But when she's talking about motherhood. She's not going, well, we have experiences of motherhood on earth, and I'm transferring that to talk about Jesus. She's saying that mothers are a metaphor of Jesus, of God, that God is so a mother that we borrow. We transfer the qualities of motherhood to human beings that are from God.
And in a way it's funny that this makes us uncomfortable. There's also like a really rich, I don't know if I'll call it tradition, but habit in medieval writers of talking about God as mother and specifically Jesus as mother. So there's like pictures of Jesus nursing us from his, from his wounds. There's, you know, it's a famous kind of Holy Grail of being in.
It's quite graphic, anatomical depictions. So that's a really, but also like even I think it's Ansel Canterbury talks about Jesus the mother chicken. So it's a very rich thing. But it's funny that we find this uncomfortable, right? Because we talk about God as a father all the time. But it's funny because at least as illustrations I grew up in, there'd be an idea that's like, well, if you talk about God as a father, that's real.
Whereas if you talk about him as a mother, that's just a metaphor, right? That you're, you're just transferring, you're your experience of motherhood onto God. So what's quite significant to me about Julian is that she's not, she's not doing that. She's saying, no, true motherhood is in God. And we, we borrow that from God.
And the thing is, I think that if you kind of think through the theological elements of it, if, if everything exists in God and draws its perfection from God, even on a very like old fashioned, you know, kind of hardcore traditional account, whatever that is. You have to say that, that motherhood is a metaphor of God.
It would be kind of irrational to say that fatherhood was real, but motherhood was just a metaphor for God. So, but I brought that out, whether or not people feel confident in affirming that, because it brings out that question of, of how we use metaphor when we speak about God and where we think kind of the perfections in the earth are coming from.
Are they, are they just us projecting our experience onto God? Or when we experience something that is cohesive and beautiful and good, is it actually drawing its, its perfection from God? And what we're experiencing in motherhood is more like a metaphor transferring from God to us. That's a rambling way, but that was basically what I wanted to set up was kind of the question of why do we, how do we distinguish between when we are using our own experience and projecting it onto God, or rather, because God is the source of all goodness, are we, are we actually experiencing motherhood from God?
That's not just a metaphor, that's actually something we can infer. So, that was. the constellation of questions around which, why I brought up that, that passage. Yeah, that's
Macie Bridge: fantastic. That's making me think of, I'm not sure if you've encountered Bobby McFerrin's version of Psalm 23, which is a Gregorian chant of Psalm 23, but with all of the pronouns replaced with feminine pronouns.
And particularly at the end of the Psalm, it concludes with, I think it's glory be to the mother and to the daughter and to the holy of I've encountered that in a couple spaces in the last year and have noticed discomfort in myself with that daughter language in particular. And I think what you're getting at is really fascinating to that concept of why, why wouldn't being a daughter be a reflection or a metaphor of God's relation, of Jesus's relation to us and in humanity.
I
can't
Joy Clarkson: recommend that song enough. I haven't heard it. I'll have to look it up.
Evan Rosa: It's a kind of one, it's, I mean, like his ability musically, cause it's him in like eight parts or something, you know, it's Bobby McFerrin, but it's a truly amazing song. Like, I mean, like it's gorgeous. The song is just, it exploded me the first time I heard it.
Human realities, the developments of technology, the continual discovery of the world we inhabit. So science has a way of expanding knowledge. And then giving us new tools for speaking about the world, but importantly, speaking about ourselves and speaking about God. We started a bit here on a metaphor of a machine, but I want to give a little bit more of an entryway to talk about whether we are a tree and, and just to note that it looks like, at least in some respect, metaphor is going to be dependent on the advancement of certain creative and discoverable realities.
Okay. that as human knowledge expands, we're going to begin to allow that to feed back on certain ways that we speak about the world and ourselves. To talk about a machine at one point. or to talk about humanity as machines that would not have been possible at one point. And until you encounter an object and have a word for it and then begin to explore what that word means, we don't have a whole lot to hang on.
So curious about what you have been noticing about metaphors about humanity.
Joy Clarkson: Yeah, but I think you make a very good point, which is that there is actually kind of this fecund possibility that happens when we create new things, right? Because We have a new visible, tangible thing to reach for when we're trying to describe our experiences.
And I had a conversation about a month ago with the poet Malcolm Gite, and he talked about this great example of a, of a mechanical metaphor where I think it was Herbert, I think it was Herbert, one of the metaphysical poets, one of the ones who was married. And the reason I said that is because he uses this metaphor about like a compass.
So very mechanical thing. to describe his kind of love for his spouse and like it's very romantic and kind of sensual. Um, but that's this beautiful example of a metaphor with something mechanical that it wouldn't have been possible without that kind of ingenuity, right? That creation of humankind that enabled him to speak creatively and humorously and endearingly about his spouse.
And I think, you know, with the book, I didn't want to, I didn't want to kind of negate all mechanical metaphors, because I think there's this kind of impulse whenever we're in a period of advancement to just kind of be suspicious of all new technology and think it's all very, very bad. Um, so I think there's, makes sense that we use, that we use technology to speak about humanity because we're just surrounded by it, right?
We're doing this podcast. There's probably at least, I would say at least six, if not nine, um, machines between us, right? We've got our microphones and our Mac, well I'm using a MacBook Air, our AirPods, I've got my cell phone next to me, you know, that's a lot of machines. So of course we reach for machines when we're describing human beings because we're surrounded by them.
I think the danger of that can be when we start to kind of embed that metaphor in our mind of machines as human beings without a consciousness that it's a metaphor. So when we don't have the. Human beings are not computers, right? If we kind of have that. So like, when I think about the kind of everyday language we use, we talk about, I need to recharge.
That makes sense, right? Like human beings are, we don't have infinite capacity. And so we do need to replenish energy. The way in which maybe that falls short is that, you know, if I say, well, I'm, I need to recharge. And then I have one weekend, like I rest and I sleep and I'm like, I'm so tired. Like, what's wrong with me?
I should just totally get back at it. Human beings don't need just one, like most of the time my computer mostly just needs one source of nourishment. It's just to plug it in, right, and it fills back up and it does its job. Human beings aren't like that. We have seasons where no matter how much we sleep, we will never be replenished.
And the only thing that can change that is coming into a new season or looking at maybe other ways in our life in which we're depleted. So it's a youthful metaphor, but it falls short. Other examples might be, you know, if we say I'm going to crank out some work, right, which is like a mechanical metaphor.
We know what I mean by that, right? We mean that I'm being really productive, and I'm pushing really hard, and I'm doing the same thing over and over again, and I'm routined. But human beings aren't machines, right? So we, we're sometimes really productive, we're sometimes less productive. We're just, so it's a, it's a metaphor that can work, but that falls short in various ways, in the same way that all metaphors do.
But I think that part of the reason that a Mechanical metaphor for human beings. is maybe a little bit dangerous is that machines are made for usually a purpose to produce something, to produce some kind of work. They are reasonably self contained, right? I don't, I don't need to like put my computer next to my friend's computer once a day or otherwise it'll get lonely and get depressed.
Like it's pretty self contained. And, and it's disposable, right? At some point, if your machine stops working, you don't, maybe you'll have like a sentimental attachment to it, but ultimately you'll just get a new MacBook. And I think if we embed that kind of metaphor about human beings, about mechanics, if we think that human beings are primarily valuable for production, for kind of being able to put monetary or social value into society.
That's a pretty damaging thing, but I think it's also something that is quite prevalent, right? We do, we are all little cogs in the capitalist machine. If I think of myself as being kind of self sustaining, not needing to be entangled with other people, then I will become diminished. I will be malnourished because there is something about community and connection of other human beings that I do need.
And fundamentally, If I think of myself as kind of when I stop functioning or I'm not contributing in some way, if I'm disposable, that's a pretty heavy weight. And that may sound kind of scaremongering, but I think that is kind of a way that we talk about human beings in the world that we live in. And it's, those questions really come up.
But I think that the metaphors we use about human beings do matter and they do shape how we think about ourselves, how we operate on a societal level. And so I look to trees, partially just because they are one of the most ancient metaphors for human beings, you know, in the Christian scriptures, but also otherwise, it's just something we naturally reach for.
And I think that it is, it's an older, and I think a more mysterious and that, and in that sense, somewhat humane, a more humane metaphor for human beings, that has a lot to offer us.
Evan Rosa: Instrumentalization. I mean, like, like it's when you can instrumentalize a machine. Um, and it's worth pointing out, like, you know, trees are also useful in that sense.
And yet there's, there's a different reality to them, but machines are meant to be instrumentalized where and they're created as such, right. As a product of human artifice. Yes.
Macie Bridge: I think the systematic implications that you're pointing to, I mean, I, I felt that really deeply with the climbing the ladder metaphor that you pulled out as well.
How? Yeah. And that is reflected in every area of our society and, and how detrimental that can be to our personal lives, but also the formation of our communities. How would you connect that, that metaphor particularly to maybe bringing it back to the trees? How do you kind of grapple with, with where we go from?
I loved your mountain metaphor as well. How, where we go from the latter kind of
Joy Clarkson: implications in our world. Yeah. So the metaphor you're describing is in my chapter on kind of security and success and about how so many of the metaphors we use just colloquially about success and safety. Our success and safety is up there and danger and failure is down there.
So you'll say someone's the top dog or they're the underdog, right? Those mean opposite things. And that makes sense, right? It just refers to real things in the material world. But we also talk about being at the top of your career or being on the up and up, or we talk about being under someone's control, right?
So there's a sense of, kind of the up and the down. And that's something that Lakoff and Johnson talk about in Metaphors We Live By, the kind of directional metaphors. And so the metaphor you're specifically referencing, as I talk about how we, we use the metaphor for success of a ladder, right? So, so I'm just, I'm just climbing the corporate ladder.
Or, you know, if you think about that as kind of being at the top of the ladder, being on top of your game. And the thing I talk about is that that mental image is a little bit violent, right? Because If I'm on a ladder and I'm trying to get up, there's no way to get up unless the person in front of me like gets up and gets off the ladder, or unless I kind of grapple around the person and step on their hands and, you know, kind of gorilla fight my way to the top of the ladder.
And there's also a sense of the ladder where only one person can really be at the top of the ladder. And I think that metaphor does kind of play itself out and. You know, obviously we're not trying to embody the metaphor, but as you were kind of saying earlier, there are ways in which our language does kind of bring, bring things into being.
And I can speak, especially, you know, being a woman in academia, I had wonderful supportive experiences, but there's also very much places where there can only be one successful woman in the room. And whether that's an attitude in the other woman or in there, there's that sense of kind of, there can only be one person in the latter.
And so, I think that is, that's obviously violent. I think it's also a recipe for bad institutions and unhealthy institutions, right? Because if you have that kind of, the reason I see that a lot in academia is I think because there's a sense of receding resources, especially in humanities programs. So people are kind of fighting and they're using their elbows to get what they need rather than to make space for other people.
But that's the sense of things becoming smaller and I think going back to the, the tree metaphor. So on that, I talk about what if we kind of thought about success differently? What if we thought about it as a mountain? What if we thought about, you know, there's actually room for a lot of people at the top of the mountain.
But also, if you climb a mountain, not everybody has to go to the very top, right? I was just talking with somebody recently who was like, yeah, I climbed a mountain recently in Colorado and I got about halfway up. My daughter and I were proud. We had a picnic. Meanwhile, these other people are like walking up to the top of skis to go all the way down.
And those are both successful experiences, right? We shouldn't prize. If, if we have a more expansive view of success, then we don't have to kind of nervously, anxiously get to the top because that's the only place that's safe. And I think that when it comes to trees, this also has a better picture of what it means to thrive and to flourish.
And I think this is very true in kind of institutional settings. Trees need each other. Forests do all of these cool things that really look a lot like human agency. They, they send each other nourishment to their roots with, with mycelium, which is like fungus. They, they'll hold on to each other's roots if there's a storm so that they, so the forest isn't destroyed.
And there's this sense in which every tree in a forest is important because if one tree goes away and there's a section where the earth is, is more exposed to sun, then that will become more dry and then all the other trees will have less resources, which also means that trees will even keep a stump alive, which if you remember your kind of like elementary school.
uh, science lesson, you know, if it doesn't have leaves, it shouldn't be able to do photosynthesis and stay alive. But oftentimes, if you go into the forest and cut open a stump, it will still have green because there's something about the survival, even a very dysfunctional trees, that matters for the whole forest.
And I think that that is a very rich evocation of what human beings seem to do, right? That we, We need each other. We need our, we need our members to stay alive, to create an ecosystem of health and that we don't even just need the, the functional, productive, fruitful, even though, you know, the great thing about trees is they are fruitful.
They do produce, they do have something that is, looks like growth and fruit and all those words come from trees, but that they don't even just need the functional ones. So there's something about even the smallest tree, even the stump that's important to keep each other alive.
Evan Rosa: Two, um, literary masterpieces need to be, need to be brought up in this regard.
Um, the masterpiece could be, you know, highly contestable here, but, uh, The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein, of course, is one. And then I just finished reading The Two Towers to my son, Ben, and Gus, my, my, my little guy too. And The Ents, the oldest living being on middle earth, tree beard and, and the slowness of that life and the, and yet the ways that, that there is a kind of a depth to the anger that you don't get from the movie.
I mean, you do get it in the movie, but, but the book reveals a kind of depth to their anger that slowly wells up toward the, the destructive mechanizing and instrumentalizing of Saruman. And I just want to ask you about Tolkien and trees, honestly, that's just my, that's my segue to Tolkien and trees. You know,
Joy Clarkson: what do you think about Tolkien and trees?
I love Tolkien and trees. I feel like I actually talked less about Lord of the Rings and the book than I could have because I was self conscious that I was going to be a Tolkien girly.
Evan Rosa: Yeah, and you all, and you did Journey, like, life is a journey, and yes, Frodo and Sam are on the journey, but there's, there's a lot of metaphor that's happening.
Absolutely.
Joy Clarkson: In Lord of the Rings. No, I think Tolkien was a great lover of trees. I think that, that reading those, those books, especially in my teen years, kind of inculcated a love of trees in me. And, you know, the great offense that Saruman commits is cutting down Fangorn forest. And that creates this kind of like primal rage that causes the, the Ents after all this time to respond to the world.
And I think you're right too that, you know, a lot of what the imagery that Tolkien brings in, especially to the Two Towers, I think. is a kind of anti industrialist, you know, view of things that you see Saruman kind of basically creating something like a industrial kind of factory of works and It's a
Evan Rosa: wasteland and he's, and he's, and he's diverted all the water.
He's, he's, he's basically just destroying the earth for the sake of his, the exercise of power. Yes.
Joy Clarkson: And I think that's, I think power too is, that's the central theme in Lord of the Rings, isn't it? What do we do with power? And, and I think a big part of that too for Tolkien is treating the earth or treating the natural world as kind of a dead thing rather than ourselves as living beings.
members of the earth as creatures amongst other creatures. And, and I think, I guess in a way, if we want to learn from trees, we have to think about ourselves as creatures amongst other creatures. That they, that we, we're not somehow separate from the world that we live in, but that we inhabit. I always think it's actually kind of funny when you start thinking about it, that we talk about the environment as though there's like us and then this separate thing called the environment when we are inside of it.
It shapes who we are and. And so, no, I love how Tolkien brings in kind of that difference between seeing the world as kind of a giant Baconian machine that we can extract resources from versus the world as this place that is steeped in meaning that we're one creature amongst other and that the natural world is a gift that teaches us and guides us.
And, you know, throughout the book too, it kind of will almost miraculously protect the fellowship as they go. So that's not a very coherent thought, but I just, yes, yes. And amen. This is reminding
Macie Bridge: me of just many conversations I've had in the past about what it means to be the body of Christ. And this
Joy Clarkson: community of trees, this forest of trees, how that's
Macie Bridge: not at all different from what we're trying to do in our Christian communities.
And yet we think about our, our creaturely siblings as, as other and nature as other. I'd love to hear a little bit more about you come to this idea at the end of the book that the entirety of our Christian life could be a metaphor, might be a metaphor. And that's, that's a large subject to just throw at you, but I'd love to hear you speak a little bit about what is that?
Yeah. What does that Christian walk look like when we're working, we're creating our own metaphors and we're walking
Joy Clarkson: on metaphors? Yes. Well, I think one of the kind of most marvelous things about the Christian story is that it's one in which God doesn't just kind of do stuff and then let us experience that, but he invites us to participate in the work that he does.
that God does. And so that means that God doesn't just create, but that he, that God invites us to create as well. And so when I think about life as a metaphor, you know, that's going back to that kind of sense of that metaphor is transferring one thing to another. And so the life that we live, if you're a Christian, is that the idea is that you are borrowing the perfections from God for your own life and the way that you live.
And I think that's kind of a, It creates this sense in which the human life is a metaphor, but it's also like a poem that kind of refers back to its, its source of transference. It refers back to its source of inspiration, which is God. And I love passages in the New Testament where it talks about for you are God's handiwork.
But the word there is closer to what would mean poem, right? You are, you are God's poem. You're kind of this living, breathing poem that's drawing its imagery from, from the goodness of God. And, and I, it kind of reminds me of, you know, the romantic poets saw kind of the human life as, as creating a work of art.
But I think that that's a very Christian idea too, that if God is a creator, that if, God invests this natural world that we live in with meaning, with order, with structure, with these kinds of patterns that allow us to speak about love and wisdom. But then as we live, when our lives take on the structure and order and form, we can become kind of the poetry, in a similar way that creation is a poetry that evokes and speaks of the God in whom all of this is, is
Evan Rosa: rooted.
It's kind of an image bearing kind of moment, right? Because that poem is, I mean, it's okay to say the big, the big Greek word is poesis of like, it's kind of, I mean, it's mimicking creation ex nihilo and, and, and bringing something truly new into the world, or at least the effort to do so. And metaphor gives us a chance to kind of explore what that, what that might be.
Um, Because of our creative powers and because of the extent to which that's, you know, sometimes, sometimes just, just bringing up the Imago Dei too quickly stifles the conversation. Some sometimes it's like, what else do you say about it? But, but there's something really fascinating about our capacities and that our creative capacities, something truly new comes into being.
And there's a desire to, to see that repeatable and, and it's an artistic side to it. Absolutely. In light of the fact that metaphor is so bottom up, it is so empirical, if you will, in the sense that it requires the, the stuff, the materiality and the, and the body writing about metaphor and exploring it, how have you found it personally transformative?
Joy Clarkson: I really loved writing this book and I think the reason that I loved writing it was that one of the things I wanted to do was to, in writing about each one of these, these metaphors, to draw back to a kind of our analytic continental question, I wanted to do something kind of like a phenomenological description of each of the things.
So, you know, sitting with what is the, what experience do we have of light? If we're not bringing other kind of concepts into it, how do we experience light or heaviness? And, Doing that, paying attention to those kind of very everyday experiences, just filled me personally with a sense of how densely meaningful and poetic our everyday lives are.
And so I think that was what writing about it personally did for me, was Just made me think about paying attention to my life and how much there is there actually to pay attention to. So that's, I think, what I personally took away from writing the book.
Evan Rosa: Joy, thanks for your time. Thanks for this book.
Thanks for joining
Joy Clarkson: us today. Thank you for having me. It's been a delight.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Joy Marie Clarkson. Production assistance by Alexa Rollo and Tim Berglund. And special thanks to Macie Bridge for her editorial assistance and co hosting this interview. I'm Evan Rosa, and I edit and produce the show.
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