The 'short' answer I suppose is that the literal meaning doesn't make sense to me. I was raised with fundamentalist beliefs and by the time I was 16 I could no longer reconcile them with my own experience or my own reality. It seemed a limited view of the world at odds with science, logic, common sense, and even itself.
Turning away from Christianity at that young age was like freeing myself from under a burden -- but at the same time, I spent many years afterwards feeling like a spiritual refugee in a self-imposed exile.
It was not until much later that I learned there are other ways to approach scripture -- and finally being able to appreciate the beauty in scripture was like watching a desert bloom into life.
It is not that I am "guessing" what passages mean, so much as that I feel these meanings are like blooms just starting to push up through concrete that was laid down over them.
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timeasmymeasure
Re: Analogies
Date: 2003-04-21 08:34 pm (UTC)Turning away from Christianity at that young age was like freeing myself from under a burden -- but at the same time, I spent many years afterwards feeling like a spiritual refugee in a self-imposed exile.
It was not until much later that I learned there are other ways to approach scripture -- and finally being able to appreciate the beauty in scripture was like watching a desert bloom into life.
It is not that I am "guessing" what passages mean, so much as that I feel these meanings are like blooms just starting to push up through concrete that was laid down over them.