A parable: There was a coastal city that had marvelous sandy beaches and each year they had sand sculpture contest in the summer. And each year they chose a theme for the sand sculpture contest. One year they chose the theme of “lakes” and so each sand sculpture had to incorporate water in their created sand cities or villas. So this meant running to the ocean and fetching buckets of ocean water to fill their miniature lakes. At the end of the day the entire beach was filled with marvelous sand structures of every sort, all incorporating miniature bodies of water. And so it was time for the judging to begin. There were judges from every age group and one judge happened to be a six year old girl. And the judges were reminded that they were to judge based upon the best incorporation of a body of water into their sand creation. When it came time for the young girl judge to render her decision, they ask her to go and point to her winner. And they were startled to see that she ran past all of the sand creations toward the ocean and she pointed at the ocean and said, “This is the winner!”
Sometimes we spend our time in religion filling our little human made lakes from the abundance of the ocean and we take those little lakes so seriously that we forget the plenitude from which they came. We do the same in our religious metaphors about God; sometimes we let the metaphors serve as a replacement for the plenitude of God, who is grander than even the ocean.
Riddle: The water of the beach lakes is and is not the ocean.
