Rev. RAY INNEN PARCHELO

is a novice Tendai priest and founder of the Red Maple Sangha, the first lay Buddhist community in Eastern Ontario.

We possess many extraordinary qualities, but humans are but one form of animal life, so we share our compassion, kindness, competitiveness and determination (to name a few) with countless other beings.

I think this question is looking for something unique to humans. Qualities may be different, but may include capacities, such as our capacity for reason, certain kinds of intelligence and physical details, such as our opposable thumb or the ability to walk upright.

In his book, Embassytown, China Mieville uses a future and distant space fantasy to delve into this question. He suggests our most unique quality is our fluency with metaphor.

In the novel, an alien race learns from humans how to borrow this “lying” to lead them into a radically new mental space. They learn to mimic our use of metaphors, to move from their strictly factual and referential existence into one rich with possible meanings, lavish as a painting or poem. It’s not such a stretch to see his metaphor for our lives, and the importance of symbolic language to full human experience.

This use of metaphor and symbols is one of the primary dimensions of our human and, more specifically religious intelligence. We can construct an imaginary parallel world which is both true and untrue at the same time, one which permits us to extend our understanding of our universe and our place in it as no reasoning can accomplish.

Metaphor enables storytelling, in a secular and sacred way. No other creature can spin symbol-worlds, enter and dwell in them, allowing them to remain transparent over and through the concreteness of flesh and stone.

We can say “I am the spring breeze, the breath of the newly emerging world” and simultaneously know we are and are not that. Yet we have this quality that dwells both in and not in that claim.