We use the metaphor of fire in myriad ways. We speak of someone having a fire in their belly, a burning ambition, an overwhelming desire to accomplish a goal. We talk about motivational speakers firing up the crowd. Parents sometimes want to light a fire under a reluctant child. Lovers have a burning passion for each other. Someone is playing with fire when they nonchalantly engage in a possibly dangerous activity. Our house is on fire when we feel that everything around us is falling apart.
Fire is one of the four classical elements, along with earth, air, and water. All four elements are intimately intertwined. Fire requires oxygen in the air to burn, and water or earth can quench it. But while earth, air and water are substances, fire is the catalyst, or energy source, that causes change in the other three elements.
Fire can melt metal, an element of the earth, so that its shape can be transformed into something new. The molten core of the earth changes earth’s topography as volcanoes erupt.
Water’s three forms—ice, liquid, and steam—are dependent of heat/fire, or heat’s absence, to transform between the three states. Much of earth’s weather is due to the effect the sun has on water—rain, snow, dew, hurricanes, humidity. The magic of a rainbow occurs when the sun’s light strikes tiny droplets of water suspended in the air at just the right angle.
In its most basic form, bread is made when fire transforms a mixture of flour and water. Throw in the leavening power of yeast, and air is incorporated into the loaf.
In traditional Christian teaching, the refiner’s fire is presented as a way to see the work of the divine in our lives. A refiner used extremely high heat to melt a precious metal, such as gold or silver, then skimmed off the impurities that floated to the surface of the molten metal, making the resultant cooled metal more pure and strong. The teaching holds that God is like the refiner, putting us in the fire to purify us.
I have a problem with this way of viewing the divine. It implies that the fires in our lives are deliberately set as learning or purifying lessons. I just do not believe that a loving God desires that we be made more holy by throwing us into the fire pit.
Yes, we all have to walk through fires in our lives, and we can learn from them, and be changed by them. And I believe it’s important that we do walk through them and try not to avoid them or deny them. It helps to have someone walk alongside you through your fires, and that someone can take human or spiritual form. It’s the purposeful lighting of our fires by the divine that I object to.
Maybe the divine is more like a glassblower. The blob of molten glass is shaped by the glassmaker repeatedly smoothing and twirling it into a new creation. Using thick woolen gloves covered in a layer of Kevlar, and applying gentle but firm pressure, all the while moving the glass, the piece takes form. When the glassblower sets her mouth to the tube connected to the blob and gently blows a bubble of air into it, she breathes life into a vase or goblet.
When I view the fires in my life this way, I can imagine a being of pure love transforming my trials into a beautiful new vessel—one that can carry love, like water in a bowl, out into the world.