A Myth’s Reflection

Strong myths are created by gifted artists striving to describe essential personal truths.

If done well, those essential truths described in the myth will be recognized by others whose experiences are similar. Each one who looks upon the myth sees a nearly exact rendering of their own experience causing them to be drawn close to the myth maker and to others who recognize the truth but it also deludes each one into thinking that the image the myth shows them is the exact same image the myth shows to each of the others. In other words, the myth comes to be seen as the truth itself.

And so, myth, the imperfect but powerful vessel into which human experience is poured comes to be seen, not as a general proposition or template encompassing the many imperfect truths, but as truth itself. That which should be a focal point for an outpouring of human expression for the purpose of drawing people together into a common experience and a common understanding becomes, instead, attempt to draw from the myth as if it is the source of the power. The problem with this is that the myth is a description or a rendering of many shared multi-faceted understandings having a common essence. The truth is only understood best by seeing many of the the facets; the myth is the guide to see the underlying essence or commonality of those facets. It is important as a guide but it has fewer dimensions and less complexity and less ambiguity than the truth it describes. The power drawn from it, then, is much less; if the flow is drawn from the myth to empower individuals it of necessity is a limited and puny power. If the flow, instead, is one that goes in the direction to the myth from the many human expressions, voicing similar experiences or similar truth, then the power is unlimited and magnified and vital.

Setting aside for the moment the question of whether Jesus is God or if the Christian God even exists, the fact is that there is no way to prove either and that each person’s understanding of Jesus and God is, and cannot be anything but, a personal, individual understanding that each believes to be perfectly described in the Bible, not knowing that each other person, whose experience and understanding are different, also think the Bible is the perfect description of their own experience. In other words the Bible’s description of God and of Jesus is a perfect myth example. It is a focal point. It is a means by which many individuals can draw close and attempt to find the commonalities in their experiences and rejoice in the similarities. It can be a powerful force in each of their lives. Similarly, if each stops pouring their own expressions of truth out and stops refining the myth and stops attempting to relate to it in their own words and stops finding the commonalities they have with others as they also express their experiences, and instead, decides that the myth is the truth itself, then they will be trading a vibrant, vital and powerful experience for an impotent, diluted and puny power.

It seems to me that not many Christians approach their faith this way. There should be no fear that the myth will become irrelevant or shifting sand. The power of great myths is that they so ably describe vital truths of human experience and are, therefore, lasting. The truth of human experience may be due to God’s influence and due to the divinity and resurrection of Jesus or it may be due to human drives and essences alone but, in either case, the myth is strong and vital and descriptive of true experience that is commonly held. A strong myth such as this is a wonderful stone against which each individual can press against and test their own experiences to see how closely the grooves and cracks and pores of their own lives mesh against those of the stone.

Prayer exemplifies the direction and degree of the flow that should be toward, not from, the focal point myth. Those of the conservative Christian faith view the Bible myth as the actual truth and pour nothing into it and do not test themselves against it. There is no room for a dialog with other believers as to how each interprets the Bible so that they may find the common ground of the Bible closest to the truth. To enter such a faith, to test one’s experience against a mere interpretation of the Bible, is seen as an admission of the inerrancy of the Bible. There is no room to consider that the inerrant truth imperfectly described in Biblical words is really outside of the Bible. So, conservative Christians expect the power to flow from the Bible to them and their prayer takes the form of examining the Bible myth and seeking the truth there and expecting the answers to their prayers to be found there and flow to them.

For others, the Christ story and the creation story are the best attempts of an artist rendering the truth from the artist’s own experience. It is the closest to truth that words can come but it is not the truth itself. The truth is in the comparison of each person’s experience held up to the Bible myth and tested against the myth to find the commonalities of experiences with others and with the myth maker. Their prayer is an outpouring of all they find within themselves that resonates with the myth and a delight in how well the myth describes their own experience. Their prayer is a communion also with others who relate as they do. The prayer and the fellowship is vital and vibrant and powerful. In this way the atheist can pray with the theist.

Said another way, let’s say that God exists and that Jesus is God and has been resurrected and lives in a spiritual realm where he influences our lives and waits to judge and reward the dead and resurrected. Words alone, whether divinely inspired or not, are an imperfect representation of the truth. Words can only be an imperfect reflection of the truth. The Bible’s words, though, give us something to bump up against, something to test our experience against, something by which we say, “This that I am reading I relate to. This that I am reading resonates with an experience in my life. I know what this means when it says, for instance, perfect love casts our all fear. I may understand it in some ways differently than you but those words tie us together. There is something in those words that we each relate to and we know that there is something we have both experienced in common that is true.” This is the power of myth. It is a superb artist’s expression that is so good that it stands the test of time and we know that it speaks of something true and common to all. If I, as an atheist, resonate with those same truths and those same experiences, the only difference in your communion and mine is that I attribute that experience to our common humanity, alone, while you attribute it to a God who inspired the artist to write the words to direct you to those truths. We nonetheless have found a commonality, a communion, a touchstone and focal point that draw us together.

I personally believe that the more Christians stop looking to the Bible and church doctrine as the truth itself and instead look to the Bible’s teachings and doctrine as focal touchstone that enables and requests a pouring forth of each one’s own experience and encourages each one to enter a dialogue with others as to how each interprets the myth in their own experience, the more vital and powerful the religion will be. It’s as if, not being able to look on the glory of God directly, the artist stood God at his back shining his image through the artist to write the myth. When we each look upon the reflection of that myth, each from a slightly different perspective, we can compare how each of our perspectives differs and discover the commonality that is the truth. Some of us may think that truth is God, some of us may think that truth comes only from ourselves but we all have something upon which we can have a dialogue and test our experiences. The only ones with whom we cannot have this conversation are those who insist that the artist’s words are themselves the truth and that the truth they see must be the only truth that others must see.

Tempering the Rights of Man

Most Americans don’t realize that our preoccupation with individual rights (expanding or contracting those rights) makes us all liberals. The Enlightenment was liberal in its approach advocating the individual above the king. Americans took it to heart and overthrew their King and established a country ruled by law and by a representative democracy of individuals. This is all liberal; it is anti-caste. It advocates against entitled power. It advocates for each one making his or her own way as their ability dictates. No class or aristocracy will impede them.

Individuals who are free to follow enterprise, free to make their way by merit and skill, must of necessity be free to associate and assemble with others of like mind and to form alliances and allegiances but the founders of this country saw a problem in unfettered individualism. The problem was that alliances and allegiances can encompass a majority and that majority, just as a king, an aristocracy or a class system, can snuff out the freedom of individuals not part of the majority. This was the basis for our Bill of Rights: to ensure that a majority vote in representative government would be limited to prevent the majority from becoming the new entrenched power overrunning individual rights.

Conservatives defend the individual’s right to do as he or she chooses (restrained only from doing harm to others), to earn his or her own way and to form allegiances with whom the individual chooses. Liberals defend individuals’ rights by imposing limits on the extent of some individuals’ freedom to ensure that other individuals retain some basic rights. Both are championing the rights of individuals. Either stance will result in some limitation on individual freedom. Liberals, in choosing to limit those with allegiances in order to preserve basic freedoms for those who have no allies or other source of power, reveal an underlying pessimism about human nature and human motives.

This same dichotomy and liberal pessimism can be seen in our religious institutions. On the conservative side there is a defense of unfettered individualism by an emphasis on the Reformation dogma of “by faith alone,” “sola scriptura,” personal salvation and unmediated prayer and confession. These tenets carry the message that God accomplishes his will by working directly through the individual, speaking directly to the individual and motivating the individual to act. The avowed belief is that God will inspire the individual to care for the poor and tend to the needy. Organized social agenda are seen as suspect in that it might limit God’s inspired action through the individual and might lead the individual to rely less on faith and more on good works for their salvation. An organization and hierarchical priesthood is seen only as inhibiting individually inspired faith. It is not mere coincidence that it is within the conservative churches that the phrase “a personal relationship with God” is used. It is, in fact, a badge of one’s dismissal of liberal theology and the more liturgical denominations.

The liberal churches emphasize social justice, liturgical services, mediated intercession with God and books of common prayer. These emphases carry the message that God works through the church as a community, that individual motives and internal urgings are suspect. As a result, the liberal churches are more likely to believe that organized social action is necessary and that an organized priesthood or pastorate protects against individuals mistaking their personal motives as God’s will or God's voice. Jesus' example is sought more than his mystical inspiration. If there is a liberal counterpart to the conservative’s avowal of “personal relationship with God” it is probably “God works through his church” or “follow Jesus.”

This is the fundamental divide in American Christianity. Both conservative and liberal faiths believe God acts through individuals but one gives free reign to the internal inspiration received by the individual and the other sees a need to temper the individual more with a structured community of believers and established theological scholarship and tradition. It is the same dynamic as on the political stage: Can individuals be trusted to do good and take care of the less fortunate without regulation or restraint? The Bill of Rights, by its very existence, implicitly says, “No.” So does the Bible.

Images

I see you.
In image after image
you are looking down.
I imagine
you look at the earth
rather than see the eyes
of your beholders.
They see
you are afraid.
They imagine something missing in you.
Or was it
that you were too young yet
to imagine a smile?

Jibbelty Jye

Hinkey pinkey jibbelty jye
Ever play catcher in the rye?
No, not ever. Why would I?
Lost my way in jibbelty jye.

Too Close To The Flame

I am not ready yet.
I may never be.
How can I draw close?
I see it is as metaphor;
You do, too, but do not realize it is so.
Without recognition you immerse yourself in it,
It fills you and sustains you.
It defines who you are.
My drawing close would change me in your eyes.
I would lose my metaphor.
You would lose nothing.

Happenstance

Pebbles on a drumhead
Racing in a swirling slurry to reach the perimeter:
“Here! Over here! Get here quick!”
“No, there, go back, all of us now.”
Wind-driven rain upon the hide.

The Chimera

Same house
Same flesh
So similar
But yet deformed
One by pain and the other by hurt
One seeking escape the other seeking redemption
Who was whole?
Who was damaged?

Our Next War

The subject of our contented happy life in the US at the expense of many in the world is one I have thought about quite a bit. I don't think we realize how much of our life styles are artificially supported by underlying inequities that cannot continue. I don't necessarily mean "inequity" in the sense of unjust, though in many cases, it is that, too. I mean mostly that there has been an inequity of the economic equation and that a balancing is inevitable. Also, when I say the inequities "cannot continue," I don't mean it as a manifesto to rise up give away all our goods, though that may be a noble reaction, I mean it more practically -- that it is inevitable and beyond our control.

Just this morning I saw a headline about a school system in Kansas that closed half of its schools in a last ditch effort to stay afloat. It frightened me. I think there is more of this to come. Our whole economic system is crumbling under its own weight of inflated wages and built-in assurances of security that we have paid for by ginning up our own isolated market and, now that we are having to compete globally, the rug is being pulled out from under us and the artificiality of the supports is becoming apparent. I wonder if I really shouldn’t move to India or at least to Ireland.

What scares me most is that even in a blog of friends, when I write about what appears to be inevitabilities to me, the response was in no instance about discussing whether it is or is not inevitable or whether my view of the economics might be incorrect. Rather the response was almost entirely an emotional fear response from a position of feeling threatened. The responses were either to rail against scapegoats like corporate CEOs for causing the situation and insinuating that those scapegoats need only be slaughtered for us to retain our good fortune or the response was one of blindly misinterpreting the issue as if I was demanding that we all voluntarily, out of some leftist philosophy, go out and give the world all of our money and take vows of poverty.

To me the whole effort was very revealing. It is not like this blog group to not be willing to discuss issues. If this group of friends could be so fearful and blinded and reactionary, what does that say about the country as a whole? This is the sort of thing that erupts in war. It makes me fear that more economic upheaval (which in my view is certain still to come) will eventually result in us looking outside this country for the scapegoats and going on the attack. If we do, it will sure to be under the guise of nation building or spreading democracy or defense of country but what it in fact will be will be aggression to defend our standard of living that we have been so spoiled to enjoy.

I remember on September 11, even at the very time I was watching the towers collapse live on TV, thinking, “The fear from this will cause us to strike out disproportionately,” and, “The fear from this is going to result in us stupidly surrendering some of our constitutional rights just so someone will protect us.” Both of those thoughts turned out to be correct. The fears I have now of us going to war over this economic collapse feels the like the same premonition.