Myth or fairy story?

Here is a frustrating thing. You’re a minister, a priest or parson – whatever tag you assign to your Christian ministry – and you encounter all kinds of people, many of whom are doing well, but many who are doing very badly. And with the great majority of the latter you feel like a doctor with medicine that you trust implicitly, but deep down your patients believe it is ineffective and will not take it.

In the course of ministry you encounter many who suffer the ordinary struggles of trying to make a life in the world but find that they cannot, for instance, find work, or if they have work they are worked too hard, live under constant threat of dismissal and they have bosses who bully and threaten. Then there are those who are long-term sick and anxious because they are refused state support and are being pressured to return to work. There is the single parent struggling with a benefit system that is not fit for purpose, your children are mixing with dangerous people and you keep making terrible choices of boyfriends. There are the elderly feeling that their lives have been reduced to a perpetual round of hospital appointments. The colour has gone out of their existence and the things they used to enjoy are, for one reason or another, no longer giving them happiness or are simply unavailable. And then there are the bereaved: death is regarded as extinction though they try to take seriously what the vicar is saying about life after death. The problem is it doesn’t really make credible sense to them and deep down they are full of despair because they believe their mother, husband, child, grandparent, is lost forever.

These are the ordinary hurts and tragedies experienced by the people you encounter in the course of something like parish ministry. And yet the great majority of the latter find the thing that you are representing  – for those of you who didn’t know, the Gospel of Jesus Christ – to be irrelevant, naïve, unintelligible or indeed all of those things. I would imagine this is not an uncommon experience for the clergy of the Church of England, whose job frequently involves willing interaction with people who don’t go to Church, don’t believe or have only a kind of residual faith, in parishes up and down the land. 

One of principle problems has to do with the fact that much of the faith we represent is couched in what I will call fir now mythopoetic language. We don’t apologise fir this and tye common assumption that myth means fairy tale is a complete misunderstanding generated by centuries in which this language has been relegated to being thought as simple people as, simple representation of tge way they work. Like a kind of primitive scientific discourse (see Frazer’s book, They Golden Bough’).

In our teaching we make reference to notions such as: Jesus is the Incarnation, God made man, we tell of creation in six days and of Adam and Eve in a Garden of Eden; we speak of the Holy Trinity, and this as the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the Three in One, and there are others that you can probably think of.  Such language compasses some of the deepest, most dramatic and enigmatic aspects of human existence, the paradoxes; the contradictions; the pathos and rapture and because these are such profound aspects of human life then talking about them using the prosaic language of fact simply will not do. But when we take this out into our contemporary world we have to understand that there is some important translating that needs to be done.

We have to be aware that modernity is, in certain important respects, a post-mythological society. I should qualify this: people still believe myths, the great machine for encouraging people to buy lots of stuff peddles myths all of the time and they tend to be swallowed by all of us, including a grizzled old clergyman like me. We also stand to some of the images generated – for instance, of the guy who has the lovely car, house, lifestyle etc – as our ancestors once stood before their God; we worship it as an image of our liberation; we long for it and so on. I don’t think this is accidental, I think this is essential to the re-making of us all into the ideal 24/7 worker/consumer.  But we tend not to understand the more overtly spiritual, mythological images and have an infuriating tendency to read them literally and thus sometimes take them as rather childish fairy stories.

Our tendency to misunderstand mythological, poetic language in matters most spiritual is a deeply unfortunate thing for our psycho-pneumatic health, by which I don’t mean matters pertaining to a healthy mind and resistance to bouts of dreadful flatulence, but rather of mind and spirit, with the latter, ‘spirit’,  itself being a mytho-poetic term much used and little understood. 

We are a people of great technological sophistication and great philosophical and theological naivety and the result of this is that we often don’t understand the wisdom we have inherited from our ancestors and now have to reinvent the wheel that they perfected centuries ago. We have to negotiate many of the great existential conundrums from scratch. Amongst other things this leads to fear and anxiety as a collective background sensitivity. It can be a tendency on the part of our whole society toward all manner of social panic and hysterics over things like, for instance, some omnipresent paedophilia – child molesters behind everything bush – impending environmental catastrophe and the dreaded approach of some alien virus. Of course I don’t mean to suggest that these mentioned problems are not actually problems – they certainly are – but sometimes we can respond to them with disproportionate levels of collective collywobbles. 

As individuals, when all is well we feel quite confident. When the ordinary routines go smoothly our fundamental relations with things and people sink into a kind of background – taken for granted- level of consciousness. We hardly notice them. It’s like when we get in the car, start it up, drive, get somewhere and suddenly realise we can’t remember the journey we just made because our minds were elsewhere. We have driven the car and one the journey so many times we go into a kind of automatic mode. Much of our world is sunk into a kind of implicit, background consciousness. The things that we have done for years, some if the skills we possess and even some of the relations we have are sunk into a kind of implicit, pragmatic consciousness. And we need that some of the most fundamental of our relations to people and things in our world are held in this taken for granted, automatically and pre-reflectively performed way. It is not that they are unimportant, quite the opposite in fact, but we need them not to be in the foreground of events all the time so that we can get on with the ordinary business of daily life. We need to be able to go to work and deal with the myriad of petty and not so petty drivel that work often entails, safe in the knowledge, say, that when we get home we can pretty much rely on there being the comfort of a loving family waiting fir us.

When everything goes well we can fall into the vain delusion that we are in control. We might even look down our noses and those whose lives are a mess because we think that the stability of our existence is all down to us rather than that we are fortunate that the great god of ‘shit hitting the fan’ hasn’t got around to chucking some at you yet. But when something important breaks down we start to feel that background anxiety looming inti explicit consciousness. That anxiety we often feel is strangely familiar. It was actually always there; part of the deep down realisation that we never really did have the grip on things we thought, no human ever can, and it is a rather unpleasant reminder that everything is contingent, unpredictable, and ultimately out of our control. If what we are talking about as going wrong is a loving relationship with someone dear, or our own body, the crises is obviously all the greater. How do we cope with the doctor telling us that the results indicate a tumour…?

Mythopoetic language once allowed us a way of speaking and thinking about our deepest level of existence in the world, with things, other people and the great unknown that we ever stand before. It came out of primal, emotional/spiritual reflexes to things like the awe inspiring vastness of mountainscapes that instils a sense of our own smallness and fragility. The first hunter-gatherers living sometimes precariously on the African Savannah intuitively prostrated before rising of the life-giving sun, the power of the sea, the glory of love or indeed victory in battle and so on. Mythopoetic language comes from primal responses, intuitive reflexes and feelings which are translated through art-full speech into images that speak to the very edges of our intelligible experience . They articulate, thereby, things like awareness of the profundity and beauty of love; the love of love, the love of lovers and love of children, freinds, causes, existence itself. They speak the complexity, the confusion and paradox of existence, setting out our collective experience in art and coming to more definitive form in something like philosophy, spiritual writing and theology and…I leave you to fill in the gaps. It encompasses the great paradoxes and contradictions such as all that can be said of the beauty, longing, loving and ambition of life, over against the reality of: death, the possibility of the extinction of all our life and loves. These sorts of contradictions stretch out our facility for thinking and speaking them and often it is left to the poets, the artists and the myth weaving spiritual masters to give us some kind of language for compassing it all.  The myth weavers of the ancient world, from Homer to the composers of the Vedas to those of the Old Testament, were magnificent at this. The Fathers and Mothers of the ancient Church who, over at least 500 years, helped compose what we now think of quite glibly as orthodox Christianity, were wonderful at it.

The age we live in is wonderful for so many reasons and I would hope to come back to some of the reasons for My being able to say this again and again. But it is dominated by the notion, drilled into the collective western brain over hundreds of years, that the only language of real reality, is the language of fact. There is a word, ‘chair’, and that compasses the thing over there that we see, chair, Q.E.D. There is a word: ‘spirit! ‘Where the hell is that?’

In the western world capitalist modernity with its scientific sophistication and its unprecedented productive technological power, has supplied millions of ordinary people with a standard of living that is not only much safer and more secure than our ancestors could dream of, but replete with entertainments and means of expanding oneself intellectually and physically. We face ridiculously big problems, of course, in the way we make and consume, but I always feel that progress toward resolving some of these should never mean some retreat from the first time ordinary people have enjoyed a decent standard of living in human history. But anyway, it all has come after 400 years with the dominance of a way of factually speaking and thinking, developed from  science and technology, scientific administration, techno-bureaucracy and management, that has tendency to reduce all things, including human beings, to their role in a great machine for producing stuff, most particularly stuff that will become private property. In other words, we are reduced to cogs, and after so long this is how we fundamentally, pre-reflectively, often come to think of ourselves.

This way of thinking and speaking reality has become dominant throughout the western evolution of what we call modernity, roughly from the 17^th century onward. And it now shapes our intuitive way of grasping the world as opposed to the much more multi-dimensional manner in which our ancestors thought and spoke it using mythopoetic forms. This language not only has become dominant but it has relegated mythopoetic language to just a form of thinking and speaking for simple people, pre-industrial, pre-technological people. We moderns, of course, know so much better than they.

For a while the mythopoeticism left in religious language was considered a way of speaking and thinking just for the peasantry or working classes, who apparently lack the intellectual, moral or emotional capacity for thinking in the more sophisticated ways of their betters. We find many men of the enlightenment {late 17^th century to approx late 18^th), sat in their salons and coffee houses exchanging fascinating new ideas and being quite open about no longer believing in the God of traditional Judeo-Christianity but considering that this language should still be peddled to the servant classes as it gave them hope, confirmed their status and generally kept them quiet. Amongst other things some of them had become rather concerned about the somewhat unruly upstart classes with their funny ideas about equality and liberty. They feared that it might all get out of hand if there was not something like Christianity to keep them happy: I.e. hopeful of heaven whilst putting up with hell on earth.  The language of mechanical fact, as I shall call it now, has become embedded in the western mind over hundreds of years until it now dominates the way western people intuit their reality. In other words, without reflecting on the matter, we all possess the tendency to grasp the world as a giant, impersonal mechanism that turns over and over without the slightest consideration for us in our intimate humanity, our hopes, fears or loves and so on. Even people who are religious tend to be in a constant inward struggle to maintain their faith against a deeper impression that reality is just a crass, dumb mechanism. 

Religious language becomes a kind of secondary language, the language of what we hope is the case rather than what we, deep down in our gut, believe really is the case. It is often the language of compensation and wishful thinking. It is the language of being fluttery and feminine rather than real, cynical and masculine. I have often visited bereaved families who try to reassure in the face of the death of someone they loved by saying things like: ‘Granddad has gone to the ‘Three Feathers’ in the sky, off to place a bet on the celestial 2.30 at Heavenly Newmarket’, and so on. This sort of thing will be familiar to many parish clergy.  But my suspicion came to be that even they don’t really believe that, it’s just all they have, it’s like they’re whistling in the dark to keep their spirits up and they think of Christian mythopoetic language and symbology in a not too different way. But what I thought might really be going on deep within them , what they really believe has happened, was that the great machine had turned again and their loved one has become crushed under its wheels. And it sometimes it made me almost sick to realise this might be what they really believe over and over again.

Finally, this is obviously a big problem for the Church, not least because there is a tendency for the Church on the ground (in the parishes, the deaneries and the dioceses), not to reflect a great deal on the philosophical and theological – or for that matter social, political and economic –  background to what they believe or how they have come to believe it. Too many people still like to think that Christianity dropped like a self contained, consistent block, all of a piece, out of the sky. The Church in the universities and academies do think on these matters, but whilst the academics tend to speak a kind of alien lingua franca designed so that only they can really understand it, sometimes the clergy think that the laity are either too intellectually lightweight or too fragile in faith to reflect on these matters; they might have a collective nervous/spiritual breakdown if they have to think about these things. Actually, this is just one reason why reflections on these matters might help to strengthen faith and lend Christianity an air of greater credibility for a rather cynical, secular, modern public. 

If there is a fundamental tendency to intuitively interpret reality in factual terms, to see fact as the only way of speaking what is real, then there will be a continual tendency to intuitively hear mythopoetic language in factual terms and an attempt to find some metaphysical (beyond the physical), objects to attach words like ‘God’ and ‘Spirit’ to. Our teaching, I think, must constantly bear this in mind and be prepared to do some talking about how our language works; that is is not about facts – facts are things in the world – it is about that which is on the fringes of our world, on the edge of our experience of ordinary factual things in their ordinariness. This does not mean our language is not about reality, rather our language is about deeper realities, the fundamental realities without which we are no longer fully human, no longer living in a meaningful world, no longer living with transcedant hope. Good luck with that.