Remythologization.

Given my conviction that we need to grow out of the limitations imposed on the Church by Modernity and the so-called Enlightenment, maybe we should start talking more explicitly about remythologizing.  

One of the big projects of the 16th-19th century movement called the "Enlightenment" was the de-enchantment of the world.  That means, they wanted to reduce the world to physics and math, and discount, which is to say discard as superstition, anything deemed to be subjective and interior, like awe, beauty, mystery, myth, art, love, or a sense of the transcendent.  In other words, any notion that there might be something in the universe bigger than the human, and beyond the comprehension of the human mind, was dismissed as nonsense, at best.  The Enlightenment view of God was summed up by the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, who believed that "God" was purely invented by people for various not so good reasons.  Anything that could not be rationally explained, felt by the senses, measured, and quantified (and marketed...), did not exist.

In the scholarly study of the Bible, the program was eventually summed up as "demythologization."  That is, they sought to rationally explain the real events behind biblical texts.  Scholars had to suck up to the establishment Enlightenment view and subject the Bible to the same kind of analysis that was applied to anything else, leaving scholars -- and these were the good ones -- to find some kind of redeeming social/economic value in the text, so that other Enlightenment-influenced scholars might not dismiss the Bible as a collection of pointless fairy tales and reject Christianity altogether.  

Enlightenment thought left the world a flat, dry, harsh, linear, binary, cold, and dead place; everything became "resources" to be used in the service of some other goal, usually economic profit.  Humans were bought as slaves or workers, the creation was there to be exploited, and religion had to prove its economic and political usefulness to the powers-that-be.  (Often as a kind of narcotic inducing compliance, as Karl Marx observed.)

That Christian faith survived the Enlightenment and subsequent Modernity is a miracle attributable to the fact that many humans remain aware of a Reality beyond the measurable one, and some Christians managed to be influenced and shaped by the story of Jesus and the rest of the Bible.  There was always a witness, however small, to the Truth of God; and there were always voices, often very few, raised against injustice.  People did continue to engage in wildly irrational activities like prayer, the Sacraments, and living for the benefit of others, not just themselves. 

Meanwhile, the whole Enlightenment project started to collapse.  It was unsustainable to begin with.  But eventually, as people became aware of the stupendous atrocities it inspired, from slavery and other forms of economic injustice, to an addiction to war, guns, and armaments, to horrors like the Holocaust and Hiroshima, to the systematic poisoning of the planet's air, soil, water, and the wanton killing of its life-forms, they began very slowly to turn away from Enlightenment ideology, and discover meaning and purpose in the very things that Modernity had rejected as irrational and superstitious.  People came to appreciate intangibles and non-quantifiables like nature, music, and  poetry, and they began to develop a vision of an emerging human community based on equity and sharing.  Spirituality and religion, refusing to comply with the Enlightenment's assumption that it would just die out, actually started becoming more important to increasing numbers of people.

A gradual re-enchantment of the world has been going on in the lives of many people, and it includes some good things, like an attention to mysticism, symbol, myth, cosmology, beauty, and justice.  When people become more self-aware, they simultaneously grow more conscious of their connectedness to others, to creation, and to the Creator of all. 

Sadly, some questionable things also began to congeal: like the occult, nostalgia, religious fundamentalism, and the cynical pressing of myth and symbol into the service of death and destruction, as we see with the persistent calcification into Modernity's logical final form: fascism.  For the Enlightenment regime, because it is based on paranoid lies, can only be sustained and enforced by increasing levels of violence.  See Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four for a picture of how this works out for us.

The answer for the Church right now is a remythologization of ecclesial life, which means paying closer attention to myth and story, symbol and ritual, imagination and art.  We need to cultivate a realization that biblical stories are less historical records and more invitations to find meaningful and liberating images and connections.  What if the whole text of the Bible is intended as metaphor, directing our sight to the perception of the Creator and the Creator's emancipatory love all around us?  What if we finally realize that "did this really happen?" is an irrelevant and corrosive question, betraying the Enlightenment's agenda of neutralizing the stories -- and the community that develops and cherished them -- as obsolete and meaningless?  What if we started to understand that the Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier of the world still speaks to us by the Word and Spirit, drawing us into lives of equity and justice, compassion and peace, simplicity and gratitude, contemplation, wonder, and joy?       

+++++++

 

            

"Formulating Your Own Thoughts and Opinions in Your Own Unique Way."

(I tried to copy and paste something from Facebook but it didn't work.  It is a satirical page by a Unitarian-Universalist mocking responsive readings in worship because they make people say someone else's words, which the author believes is insincere because it's just "repeating someone else's thoughts," and is not "formulating your own thoughts and opinions in your own unique way" which is supposedly much better.  This post below is my response to that.)

This meme occasionally makes the rounds on Facebook.  After ignoring it for a while, watching many of my friends "like" it, I decided it deserved a response.  The sentiment expressed here is that "formulating your own thoughts and opinions in your own unique way" is obviously and necessarily a good thing for which we should all strive.    

Is it?  Is it even possible?

Were we to take the meme seriously, we would have to assume that our Unitarian Universalist friends certainly refrain from other kinds of "repeating someone else's thoughts," like sharing "store-bought greeting cards."  Would they also not sing hymns, or recite poems, or quote from literature at all?  Would they write books based on "their own research" rather than use footnotes indicating a shameful, small-minded dependence on the prior thoughts of others?  And would they patronizingly mock the rest of us as unevolved slugs for doing such unenlightened things?

But could they even use a language at all?  Should we compromise our ability to take charge of our own thoughts and formulate them in our own way by utilizing a language system as archaic, confused, irrational, and frankly colonialist as English?  Should we not each be responsible for developing our own personal, individual language, unsullied by the corruption of tradition and community, but utterly unique to our precious individualism?  Indeed, why should I defile my unique and special personal thoughts merely to accommodate the pathetic and constricting needs of anyone else to understand me at all?

It is a central part of the ideology of Modernity that "formulating your own thoughts and opinions in your own unique way" is something to strive for, an indication of freedom, creativity, and maturity.  In reality, it's nonsense designed to devalue tradition and community and keep us under the Empire's Big Lie that we are separate and independent individuals... which means that we are in eternal competition with each other, with no unison refuge from the din of arbitrary and irrelevant self-expression.  As long as we are all convinced we are independent individuals we will keep yelling into the void and the owners may keep swindling us.

Oh, and it's also impossible.  Each of us lives in a web of interconnection and conditioning.  No human has ever had an original thought.  No one has ever formulated their own thoughts and opinions in a unique way.  Everyone exists in a matrix of experience, education, socialization, memory, fear, and culture; we are all conditioned by ego-centric, exclusive subjectivity.  All perception is interpretation based on prior experience, which was also interpreted.  Further, we are also radically social and integrated beings, dependent on other people and creation itself for our very lives.  If you imagine you are an independent agent able to formulate your own thoughts and opinions in your own unique way, you are a deluded narcissist.  It is the very definition of a lack of self-awareness.  It is to be unconscious. 

At the end of the book of Judges, the author notes, "In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes" (Judges 21:25 NASB).  The text does not view this situation as a good thing.  Rather it is chaos, a nation divided against itself, easy prey for the next expansionist empire.  And this is Empire's MO: divide and conquer, keep the people from uniting, keep feeding them the ideology of their own sacred individuality.  

In the Bible, the solution is a common king.  That is, a center, a focus, a guiding, unifying principle, that is not one's one supposedly sovereign ego.  That common King was supposed to be YHWH, the Liberator, the Creator, the One, Someone both beyond and within all, uniting all in all.  Unfortunately, the people preferred to have a human king "like the other nations."  

Bob Dylan sang about how we each have to "serve somebody; it may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you're gonna have to serve somebody."  The Apostle Paul says much the same thing in terms of flesh or Spirit.  My point is that we may be enslaved to our own egos, with their small-minded, self-centered, biased and limited perspective, or we may follow and serve our Essence, Jesus Christ, in Whom we are connected to and integrated with all people and all of life.  To be enslaved to Jesus Christ is to be liberated from ego, alienation, and separation, and united to the whole creation.  We come to see and therefore act from the most universal and inclusive perspective.

From this perspective we all, all creation, sing together.  Different voices, different parts, different instruments, one song.

+++++++     

   

Stop Thinking About Tomorrow.

We celebrate here in temporality with a view to the eternal birth, which God the Father has accomplished and accomplishes unceasingly in eternity, so that this same birth has now been accomplished in time within human nature.  What does it avail me if this birth takes place unceasingly and yet does not take place within myself?  It is quite fitting, however, that it should take place within me.

-- Meister Eckhart

The Nativity of the Lord has mainly to do with Presence.  What we have been waiting for has really been here all along.  We were not in Advent waiting for anything for God to do, as if God were taking God's sweet time about it.  We were waiting for our souls to relax, focus, adjust, adapt, and emerge into the Truth.  We were waiting rather for our own baggage and blinders to drop away to we could see what was always here.   We were waiting until we lost our fears, desires, expectations, needs, fantasies, habits, and conventional ways of thinking.  We were waiting for the fog to burn off.  We were waiting for our imaginations to let go of both our obsession with what has gone before and our infatuation with what will come next.

Our waiting was purposeful, intentional, not inert or inactive.  It was a preparatory waiting: at once a self-emptying and a refurnishing.  I compare it to prospective parents making room for a new child; a two-fold movement of creating space by moving unnecessary things out, and moving necessary things in.  Nesting.  We wait by letting go and taking on.

Ego and Empire dominate us by manipulation of two pervasive ideas that are not actually real: past and future.  Beginning with the alienation that is a consequence of our mortality, we invent stories that invest meaning by telling us "how we got here" and "where we are going," in time. 

But now that time of waiting, preparation, divesting and furnishing is over, for Christ is born in Bethlehem!  The Creator is Present, "with us," Emmanu-el.  One great hymn describes the Creator's action in time this way: "The hopes and fears of all the years are met in him tonight."  Past and future are completely reframed for us.  Now our attention is not on what we imagine to be ahead of or behind us, but on something that has arrived; it is here and now, "above," "beneath," within, among us.  

This is not escapism into either the dreamy pie-in-the-sky-by-and-by or imploded "navel gazing," but an engagement with the Good, True, and Beautiful that is always Present, always "near," always "at hand," which Jesus Christ proclaims and embodies.  He is the eternal Presence, the divine Shekinah.  He is the Real that is always closer to us than we are to ourselves. 

One major problem in the Church is that we waste far too much time and energy looking back and/or looking ahead, and offer too little attention to looking "above," "beneath," or within/among at what is happening here and now.  We habitually and reflexively focus on what is not here.  Now is the time to open our consciousness to what is present with us.

Jesus says to seek first the Creator's Kingdom and justice (Matthew 6:33), which is within and among us (Luke 17:21), and "at hand" (Mark 1:15).

Thomas Merton affirms this presence when he notes that, "in the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at your disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will.  This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us."  Maybe that little room, which he calls "the virgin point," pointe vierge, is what we have been preparing in Advent; a ready space.

We fritter away our time and energy on trying to "adapt" to the latest dopey and illusory big shiny, entertaining thing going on in the world out there, when everything we desire and need has always been right here, with and within us, in the spark of truth and clarity, at the center of our being.  Christ is born in astonishing and scandalous simplicity and poverty, revealing the glory of God shining from that bright point, in and throughout our world.  God, is present in the stable of Bethlehem, on the cross of Calvary, and in the shared bread that is his Body... which makes us, the Church, his Body, Christ-in-the-world.

Nothing could be more irrelevant or beside the point than allowing ourselves to be distracted by the imagined "historicity" of its details.  The Nativity is about birth, "which God the Father has accomplished and accomplishes unceasingly in eternity," now being "accomplished in time within human nature."  Within all human nature.  Within the nature of every human.  "Cast out our sin and enter in, be born in us today."  That's the point.  

Today.  Not tomorrow.  Not yesterday.  Today.  "Now is the opportune time; today is the day of salvation" (2 Corinthians 6:2b).  Nothing less than this is happening in the Incarnation.  A vertical bolt of pure light from beyond, welling up within us.  Jarring us into the realization of God, the Creator, with and within us, now.

And now... what?  If the Creator is born in us today, how do we live as the Creator's agents, messengers, witnesses, and people?  For we are Christ-in-the-world.

+++++++