I had every intention of posting today’s blog entry last week on April Fool’s Day. A day that also coincided with Easter Monday, a holiday in Australia. However, a five day workshop at Windgrove on “Wild Mindfulness: Leadership training for activism” stuffed my head and heart with so many other thoughts and feelings that I became immobilized and incapable of completing the draft blog I had started earlier in the week. The best I could do was to strip down fully and do what my animal body craved: to crawl on hands and knees in the soft, plowed soil of the yet to be constructed tennis court pulling out bracken roots with a pitch fork, all the while allowing the warming sun to sooth a darkening body.
Sorry, therefore, to any readers expecting some form of witty prank on the 1st of April.
But the subject matter is still relevant. “Who’s fooling whom?” could also be the title of this blog entry as I am writing about myth making and it’s importance as story but not literal truth. To perpetuate myth as factual truth is to mislead.
Most practicing Christians would know of the story of the crucifixion of Jesus and his placement in a cave where a stone was rolled over the entrance and then rolled back three days later to let the “re-born” Jesus out.
I’m all for good stories to inform and give clues on how to live decently with compassion, with a loving heart, inspired to do good to all creatures great and small as practiced by the historical Jesus. For two years at Harvard I gave monthly sermons based on such teachings of the Bible.
Why, though, is it that educated people around the world are still fooled into believing in the literalness of a myth that is as old as the first pagan rites of 30,000 years ago when going into a dark cave for three days and nights was an abstract representation of when the New Moon disappeared for three days and then “magically” was re-born.
In most forms of Christianity, these pagan connections are disguised and, in a way, plagiarized so that the story of Christ at Easter (and Christmas) appears to derive from sources entirely within the Christian framework of belief. Even the word “Easter” has been derived from the name of the pagan goddess whose feast was celebrated at the vernal equinox.
We are supposedly an educated society. This should require that we fully understand the importance of both science and myth in giving meaning to our lives and world.
I love what science brings to my understanding of the world. I also love what imagination, poetry, sculpture and the non-rational can bring to my understand of the world. As an artist, I’m all for creating stories to guide us through the turmoil of a complex world. Art as a useful “truthful lie”.
All children grow out of believing in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. Christian adults — as adults — should stop believing in the literalness of their mythic Biblical stories and accept that they are just stories to help guide and inform, but nothing more. Why? Because not to do so keeps us in adolescence.
This, I would exclaim, is “religious neoteny”.
— Continued next week —
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