Sunday, February 06, 2005
 
Living Myth, Part 2
The problem we face currently in Christianity is that we are no longer mythic...we are no longer about a story. As mentioned in my previous post, people need a story to give meaning to their lives. The typical Christian approach to the Gospel, to Scripture, to Social Justice, etc. doesn't have any sort of story to it at all. We present principles to live by as if they are cold facts from some data sheet. Every once in a while we may throw in some pithy story for emphasis, but the general focus is on informational life modification concepts. We don't even begin to touch on the creativity, imagination, and meaning that a good story sparks.

I loved the movie Big Fish. Maybe for the same reason that I love a good funeral. Typical funerals are much like a typical church service. Someone stands behind the pulpit and gives a talk dotted with facts and a few humorous stories about the deceased. Many times the person giving the talk doesn't even know the person they're talking about. Good funerals are inspiring. It's where the deceased are made alive again by the stories told about them...stories that we bring into ourselves and somehow are challenged to live ourselves. Good funerals are mythic...where the deceased becomes something more than we ever aknowledged while they were with us (in a good way). It's not the details, it's the story-telling that makes the difference.

But we've lost the imagination and creativity that it takes to be good story tellers because we're so focused on those danged details. It's like we're astronauts who have just touched the moon, but all we can talk about when we get back is the temperature, the stats on gravity, the approximate time we've been there, etc. I recently had a class where I expressed to the students that the Bible is a wonderful book because it leaves so many of the details out. It leaves room for us to create, to imagine what the unmentioned was like: where was Joseph, what did Jesus feel, how did it smell, etc. I shared with them some of my recent posts concerning Jesus and his thoughts. It is interesting how students responded. Some of the Christian students responded with "how do you know you're not making things up?" I said, "I am making things up." They said, "How do you know you're right?" And maybe that's a huge part of the problem, the desire to be right. Interestingly, some of my non-Christian students were encouraged by the discussion. A dead book now had the possibility of becoming a living word. One of my students even made a point to literally grab me after class and say with some amount of excitement, "This makes sense to me."

We must get back to learning the art of being story tellers. As individuals and communities of believers we need to have a sense of the mythical. It has always drawn people in...whether it be the Greek tragedies, the Cantebury tales, Lord of the Rings, or the story of Stories itself. We cannot continue to (in Elderidge's words) "dissect the cat until no living, breathing cat remains". Even in the Emergent circles where much of this has been discussed from the beginning, it surprises me to see how little we have focused on stories and how much we have focused on style, technique, and the details. May God give us the grace to tell our story as if it is His own, and His as if it is ours...and may they be full of myth.

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