Cultural Mythology: Myth, culture, and consciousness

He who is first will later be last

The last place that I ever thought I would find Titanism in American culture is the Christian church. Whether or not you personally embrace Jesus as your savior in the Christian sense of the word, his life and teachings hold tremendous value as an example of what it means to live a life of love and to transcend the small concerns that occupy so much of ordinary human life. As Rilke said, "What we choose to fight with is so tiny....and the triumph itself makes us small" ("Man Watching," see poetry archives). As someone who struggles daily with the perverse grandiosity of my own small self, I love Rilke's poem and draw inspiration from the story of the life of Jesus because they exemplify the humility necessary to truly be alive in the mystery, to be in service to something larger and ultimately incomprehensible.

So how strange and unsettling to find Rush Limbaugh in such a prominent position in the culture, with his fellow Christians cheering him on. I know they don't all support him, and fervently wish that the ones who understand the spirit as well as the letter of their faith would step forward. Thanks to Barb, for bringing this piece by Robert Parham, Executive Director of the Baptist Center for Ethics, to my attention. If you, like me, find all of this disturbing, check out Parham in the Washington Post . This man has a sense of perspective that crosses all religious and spiritual boundaries and I pray for more of the same in the days to come.

The speck and the log in your eye

In the minds of many Americans, the recent election is a rebuff of the conservative movement and a setback for the religious right. In his victory speech, Obama spoke directly to non-supporters and said that he would work to be their president too, a pledge that has been met with skepticism and outright hostility in some Christian circles. Rush Limbaugh for example, says this is time to rebuild the conservative movement and that Obama must be met with "principled opposition."

In his post-election analysis, Limbaugh says, "I started laughing uncontrollably during the "yes, we can" stuff last night.  I was having a great time last night.  I actually was having a great time watching all this.  I just flipped around various channels to watch the coverage and I was just laughing.  Can we oppose the belief that one's earnings must be redistributed for the false promise of fairness?  Yes, we can." The rest of this transcript is available here 

If you have a strong enough stomach for Limbaugh's website, you will also find t-shirts that read "Rush Runs America" for sale. Hmm, who has the Messiah complex here, I wonder?

Of course Limbaugh is not the majority view, in attitude, content, or tactics, and the political strategy that he advocates, along with the somewhat gentler James Dobson (Focus on the Family) and others, is being questioned. There are Christian leaders, evangelical and otherwise, who argue that the pursuit of political power corrupts spiritual values. Phil Johnson, for example, believes that the image many people have of Christian conservatives, as "the angry face of Jesus" is proof of their failure to positively impact the culture and develop Christian community. Johnson and others point to the dismal example of Ted Haggard, the former president of the National Association of Evangelicals who was exposed as a meth addict with a penchant for male prostitutes, as proof that Christians have the wrong standards for their leadership. They point to the teachings of Jesus, who preached a practice of moral example, not force--political or otherwise--, and consistently cautioned his followers not to overestimate their own moral goodness. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus says "Or how can you say to your neighbor, 'Friend, let me take out the speck in your eye,' when you yourself do not see the log in your own eye?" (Luke 6:42)

Read Phil Johnson here

Moral decisions are tricky, or they should be, and history illustrates the atrocities committed by people who claimed to know the mind or plan of God. I think the big question facing Americans today, is what, if anything, we can agree to accept as the basis for a shared moral system. We need to understand religiosity and the longing for spiritual connection as human impulses that are active regardless of conscious religious affiliation. We need to unearth the shared mythologies that give rise to ideologies and dogmas; we need to confront the many faces of our god(s). In short, the relationship between morality and government, between spiritual duties and civic participation, concern us all, and not just because many of us on both sides of the "Christian" and the "conservative" lines feel persecuted (irony of irony).

I feel the temptation to leave the conservative Christians to their debates, to simply continue to oppose their legislative attempts to marry church and state with my money and my vote, and avoid, as much as possible, exposure to the rhetoric of hate and bloody bigotry by folks like Limbaugh. But that is not the smart or enlightened path. We are all vulnerable to fanaticism and self-righteousness. And in the specific context of the religious right and their agenda, we have a model for the marriage of secular and spiritual life---Islam.

I've no interest in bashing Islam or Muslims. I do think that the historical and doctrinal parallels between Islam and Christianity are beautiful and terrifying, and I think the history of intolerance exemplified by extreme elements in both are instructive. I offer this as food for thought and future discussion, and some (very modest) edification.

According to Islamic doctrine, the Qu'ran (which means "guidance") is the final piece in the Abrahamic lineage and is the perfection of the Torah and the Gospels. One of the "mistakes" corrected by the revelation of the Qu'ran is the union of religious and secular life. Islamic law, the Shari'ah, governs almost everything in life, and is divided into five categories: duty, recommended, acceptable, disapproved, and prohibited. The great prophet Mohammad, who was granted moral perfection by God, was also a general. The early Islamic community was repeatedly attacked by non-Muslims and the physical security of the community was a major concern. The need for security, and the need to secure traditional institutions that provide societal stability, have been arguments for contemporary Muslim fundamentalist movements and echo arguments advanced by the religious right in this country.

I will post more as I continue to ponder. In the meantime, I recommend the website of Oxford Islamic Studies. Here is an article about the Islamic state.

Finally, my current mantra: "Tyranny is the absence of complexity."--Andre Gide

Karen Armstrong on Belief

Karen Armstrong is author of The Battle for God (which is on my reading list), Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet, A Short History of Myth, and other titles. Armstrong is an intelligent and thoughtful commentator on the state of religion today. A friend recently turned me on to an interview of Karen Armstrong conducted by Alan Jones, in which they discuss the relationship between mainstream religious belief and mythology.

According to Armstrong, the need for certainty compels many of us to read mythology (which includes religion) as history, to debate the rather paltry fruits of a literal, factual truth and overlook the metaphorical and psychological, which is the realm of meaning. I generally agree with Armstrong and especially appreciate her insights about the changing purpose and meaning of belief in contemporary society. For example, Armstrong explains that the word “believe” changed meaning in the 17th century. For Chaucer and Shakespeare the word “believe,” meant to love, to prize, or to commit to, not “I accept certain propositions,” as it does now. “We call religious people believers now,” Armstrong remarks, “as if that is the main thing that they do.”

And, I might add, the religious life is more and more a matter of what one is willing to believe—that dinosaurs roamed the earth three thousand years ago, for example-- than what one does.

Which leads me to another valuable insight by Armstrong—to live a spiritual or religious life, it is not necessary to believe first, to erase all doubts. Instead, practice.

To listen to the full interview click here

Keeping the Ball in the Air

I often say that the goal is to keep the ball in the air. In other words, let truth and meaning move in an infinite midrash. Imagining, and the act of interpretation, never end. This is the task imposed by myth, which opens and deepens, illuminates and confuses, because a myth is a means through which to see something, not a statement of “what is.” A myth is a map, as Ginette Paris says, not the terrain. A myth displays possibilities, but it doesn’t tell you which way to go.

I have embraced the exploration and use of this insight as my life’s work. But there is an unanswered question, a problem, and it has newly occupied me ever since I read and responded to Deepak Chopra’s post “Obama and the Palin Effect.” What is the relationship between myth and morality? Or more specifically, in a world of ever changing meaning and imaginative constructs, what is the basis for a moral or ethical system? How do I take the moral position, and I have, that Sarah Palin is just wrong about abortion and book banning and wolf hunting and the Iraq War, and keep that proverbial ball in the air? How convenient, if people just agreed on what is right and what is wrong. But we don’t.

The disagreement is a practical, albeit important one, if one is willing to just be absolutely, unequivocally right. But as Thich Nhat Hanh writes, “If you have a gun, you can shoot one, two, three, five people, but if you have an ideology and stick to it, thinking it is the absolute truth, you can kill millions.”