The Myth Factor

A Christian worldview will be a unique blend of the teachings of Jesus with individual life experience. If you write, if you paint, if you get out of bed in the morning, you have to do it from a world view. There is no way around that. Maybe the common thread in any Christian worldview is a question: How do I get from my specific little corner of the wilderness, to that far off castle on the mountaintop? The teachings of Jesus show that he spent a lot of energy posing the question, often to people who could not see the castle. My worldview is built largely on that question. At the same time, my worldview is my own. At the same time, I think it's also fully Christian. 

It starts with the pattern of experience as we know it: Life-death-new-life. It's everywhere, and it's been happening since long before Jesus walked the earth. It happens in a moment with the shifting of a mood. It happens in relationship with the passing storms of argument. It's in the job change, the new school, the bankruptcy, the sickness. It's symbolized every day in the world around us by the rising and setting of the sun, the change of seasons. The Jews have it, the Muslims have it, the Hindu's have it, the Sikhs have it, the Christians have it. It's not religious, it's human. The daily dark passage into death and out again—that's the pattern of experience as we know it. Myth is the language of that pattern. To understand the world with a mythic perspective is to have a decoder for how it all works. That decoder enables me to participate in life in the deepest possible way, to seek and find the potential in each moment, to clarify my life's vision, to build my dream, to follow my destiny. 

Every culture has it's Myths, and has had them since before Jesus was born. This is important because it points out that every culture exhibits a basic striving toward ultimate meaning, toward God. I think human consciousness contains a basic structure, like a genetic code, that is sensitive both to what we can know, and also to what we cannot know—but somehow feel. There is right-brain, there is left-brain, and there is myth-brain. That basic structure, that Faculty of Myth, that myth-brain is attracted as if by magnetic pull toward the Absolute. Humans must respond, and our response to that attraction, that pull, is Myth. God gave us myth so we could find him. One of the brilliant aspects of Christianity is that it's first expression, the life of Jesus, was presented according to a pattern that people already understood, and had been employing for thousands of years. 

The story of Jesus appeals to the myth-brain. It's an illustration of the pattern of experience as we know it. So my worldview is heavily mythic. The story of Jesus is to me not only foundationally true, it's also my primary Mythic reference. It's how I understand and engage in the constant flow of life and death. That flow just keeps happening. I tend to step in and step out because it can be wearying. Jesus was onto that. He taught people how to stay with it. His teachings, his ideas, his life story came to be known was Christianity, but it rose up out of and in response to the underlying experience that is common to us all. 

In the end, Christianity is a synonym for Human.

Ever forward. 

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