Universalist Unitarian Church Santa Paula, California

Myth and the Meaning of Life
by Reverend John Alexie Crane

I. A Dream That Is Dying

There is a god-like perspective on human life caught up in these two lines from a poem by Arthur O’Shaughnessy [19th century British]. Each epoch in history, the poet observes, is one in which an old, old way of viewing the world is decaying, or one in which a new world view is taking form. It appears to me that both of these movements are occurring in our own time: an old vision of the meaning of life is dying, and a new one is coming to birth.

In the Bible, in the book of Deuteronomy in which the Ten Commandments are listed, there are hundreds of other commandments set down, all said to have been given by God to Moses for the guidance of his people.

One of the commandments reads like this: "If a man has a stubborn, rebellious son who will not obey his father or mother, even though they punish him, then his father and mother shall take him before the elders of the city, and... then the men of the city shall stone him to death. In this way you shall put away this evil from among you, and all the young men of Israel will hear about what happened and be afraid."

Another brief commandment for the regulation of certain interpersonal conflicts reads: "If two men are fighting and the wife of one intervenes to help her husband by grabbing the testicles of the other man, her hand shall be cut off without pity."

These are laws, plainly, conceived by a relatively primitive people, in the early stages of developing a civilization, laws no more infallible or inerrant than the laws of the state of California. It is hard to see now how anyone could read these two passages, and still look upon the Bible as the word of God, an infallible and ultimate guide for the behavior of human beings. Yet, a substantial, though dwindling number of people in this country still do so. For centuries our forefathers had little difficulty holding this conception.

This is because the mythical mode of thought, out of which this traditional story of God, Moses and the commandments grew, does not function critically, rationally, empirically, as we have become somewhat accustomed to doing.

Rather it explains and gives meaning to human experience by creating stories that satisfy the human need to know about things, to have order in our minds and in our lives, stories that satisfy human feelings, allay fears, enhance the human ego, that create meaning, comfort, order, peace, bring an assurance to people that they know all it is important to know about the nature of things. The myths created a kind of protective canopy to shelter and structure human life. A shelter desperately needed by our species as it groped its way into conscious life.

It appears to me (and many others) that this old mythical mode of apprehension is a dream that is dying. Even among fundamentalists controversy has developed over whether or not the Bible is actually inerrant, without erro r, the literal word of God. The Wall Street Journal reported on the controversy a few years back. It pointed out that some of the fundamentalists can now see that "there are just too many areas where the Bible can't stand up to close scrutiny."

Others argue forcefully in defense that "once the Bible's authority is questioned on any point, no matter how trivial, it's only a matter of time until the entire book is questioned." And this is quite right, of course. Once you admit the analytical and critical faculties to the study of an established mythology, its magic, its marvelous power to integrate, explain, and order human experience begins to decay. The two modes of thought are not compatible.

And we can't seem to prevent ourselves from subjecting the myths to rational scrutiny. The lure, the promise, the rewards of the rational mode of thought are such, evidently, that we have developed our capacity to use it even though it has undermined the power of the traditional myths to bring us meaning, comfort, confidence, ego-gratification, and a substantial degree of psychological security.

II. One That Is Coming to Birth
It is a profound, world-shaking shift in the organization of human life, this change from the dominance of the mythical mode of thought to the ascendance of the rational mode of thought. It is at the level of a cultural mutation, an evolutionary change that will affect human life for centuries to come.

It is not yet clear whether the rational mode of thought is the primary contents of the dream that is coming to birth, or if it is only the agent of decay of the dream that is dying. My intuitions tell me that the rational mode is essential to us but is not the ultimate answer, that the new dream is yet to be born. I sense that it has begun to take form, but is still not within the range of our vision.

It has taken centuries for the change to develop and ripen. You can see its beginnings in Socrates in ancient Athens, then again in western Europe in the fifteenth century. It began to grow more rapidly in the eighteenth century, more rapidly still in the nineteenth century; and in the past thirty years it has been moving swiftly forward. The radical changes in the religious tradition that have taken place in recent years are a reflection of this swift acceleration of the pattern.

The scholar, Joseph Campbell, who probably knew as much about mythology as anyone in our time, says in his book, Myths to Live By [1972] “I like to think of the year 1492 as marking the end — or at least the beginning of the end — of the authority of the old mythological systems by which the lives of humanity had been supported and inspired from time out of mind.”

Why 1492? The view of the universe that most people carried in their minds up until that time was the image expressed in the Bible. In this view the earth was seen as flat, shaped something like a dinner plate, floating on a great ocean. This world view was very old, dating at least as far back as 2000 BC. The people who wrote the Bible understood the world to be structured in this way, and this was the way most European people perceived it in 1492.

There was another, more sophistocated world view held by learned people of the time which was derived from the ancient Greeks. Here the earth was seen as a motionless, solid sphere, enclosed by seven revolving, transparent spheres, each of which contained on its surface one of the planets: the moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Thus, the earth was seen as being the center of a set of transparent spherical globes which enclosed it. Beyond the seventh sphere was the brightly lit celestial realm where God was enthroned.

This was the view held by most educated people in 1492, though these were relatively few in number at that time. The popular view was of the earth as flat, floating on a cosmic sea. But then, soon after Columbus sailed across the Atlantic and discovered the New World, Magellan sailed all the way around the globe. Our species had begun the systematic, empirical exploration of the actual earth, rather than remaining content with either of the old mythological images.

Then, fifty years after Columbus first voyage, Copernicus published his argument that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the solar system; and a little over sixty years later, Galileo made a telescope which enabled him to see directly what Copernicus had worked out mathematically . The telescopes we have today are, of course, far more powerful than Galileo s. We can now see almost inconceivable distances out into the universe.

We no longer hold either of the ancient myths. The one in the Bible is relatively primitive. We know now that the sun is the center of the planetary system of which the earth is a part; but far more than this we know our sun to be one of about two hundred billion other suns in the galaxy in which our solar system is involved. This galaxy is a vast collection of suns and planets shaped like an immense lens, hundreds of quintillion miles across. We know also that this enormous galaxy is only one of many millions of other such galaxies dispersed in infinite space.

This is the view of the world that all school children now learn. It is the world view, roughly, that most of us carry in our minds. It has displaced the old myths in defining the world for us. The displacement began, broadly speaking, in 1492; and as Campbell put it: "Actually, the occasion for an experience of awe before the wonder of the universe that is being developed for us by our scientists is a far more marvelous, mind-blowing revelation than anything the prescientific world could ever have imagined."

We are on the edge of a new era in the development of our species. Campbell makes very clear a fact we have been only dimly aware of, namely, that "there is no divinely ordained authority any more that we have to recognize. There is no anointed messenger of God's law. In our world today, all civil law is conventional. No divine authority is claimed for it: no Sinai; no Mount of Olives.

“Our laws are enacted and altered by human determination, and within their secular jurisdiction each of us is free to seek her own destiny, his own truth, ... to find it through her own doing. The mythologies, religions, philosophies, and modes of thought that came into being six thousand years ago and out of which all the monumental cultures both of the Occident and of the Orient — of Europe, the Near and Middle East, even early America — derived their truth and their lives, are dissolving from around us, and we are left, each on his own to follow the star and spirit of her own life."

No divinely ordained authority... Each of us is free to seek her own destiny, her own truth, to find it through her own doing... Mythologies are dissolving around us... We are left, each on our own to follow the star and spirit of our own lives...

Those are the words of Joseph Campbell, a leading authority on the mythologies of the world. Do his conclusions sound familiar, sound Unitarian Universalist7 This is the world view we have been developing since about the year 1800.

Since that time we have gradually, one by one, set aside each of the elements in the mythological tradition as not being essential to the religious life. It is not that we have been leading the way. It is just that, because of our free organizational structure, we have been able to evolve as new knowledge accumulated. We found our way to this conclusion a little earlier than most other churches. But all are moving now in this direction.

III. The Natural Meaning of Life
We are aware now that our lives are conducted in the context of a vast universe outside us, as well as of a vast universe of experience within ourselves. Campbell points out that there is an extraordinary linkage between the world within and the world without. Our human nature is characterized by an intimate, electric congruence with the nature of the universe as a whole.

We were able with our minds long ago to spell out mathematically the laws of motion that govern the behavior of the suns, planets and galaxies strewn out in infinite space. Our minds are so constructed that we can, with effort, grasp to some considerable extent the immense nature of things in which our individual lives are set down.

We know that our being grows out of its being. Our nature was formed out of its nature. We human beings emerged out of this immense universe, are made of its substance, contain its potential for being. Each of our acts and thoughts and feelings is part of the whole process of being. We are the universe seeing itself, beginning to understand itself. We are the eyes, the ears, the mind of the universe, and are an intimate part of its vast being.

We are launched now on a great new adventure, that of exploring the infinite space within us, the infinite space outside us. We have begun to probe physically into the nearby planets in our solar system; we have begun to probe the depths of the human psyche. As we begin this series of explorations, we do so after largely setting aside the old mythological mode of thought.

Instead, we are now asking that each individual develop the capacity of looking at the world in a free and independent way, that each approach the world insofar as possible without preconceptions, being analytical, critical and creative: not simply reproducing inherited patterns of thought and action, but becoming oneself an innovating center, an active, creative center within the life process.

Having begun to transcend the limitations of the old mythological way of organizing life, we are free to find salvation now in the fully lived, fully realized human life. We will find it in art, in science, in close relations with people we love. We will find it in ourselves. We will find salvation in being as fully human as it is possible for us to be.

By learning to think, to feel, to run, to dance, to work, to play. By learning to love wisely and well. By learning to be deeply in touch with the beauty of the natural world. By enjoying music, reading, people, sunsets, skiing, children, woodcarving, philosophy, cooking, stained glass, birds, sculpture, soaring mountains, trees, waterfalls, fountains.

A group of close friends, the warmth and beauty of faces close by, and the quiet pleasures of being alone. By learning to be in touch with our own inwardness, coming to know, accept, and respect ourselves, our feelings, thoughts, intuitions, the things we feared and had fled from.

Coming to know and love ourselves, to love others, to love the world; and to become a part of this wondrous adventure in the infinite universe of which we are an intimate, inseparable part, in which we live and move and have our being; and in which we are evidently invited to play an extraordinary and influential role.

Dr Alexie Crane
2880 Exeter Place
Santa Barbara, CA 93105
(805) 682-3476

Lex1304@aol.com