“Human life began in flight and fear. Religion rose from rituals of propitiation, spells to lull the punishing elements.” --Camille Paglia
“The person has put himself off center. He has aligned himself with a programmatic life and it's not the one the body's interested in at all. And the world's full of people who have stopped listening to themselves.” --Joseph Campbell
Light, dawn light, creeps across my sky, and I think about great thinkers. To listen to the lectures or read the books of Joseph Campbell is to remember that before modern man there was still man. Our rich existence as a species did not begin with the qwerty keyboard nor was it spiritually enriched by the invention of the itty bitty cell phone. Modern playthings are just our current accessories, replacing the beads and bones that once adorned our hair and clothes, replacing runes and smoke signals. Our lives are neither richer nor poorer because of these changes; Our lives have simply continued.
The ebb and flow of time seems to disappear when you listen to Campbell discuss the inherent differences between men and women. Their different needs and responses, their psychological and psychosexual baselines. I do believe in equal pay (for equal work) but I do not agree in different standards for the same task. If a man can do the job better because of muscle mass, aggressive approach or what have you, than a man should be given the job, quotas or not. God did not make men and women the same. He made them equal – just as He made every male and female in every other species equally important – but not the same. To ignore these differences – to not celebrate them – is a crime not just against each other but against the beauty of God.
To grossly simplify Camille Paglia: I want my women passionate, sexy and straight, and I want my men possessive, aggressive and erect. Disgustingly blunt? Not entirely correct? Of course to both. Because in God's natural order for man, as mirrored in nature, His divine map laid here for us, there is room for gentle, quiet, sensitive men, and there is room for protective, assertive, viciously brilliant women. The point is, there is room for all kinds of vibrant differences.
“I do not believe that Christ, our Lord, our Lion and Lamb, placed us on this world alone and without guidance. And you will know your guides because they will refuse to call themselves divine and may not even call themselves Christian. They will be humble. They will hide nothing, for Christ hid nothing. And not everyone will follow them but all will hear them and agree with what they say. Because the truth can be ignored but it cannot be denied.”
I want to paint. Instead I am sitting outside on the closed dome of the private observatory of a friend. I have realized, strangely, that I like to look at the stars with my naked eyes more than I like to view them through the telescope. I do not want to see them so explained and scientific. I want to view them through the lens of my personal mythology. I want to connect their points to form my own constellations. I want to remember them attached to my own memories and the histories of my family. I don't want to *know* what I see. I want to believe what I see.
“Religion is a construct of man. Even if you subscribe to a denomination, you know this as truth. It is a construct of man which stands *between* man and God. It is meant to better facilitate the understanding of God by man. But religion must be transparent. It must be open like air and sky. If it is not transparent, than God cannot be seen through it.”
Why do so many of us flock like sheep to the constructs of man? Why does denomination soothe and call to us? Because it is comfort, ritual, structure and pattern. Because it is tangible belonging. I met once a man who said to me that his faith was strong as steel, that it was everything to him, his life and breath and thought and reality. Walk away from your church then, I answered. Walk away for one year and walk your path, just you and your God. And it was obvious from the blanch of his face and the panic in his eyes that he was sincere when he responded, I would lose my center if I lost my church.
The loss of mythology is indeed the loss of our center. Without mythology we lose the knowledge of who we were and lose touch with the primal forces that still exist within us, sometimes slumbering, other times roiling. Mythology is the key code or directions on our road map to a life lived not in fear but in rejoicing. A life lived fulfilled and rich, a depth of experience that nourishes and sustains us.
Of course, how we build that mythology, where we turn to for that mythology, is entirely our decision and there are as many personal mythologies as there are people on this only green world. Of course, my answer was: Fill that center with Christ.
“The power of Jesus Christ is that He does not need to have been a god to have changed everything.”
“I live my life as if there is no heaven that awaits me, but that Christ was still the son of God. Now then forever, He is my teacher, guide and maker. There is no incentive. There is no after life. There is only what my Lord has commanded of me, and that is enough.”
Society crumbles when one of two things happen. When we either destroy our mythology or our mythology destroys us. Both are equally possible and equally horrible.
“Babylon Syndrome is man as God. Man proposes now or in a far future to be as God. God is not now and was never a mortal man. We are and will be until we return to that which we came from. We are not now nor will we ever be gods. To strive for this – to strive to be as our Lord – is not just blasphemous but a disease that infests through the wound of hubris and spreads like the most virulent of contagions. These are mythologies for small, fearful minds and they are addictive.”
“When we topple our gods, we topple our survival as a unified people. God surrounds us and classifies us as natural unto Him, as He planned for us. We are embraced by Him. Once we fell God, once we lift ourselves out of His natural center and place ourselves outside with Him, we are no longer a people of one heart, one mind, one path. We are no longer concentric circles, but rather opposed and opposer. Elevated and descended. More than and lessor than. Right and wrong. The table, my friends, is no longer round.”
I am witness to a small group of brave young people choking on tradition and struggling against real odds to find themselves in a heritage that has no room for them. I think of the human rights activist Harvey Milk talking about there being no time or luxury for hiding. If everyone was aware that they knew a gay person, he argued, they would see us as human. Not abnormalities or even just the extremes they may glimpse in public. They would see us as part of the pattern. One of the concentric circles of human life.
But instead many people see the world, and raise their children, entrenched in personal mythologies that are outdated, outmoded or simply wrong, founded in hubris or otherwise out of control. It is terrifying how recently many major religions still proclaimed racial segregation a holy mandate and equally disgusting how many denominations do the same today for orientation. Both diverse attributes are positively displayed in abundance in nature and seem to make only logical sense – vivid difference in species allows for the adaption to multiple environments; homosexuality allows for birth control on a planet with limited capacity (gay couples, if they have children at all, have far fewer, on average).
By propagating mythologies that are contrary to our natural truth, we are allowing discord. We are moving against the grain that is God's plan. His map for us is so very beautiful and we are ignoring it when we try to build religions out of smoke and mirrors, denominations that do not stand up under close scrutiny and that fight for traditions that only benefit the further spread of ignorance. The blind are so more easily led. The collection of souls at the thrones of men naming lightning in the dark.
EJ
