[Dialogue] 1/23/20, Progressing Spirit: Matthew Sydal: Christian Imagination and the Return to Myth; Spong revisited

Thu Jan 23 03:16:58 PST 2020

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}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv7491073994 h3{ font-size:18px !important;line-height:125% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv7491073994 h4{ font-size:16px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv7491073994 .yiv7491073994mcnBoxedTextContentContainer .yiv7491073994mcnTextContent, #yiv7491073994 .yiv7491073994mcnBoxedTextContentContainer .yiv7491073994mcnTextContent p{ font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv7491073994 #yiv7491073994templatePreheader{ display:block !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv7491073994 #yiv7491073994templatePreheader .yiv7491073994mcnTextContent, #yiv7491073994 #yiv7491073994templatePreheader .yiv7491073994mcnTextContent p{ font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv7491073994 #yiv7491073994templateHeader .yiv7491073994mcnTextContent, #yiv7491073994 #yiv7491073994templateHeader .yiv7491073994mcnTextContent p{ font-size:16px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv7491073994 #yiv7491073994templateBody .yiv7491073994mcnTextContent, #yiv7491073994 #yiv7491073994templateBody .yiv7491073994mcnTextContent p{ font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv7491073994 #yiv7491073994templateFooter .yiv7491073994mcnTextContent, #yiv7491073994 #yiv7491073994templateFooter .yiv7491073994mcnTextContent p{ font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }  Myth is the foundation of life.  
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Christian Imagination and the Return to Myth
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|  Essay by Rev. Matthew Syrdal
January 23, 2020
“Myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless pattern, the religious formula to which life shapes itself… Whereas in the life of mankind the mythical represents an early and primitive stage, in the life of an individual it represents a late and mature one.” - Thomas Mann

As a boy of ten, I will always remember a sacred encounter with a large male orca, the elder of its pod, breaching right off the starboard side of our boat on a summer trip with my family. Its six foot tall dorsal fin rising silently, then descending, splitting the black surface of the body of the Salish Sea mere meters from my elated wind-drowned shouts. As this numinous image plunged back into the mysterious depths of my memory, it left an indelible mark on my soul — a wake of wildness rippling through the coastlands of my ripening identity — like a story that was waiting to be overheard so that it might one day be spoken in human tongue. 

Childhood numinous experiences connect the outer wildness of an untamed world, teeming with the wondrous treasures of biodiversity, with our own inner wildness. A wildness that both mirrors, and is mirrored by, the deep world itself. Children who are raised with free time in nature exploring the outdoors will learn the magic of kinship with the more-than-human world. Our childhood imaginations effortlessly absorb whispers from this living world untamed by culture, untainted by the concerns and projects of our ‘civilized’ world.

>From my early childhood experiences of the totemic imagery of native Pacific Northwest coastal tribes, and from their diverse stories, I have always been drawn to myth. Throughout history, myth has functioned to help humans remember who we are in relation to a whole ecology of place. Our storied relationship within the intricate and delicate web of the more-than-human world — with the wild itself. The ‘wild’ is that which is pure, uncontrolled, unmanaged, untamed nature. By wildness we might assume there is something inherent in all natural systems: an original, primordial wisdom, a deeper pattern, or blueprint, in all earth processes, bioregions and species — including the human — moving towards some mysterious, yet wild, equilibrium. From our own creation accounts in Genesis and the prologue to John’s gospel, we find an indigenous sophia-logos that is both evocative and liturgical. In the beginning was the speech, the singing, the courtship.

This living Mystery and Myth of our origins, it seems, is coded into our cellular memory—our bodies, our DNA—by way of image and archetype. These basic universal energetic patterns appear in myths across all cultures and languages. It seems to me that over the centuries, theology and doctrine have domesticated and deadened our attunement to the poetic and mythic that since the beginning is even now creating worlds full of astonishing beauty and meaning. To be fully human, that is, to follow the path of individual maturation—our own ontogeny as a species—is to become allured by the deeper mysteries of nature and the soul. It is to be summoned on a dangerous quest to find, what Jesus cryptically referred to as, the kingdom hidden like treasure in the field. This quest is the journey of individuation coded into the mythic structure of Jesus’ parables and actions.

There is a certain image or energy latent in each of us, conjured by crisis, loss, or maturation, alluring us into the dismemberment and darkness we previously denied and avoided in the ‘first half’ of our lives. As Sanford writes, “There is an inner reality within each of us that is like a great treasure lying hidden in the field of our soul waiting to be discovered. (John Sanford, Dreams: God’s Forgotten Language)” When we finally find this inner treasure, and recognizes its supreme value, with wild joy we will give up all other goals and ambitions in order to make it real in our lives.

“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in the field. When someone found it,
in their joy they hid it again, and then went away and sold everything they had
to buy that field.”

“Losing,” “searching” and “finding” are symbolic themes that create a dreamlike thread running through many of Jesus’ parables. Dreams of becoming lost, losing car keys, searching for spouse or children, are common themes for many of us. The parables of the Treasure in the field and the Pearl of great price form one unit that function to amplify the meaning of each other. (Matthew 13:44-46) In the first parable of the Treasure hidden in the field, the “kingdom” is a treasure that we must search for and find. In the very next parable, which amplifies the first, the kingdom is compared to a merchant who is searching for something of great value. In this parable of the Pearl of great price, we are the pearl, we are the treasure found by the kingdom of heaven.

I believe the paradox of this parable lies at the heart of the split in the West from the realm of nature and the soul, the kingdom. The kingdom is both that which we find within, the inner treasure of our true Life, and also that which is searching to find us. The kingdom is a living reality—it is what I call, the Deep World. Sanford says, when we are found we become something of “supreme value in the eyes of God. We are the fine pearls if the kingdom can take root within us, and to us God gives a place of supreme value in his creation. (Sanford, Dreams)”

As an indigenous Messiah, Jesus was one who listened deeply to the song of Creation, to the living dialogue that is in the beginning, the heartbeat of the universe itself. In this sense, Jesus was the mythteller of the community he was forming around his own ministry of power, healing, and renewal. His parables of the kingdom of heaven are stories that have always existed, in the soul of the world, waiting to be heard, ‘whoever has ears, let them hear.’”

As I have written in a previous article Rewilding Our Narrative, “The key to our uniquely human role as homo poeta, in the evolution of the universe seems to be in the power of our story-telling, meaning-making in the cultivation of the world — the power to tell ourselves stories about who we are, and what we really are, our ultimate place in the world.” In the beginning was the Logos, the Speech, the Singing, the living Story actively creating meaning and life itself. Myth is the ecology of the soul and the world itself. As Sean Kane explains, “myth is in effect a whole ecology holding itself in place in a part of the world, and expressing itself through the storytelling of local humanity.” (Wisdom of the Mythtellers, 51) Myth in the oral form of passing on of stories from generation to generation—“take their inspiration, not from texts, temples or other monuments at the center of the human effort, but from the life of nature surrounding it.”

Reimagining the bounds of the ‘kingdom of heaven’ to include Earth and cosmos, body and soul, as well as spirit, requires the courage to deconstruct our cultural and anthropocentric distortions of our inherited patriarchal theology that had become severed from its rootedness in the natural world, the Creation. What is needed is a return to the primal pattern of myth, image, and imagination.

As Moses says in Deuteronomy 30 “the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so you may obey it. See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction… this day I invoke the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life…” (vv. 14-19). We are at a turning point in our history where we must make a choice, and our choice affects the viability of our future as a species.

To paraphrase, language has the power to domesticate or to rewild the soul of the community and the more-than-human community. In order to restore biodiversity on our planet, and enhance life for future generations of species including our own, it is important to become educated and involved in conservation efforts. But this alone is not enough. The renewal of the Christian imagination and return to myth invites us to radically reconceive our identity and role as a species for such a time as this. We are now being called to rewild the very stories we tell ourselves about what we are and what the world is. We must reclaim the wild roots of the Christian story. We must choose to rewild the Way.

~ Rev. Matthew Syrdal

Read online here

About the Author
Rev. Matthew Syrdal M.Div., lives in the front range of Colorado with his beautiful family. Matt is an ordained pastor in the Presbyterian church (USA), founder and lead guide of WilderSoul and Church of Lost Walls and co-founder of Seminary of the Wild. Matt speaks at conferences and guides immersive nature-based experiences around the country. In his years of studying ancient Christian Rites of Initiation, world religions, anthropology, rites-of-passage and eco- psychology Matt seeks to re-wild what it means to be human. His work weaves in myth and ceremony in nature as a way for people to enter into conversation with the storied world in which they are a part. Matt’s passion is guiding others in the discovery of “treasure hidden in the field” of their deepest lives cultivating deep wholeness and re-enchantment of the natural world to apprentice fully and dangerously to the kingdom of god. Matt has been coaching, and guiding since becoming a certified Wild Mind nature-based human development guide through the Animas Valley Institute and is currently training to become a soul initiation guide through the SAIP program.
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Question & Answer

Q: By John

I subscribed to your messages and to expand the understanding of God through Jesus because of the open-hearted, loving messages of John Shelby Spong and several others that I had read. Lately, it seems to have many messages spewing hatred toward white, heterosexual males like me. I agree with the general premise that people who look like me have dominated and abused the world, and I am working for change much to the chagrin of many people who know me. Today’s message insists Jesus was an African, but nobody really knows. By the time he walked the earth, Jews had spread around the Mediterranean, traveled all over, and had mixed with Europeans. Yes, those horrible Europeans! Jews were taking converts from everywhere. It is unnecessary for anybody to throw stones because of anybody’s race or ethnicity. It repulses me and is plain not Jesus-like. It is prideful and hateful.

A: By Rev. Mark Sandlin

Dear John,

Thanks for sharing your thoughts and concerns. I'd like to start by recognizing that, like you, I am a white, cisgendered male. I'd also like to start from a point of common agreement. As you so aptly put it, “people who look like me have dominated and abused the world.” So, right off the bat, there are a few things in common.

I can't, however, join you in the implied idea that Jesus might have been, like you and me, white (or had some “white” heritage). From a pragmatic point of view, Jesus was a Jew living in the Middle East. A particularly high percentage of the people who fit that description at that time looked like Middle Eastern Jews. That is, they had dark skin, dark hair, and brown eyes. It was so common, if Jesus had not fit that description, it most certainly would have been pointed out in the scriptures, maybe particularly by the Sadducee and Pharisees in their efforts to discredit him. There is not a reference to his possible “whiteness” in the whole of the Bible, nor in the non-canonical writings, or even in writings from outside sources of the time. Not only that, several of the earliest colored deceptions of him show him clearly with brown skin.

So, the idea that he could have been white (or had “white” heritage), while isn't completely unlikely, it is highly improbable.

The good news is that the larger overriding issue here is something that we both can (and already have) agree upon: “people who look like [us] have dominated and abused the world.” Imagine, as much as either of us can, that you aren't white. Imagine what it would feel like to be told that the son of God was much more like those who have “dominated and abused” you and your people than he is like you.

I have to believe that would be difficult, particularly when the reality is that it isn't even close to the likely reality. Consider the fact that the domination and abuse from folks who look like us frequently was backed up with scripture. I can only imagine how oppressive and subjugating it would be to also be told that the people who are doing it to you are the most like Jesus.

Now, if we'd like to stray from the likely historical reality of Jesus' heritage, I can't help but believe it would be decidedly more helpful, decidedly more Jesus-like, to consider the image of Jesus as one of the various images that white men have dominated and abused over the centuries. I'm not saying we should believe that Jesus was anything other than a Middle Eastern Jew, but I am saying it is clear that he identified more with the marginalized than with the powerful. It can be very insightful to imagine Jesus being more like those he identified with.

I actually ran into the issue of the identity of important spiritual figures while raising my kids. I have a girl and a boy. Around the age of seven or so, my daughter received a praying doll as a gift. When you placed its hands together it said the Lord's Prayer. After many nights of hearing her praying “Our FATHER, who art in heaven,” it hit me that I was reinforcing a particular view of God that isn't the only view of God in the Bible. For example, there are plenty of more feminine images in the Bible. (You can read more about all of this in my article “On a Genderqueer God”).

I also realized that in the language we were using, it was being reinforced upon my daughter that God was more like her brother than like her – and that simply isn't true. So, the next few days she and I talked about God and she came to the conclusion that from now on she'd pray the prayer saying, “Our Creator...”.

I guess what I'm saying is that it can do us and the world a lot of good to not have the only or primary image of Jesus and of God, look a whole lot like the people who “have dominated and abused the world.” It's not just helpful and healing for those who have been oppressed and subjugated, but it also can bring to those of us who live in places of comparative privilege (like male and white) spiritual insight that we could have never gained from our places of advantage in the world.

~ Rev. Mark Sandlin

Read and share online here

About the Author
Rev. Mark Sandlin is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA) from the South. He currently serves at Presbyterian Church of the Covenant. He is a co-founder of The Christian Left. His blog, has been named as one of the “Top Ten Christian Blogs.” Mark received The Associated Church Press’ Award of Excellence in 2012. His work has been published on “The Huffington Post,” “Sojourners,” “Time,” “Church World Services,” and even the “Richard Dawkins Foundation.” He’s been featured on PBS’s “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly” and NPR’s “The Story with Dick Gordon.” Follow Mark on Facebook and Twitter @marksandlin.
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited

The Origins of the Bible, Part XV: Ezekiel

Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
November 20, 2008
When Americans are asked to name the great presidents of this nation, four names appear more often than any others: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. The thing that each of these presidents has in common is that they presided over a time of trauma, transition and change in our nation’s history: Washington at the birth of our nation; Lincoln during the dissolution of the Union; Wilson over World War I; and Roosevelt during both the great depression and World War II. This list thus begs the question: Does the nation in crisis call forth great leaders? Or do leaders become great because they have to deal with a crisis? I suggest that it is the latter, but historians will debate that forever.

When we study the prophets, the same question arises. Does a crisis in the life of the Jewish people serve to call great people into leadership or do these leaders become great because they had to deal with a crisis? Once again I suspect it is the latter, but biblical scholars will debate this forever. There have been two great crises in Jewish history where the extinction of the whole nation was a real possibility. One was in the 20th Century when six million Jews were exterminated by the Nazi government in Germany. The other was the time of the conquest of the Jews at the hands of the Babylonians and their subsequent exile in the land of Babylon.

The crisis in the 20th Century called David Ben-Gurion into leadership. The earlier biblical crisis, occurring in the first half of the 6th Century BC, called the Prophet Ezekiel into leadership. This week in our series on the origins of the Bible we turn to a consideration of this great figure upon whom the continuation of the Jewish nation literally hung. The book of Ezekiel is the third of the “Major Prophets”. We have looked already at the first two, Isaiah and Jeremiah. Ezekiel is probably not as well-known as these, but perhaps he should be. His star still burns brightly in the Jewish diadem as a critical life in Jewish history.

It is hard to recreate the person Ezekiel from the text of the book that bears his name, since we now know that the text has been edited a number of times, corrupted badly and even that chapters 40 to 48 are generally regarded as a later addition to this text by another author, a kind of II Ezekiel. Yet there is a real figure who stands in the shadows behind the words of this book, one who lived in history and who changed the character of the Jewish people. Since his life overlapped with Jeremiah they shared some common background. Let me review it. In the late 8th Century BC, the nation of Assyria was the scourge of the Middle Eastern world. They had a disciplined and fierce military establishment. The first nation to develop horse-drawn iron chariots, the precursor of tank divisions, to hurl into battle, they destroyed their enemies on every side. The Northern Kingdom of Israel fell to them in 721 BC and in the process, its people became known as “The Ten Lost Tribes” that today live only in mythology. The fate of these Jews in defeat was to be removed from their land, resettled across the Assyrian Empire and ultimately to disappear in to the DNA and gene pool of the Arab-Semitic world. The Southern kingdom of Judah, with its capital in Jerusalem, survived this scourge by becoming a vassal state of Assyria, who then ruled that world with an iron fist until falling to the rising power of Babylon in 612 BC. After a period of consolidating their power, the army of the Babylonians swept down on and destroyed Judah and Jerusalem in 596 BC. This was the first time the city of Jerusalem had been conquered in 400 years. For the “Holy City”, believed by the Jews to be the dwelling place of God, to fall was devastating. Leading Jewish citizens were then rounded up and marched off to Babylon to be resettled as an underclass in the service of their conquerors. They appeared destined to disappear as the Northern Kingdom had done about 125 years earlier. Among those exiles, however, was a young prophet whose name was Ezekiel, who was apparently a member of a well-respected priestly family. In that crisis this young man rose to become a determinative leader of his people.

The first problem to be faced in the exile was that of survival as an identifiable people.  What could keep these exiled people intact and separate, the bearers in history of a national destiny? Even if they never saw their homeland again, they had to create the desire in their descendants to do so. The fate of the Jews of the Northern Kingdom must not be allowed to be the fate of these Jews. Ezekiel saw that as his primary task. This man was a psychiatrist’s delight. He had vivid dreams, perhaps even in Technicolor, which he used to galvanize his people. Two of his dreams made such indelible impressions on future generations that they have been turned into Negro spirituals and used to illumine the black experience of being first exiled from their native Africa and second being enslaved by their white oppressors. The first of these spirituals was based on the first chapter of Ezekiel and proclaimed that “Ezekiel saw the wheel, way up in the middle of the air”, words that expressed a yearning for deliverance to come from on high. The second, based on Ezekiel 37 was entitled “Dem bones gonna rise again”. In this dream, Ezekiel saw the Jewish nation under the analogy of a valley filled with dead, dry, fleshless bones. There was no hope of restoration or resurrection. God speaks to Ezekiel in this dream, addressing him by his
favorite title, “Son of Man”, to ask: “Can these bones live again?” To which Ezekiel replied, “Lord, only thou knowest!” Hope for a future life for the Jewish nation was at that time beyond Ezekiel’s imagination. Behind both of these dreams was the biblical idea that God was the source of life.

In the Jewish myth of creation, it was the breath of God that was breathed into Adam, transforming him from being an inert body of clay into a God-infused living soul. God’s breath had also been identified in the Jewish tradition with the wind that animated the forest. Now, Ezekiel’s dream proclaimed, the breath of God also has the ability to recreate the lifeless Jewish nation. So it was that in Ezekiel’s dream the breath of God blew over that valley and caused those dead bones to be reassembled. That is, “the toe bone connected to the foot bone, the foot bone connected to the ankle bone, the ankle bone to the leg bone” until they were all standing up again. The Jewish nation was destined to be revived with the life force, the breath of God. That dream now became Ezekiel’s task to fulfill. Of course it was a task that no one person could accomplish on his or her own. It would indeed be the task of several generations. One person, however, had to have the dream, see the vision, stamp it on the minds of his people and turn it into a reality. That person was Ezekiel.

The exiled people under Ezekiel’s influence made separation, which was the prerequisite to survival, their highest priority. In three distinct ways they set out on a national agenda to make themselves different, to keep themselves separate and to maintain their Jewish identity. Firstly, they resurrected the ancient Sabbath Day observance, a tradition that had long ago fallen into disuse. They codified every detail of the Sabbath. Jews not only refrained from work on that day, they even immobilized themselves. A Sabbath Day’s journey was defined as three-fifths of a mile. No Jew could walk more than that on the Sabbath without violating the law. These Jews were “different” and “separate” and to remain so they made these Sabbath Day observances the very mark of their Judaism. This was the time when the seven-day creation story with which the Bible now opens was written and added to their sacred text. Its purpose was to ground the Sabbath Day observance in the act of creation as the command of God.

The second thing they did was to adopt kosher dietary laws. The Jews would not eat the flesh of swine or shellfish and Jewish food had to be prepared in kosher kitchens. So Jews never ate with Babylonians. It was, they said, the law of God, designed to keep them separate. The third thing they did was to revive the practice of circumcision that had also fallen into disuse. This meant that they literally carved into the flesh of every Jewish male the mark of Judaism, making intermarriage very difficult and enhancing separation. To ground these practices in the will of God a group of priestly writers, inspired by Ezekiel, edited the entire sacred narrative of the Jews so that these traditions were seen as unique to the entire history of their call from God to be God’s people. Thus the priestly version of the scriptures came into being.

It worked. The Jews were the only defeated and exiled people in human history to return intact to their homeland after defeat and exile to re-establish their national history. That vocation was burned deep into the Jewish psyche and would forever remain a characteristic of these people. They would need it again some 2,500 years later: in 70 AD, Jerusalem was destroyed again, this time by the Romans and the Jewish people were scattered across the face of the earth. The maps of human history contained no Jewish state from 70 until 1948, when the nation of Israel was established in accordance with the Balfour Declaration of 1917. During that exile time the Jews endured many horrors, much persecution and even the Holocaust, but the lessons of Ezekiel were too deep to be ignored and so they survived once more to return to the land of their fathers and mothers.

I do not mean to minimize the pain and dislocation that the return of the Jews to Israel and to the land of Palestine caused in 1948 and since. I do mean to suggest that a people who can maintain their national identity for almost 1900 years as a homeless people is a remarkable accomplishment. They have Ezekiel to thank for this survival.

~ John Shelby Spong
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