Dreaming the Future Closer

This post has been brewing in my head for a while.  I keep meaning to sit down and let it out, but until now that hasn’t happened.  For all the time brewing, I’ve not had tons of time or energy to rework the underlying ideas, so take it for the rough piece of work it is.  It ends up a good deal more vague than I would prefer.

The basic idea behind this is simple: History is not the enemy of faith.  It has only become so in light of the discipline’s alliance with the ideal of Enlightenment, that notion that creates this divide between the modern world in which ‘progress’ occurs, and the archaic world that languishes in ignorance and superstition. 

That alone doesn’t quite tell the story, though, because that division between progress and ignorance is not entirely abandoned by many spiritual people.  More often than not, they transform the division into one between the ‘empty’ change of the present and the unchanging face of the ‘real’ spiritual world.  In turn, the values that real world tends to get projected backward in time, to an immemorial past that we are trying to recover or recreate.   

Enlightenment history picks up on this and tends to criticize religion by criticizing the image of the past it memorializes.  The equation of myth with falsity emerges from this approach—the idea being that when you show that the myth is not ‘true’ history, you disprove that religion, too, since its validity is premised upon the (historical) validity of its myths. 

This can be quite effective persuasion.  Plenty of people leave their religion because they see their myths’ historical truth as the justification for their religion.  I want to suggest that both ways of framing the problem are wrong-headed.

The spiritual person, in their encounter with the sacred, comes away with a sense that their is a, for the lack of a better word, timeless order to which the everyday world is of secondary, derived, importance.  The cultural resources (the concrete religions) that allow them to make sense of that experience tend to get associated with that timeless quality. 

Religions, however, are not unchanging.  They, like all things, are subject to the vicissitudes of time.  Elements change.  Sometimes those changes make it easier for some people to interact with the spiritual world, sometimes they make it more difficult, sometimes they have little impact either way. 

A lot of times, I suspect the habit of connection replaces an actual connection.  In the same way that we must refresh our appreciation for our friends, see how they have changed over time, we must refresh our connections to the divine and appreciate how we may need to interact differently.

Rather than fight with the enlightenment history, we can re-embrace it to our own ends.  We can look at it not as an elaborate reductio ad absurdum of our faith, but a record of the kinds of struggles that sustaining a connection to the divine entails.  If I had to draw a comparison, it’s akin to reading the history of diplomacy in order to understand all the factors that go into a negotiation, all the complexities that can arise. 

In the diversity of myth and religion, in their conflict, we aren’t seeing the churning of animal irrationality, but the passionate engagement of limited intellects and limited imaginations in representing a much more complicated spiritual reality. 

Rather than look to disprove or prove this variation or another, we ought to consider that those variations were likely created in response to different situations, or different perspectives on the same situation.  There is a diagnostic element to this, reading myth as we might read over competing diagnoses and treatment plans.  Here, we see an invitation to Zeus as the proper balancing act, and there we see the need for that to be qualified by another force, that of Hera. 

They are reasoned applications of tradition to a changing world, applications that can introduce novelty without simply overturning the tradition.  Myths aren’t just just-so stories, but symbolic, schematic models for how the different facets fo divinity interact with each other.  They provide us with insight into how different ways of comporting ourselves toward the divine can change the way in which the divine manifests.

In this, we need to keep in mind the relationship of myth and ritual.  They are in dialogue with each other.  One does not determine the other, but both exert influence upon the other.  Variations in ritual suggest new ways of telling myths and variations in myths suggest alternative ritual practices. 

And both focused upon the realization of a deeper relationship with the divine that they cannot fully encompass.