June 18, 2007
Grass
“A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world.” Rollo May wrote this as the first sentence in his intriguing book The Cry for Myth.
We enjoy in our Communion an appreciation and deep respect for myth, entwined with an authority derived from Scripture, tradition, and reason. Further, we have understood Scripture as a “normative tradition” which sets the parameters for all the rest. We may slip into idolatries from time to time. But we are not bound by verbal inerrancy, the idolatry that’s fundamentally insulting to God who in his image imagines us humans to be free to choose to become as he wishes us to be.
Our normative tradition includes a plethora of stories about eternity breaking into time, about creation from nothing, about seas parting so we can get by, about prophets assumed bodily into heaven, indeed, about heaven itself. We treasure that norm, that Scripture, so much that none of our many liturgies can be said not to be filled with its references.
To gather as church, to be church is to tell repeatedly our story at one family reunion after another, Sunday in and Sunday out, crisis in and crisis out, and never seem to tire of it or of rehearsing it in our creeds and prayers or of ringing changes on it in our homilies. Our myths are our ways of making sense out of nonsense. Our stories are our way of modeling families for families to become story tellers of their own of themselves.
I wonder has our world ever been more morally confusing than now. How refreshing would be a mooring, a centering, a remembering and retelling of our myth. It awaits our attention. God’s grace remains quite sufficient for us as a way, an energy of being and telling. Like in the mass feeding on the hillside, there is even much green grass left in the place on which to sit and make some sense (Mk 6.30-44). Who could ask for anything more?
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