Myth or Reality

I have sometimes remarked how the shape of my Christian faith might have been very different had it not been from the works of C. S. Lewis. He in turn spoke of George Macdonald as his master saying that he fancied he had never written a book in which he did not quote from him. 

My father introduced me to Narnia. He was so enthused with the books that he wrote Bible cross references in the margins. I’ve not seen anyone else go to such lengths. But I can vividly remember the day he told me that Lewis had died. Lewis was someone who spoke a language I could understand.

It was after I left home for college that I chanced upon a copy of Till We Have Faces subtitled A Myth Retold in an Oxford bookshop. I hadn't known of its existence before so it was an Oh Joy! moment. 

Lewis called it "far and away my best book" and I agree. Because I identify with the protagonist Orual in all her struggles and I want to share her final redemption. In this blog I have already made several references to it: I make no apology for making another.

The myth in question is of Cupid and Psyche as told in Book 4 of the Metamorphoses of Apuleius (aka The Golden Ass) being the only ancient Roman novel in Latin to survive in its entirety.

To jump in half way through the myth, Aphrodite (aka Venus) gives Psyche barrels of grains, barley, wheat, beans, and poppy seeds mixed together, and orders her to have them sorted by evening. Psyche breaks down in despair, but an ant takes pity, instructing her colony to help sort the grain. Aphrodite, surprised and enraged to see that the task had been completed, gives Psyche a new task: to approach a pack of rams known for being violent and shear their golden fleece to bring back to the goddess. Rather than be killed by these rams, Psyche plans on drowning herself in the river, but again she is saved. Aphrodite then sets a third impossible task: gather the black waters from the River Styx in a crystal cup the goddess had given her. But again she is saved. For her fourth and final task, Psyche is given a golden box and ordered to travel to the Underworld to retrieve a bit of beauty possessed by Persephone, goddess of spring, and queen of the Underworld. Psyche again decides to take her own life, but at the last moment she is once again saved. Finally the marriage between Psyche and Eros takes place and the rest, as they say, is history.

Tolkien argued that ancient myths were the best way of conveying truths which would otherwise be inexpressible. The same could be said of fairy stories, which is why stories like the Narnia chronicles or the Curdie books by MacDonald are so effective. Musicians claim similarly that music can express unspeakable emotions.

I read on a forum on Reddit: I think what it [the book Till we have Faces] means is that what we say we believe is just a thin, distorted, and in some cases even completely wrong picture of what we really believe in our hearts. Instead, what we actually believe drives us and changes us, so that life itself draws it from our hearts to the surface, and it's only after our lives - after we have stopped both talking and doing - that we can stand before God and truthfully proclaim who we are. 

What people see when they look at us is often at odds with what we actually are or believe, as epitomised in Lewis Carroll’s parody:

"You are old, Father William," the young man said,

    "And your hair has become very white;

And yet you incessantly stand on your head—

    Do you think, at your age, it is right?"

"In my youth," Father William replied to his son,

    "I feared it might injure the brain;

But now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,

    Why, I do it again and again."

In Till we have Faces Orual says: Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when the Fox was teaching me to write in Greek he would say, "Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words." A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the centre of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces? 

What do you see when you look at your comrade? Will you invest the energy and time required to tease reality out of him or her? And if you did, would you be horrified or would you fall in love? For the basis for true phileo love (friendship) can often be a "What? You too?"

Trauma (e.g. in war-time or disease), or even plain camaraderie over a long enough period, can become the catalyst to break open our hearts. Perhaps that is why God allows suffering to be so much a part of our human experience - because it shapes our innermost being.

When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the centre of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces? 

Gunpowder, band-wagon and lot: Part 3

It has been said, and is also patently obvious, that children will usually follow their parents' religious inclinations. The church our hero's parents attended was Bible based fundamentalist so he grew up knowing all the stories and believing them to be true. Thus he assumed all manner of notions on top of which were balanced precariously those of the movement he had stumbled upon, not realising how few of these were his own convictions. O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you?

But every so often he was brought up short when hearing some proposition or seeing an action that jarred or was evident nonsense. The reader will want examples but must understand that such can often be explained away so, at best, only loosely point to the core problem. 

Years previously he had remembered one of the leaders of the home church group he was then part of stating that the group was finally moving from "40 years going around the mountain" to entering the Promised Land. All hunky dory except nothing had changed - there was no such progression.  Or, in his present context, it seemed that folk too easily maintained that, as they were praying, "the Lord said..." whereas his experience differed - he only longed to hear God's voice. He found that apparent answers to prayer were often promoted whilst at the same time the more numerous failures were silently discarded. An example of confirmation bias. There was the much repeated "He who began a good work in you will be faithful to complete it" but should anyone dare to question its realisation this side of eternity "Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation". And of the songs that he found himself gaily singing in church, although many were praise-worthy and the nonsense in some might be dismissed as "poetic license", a few were decidedly questionable.

There was his treatment of his parents. True, back then having given all his money to the Christian community in the North that he was then part of, and with no income, he was rarely in a position of being able to travel at all but, all the same, he could have written more often, could have cared more dearly, but rather I suppose he figured that he that loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. It may well be true that your children will surpass you in that they'll learn much more than you'll ever know, but I implore you to forever honour your father and your mother.

And so began the impossible, Psyche-like task of sorting wheat from the tares. What indeed was the truth about Christianity? Recently there have been many public debates involving creationists, atheists, theists, evolutionists, big-bang physicists where each proponent has stuck firmly to their guns but often in a distasteful and bigoted way. How can love (a central theme in Christianity) be so distasteful?

The north wind doth blow,

And we shall have snow,

And what will the robin do then, Poor thing?

A few days ago Ali and I watched the film "Miracles from Heaven" which recounts the true story of a young daughter who had a near-death experience and was later cured of an incurable disease.  Undeniably things like this, though rare, do happen. Closer to home I could list my getting married at all, at all, the story of how a Thai baby became my adopted granddaughter, and the acquisition of the house we now live in as near miracles or, if to be explained by chance, one in a million. Two mature, educated adults can look at the same natural world around them and one will, with good reason, attribute it all to Darwinian evolution in which no god has a part, the other will be observing that the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse. One will claim divine creatio ex nihilo, the other that it all started with a singularity (what's that?) and brush off the question of "whatever preceded?" by claiming that such a question has no meaning. The truth is nobody knows for certain, but then there is an awful lot in that category. It seems that we humans are doomed to a finite and oh-so-restricted-an understanding of the world around us, just as a dog might adore his master but cannot attain to human thought or emotions.

But I do at least know for a certainty the turmoil that goes on in my inner being.  The turmoil that identifies with that man, remembered throughout all ages since, who retorted Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief.

To set the record straight I will add that the members of the community I am presently part of are loving, sincere, trustworthy good people and our lifestyle is in many respects exemplary. I have no bones to pick on that score apart from my own.

(To be continued in Part 4)    (Go back to Part 2)