Myths are not mere fictional stories but narrations that are intended to make us think wider and deeper. It is to elaborate on this theme that Joseph Campbell wrote his famous book Myths to live by.
Diane Pendola explains in her writing:
"The Expanding Heart" :
Stretched out like a horizon:
on this side what is seen.
over there, the unseen;
on this side, the known,
over there, the unknown
My mind pushes toward the horizon and in my advance the horizon
retreats, always inviting and always out of reach. Philosopher
Raimon Panikkar calls it a "horizon of intelligibility". On
this side of the horizon we make sense of our world but there is always more
that we cannot see, cannot know. We grow. We gain
knowledge. We learn the earth is not the center of the universe. Our
horizon expands to include planets beyond our planet, galaxies beyond our
galaxy. Our myth-making expands with our awareness. The
creation stories that helped make sense of the world for our ancestors appear
to us as fictions. And yet myth is not fiction.
One of the foremost authorities on mythology, Joseph Campbell,
says of our myth-making:
Mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth-penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words, beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told. So this is the penultimate truth. As we engage with our ever-expanding knowledge of the universe a new myth emerges, a new way to create meaning, to make sense of our ever unfolding experience.
Mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth-penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words, beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told. So this is the penultimate truth. As we engage with our ever-expanding knowledge of the universe a new myth emerges, a new way to create meaning, to make sense of our ever unfolding experience.
Joseph Campbell suggests that the emerging symbol for this new myth is
our planet as seen from space: a beautiful round gem of
multi-faceted life in an otherwise vast and largely mysterious universe. From
this new horizon of space the earth is seen as fragile, precious and unique,
without national, religious or ethnic boundaries. From this new
horizon the earth emerges as our one and only Home, needing our protection and
worthy of our loyalty and our love.
Through the lens of contemporary science emerges this new cosmology,
what Thomas Berry calls the Universe Story. As we bring our whole
being into engagement with this New Story, which means our hearts as well as
our minds, faith as well as fact, it can become our sacred story. Raimon
Panikkar describes faith as existential openness towards
transcendence. The experience of faith is primal for the human being and constitutive
of the very meaning of our humanness.
Some might argue that science is not myth but fact. But even this points
to its mythical content. Myth, Panikkar asserts, is the truth we presume, the
ground we do not question, the horizon against which our world becomes intelligible. When
myth becomes knowledge and understanding it is no longer myth but logos, no
longer the back-drop of our knowledge but the content. And don't we see
scientific facts themselves pushing ever toward a horizon that recedes before
them revealing new knowledge that makes the old knowledge look small or
obsolete? Our knowledge is never complete. It only
reveals itself against the yet-to-be-revealed. It is ever expanding
just as the universe that this new cosmology reveals to us is ever expanding.
Through this new cosmology I am discovering deeper reservoirs of meaning
that illumine my own Christ-centered spirituality which in turn is integral
with my personal, familial and cultural myth. One theme I find
illumined is the reality of suffering and evil. We all struggle with the
presence of evil in the world. At times the tension between the true
blessedness of my own personal life and the suffering through out so much of
the planet feels overwhelming. I feel into the center of myself and
I sense that I am not big enough to contain the suffering, to respond to it, to
effect it in any way. In my heart I carry this suffering and the suffering
itself demands that I expand, that I allow my heart to be effected, even to
break, in order for a bigger spaciousness to open up within me. In
this I am a microcosm of the universe itself which is expanding and which has
often found suffering, violence and death essential to its own transformative
processes. I find I always have a choice. I can close
down, harden my heart and cease pushing toward that horizon of the
not-yet-born, thus sealing the door to any further revelation (which appears to
me a very denial of my humanity). The other choice is to open, soften my heart,
allow suffering to enter and expand me as the universe itself is expanding. It
is through this vital choice I participate in birthing an ever-new creation.
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