On the Really Real, A Christmas Eve Message

 

On the Really Real

A Christmas Eve Message

December 24, 2020

 

I have expended a lot of energy over the years trying to get people to understand religious faith in a way other than literally. I call that way symbolic and mythic. More popular writers like Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, though I assume they know better, tend to call it metaphorical. I don’t want to get hung up here on terminology. Instead I want I want to develop a thought I take from Crossan’s book How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian. In that book, in a chapter on Roman imperial theology, Crossan says that we post-Enlightenment people mistakenly take the distinction between the factual and the metaphorical to be the distinction between real and unreal. We take the factual to be real and the metaphorical (or to use my word for it, the mythic) to be unreal or false. Crossan is absolutely correct about that. The European Enlightenment reduced truth to facts. People of European cultures (wherever they were located) came to believe that facts are real and anything else is unreal, that facts are true and anything else is false. Popular theologians raced to keep up with the explosion of scientific knowledge of the physical world that accompanied the Enlightenment. They reduced the truths of faith to mere facts. That’s how most western people think of faith today. If it’s fact it can be true, if it isn’t fact it can’t.

The Enlightenment’s reduction of truth to fact gives us a woefully impoverished understanding of reality. There is a depth to reality to which facts can point but which they can never capture. It is the dimension of spirit, the dimension of the divine. Every human culture has experienced it. Even in our post-Enlightenment, fact-obsessed culture some of us are aware of it. Some of us have experienced it breaking into our lives in ways that mere facts never can. Call it what you will—the depth dimension of reality, spirit, Spirit, God—there is no doubt that it is as real and true as any mere fact can ever be. Indeed, many human cultures consider it to be more real that physical reality because it is the foundation and source of physical reality.

And it is so much richer, more dynamic, comforting and challenging than any combination of mere facts alone ever could be. It touches us in ways no mere fact can, or at least it can do that if we’ll just let it. Yet most people in our culture never experience it. They don’t experience it because they deny it. They’ve convinced themselves that facts and the physical world are all there is to reality. We humans cannot experience anything to which we are not open. Enlightenment rationalism and the secular humanism to which it leads close us off to it. Because they do, they impoverish our lives. They leave our moral standards suspended in thin air without foundation or grounding. We miss what can be the most powerful experiences of our lives simply we won’t let them in.

Our access to this depth dimension of reality doesn’t come through facts. Mere facts are incommensurate with the truth that is so much deeper than fact. Our access comes through what Crossan calls metaphor and I call myth. I mean by myth not something thought to be true that isn’t true. I use the word in its technical theological sense to mean a story that points us toward and connects us with this deeper dimension of reality. Myths can unlock the spiritual for us in ways mere facts never can. They are non-factual but profoundly true, or at least they can be profoundly true. The dichotomy fact = true and myth = untrue is a profoundly false one. Our lives could be so much richer than they are if we would just get over it, if we’d open our souls to a new level of reality (new for most of us though as old as creation itself), open ourselves to depth, to spirit. The spiritual level of reality is at least as real as the physical, and it is much more enduring.

So on this Christmas Eve, 2020, at the end of what has been such a difficult year for so many, with the end of the pandemic in sight but not yet here, I pray that you will be at peace and that you will open your minds, hearts, and souls to the truth that there is so much more to reality than mere facts, more than the physical world. It doesn’t matter what you call it. It’s real. It can change your life, making it so much richer and more fulfilling. May it be so.