"Myths to Live By," Part One

3 October 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

The theologian Howard Thurman once said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go and do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

It sounds easy, but often seems hard. Let us focus on what makes us come alive, that we may go and do it.

Let us seek to live within stories that know our true name. And those places where we feel safe, real and cherished: let us seek them as well, and learn to dwell near them.

Let us muster the courage to listen for those voices that demand only the best from us, and let us grow comfortable in their company. For they are angels of our better nature, and we need to put ourselves in the company of the better angels of our nature.

For our calling is a high one. We are made, as scientists and poets have told us, entirely of stardust; of the stuff of gods are we made. And that noble origin grants us much honor, and a task.

The task begins with asking what makes us come alive and going to do it. Because more than anything, the world needs people who have come alive. Let us seek that which makes us come alive, nothing less. Amen.

SERMON: “Myths to Live By”, Part One

Over the next few weeks, I want to talk with you about stories, so let’s start with one:

The Great Stone Face

Once there were people who lived in a valley at the foot of a large mountain. High at the top of the mountain there was a face, a great face carved in the stone. The people said it was the face of a god. And if you could see that face clearly, they said, it would show you who you were, and how you were meant to live your life.

That sounded easy enough, but it was not. For the face was in a part of the mountain impossible to climb, and so high up it was almost always obscured by clouds or fog. Furthermore, the face seemed to look differently in different light, and no two people ever saw it exactly the same.

But it was important, this face, because if only it could be seen clearly’well, then you would know who you really were, and who you were meant to be. And so the people studied what they could see of the face, as best they could, and they told others what they thought they saw.

Stories even arose, stories about times that the great face had actually spoken to someone, and what the great face had said. People wrote these things down, and tried to make a list of do’s and don’t for living, but no two lists ever completely agreed. Still the people told their stories, and listened to the stories of others, because after all there was so much at stake, if only they could get it right.

And as they believed they understood the message of the great face in the stone, they tried to live in the ways they felt they were meant to live. Usually, this meant they tried to be kind to one another, to be good neighbors, to work hard, to make their little valley a better place for their having been there, and so on, as you would expect. There were always a few, of course, who did not care much about making the valley a better place. They lived to chase after power or wealth or other things like that, and they too, if pressed on it, would argue that this was the way the great face of stone had intended things to be.

From time to time, as you would also expect, there were also people who said that all of this was just nonsense, that there was no face at all in the stones above, that these were just these silly myths. And it was certainly true that if there was a face up there in the rocks, it was very faint, so faint that you couldn’t even be sure you were seeing anything at all.

Yet others would then say that without the face, and the stories about the face, the people in the valley might not have been so eager to be decent to one another, and then what kind of a valley would they have? After all, they would say, you needed something to live for, and some kind of rules to live by.

But as any visitor or other objective person could see, if there was any face at all up there, it was too vague to be clear about, even on a sunny day. All you could be sure of was that the people had these stories, and they lived by them. Should there be an expedition to the top of the mountain to try and see once and for all what the great face of stone was trying to say? Or should they instead be paying more attention to their stories, and their lives? If they could never see the great face clearly, then all they had were their stories, and their efforts to live well together. And if someone swore that the great face had indeed spoken clearly but the way it wanted them to live made no sense, either to individuals or to the community, then who would have cared what the great stone face said, anyway?

Well, as you can tell, this is not settled, neither within that valley nor elsewhere. And yet there is something here of importance, and we cannot seem to stop thinking and talking about it.

The psychiatrist Rollo May wrote a book not long before he died, called The Cry for Myth, which I recommend to anyone interested in this subject. These are some of the things he wrote about myth in his book:

“A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. [And all worlds are senseless until we can find a way to make sense of them!] Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence. Myths are like the beams in a house: not exposed to outside view, they are the structure which holds the house together so people can live in it. Myth making is essential in gaining mental health, and the compassionate therapist will not discourage it. Indeed, the very birth and proliferation of psychotherapy in our contemporary age were called forth by the disintegration of our myths (p. 15).”

“Whereas empirical language refers to objective facts, myth refers to the quintessence of human experience, the meaning and significance of human life (p. 26).” He has also defined psychotherapy itself as the search for an adequate personal mythology.

What is a myth? Well, it is a script for our life, a kind of story buried deep within us and probably going back beyond our childhood even to the crib, a story that defines our peculiar style of living, and makes us who we are. This is the story, the script, that we live out in more ways than we can count. So a myth is a script.

The psychiatrist Alfred Adler spoke of these stories as our ‘guiding fictions,’ and that is another good phrase. A myth is a guiding fiction, an internalized story that assigns us a role within it, that tells us who we are and should be, and we tend to follow that script throughout our lives, both as individuals and as a society.

It does not do any good to ask whether myths or stories are ‘true’ or not. True and false are the wrong questions to ask of these scripts for living. They are good or bad, healthy or unhealthy, adequate or inadequate. They can serve as good or bad guides for our life. But once they are in place, once we are living out our lives in their terms, they are very hard to change, or even to be aware of: one of the images that Rollo May used was the image of myths as the beams in a house, not exposed to view, but holding the structure together from within.

Here’s what a myth can sound like in real life. Some years ago, at the Unitarian summer camp at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, I spoke with a woman who told me her problem was that she just couldn’t seem to do enough. She was working hard at everything, sacrificing herself to her husband, her children, and nearly anyone else who asked. But her life felt empty, she didn’t seem to be getting anything out of it, didn’t seem to be getting anything back from all this giving she was doing. I asked her if she thought she was supposed to be getting something out of it, and she said yes, it’s supposed to work that way: you give and you give, but eventually, you get back, too, and that’s what makes it all worth it.

That’s what I mean by a script, a guiding fiction. There is a story being lived out not only by that woman, but by millions of women and men ‘ though that one is mostly a women’s story. But there is no way to help this woman do well enough to get what she wants, because she is living out a story that is not likely to have a happy ending. It is like the story of Cinderella, who works and slaves for others, and whose only hope is that somehow a fairy Godmother will see her pure heart, reward her with a handsome prince, and usher in a kind of Judgement Day, when all who have wronged her will be punished. The only way to win is to get out of this story and find a different kind of role to play, because in real life there is a great scarcity of fairy godmothers.

Cinderella is only a fairy tale. But the best fairy tales have plots that have been told many times in many other ways. This Cinderella script, for example, is very much like a traditional script of Christianity, especially for women, that says you spend your whole life giving to men, to children, and to all others who ask, you spend your life as a Suffering Servant, and you’ll get your reward in heaven.

Now you have to say that this role is not always, or even necessarily, bad. It depends on the other characters in the story, and what roles they are playing. This is often a very rewarding role for women, because their husband, children, and friends appreciate and love them not in heaven but here and now for their hard work and their good heart.

Nor do you have to be a woman to find yourself in this story. College students living on no money in crummy apartments with three-inch cockroaches can identify with Cinderella too, where the role of the fairy godmother will be played by their eventual employer who makes all of this sacrifice worth it. And that usually happens. So it is not necessarily a bad story. But sometimes, a story like that Cinderella story, that ‘pay now, fly later’ script’sometimes it only makes people perpetual victims. And then the only way out of it is to get out of the story, and find a better script for your life.

Let’s do another story. You see a teen-aged boy who acts like a caricature of every macho role he has ever seen. He is a little blowhard practicing to become a big blowhard. He is arrogant with girls and with everyone else. His guiding fiction is a very old story. He is acting out the ancient warrior role, even the ancient barbarian role: the role of one who believes that through strength and bluster he can intimidate opponents, win the battle, get the girl and win respect.

It is not hard to see where a boy could learn a story like this. He could go to action movies or listen to Neo-conservative speeches about war and America’s manifest destiny to rule the world, and he would see this same old script being played out. It can govern a whole life, that myth, no matter how inadequate or silly it is.

And when a boy is frustrated because he can’t seem to win the battle or the girl or whatever, it will do him no good to take karate or courses in how to succeed through intimidation. Oh, he might become a successful businessman that way, but he will not become much of a human being, and that is what we are after here. To do that, he has to get out of that ridiculous story, and into a bigger one, into one that can steer him toward a more grown-up and responsible kind of life.

As in the case of the Cinderella story, this macho role you see in movies and television programs is an ancient part of our human repertoire. Just as you could understand the Cinderella role to be a variation on the ancient Greek goddess Persephone, the obedient daughter who was forever trying to please people, so you could see this macho script as another incarnation of the old Greek war-god Ares.

Do you see how different the discussion of life’s problems is when we do it in terms of the stories and scripts we’re living out instead of talking about tables of moral absolutes, theological mandates and forbidding lists of ‘Thou shalts’ and ‘Thou shalt nots’? We’ve taken it to a deeper and more important level, when we can identify the scripts we are living out, and begin to ask whether these are really adequate models for a mature and integrated human life. When we are living out stories rather than God’s Orders, then we can aspire to a creative role in the picture ‘ editor, perhaps. Or at least collaborator.

When you understand your life as a story rather than a set of rules, then there is the possibility of changing the story: changing the setting, the plot, and the ending. That is another way of understanding what a religious conversion is about, or someone going through a significant personal transformation in psychotherapy: it is someone changing their story, finding a different role to play, finding a new myth.

While there are a lot of images and stories that are important to me, you can learn most of what you need to know about me by understanding how I have been both attracted to and shaped by two children’s stories, a fable, and a minor Greek god. The children’s stories are ‘The Little Engine That Could’ and ‘The Little Red Hen.’ The fable is the old story of the blind men and the elephant, and the last is a little-known Greek god named Proteus. These stories, at least as I have understood them, have been characteristic of my views of what is most sacred in life, what is to be avoided, and how I have gone through difficult changes in my life.

You can learn more about me by understanding the stories that have been important, especially those four, than you can learn by knowing my education, my occupational history, or my family background.

And the same is true of you. Neither you nor anyone else will learn much about you from your resum’. If you really want to learn who you are, you will need to know what your guiding fictions are, your stories, your scripts, the myths you live by.

I want to give you an assignment. I want you to think of the stories, images, fables, proverbs, slogans and so on that are your favorites. Write them down if you need to, but make at least a good mental list of them. Or make a list of what you think are the five best rules to live by: they will be a good start.

Make a list of them, and then look at them and see how they are alike and how they are different, whether they seem related to one another. Then try to think of stories that they bring to mind, stories that seem to make the same points. The stories may be from movies or television shows you have seen, books you have read, fairy tales, Aesop’s fables, stories from the Bible, or just favorite personal anecdotes from within your own family. But you have such a collection of proverbs, fables, guiding fictions and myths, and they have played a central role in who you really are. They have a lot to do with what matters most to you, what you think life is about, who you see as the winners and losers in life. Learning to know your own stories is like learning to know your own soul.

It is said, at least in legend, that some of the Native American Plains Indians painted what amounted to psychological self-portraits on the decorative shields they carried, much like some of the shields our own kids made a few months ago. These shields showed, through symbolic animals like the eagle, bear, buffalo and mouse, what this person’s spirit was like, what they brought to life, and what they most likely still lacked, so that those who met them along life’s ways might better be able to help them on their journey toward wholeness. Sharing our stories is a little like carrying such a symbolic shield. It is a way of telling ourselves and others who we are, what we struggle with, and what is sacred to us. Try it with someone you trust, or just do the exercise by yourself. If you are willing to share your stories with me, I would love to hear them, and you can call me either at church or at home, I’m usually up until midnight.

Your stories, slogans and so forth may seem silly when you become aware of them, like stories of the Little Red Hen or the Little Engine That Could. I can assure you that they are not silly, and that there is probably a classic myth, thousands of years old, that tell the same stories. The Little Engine That Could, for example, is a child’s version of the ancient myth of Prometheus, and the Little Red Hen is telling the same story that Aesop told over 2500 years ago in his fable about the ant and the grasshopper. These things may sound silly, but they are not. The myths we live by are some of the most important things about us.

There is a wonderful old story about stories, it is the legend of Sheherezade. She was condemned to death by an immature, woman-hating tyrant. To save her life and the lives of others, she began telling the tyrant a story the night before he was going to have her killed, and she ended the story in mid-air, to be finished the next night. He let her live another night because he wanted to hear the ending. But she was no fool, and the story kept going on, for a thousand and one nights, according to the legend, until through her stories she had finally softened his heart, and opened his eyes and ears. She awakened the decent person that was inside of this tyrant. It was waiting like a Sleeping Beauty, for someone who could reach his soul and break the evil spell his life was being lived under.

But you see, we are all under the spell of Sheherezade. We all tell our stories in order to live. And we tell them, as well, in order to transform both ourselves and others into the people we think we were meant to be. We live in that valley where we look up to see a vague but important face carved in the rock high above. We know there is something terribly significant about that face. Somehow, it calls us toward a noble, even a sacred, destiny. We are not quite sure what that is, for the face seems to change as you move through life, or as you view it from different perspectives.

Actually, this is a myth. There is no face up there in the rocks at all. There may have been long ago, but the image is worn away beyond recognition now, and all we have are the stories. They are not much. Children’s stories, fables, old myths, tales and images from our sacred scriptures – these are about all that we have. And so we tell those stories, as Sheherezade did. That is why it is so important to know these guiding fictions that shape our lives, and to find better myths to live by: because we are all under the spell of Sheherezade. We all tell our stories in order to live.

Perhaps the people in the valley had it backwards. Perhaps it was their stories and the way they lived their lives that created the great face of stone. It is still unfinished, still worth pondering. Let us leave this place and ponder the meaning of our stories, and the meaning of our lives. Let us go seeking stories that have parts for us, for our families, community, nation and world ‘ parts that are worth playing.