(This really IS a response to the Where is your Galilee” question as part of the Acts8 BLOGFORCE. As Bp. Curry says, “Stick with me now….”)
One of the unfortunate decisions in the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings (LOTR) films was to omit the chapter “The Scouring of the Shire” from the book The Return of the King. In that chapter, near the end of the trilogy, the returning Hobbits find the shire subjugated and industrialized by Saruman and his followers. From a mythological (Actually Mythopoeic[1]) perspective, this is the key to the book. The Hobbits represent the average readers, who are taken on a mystical journey, face travails, prevail over evil, then return to their world to bring it healing. The Hobbits not only drive the invaders out of the Shire and return it to it’s agrarian base, but make it better than it was through their wisdom, abilities and the gifts of the elves which they acquired during their quest. In LOTR, the industrialization of the shire under Saruman was not just about factories and waste, but is a metaphor for the loss of meaning in society - a loss of the value of story in the face of bare empirical reductionism.
If you can’t tell from that previous paragraph, I’m a geek. I often tell people that I was a geek long before I was a Christian. I saw Star Wars before I ever saw The Ten Commandments. I read Dune before I read the Bible. I’ve been a Dungeon Master longer than I’ve been baptized. I grew up in South Central Kentucky, where most of my contact with Christians had to do with people telling me I was going to hell because I didn’t go to their specific church. While I thought Jesus was an interesting figure, I couldn’t get past what I saw as the bigotry and anti-intellectualism of his followers. Christianity, as I saw it, was a narrow, moralistic path that seemed to have very little joy. It was a reductionistic way of thinking completely bereft of the power that I found in the books of Tolkien, Herbert and Asimov. I felt more community in 12 hour gaming sessions of “Star Frontiers” than I did in any of the student led prayer meetings that occurred around school events.
I was ignorant enough of the Christian story that when I read the C.S. Lewis Narnia series, I didn’t pick up on the rather heavy-handed allegory. I remember loving the character of Aslan and thinking, “If the God of the Christians was like that, I might be interested in Christianity.” There seemed to be no correlation between what was going on in Narnia and what I was hearing from the Christianity around me.
I became a Christian gradually and somewhat grudgingly - my stepfather was hired as the organist of the Episcopal Church and so I became an Episcopalian by default. The initial attack into my skepticism was liturgy and community. I had been led to believe that Christianity was about the acceptance of certain empirical propositions about God and Jesus. But as I spent time in my new church, I found that little time was wasted on that. Instead, it was all centered around building community inside and outside the church, as well as worship which featured re-telling the story of Jesus and re-enacting it in a communal way. This was from an unexpected direction, and I found myself bringing my guard down bit by bit.
The major turn towards faith took place when I started to look at the Bible critically. As long as the characters of the Bible were sterile, saintly characters, I had no real use for them. But when I began to read the Bible as literature, it came alive for me. As a person who had immersed myself in story in both reading and creating my own through tabletop role playing games, I could relate to real, mixed-motive characters. Abraham and Ehud, Jael and Rachel became characters as interesting as Gurney Halleck and Hari Seldon. It worked the other way too. After I had studied the Genesis account in a mythological manner, I found I could read Tolkien’s Silmarillion all the way through - something I had attempted several times before without success. The Bible became a way to expand my imagination, rather than shut it down. It was now possible to think about Christian religion in a new way - as a story with incredible power. But I still needed a further step.
It was Lewis story of coming to faith that brought me in totally:
On that fateful night in 1931, Lewis was in the midst of a fretful return to religious faith. Raised as an Irish Protestant, he had become an agnostic as a teenager. Though he came back to accepting the idea of a divine presence in 1929, he continued to resist Christianity. It remained for Dyson, a High Anglican, and Tolkien, a devout Roman Catholic, to push him over the threshold — though it literally took them all night. As they marched back and forth along Addison’s Walk, Tolkien argued for the literal and mythological truth of the Resurrection of Christ.
By all accounts, the key moment came when Lewis declared that myths are lies, albeit “lies breathed through silver.” Tolkien replied, “No, they are not,” and demanded to know why Lewis could accept Icelandic sagas as vehicles of truth while demanding that the Gospels meet some higher standard. Hours past midnight, Tolkien finally went home to bed, leaving Dyson to carry on the campaign. Tolkien’s argument — that the Resurrection was the truest of all stories, with God as its poet — may not sound particularly convincing to nonbelievers (nor indeed to some Christians), but to a man committed to the idea of myth as the only way to express higher truths, it was irresistible. Two weeks later, Lewis told a friend he had once again fully embraced Christianity: “My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a good deal to do with it.” [2]
(This is a fictionalized video of Toklien and Lewis' conversation. It's from EWTN, so it portrays Tolkien as the self-confident Roman Catholic and Lewis as a kind of slow student, but the dialogue is helpful.
While it’s often novel for people who know the Bible to read it as literature for the first time, for me as a religious outsider familiar with imaginative literature, it was the necessary step to be able to accept it as truth. For some Christians, it seems necessary to hold the Gospel as an exclusive truth that is unique from all others. For me, it was necessary that the “Christian Myth” was NOT unique in many of the archetypes and stories it uses. It was the fact that it had all the humanity of the other stories, but was transcended by divinity. Christ is the myth-made-man that gathers in the truth of all of humanity’s myths and brings them into focus. Christ is THE story, embodied. I am not saying that Jesus did not exist, or that his Resurrection is purely a metaphor. I believe in the bodily Resurrection. I mean that God uses story as a primary means of imparting meaning, and that Jesus as one person of the Trinity is the ultimate meaning.
(I’m getting to the point. I’ll sit down in a couple of minutes.)
In our culture, we are bereft of story. The enlightenment, while providing us with many benefits that I would never speak ill of, has left us with a lesser view of the power of fiction. We now say that something is “Only a story,” inferring that since it does not bear up a strict factual truthfulness, that it must have less value. Despite that, as human beings we derive all our meaning from story. Therefore, we invent new stories to fill that meaning gap. These days, they are usually stories of political certitude backed up by niche media. In my opinion, part of the reason (beyond economics) why groups such as Al Queda and ISIS are able to recruit effectively is that people are growing up in a world bereft of narrative. Eventually, the narratives of politics wear out. They don’t have depth and they leave one wanting more. People will reach for any meaning if they have none.
Christianity has that depth of story. We have THE story of the people of God culminating in the person of Jesus. In itself it is compelling if we don’t sanitize it. It speaks deeply to people if we don’t require subscription to moral codes and creeds before they hear it. It can be life changing for people who immerse themselves in other kinds of story if they are allowed to hear it that way - with it’s native power.
This is my Galilee: The Geeks. My people. People who hunger for and immerse themselves in story, but have not been able to hear Christ’s story in the same way, quite often due to the actions of his followers. As Episcopalians, we have the temperament and tools to be able to be the Jesus Movement to my people. We can present the narrative as narrative, while still holding onto its divinity.
Those of us who have experienced the life-transforming story of Jesus have, like the hobbits, gone into the world of legend and saga and returned changed. We can transform the Shire, returning the tradition of the past while bringing the best of the present. We can encourage tolerance and respect for all despite holding onto our particular truth claims. The challenge lies before us. “Go!”
To close, a paragraph from JRR Tolkien’s essay On Fairy Stories:
I would venture to say that approaching the Christian Story from this direction, it has long been my feeling (a joyous feeling) that God redeemed the corrupt making-creatures, men, in a way fitting to this aspect, as to others, of their strange nature. The Gospels contain a fairy story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels—peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving: “mythical” in their perfect, self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe.[3] But this story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfillment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. It has pre-eminently the “inner consistency of reality.” There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many skeptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. For the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of Primary Art, that is, of Creation. [4]
Mythopoeia (also mythopoesis, after Hellenistic Greek μυθοποιία, μυθοποίησις “myth-making”) is a narrative genre in modern literature and film where a fictional mythology is created by the writer of prose or other fiction. This meaning of the word mythopoeia follows its use by J. R. R. Tolkien in the 1930s. The authors in this genre integrate traditional mythological themes and archetypes into fiction. (From Wikipedia) ↩
The Real Fellowship of the Ring - Salon.com. www.salon.com. Web. 16 Nov. 2015. http://www.salon.com/2003/12/03/tolkien_lewis/ ↩
Eucatastrophe is a term coined by J. R. R. Tolkien which refers to the sudden turn of events at the end of a story which ensures that the protagonist does not meet some terrible, impending, and very plausible doom. The opposite of catastrophe. (From Wikipedia) ↩
“On Fairy Stories by Tolkien.” Excellence in Literature by Janice Campbell. Accessed November 20, 2015. http://excellence-in-literature.com/childrens-literature/on-fairy-stories-by-tolkien. ↩
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