While we often use the word “metaphor” when we talk about sacred text, a more accurate word is “mythos.” (We could also talk about “midrash”, but let’s leave that one for the preacher crowd for now.)

The problem is that we’re used to lumping mythos into the fiction category, as “mythology.” It brings to mind Odin and Thor, Apollo and Aphrodite.

Mythos, however, does more than entertain. It uses story to tell us things about ourselves, our world, and our Creator. Which is why it’s so difficult for us to simply give up the imagery that has informed our faith for so long. We feel the power of what the stories in the New Testament are telling us about our place in Creation, even as we reject the literalist interpretation of those stories.

Karen Armstrong and others use the term to highlight the difference between the kind of “Truth” that simply explains the mechanics of the universe, and the kind that helps to point our consciousness beyond the material.

In the same way, when we read the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, we have to understand that, while they can be read like “history”, their power to move us on our spiritual journey lies in their interpretation as mythos.

There are times when I read Scripture as though it were no more complicated than the telling of a story about a wedding I was at, or a party I attended, or the time a friend got the best of a self-styled “expert.” That’s because, as a human being, there are times when I need to be able to relate to Theos – to God – in a human way.

There are times when the articles I write on Seems Like God are written the same way.

But it doesn’t matter in the least whether Jesus ever existed exactly as depicted in the New Testament. It doesn’t matter if there was ever a wedding at Cana, or dinner with a tax collector, or an incident where a Pharisee was forced to admit that a Samaritan could be his “neighbor.”

What matters is that, through the mythos of those stories, our agapé relationship with Creation is enriched.

For some additional thoughts on the place of mythos in our spiritual journey, you may be interested in the accompanying podcast –

The message of Christianity is transformation. Not because we’re “broken” and need to be “fixed”, but because we’re just as we were created to be.

Transformation of the world is up to us.

We are the Hands of God in action.

What are we going to do about it?

No doubt that’s a comforting belief. Unfortunately, it’s also incredibly naïve. We don’t have to look very deeply before we start to run into problems.

We could talk about the Old Testament rules that we no longer follow, like wearing clothes of blended fabrics, or not cutting our beards. We could look at the New Testament statements apparently endorsing slavery and the beating of children that no one, outside of a few fringe groups that are rightly labeled cults, would consider defensible today. Or we could get into a discussion about how most literalists are using an Olde Englishe translation, the King James Version, which leaves them working through not one, but two, layers of interpretation.

For me, however, we needn’t look any farther than the sheer number of Christian denominations and splinter sects that all claim to have the one and only correct and inerrant understanding while every other correct and inerrant understanding is dead wrong.

In contrast, most mainline denominations consider the Bible to be the “inspired” Word of God. This view holds that the books of the Bible – those of the New Testament at least – were written by human beings who were acting at the urging of God. This influence, proponents believe, lends extra authority to the collection of manuscripts that we call the Bible; again, with special emphasis on the New Testament.

Inasmuch as it allows us to discuss the Bible’s human origins, it seems to me that it’s a more flexible approach than literalism.

However, here’s the thing that, for me, makes both approaches totally inadequate – they both start with the Bible.

Huhn?

No, I’m not dismissing the Bible. Far from it.

I just think that we’ve got the cart before the horse here. Instead of using the Bible to understand God, we need to start with God, and let our relationship with Theos/Divinity/the Creator help us to understand the Bible.

And yes, I’ve heard the claim that we can’t “know God” without the Bible. I honestly don’t get this.

Let’s use the New Testament image of Jesus as “bridegroom” to the church for a moment. Incompetent husband jokes aside, would any of us depend on a book to decide whether or not our relationship with our prospective spouse was “real”? We may use one to help enhance that relationship, to make it stronger, but it’s certainly not the starting point.

The starting point, whether with our significant other or God, is our personal relationship.

And I would argue that’s also the starting point for the majority of people who’ve left “religion” behind. Debates about which interpretation of the Bible make it the most authoritative are moot. Most of us simply “get God” first hand.

Even if we don’t express it that way.

Even if we don’t profess a “faith” at all.

Whether the post-modern church can interpret the Bible as especially “inspired”, or whether the literal church can explain away the clashing discontinuities of the texts is irrelevant.

The People of God are simply moving on, creating a society in which we not only wear cotton-polyester blends, we also recognize that God is still one with us, speaking to us and through us and urging us to transform Creation into the Kingdom of Heaven.

It’s a starting point that doesn’t rely on the study of ancient of texts or the right set of beliefs.

It relies on relationship – ever-changing, everlasting, ever-beginning relationship.

Seems to me like a pretty good place to start.

The Prayer is about as close as we Protestants come to Confession. It’s the part where we admit to being crap – although the words are usually more euphemistic, along the lines of “we’ve failed”, “we’re not worthy”, and so on. It’s usually printed in the bulletin and recited by the congregation in unison.

The Assurance is the part where the minister or whoever is leading worship reassures the pew-sitters that God still loves us, even though what we really deserve is to be tossed on the scrapheap along with other failed experiments like New Coke and the Segway.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Let’s look at it in another context.

How would we react if our son or daughter came home and told us that their math teacher had given them a written handout to recite. Something that went sorta like this –

“Dear Principal, we suck at math. We know we should be able to do long division but it’s boring. We know we should love trigonometry but we would rather spend our time on Twitter. When it comes to multiplication, we find ourselves tempted to engage in sexting instead. Forgive us, dear Principal, we are not worthy to be in school.”

Would it really matter to us that the teacher then stood up and said something like – “Well yeah, you’re really not very good, but the Principal still cares about you. Don’t ask me why, it’s just the way the Principal is. Bottom line? You suck. Get better.”

I think we’d descend en masse on the school expecting heads to roll. And rightly so.

When our kids struggle with a subject in school or a task in life we don’t, if we’re trying to help them to become well-adjusted adults, tell them they suck. We help them to recognize some other area that they excel in. No good at math? So what? Maybe they’re a whiz at fixing their sister’s broken toys, or maybe they love sports, or culinary arts, or volunteering.

We help them to find their strengths. And then we encourage them to find the approach to life that builds on those strengths.

Sure, we know they need to recognize and deal with their weaknesses. We all do. But we don’t, if we love them, tell them they’re crap.

Faith should work the same way. So should “Sunday service.”

Rather than rub our noses in our failings, which most of us are all too aware of anyway, what if we focused on what our faith has helped us to accomplish?

What if our Prayers of Reconciliation, rather than a confession of failure, were an acknowledgement of success? What if the Assurance was an encouragement, and a challenge, to succeed more often?

Prayer of Reconciliation (in unison, whether you’re in a church or in front of computer)

Dear God; in spite of the fact that we were scared, at least one of us spoke out this week in support of someone who was vulnerable. We worry about supporting our families, God, but at least some of us offered a few coins to people we passed who were sitting on the sidewalk, hat in hand. It feels like we’re failing more often than we’re succeeding, but we’re trying to live our relationship with you every day.

Assurance of Pardon

God is with us when we overcome our fears and our worry to do good. Just as God is with us when we’re unable to overcome them. God doesn’t expect us to get 100% on every test. Just to do our best. To celebrate our successes; accept our failures. And to keep trying.

God is with us through it all; encouraging, uplifting, strengthening. Let us be aware of God’s Presence with us so that we are less afraid, less worried, and more courageous, each day.

This week, may that be true for us all.

A few years ago, the United Methodist church in the US ran an ad campaign that showed people climbing up a mountain. Some took one route, some another; some went directly, others followed a more winding course; some came from the east, the west, the north or the south. In the end, they all arrived at the top of the same mountain.

Modern pluralism has embraced the old saying “We’re all trying to get to the same place” with great enthusiasm.

But I wonder…

Now, don’t worry, I haven’t been converted by the “my way or the hellway” crowd. No, what I wonder about is whether we haven’t missed the point (again) by talking about the destination at all.

I often hear people describe the traditional Christian image of heaven as boring. Who would want to sit around for eternity singing hosannas? How long could you stand it if nothing new ever happened?

For those who live in horrible conditions, whether in a war- or famine-ravaged part of the world; or in squalid or abusive places in the most advanced societies on the planet, I can understand how a few eons of peace and quiet might be appealing. Not to mention justly earned. But even for them, would an eternity of quietude be satisfying?

There’s another old saying that I like – It’s not the destination, it’s the journey.

What if the point isn’t to reach a “goal” but rather to engage in a journey? A journey without end.

Regardless of whether it’s called “heaven” or “Nirvana” or “at-one-ment” or “Cosmic Unity” or anything else; whether it’s traditional religion or New Age spirituality; it always seems as though we express faith in terms of a goal to strive for.

And there’s the problem. If we’re concentrating on our destination, then everything we do between here and there is simply a means to an end.

I took a trip last summer with my daughter. We drove across Canada to see my sons. One lives in Alberta, the other in British Columbia. I live in Ontario. Unfortunately, I miscalculated the distances (using an American Google map which talks in those quaint “miles” things, and then converting to kilometers, is not recommended). The result was that we left later than we should have and ended up in a mad dash across the country in order to get to our destination on time. The places I had planned to stop, the people I had planned to see, sped by the open window while I snapped pictures and my daughter wondered how many shots of snow-covered mountains one really needed to put on Facebook.

The destination was all that mattered.

The thing is, from a purely human, materialistic point of view, that makes perfectly good sense. We only had a limited amount of time. If I had to choose between looking at dinosaur bones or the north shore of Lake Superior, and playing with my grandchildren and hugging my sons and daughter-in-law, there was no contest. The destination won.

But faith isn’t like that.

As much as I liked the United Methodist mountain-as-many-paths metaphor, I’ve come to realize that it missed the mark as well.

It’s not the destination, it’s the journey.

In fact, we should turn the image around. We all start from the same point. We come into the world in the same way, with no preconceived ideas of what the world, or God, are like.

From that common starting point, we fan out in all directions. None of us experiences the world, or God, in exactly the same way. Good fortune or bad, loving family or aching loneliness, celebrity, notoriety, or anonymity; for each and every one of us, a path as distinct as our fingerprints.

From that perspective, the mountain is not a good metaphor. In fact, it could be downright depressing. It conjures up an image of moving “away from” the point of unity. It seems to say that, as we go through life we get farther and farther away from God.

Which, I hope I can hear you saying, is just wrong. We know that we’re not moving away from God. We know it because God doesn’t move away from us. God is part of us, now and always.

So instead of a mountain, or paths (many or one), let’s try a different metaphor.

We are like fish. We’re constantly surrounded by the “ocean” of God’s Spirit. We breathe it in, it gives us life. No matter where we go or what we do, God is there. We need no “destination” to be one with God because God was, is and always shall be, one with us.

But to experience God more fully we need to swim. We need to explore. We need to move in a myriad of different directions; in three dimensions. That’s the only way we can encounter more of God.

If we stay in the same pool in which we were spawned, it isn’t that we won’t “reach our destination.” We’ll still know God – in whatever way God is expressed in that place. Whether through small eddies that bring the taste of salt; or in the warmth of still waters heated by the sun.

But we’ll never know the crash of the surf, or the rushing of a waterfall, or the magnificence of a calving glacier. Those are also part of the “ocean” in which we live and move and have our being.

There aren’t many paths to God. Nor is there just one path to God. There is only learning about the limitless diversity in the ocean of Creation that is still only a partial expression of all that God is.

And even when we inevitably reach the time when we can journey no farther, we don’t need to be concerned about the destination. Because our “destination”, our God, has been with us the whole time.

Enjoy the journey.

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From a purely dictionary definition perspective, an ideology isn’t in any way “cast in stone.” It’s simply the “body of doctrine, myth, belief, etc., that guides an individual, social movement, institution, class, or large group.”-  (Dictionary.com) There is nothing to prevent that “body of doctrine” from changing as the people’s understanding of their world changes.

Nevertheless, in common usage, an ideology is often little different from an idol. And I think you would be hard put to find anyone who would consider being called an ideologue a compliment.

“Faith”, on the other hand, is generally thought of as fluid, adaptable; able to change with circumstance.

There are those who try to argue that adaptability leads to “relativism” and from there, they claim, it’s a short step to “anything goes.” For the most part, it seems to me, these arguments arise out of fear. Most human beings need certainty in order to feel secure. Some need more than others.

Of course, we all need an ideology in the true sense of the word. We all need guideposts by which we interpret the world around us and the relationships that we have with each other and all of Creation.

For those of us who are Christian, those guideposts are the teachings of Jesus; the radical, inclusive Message of the Christ.

But we also need something else.

We need the faith to let loose of the dogma that threatens to turn that Message into one of exclusion simply because we refuse to let it grow and adapt to the world in which we live.

The Gospel writers give us a tiny glimpse of  Jesus’ interaction with the keepers of doctrine of his own time – the priests and scribes and Pharisees (let’s, for the moment, set aside questions of historicity). We’re shown repeatedly how poisonous rigid adherence to doctrine is to our relationship with God.

Those who held rigidly to the “rules” he called “whitewashed tombs.” They were capable of expounding chapter and verse of their ideology but they knew nothing of the faith that had founded it. Their whole view of the world was wrapped up in their ability to define precisely who was and who was not “worthy.”

It’s for these ideologues that Jesus reserved his greatest contempt.

Jesus talked about the value and worth of all, and about the need to understand that what we “do to the least” we do to our relationship with Theos (the word we translate as “God” but which means so much more than the Zeus-image that adorns Michelangelo’s Sistene Chapel fresco).

Rather than interpret our relationship with God through Scripture, Jesus shows repeatedly that we have to interpret Scripture through our relationship with God. And that we must see that relationship as extending to all.

That  can be frightening. It can make us feel as though the comfortable “certainty” of believing in unchanging doctrine and dogma is slipping away and leaving us with no anchor.

But if we have faith – not faith in dry words endlessly debated, but faith in Theos, in the “God” that is immanent in all of Creation, including each of us – then our anchor is secure.

Through faith, we have no need to be afraid of change. We can prune away the dead branches that no longer empower our understanding of agapé but instead hem it in.

We can reach out to the “other”, secure in the knowledge that we’ll encounter God there as surely as we do within ourselves.

That, it seems to me, is about as much ideology as I’ll ever need.

Traditional western Christian images of God tend to lean toward Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel scene, with a very male, bearded God reaching out to a reclining Adam. Fans of the TV show the Simpsons would have no trouble identifying God as a sandal-wearing, toga-clad guy who’s about twenty feet tall.

Michelangelo’s God, painted on the Sistine Chapel ceiling between 1508 and 1512, has permeated the western perception of “God” for centuries. Of course, at the time the fresco was created, we were also pretty sure that the Earth was the center of the universe. Our understanding of “God” was little different than that of the ancient Greeks’ perception of Zeus living on Mount Olympus.

Both those who take the Bible literally, and therefore the “God made man in his image” line as a physical rather than spiritual concept; and those who want to dismiss faith altogether, arguing that human religions are dangerous fairy tales of humanity’s childhood, cling to this image – for diametrically opposed reasons. The former fears the loss of certainty  that comes from letting go of Zeus-god. The latter needs the image in order to turn it into a caricature to be mocked.

However, although it might have been the predominant image of our ancestors, Zeus-god was never the only one. Indeed, the word in the New Testament translated as “God”, Theos, is more accurately rendered as Divinity than it is as parent, or king, or judge.

Divinity has no gender, no human aspect. Divinity is Theos.

Metaphors for God like “breath” and “wind” appear throughout our sacred texts. In John, the writer has Jesus describe God as “Spirit”.

A broad and growing list of theologians that includes Karen Armstrong and John Spong speak eloquently of these images of God that held meaning for and inspired the founders of our faith.

Panentheism (not to be confused with “pantheism”), for example, is a view of Theos that understands God as is both intimately connected to every particle of Creation, and yet is instilled with consciousness in a way that is beyond Creation and human comprehension – both “immanent” and “transcendent”; both uniquely personal to each of us, and yet uniquely encompassing the universe.

There are those in the progressive sphere of Christian faith who suggest that we need to stop talking about “God” altogether. To simply say, once and for all, that “God” is so incomprehensible that to even try to describe God actually leads us away from a deeper understanding of faith.

I don’t think that’s possible for most of us. Human beings have an innate need to describe Creation. Theos, intimately part of Creation, has to be part of that description as well.

The challenge is accept that all of our descriptions will be inadequate. That when we talk about God, whether as Christian Trinity or as Cosmic Consciousness; as Father, Mother, or Friend; we’re talking about just one aspect of Theos – the aspect that we have encountered in a single place and time and circumstance.

There’s another image of God that can help us do that. Love. The image of God as “love” is as deeply embedded in our faith as the Zeus-image is. However, the word we translate as “the love of God”, agapé, means much more than a warm fuzzy feeling toward people we like. Agapé calls us to recognize our interconnectedness, our oneness with each other; the unity, as the interfaith movement puts it, in our diversity.

Rather than a single image painted on a ceiling far out of reach overhead, agapé’s version of God is a montage; a collection of pictures hung on our living room wall for all to see and touch; a reminder that we are all, no matter how close or distant we may be, one family, ever-changing, ever-growing.

All part of Theos; of Creation; of each other.

As you go about the world, may you see the face of Christ in those you meet.
And may those you meet, see the face of Christ in you.

Later, they describe their encounters to each other. The first says that the elephant is clearly like a snake. The second is no less convinced that the elephant is like a rope. The third man thinks the first two are out of their minds. The elephant is obviously like a tree. They become embroiled in a heated argument; shouting that only their experience could possibly describe the “real” elephant.

The parable, according to tradition, was originally told by a wise man who had been asked by a student to explain why his teachers all taught such different views of religion.

It isn’t that the blind men were wrong; not exactly. They each truthfully described what they’d experienced. The problem was that none of them could experience all of the elephant. And none of them were willing to listen to and learn from the others. How much more would they have known if they had been open to hearing each other?

As Paul wrote to the Corinthians, as human beings we see, and understand, only in part.

When I was younger and my father wanted to remind me that it was just possible that I didn’t know absolutely everything (imagine that), he used to say it this way: “I see, said the blind man, and he didn’t see a damn thing.”

On an intellectual level, we can agree that God is beyond our ability to comprehend. And yet, the words are no sooner said than we begin to try to do just that. We call God “Father”, or “Mother”, or “Spirit”, or “Energy”, or “Cosmic Consciousness.”

Which is fine.

At least, it is right up to the point where we begin to tell others that their description of God couldn’t possibly be “right” because it doesn’t match ours.

The idea that there’s more to the elephant – to God – than we can possibly grasp seems, well, hard to grasp. Or at least, for many people, hard to accept. Perhaps that’s because there’s already enough uncertainty in our lives. It’s comforting to have the security of a God who stays within the boundaries we set.

However, the parable of the blind men and the elephant underscores the absurdity of trying to describe the Indescribable. God, like the elephant, isn’t going to be limited by our limitations. Rather, we’re the ones who have to be able to accept a Creator who encompasses the incredible diversity of Creation.

There were just as many opinions about God two thousand years ago as there are now. There were just as many “experts” in doctrine and dogma. Every one of them, like the blind men, ready and willing to tell people exactly what rules were most important; what way of “believing” was “right”; what an elephant was really all about.

And the people were no less cynical of the explanations they offered than we are of those offered by our “experts” today.

As the Gospel writers tell it, Jesus suggested something simpler. He told us we should just “love God with all our heart and mind and strength.”

Love (the original word is “agapé”, which we’ll talk about another time) isn’t something we learn from a book. We learn it by experiencing it.

Nor is it exactly the same for any of us. So trying to put rules around it, as Jesus and the author of the parable of the blind men knew, is useless. Worse, it denies us the joy of learning more of God from the diversity of others’ experiences.

That doesn’t mean that we should abandon our traditions. Whichever expression of God holds the most meaning for us is exactly that – the most meaningful.

We just need to be able to accept that it’s not all there is.

That the agapé love of God, no matter how wide we reach, no matter how far we look, is more.