According to the Flesh, According to the Spirit: Christianity as Poem and Myth

Growing up as I did in a certain subset of the Church, Psalms was a laborious book of the Bible just a bit more appealing than Leviticus, full of self-immolation and despair over one’s own wickedness and of delight over the thoroughgoing punishment of the wickedness of others. Liking the Psalms, thus presented, was taken as a kind of moral success; disliking them as a sign of spiritual toddlerdom, akin to disliking vegetables. 

In fact I rather generally disliked hearing the Bible read and having it preached at me. On my own I delighted in the accounts of Christ’s incarnation and birth, his miracles, and his resurrection (the bit about his death always made me cry, so I skipped it), and enjoyed similar oddities such as the account of creation, the story of the Nephilim, the image of the pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night, the tale of the walls of Jericho tumbling down at the flourishing of the trumpets, the absurdity of a donkey speaking about an angel. It was those readings of inexplicable, preposterously unmodern events that saved my soul. I found I could do without the moral superiority I found in Christianity, but I couldn’t do without its miracles. Eventually I discovered that the strong emphasis on privatized morality had grown out of a form of modernity and not out of Christianity itself.

A lot has been done over the past few hundred years to make Christianity more appealing to the modern person, even to warp it into a modern religion, whether by that we mean Jefferson’s Bible, or those dratted 19^th century Germans, or increasingly irreverent worship practices meant to “get people in the door.” We act as if Christianity must be up-to-date and convenient to appeal to those people, as if the Bible were a rubber band meant to be stretched around whatever the prevailing metanarrative is, and as if its miracles were incidental, negligible compared to what the Bible and Christianity really are—guides to become a good person and live a happy life. A self-help book.

Yet Christian religion remains essentially anti-modern, at least in its fixedness and inability to conform to our own prejudices. It defies easy answers and cheap comfort. It promises both a harder and a more rewarding life than you had expected, and ultimately a life not centered around yourself at all. Religion testifies of realities seen and unseen, of spirit that informs matter, of more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in modern philosophy. It is comprised of paradoxes and of poetry. It does not tell you to leave your intellect behind, but it does warn you that intellect alone will not get you far. Religion beckons you into the mystery of existence, where matter is the flesh of spirit rather than mere molecules bound by mathematics. Religion is mythic.

My life changed dramatically when I began to read premodern Christian writers. Before, I had read myth and fairytale ravenously but conceived of the mythic and the fae as fundamentally at odds with Christianity. By creed I was a Christian, but in my heart I thought I loved the miraculous too much to be a good one. Then I was introduced to St. Augustine and St. Denys, to Dante and Marie de France, Spenser and Malory. I realized that most of Christendom affirmed the cosmology my heart had been longing for, a cosmology not of a lowly material world devoid of meaning plus a spiritual God who cared only for spiritual things, but of a cosmos breathing with the breath of God and dancing around his throne for his delight. 

Then I discovered that that cosmos had been there in the Bible all along. 

National journals are quick to point out that young people are continuing to leave the church at basically the same rate as they have been for decades. That’s one set of data. Another set, discussed here in America Magazine, shows you that while 44% of young people in America are religiously unaffiliated (much higher than the 29% of the nation overall that is unaffiliated), the 45% of young people who are religiously affiliated attend church or mass significantly more often than their elders. Within that same generation, there has been a marked resurgence in interest in Anglicanism, Catholicism, and Orthodoxy. 

I’ll lay my cards down. I’m now an Anglican, and there are certain reasons that I’ve swum neither the Tiber nor the Aegean, though I love both traditions dearly. None of those reasons are the ones typically brought up by Protestants critiquing the movement they’ve seen in young people. The most charitable account I usually hear Protestants make is that conversions are occurring for reasons of liturgical structure rather than theology. 

But here’s the crucial point: this dichotomy in Protestantism between liturgy, or “structure,” and theology is precisely the reason so many of us have left. It devalues the material in a distinctly modern way, preferring the intellectualizing of sermons over the whole-person formation of an intentional liturgy. The young people I know are looking for enchantment, consecration, and sacrament. They are seeking a theology that encompasses the mysteries of heaven and earth together. They long for a God who delights in structure, beauty, and embodiment, and they are leaving the churches that try to do without these things. 

The more ancient sects of Christianity do a better job imagining the cosmos and the Church as poiema and Scripture as mythos. Poiema is of course the word Paul uses to describe Church in Ephesians when he says, “We are his workmanship;” it meant workmanship, handiwork, composition, a thing crafted or made, and from that very near root word poema, poem, grew. Paul uses the same word here in Romans: “For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.” Creation and the Church are both compositions from the mind and mouth of God, and they are not without meaning. Neither is their meaning incidental or secondary to the nature of existence. And though we participate with God in the construction of a church service or a mass, that does not make it less meaningful than a mountain or a star. There are no degrees of comparison here; meaning isn’t a finite thing to be divided carefully, portioned out to make sure there’s enough to go around. That which is made by God and his servants is abundant with meaning, wonder, and mystery. Existence is a fountain, not a cup; or, if a cup, one that overflows.  

Holy Scripture, partaking in this abundance, is best described as mythos. Myth is a troublesome word; it entered into English far too late and carries all sorts of horribly modern connotations. A mythos was a story or speech, human language about the gods. In the modern world we like to reduce myths to ancient conveyances of psychological reality or early explanations for natural phenomena. Mythos does often have something to do with Psyche or Gaia but is not reducible to these. It conveyed realities from realms usually unseen by man into the realm of the seen. Thus there is something awful and inhuman about mythos, that is, full of awe, and super-human, beyond and above human. Mythos speaks of the strange and miraculous: of religion, yes, but also of the soul, of life and death, of the movement of the cosmos, of the poetry of existence, of the divine, and of all the peculiar ways that flesh interacts with spirit.  

We read the question of the meaning in poetry and myth the wrong way. We ask what meaning humans impose on the world in order to create a poem or a story, and not without some cause. In crafting a poem or a story, we bring certain things into focus and leave others out; we work in an artistic form; we champion unity in a world that often feels disparate and chaotic. But it is wrong to suppose that that meaning is merely imposed. If heaven and earth are the poiema of God, meaning, unity, and form are there for us to find. Mythos is not fabrication but revelation. 

The Church and Scripture occupy both a vertical and a horizontal position in reality. In one sense, the Church is made up of physical buildings and embodied people. In the same sense, the Bible is made of paper pages (or vellum scrolls) and of words which can be spoken aloud. In another sense, the Church and Scripture bridge a nonphysical gap between heaven and earth, or rather, show the world that that sort of dualistic gap between heaven and earth was never meant to be. They reveal the eternal in the temporal, and perfectly picture for us how spirit informs flesh. They are poem and myth, the invisible things of God manifest in the things which have been made. Is that not a wonder? 

It happens that I love the Psalms now. They weave myth and poetry, animated by the intricacies of Hebrew religion and culture. Psalm 65 is one of my favorites:

Praise is due to you, O God, in Zion,    
and to you shall vows be performed.
O you who hear prayer,   
to you shall all flesh come.
When iniquities prevail against me,
you atone for our transgressions.
Blessed is the one you choose and bring near,
to dwell in your courts!
We shall be satisfied with the goodness of your house,
the holiness of your temple!

By awesome deeds you answer us with righteousness,
O God of our salvation,
the hope of all the ends of the earth
and of the farthest seas;
the one who by his strength established the mountains,
being girded with might;
who stills the roaring of the seas,
the roaring of their waves,
the tumult of the peoples,
so that those who dwell at the ends of the earth are in awe at your signs.
You make the going out of the morning and the evening to shout for joy.

You visit the earth and water it;
you greatly enrich it;
the river of God is full of water;
you provide their grain,
for so you have prepared it.
You water its furrows abundantly,
settling its ridges,
softening it with showers,
and blessing its growth.
You crown the year with your bounty;
your wagon tracks overflow with abundance.
The pastures of the wilderness overflow,
the hills gird themselves with joy,
the meadows clothe themselves with flocks,
the valleys deck themselves with grain,
they shout and sing together for joy.

The God of this Psalm, here called Elohim, does not ask that his people should forsake the cosmos in which he placed them. He does not ask them to do without that very creation which he did not do without. Rather, this Psalm invites us to revel in creation with its Ruler. His strength is revealed in the might of the mountains. He stills the roaring of the waves of the sea. He makes the morning and the evening shout for joy. Then, the Psalmist tells us, this God does not withdraw himself from the matters of this world, having revealed his glory; he is an agrarian God and tends to what he made. He waters the furrows of the field and prepares its grain. His wagon tracks overflow with abundance, and the pastures and hills, the meadows and valleys, bedecked with their wonders, sing for joy. 

Mythos, poetry, and the Bible all tell us this: there is a meaning to the existence of things, a meaning we might call the song of joy. Or, in other words, praise. 

The purpose of this discourse is to encourage you to listen for their song with me. I don’t want any of my readers to leave their present branch of the Church. There is goodness to be found in each one. Rather, I only ask that you champion the sacrament of existence, the miraculous strangeness of Scripture, and the wonder and beauty which lie at the heart of all things, drawing us continually to our God. Can we give up our games of moral superiority and scrupulosity to pursue that goodness that in turn pursues us and leaves us ravished? 

If our churches are still to bear witness of Christ to the world, we must begin again to teach others to see that we are still living in a myth and a mystery. Christ has died, Christ has risen, and Christ will come again. That is no fiction. That is language revealing the seen and the unseen  dancing eternally together before a divine smile.