[Dialogue] The New Global Myth and The Event and the Story

[R Williams]

Colleagues,
 
I've been stewing over the statement by Jack Gilles, that Michael May provided, called "The Ten Pillars of the New Global Myth."  I thank them both for the stimulation.  It led me to remember and search out (thanks to Wayne Nelson) a paper we used years ago in one of our seminars, a chapter from the book On the Meaning of Christ by John Knox entitled "The Event and the Story."
 
I've been brooding for some time about the fact that our actions in the world are in fact an acting-out of our stories about reality and have therefore concluded that history is shaped by stories, and that there may be no more important work than to frame a story adequate fo hold and make sense of our experience in the 21st century.  When I started looking for the Knox paper I kept thinking the title was "The Story and the Event" because what I remembered from the paper, as it related to the "Christ story, was that something happened at a particular time in history to a community of people, and the community that experienced the happening at some point got around to writing a story about what had happened.  In relating their experience they included historical events as they recalled them (after some 90 years of oral transmission without having committed anything to papyrus) but even more than the historical accounting, they included their
 understanding of the meaning beneath and within what had happened.  When they wrote they used allegories and parables and other literary formsto freight not only what had happened, but also their understanding of its significance.  What I remembered Knox saying was that the writers were so effective that, when years later the stories were read, it was as if the event happened all over again for those who were reading them.  Hence, I remembered the sequence as "story and event" rather than the other way around.
 
When I asked around on the listserv for a copy of the Knox paper, John Epps wrote that he did not have a copy at hand, but suggested that I look at some of Joe Mathews' talks in Bending History in which he talked about event and story.  The first talk I ran across when I went  to the book was Joe's RS-1 Christ lecture, which is framed precisely around Knox's categories of  (1) the historical event--that which was objectively witnessed by those who were there to hear what Jesus said and see what he did, (2) the ontological or faith statement--the community's grasp of the life meaning revealed by the event and (3) the mythological--the story the community, the church, told to preserve and convey both the historical and ontological dimensions.
 
I was surprised that I was surprised to find that the Knox paper had the framework as the Christ lecture, given the number of times I had not only heard it but delivered it in RS-1.  It is also worth noting that this exact construct is the same as that around which the "art form" or O-R-I-D process is built.
 
It is interesting that when Knox combines these three elements of the historical, ontological and mythological, he refers to them compositely, within the Christian context, as the "Christian experience."  He concludes with this statement which I find particularly profound:
 
As members of  the historical community we have witnessed the event, Jesus Christ the Lord, and in faith we have received its meaning as the saving act of God, but when we try to express, or even grasp that meaning, neither philosophical nor historical terms will serve our purpose, and our thinking and speech...become inevitably mythological.  But the myth or story, in its own appropriate way, is as true as the history with which it is so intimately connected and as the faith which it was created to express.
 
Knox is adamant that all three of these elements be included.  He points out, for example, that the ontological and mythological absent the historical is Gnosticism; the historical and ontological without the mythological is fundamentalism; and the historical and mythological without the ontological is modernism or what I would perhaps call secularism.
 
Knox further warns that we dare not forget that the story is a story, lest we "become rigid and harsh in our orthodoxy" and allow the story itself to become divisive.  From this I conclude that we are not talking about creating a new "orthodoxy."  One of the practical implications may be that the story, in whatever time, is always emerging and that there is no time in which it is ever really "old" or "new", but that it is ever-evolving.  In a sense, the moment the story is told and heard it is already obsolete, especially in times such as ours when time seems more related to kairos than to chronos.
 
So now I am wondering what all this has to do with the creation of a story that is adequate to plumb the depths of our 21st century experience, and it is at this point that I  invite dialogue.  Does Knox provide a legitimate framework with his "historical, ontological, mythological" categories and, if not, what should be the frame?  Does Jack's title of "New Global Mythology" hold it?  I had thought of something like "Our Emerging Universal Story" or maybe the title of the book by Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme, simply Universe Story does it.  Again, I invite conversation and hope that many will want  to participate.  It is possible that, with our own history, ontology and story, we may have something meaningful to contribute to this emerging 21st century myth?
 
Randy
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://wedgeblade.net/pipermail/dialogue_wedgeblade.net/attachments/20110430/c08bf3ea/attachment.html>