[Dialogue] [Oe List ...] The New Global Myth and The Event and the Story
Len Hockley
lenh at efn.org
Thu May 5 23:35:25 CDT 2011
Thanks Randy,
The importance of this for me is held in a quote I ran across just the
other day:
"If you want to change your life, change your story."
Len
On 4/30/2011 8:10 AM, R Williams wrote:
> 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 /U/niverse /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
>
>
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