[Oe List ...] Fwd: The New Global Myth and The Event and the Story - GWM

[Ken Fisher]

from Gene Marshall


Dear Everyone interested in the New Religious Mode discussion,

Thank you Michael May, Jack Gillis, Randy Williams and others for reviving this discussion on the topic of the New Religious Mode and Knox's  historical event, ontological vision, and communicating story.

Here are some of my thoughts about the topic.

1.The New Religious Mode is not religious in the sense that Old Religious Mode was religious.  Compared with the Old Religious Mode the New Religious Mode is secular. As many "old timers" will recall, in Order:Ecumenical lore we used to use the term "The Secular Religious."  What did this mean?   What does it mean to call the New Religious Mode secular?  Basically, it means that the New Religious Mode is a cultural emergent that arose to replace the death of the two-story metaphor.  First of all, the New Religious Mode includes the awareness that the two-story tales were metaphorical, not literal.  Literally speaking, there is no Spirit universe next door populated by God, Gods, Goddesses, pearly gates, and everlasting fires.  In the new Religious Mode, there is just down-to-Earth fiery despair, pearly joy in a pure enchantment with realism, essential feminine consciousness, essential masculine consciousness, and the Final Unfathomable Mystery up against which we are all inescapably up against in spite of all our attempts to escape. 

2. So how is the New Religious Mode religious?  We have a new understanding of what religion is.   Religion now has to do with Great Thinks, Great Icons, and Great Rituals, that call forth Great Feels and Great Resolves to live our lives in realistic attunement with the Final Mysterious Reality.  Such Great Thinks include stories, poems, personally grounded talks and witnesses that have the power to awaken in us the shinning through of our everyday lives of a Final Mysterious Alwaysness.  The New Religious Mode is a  revolutionary cultural event: from this time forward we can no longer "story" our stories as dramas of transcendent beings interacting with historical persons and groups.  We now know that even this out-of-date transcend story telling was secular in the sense that it was just an earlier day's cultural habit of talking about Final or Essential matters.  Today, we talk about Essential matters as ordinary life events illuminated with meaning stories that somehow have the capacity to direct our consciousness to the Essential.   The key barrier to this New Religious sensibility is a denial of the ontological, or of Essential Being.  Our culture does not typically realize that there is an Essential layer to our consciousness.  We tend to be lost in the illusion that human beings create their own reality.  Nothing is real, we tend to say, except what our minds project upon the screen of meaningless nature.  We do not typically listen for Reality to speak to us through the particularities of general nature and human nature.  We tell nature what nature is, and we control it to our needs.    We are not obedient to nature and to the Vast Void of Everythingness that shines through nature if we look fully.

3. Another way that the New Religious Mode is secular is that every religious heritage is not required to recast itself within this New Secular Religious Mode. We are not doing away with religious diversity,  We are not boiling down the huge variety of religious expressions into one religion or into one secular non-religion.  We are an ongoing dialogue among many religions each of which joins the dialogue by being present to the New Religious Mode in which every religious must now dwell or be irrelevant to this era of the human story.  Indeed, religious bodies that do not make this step and enter this planet-wide dialogue of fabulous learning are becoming demonic forces, destructive rigidities warring against the necessities of ongoing human life.

4. In this context we can further illuminate the "Event and the Story" paper by Knox that Randy summarized so well. The event was the "Barefoot Jesus," as Mathews put it.  Here was this poor barefooted Jewish boy who as a maturing man become a disciple of John the Baptist and was shaken to his roots by the absurd death of this visionary personage.  Jesus then began a mission of his own knowing that a true illumination of his religious heritage would lead to a conflict and a conclusion similar to that of John's.  And it did, but not without issue.  The radical consciousness that was in Jesus was raised up within a small community of his followers who realized that they were an embodiment of Jesus' Attuned-to-Reality life.  That is the ontological aspect of that event, then and potentially now in our own lives.   Without that discovery of Essential humanness, the historical life of Jesus is as insignificant as any other life and death.  But with that ontological discovery of Essential humanness, every historical human life can be swept up into the Jesus-significance.  So what is the story?  Well, those ancient people living in their ancient two-story telling culture made up their ways of sharing what had happened to them, and they told this story effectively to the others of their time.  In our time, we would not have thought of having a  supposed gardener turn out to be  the now dead Jesus.  We would not have thought of having some imaginary dream figure walking with fleeing disciples turn out to be Jesus.  We would have thought of picturing disciples who had returned to a fishing career hear some fish-barbecue cook on the beach turn out to be the dead Master calling them to feed the lost sheep of Israel and the world.  We would not have thought of picturing this dying and raised life as joined with the Creative Force of the entire cosmos. We wold not have thought of pictured this dying and raised life as ascended into the upper Realm of Essential Actuality and coming again in the final wrap up as THAT which judges the authenticity over every human being.  But they did.  And it worked for them.  Their story, their stories told what had happened to them and thereby spread that happening to thousands, millions, billions of other people.  I have just hinted how Christian heritage is being and will need to be translated into the New Secular but still Religious Mode.  Similar translations are happening within Buddhism and every other long-standing religious heritage.  The Christian journey now has the opportunity to learn from all these other journeys.  Human Essence is human Essence.  Any discoveries or tales of discovery are about this same Essence.  Christian practice will henceforth have an interreligious feel to it.  So will every other religious heritage that makes the transition into the New Religious Mode.

5.  And we are still spelling out what this New Religious Mode is.  We will have to relate it to the entire story of Big Bang cosmology and to the Evolution of Life and to the Ecological Crisis, and to the inner workings of the human psyche and body, and to the post-patriarchal liberation of women and men, and to its implications for a new social vehicle, and, and, and.   Furthermore, we have only begun the rescue of Christianity from the Old Religious Mode and the recasting of Christian practice in the New Religious Mode that we are still fleshing out.  It is an interesting time to be alive.

Gene Marshall






On Apr 30, 2011, at 10:17 AM, Ken Fisher wrote:

> 
> There has been a recent flutter about the Knox paper instigated by Randy.
> 
> k
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Begin forwarded message:
> 
> From: R Williams <rcwmbw at yahoo.com>
> Date: April 30, 2011 11:10:49 AM EDT
> To: Colleague Dialogue <dialogue at wedgeblade.net>, Order Ecumenical Community <oe at wedgeblade.net>
> Subject: [Oe List ...] The New Global Myth and The Event and the Story
> Reply-To: Order Ecumenical Community <oe at wedgeblade.net>
> 
> 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
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