[Oe List ...] The New Global Myth and The Event and the Story

[Len Hockley]

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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