Words Like Locusts Flew From Her Fingers

Thou Art That

I wrote this several months ago and never posted it because I thought I might add to it. I guess that’s not going to happen and, now that I read it with fresh eyes, it’s probably fine just as it is. If I’m recalling correctly, the quote that follows comes from Joseph Campbell’s Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor.

If you choose to have a God who is not comparable to any other God, then you must affirm and, as it were, stick with that God. When the God opens to transcendence, so does the believer. When the God closes, so does the believer. But then you may be face to face with something you cannot handle. The best thing one can do with the Bible is to read it spiritually rather than historically. Read the Bible in your own way, and take the message because it says something special to each reader, based on his or her own experience. The gift of God comes in your own terms. God, pure and in Himself, is too much. Carl Jung said, “Religion is a system to defend us against the experience of God.” It may be a species of impudence to think that the way you understand God is the way God is.

The one basic reality recognized by all people everywhere and at all times is that there is life and there is death and that life comes from death. Ancient people sacrificed animals (and, at times, humans) to bring renewed life to themselves, to their crops, to their livestock, and to all their various efforts. In Christianity, we have the idea of a different sort of sacrife — the sacrifice once and for all of the most perfect specimen, a God and also a man. The Eucharist is a ritualized participation in this sacrifice. This is the body. This is the blood. And by consuming these, you will come to new life. You don’t need to believe in magic to experience the Eucharist as a very powerful ritual. You only need to be in tune with that fundamental fact of living on the earth: there’s life and there’s death and life comes from death.

It’s shocking to a lot of people when I call myself a Christian and yet also say that it doesn’t matter whether Jesus was a real person and it doesn’t matter whether he actually rose from the dead. The story of Jesus is a metaphor for the universal experience of life arising from death.