God Meets You Where You're At
Can mythology till the soil of our hearts and minds for larger truths?
Since publishing How The Force Can Fix The World back in 2021, I have been trying to understand the criticism it received from a few readers about its secular approach to identifying truth in storytelling. The book plumbed the depths of Star Wars for 7 virtues that are taught in the saga by the words and deeds of its characters, and makes the case that those lessons, if lived out by fans of the story, would make the world a better place. A Christian, or really someone of any religious background, might cringe a bit at the assertion Star Wars can “fix” the world. Some days, I…the author of this book, feel uncomfortable with my own framing.
Humility, Courage, Choice, Redemption, Hope, Balance, Empathy. These were the virtues of Star Wars I expounded upon.
Sure, you can learn the value of humility in the book of Matthew (18:2-4) when Christ teaches about the necessity for his followers to “be like children”. The Bible is the ultimate source material for humility as a virtue. Christ’s life and death is The Lesson — but what if you are not receptive to religious instruction at a certain age or were ever ministered to at any time in your life?
My take was that when you’re 12 years old you might receive a more lasting impression from the actions of Queen Amidala in The Phantom Menace, or Luke Skywalker in A New Hope….then something you’re told in Sunday School. I believe this is objectively true to most people’s experience with popular stories versus religious weekend programming.
I was not receptive to the church for at least 25 years. I did try and there were momentary breakthroughs, only to experience backsliding and the overwhelming desire to rebel against what I experienced.
So while I refused to engage Christian notions of truth, I stuck to what I loved most: Star Wars
In many ways, I treated Star Wars like a religion for decades. And How The Force Can Fix The World borders on such treatment by looking at Star Wars as Truth.
Edgy!
But what I’ve noticed in my own life is that since publishing that book, which someone once called “borderline pagan”, I have felt closer to God and my faith than any time in my life. More makes sense to me after writing it.
“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains; it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world"” - C.S. Lewis
I believe that God was preparing the way for His Truth to make sense in my life, and that He is willing at many times throughout history to do so by speaking the language you speak.
This idea is central to the legacies of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis while they worked together at Oxford. Lewis had lost his faith as a younger man, but maintained a passion for mythology and the occult. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson famously appealed to Lewis’ reason and asked him why he was so enamoured with pagan myth and convinced they were founts of deep meaning, while simultaneously rejecting any profoundness of the Christian Gospels.
Lewis said of these conversations:
Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things’……..
The suggestion is that God always was and still is “tilling the soil” in our hearts and minds for His Truth.
When I meditate on this and reflect on my time promoting How The Force Can Fix The World, I feel less confused as to why this book was inside me for so many years clawing to get out.
New from Geeky Stoics on YouTube
That’s the thing about books. The best ones are already written deep within, and your role is simply to deliver it forth. It doesn’t have to be rigorously ideated like you’re the creator of a new world.
If God prepared the world for Jesus Christ by fulfilling the ideas so often found in pagan myth, and he prepared Judea for Christ with the ministry of John the Baptist as a forerunner to Jesus, it would stand to reason that he also prepares the people of today for the time when Christ will be presented to them.
2000 years after Christ’s life and death, it may seem silly to say that The Lord of the Rings, Narnia, Star Wars or Harry Potter exists to point the person enjoying them toward Christ….after all, unlike pagans of Christ’s time, we benefit from centuries of exposure to Christian teachings by Christian institutions.
But being told something since childhood doesn’t make it true to the individual. Truth has be proven or realized.
The soil is being tilled. It can be turned and fertilized with a lifetime of exposure to fantasy and stories about supernatural forces, and it can also be done with a lifetime of suffering and pain. Both are true of the Gospels and made right in them.
Of course, depending on what you consume regularly from within the popular culture, your soil may be more or less healthy. Not all stories are created equal and not all stories present truth. Discernment and “beholding” of worldly things is important.
What are you beholding? (Behold: to gaze upon with admiration or wonder)
I asked folks on Substack to weigh in on the topic of how Christianity renders Pagan mythology ‘True’, because I do honestly struggle to understand it. Even as I write to you today. These responses were hugely helpful to me. Here’s what you all said.
I think this is something that becomes clearer if you study the Church Fathers. St. Seraphim of Sarov pointed out that pagans were still interested in an honest pursuit of the truth, and weren't completely cut off from God. When St. Paul went to the Areopagus and saw all the pagan shrines and temples, he didn't rail against them, but rather praised the fact that they had one for the Unknown God, which he claimed as his own. St. Basil has an address on reading pagan literature, saying that even if they do depict false gods, they still have important things to say about virtue and wisdom. Even the term ‘Logos,’ which became incarnate in Jesus Christ, was largely drawn from Greek philosophy. Basically, the idea is just baked into the early Fathers that, while the pre-incarnate God’s main focus was on Israel and Judah, his light still shines in everyone, and so he was preparing the Gentiles for his arrival as well. -
I would say that every time you find a parallel between a pre-Christian myth and Christianity then Tolkien and Lewis would take that as evidence that the author of the myth was ‘seeing through a glass darkly’ the same truth that Christ later confirmed. -
Try thinking of these myths not as precursors of the truths - the truth of Christ is eternal, not time-bound - but as ripples. Drop a stone in the pond; the ripples go in all directions. The death of Christ was both the murder of a particular man at a particular in time and the eternal spindle around which all existence turns. -
Easiest to explain by way of example. In Norse mythology, there is a story about Odin, the Almighty, gaining the knowledge of runes and magic. Part of the process was that he hung himself from Yggdrasil, the World Tree, and impaled himself with his own spear as a sacrifice to himself. Now, imagine when someone like Saint Anskar comes to your village and preaches Christ crucified. This concept was mind-boggling to men who worshiped gods who were conquering warriors. But, a story like that weird one about Odin suddenly makes a little more connection. Suddenly, there’s a way for them to map Christ into an understanding they already had about the divine, but it corrects and fulfills that vision. Lewis and Tolkien both loved Norse mythology, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that story was one that they had in mind as they talked about this subject. -
As Lisa Ceon has shown, we are wired for story. There are patterns to story that are not inventions but are responses, discoveries we might also say, of patterns already existing in the brain. Given this, we need not suppose that God dropped hints individually into other cultures to point to Christ. We could suppose that God wired the pattern of story into our brains from the beginning so that we should recognize Christ as the perfect embodiment of that pattern when he came. But those earlier cultures, having that pattern already wired into their brains, created imperfect stories according to that same pattern, which now seem in retrospect to anticipate the Christ story, but are in fact just imperfect human attempts to capture the story pattern already in our heads. -