THE FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH OF HONOLULU
A Unitarian Universalist Congregation
MYTH & MODERNITY
Sermon by Rev. Mike Young
Preached at the First Unitarian Church of Honolulu,
December 12, 1999Just before my daughter Caprice was born, my wife and I had spent some time on the Hopi reservation. One of the rituals done amongst the Hopi for babies caught our imagination. At 20 days after birth the soft spot in the top of a baby's head is beginning to close. At that time the parents scatter cornmeal on the baby's head. A trail of it goes out the door of the home and is scattered to the four directions to attract the kachina. The kachina, following the trail of cornmeal, come to the infant and give the child the wisdom of the gods. Once the head has closed the child is on his or her own.
At the time, we lived in an apartment complex where we were the only Caucasian family. Everybody else who lived in the apartment complex in East Palo Alto was African-American or black, as they said it in those days. Seeing this cornmeal scattered in front of the apartment, one of our neighbors was quite upset that somebody had messed up the front of our place. When Nancy explained to the lady what we had done, the lady's expression was precious.
They thought this was a weird thing to do in modern urban society. And they were right. The ritual that we had performed had no roots for us. Our only connection to it was in some fantasized identification with a tradition by which we had so briefly been touched. But throughout our history as a people we have had these kinds of rituals and myths.
Joseph Campbell has rescued the concept of myth. When I was a youngster a myth was clearly something that was not true. What Campbell kept reminding us was that myths are not not true. For myths are not about how things are out there, even though that may be the vocabulary of the story. Myths are about how things are in here. They have their roots in the human experience. They are part of who we are inside as a species, not just as individuals but as a people. During the period of our history when we came into existence as conscious entities, we Homo sapiens existed in self-contained groups. Today we live in a world where the horizons are far, far more vast.
We had a foster daughter from Viet Nam who stayed with us for a brief nine months. When Thom went back to Viet Nam, my daughter, Caprice, drew a picture showing the earth. On one side a tree like the one in our back yard. On the other was a tree like one Thom had seen at the San Diego Zoo and recognized from her home. Caprice was here. Thom was there. When I was Caprice's age, that was an image I could not have thought.
More and more today our horizons are far more vast than anything that we were evolved to live in. And the myths come out of that age, says Campbell. The myths have to do, first of all, with where we are situated as ourselves in the midst of a people, in the midst of an environment. They tell us who we are, and how we are, and how we are to be. Many of those myths have to do with the various crises of development that each of us inevitably goes through. The Hopi calling the kachinas for the child is preparing both the child and the community -- watch the images of the myth -- for that child being on his or her own; with respect to the gods but also with respect to the family, the community. Those stories celebrate and re-present the experiences that exist throughout the developmental history of an individual in community.
What do we do with our children when they begin to become young adults? What ritual do we have to structure for them what that changed relationship will be? We have done, here in this church, a coming-of-age ceremony with our youngsters. It is a pale imitation. Because we lack the grounding in the myth system, there's no way that experience can be given the kind of power that, in another age, it could be given. What we did with them was sort of "let's pretend," and they knew it was "let's pretend." The pretense had no roots culturally, historically, ontologically, psychologically.
But there was a time when that ritual indeed changed the relationship of the young man or the young woman to the rest of adult society. It had its power, not merely because the acts were done; not merely because the story was one they were raised with from infancy; not merely because they had seen it happen to others ahead of their cohort. It had its power and meaning because, in fact, the relationship between the once child and the rest of the adult community changed.
The nearest we have to that in our society these days, I suppose, is the driver's license. You laugh. But one of the characteristics of all cultures is that they can see the myths of other cultures and rarely can see their own myths because those myths are experienced as really real. Those of you that have had teenage kids go through that experience know just how much deep psychological power that has. "I now have mobility. I have the promise, at least the beginnings, of independence. When I get that piece of plasticized paper with my picture on it, I can do a whole bunch of things that I could not do before."
When I was a probation officer there was a category of human being to which we became early attuned. We noticed that the last kid to get a driver's license in a family was about 80% more likely to be arrested for a juvenile offense than the rest of the kids in the family.
At the point where that last kid gets a driver's license, the role of parents is commencing to evaporate and they know it. The temptation is very strong at that point to try to hang on to that parental relationship. Mothers especially, but fathers too, become more rigid than with the previous kids, to be more nosy, more controlling, more overbearing. The result, not infrequently, was major conflict. We learned not to treat this on the same level as your standard variety criminal behavior. Most of these kids got through it without ever being involved with the justice system again and we could close their cases and leave them alone.
The dynamic was happening because there was nothing in our culture that provides the mythic grounding to tell us that the transition is going to happen. There are no stories that are a part of the very air that we breathe warning us that this is happening, that is okay for this to happen and that this is a normal human experience.
When couples come to me to get married, I am in the habit of warning them that something is going to happen six weeks to three months into their marriage. Those couples that have been living together before they got married often say, "Well, a piece of paper's not going to make any difference."It celebrates that we have become, in fact, a couple." But I warn them, the piece of paper does make a difference.
The culture is blessedly missing role expectations for shack-ups. But we have one heck of a pile of role expectations for people who are husband and wife. Six weeks to three months after the piece of paper has been signed they are going to get caught in something like the following trap. One of them will say something to the other that seems perfectly obvious and clear to any reasonable, normal person. It will contain the unspoken assumption that the other will, of course, without having to be told, do A, B, C and/or D. The other will absolutely and completely miss it. Go right over the head. And the battle will start.
I warn them to laugh because this is, after all, rather funny behavior. There is nothing left of husbandry and wifery in the myth that surrounds two people becoming a couple, two independent living entities beginning to share a life together. That myth has been emptied of all but its romanticist content.
Throughout the changes in our lives those myths continue to survive as stories out there, but they no longer inform our human experience. They no longer warn us of what the normal human experiences of developing are likely to bring us. They give us no suggestions as to how we might respond or even give us permission to have those experiences.
There is a culture in a rural corner of India that has the following myth functioning. In that culture, the wise old one who bears the wisdom of the gods always comes in the guise of a stranger. In that culture, when the elderly no longer have a role in the society, they disappear; for, without a role to play, they do not exist. And in this culture, the elderly indeed leave and are gone for months, sometimes a couple of years. Then they return and are greeted as strangers. They are installed in the city gates as the judges and advisors of the community but they don't know anybody. They are objective. They have no family ties to anyone and so they can be relied upon to be fair. They also, because in fact they're not strangers, know where all the bodies are buried. There is a whole mythic structure that supports this peacemaking, advice-giving, wisdom-sharing function within the community that empowers the wise one and permits the community to use this crisis/conflict resolution tool effectively. And it is they who keep the culture's stories alive and pass them on.
What have we lost in having become sufficiently modern and civilized that virtually none of the myths of our heritage, the ones we're aware of, function any longer in our society? What have we exchanged for the isolation of mama, papa and 2.3 children in their own separate domicile having to deal with no one if they don't wish to?
What have we gained? One of the things we have gained is a good deal of freedom. Harvey Cox a few decades ago published a book called "The Secular City" in which he detailed the gifts that we have acquired in civilization in cities. Those of you who were raised in very small towns -- and there are still a few of us around who were -- recall what it was like there. You could not sneeze without somebody's knowing about it. This had certain advantages. It meant that when I stole the gumballs out of the gumball machine from Lincoln's Market downtown, I had not gotten the whole four blocks home before my mommy knew about it. That was a small town. But it also meant that in leaving that small town and going to the urban area I could be somebody else. I could escape, to a very large degree, what my cultural milieu had decided that I was, of course, going to be. I could be a different person. Now it's true -- and sometimes we've had a hard time learning this, we modern, civilized human beings -- that we take who we are with us. It doesn't take all those other people out there reminding us. We take our own bad habits, our own tendencies to respond, our own depressions, our own deprivations and imagined victories. We take these with us wherever we go. What's the bumper sticker? "Wherever you go, there you are."
But it really is true. You really can make significant differences in who you are in that anonymity that our cultural mobility has given us. I haven't seen the numbers recently. Twenty years ago, the numbers were that the average human being moves completely out of the community in which they were living every five years. That's an incredible amount of rebuilding of the nexus of human connectedness again and again and again and again. And my assumption is that the overwhelming majority of you here, when you came to Hawaii, had to rebuild the nexus of connection to real people in this community. We have a number of folk within our church community who are either in the military or who are working in industries that pop people around a lot. They have experienced this cycle of being constantly uprooted. As I talk with them, their experience is that there is a point at which one begins to be hesitant to put down roots. It hurts to tear those things up. There is a tentativeness that I think characterizes much more of our civilized human society than we are usually in the habit of recognizing. That, too, is a part of the loss of mythic groundedness. All of the issues that the myths of the species used to give us handles for dealing with; all of those issues continue to exist. We continue to go through the same relatively limited set of developmental processes, as we go from child to aged. We continue to be essentially wired the same way as we were when we were hunters and gatherers on the veldt. But the myths that gave us at least the beginnings of some road maps for that psychic travel are gone.
My personal opinion is that it's not possible to go back. We are stuck with the blessing/curse of being finally, completely cast out of Eden. There is no possibility of return to that kind of human existence where the connections and the connectedness could be taken for granted. Once the myth is recognized for what it is--even accurately for what it is, with the full wisdom and insight Joseph Campbell taught us about our mythic past; once you know it for what it is, it can no longer function with the same power and effectiveness.
Marshall McLuhan said that one of the consequences of literacy was schizophrenia. Now, he's not talking psychiatric science here. He's suggesting that, once we understand some of those pieces of our history and our heritage up here in our heads, our heads and our hearts are no longer connected and you can't go back.
The sword really does swing across the entry back into Eden. We can't go back in there. And it is a whole painful bunch of damn hard work becoming fully conscious. One of the complications is that those myths exist indeed, still in our heads, inchoate. The rich stories that went with them are gone, but the kernels of truth that were back of those myths still exist in our heads, and still function in our lives. But we no longer have the ability to dramatize them as a part of our social reality to warn our youngsters that they are going to happen, to encourage our parents and families and old folk that these dynamics are going to occur in our midst. The power of the story is gone from those kernels of myth. The place we usually discover those myths is when we stumble across them and bloody ourselves upon them. The curse side of our being cast out of the garden into civilization is that we are condemned to become even more conscious, to become even more intentional, to become even more aware.
That would be a hard enough task for the human species to deal with except that we are condemned, also, as a part of that, to always have to be beginning from scratch with every damn kid that's born. You really can't stick this into a kid's head. Every person that comes into our community has to learn from scratch that awareness that these things are happening on our insides. We are always having to go back to the very beginning. One of the characteristics of culture, the ability to pass wisdom on, is that one still always has to begin from scratch.
The task before us as communities is the always incomplete attempt to bring one another to greater, fuller awareness. We can no longer rely on the myths that once bound us together. We are now more and less than that. In a sense, one of those myths has come fascinatingly true. As the god who threw Adam and Eve out of the garden said, "We must keep them away from the tree of life lest they eat and become as gods." And we have, indeed, for good or ill, become as gods.