A few weeks ago, I sat with the father of one of our members, as he died in his hospital room. The daughter, who had been out of town when her father's sudden complete downturn occurred, talked to him by telephone while she waited for her flight back to Denver. As she talked to her father, a nurse held the phone to his ear as he laid apparently unconscious, and yet we saw his eyes move beneath his closed lids at least twice, a silent affirmation that he was hearing and responding to his daughter's voice.

A couple of hours later, his life faded away. The quiet stillness that is the mystery of death entered the room, and he was no longer with us. The slowly declining heart rate, beeping in red numbers on the monitor, from 109 to 90, to 65 to 40 … gave us the scientific evidence, but these numbers did not begin to explain the sense of mystery that is the leaving of this world for the uncertain realm.

After the daughter's phone call, we knew his time would be short because of the removal of different medicines and support systems. A hospice social worker spoke to him in a soothing voice and said he should let the angels come as they would, and some of them might be those he had known before. We almost felt the presence of angels, of ancestors and old friends, there to take him by the hand.

Death, the fear of death, the fear of the unknown -- what, if anything happens,
after our deaths? -- the nature of unknowable infinity is the fertile ground for many, many ancient myths and religious stories. Death is one of the landscapes of our imagination and our ancient mythologies. It’s a place where humanity has spent hours telling and spinning tales to explain the unknown, all to make this place of death more acceptable to the person who is dying, which will eventually be each of us.

The purpose of myth, according to Karen Armstrong, whom we heard from in our reading earlier, is to help us learn to live with our deepest psychological fears. A good myth helps us understand and grow from these fears. But we have lost the therapeutic value of myths in our times. In fact, our primary interest in myths is to debunk them. But without the myth, the story, we also have lost one of the primary purposes of religion itself -- to help us negotiate our lives and find meaning.

And it’s not only that we are left with a frightening, nihilistic world -- a world of death and no meaning as Armstrong described, we are also left bereft of how to handle our own individual crises and can be engulfed by that same nihilism. She writes:

When we contemplate the dark epiphanies of the twentieth century, we see that modern anxiety is not simply the result of self-indulgent neurosis. We are facing something unprecedented. Other societies saw death as a transition to other modes of being. They did not nurture simplistic and vulgar ideas of an afterlife, but devised rites and myths that helped people to face the unspeakable. In no other culture would anybody settle down in the middle of a rite of passage or initiation, with the horror unresolved. But that is what we have to do in the absence of a viable mythology.

Our member's father, as many of us will, died without a ritual of death, a myth about death that gave him some kind of spiritual acceptance. I knew him, and I know that he probably didn’t believe that there would be angels to greet him. In my time as a minister and chaplain, I have seen many ways that people individually face their own end - from the scientifically and hard minded who go raging into that dark night to those who seek a final meaning, often returning to their childhood religions, which may have been the last time many had thought about the issues of what is death, who we are, and how we got here.

I am passionate about this idea of the loss of myth in our society, because there is a deep nihilistic angst in so much of what is our modern world. There are only the lessons of history and a belief in the ethics of reason that set any boundaries between what is acceptable and what is not. I almost admire the radical conservatives who hold onto their stories for dear life. They may (or may not) be wrong about the big issues, but their faith is stubborn, and it gives their lives meaning, scope, and power.

We religious liberals have lost that mooring, and we began losing it 400 years ago during the Protestant Reformation, during the Age of Reason, and the amazing advances of science and technology. I would take none of that back.
I believe in the power of human reason, but it doesn’t, and never will, give answers to the big questions -- is there a God and did this spirit have anything to do with the creation of life? What is infinity? What is the mystery of the human heart? Is there Nirvana? Heaven? The great light? The death or reincarnation of our inner spirits?

Today, I want to talk to you seriously about another dimension of life that has been lost in our modern and post-modern world. It is the dimension of what Karen Armstrong calls “mythos.” In her Short History of Myth, she argues that ancient peoples were aware of two kinds of knowledge. She gives them the Greek names – “mythos,” which means tale or story in Greek, and “logos,” which means word, logic or reason.

Logos is the reasoning mind, the development of knowledge that keeps humanity ever moving forward with advancements in culture and science and society. It helped us to invent the wheel, to move from societies of herding nomads to agricultural farmers, to move from farming to manufacturing, from rural life to urban cities. It is what most of us call today the scientific, reasoning, rational mind.

But our ancient ancestors also recognized the power of “mythos.” Yes, there were many superstitions and many wildly improbable stories. But the power of myth, if it stuck, had the power to place salve on our deepest fears; it had the power to help us dig from deep within to be our most heroic selves; it had the power to teach us the difference between good and evil, compassion and harm.

Ancient peoples and all of our forebears up through the formation of all the great world religions: Hinduism, Judaism, Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam -- knew this difference between logos and mythos. These ancient believers knew that the religious stories were not literally true – logos. They knew that the religious stories, the good ones, the ones that worked, were mythos, stories purposefully told and embellished for their power to direct and guide humankind. These are the stories of sacred scriptures and of wisdom stories within all traditions, handed down from generation to generation.

So, what is a myth, a good myth? Not one that you should too easily dismiss pejoratively as only a story, or an un-provable superstition. Neanderthal humans give us five different aspects of myth that have survived the test of human history, Armstrong says. The first is that myth is almost always rooted in the experience of death and/or the fear of extinction.

Second, myth is usually inseparable from ritual – that is why, to this day, we have so many rituals around memorial services, wakes, funerals, burials, cremations and mourning.

Third, myth is usually recalled beside a grave, at the very limit of human life.
The most powerful myths are about extremes and the further limits of human experience. She says they force us to go beyond our experience. There are moments when we all, in one way or another, have to go to a place that we have never been and do what we have never done before. So myth is about the unknown, that for which we initially have no words. Myth looks into the heart of the great silence.

Fourth, myth is not a story told for its own sake. It shows us, instead, how we should behave. Correctly understood, mythology puts us in the correct spiritual position or psychological posture for right action in this world or the next.

And, fifth, all mythology speaks of another plane that exists along side our world and that in some sense supports us. It supports the belief in an invisible, powerful reality, sometimes called the world of the gods. All prayer and meditation is aimed at reaching this other plane, however it is described in different religions.

Mythology is rich with symbols and metaphors that point to this other reality. The sky, stones, trees, water, the circle, the mountains -- all point to the other, mysterious realm. Stories that help us understand this realm -- be it the mystery of life, of love, or of god or goddess - are sacred mythology. These stories are also usually filled with themes of transformation, of ascending and descending between worlds, always to learn something that will help us in this world.

The writers of the ancient Hebrew Bible and the newer writers of the Christian
New Testament, were not trying to tell us simply a history of what had happened, they were trying to tell us the meaning of what was perhaps once a snippet of history, but re-set in a timeless fable, a myth, that would guide humanity. The images and symbols and metaphors of the Bible, which are consistent throughout, and often repeated in the Koran, are proof of this assertion.

There are so many stories of ascending, of flight, of burning bushes, and flaming clouds, of miracles involving waters and rivers. These are not, as you know in your rational mind, possible -- of course they’re not! They are stories of metaphor and purposeful myth. They were not read or heard until the dawn of the Age of Reason, for anything but their mythos, their religious and sacred meanings, their guidance. Virtually all religious stories have a mythological subtext that is echoed in other ancient myth-laden religions - Greek and Roman mythology, and all the depth of story of the ancient western and Middle Eastern and eastern worlds.

Our middle hymn this morning is referring to the dream of the Jewish patriarch, Jacob, as told in Hebrew Scriptures. Jacob was on a journey to find a wife, start a family, and, hopefully prosper. He stopped for the night and laid his head upon a stone. He had a dream of angels ascending and descending a ladder, and God talked to him, promising him that the land he was in would be his and that his offspring would multiply and be plentiful. When Jacob awoke, he anointed the stone upon which he had slept with oil and declared that he had been in the land of God and at the gate of heaven.

Not only does this story have the idea of ascending to and descending from heaven, connecting to God - it has a ladder, a wooden ladder, as the path.
It is a symbol of the great tree, as mythologist Joseph Campbell would say, the tree of life and of knowledge, the tree at the center of the world, at the earth’s navel, where we can go back and forth between the two planes.

All myth is like this. The story of Jesus turned into the Christ is a story of myth.
He died upon a wooden cross, symbolizing the same tree. And he ascended into heaven, the same legendary juncture between the two planes. It is St. Paul who mythologized the story of Jesus into Christ, Armstrong says. Paul did not care so much about Jesus’ teachings as he cared about what his life had meant. No myth is meant to be taken literally. Whether it is the story of Moses parting the Red Sea, or the story of Jesus rising after his death. Writes Armstrong:

Myths about flight and ascent have appeared in all cultures expressing a universal desire for transcendence and liberation from the human condition. These myths should not be read literally. When we read of Jesus ascending to heaven, we are not meant to imagine him whirling through the stratosphere. When the Prophet Muhammad flies from Mecca to Jerusalem and then climbs up a ladder to the Divine Throne, we are to understand that he has broken through to a new level of spiritual attainment. When the Prophet Elijah ascends to heaven in a fiery chariot, he has left the frailty of the human condition behind, and passed into the sacred realm that lies beyond our earthly experience.

The interesting thing is that our ancestors knew what myth was; they knew it was sacred, religious story meant to help people live a good life, find meaning, follow the hero’s journey, and accept death. We have lost this understanding with the developments of our scientific world view. Science almost had to take this stand against mythos as we learned more about the physical nature of the earth, the planets and the universe, and later about the development of life through an evolutionary process. And the religionists, in turn, became dangerous, as their world view, the once unknown world given to them through mythological story, was threatened.

Sir Isaac Newton (who had the good name of a Jewish patriarch) in particular believed that mythology and mysticism were primitive modes of thought. And he, completely immersed, as Armstrong says, in logos, went on a mission to purge Christianity of such doctrines as the Trinity, which flew in the face of logic. The Unitarians, also, were so named for their desire to make Christianity more reasonable, too. "Newton was quite unable to see," Armstrong writes, "that this doctrine had been devised by the Greek theologians of the fourth century precisely as a myth, similar to that of the Jewish Kabbalists. As Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa (335-395), had explained, Father, Son and Spirit were not objective, ontological facts, but simply ‘terms we use’ to express the way in which the ‘unnamable and unspeakable’ divine nature adapts itself to the limitations of our human minds."

But Newton insisted, as many of us would today, that if something can’t be explained logically, it is false: “Tis the temper of the hot and superstitious part
of mankind in matters of religion,” he irritably wrote, “ever to be fond of mysteries and for that reason to like best what they understand least.”

Only a few scientists raised flags of caution. French mathematician, Blaise Pascal, a deeply religious man, was filled with horror when he contemplated the “eternal silence” of the infinite universe opened up by modern science. He believed that all “light” was taken from humanity, leaving them lost in a corner of the universe without knowing, as he wrote, who put them there, what they were supposed to do, or what would become of them when they died. “I am moved to terror,” he wrote, “like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes quite lost, with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair.”

This, of course, has become a modern parable, whether we are talking about the popular television show, Lost, or we are reading the Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad or The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot. The backlash of the loss of myth and the application of so-called scientific fact was immediate. And the dark side of the human mind did not go away with reason; evil did not disappear.

All over Europe and in the new world, Catholics and Protestants, including the Puritans, our ancestors, were hit by the “witch craze,” as Armstrong calls it, a collective demonic fantasy that led to the execution and torture of thousands of women and men. “Without a powerful mythology to explain people’s unconscious fears,” she says, “they tried to rationalize those fears into ‘fact.’ Fearful and destructive un-reason has always been part of human experience, and it still is.”

Further, to read the Bible now, literally, to insist that the Genesis creation story is science, for example, results not only in bad science, but bad religion. The failure to understand what religious story is, and the loss of the way of knowing that is mythos, which also is part of the wisdom traditions, is to lose, as most of us know and feel, the deeper river of the meaning of life, at least as we have tried to describe it in our human ways since the beginning of human time.

Finally, Armstrong, also points out, that we have failed, as well, to develop much spiritually since what she calls the Axial Age, from 800 to 200 years before the Birth of Jesus. (She, as many scholars do, sees the later Christianity and Islam as further extensions and outgrowths of Jewish monotheism). In the thousand years, or so, before the common era, we saw the flowering of Hinduism with the sagas of the Upanishads, the birth of Buddha, Confucius, and Lao Tzu the writer of Taoism, the fiery prophets of Judaism, and Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. The most serious kind of spiritual development we have today is in writing, poetry and painting,

But these modern spiritual forms, Armstrong says, "are not myths. They may help us transcend our understandings to deeper knowledge, but they carry with them no ritual and no communal understanding, nor do they usually point toward the invisible plane, the mystery or the infinite that guides other myth."

And as we deal with the perverted myths of our time, for there have always been bad myths, as well -- racial and ethnic superiority, religious superiority, technical and scientific superiority, greed and materialism, and the fanatic terrorism, genocide and war and horror that accompany them, we may be driven to despair and wish that we were on a deserted island.

The purpose of our religion today is to find a way to regain hope and sanity.
Some say we need new myths – powerful and strong modern stories that deal
with modern dilemmas. This may be true, but what’s hard to regain, now that it’s gone, is the mythos imagination that has been lost. Can we relearn to see the world through a mythic understanding? Can we create new names for the
Holy and the sacred and new stories about compassion and ethics, good and evil? New stories about purpose and journey?

As I was preparing this sermon, I also read some of the words of Unitarian Universalist ethicist James Luther Adams, who witnessed some of the horror of World War II. An idea of his, at least in part, is that myth has not left us … it is just hidden. He talks about a Greek philosopher named Thales, who had grown tired of the Anthropomorphic Greek gods and goddesses, and who turned to the idea of water for meaning, not realizing that water, itself, as only an example, is a symbol of myth, too, as Adams says.

The religion of Taoism, for example, relies heavily upon the qualities of water to describe life. Our imaginations almost cannot help themselves from finding meaning in all the ancient symbols and metaphors, the archetypes as psychologist Carl Jung called them.

Symbolism is weak in our Unitarian Universalist church, but we still have the light of the chalice, and the light of candles of community. And we still do child dedications, initiations of new life, with water and roses. We still perform weddings and memorial services, and we still form a worshipping community
every Sunday. We have spoken together much this year about the loss of our progressive voice in the public square, and, as we go forward, I ask each of you also to consider what spiritual symbols hold meaning for you and how we might begin to recover their mythical stories and value, and reshape them for ourselves.

In his book, Stages of Faith, James Fowler says that Unitarian Universalism
is a “Stage Four” form of religion. We are outside the stage three box which houses most of Christianity. We are scientists and questioners and we do not have much patience for the old religion. But there is something more beyond Stage Four. Stage Five, he says, comes at mid-life and late-life crisis, when we learn about the total ambiguity and grayness of life, and that there are no real answers. At this stage, most people begin reassessing their old symbols and begin seeing new meanings.

These are the people I have known, as I mentioned earlier, who return to their childhood faiths for answers as they approach death. I don’t know what we will find collectively if we move beyond the arrogance of believing we know the answer to everything, a common trait of Stage Four, into the next level where we admit we do not know. But perhaps we will find a way back to mythos,
another level of spiritual and religious understanding that could bring back some hope to our world.

AMEN