Myth and England

A sermon delivered in Christ Chapel by the Rev. Dr. Alan P.R. Gregory, Associate Professor of Church History

How sad it must be to be German
All those umlauts and separable verbs.
Fine, one reads Kant in the original
But I ask you -- can you have a good time?
Of course, it's far worse to be French,
Crazed and confused, self-bewildered
Among those four hundred different types of cheese.
My mother taught me all I know about foreigners:
Of their sad yearning, their desperation
To be English. From this, my mother insisted,
Comes their stiff-necked refusal
To understand the simplest words.
Since then -- God bless her, she's dead now --
I've heard the ugliest rumor:
That the French and the Germans, the Swiss
And, would you credit it, the Irish:
All think they're the acme of Europe,
The obvious heroes for the moment
When greatness and destiny calls.
Now I know that that's just ridiculous --
It's complete and total balls,
But believe me, I now hear there's worse.
My late colleague, Dr. Diego Rodriguez,
Told me, with some indignation,
How Cubans now think they're important,
And that history's great big red carpet
Has rolled out to tickle their toes.
In my childhood, it was all so much simpler;
Then the foreigners were properly grateful,
Though still sad that they couldn't be English.
Now everything's just terribly backward,
My mother, she'd be so confused. There's
No doubt that we're just as important but
No one will second our views.
Maybe, far down near the South Pole
Some King Penguin is taking his ease,
Gulping fish eyes with deep satisfaction.
He's thinking how cozy the cold is;
How the wind gently freezes your nose:
And wondering why we all don't rush down there
To claim our home on those Antarctic floes.

My dear Polybius, many greetings. I return from my travels to learn you're leaving on some of your own. My friend, I am sick and so, as I cannot come myself, though believe me, I want to, I am sending the boy with this message. I pray to all those traveling, journeying gods of land and sea that this letter finds you before the ship sails. Britain, Polybius, I'm told that you are going to Britain. With all my heart, I urge you to forget this. No good comes of going beyond the accustomed seaways, past set limits. There are gods there, perching like eagles on the world's edge. They'll have your soul, my friend. Those islands, by all and every account, they're haunted. Rivers run backward to the source in Britain; stones rise from the ground and walk in moonlight like the dead; there are giants that drink human blood and women with eyes in their breasts. Nothing, no rubbish about gold tipping from the hand like grain, no magic swords, or flying fish, nothing could get me to these islands at the world's end. And certainly no loud-mouthed Phoenician bragging he's bedded the witch of the North Wind. Forget it, I beg you. Stay close by, keep to the well-tracked waters. Travel where the gods are tame and come at our call; where we know the name of wave god and wind master. Polybius, I pray, do not go to Britain.

Under this hill-top, some say, Arthur is buried, waiting to be summoned when the gray mist smoothers this land and all hearts fail. You can see Glastonbury from this hill: somewhere hidden among the broken stones are two cruets full of the blood and sweat of Christ. Near that wall Joseph pressed his staff into the dry earth and it flowered like a rose might bloom, single, puzzling, in a barren and neglected garden. Far away, on the western horizon where the glinting hints the sea, Corineus wrestled Gogmagog, threw him from the cliffs and split him on the rocks like a fruit. Behind me, in that wood, lives a roaring man who laughs like a flood. He has a green coat and green boots thick with mud. There's a crown of leaves on his head and small flowers tied in a beard thick enough to nest birds. Once, far to the north, were dragons. I think of warriors in the pride of their former deeds; their souls kindled in the battles of old and the actions of other times. A car turns into the parking lot beyond the abbey. The historians' disenchantment tells me these tales are debris: the leavings of tribal squabbles, migrations and the invasions of petty kingdoms, or else forgotten rituals to secure fertility. Other than that, they are stories for children, the naïve, or shabby eccentrics who play at being druids in muddy fields. Such is the voice of disenchantment. I remember, though, when I was young, there was a time when these tales were almost biblical for me. Now I live in Texas which has other tales: but there are no green men, dragons have never flown here, and Avalon is a motel near Waco.

This is not a cry of homesickness but the recognition of an inevitability. We landed in America and drove south along the line of Appalachians, the fat meanders of the Shenandoah below us. At the time, all I knew was that England was more miles away than it had ever been. Later, I understood that she was slowly becoming "another country." As when someone says, "I want to buy your house." And you realize, "yes, I have a house, not just a home but a place on the market, a house among other houses, to be assessed, surveyed, compared, judged, priced." England is no longer the measure of everything, it is a home that is also foreign, where I hear the people have "accents." The town square in Mesilla is dusty and red, empty, even in June, as the tourists make for the north and Santa Fe. The window of an antique store displays kachinas and, next to them a retablo. St. Francis has an Indian face and a yellow sunburst on his chest, in front of him, a skeleton is dancing, he plays the violin and grins under a blue hat. They are enigmatic. The association of myth and land, of story and tribe, is very intimate. And I, watching leaves twitching on the wooden steps outside a shop in Mesilla, am homeless, a man between myths. There's the thing, can there be a mythology for the homeless, for those with each foot in another world, foreign at home and at home in another country? What myths are left for those who have no abiding city?

"By now it was about midday and a darkness fell over the whole land, which lasted until three in the afternoon; the sun's light failed. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two. Then Jesus gave a loud cry and said, 'Father into thy hands I commend my spirit.'"

Jerusalem is not a good place for gods. If you care about the stories that thread the lives of nations, if you care about the myths that bind a tribe, the tales that hallow a land, then go not up to Jerusalem: that gobbler of old gods. This is the city of the God who has no city, whose footstool is the earth and whose measure, eternity. No sanctuary secures him, no high place suits his ease, he is a passer-by in every temple. And now a darkness has settled even here: the healing darkness of God, who consumes all things, even Jerusalem. Where is God now? Hidden in the darkness. Look for him outside the city. Look on the refuse hill. Look for the hanged man. Unsanctified, beyond the pale. And beyond mythology. The sun, that most obvious god, Apollo's chariot, the spark that Odin seized from Muspell, fails. No hero raises a red lance against this shabby business and no gentle goddess laments under the hanged man. The crucified Jesus does not slip off the hooks through a planetary aeon. For the dejected clutch of disciples, there is no relieving metamorphosis, no yellow flower now blooms where once a nymph wept. Here is the death of myth. Myths secure us, cupping us in the palm of a story, placing us in space and time. They establish the boundaries, the sphere of land and home, the cast of friends, enemies, and strangers, they fashion duties and dangers. Myths are the clocks of our belonging, they tell us where and who we are. Around the Cross, though, the myths are empty. Mythology grants us a home, a culture to defend and preserve, but the crucified Christ casts us out into the stubborn world where the many voices are cacophonous and enigmatic. Out there, the apostles became wanderers, neither Jew nor Gentile, between Israel and Rome, between Greek and Syrian. They are our forebears: following the hanged man, the holocaust of myths, tribes, and nations.

Can we stand it? Can we live without mythology? As holiness seems not much given to laughter, we don't often notice this but the bible ends with a joke. After all the plagues, the fire, and the torment, when the nations have ripped each other to threads, when the kings are buried under their own palaces, and the merchants have bewailed every costly thing sunk on the ocean. When all the treasures of earth have burned like paper and are gone, not even a smoky wisp remaining, then the new heaven and the new earth arrive. But now you notice that, basking in the light, strolling about in celestial splendor, there they are again, all of them: the nations, and the kings, and the treasures of the nations. All present and correct. After the whole deluge of flame, nothing worth speaking of is lost. That is the joke at the world's end.

Can we live without mythology? After the judgment, when our tribalism, when our cultural pride, has stuttered into silence under the Cross, do the myths then return? Do they come back for those who have no abiding city? They must because we cannot live without mythology. Without mythology, we have only the thin gruel of reason. And you can't live on that. Bereft of mythology, barred from its tales, and images, and symbols, we would have no words for the glory that hedges every human face, and none for the beauty that settles on the landscape and steals a gasp from the heart. It is the language of myth that breeds up courage, names our terrors, and makes justice more than politics. Here are words for love's unaccountable sacrifice, and tales for the sad sweetness of passion.

In the light of Christ, the myths live again. Handed back to us, not to secure us, not to reinforce our tribal instincts, but to lead us to that Jerusalem which is the final home of the nations. We need mythology because the roots of our lives are too deep for reason, because we are heaven-fed. And we need mythology because our destiny in Christ lies beyond our loyalties to race or nation, because our belonging is not yet. Now that is a very good thing, very good for the world. Cultures, after all, are always changing, shifting, leaving us behind. They meet, adapt, die, and give birth to new forms. We want to fix them, of course, we want the place of our belonging to be forever. But that's impossible. We want to say, there, look, England; and, there, pure Americana; there, quintessential Mexican-American. Such purity is an unhappy dream. If you cling to the forms of mortal life, then the whole world is one long dying, the charnel house of peoples and nations. There is hope, however, in wandering, in the quest for the Grail that is always ahead of us. To be human is to be called elsewhere, to that parliament of nations which is above, in the city of the Lamb. Part of the Church's vocation is to bear witness to the hopes, the possibilities for life and humanity, concealed in the meetings, birthing, dying, and transformation of cultures. In these metamorphoses, and despite tragedy, there is promise for a human peace. That peace, that human convocation, whenever it occurs in the mixing of cultures, that peace breathes the air of our final kingdom. That kingdom is above, the peaceable fields, the golden city to which the peoples bring their many treasures. And, to speak of which, we need myth. Till then, we must live, in faith, hope, and love: migrants between earth and heaven.

Amen.