“A myth is not an untruth. It’s a something that didn’t happen that happens all the time. It’s a colourful way of describing our humanity. We know there wasn’t a historic Adam and Eve 6000 years ago in a particular garden, but we know it’s happening in Brisbane this afternoon, it’s happening in my part of Edinburgh today. Humans are filled with discontent; they’re filled with wandering, lust and uneasiness.. We lose the capacity to read and understand and profit from myth and we try to scientise it and turn it into a knowledge system rather than a form of art that exhilarate and depress and challenge us and judge us…”
“One of the things that kills religion is a failure to understand how myth operates. If you try to turn the myth into historical reality you lose the beauty and teaching-ness of it, because it becomes useless to you. Because sensible people know that’s not what happened. But if you keep the myth as myth, you can say, in what way in my own life am I replicating the Adam and Eve story?”
Richard Holloway joins the podcast from Edinburgh to explore how the stories we tell ourselves create the rules we live by and the meaning we make of our existence.
Richard tells some of his story as he looks at the narratives of the Judeo-Christian tradition and the way down the ages myth has morphed into certainties that have been destructive rather than liberating.
How do we engage a rich and varied tradition without succumbing to the temptation to systemise our narratives into dogma that ignores the reality of suffering? How can we live with the paradox of a God we experience in the absence as much as presence? What stories reduce our humanity and which ones capture our imagination and enable us to live into our best selves?
Listen Online: https://omny.fm/shows/on-the-way/toxic-or-liberating-the-stories-we-tell-ourselves?in_playlist=on-the-way!podcast
On the Way is a podcast exploring the deeper mysteries of faith, meaning, and beauty. Based at St John’s Cathedral in Brisbane, the podcast invites others into conversation who are also “on the way”; seeking a transformative spirituality and inclusive faith that speaks to real issues of today. Together we seek to make meaning and articulate a Christianity that expresses the liberating and life-giving message of the Gospel in our time.
