Episode 264 (Transcript): Big Ideas | Myth
Episode Transcript
Many thanks to listener Tara Larson for her work in transcribing this episode!
This episode can be found on any podcast app or can be listened to here on our website as well. All the notes and resources we cited in the episode are found at this link as well:
SH: A myth is like the advice that your elders are giving you around the fire, right?
CW: Mm, Nice.
SH: Myth is a thing that lays out a problem or a life experience for us, and then asks us to assign meaning to the parts of it, or to decipher how the wisdom of the story might apply to us. And how do we do that? Well, we do that by looking at our own experience.
SH: Hello, I’m Susan Hinckley.
CW: And I’m Cynthia Winward.
SH: And this is At Last She Said It. We are women of faith discussing complicated things, and the title of today’s episode is Big Ideas: Myth.
CW: We’re going there, Susan.
SH: I know. I’m so excited for this conversation.
CW: What? Oh my gosh, okay, you’re excited and I’m just nervous, like–-
SH: No, it’s gonna be great.
CW: Like nervous laughter, but I can only blame myself because I started the notes today, so I don’t know. And here’s why I’m nervous is, I don’t know. Like so many topics, how long have we been wanting to have this conversation?
SH: Right.
CW: And how many times do we just keep kicking that can down the road? I mean, and we’ve danced around it. Like, let’s go four, four years ago with Kaisa Berlin Kalfusie, episode 84-
SH: Right, right.
CW: Do I Literally Have to Believe That? So we have talked about, you know, literal versus metaphorical, but somehow bringing in the word myth and really dissecting that, I feel like I’m really punching above my weight, and I could be punching into, like, really tender spots for people. So I just kinda need to, needed to have that disclaimer right here.
Okay, here we go.
SH: Okay, but, you’re like a business major.
CW: Yes.
SH: And I’m, like, an English major married to another English major. Like, sometimes my husband actually, like, when we talk about New Year’s resolutions, he’ll say, “I haven’t read my Greek mythology for a while. I think I need to reread Greek mythology.” I mean, this is the house that I have.
CW: I’m so jealous of you two. So jealous.
SH: So I’m just saying that, like, some of your feelings as you approach that word, that big, small word, that big, little word, might be just because you’re not as comfortable in that realm maybe-
CW: 100%.
SH:…as some other people. So let’s see if we can get you comfortable there. I’m excited.
CW: 100%. I just realized that you and Russ are English majors. Paul and I are both finance accounting people, so. Yeah.
SH: Right, right. You’re probably not talking about Greek mythology at your house.
CW: No, we’re talking about amortization schedules at the dinner table.
SH: See, there you go. Different marriages for different folks.
CW: Different marriages. Okay. Well, all I’m trying to say is maybe you should have done these notes, but anyway, here we go.
SH: No, no. This is the other thing I love about it, is that someone who isn’t that comfortable in the realm of myth found a way into it for us because it’s gonna help other people-
CW: Oh, thank you.
SH: …who aren’t comfortable. So, like this is the perfect setup. I’m so excited. Okay.
CW: Well, I’m really comfortable with certain things. Like, a few years ago I adopted the phrase, like, when talking about the Bible, I talk about it, I use the phrase Hebrew poetry.
SH: Okay.
CW: That feels really good to me, and so I’ve adopted that line, and I’ve said that for a few years.
And I mean, I also have found way more meaning in the scriptures once I could let go of the literal belief and see it more as poetry.
SH: Mmhmm.
CW: See it more as how God, how a group of people interacted with God, what, how, what these ancient people thought of God. Sometimes it’s very different-
SH: Right.
CW: …than the way I think about God, right? How they made sense of their world, especially in a pre-science era. I mean–isn’t the Bible, like, during the Bronze Age or something? Like, that just-
SH: Right, right.
CW:... that just sets it in a very specific timeframe, you know, well before modern-day science. So anyway, you might remember that I ridiculously said at the beginning of 2026 how excited I was for Come Follow Me this year for Old Testament– precisely because I approach the Old Testament now as literature, as poetry. Spoiler, I’ve been very disappointed. I don’t know what I was thinking.
SH: That’s my next question. How’s that going for you?
CW: Not so great. I switched over to Gospel Principles because I just couldn’t, I just couldn’t do the– I just couldn’t. We’ll just leave it at that. I love my ward so much. They’re such good people. I just couldn’t do Old Testament if I can’t do it through a literature and through a poetry lens, so..
SH: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, ‘cause my question is how do you approach the Bible as literature in a church that insists that it’s literal? I mean, I guess that’s the whole point of this episode.
CW: That’s the whole point.
SH: But my husband just said to me the other day, see, he keeps wanting to go to gospel doctrine this year also because he is such a student of the Old Testament. And because I think his own understanding of it has evolved so [00:05:00] much through everything that he has has studied about it, and so he keeps wanting to go because he feels like he has, like, important insights to share that he really wants some of these ideas to be in the room.
CW: Oh, this touches my heart.
SH: I know. I know. And it never fails to be frustrating and disappointing to him. And he’s like, “I’m not appreciated among my own people.” And I’m like, “Of course you’re not.” But, you know, he turned to me the other night and he said, you know, he’s just been recovering from surgery, and I was out of town, and so he had the...he was faced with the decision of how much do I wanna go to church? Do I wanna go enough to get dressed and, like, get out of this chair and do it when I’m the only one there? And he wanted to because it was Old Testament. But he turned to me the other night and he said to me, “I realized that me wanting to go and share my ideas about the Old Testament, that’s just my ego talking. I don’t know that it’s really helpful to anyone in that room. It’s about my ego.”
CW: Yeah, but maybe can, maybe it can just be show and tell. Maybe it’s– maybe there’s a little ego, but wasn’t show and tell your favorite-
SH: Yes…
CW:...elementary school-
SH: It’s every kid’s favorite. Of course.
CW: Yeah.
SH: But the reason I’m telling that story is because I think that’s probably why I’m so excited about this episode. It’s just my ego, Cynthia.
CW: Oh. Oh, okay.
SH: Finally getting to talk about something that I, like, know anything about. So, like, I love approaching Bible as literature. This is in my wheelhouse, and I say bring it. But I also wanna say at the beginning that our church is still very much steeped in literalism.
Like, for all of the ways that we might be sort of moving into the 21st century and I’m not... We can... A whole other conversation is how many ways are we actually moving? But anyway- the Bible is, or scripture generally is not one of them, and I’m going to draw on two recent quotes from leaders to illustrate this.
The first comes from Jeffrey R. Holland, and I remember hearing this in real time, and I remember saying out loud, “Did he actually just say that?”
CW: Oh my.
SH: And here’s the sentence. This is from a conference talk in 2015, and where it’s called “Where Justice, Love, and Mercy Meet,” and it contains this sentence:
“There was an actual Adam and Eve who fell from an actual Eden with all the consequences that fall carried with it.”
CW: Oh my gosh.
SH: Okay, so that’s the first one. And then the second is from a conference talk by President Nelson that we’ve talked about more than once on this podcast. This comes from 2019, and the talk is called Come Follow Me, and President Nelson said this:
“Adam and Eve, Noah and his wife, Abraham and Sarah, Lehi and Sariah, and all other devoted disciples of Jesus Christ since the world was created have made the same covenants with God. They have received the same ordinances that we as members of the Lord’s restored church today have made, those covenants that we receive at baptism and in the temple.”
SH: So he’s saying these are literal people doing the literal same things that we literally are doing in 2026 when we go to the temple.
CW: That’s what he’s saying. Okay, that Jeffrey R. Holland quote, you actually texted it to me yesterday and you said, “I found it.”
SH: Yeah, I’d been looking for it for a while, ‘cause I knew it happened. I remember it happening.
CW: Right. But ever since you texted it to me yesterday, I’ve had a heavy heart. Like so heavy about this, like it almost makes me cry, because where is the space making in those teachings?
Like we, you and I like to use that metaphor, like they opened the window and fresh air came in. I just feel like-
SH: Right.
CW:...a vacuum was created, sucked all the air-
SH: All the air.
CW: ... all the space that you and I have tried so hard to just create over the years. Like, how many women have said to their spouses, to their mothers, or to their bishops, like, that they don’t believe in a historical whatever?
SH: Right. Right.
CW: So where does that leave them then? Where does that leave people when they don’t... Anyway, this isn’t our beliefs episode. Go all the way back to I don’t know, a couple months ago, our big ideas belief episode. I found this quote by Brian McLaren in Faith After Doubt, and here’s what he says about that.
“I was a very loyal person, respectful of authority, and always ready to give the benefit of the doubt to my tradition and its spokespeople. But over time, I not only lost confidence in many of the beliefs that gatekeepers required, I lost faith in the gatekeepers themselves and their whole system of using beliefs as markers of belonging. If I was going to be a person of faith, it couldn’t be in a community that was obsessed with policing my beliefs. I needed a different understanding of faith entirely as something beyond beliefs.” [00:10:00]
CW: And it’s that line about our beliefs being a marker of our belonging.
SH: Right.
CW: That’s the part that makes me want to cry heavy tears is, I just don’t know where that leaves people when they can’t force themselves to believe in the historicity of fill in the blank.
SH: Well, I mean, it’s not easy to go to Sunday school and to have a conversation about Noah’s Ark as if it’s a literal story. Like, like, that’s not easy for some people.
CW: No!
SH: So Brian McLaren is right. Though I feel like our gospel doctrine conversations are often defended by gatekeepers of belief and therefore of belonging. And that makes it really hard if you’re a person who is engaging with these teachings differently.
CW: Yeah. I just wanted to get that idea out there, right? We’re not gonna dive into beliefs too much more–-
SH: Nope.
CW: …except the idea of space making. I just want more space for everybody who sees things in all kinds of different ways. So anyway.
SH: Well, hopefully this conversation can do that.
CW: Hopefully. Hopefully. Okay. So let’s kinda ask a big question right up front, which is why is the idea of myth insulting? And I do think that’s the right word, insulting. Why is the idea of myth insulting to Latter-day Saints and actually a lot of other Christians?
And so I looked up on LDS, on lds.org I think I just looked up myth, and I saw lots of headlines that said things like myth versus reality or myth versus facts.
SH: Mm, okay.
CW: And so I realized doing that search, okay, they’re thinking about it different- I mean, and I used to think about it that way, right? I used to think when I heard the word myth, oh, we’re talking about the opposite of facts. We’re talking about also, like being lied to or tricked into believing something. And so I-
SH: Okay.
CW:... I get that it’s kind of a heavy that’s a heavy way that I looked at it and from what I could see on lds.org.
But surprise, the actual definition of myth is quite a bit more nuanced. So this is what I found. “A myth is a traditional, often sacred narrative explaining natural events, cultural practices, or early history, frequently involving supernatural beings or heroes. It serves as a pragmatic charter of belief and morality, not just an idle tale. It is also commonly used to describe a widely held but false belief.” So that last sentence is what I always thought it was. It was just-
SH: Right.
CW: ...talking about false things.
SH: Right.
CW: But the rest of that definition is really beautiful.
SH: Right. I mean, sounds like a description of scriptures, doesn’t it?
CW: Doesn’t it?
SH: I think it’s really important to separate those two meanings, though, right at the beginning of this conversation, because they’re very different uses of the word, and when we’re talking about the scriptures as myth, we’re not talking about the scriptures as not true.
CW: Right.
SH: That’s not what we’re saying, right? We’re talking about them functioning as mythic literature or poetry and doing for people the specific things that those literary forms can do.
One of my favorite faith writers, Christian Wiman says this:
“Christianity has been afflicted with theology. Afflicted with theology. It’s a theological religion, and I think that’s largely a mistake. I love theology, but I think most of what Christianity ought to be is a poetic religion. It teaches us a way and gives us models of experiencing the world and not directions for how to be in the world.”
CW: Okay. Can you even imagine that Christian Wiman quote being read in church? ‘Cause as soon as you read that, I’m like, “This is space making right here.”
SH: Right. And I also love that it gets to that shift to, like, experiential, the experiential side of religion-
CW: That’s exactly why. Yeah
SH: ... which is very much not the standard LDS approach that I have experienced to create a pun I didn’t really mean to there. But, yeah. This myth shifts us into this experiential space that is very different from a prescriptive commandment space, I guess, is not really the word I want, but it’ll function there.
CW: Well, but-
SH: But Mormons are not the only people, right?
CW: Oh, correct. Correct. Correct. In fact, I found some fun quotes from some other Christians who struggle with the idea of myth in religion as well. Here’s one from Pete Holmes, one of my favorite comedians from his book, Comedy Sex God. He said:
“My whole religious life, if someone had told me the Bible was a myth, I would have wanted to punch him in the face because myth had meant not true.I think that’s still what it means to most of us.”
So I’m raising my hand here, guilty. Like, that’s what I thought myth meant as well. From Pete Enns, from his book, The Bible Tells Me So, he said:
“Myth is a perfectly fine word, as long as we remember myth doesn’t mean [00:15:00] silly things we made up while on acid. Myths were stories that were part of ancient ways of describing ultimate reality, which is found not here and now, but on a higher and more primal plane of existence.”
So not only are we averse to myth-
SH: Right
CW:... our other Christian friends are, but I feel like, and I’m only speaking as a Latter-day Saint here, like, we go to really great lengths to, like, swing the pendulum all the way over straight to, like, knowledge and facts.
We wanna run away from myth so quickly that, you know, we end up having things like what Jeffrey R. Holland said “actual,” right? He kept using that word, “an actual Adam and Eve in an actual garden,” blah, blah, blah.
SH: Right. Right.
CW: So that’s just something that we have a tendency to do. In fact, I just heard a sacrament talk where the speaker said that when she was learning Portuguese on her mission, it was really helpful to her testimony because she said there are two words for the verb to know in Portuguese.
One, one of those verbs is just to be familiar with, the other one is to know, like a fact. And so she said in testimonies, they always used the second definition when they say to know-
SH: Of course
CW:... like to know a fact, right? Of course. So I have a lot of compassion for religious folks, in or out of our church, whoever, when the pendulum begins to swing from, like, “I know a fact” towards symbol, myth, and metaphor and just all the growing pains that are associated with that.
SH: Yeah, and, I mean, as you say that, I have a lot of compassion for Mormons specifically on this because is there anything that we want more desperately than for the Book of Mormon to be true? You’re putting true in air quotes there, but to be-
CW: Meaning to be historical.
SH:... literal, to be historical, yeah. We want it to be historical, and not only that, we want the whole origin story of it to be based in fact because it proves everything, right?
CW: Right.
SH: It’s the thing, it’s that linchpin on which everything else spins in our religion. It’s right at what’s the foundation of it’s all true or it’s all a lie. Fraudulent or true, right? Was Joseph Smith a real prophet? Well, then the Book of Mormon is real, and then it’s all real.
And so of course we are heavily invested because it functions the same for the Doctrine and Covenants and for the Pearl of Great Price. We are heavily invested in these things having literal meaning, not just in the documents themselves, but also in the way that they function within our whole religious identity, I guess.
CW: Identity. Nailed it.
SH: And yet, Cynthia, as a person whose education is in poetry, like this is what I went to college for, the beauty of it is that just a few words can embody a much wider and deeper meaning than those words, you know, possess on their face. Wouldn’t spiritual things more naturally lend themselves to that form than to just some kind of reporting of facts?
CW: Yeah.
SH: I mean, it just makes sense to me-
CW: I’ve never thought about it that way
SH: ...that we would be speaking in these other forms. I think we see some cultures embrace this plainly when they’re relying on literary forms to pass down information like origin stories. Think about some of the mythology that functions within Native American cultures, for instance.
CW: Yeah.
SH: I don’t think... i’m not sure the idea of did this ever happen would even be a weight-bearing idea-
CW: Aha.
SH: ...to those people, right? I don’t even think that would ever occur to them. And I was also thinking about this, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that when Jesus is specifically teaching in the New Testament, how is he doing that? He’s doing it using a storytelling form.
CW: Mmhmm. Parables.
SH: He’s using parables, right? Because this is a way to communicate information that makes it not only widely accessible, but it opens up a whole range of meaning and sort of access points into what is being taught.
CW: Yeah.
SH: It’s just a way more expansive form.
CW: You and I are doing the Living School right now at the Center for Action and Contemplation, and we have a bunch of friends who are also doing it with us, and so-
SH: Right.
CW: ...I was talking to some of them, and one of our friends, Brian, he said, “You know, if you’re talking about myth you gotta make sure you talk about the distinction,” kinda like what we were talking about earlier. You know, a story that is filled with meaning, which I think-
SH: Okay.
CW: ...is what our approach is. We’re trying to lean towards that versus, like, a lie we were tricked into believing. And he said, you know-
SH: Right
CW: ...instead of asking is it true or historical, ask is it useful? Is it useful?
SH: I love that phrase, a story that is filled with meaning. That’s such a simple way of saying it.
CW: Yeah. Yeah.
SH: Of describing what we want scriptures to be.
CW: Exactly.
SH: A story that’s filled with meaning. That’s the function that they’re intended to have for us.
CW: Our friend Shauna, she said that once she accepted myth in the scriptures, like particularly like the Noah and the ark story, she said she was able to feel much more [00:20:00] comfortable with God again, and that her relationship with God improved because, you know, not having to think that God drowned all of planet Earth-
SH: Right.
CW: ...and all the animals, like imagine that. All of a sudden she could see God as more loving again if she could see stories in the scripture as mythical stories.
SH: Yeah. Actually, the way that Shauna expresses that as sort of opening up, opening her up to relationship through some of these stories, it really reminds me of how changing the strict form of prayer for myself, right, erasing the way that I thought about prayer and reinventing it, changed it for me from being this sort of required performance that wasn’t doing anything to get me feeling closer to God, to actually being a vehicle for building a relationship with God.
—-
CW: Okay. Well, let’s talk a little bit, let’s kind of reframe myth. We’re already doing that a little bit, but I want it to be more palatable to us, right? So let’s talk about myth as poetry.
SH: Okay.
CW: Like, can we see myth as a synonym for poetry? Like, if we ... Like, kinda like how I started out this conversation saying, you know, I see the scripture, at least particularly the Old Testament, as Hebrew poetry. Like, I don’t know that-
SH: Right.
CW: ...that is as offensive to people as saying I see it as Hebrew myth or whatever. So maybe a softer word instead of myth could be poetry, but anyway.
SH: Can I ask you a question about that? I mean, I don’t-
CW: Sure.
SH: ...wanna interrupt you, but I was interested the first time you said it. When did that reframing happen for you and how? What’s the background on that a little bit?
CW: I don’t remember now. It was probably someone, some amazing biblical scholar that had said it, and I, and actually it might have been Rachel Held Evans now that I-
SH: Okay.
CW: ...think about it. I should have written it down because it was, there was a before and after moment for me, for that. So if we’re gonna talk about myth, and myth as poetry- I mean, we kind of have to go straight to Joseph Campbell, don’t we? Because he’s-
SH: I think we do.
CW: ...kind of like the big dude in charge when it comes to talking about myth. And I think a lot of us who are older are familiar with the PBS special that he did, like way back in the late ‘80s or early ‘90s called The Power of Myth.
It was pretty monumental. I’ve actually been digging ‘cause I want to watch it. I haven’t been able to find it yet, and I’m even a PBS member. I’m like, “Where can I watch The Power of Myth?” But anyway, there are transcripts that I’ve been able to find of what Joseph Campbell said in this series, and here’s one of them I wanna talk about.
He said, “Mythology is not a lie. Mythology is poetry. It is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth. Penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words, beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist wheel of becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim to what can be known but not told.”
SH: Oh, that last phrase, known but not told. It is such an apt description.
CW: I knew you would like that one.
SH: It’s like there’s that larger meaning that transcends the words that are on the page, right?
CW: Yeah. Yeah.
SH: That’s exactly what I was talking about, and of course he said it so much more beautifully and, like, right to the heart than I could get.
I wanna just hear lay out because I think it outlines clearly, like, what this kind of shift looks like and what it requires of us, which isn’t that much to lay out the four things that Joseph Campbell teaches us to look for within this form, okay?
And so the first is a cosmological story. So that’s a story that tells us how the universe got here and how the universe works. Can you find that in the Bible? I mean, that, that would be Genesis, right?
CW: There you go.
SH: We’ve got it right there, and also in our Pearl of Great Price. The second would be a societal or ethical story, and that’s a story that tells us how to create a sustainable culture, live in community, and get along.
CW: Wow.
SH: I mean, that’s basically the whole Book of Mormon. That,
CW: Yeah, I was just thinking that. Right? The whole Book of Mormon.
SH: That’s what the Book of Mormon is doing, right? Okay, the third one is a personal psychological story, and that’s a story that tells us how to live a life or gives us models to experience a life, kinda like what Christian Wiman was talking about.
And here you can think about, like, the hero’s journey archetype, right? This is someone-
CW: Yeah.
SH: ...who they leave their ordinary life, they encounter all kinds of trials and adventures, and then they return with wisdom to share with the community. And I mean, you can think Moses, you can think Abraham, you can think Joseph and his multicolored dream coat.
CW: Mmhmm.
SH: Anything that, you know, there are so many stories, and Jesus himself actually falls into the hero’s journey.
And then the fourth would be a mystical story, and that would be a story that tells us how to get beyond ourselves and connect with the divine which is kinda like what [00:25:00] that Joseph Campbell quote was talking about, where it was talking-
CW: Yeah.
SH: …about, like, blowing out the Buddhist wheel to get to the thing beyond it. And in the Bible you might think of, like, Ezekiel’s vision, Moses’ experience with the burning bush. Right? All of these things, it’s like the Bible is full of these mystical nuggets. Sometimes they’re not even whole stories. They’re small experiences embedded in larger stories.
CW: Right.
SH: But they’re like an attempt to talk about the things that we can’t say with words.
CW: Yes.
SH: And I feel like, the Bible is very often trying to do that, and that if we aren’t training our eyes to look for something beyond what’s right there on the page, like what’s on the page is a good starting point, but if we aren’t thinking about trying to go beyond that in some way to what is this story trying to say and why did they choose this way to say it, then we’re very often missing the important part of why we have that text.
CW: I had a gentleman in my ward recently say something about artists and the importance of artists and how artists kind of help us see the world through this different lens.
SH: Mmhmm.
CW: And I’m gonna say the same for poets. I think we need poet-- And I think we need more poets in our tradition. Like, maybe that would be a good start. That would be a good start if we had more poets who could, you know, like you just did with these four points from Joseph Campbell, kind of go through the importance of myth and in poetry and how it can teach us and I don’t know. My mind’s just exploding right now. It’s so good.
SH: I think, I think–no, I think music does it too in the same way-
CW: Oh, for sure. Oh, yeah
SH: ...that art or poetry does. Like, music does it. Like, it takes you right to this place. The lyrics of the song may not even be about the place that it’s taking you emotionally-
CW: Nice.
SH: ...like in the way-
CW: Right.
SH: ...that you experience that song, but it gets you to this place.
CW: Yeah.
SH: And I think that’s the way that we’re, that I’m hoping we can shift people toward thinking about engaging with the scriptures. Like, what if the scriptures were a song on the radio? What does that do? What does that song do for you?
CW: Nice. Love it. Okay, how about myth as symbol? Can we see, can we maybe replace the word myth if it’s ouchie for us as just talking about something as symbol?
SH: Okay.
CW: I mean, let’s just go straight to some, a couple of phrases from the temple ceremony pre-1990. These were removed, so I-
SH: I’m raising my hand because I remember them.
CW: Yeah. Okay, just two phrases. They used the phra- you should be reading this, not me, ‘cause you actually were there and remember it. But there were two phrases. One was simply figurative.
SH: Right.
CW: Right? So simply figurative so far as the man and woman are concerned, meaning Adam and Eve, and then the other one was they used the phrase symbolic representation.
SH: Mmhmm.
CW: So I just wanna know why were those phrases removed? Because I feel like we’ve only doubled down more on, like, literal historicity, whereas our temple ceremonies once upon a time were all about symbol and were trying to teach us that things were, quote, “simply figurative.” So-
SH: Right
CW: I don’t know. Maybe they took it out for time purposes, but I don’t know.
SH: We’re talking about one sentence, so, like, I am willing to think that there are other reasons that they took it out. I don’t wanna speculate about what those are, but I mean, I did open this episode with two quotes from relatively current general conference-
CW: Yeah.
SH: …talks that show the direction that we have moved in our narrative, I guess.
CW: Yeah.
SH: Or that some of our leaders have moved anyway.
CW: Well, you and I are in the cheap seats, so we have no idea why they specifically have made this move more towards literalism and away from figurative and symbolism. I don’t know. Cheap seaters. We don’t know those things, so.
SH: Nope.
CW: Okay. In some of our curriculum that we’ve been doing at the Center for Action and Contemplation, one of the fabulous teachers, Mike Petrow, he’s a big Origen of Alexandria fan, and so here’s a quote from him about myth. He said:
“Origen of Alexandria told us that there was a literal representation of scripture, but that it was destined to push us past the literal to the historical or the ethical teachings and to ask- What does this text mean for the person who wrote it or the people who wrote it and the people they wrote it to?
Then that pushes us past thinking about the original author and the original time and place. That lends us to a secondary or a tertiary lens. We can ask, what does it mean for me in my unique time and place? How am I every character in this story? And how is every character in this story living inside me?
You can read texts from the second and third century and even earlier than that where Christians are saying, “This is how you read scripture.” And then finally, of course, there’s the mystical layer. What is this telling me about the divine and my life [00:30:00] inside it and my transformation into it?”
CW: That’s a lot, but I remember when Mike said that, it just really gave me a new insight into myth and the importance of it.
SH: Yeah. It is a lot, but I love the way he laid that out in kind of three different ways to look at it, and I think that Latter-day Saints, that our approach often gets stuck in that secondary lens that he talks about. What does it mean for me in my unique time and place?
CW: Yeah.
SH: How am I every character in the story, right? Because he’s talking about likening the scriptures-
CW: Yes!
SH: ...to ourselves, right? Which I think Latter-day Saints excel at.
CW: Yes.
SH: We are maybe too good at that, and I say that, like, thinking about the parables as another literary form. Like, we frame the parables within our current experiences, which means that, like, Latter-day Saints even have trouble taking parables non-literally, don’t we?
CW: Yes.
SH: Like, we want talents to be actual talents. We want the 10 virgins to be about self-reliance. We’re convinced that tares are the people on social media who are critical of the church maybe, or who we don’t agree with. Like, I don’t think we ever get anywhere near that third, that mystical layer.
CW: that mystical, right.
SH: Right? That he– and I love the way he expressed it. What is this telling me about the divine and my life inside it and my transformation into it, right? I mean, but this means that with a lot of scripture, including some of Jesus’ seminal teachings, we’ve missed the entire point.
Likening them to ourselves did not serve us as a sole access point really for the scriptures. There has to be a broader method of reading and interpreting them than that.
—---
CW: Okay. One of our favorite phrases, weight-bearing. Myth to me is weight-bearing. Whereas I think for me, literalism ran its course, so therefore it’s not really weight-bearing for me anymore.
SH: I love the idea that myth is weight-bearing. Say more.
CW: Well, I need– I feel like if Latter-day Saints were gonna have another bumper sticker campaign, remember the families are forever? I think it could also be like literally or else. Like, I feel like– like, I feel like that would be a bumper sticker so many of us have, and I’ve just, I’ve moved beyond that. It doesn’t get my juices flowing anymore. I mean, I went, got to the end of my rope with literalism.
SH: Okay.
CW: So I don’t know, the literally or else, you know, the subheading to that would be like, you know, like you were saying earlier, the Gordon B. Hinckley line of it’s all true or it’s all a fraud, and that’s where my compassion-
SH: Right.
CW: ...comes in here, is because it is so ingrained in us that it’s all true or all a fraud that we really have a hard time making the jump to myth. And so-
SH: Right. Right.
CW: ...like knowing this about us, that’s why I was so hesitant to talk about, to have a whole episode about myth, Susan.
SH: Okay. Okay.
CW: Because life’s really hard.
SH: Yes.
CW: I am not here to squash anyone’s beliefs, and I’ve had two specific experiences I’m thinking of in the last couple of years where I let on that I think, like with one friend, that I don’t think the Book of Mormon is historical, and he almost lost it. And then another experience where I also let on with a friend that I didn’t think Adam and Eve were historical, and then she started crying. Like, both of these people whom I love dearly, they were rocked, and they had to push back. And I was totally fine with their pushback because like I said, like you believe what you need to believe and what gives you hope and helps you get up in the morning. I’m not here to squash that, and so that’s why I have felt like this-
SH: Right.
CW: …is such a tender topic.
SH: Okay but, I’m gonna push back on that for just a second.
CW: Oh, good. Do it.
SH: Because I feel like even the most, even the Latter-day Saints who need, who most need the scriptures to be literal, for whatever reason they have built their camp there-
CW: Okay.
SH: ...and that’s what, that’s how they need the scriptures to function. I would hope that in our conversation, even those members could see that what we are doing through approaching the scriptures in a different way is enlarging the pathways to belief.
CW: Okay.
SH: Right? We are offering a more varied and larger landscape from which to approach what we all agree are important, and I’m using air quotes, but true works, right?
CW: I love that.
SH: But if people can only think about accessing the truth of the scriptures through the narrow pathway of a literal interpretation, they have closed down a whole lot of opportunities to experience belief in them and find understanding and access the wisdom in them. They’ve closed off, I would say the majority of ways that the scriptures actually can function [00:35:00] to strengthen belief.
CW: Okay, I love that you’re bringing this up because just last week on our episode, you used two phrases. What was it? Like, line upon line, and then, like, light, more light added.
SH: Right. Further light and knowledge.
CW: Further light and knowledge. Thank you.
SH: Right.
CW: So maybe you’re right. Maybe our friends who are in the historical camp can see this as just line upon line. Like, I’m just, we’re just trying to add another lens.
SH: Yeah, we’re offering you more. We’re just offering you more.
CW: Love it.
SH: We’re not trying to take away from what has worked for you.
CW: Oh, I’m so glad you-
SH: ...or what is currently working for you.
CW: I’m so glad you brought this up. This makes me feel a little bit better because I really, I have really felt badly ever since I rocked the world of these two friends-
SH: Yeah, I understand that. Yeah.
CW: ...of mine. So, but again, we’re not alone in this because another quote here from biblical scholar Pete Enns, where he talks about in his book Curveball, how he came to the point where he’s like, “I’m not sure if Abraham was real.” Like, I think he was in Harvard by then. He’s in graduate school.
SH: Okay. Right.
CW: And he’s, like, in his first semester of doctoral studies, and he says he comes home, and he has this Maytag moment where he’s staring into the fridge. And he had the courage to say to himself, “I don’t think Abraham was a real person.” And then he said he instantly felt shame. And so here-
SH: Right
CW: ...here, I just wanna read this one direct quote about that. He said, “Was this scenario really my fault? If my notions about the Bible could evaporate like an August dew within a half semester of doctoral classes and doing some reading, then perhaps the weakness wasn’t in my spine. Like a frail plant that needs careful tending and constant protection from sun and wind, perhaps the real problem wasn’t me, but the fragile, unsustainable version of Christianity I had been told was my only option. Maybe the pressure of reading the Bible literally or else was the deeper problem, not my questioning it.”
SH: Yes. I feel this story in my bones, Cynthia.
CW: Same.
SH: Yeah, I talked a couple of episodes ago about coming to the realization that maybe my ideas about God needed to be yanked away from me in order to get more durable, more generative ideas about God. Like, the problem wasn’t in me. Maybe the problem was in the smallness of my ideas about God, right? But I was not gonna give up those fear-based ideas willingly. I was too afraid. I would never have pried my hands off those ideas willingly. It had to be pulled out from under me, and I think that’s, and that’s exactly what he’s describing there.
CW: Okay, but what you’re describing is a really painful process, and-
SH: I think it was for him.
CW: I think it was for him-
SH: I think that’s what he’s saying there.
CW: But does it always have to be this way? Does it always have to be-
SH: Yes.
CW: What? No, Susan.
SH: Yes.
CW: No.
SH: Yes, it does.
CW: I want the easy way.
SH: It has to because think about the story you were just telling us a second ago about just even opening up this notion with some friends of yours, and they’re, like, one of them started crying, I think you said, or maybe-
CW: Yeah. Yes.
SH: …they both did. But also, and you’re still feeling sad about it later, right? I mean, yes--
CW: Right.
SH: …this stuff is deep, and emotional, and fraught, and tangled in everything, like we always say. This is just one more aspect that operates that way. And also, I wanna say here that I think there are people who more naturally lean toward figurative interpretations of things. I’m talking about the English majors and the arty types of the world, right?
CW: For sure. For sure.
SH: People for whom, like, this broader view of scripture probably comes really quite naturally. People who would naturally prefer this and gravitate toward it. I think your experience with the shift away from literal scriptures may sort of depend on where you started with it. Like, are you a person who thinks in metaphors?
CW: Yeah. Yeah.
SH: Because there are people who move through the whole world thinking in metaphors, speaking in metaphors. This is just the way their brain operates and if you’re one of those people, then thinking of scriptures this way is not a big leap. It’s the obvious way to think about scriptures.
CW: Okay, well, I’m just gonna put my favorite friend who majored in English on the spot here and ask you to say more about that. Was, because of your background, because you literally have a degree in poetry, like was this an easier jump for you? Did you never have to make the jump ‘cause you were always in the metaphor camp? I don’t know. Say more.
SH: It did not feel like a jump to me. It felt like a huge relief to me to actually give up any kind of idea that anyone expected me to believe in this stuff literally.
CW: Okay. So just like our friend Shauna said, it was a relief for her.
SH: Yeah, absolutely a relief. Yeah.
CW: It was a relief for you.
SH: Yep, I could quit trying to-
CW: Get out.
SH: ...do something that my brain was just never gonna do.
CW: Oh my gosh.
SH: Look, I started writing poetry seriously, using air quotes again. I started- I, like, I [00:40:00] really started thinking of myself as a poet and sort of addressing the world with that pen in my hand in second grade.
CW: Get out.
SH: Like, this is, this comes very naturally to who I am and to how I process information. I’m a person who thinks in images. I’m a person who finds the best description and the shortest distance between two points to be a metaphor. So this stuff just like, it make, the scriptures make so much more sense to me from this standpoint than from a literal standpoint. But as you can imagine, this has made every every gospel doctrine class of my life a pretty uncomfortable chair-shifting exercise.
CW: Mmm.
SH: So, like, makes this easier for me, but regular life in the church has not been easier as a result of this. But I think it really does matter where you started with it.
CW: I love this so much. I love learning this about you, about your little second-grade self writing poetry, and also, Susan, you might as well be speaking a foreign language to me.
SH: I know, Cynthia.
CW: I have no idea what you’re talking about right now.
SH: No, but one of the magic things, the special sauce of this podcast, is that you and I grew up in the same church and did not have the same experience with it.
CW: Correct.
SH: Right? That’s what powers all of these conversations, and so I love that it powers this one.
CW: Alright. Wow, that just made my day. Okay, let’s move on here. Myth helps us sort what’s important and lasting and, like we were saying, what can bear the weight. Is it a weight-bearing question? That kind of a thing.
SH: Right. Right.
CW: Can it bear the weight of your messy life?
SH: Okay.
CW: And it’s been a while since we... I, we’re always throwing around that, you know, is it a weight-bearing question line that we got from Adam Miller. I wanna read the full quote just ‘cause it’s been a minute since-
SH: Okay
CW: ...probably several years since we’ve read it because it’s just so gorgeous the way he says it. Okay, so he had, Adam Miller wrote an essay called “The Body of Christ.” We will link to it, and this is what he says:
“Don’t ask the thin question, is the church true? Ask the thick question, is this the body of Christ? Is Christ manifest here? Is this thing alive? Does it bleed? This is a load-bearing question. This is a question properly fitted by Christ himself to address the existential burn that compels its asking. If your life itself depends on the question, then ask a question that is rich enough to cover the whole rich span of that messy, unfinished, broken, vulnerable life.”
SH: Mmm.
CW: So according to Adam Miller, and I have adopted this in my life ever since I read that essay of his, it’s probably been seven, eight, 10 years ago, like, I get to decide what is and isn’t a weight-bearing question. So ask better questions that can bear the weight of a messy life.
SH: Right. Right.
CW: So good.
SH: Ask living questions. I love the way he says, “Is this thing alive?”
CW: Yes.
SH: “Does it bleed?” I love it. I just love that approach. Look, more than getting to decide what is a weight-bearing question, I think we’re made to decide that because we find out from our lives what bears weight and what doesn’t, right?
CW: Mmhmm.
SH: We have talked so many times about experience coming in and crashing into all of your ideas and suddenly the ground’s gone out from under you on this stuff. I feel like our experience is a sorting mechanism for what matters and what doesn’t. Like, that’s the whole point of it. But that being said, a whole lot of misery happens in that space in between, right? Where your experience is insisting that some point of dogma doesn’t matter.
You can hang in that space for a long time trying to reconcile those two things. For most Latter-day Saints, once your experience starts to contradict your dogma, the voices in your head are gonna insist that dogma has to matter-
CW: Yes.
SH: …more than your reality does, right?
CW: Yes.
SH: And navigating that hurdle, like getting over that is hard, hard, hard stuff. That’s the work of deconstruction, really, in a nutshell. That’s what we’re trying to navigate.
CW: For sure.
SH: So I think we’re made to do that. I’m glad that’s become an animating question, actually, in your spiritual life. Is it weight-bearing?
CW: Well, and when I ask that question, what is weight-bearing for me? What develops my faith? Well, developing faith or faithing, ‘cause you and I like to turn faith into a verb.
SH: Faithing.
CW: Right?
SH: Sharon Salzberg.
CW: Yeah. It’s a load-bearing question for me. And I’ve been reading these gorgeous essays from Frances Lee Menlove in her book, The Challenge...well, she has a book called The Challenge of Honesty: Essays for Latter-day Saints, and in one of these essays she said this:
“Faith means fidelity to God, faithfulness to God, not to statements about God. I was impressed by an answer given by Stephen Shields at a recent Sunstone symposium when he was asked if he believed in the Book of Mormon. His reply embodied faith as fidelitas. ‘I don’t believe in any book. I believe in the God to whom the Book of Mormon points.’”
[00:45:00]
SH: Mm mm mm!
CW: I knew you would like that line, Susan.
SH: So good.
CW: Right?
SH: Yes. Yes. Why is this so hard? Oh my gosh, that’s gorgeous. That’s gorgeous. Okay, that makes me think of something else that I just was reading about, which is Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. Martin Buber was a 20th century philosopher. Actually, died in 1965. But he has some magnificent writings where he differentiates between faith, trust–right–fidelitas, and belief. Okay?
CW: Oh, I’m here for that.
SH: So he thinks about it. All right, okay. He says, “Faith is, it’s trust in,” right? So trust is trust in, and belief is belief that.
CW: Oh, yeah.
SH: Now think about that for a second. Trust in versus belief that. Because the first of those is about relationship.
CW: Oh my gosh, here we go again. Relationship.
SH: And the second is what we think about something.
CW: Yeah.
SH: Well, which are we seeking with God? Does it matter that we have relationship with God, or does it matter what we think about God? Like, where-
CW: Nice.
SH: ...where is the durable place to pitch your tent, right? And he uses some fantastic illustrations for this. One is he talks about how Moses’ encounter with the burning bush is not about content. It’s not that Moses came away knowing everything about God. It wasn’t about that, right? It was about presence with God.
CW: Gorgeous.
SH: Right? So, so, so gorgeous. Here’s what... I just wanna read a small quote from the book. This actually comes from John Philip Newell, who is sort of laying out the teachings of Martin Buber in this book. And I will link to the book where it is, but anyway, He says this, “The guiding counsel of God,” says Buber, “is simply the divine presence communicating itself directly to the pure in heart. Revelation does not consist of the dispensing of religious commandments from above that are to be etched forever into stone and followed meticulously. Rather, revelation consists of encounter, and the presence itself,” says Buber, “acts as counsel.”
Experiencing God, being with God is where you learn how to, how God wants you to become and act and treat people, right?
CW: Yeah.
SH: It has to be based in experience.
CW: Yep.
SH: Seeking presence with rather than information about is, like, an entirely different way to approach scripture. I think we often go to scripture looking for information about– information about God, information about history, you know, information about the story that we’re reading. Not experiencing the story itself, like what can we learn about it, right? But seeking presence. Myth helps us actually get closer to presence, right?
CW: Yes.
SH: Because it gets us closer to that thing that we can’t describe- Yes ... with words. Myth makes the Bible a song that takes you directly to the experience, right? It doesn’t matter what the song is about. You, it can get you straight there.
A German pastor once asked Martin Buber if he believed in the divine, and he said, “If to believe in God means to be able to talk about God in the third person, then I do not believe in God. But if to believe in God means to be able to talk to God, then I do believe in God.”
CW: Susan, sometimes my just word for the day, ‘cause I’m a terrible meditator, right? You and I have–we’ve been talking so much–
SH: You’re way ahead of me, Cynthia.
CW: Right?
SH: Way ahead.
CW: I’m so terrible at meditating, so I have one word, and my word lately has been presence. So you reading all this good, juicy stuff, I’m just sitting here fist bumping because, well, it’s like me finally realizing, like, communing versus communicating, right? Like, communicating with God-
SH: Right.
CW: ...dang it, that is hard for me. But communing, sitting under my trees, has filled my soul. It is load-bearing. I’m gonna, I’m gonna go straight to load-bearing. Like, the presence, just being who I am, being in presence, being in communion with God is load-bearing for me.
SH: So would it have helped you earlier in your life? I mean, I’m just asking this because I’m curious to know, would it have helped you to approach the scriptures with the idea of “presence with” rather than “information about”?
CW: I mean, I would have liked--
SH: Like, would that have been a meaningful shift for you?
CW: I would have liked someone to nod to it at least, to nod presence, so that it could have been, like, a tool in my belt when I needed it. But I don’t think it could have been a tool I regularly used. This is where the ouchy part comes in. This is the part where I was like, “Does it have to be ouchy?” And you’re like, “Yes, it does.”
SH: Yes.
CW: Well, for me, [00:50:00] switching to presence, I only got there kicking and screaming.
SH: Hey, I’m still not there. I’m still not there with presence.
CW: I don’t know. You’re the poet.
SH: Like, I’m actively... Yeah, but you know what? See, this just tells you that people are complicated, Cynthia.
CW: Okay. Okay.
SH: And I feel like being a Latter-day Saint, growing up approaching spiritual things through the Latter-day Saint lens really, really complicated my ability to find divinity in presence.
CW: Okay, that makes me feel better, just knowing that even for someone like you who lives in this, like, poetical, imaginative... I don’t even know if you’d- you would use the word imaginative realm, but I love knowing that it was even hard for you, ‘cause that’s-
SH: Oh, I can do it with literature, but doing it with God required me to reinvent God, you see?
CW: Ah okay. Okay.
SH: And that’s just huge. That’s just huge.
CW: Okay.
SH: So I’m not trying to downplay how big a deal any of this is, or how much it requires us to get out of the way, really-
CW: Nice.
SH: ...to get there. Like, there’s a lot to sort through.
CW: Thank you for making me feel better.
SH: So, like, the Bible was easy for me to make that transition with, but, like, God-
CW: Okay.
SH: …God’s self, that’s way bigger. But even a small word like presence I feel like I’m gonna be learning that and what it can mean and how it can function, like, for the rest of my life. This is a life lesson and I ain’t got it yet.
—--
CW: Moving along, I think myth allows wisdom to be the main thing.
SH: Beautiful.
CW: And here’s what Pete Enns-
SH: Beautiful.
CW: ...has said about that. I absolutely love his book, I’ve read it several times, How the Bible Actually Works. And I have to read the whole subtitle, “In which I explain how an ancient, ambiguous, and diverse book leads us to wisdom rather than answers, and why that’s great news.”
SH: So good. So, one of the best titles ever.
CW: Right. That’s such a ridiculously long title, and yet I felt like, okay, I could see why his editor was like, “You need a really long title,” because the whole point of that book is to have wisdom be the main thing. If you’re gonna be a Bible-
SH: Right.
CW: ...reading people, and for us, scripture reading people ‘cause we got way more than the Bible, like wisdom has to be the main thing. Anyway, here’s what Pete Enns said about that. He said:
“I still understand that seeing the Bible this way as a book of wisdom, might cause some a bit of concern. I get it. After all, if the Bible is God’s word to us but isn’t clear and direct, what good is it? If we see the Bible as a book of wisdom that makes us figure things out rather than dispensing unambiguous divine instructions shaped for our eyes and ears it may seem like we’re caving into a less than view of the Bible that isn’t of much practical use for anyone. A Plan B because Plan A unraveled.”
CW: Gosh, that sounds familiar. He goes on:
“But again, nothing could be farther from the truth. Wisdom is Plan A.”
SH: Yes. I mean, it’s so funny to feel to have to say that about the Bible, right?
CW: I know. That’s what I thought.
SH: Wisdom would be Plan A. And yet-
CW: That’s what I thought
SH: ...this just makes so much sense to me. I love the way he just, I love the way he articulated that, and that I’d never thought of it that way, and that when I hear it, it sounds-
CW: Right?
SH: ...so ridiculous, right? It’s like the whole nature of life is that we’re here to figure things out, isn’t it? So like why wouldn’t I expect a book of wisdom, a book of figuring out, rather than a book of instructions, from the God who is supposed to have set up this whole thing? Of course that God would give me a figuring out book.
CW: Yeah.
SH: It’s what I’m, it’s what I’m here to- I’m being proved herewith, right? So in order to study for that test-
CW: Nice.
SH: …a wisdom book is gonna do a lot more for me than a handbook.
CW: Okay, that makes me happy you had the reaction to that quote that I did, ‘cause I thought it was just me. I thought I was the only one having this duh moment.
SH: No, it’s so good.
CW: That, yeah. Exactly.
SH: It’s so good. And the duh is what makes it so good.
CW: Right. The duh is what makes it so good. But I think this is why you and I specifically, why we have been so interested, I don’t know, like two podcast seasons now, in mysticism. And why we can’t get enough of it, right? We read Ordinary Mysticism by-
SH: Right. Mirabai Starr.
CW: By Mirabai Starr. Thank you. I mean, just we’ve had episodes on mysticism, and so yeah, Pete Enns, thank you for pointing out the duh moment for me. Like, books of instruction, they just, they aren’t as interesting to me-
SH: Right.
CW: ...anymore. And I was watching one of Brittney Hartley’s YouTube videos. My gosh, that woman’s on fire. I just love her. And she was talking about mystics, and she said this: “Mystics don’t take their texts as if they are literal. They are just playgrounds and mirrors with which to play. And that’s when the world opened up for me again. I could let go of having to claim truth. I just get to explore.”[00:55:00]
SH: Beautiful.
CW: I know. I just really loved that, the idea of exploring. You know, I don’t know that I would have necessarily used that word, but for Brittney, I know that’s been really resonant for her. So I think, like, for me, reading sacred texts, poetry, writings of the mystics h- for me, has been wisdom development. Like, the wisdom was the plan A, like, like Pete Enns was saying. And so I will happily trade, what was his phrase? Unambiguous divine instruction. I will happily trade that in, thank you very much, for, like, a more explorative, playful, mystical lens every day of the week.
SH: I love that you describe it as wisdom development. I feel like it means sacred texts are finally functioning in the way that-
CW: The way they should.
SH: ...they’re meant to function.
CW: Yeah.
SH: Yeah. Yeah. That’s great.
CW: Nice. Okay, Susan, let’s get really specific about some very specific scripture stories, ‘cause this is the part that makes me, like, rub my hands together and go, “Aha, here we go.” Because for a second, let’s talk about Noah’s Ark.
SH: Okay.
CW: And our friend Shauna-
SH: I mean, that’s an easy one to pick on, right?
CW: It is an easy one. It’s a really-
SH: Yeah.
CW: …it’s probably the easiest one to–this is low-hanging fruit. But-
SH: Right.
CW: ...in talking to our friends about myth, our friend Shauna, I’m gonna talk a little bit about her again, is she is a nurse, and she’ll–she actually went around and, like, interviewed all her coworkers and asked them if they thought the flood was literal or if it was myth and symbol. And she said, you know, no surprise, it fell along religious lines. She said that all the Latter-day Saints said it was a, there was a literal flood, and then everybody else was like, “Of course not. It’s myth and symbol.” So, you know.
SH: Interesting.
CW: I know. Don’t have to be too surprised about that. And like I already said, like, Shauna said that, like, once she could accept the myth of the flood story, it became easier to love God again because, Susan, who wants to believe in a God that drowns all the cute little animals, all the puppies, all the bears, you know, and all the people? Like, that’s just really icky and painful.
SH: Yeah. God as a drowner of puppies is about as icky and painful as it gets.
CW: It’s awful.
SH: I want no part of that God. Anyway I, yeah, as she describes that though I’m thinking about a line from Carmen Acevedo Butcher who says that “myths are messy.” That’s how she describes them. And you know what? Myths are pretty, are often full of pretty terrible things too, but it makes sense because all the meaningful parts of life are messy, you know? Birth, family, love, sex, friendships, creativity. It’s the human mess. That is what we’re doing here, right? So wouldn’t our wisdom stories need to be messy in order to convey the kind of meaning that we need to navigate that mess? Like, we need the icky and painful, I feel like-
CW: Yeah, we do.
SH: ...to be able to get where we need to from, with these stories.
CW: Okay, so you were just quoting Carmen Acevedo Butcher. I’m gonna quote a little bit, or tell a little bit about Jennifer Tompos. She’s another one of the instructors. We’re just going through all of our favorite teachers at the Center for Action and Contemplation today. Anyway, she said she remembers, I think she was a kid and she’s in a Sunday school class, and they’re doing the Noah’s Ark story and she asks the teacher, “So how long do you think it took for all of the bodies to sink?” Like, there are millions of dead people floating, right? How long-
SH: Wow.
CW: And yeah.
SH: That’s quite an image.
CW: The teacher was not gonna go there, and I thought, yeah, if you’re gonna take everything literally, then I think that’s a very fair question actually.
SH: It’s a fair question. Okay, but I love this example for two reasons that I wanna talk about, and the first is that kids are very literal thinkers, right? So we should anticipate that they’re gonna try to make sense of things that don’t make sense.
CW: Right.
SH: They’re gonna try to make literal sense of things with what the other things that they know and understand. And that’s confusing for them because it’s generally an authority figure of some kind who’s telling the story, right? So kids feel like they have a responsibility to believe it. So I can think of little Jennifer sitting in her chair thinking, “Wait a minute, my Sunday school teacher is telling me this. I’m, I’ve gotta get to a way to believe what the teacher’s saying.” But kids are also imaginative thinkers, right? They have not been pressured by the world to shut their imaginations down yet.
CW: True.
SH: That’s like often a kid’s first line of thinking.
CW: Oh, absolutely.
SH: And so, like, they have no problem letting their minds off leash in the way that, that you or I might struggle with that sometimes. Yes. So, like, what better time in life to teach scripture as myth with all the power inherent in that form than during childhood-
CW: Oh, yeah.
SH: …when kids’ brains are already working that way. A kid is not gonna have trouble with that story as a myth, so I just put [01:00:00] that out there. The second thing I love about that example is that kids are not afraid to ask big questions.
CW: No, they’re not.
SH: Exhibit A. And if a teaching story, which I think we can all agree that the scriptures, whatever else they are, they’re meant to be whether we take them literally or not, a teaching story, if a teaching story doesn’t inspire big questions, then it’s not worth much from a teaching standpoint, is it?
CW: I agree.
SH: But as adults, we have learned through things like shame and fear and peer pressure and the other weapons that adults use against each other, we’ve learned not to ask big, obnoxious questions like that. Like, we have learned not to put authority figures, including the scriptures, on the spot.
CW: That makes sense.
SH: That is frowned upon, right?
CW: Right? Why Pete Enns said he felt shame having this Maytag moment.
SH: Yes, that was...that’s the first emotion that came to him, was shame. Like, asking big hole-poking questions is a really quick way to get shown out of the group in, like, a church group. But if we can’t put that kind of pressure on the scriptures, and if we can’t put that pressure on the scriptures in our religious community, then, like, what good are the scriptures and what good is the community?
CW: Yes, you said it. You said it.
SH: Like, why are we having gospel doctrine?
CW: Right.
SH: What would be the point of it if this book can’t stand our scrutiny?
CW: I wish that could be part of our religious community.
SH: I wish it could too, man. We’re trying to work through some stuff. We’re trying to work through some s*** here, Cynthia.
CW: Yeah.
SH: And, like, if we can’t do it with the people who are similarly invested in the things that we love and value, like, well, what are we even doing?
CW: What are we even doing? Well, can we see... I mean, if we’re gonna... The story of Noah’s Ark, one of the main benefits, I think, of seeing it as a mythical story is it could be a cautionary tale to us-
SH: Okay.
CW: If we could look at it that way. And back to Mike Petrow, he said, “When I looked at the story of Noah with fresh eyes, I thought, oh my, this is a story of genocide where the entire human race is wiped out indiscriminately. Noah gets off the boat, invents alcohol to get drunk and passes out because he has such unbelievable survivor’s guilt and PTSD over the whole thing. And then even God looks at the situation and says, ‘Oof, that was a really bad mistake. I’m not gonna do that again.’”
SH: Wow.
CW: He goes on to say, “I had been taught all these theological conundrums, like people saying, ‘Does God change God’s mind or not?’ Instead of realizing, no, this is a cautionary tale. When people say, ‘Why doesn’t God punish the bad people?’ Well, this is what that would look like, and it’s an unmitigated disaster.”
SH: Love it.
CW: And when I heard him talk about Noah’s Ark reframed as a cautionary tale because even God regrets having done it, which is why he gives us the rainbow and everything-
SH: Right, right.
CW: I’m like, this is a way more helpful lens that I wish I had in my tool belt. Like I said, I may not have been able to completely use it consistently, but it would’ve been nice to have been taught that. But I love the idea of the story of Noah being a cautionary tale. Jennifer Tompos said, “These mythological stories can inspire us, but they also can warn us, and it creates this mechanism for social learning. We can pass on collective societal learning through these stories.” And I think isn’t that the whole point of, like, oral tradition was to kind of pass on this wisdom?
SH: Right. Absolutely.
CW: Like, collect it all and continue to pass it on so that each generation isn’t, like, starting from scratch. So, I mean, I don’t know. I’m just sitting here after I’ve just read these two examples thinking, like, “Why was I never taught this angle that scripture is a cautionary tale?” I just-- I’ve heard that some-- You’ve probably heard the phrase too, like, some scripture stories are descriptive, not prescriptive.
SH: Right.
CW: So I guess that’s something. Like, that was part of the idea of scripture being a cautionary tale.
SH: Yeah. Well, and I like that distinction between descriptive and prescriptive, but I didn’t ever feel like I was meant to draw my own conclusions, I guess-
CW: Right.
SH: ...as a Latter-day Saint. I feel like the conclusions were generally given to me. But of course, the scriptures are full of cautionary tales, right? We see the perils of things like lack of faith or empty faith. We see pride, greed, complacency, wealth, testing God, you know, on and on. We get cautionary tales about all of these things.
But I think it gets really interesting when you start approaching them from the idea that they might be a cautionary tale rather than a prescriptive story. Like, for instance the one that I thought of immediately was, like, did Abraham pass the test in being willing to sacrifice his son Isaac, or is that story actually a cautionary tale? And if it is, what might the caution be?
CW: Nice.
SH: Like, could it be a caution against extremism or blind obedience, maybe? And then it gets even more interesting because then it turns out that God provides his own sacrifice in that story, right? At the end, God comes in and provides the sacrifice. And so, like, that adds a whole other dimension from which to [01:05:00] consider what we’re supposed to learn from it.
CW: Wow.
SH: But in my study of that story, I didn’t ever feel like I was encouraged to consider all the angles from which it might be a cautionary tale.
CW: So good. Okay. Okay, so if you’re the one who opened the door there with Abraham being a cautionary tale, so I would think, don’t you think Nephi killing Laban-
SH: Yes, another one.
CW: We have often drawn that-
SH: Yes.
CW: Right? We call Nephi having to kill Laban an Abrahamic test as well.
SH: Right. Right.
CW: And Eugene England has a whole essay about this called Why Nephi Killed Laban: Reflections on the Truth of the Book of Mormon. And I wish we could talk more about this, but just one, one quick thing he said about this, he said, “Or could it be (and this is what, finally, I believe myself) …as others have suggested, God was both teaching and helping Nephi to develop through this Abrahamic test into a servant and leader who could be obedient, but that God was also teaching Nephi and us the costs and limits of such obedience.”
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CW: Okay, just for a quick second as we’re wrapping up this episode can we talk about the fact, ‘cause I think it is a fact, that our scriptures were oral long before they were written down? And we recently just talked about this on our Mailbag Mayhem episode, that biblical scholars agree that the four Gospels were not written down until I think, like, 30 years, and, like, the Gospel of John not until, like, 70 years after-
SH: Right.
CW: …Christ had died. And you said something on that episode, like, there were no tape recorders, right, when Jesus was alive. Like, there, there-
SH: Right.
CW: ...were no tape recorders or, I mean, obviously. And then we also mentioned, we talked about, like, the D&C Jesus, our Doctrine and Covenants Jesus, and how he’s portrayed there.
And so, like, even if you are a true believer that Joseph had visions with Jesus, there also wasn’t a tape recorder there during these visions. So everything that we have written down in the Doctrine and Covenants as well was being interpreted and written down by Joseph or a scribe through their own lens as well.
SH: Right.
CW: And so I mean, we’ve said this a million times, like, there have always been human fingerprints on everything that we call scripture or any word that comes out of a prophet’s mouth or whatever. Like, everything has human fingerprints. And I know we love to quote that Richard Rohr line, we throw it around all the time, of “literalism is the lowest form of meaning”, but I think it’s important to read the full context of that Richard Rohr quote here.
And we haven’t, I don’t think we’ve read this full quote since we had that episode, “Do I Literally Have to Believe That” with Kajsa, and here’s the full quote. Richard says:
“The New Testament was written in Greek, a language which Jesus didn’t understand and was composed 30 to 70 years after Jesus’ death. We can conclude that the exact words of Jesus were apparently not that important for the Holy Spirit or for us. We have only a few snippets of Jesus’ actual words in his native Aramaic. This should keep us all humble and searching for our own experience of the risen Christ instead of arguing over Greek verbs and tenses. Literalism is invariably the lowest and least level of meaning.”
So I love that, that-
SH: Good stuff.
CW: ...you know, the idea of, like, myth can help us as Richard Rohr said, in searching for our own experience.
SH: I love that, too. Yeah, and I love that you brought up our scriptures originating in an oral tradition, because I feel like myth is very often that way as I mentioned with some of the myths of indigenous cultures have operated that way. I think Greek myth obviously probably operated that way and has throughout time. Like, these are stories that people tell each other or have told each other first and foremost. Jesus’ parables, right?
CW: Mmhmm.
SH: We’re talking about an oral tradition there. This is what he was doing. He was telling stories. So this is what people do, and this is kind of how these stories develop. I would say that a written version of these stories would be, like, the secondary form through which they come to us, not the primary form.
CW: Yeah.
SH: And I feel like that’s important because I feel like myth functions in sort of an opposite way of a factual story or a prescriptive story. Like, a myth is like the advice that your elders are giving you around the fire, right?
CW: Mm, Nice.
SH: Myth is a thing that lays out a problem or a life experience for us, and then asks us to assign meaning to the parts of it or to decipher how the wisdom of the story might apply to us. And how do we do that? Well, we do that by looking at our own experience. [01:10:00] So I love that Richard Rohr says this should keep us searching for our own experience- You know, instead of arguing over the thing, parts of speech that are being used to tell the story.
CW: Exactly.
SH: I feel like the oral tradition is an important thing to keep in mind as we approach the Bible. We don’t often think of it that way but I feel like it is important.
CW: Totally. All right, let’s give the last word to Rachel Held Evans, and in her book, Inspired, she said, “It is no more beneath God to speak to us using poetry, proverb, letters, and legend than it is for a mother to read storybooks to her daughter at bedtime. This is who God is. This is what God does.”
SH: It almost takes my breath away to think that someone could think it would be beneath God-
CW: Right.
SH: ...to speak to us using these forms, right? Our God is a God of creation, so like it is exactly what I would expect. When I would envision God communicating, these higher forms I’m gonna say, and that shows my bias toward them, are what I would expect. Like I’d be much more surprised if such a God sent us a handbook. How disappointing would that be?
CW: Well, you’re in good company with Rachel Held Evans, ‘cause that’s what she thought as well.
SH: No one I’d rather be in company with than RHE, but also with you, Cynthia. Thank you so much for this conversation. I’ve loved every second.
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Voicemail 1: Hi. I just wanted to respond with my thoughts about women being able to serve as Sunday School presidents. Maybe I’m just more cynical, but I do think that it might be more of a PR move, like Cynthia and Susan were saying, that it’s to help counter some of the pushback against the recent appointment of a controversial apostle, or the focus and emphasis on people getting married younger and having more children.
Or maybe it’s because they knew they were going to be changing the Sunday schedule, it’s a structural move, or about numbers. Either way, it is more hurtful, I think, than positive, and I think the main reason for that is because they did use the language that they determined this. So previously we weren’t determined worthy for whatever reason, and who knows what they still have determined we’re not worthy to do right now.
It just feels like it’s a very honest declaration of how little they think of women, and honestly kind of feels like a power play to tell the world, to tell the church, to tell women of the church that this wasn’t revelation from God, this was their decision. They’re the ones who make these decisions, and they’re the ones deciding what women get to do and what they’re worthy and able to do.
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Voicemail 2: Hi, Susan and Cynthia. I was just leaving a message about the announcement yesterday that women can now serve in Sunday school presidencies, and I read so many comments online where people were celebrating that this is such a wonderful thing, and I just found myself yesterday feeling so mad and angry. I was just really frustrated.
Number one, we all know the Sunday school presidency doesn’t do anything anyway, right? Like, what do they do? But also just the fact that, you know, I’m just wondering when women will be treated as partners to men in this church. And this just feels like throwing women a breadcrumb of, you know, you can do this.
Now you’re allowed to do that. Now women are allowed to do this. It’s like, when are we going to be equal partners? There’s nowhere else in my life but in the church where men and women are not equals. And I’m just so tired of it. It’s just worn me down. So I don’t know if anybody else was feeling yesterday the same way I was, but I was mad. I was mad. And I want more than a breadcrumb. That’s all.
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