I love the arrival of a parcel in the post. Even more so when the parcel is a book. The book arriving in the post today is The Cry For Myth by Rollo May (1909 – 1994). One of my favourite books of his is The Courage To Create – he is an existentialist psychologist and well worth reading. In The Cry For Myth he is making a case for the need to embrace our myths as frameworks for helping us find meaning as human beings in what can often feel like a meaningless world;

A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence.

He laments the fact that myth has become synonymous with falsehood saying

There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular – though profoundly mistaken – definition of myth as falsehood

This is especially interesting to me as I contemplate a switch in my career as a priest as I feel strongly that the Christian myths are (in Tillich’s words) stories that cannot be proved but yet believed. The great themes of life, death and rebirth or resurrection are key to our making some sense of our existence and they become devalued if we attempt to ‘prove’ them or if we simply dismiss them as falsehoods. I am optimistic that a post modern world may yet reclaim the myths that the modern world dumped out of the bath along with the baby believing that only that which can be proved can be believed.