Bonny Joe Campbell

When I got sober and started trying to have some kind of spirituality in my life, I turned to the works of Joseph Campbell, specifically his The Masks of God series, which was way over my head. So I backed off a little and tried again with The Power of Myth which proved to be a much better introduction. In time, I read all of Campbell’s books as well as those of many of his contemporaries and fellow travelers. Campbell provided me with a way into myth, which is a very different kind of writing than any other.

Campbell emphasized the metaphorical nature of myth, always stressing that the angels and demons, gods and monsters, of myths represented energies within human beings. He did not deny the existence of spiritual forces outside of human beings — in fact, he said there were surely mysterious forces working behind and in our experience of reality — but he focused more on how myth could help people learn about their own psyches than how they could help people relate to actual entities in the ether. I wouldn’t say that I ever agreed completely with Campbell on every point, but I am definitely indebted to him for showing me how to read myths.

I’ve been listening to The Bible Project podcast lately. They did a long series on the identity of God, which went into the ways God is presented in the OT, which included a lot of talk about the “elohim” which might refer to God or to the “sons of God”, which are similar to God, but not God, and also similar to, but not, the “Son of God” who is Jesus of Nazareth. Then there was some talk about the “glory of God”, the “name of God” and the “angel of God”, all of which are mentioned in the Bible as attributes of God that are part of God, but also, at times, distinct from God. Tim and John, hosts of the podcast, seemed to be struggling to understand and articulate what all these things meant, while also trying to put them into the context of monotheism. I found that I was not having the same difficulty that they seemed to be having and at some point I thought, “Oh, it’s like Hinduism.”

Many people think of Hinduism as a polytheistic religion, but it’s actually monotheistic because all the gods of Hinduism are expressions of Brahma, who is the inconceivable source of everything. Brahma, the ultimate being, has no attributes, and is not personal. All of the other Hindu gods are parts of Brahma, which are endowed by worshipers with attributes, and worshiped as entities on their own, by people who recognize that the god they’re worshiping is a representation of another thing which is unknowable. Then, some of the gods are depicted as taking on physical forms in order to enter into the field of time and space — so Krishna is a personification of Vishnu who is a representation of Brahma. And all of these gods can be understood separately, but also as one thing, because they don’t have to fit into the field of physical reality. The gods are not subject to any of the forms of reality. Then you throw in that there actually isn’t a “Hinduism” — that’s the term that the colonial British used to refer to “the religions of the brown people in this part of south Asia that we’ve taken over” and it starts to actually make sense in a way — as above, so below.

So I have a way of fitting all the apparently weird names and terms, aspects and angels, that the Bible talks about as being both God and distinct from God into my brain without much trouble. I’m not saying that Hinduism and Christianity are the same, or that Yahweh and Brahma are the same — I’m also not saying they’re not — I’m just saying that learning about Hinduism, with some guidance from Joseph Campbell, makes it not difficult for me to think about some details in the Bible. In the same way, the Bhagavad Gita, an important poetic work within Hinduism, helped me to understand the book of Job.

At some point, reading various different myths from various different world religions, I got comfortable with paradoxes. I started thinking of paradoxes as indications that I was on the right path — that if a religious concept seemed to make total sense, then I must have missed something.

Religions are concerned with things that are outside of and of a different nature, or essence, than anything we will ever encounter in our lives. Expecting them to make “sense” in some logical way, is just plain wrong. It won’t happen that way. And there is no need for it to.

“God” is not God. “God” is a clumsy term that we use, in English, to refer to something that can’t be named or comprehended. God is eternal and infinite — we are temporal and finite. All the debates and schisms in Christian history about the nature of God or how many angels can dance on a pinhead were based on a fundamental failure to grasp this point.

I am committed to Christianity. That is the path I am on because that is the path that I was directed to follow by the inconceivable cosmic entity that my society calls “God”. I will stay on this path unless/until God tells me to do something else. It does not follow that I believe that people who are on different paths are wrong. Maybe they are — that’s between them and God, or Vishnu or Wakan Tanka or whatever the case may be. I confess that I am less open when it comes to atheists than to people of other faith traditions. A Hindu who is sincere in their devotion to Krishna, who they know to be a form of Vishnu who is a representation of Brahma, is much closer to me in their worldview than is an atheist who just walks around saying, “Nope, there ain’t nothin’.”

There’s a long tradition in Christianity of understanding the Bible as telling us what happened at a certain point in history — Jesus turned water into wine at a wedding in Cana — and also telling us what happened in history via metaphor — Jesus brought a new covenant relationship between humans and God, which is represented by the fact that the wine He made was “better” than the wine that was served earlier — while also presenting us with stories that we can fit into our own, personal life stories — my life now as a Christian is like the new wine that Jesus made, better than the life I had before when I was an untethered spiritual seeker. All of these things can be true at the same time.

An angel of God can be distinct from God while also speaking of itself as God in a conversation with Jeremiah or Moses. Jesus can be completely human while also being completely God. (Someone in the ELCA said, “Jesus is 100% human and 100% God, which is bad math, but good theology.” I wish I could remember who it was.) None of this makes sense if you try to fit into our understanding of physical reality here in the zone of middle dimensions. All of it makes sense if you let go of that and accept that God is present in, and greater than, atoms and galaxies, which have a very similar basic form.

God doesn’t make sense. That’s not a thing to struggle with. We are not expected to understand. We have been given access to sufficient information to engage in a relationship with God. For me, part of that access to information is in the Bible, specifically the NRSV, but that certainly isn’t the only place. Actually, the greatest part of my relationship with God is outside the Bible — in other people, the national forests, my cats, my kid, my feelings. The Bible just gives me stuff to think about.

Another thing Campbell talked about was the importance of really living with myth. He said “myth” — I have a slight degree of discomfort using that word to talk about Christianity, which I think is somewhat more than myth, but I recognize that my unease is based in bigotry — the old idea that “myth is someone else’s religion”, that my religion is better than others. I can ignore that — all myths are true to those who believe them.

Living with myth means incorporating into the regular fabric of one’s life, so that it stops being something that one does and starts being simply what one is. This starts off as deliberately reading, or praying or going to a worship service, and gradually grows until it fills one’s whole life. I’ve been doing this for a long time, first as an ecumenical pagan, more recently as a Christian. My relationship with God now fills my every moment. That might seem strange to some people, but I experience it as a wonderful thing. I’m always in the divine presence.

The Bible is not like other writing. You can’t just pick it up, read something and think you understood it. There is a way of reading it which has to be learned. I started learning how to read the Bible — and other myths — from Joseph Campbell, but there are many other resources. The Bible Project is good. However you go about it, there will be paradoxes and rewards.