Quotes about Myth

Science is now giving us a very helpful language for what religion rightly intuited and imaged, albeit in mythological language. Remember, myth does not mean "not true," which is the common misunderstanding; it actually refers to things that are always true!

the opposite of rational is not always irrational, but it can also be transrational or bigger than the rational mind can process; things like love, death, suffering, God, and infinity are transrational experiences. Both myth and mature religion understand this. The transrational has the capacity to keep us inside an open system and a larger horizon so that the soul, the heart, and the mind do not close down inside of small and constricted space.

Myth is, in fact, something that is so true that it can be adequately expressed only in story, symbol, and ritual. It can't be abstracted and objectified. Its meaning and mystery are so deep and broad that they can be presented only in story form. When you step into a story, you find it is without limits and you can walk around with it and inside it. It is natural to sing, dance, and reenact a story. It is too big and too deep to be merely "understood" or taught.

The most common myth about money is that having more will make me more secure. It won't. Wealth can be lost instantly through a variety of uncontrollable factors. Real security can only be found in that which can never be taken from you — your relationship with God.

Christmas is a story that has both religious and pagan origins, and to ignore its power is to ignore the power of myth - those symbols and legends that help us to ground our lives.

Every fairy tale had a bloody lining. Every one had teeth and claws.

It's a well-known fact that tall people are evil.

It's really easy, once somebody passes away, for the tales about them to become taller, the good ones and the bad ones.

If you had refused to descend to men, you would have been my distant dream. If you had refused to sow your word, I would love you without hearing it. If you had hesitated and fled from the crucifixion, and I were not saved, I would still love you. If you were a myth, I would leave reality and live with you in a dream.

Taking heaven seriously, then, means taking suffering seriously, now. Not because we've bought into the myth that we can create a utopia given enough time, technology, and good voting choices, but because we have great confidence that God has not abandoned human history and is actively at work within it, taking it somewhere

The hocus-pocus phantasm of a God, like another Cerberus, with one body and three heads, had its birth and growth in the blood of thousands and thousands of martyrs.

We do not destroy religion by destroying superstition.