by

Davidson Loehr

November 26, 2000

Sermon

The story of Psyche and Eros is among the oldest stories in human history, first passed on orally for centuries before it came to be written down. It is a complex story with many layers and turns. It would be easy to do six sermons on its many layers and levels. This morning, I want to consider just a few parts of it.

Psyche is a young woman who is seduced by, and falls in love with, a mysterious man whom she can meet only at night in a magical castle. While the nights are heavenly, his rules are that she may never see his face nor know his name.

Psyche’s jealous sisters convince her that such rules can only mean that her mystery lover is a horrible monster, and that her life may even be in danger. They advise her to take an oil lantern and a dagger, to light the light after he has gone to sleep, and when he is indeed revealed as a monster to use the dagger before it is too late.

So at their next meeting, Psyche follows the script. But when she lights her oil lantern, she discovers that her lover is no monster, but is instead the handsome god Eros, the god of divine love. Startled, she jerks the lantern, a drop of hot oil is spilled on Eros’ shoulder, and he awakens. Infuriated that Psyche has broken his rules, Eros vanishes, and in the morning the magical castle is gone as well, and Psyche is alone.

She seeks for Eros and finally, after many trials and with some divine intervention, finds him. This time, they meet in the daytime; they can see and know each other, and the love is more equal. As a reward, the gods of Olympus grant Psyche immortality. Even in this quick summary, you can see some of the many levels of psychological insight in this ancient myth. The core salvation stories of both Eastern and Western religions are contained within this ancient Greek myth. I want to back off and think about religion from a distance, then sort of approach it from several directions. But all directions will come back to that old story of Psyche and Eros — or to translate their names into English, the soul’s search for divine love.

It’s a funny story to think about people believing. But we’re funny animals. We will believe almost anything. And if you look at the range of things people actually believe, it looks like we do believe almost anything. When you listen to any one of us talk about what we believe, how we think life works, what we think it’s about, the stories tend to be well-rehearsed and dramatic. We’re often so serious about it, so sure.

But we always leave out the most important part of the picture, because our stories never seem to include the picture of us telling them. In other words, religious beliefs aren’t really about gods or angels or demons. That’s too simple. They’re really pictures of some person sitting there telling us these stories about gods or angels or demons. They’re stories we tell, and the stories always seem to revolve around our needs, our fears, our wishes. When you put the thinker back into the picture of the things we think, it changes the picture. When you back off, the whole show of people telling the stories of their religious beliefs looks more like a flea market, or a storyteller’s convention.

  • I hear a full-grown woman tell me she believes in God. I have no idea what she means by that, and she probably doesn’t either. She doesn’t believe there’s a Guy in the Sky, so she’s using the word “God” in a psychological or emotional way it would be hard to understand without knowing her fairly well. Still, the belief, whatever it means, is a deep part of her, and it gives her the “center” for her life.
  • Somebody else spins a yarn about how we all have guardian angels. But they know that no video camera would show anything but the person telling the story, with no angels ever in sight. So they are using that word “angel” in a creative way, too.
  • A man tells you he’s going to heaven when he dies, and will see his wife there, and he’s sitting there in his kitchen telling this story in a world without anything “up there,” where an “up there” doesn’t even exist, where his wife was cremated after she died, just as he’s planning to be. If you enter into his imaginative world, you can see where it might comfort him. But when you back off to put him back into the picture, it’s just another old man who wishes he weren’t so alone, wishes that we didn’t all have to die and disappear from memory, and who was once taught this imaginative story about living forever that he’s now telling to you. When we talk about going to heaven, or living again after we have died, we don’t mean to examine the belief for coherence. If I saw my grandfather in heaven, would he be a senile half-blind 84-year-old man like I remember him? If so, what kind of heaven would it be for him? Or would he be in his prime, a man of about forty or so, when he was happiest, and before I was born? Would we all be in our primes? Would heaven be filled with 35-40-year-olds? How would anyone recognize their parents, grandparents, children, grandchildren? Pictures of heaven aren’t meant to be examined this closely. A belief in heaven is a different kind of statement. It’s a story we’re spinning from our imaginations, a story for us to live in.The point of religious beliefs isn’t really their meaning. It’s a kind of comfort, safety, confidence, a feeling of being at home in a world that can be trusted, or that we have at least decided to trust. We’re spinning stories to live in the way spiders spin their webs. But it isn’t science. We’re creating imaginative, comforting worlds to live in.
  • And our faiths aren’t just religious. We even spin tales about our favorite sports team, how they — and we – are “Number One.” University of Texas fans flashed the “Number One” sign during their defeat of Texas A&M Friday, even though they knew there wasn’t a chance the team would be ranked that high. Even a team that isn’t ranked in the top 1000 gets its fans waving the “Number One” sign when they score. When you’re waving a flag or caught up in the emotions of a tight football or basketball game, it all feels so convincing. Then you back off and see the whole show, where there are thousands and thousands of people all selling these stories of how they are part of something that’s Number One – and again, the stories are about us, and something we’re seeking.
  • A young woman in love tells her friends this new guy is the most loving man, the handsomest dude, in the whole world. But when you stop just listening to the story, and back off to see her sitting there telling it with that excited, hopeful look on her face, you see that she has no intention of traveling the world to see if it’s really true. The story really isn’t about this guy at all. It’s about her hopeful yearning to be part of a relationship in which she feels cherished. And all those other stories aren’t about gods or nations or sports teams either: they’re about us, and our need to feel special, to feel that we’re part of something bigger and more enduring than just ourselves.It’s always about us. The real subject is all these storytellers. The real religious question isn’t about what we’re selling, but why we need to sell it.Some faiths we just inherited, loaded our hopes and fears onto, never questioned, and have carried with us ever since, the way some people used to put those little plastic statues on the dashboards of their cars. They couldn’t explain just how that plastic statue was going to protect them, but they felt safer with it there, and would feel a lot less safe if it weren’t there.

The things we believe cover an amazing range (From “What Does America Believe?” pp. 114ff in Dec 96 issue of “George” magazine):

  • 75% of Americans believe in life after death, though probably no one has any idea just how or where this would all take place.
  • 86% believe in Heaven, and most will still point up if asked where it is. But if they believe in it, they think there might be a place for them in it.
  • Only 38% believe in evolution, which means most people can’t find a place for themselves in that story, they don’t feel like it connects them with something they want to be connected with. It may be scientifically true, but it isn’t an interesting enough story to live in for more than about 38% of the people.
  • 78% believe in angels, some swear they’ve seen them, though nobody has ever caught one on a camera, so it sounds like the angels exist in their minds, not in the public space they share with others. But I’ll bet they think that if there are angels, the angels notice them.
  • And I don’t know how many people believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, Barney or the Tooth Fairy, because these polls seldom include children. But it’s easy to see that even as children, we create imaginary playmates and imaginary worlds that make us feel included and cared for.

The ancient Greeks used to say that their world was supported by the strongest of the gods, Atlas. We’ve all seen pictures of Atlas, holding up the modern earth. That’s what all of our special beliefs are like: that picture of Atlas, holding up the world. All of our deepest and most important beliefs are stories we tell ourselves because we really need to believe, as the ancient Greeks also did, that our world is being supported by something that is both strong, and friendly to us.

Psychologists say that such imaginative worlds show us projecting our own needs and thoughts outward like movie projectors, investing all these inanimate things with spirit that really all comes from us. Many scholars view our religions as successful imaginative projections of a positive spin onto an otherwise indifferent world. Then, in a “footnote” tone, they may add that these imaginative stories seem to let us live with verve and hope. There’s a line from Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass” that I’ve always liked. It comes when the priest is trying to conduct the Credo, and a street singer, sort of a hippie, comes up to argue with him. “I’ll believe in one god, I’ll believe in three,” sings the hippie: “I’ll believe in thirty, if they’ll believe in me.” He didn’t just want a God, he wanted an Atlas, something both strong and friendly.

Then religion is an act of the imagination, a creative response to life’s deepest urgings, the active attempt to make a home out of an otherwise indifferent world. We must make a home, we must make a home for us. But there is a catch to this. There is a price to pay, and it stops most people from growing up religiously. Growing up religiously is always heretical – it always involves growing beyond the boundaries of the beliefs we inherited. You can stay a child with inherited faiths, but growing up religiously means making those beliefs an integrated part of your adult worldview and your life.

Next spring, I’ll be teaching an eight-hour program here, on the Jesus Seminar, the findings of this critical scholarship, and some of the revolutionary implications of this new look at the man Jesus and the origins of the religion of Christianity. I’ll also be doing the week-end program in Wilmington, Delaware in the spring. I think it’s an important program, and have been doing it for several years. If you come to the Friday-Saturday program here, you’ll hear how the man Jesus taught that his version of the Kingdom of God simply required all people to treat one another with love and charity. There was nothing supernatural about it, no miraculous intervention by a God from above in Jesus’ notion. The Kingdom, as he said again and again, is already potentially here, it is within and among you. His disciples didn’t understand him, and Christianity, you could say, is founded on that misunderstanding.

These two levels of understanding religion, the natural and supernatural, have been with us forever. Most of you know the character of the Grand Inquisitor from Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov. That chapter shows the difference between spiritual children and spiritual grown-ups, and the terrible price that must be paid if we are to grow up religiously. As you may remember, the Grand Inquisitor is interviewing Jesus, who has returned during the Spanish Inquisition. He knows what Jesus tried to teach, but isn’t impressed. He says Jesus demanded too much of people, demanded that they grow up, and people don’t want to grow up. People just want magic, he says, and are eager to give away all their freedom to any church or charismatic leader who will promise to take care of them like children. That is the biggest single dividing line in religion, the line between the Narrow Path that prophets and sages like Jesus teach, and the Broad Path of magic and gods that too many churches offer. Finally, all “Kingdoms of God” must point beyond God.

This is the paradox of religion: growing up means letting go. Here, the Buddhists seem to see this much better than we Westerners do. “When is a man really grown up?” asks the student in one Buddhist saying. “When he no longer needs to be lied to,” is the teacher’s answer. “If you meet the Buddha on the road,” runs the title of one popular book on Buddhism from thirty years ago, “kill him.” As long as you are bowing, deferring to a teacher, a savior, or a god, you are fooling yourself. Because religion isn’ t about God, even when it seems to be. It’s about something else, something deeper, something older than the gods.

You notice that all the pictures of people telling their special stories look a lot alike. They’re all variations on a common theme, and that theme is older than the human race. Whether it’s the woman who’s found the most handsome and loving guy in the world, the man who wants to spend forever with his wife in a heaven above the sky, or even a kid wearing a football jersey with his favorite player’s number on it – these are all variations on the same story, a fundamental human story.

It is the story of life’s longing for itself, playing out once more through us. There’s a puppet show going on here, and our strings are being pulled by the same force, always invisible, always there.

Even modern science has produced a poetic myth for us to live in, and quite a nice one. According to current theory, everything in the universe, including us, was present at the Big Bang fifteen or so billion years ago. That means that each and every particle of us is made out of stardust, and that our home is in the cosmos; we are children of the universe. That’s a way of understanding that our deepest yearning has always been for a sense of reconnection with that infinite and eternal identity. That’s what religion is about.

The spirit that animates the religious search is that spirit of life’s longing for itself, trying to find a form that fits us yet is true to those deep yearnings that lie at the heart of existence. Or religion is like clothing, but it must be our clothing. What we inherit are always hand-me-downs, yesterday’s faith, second-hand religion, and we can never grow up until we have grown beyond them.

That’s one of the fundamental lessons of religion: Healthy religion is always equipping us to grow beyond it. It always begins by claiming authority, and asking us to defer to its authority, like the religion of the Grand Inquisitors. But if it’s an adequate religion, it must always end by helping us to reject its authority, find the necessary authority within ourselves, and grow toward becoming worthy of this spirit of life that, through us, is longing for itself.

It’s the story of Psyche’s search for Eros, too. Her search didn’t begin until Eros had left her. She broke the rules, and he left her, because while she needed love, she also needed to be known, and to know the one she loved. She didn’t want generic love, not even from a god. She wanted a love that knew her name, and could be known by her. It was during that search that she grew beyond her cocoon and her soul took flight. That’s part of the meaning of the end of the story: after her successful search, she was given immortality, and joined the gods. But to do that, she had to grow beyond her servile, obedient, unquestioning attitude toward the gods. And what she learned, in the end, was that she was one of them. When the soul has the courage and the vision to grow beyond its cocoon, it becomes immortal, to put it in that magical poetry of mythology. The Greek word “psyche” means “soul,” and this is the archetypal story of the soul’s search for divine love.

In ancient Greek, the word for “soul” (psyche) was also the same as the word for “butterfly.” In a way, that double meaning of the word “soul” contains the essence of the story about Psyche and Eros, the soul’s search for divine love, life’s longing for itself, the human search for our infinite and eternal home. Because butterflies can’t fly, aren’t recognizable as souls, until they’ve grown through and grown beyond their cocoon. Till then, they’re just caterpillars, and caterpillars can’t fly anywhere. The growth of our own souls also demands that we grow beyond the beliefs we were born into, and do that hard work of taking the meaning and purpose of our life into our own hands. It’s that same choice between the religion of Jesus and that of the Grand Inquisitor, between first-hand religion, which is always hard-won, and second-hand religion, which is the cocoon we are meant to outgrow when we grow up religiously.

Our goal is not a modern goal; it’s a very ancient one. All of modern society is after progress. But the religious goal isn’t progress but return, and reconnection with that infinite and eternal identity. In fact, that is the meaning of the word “religion” itself: reconnection.

We’re into poetry here. As T.S. Eliot put it, the end of all our searching is to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time. This is the highest teaching of Hinduism, too. Each of us contains a small piece of the infinite and eternal creative powers of the universe, they say. That great universal and eternal power is called Brahman, our little piece of it, like our soul, is called atman, and the goal of growing up religiously is to realize that our atman is, in fact, Brahman, the way a teeny drop of water’s real identity is as part of the ocean. The Hindus teach this by pointing to everything, everything in the universe, and saying “That – art Thou.”

All these pictures and stories point “beyond God.” Yet the “beyond” doesn’t mean something in the future, something we’ve never yet experienced or known as a species. It points in the other direction: toward the ground of our being.

Many years ago I heard one of the world’s leading Buddhist teachers interviewed on the radio. Growing up religiously, he said, involved growing beyond the boundaries of your religion’s symbols. When he was asked what Westerners needed to do to grow up spiritually, he said the answer was easy: Western Christians, Jews and Muslims had to crucify Christ and God in order to grow up. “Christ” and “God” were only training wheels, he said, and we had mistaken them for a sacred vehicle.

Another Buddhist story makes this point:

A new arrival to the monastery reported for his initial meeting with the Master. He was agitated. “Why have you come here?” asked the Master.

“Oh, Master, I must know the Buddha!”

“The Buddha,” said the old one, “is the Mind.”

For several years, the young initiate used the Master’s short statement as a focus, a center, and a mantra as he explored everything he could find inside and outside of him that seemed to shed light on “the Buddha” and “the Mind.” Then he had a second meeting with the Master.

“Years ago, you told me the Buddha was the Mind. I have followed many paths to and from that wonderful statement, and have grown in many ways. But now I need more.”

“Very well. There is no Buddha, and there is no Mind.”

“But you said-” began the young one.

“When you came here, your baby was crying. To lull your baby to sleep, I gave you the first lesson. Now that your baby has stopped crying, you can grow up.”

There was a Buddhist version of the move Jesus made when he told people the Kingdom of God was within and among them, and nowhere else. It is life’s longing for its best self, through us, and it can only be found by growing through our cocoon and learning to fly.

It’s like that Psyche and Eros story again. It’s also like the difference between Eastern and Western religions. In Western religions, we can never aspire to becoming God. That’s blasphemy. The most we can ever hope for is to establish a relationship with God, and that relationship is always mediated, by priests, creeds, or churches. But such “relationships” always keep us in the dark, as Psyche was in the dark at first. And that isn’t our real longing. We long to find our identity with the sacred, with the gods: the atman merging with Brahman. Stardust. Thou art That.

Psyche began her story in the dark, too. She was blissful, but it was a kind of ignorant bliss, meeting a stranger in the night who she couldn’t know in the daytime. She only left her cocoon, only began her spiritual quest, when she lit that light and looked for herself. At first, she thought he was completely unlike her, for he was a god. Then her illusion vanished, and she lost her childish world of obedient love that won’t bear examination. But later, when they came at last to know one another as equals, her butterfly took flight and she at last saw they both were gods.

It’s true, you know: That art Thou, and Thou art God. We have within us all that is godlike, if we will just outgrow our protective cocoon and set it free. It’s true. But to see that, we must first be willing to light the light, leave the cocoon, become a butterfly, and finally discover our true identity and our true home — an identity, and a home, that has been waiting for us to discover it since the day we were born.