“Most if not all of us over the age of 35 have come to a point in life when the old thing isn’t working for us anymore. We slowly become aware that there is an old way of living or thinking that must die to the new.“
Within Mormonism, I took a lot of things literally. Noah had a literal flood, the earth was created in 6 literal days, Jesus literally rose from the dead and lives in his mortal body.
I didn’t have these thoughts in a vacuum, the church encouraged me to think this way. Many churches do. Often the literal reading of scripture is held as the reading with the highest value. If something actually happened, and the facts were recorded in scripture, then we can say that it is true and therefore Truth, right?
Or, what if Truth was never intended to be reduced to facts. The sky is blue, the ocean is wet, the sun rises. These things are all true, but do they feed the soul with spiritual food when presented as facts? Over the years, I have heard far too many people argue their faith system speaks Truth because their scripture contains facts.
What if the stories and parables told in scripture were never intended to be taken literally? What if a non-literal reading can speak a higher truth to our soul? Here is an example of what I mean (forgive me for the Star Wars reference):
At the beginning of Star Wars (A New Hope, 1977), Luke is living with his aunt and uncle and working on their farm. He’s restless and he daydreams about a life devoted to a higher cause. After meeting Obi-Wan who attempts to convince him to join the rebellion against the evil empire, Luke returns to the farm to find his aunt and uncle murdered by stormtroopers. There is a brief shot in the movie that includes their corpses, burned down to skeletons.
Those are the facts. However, do those facts contain the Truth the story is meant to speak to one’s soul? How many of us can relate to coming home to find our family members murdered? Hopefully, none of us can relate to that story at the literal level.
However, many of us can relate to the feeling that Luke is experiencing in that moment. Most if not all of us over the age of 35 have experienced a point in life when the old thing isn’t working for us anymore. We slowly become aware that there is an old way of living or thinking that must die to the new. A part of this awakening is a knowledge that we can’t go back, the only thing we can do is move forward. This is the essence of story being told, and experienced on the spiritual level. The soul’s opportunity to connect with this Truth rests on the symbolic meaning of the story, not the literal.
When someone asks “were Luke’s aunt and uncle really murdered by stormtroopers?,” we have an opportunity to ask in return “what is it about Luke’s story that resonates with us in our own human experience?”
When storytellers attempt to connect you with a feeling, symbolic language is brought into the story. The idea isn’t for you to take that part of the story as fact, the idea is to help you feel something. A good storyteller connects with their audience when the symbols speak to the heart. When everything is spoken of in literal terms, the opportunity for real connection is lost.
What do we lose when religion, meant to speak to the soul, speaks to the brain instead?