Tread lightly on the things of earth

I love reading The Preacher. In particular, his words about myth — in his observations on the movie The Fast Runner — have stuck in my head:

Myth laughs at centuries and leaps across millennia. Myth punctures our provincial culture sacks and seeps into the world. Myth is patient, though not always kind. Myth is the soft womb out of which we came and to which we would return if we could.

Myth is the language of God. It is the larger and older language of value that has birthed us and created us in its image.

I wish more Christians would embrace the myths of the bible and not be afraid to name them as such. To force a brutal literalism on such powerful stories is like bitch-slapping your mother because she’s slowed down with age.

Yes. How very different from the popular definition of myth, that it means “fiction or half-truth” — when in fact myth conveys the truest truths a culture knows.