I was brought up in fundamentalism — in the literal existence of Adam & Eve 6000 years ago, in Noah’s global flood, in the Exodus, in Jesus as God the Son born of a virgin and physically raised from the dead after three days — and it was never very real for me, even during my intensely religious phase at the tail-end of my teenage years. It was only when I had the rug pulled out from under me, had my world flip-turned upside down, and everything I believed in dashed upon the ground, that Christianity and religion/spirituality in general became alive for me. It took awhile to get there, but I managed in the end.

“Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth — penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told.”

― Joseph Campbell