Myth and Parable

Myth and Parable 

Outside Reading: John Dominic Crossan/The Dark Interval

September 12, 2016

In his short work, The Dark Interval, John Dominic Crossan presents a spectrum of story that consists of myth, apologue, action, satire, and parable. Myth and parable lie at the opposite outskirts of the spectrum as two extreme narrative paradigms. If myth constructs a city, parable is the invading army that breaches the walls and levels it. Myth gives us a world of stability and security whereas parable undermined firmly held assumptions and enacts change. The purpose of parable is to overturn mythic expectations. Parables undermine our shared system of values, opening us up to a transcendent order of values that our own mythic stories were blind to all along.

We are in constant need to be grounded in myth and uprooted by parable. The sequence follows a pattern of death and rebirth that is characteristic of all life. Thomas Jefferson proposed the radical idea that the American government should come up with a new constitution every twenty years. I think we should take the same approach to our own cultural myths. The goal is to never get to a point where tradition is never blindly accepted for traditions sake but always being tested anew and proven good in each generation. So it is with our own stories as individuals. There are times in life where it seems as if we are stuck living in the same chapter over and over. What we so often need and so often resist is not “peace, but a sword.”(Matthew 10:34) We need a parable that jolts us out of our complacency, overturns our tables, and shakes us to the core of our being, causing us to reconsider all we hold to be good and true.