I think I may have mentioned before my discomfort with that responsive reading, lovely as it is and written by one of our Unitarian saints. Sophia Fahs was the creator of the American Unitarian Association's religious education program in the 1940s and '50s, and many of her books are still in use in our church schools, and more of them in our libraries as important resources. Nevertheless, there is a serious omission in that responsive reading. It does indeed matter what we believe, but one of the things that make a difference in belief or unbelief is truth. We cannot believe anything that we know is not true - or even seriously doubt. Or at least we shouldn't, even if such a belief would have all sorts of the good consequences Fahs lists. There are, however, different kinds of truth. There are those who think that we can only talk about truth if we have provable facts, or elegantly solved equations, but it seems to me that there is also poetic truth, the kind of truth, for instance, that I recognize in that passage that I read from Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill. In one sense, of course, I do not believe in the Land of Faerie at all, but in another it holds for me a numinous truth - that is, a sense of awe and wonder and mystery and power that transforms me. And though I can feel affection for the little butterfly-winged flower dwellers, it is the other faerie, the one of ancient tradition and power that has a kind of inner integrity to which I respond.
I lost my credentials as a good feminist back in the early eighties when I couldn't go along with the invented history and creator myth of the primordial goddess. Not only did I find the scholarship worse than suspect, but I'd been trying to degenderize god for a long time, and I couldn't accept one even with female secondary sexual characteristics. What's more, I couldn't understand why women who had been explaining at some length and sometimes equal stridency that they were more than sex objects and baby factories wanted to put their faith in a female fertility symbol. Worse, I not only didn't believe in it myself, I didn't think they really believed in it either. It was an invention to be used for a desired end rather than a truth in which to put one's faith.
I have always been the most passionate lover I know of myths, fairy tales, fantasy, and all other flights of fancy you can imagine. While most contestants on my favorite TV program, Jeopardy!, avoid such categories as those as long as possible, I know that I will be able, if they ever get around to revealing the questions, to sweep the category. I not only know who cut the Gordian knot, I can often remember the reason for the Gordian knot in the first place, though today it escapes me. I did not stop reading fairy tales at the time most young people do, and in fact, I still read them. One of my favorite sources of literary entertainment to this day is what is called sword and sorcery.
However, the literature needs to deal with its characters and environment in certain ways for me to be satisfied with it. It needs to take it seriously. That doesn't mean it can't be funny, that it can't take extreme liberties, even, with tradition, but it has to be clear that the tradition is taken seriously. For instance, in one of my favorite modern series, the Spellsinger series by Alan Deane Foster, there is a gay unicorn. It is clear that Foster is using the ancient tradition that unicorns can only be caught by using a virgin (a female virgin, at that) as bait. The trap set by the villains falls to the ground when the unicorn's sexual orientation gets in the way. As lagniappe, we learn for certain, what we had before only suspected, that the dashing young hero was not quite as dashing as he wanted people to believe. The humor itself was based on the fact that Foster takes the myth of the unicorn seriously. It was utterly incongruous that a unicorn should have a sexual orientation different from its tradition, because its sexual orientation is almost what defines it. The unicorn itself is a sexual symbol, and therefore to mess around with its sexuality is to make a rather subtle joke, even if nothing particularly funny happens because of it.
I'm not even totally unbending in my requirement that the myth be taken seriously when used in modern fantasy. Because they are much prettier, I am willing to accept the more modern version of the unicorn which is merely a horse with a horn, over its ancestor which had elephant's legs and a donkey's tail. Despite this generous flexibility, however, I am rigid about the preservation of the essence of the myth.
It is similar to the strong reaction that I have when watching a poor movie version of a book that I have read and loved. I have no objection to the movie's leaving out incidents or even changing them around. However, I am reduced to gobbling fury when it changes whole characters or omits or changes the thesis for the sake of what is currently popular. Shirley Temple's Heidi which changed Fraulein Rottenmeier from a rather stupid, cruel and rigid but upright woman into an out and out villain, even kidnapping Heidi, who in the book could have had absolutely no value to the least demanding kidnapper, was my first experience of this kind of personal reaction back in the fourth grade. I wouldn't have objected to it at all if they had been honest enough to call the movie something like Shirley Temple's Adventures in the Swiss Alps, and found other names for its characters. It may actually have been a fairly good story, and for all I know, perhaps better than Heidi. Certainly it was more exciting, but I was too busy being disgusted to enjoy it. In later years Walt Disney has been the worst offender calling an otherwise charming invention by the misleading name of Mary Poppins to which it bears no faintest resemblance and changing villain to hero, hero to villain, and wise to foolish, among the characters in The Jungle Book.
In similar vein, but drawing ever closer to the point at which I begin to understand what my concern is, was my extreme negative reaction to the cult of Tolkien in the mid-sixties and later, to which, in fact, I should be grateful since it created a market for a type of literature that I enjoy. I had read The Hobbit as a child, and when I discovered The Lord of the Rings shortly after its publication, I was ecstatic. It lived up to every hope that I had for it as I read it, followed its characters' journeyings on the beautiful and detailed maps, and even studied each of the appendices to the point of writing messages to other enthusiasts in the elven alphabet. For almost ten years I tried to get other people to read it with little or no success, and then suddenly people were not only reading it with enthusiasm, but reading into it a significance that its author strongly deprecated and which almost (but not quite) made me wish he had never written it. He did write an essay on fairy tales and legends in his book Tree and Leaf in which he expressed his distress that anyone might think he had invented and written of the hobbits for any reason except his own and others' enjoyment. That is not to say that he was not wrapped up in his invention, that he did not take it seriously, or that there are no lessons to be learned from the story. Any such detailed fantasy is clearly a serious preoccupation, and there are lessons to be learned from any work of an intelligent and thoughtful author no matter how fantastically presented. Nevertheless, there is a difference between a work of literature, no matter how essentially true and the essence of truth. Frodo Baggins does not live, and neither does Bilbo, and never did. More importantly, even those carrying the banners that said they live knew that they did not. Unicorns might, but not hobbits.
Until the onset of the goddess as a focus of ritual for certain feminists and my personal confrontation with the idea, I had no handle on my discomfort and wondered if perhaps my negativity toward such things simply showed that I was losing my sense of humor, my sense of proportion, that I couldn't tell play from seriousness. After all, as I said before, even the hobbit fanatics didn't really believe in hobbits, just as goddess worshippers don't really believe in the goddess. Since actual belief in these unbelievables isn't at issue, why be concerned at the fun people are having with them? Too, since these things are not real, why worry about the accuracy of their use? What difference does it make that Heidi was never and could never have been kidnapped, if she never really existed, or that Kaa, the snake, was one of the noblest of the denizens of the jungle rather than a hypnotic sociopath? Kidnapping is more exciting than terminal homesickness; everyone knows that snakes are evil; if cute little people with furry feet can overcome the dark lord, we don't have to deal with him ourselves; and it's more fun to make up rituals celebrating something you don't really believe in than trying to decide what is really worthy of worship.
I think the issue I have been dealing with is one of respect more even than of authenticity or accuracy, though they are extremely important. In a way it is the question of worshipping God or Mammon, of choosing God or the golden calf, but not precisely, because in those choices the worshippers saw what they worshipped as more valuable than what they rejected. It seems to me that here that is not the case. They do not perceive the object of their attention as having intrinsic value, so they can do what they will with it, shape it to their own desires and then play at worship, since they know that there cannot be true worship of something that is less than divine. Their golden calf is not made of gold, but of the permanently malleable clay that you can buy in toy departments.
I believe that those things are made of gold and most artistically crafted. They deserve the respect of attention to accuracy and authenticity. Though they can certainly be played with, they aren't toys in the sense that they have no value other than in the game. That matters worthy of respect are treated disrespectfully is a great pity.
Despite the fact that I don't think the Ten Commandments are an appropriate legislative or judicial tool, I believe that they're a pretty good list of proper attitudes and behaviors, and at the very beginning of them they warn against idolatry. It has always amazed me that Aquinas's list of deadly sins played around with such perfectly reasonable things as lust and sloth and omitted the much more serious one of idolatry - the setting up of something as god that is not god. It is much worse, it seems to me, to do it when you know perfectly well that it isn't - to worship a goddess you don't believe in or a fairy tale whose inventor you know. Equally horrible, I think, is to treat something that has transcendent value as if it is something you can play with to suit your own fancy. Such, it seems to me, is the integrity of an artist's vision or the numinous truth of ancient myths and legends. There are people calling themselves druids who go to Stonehenge to worship without bothering to learn that the druids had nothing to do with the standing stones which long predated them, but did their worshipping in glades and forests. There are those who invent a creator goddess who even use an ancient name with no real appreciation of the story of that name.
There is a truth, I believe, beyond what is factual, beyond even what is to be believed. I do not believe in the old myths and legends; I do not believe in the unicorn or the land of Faerie or the goddess Athena, yet I see in them a poetic truth like that of the vision of the composer, the writer, the painter the integrity of which deserves our deepest respect, and the value of which can transform us.