Literature is, and has always been, the sharing of experience, the pooling of human understanding about living, loving, and dying. (From this article)
I remember the exact moment when this became my understanding of scripture. I was 17. I was sitting on a bench in Cincinnati, OH with two friends from youth group. We had the Bible in our laps. We were on a "mission trip" to help a church organize and clean in preparation for their VBS program.
Until this point, I thought I was conservative... politically and religiously. Part of this had to do with my upbringing, some with my developmentally appropriate teenage perspective, some because of who my best friend was at the time. I had been attending a UCC church for yeaaaars, but I just couldn't wrap my head around the progressive nature of its theology, much less any beliefs of my own... except the ones that were in question, of course. This meant scripture was especially troublesome.
So there we were, sitting on a bench reading Genesis. Poring over the creation stories... both of them. The three of us had so many questions. Who wrote these stories? Why are there two different creation stories? If these were the first created people, how can it be a first hand account? Why wouldn't someone write themselves into a story? How can these things be taken for Truth? What does it mean to believe these stories? What are we actually believing? What does it mean when our pastor says she takes the Bible "seriously but not literally"?
So we asked her. And she said six magical words: "These stories are like campfire stories."
And THAT was it for me. That was it. I finally got it. I finally understood that the scriptures, the stories we were reading in 2006, were the same stories people had been reading for centuries... millenia(!)... they're the stories of a people coming to understand who they are... as individuals, in community, in opposition to others, and in relation to G-d. I finally got it. It's "the sharing of experience, the pooling of human understanding about living, loving, and dying."
And in the words of my pastor, it was as though I "had come up for a breath of fresh air."
She was right, but it felt more like I inhaled campfire smoke... at once relieving and alarming.
If we don't take it literally, there is so much more to learn.
