We all live in imagined worlds and we live in those worlds as if they were real. This is not to say that there is no such thing as reality but it is to say that how we appropriate and construct that reality is through the imagination and that imagination incarnates itself through stories.

We read reality through those stories. We may help in the construction of those stories, but by and large we live in those stories and those stories construct us.

For example, we live out of the stories of our families, and the stories of our cultures, our ethnicities, our spiritualities. We can even say that we live out of the stories of our biologies, and that we are shaped by the narratives that are the forms of our DNA.

These stories do not present us with closed myths that fix our identities––though certain ideologies would have us read ourselves in that way. Stories are open ended. Beginnings and endings are conventions. They offer us closure of a certain sort. But it is an artificial closure.

And the readings of what is contained between those beginnings and endings are subject to ongoing interpretations as the context of the reader changes. All of this is to affirm that stories are relational. I would say that it is the nature of sin to entrap us in forms of closure offering us the illusion of security which allows us to justify ourselves and to demonize what is not ourselves as "other." The stranger, the alien, the outsider are all forms of the "other."

At times even God — however that mystery is enstoried — is given the qualities of the other, and treated with fear and dread, and suspicion. There is a move to domesticate such a God in theologies, displacing spirituality with rituals and institutionalized religion. Then there is the struggle to control orthodoxy, and its politics are maintained by the quality control of systematics, canonicity, and the authority of professionalism.

All of this is to say that we live in stories but these stories are not closed, and when we try to live in stories that we impose closure on––in the form of closed myths–– we destroy parts of ourselves, and others. We eliminate or distort relationships. We con-sign ourselves to death.

There is a whole and long process of moving out of closed myths. It is called conversion. Through conversion we move from one story to another. It is not an easy process like changing clothes, or even names. We become disillusioned by the closed myth; we move out of it by facing our fears; we abandon the illusions of clarity and the myths of transparency, simplicity, ease and comfort closed myths offer. We question, and we even question the basis of our questioning.

Then we realize just how trapped we are in patterns of perception sanctioned by personal habits, society's laws, cultural norms, and the many levels of tradition which in-form us about who we are. We come to the realization that we live, not out of a closed myth, but within broken myths. A broken myth is a closed myth we know does not give life but it is also one we refuse to abandon. We have stepped away from its illusion of values but we have nothing to substitute for it.

Then, like Lot's wife leaving Sodom, or Orpheus emerging from the underworld with Eurydice, we look back and we lose what we most desire. Broken myths trap us in the past, into nostalgia for some mythic time when "things were perfect." "the good old days." In 1928, D.H. Lawrence opens his now most famous novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover, with these prophetic words that define post-modernism:

"Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen." 

But at the end of the novel the lovers are separated, the illusory security they held together with their sexual passion now as lost as the hypocritical social structures they rebelled against. Broken myths do not offer us a viable way forward.

This does not mean that we are trapped by our past. We can look forward if we live in the context of an open myth. Such a perspective and a posture accept the given-ness of the past and accept as part of this given-ness the radical openness to a future which moves us into relationship. It would hold that the past is open to being re-interpreted, as the risen Christ re-interprets the past to the disciples on the road to Emmaus.

Here it might be helpful –note we are making use of a story – to think of ourselves as lovers defined by the past but also by our relationship to the beloved who runs out of the future into our lives. We run to the beloved as the beloved runs towards us. We are defined by the past but also by our awareness that that past is shaped by the future. 

Our present comprises broken myths but also myths that are open to ongoing transformation, as creation is open to constant ongoing transformation by the Creator. This is not utopianism which is another form of the broken myth and projects onto the future a possibility defined only as a liberation from present constraints.

Such utopianism does not radically transform vision because it interprets reality from the same perspective which constructs the present. An open myth allows the present to be deconstructed in order that the future may have an opening to become incarnate.

All of this is just to say we do not live the present as a manifestation of the past, and we do not anticipate the future as a repetition of the past. An open myth invites us to live the present as an ongoing journey. It accepts the radical contingency of being human within the context of a creation which has its identity not within itself but within the ongoing story of the Word-made-Flesh and offered to us as love. We journey into love, and that love has no end. Our journey has no end.

The open myth is not constrained by a pragmatic existentialism that says: well, this is what we have; we might as well make the best of it. The open myth, though beset by insecurities and the reversals of fortune, human bias, and cultural chaos, faces the darkness, which is the face of the future, as the context of emerging possibilities based precisely on relationship.

Those relationships invite, call, entice, seduce, beckon, and impel us forward. We continually leap into the furnaces of affliction bearing with us the materials of the past to create a new world, which is subject to the vicissitudes of time: decay, closure, entombment, and we are constantly called to be who we truly are by constantly moving beyond who we are now.