Brian Pearson, a retired Anglican priest from the Diocese of Niagara – where else – has chosen this Christmas to expose the fundamental tenets of Christianity for the myths they really are.

Forget the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, angels from the realms of glory, Magi and a miraculous star. All much too literal: Jungian mythical thinking is what we need.

Keep Jung in Christmas!

From here:

Consider this. The Christmas story is not just about Jesus. Yes, it’s a theological construct designed to bolster the Christian claim that Jesus is the Son of God. But it’s also a mythic tale that has something to say about all of us. Or why would we still be telling it, lo, these many years later? It’s not supposed to be just about him!

The hardest sermons I had to preach in my 38 years of ministry as a parish priest were at Christmas and Easter. People wanted to hear the old, old stories, and they didn’t want you messing around with them. It was hard because, as literal stories, they not only beggar our ability to believe, they have almost nothing to say to us. Jesus was born of a virgin. Okay, interesting! Jesus rose from the grave. Well, how nice for him!

These stories only speak to us if we see them as the myths that they truly are, that is, as stories that may not be literally true, but that tell a certain kind of universal truth. Or, as a First Nations saying goes, “It may not have happened just like that, but every word of it is true.”

As to Christmas, what could a virgin birth, an angelic visitation, and a guiding star possibly have to do with us? Unless, that birth is viewed mythically — as hope in a dark world, as each new birth is; as attended to by the angels, as all births are; as changing the world, as every birth does.

Then the story shifts to become a lens through which we see our own miraculous arrival, both literally, as babies, and spiritually, as we become the people God made us to be. I was a sign of hope, when I was born; the angels watched over me, and celebrated; my presence has changed the world, forever. Now that’s something to chew on over Christmas dinner.

The Jungian writer James Hillman says literal thinking is the enemy of mythical thinking. You make a story literal — like, insisting that the virgin birth was historical fact — and you squeeze all the life out of it. But mythical thinking — well, there we are, right in the middle of that story, right down to our soul.

Brian Pearson is a retired Anglican priest (formerly from Niagara).