The Power of Myth

Stories to Live By

On Wednesday I was at another friend’s funeral. The third in the past 6 weeks - it’s been a tough time.

This one was a more traditional church funeral, quite different from the previous two, which had been held at the crematorium. There were hymns, prayers, familiar words, and the old Christian language of death and resurrection: the belief that through Christ we rise again to renewed life.

And I found myself drifting a little as we sang.

Not drifting away, exactly. More drifting inward.

Something in the hymns, the words, the ritual, the shape of it all, seemed to touch a place in me that I remembered from childhood and youth: that old sense of the Eucharist as something holy and almost unbearably close. When I was young, I could be moved to tears by the feeling of nearness to the divine — by bread and wine, candlelight, prayer, and the suggestion that ordinary things could become filled with sacred presence.

And as I sat there, I found myself wondering whether this was one of the great powers of myth.

Not myth as “something untrue”.

But myth as a living story.

A story large enough to hold us when ordinary explanation fails.

At a funeral, we are brought face to face with the limits of practical language. We can say that someone has died. We can speak of illness, age, accident, the body, the arrangements, the date, the time, the place. But none of that quite touches the deeper human question: what does this mean? Where has love gone? How do we live with absence? What do we do with the strange feeling that a person who was here, who laughed and spoke and touched our lives, is now no longer present in the same way?

Myth steps into that space.

The Christian myth says: death is not the final word. The body is laid down, but life is held in God. Through Christ, suffering, death, and resurrection become part of a larger pattern. The journey passes through darkness, but darkness is not the end.

Whether one believes this literally, symbolically, spiritually, or only half-remembers it from childhood, it has power. It gives shape to grief. It gives words to hope. It places individual sorrow inside a cosmic drama of loss, love, sacrifice, and renewal.

And Christianity is far from alone in doing this.

The ancient Greeks lived with the stories of the Iliad and the Odyssey. These were not merely entertainments. They offered models of courage, honour, rage, loyalty, cunning, longing, homecoming, and fate. Achilles showed the terrible glory and cost of heroic pride. Odysseus showed endurance, intelligence, temptation, exile, and the long desire to return home. Penelope became an image of faithfulness and waiting. The gods themselves were not abstract doctrines, but living presences through whom the Greeks could imagine beauty, war, jealousy, wisdom, erotic longing, inspiration, and sudden disaster.

The Norse sagas, too, must have shaped the imaginations of those who heard them. Their world was harsher, darker, more fatalistic. Even the gods were not safe from doom. Yet there was grandeur in that: the idea that courage matters even when defeat is certain; that honour, loyalty, and boldness have meaning even in the shadow of Ragnarok. One can see how such stories might form a people who valued bravery, endurance, reputation, and the refusal to meet fate on one’s knees.

Myths teach us what kind of world we think we inhabit.

Are we living in a world created and loved by God? A world ruled by fate?A battlefield between good and evil?A heroic journey?A meaningless accident?A marketplace?A machine?A garden?A school for the soul?A wilderness to be survived?

A home to be cherished?

The answer matters, because we do not live by facts alone.

We live by stories.

We may tell ourselves we are modern, rational, scientific people who have outgrown myth. But I am not sure that is true. I suspect we have not stopped living by myths. We have simply become less conscious of them.

In the modern Western world, some of our dominant myths are not especially nourishing.

There is the myth of endless progress: the belief that life is always improving, that technology will solve everything, that tomorrow must be better than today. This myth can inspire invention and hope, but it can also leave us bewildered when progress fails to make us happier, kinder, wiser, or less lonely.

There is the myth of the individual self-made person: the idea that each of us should be independent, successful, resilient, attractive, productive, and personally responsible for every aspect of our fate. This can encourage courage and initiative, but it can also become cruel. It forgets how much we depend on love, luck, community, health, history, and the kindness of others.

There is the myth of consumer happiness: the story that fulfilment can be bought, upgraded, delivered, streamed, subscribed to, or displayed. It promises enchantment, but often leaves life feeling strangely flat. We are offered endless choice, yet not always meaning.

There is the myth of youth and visibility: the idea that to be young, beautiful, busy, admired, and publicly seen is to matter. This myth can quietly make ageing feel like failure, silence feel like disappearance, and ordinary private goodness seem less valuable than performance.

There is also, increasingly, the myth of threat: the story that life is a struggle between “us” and “them”; that outsiders are dangerous; that compassion is weakness; that identity must be defended by suspicion, anger, and exclusion. This is a very old myth in new clothing, and one of the most dangerous. It offers belonging, but at the price of fear.

So perhaps one of the important questions of our time is not whether we live by myth, but which myths we are living by.

And whether they are worthy of us.

Could we choose better myths?

Could we recover the myth of life as pilgrimage — not a race to success, but a sacred journey, with companions, losses, mistakes, revelations, and unexpected grace?

Could we recover the myth of the garden — the world not as a warehouse of resources, but as a living place entrusted to our care?

Could we recover the myth of the hearth — the small circle of warmth, food, friendship, animals, memory, and welcome?

Could we recover the myth of the wounded healer — the one who does not become wise by avoiding pain, but by passing through it with an open heart?

Could we recover the myth of the elder — not as someone irrelevant or left behind, but as one who carries memory, perspective, humour, blessing, and story?

Could we recover the myth of the beloved community — not a perfect society, but one in which each person is more than their usefulness, their productivity, their tribe, their body, their age, their money, or their mistakes?

And perhaps, very personally, we might ask: what is the myth I am living by?

Am I living as though I must prove myself? As though I am exiled?As though I am waiting to be chosen?As though I am here to serve, to heal, to create, to awaken, to love?As though the world is dead matter, or alive with presence?As though I am alone, or accompanied?

At the funeral, listening to the hymns and the priest’s words, I was reminded that myth is not merely something from the ancient past. It is not just Homer, the sagas, scripture, or fairy tale. It is present whenever a story gives depth to experience.

Whenever ritual helps us bear what we cannot otherwise bear. Whenever an image gives courage. Whenever grief is held inside hope. Whenever ordinary life opens, even for a moment, into mystery.

Perhaps we need myth because we are creatures who suffer, love, fear, dream, and die.

And perhaps we need better myths now because so many of the stories offered to us are too small.

They make us consumers instead of souls. Competitors instead of companions. Spectators instead of participants. Isolated selves instead of members of a living world.

A better myth would not need to deny suffering. The old myths never did. They knew about death, betrayal, war, longing, exile, monsters, and loss. But they also knew about courage, beauty, homecoming, sacrifice, wonder, transformation, and the strange possibility that the divine may still be encountered in bread, wine, sea, fire, forest, friendship, animals, silence, and song.

Maybe that is where we begin.

Not by inventing a grand new doctrine, but by noticing the stories that still make the heart larger.

The myths that help us become kinder. Braver. Freer. More loving. More awake.

The myths that remind us that life is not flat, not merely ordinary, not only survival or consumption or fear.

The myths that whisper that the world is still alive with meaning.

And that we, even in grief, are still part of a sacred story.