Icarus and Christian Existence

In Greek mythology, Icarus is the son of the master craftsman Daedalus. Icarus and his father attempt to escape from Crete by means of wings that his father constructed from feathers and wax. Icarus' father warns him first of complacency and then of hubris, asking that he fly neither too low nor too high, so the sea's dampness would not clog his wings or the sun's heat melt them. Icarus ignored his father's instructions not to fly too close to the sun; when the wax in his wings melted he tumbled out of the sky and fell into the sea where he drowned.

Interestingly, the part about complacency is usually left out and the myth told solely about the dangers of hubris. I take this as a parable about Christian and ecclesial existence. Though the gospel calls us to fly neither to high or too low, but still to fly, most of the time most of the church has taught us to fly too low or to stay on the ground which is where the too low flyers end up anyway. Avoiding hubris, while good and necessary, doesn't mean we ought not to fly. Yet that is just what happens all too often.

How do we do that? Low expectations.

-we infantilize our people by legalisms of the right and the left (we weren't meant to be mere rule-keepers).

-we herd them into adolescence by the low expectations that come by a insensitive use of the “at the same time a saint and sinner” teaching or by claiming that our weakness and sin are due to our being “only human.”

-we rob them of adulthood by neglect of life in the Spirit (freedom) and by churches that offer no opportunities or openness for risky ventures of faith.

Such defective views of God (who mandates our rule-keeping), of Christ (who is our measure of humanity and died for our experience of full humanity), and the Spirit (who is our experience of that freedom and full humanity) underwrite our people's inability to fly “not too high nor to low” but at right height appropriate for us a God's human creatures made in God's image.

Defective anthropology, soteriology, and pneumatology like I just mentioned breeds an atmosphere or culture of settling, boredom, and vulnerability to control by stronger personalities. The resulting pathologies are numerous and complex. We see them all around us. They're killing the church. The way out of this morass goes through theological renovation to a deeper experience of life in Christ, in whom we will fly at just the right altitude.