The Hero’s Journey
Richard Rohr uses the framework of the “hero’s journey”
to describe the path of spiritual transformation. He
points to The Odyssey as a powerful metaphor:
The universe story and the human story are a play of
forces rational and nonrational, conscious and
unconscious, involving fate and fortune, nature and
nurture. Forces of good and evil play out their
tragedies and their graces—leading us to catastrophes,
backtracking, mutations, transgressions, regroupings,
enmities, failures, mistakes, and impossible dilemmas.
The Greek word for tragedy means “goat story.” The
Odyssey is a primal goat story, where poor Odysseus
keeps going forward and backward, up and down—but
mostly down—all the way home to Ithaca. [1]
The hero’s journey is a key myth that keeps repeating
in different cultures. I learned about it from
mythologist Joseph Campbell. The hero or heroine—the
gender really doesn’t matter—must leave home or
business as usual. They have to leave what feels like
sufficiency or enoughness. There is a sense of
necessity in discovering the bigger world. We’ve got to
know there’s a bigger world than my home state of
Kansas, or wherever we’re from. In The Wizard of Oz,
Dorothy has to leave Kansas—and she’s taken away by a
tornado. We usually don’t leave home willingly. More
often than not, we’re taken there by some circumstance,
shipwreck, accident, death, or suffering of some sort.
That’s called the departure. The hero has to lose or
walk away from their sense of order and enter some kind
of disorder.
Then there’s the encounter. After the hero leaves their
castle or their stable home, they have to experience
something bigger, something better, something that is
more real and more demanding of their real energies. Of
course, that takes different forms. In the Gospels,
after his baptism, Jesus goes into the desert for forty
days.
Surprisingly, the third stage of the hero’s journey is
the return. The hero’s journey is not to just keep
going to new places, making the trip a vacation or
travelogue. We have to return to where we started and
know it in a new way and do life in a new way. We are
not somehow “beyond” the order and disorder of our
lives; we’ve learned how to integrate both of them.
This stage of return is so rarely taught. What is good
about the order, what is good about the disorder, and
how do we put them together? That is the “reorder” or
the return.
We have the departure, then we have the encounter,
which will always lead to some kind of descent away
from status, away from security, away from ascent.
Eventually something happens, something gets
transformed, and then there’s the return. [2]
Read this meditation on cac.org.
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A person gets engaged to someone who they
eventually realize isn't the person they need
to, want to, or should marry.
It isn't apparent then, everything seems okay
then, but deep in the recesses of their mind,
there's the faintest subconscious whisper
saying "this isn't right".
It doesn't take long, maybe no longer than the
honeymoon for that faint whisper to become
more than just that, and by the time they've
realized they really f**ked up, there are
innocent young victims caught in the middle of
a Greek tragedy they and the other (who
probably had that same whispering warning)
created.
The tragedy ends and thankfully, after months
or years of emotional healing, from 1/2 to the
entire time it took for the tragedy to play
out, they come back to sanity, to finally hear
and acknowledge the whispers coming from the
recesses of their mind.
They "find" themselves, they find peace again.
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