We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.
Last night after our walk I found the Braves and the Mets on Hulu, the first game of a double-header, and caught the last couple innings and the Braves' victory. Actually, I had forgotten that these double-header games lasted only seven innings, and was surprised to see the Bravos high-fiving each other when I thought we still had a couple innings to go.
Figuring it would be a while before Game 2 began, I fumbled my way through logging into Peg's Great Courses subscription (now called "Wondrium" for some inexplicable reason), and scanned the buffet of brain food, with lectures ranging from woodworking to learning Italian to French Renaissance history.
Deep in the Wondrium batting order I stumbled across an interview series featuring talks between Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell. I've always felt a certain intellectual kinship with Moyers--born in Hugo, Oklahoma, the same as my grandmother (maybe we're cousins), ordained but with a life engaged in the secular world, and a pragmatic approach to society and politics. A vanishing breed.
And Joseph Campbell--what can one say about him and his influence on Western thought? I tore through The Hero With a Thousand Faces in my fighter pilot youth, and for better or worse his premise that the meaning of life centers upon taking the hero's journey, risking everything to learn through experience and hardship who we really are, has dragged me by the nose through pilot training and war and law school, seminary and divorce and remarriage and reshaping my vocational life in this present moment. He's the wise old uncle I've never met.
So getting to watch a discussion between these two, filmed shortly before Campbell's death in 1987, was a serendipitous treat for me. Peg indulged me, and we curled up on the couch for a blissful and insight-filled hour of listening and thinking.
The whole transcript is online, if you're interested:
They covered a lot of ground in that talk, from Siegfried to the Iroquois to Star Wars, tracing the common threads in each culture's version of the hero's journey. The most fascinating premise for me, old seminarian that I am, was Campbell's explanation that our religious traditions are filled with these heroic quests in which the protagonist loses who he was to become who he really is. Moses lived that experience, but of course the story that comes to mind among Christians is that of Jesus, of a hero's journey that takes him through the darkness of death itself, only to emerge to resurrected life among disciples whose vision finally allows them to see the divinity in their midst.
As Campbell repeatedly points out, our myths reveal hidden truths about who we are, or who we think we are, and what we see as meaningful in our lives. Through that lens, the comparison that resonated most strongly with me was that between the temptations in the wilderness of Jesus and Buddha. They both had them, you know. And both encounters with the tempter involved three temptations.
But the nature of the temptations was radically different.
As is so often the case, the Gospel writers give different accounts of the myth. Luke's fits my purpose the best because of its sequence. First, Satan tempts Jesus by suggesting he turn stones into bread, representing economic temptation. Then he scans all the kingdoms of the world from the mountaintop and offers them to Jesus, representing political temptation. Finally he sweeps Jesus to the top of the Temple and urges him to throw himself off and into the arms of angels, a spiritual temptation. Ever an accomplished proof-texter, Jesus has a pithy scriptural comeback for each, and overcomes the trial. And they were his temptations, after all--aren't these the sorts of things a God-man might consider, all representing selfish applications of his power?
Now consider the Buddha, sitting there under his tree. I'll let Campbell summarize his temptations, comparing them to those of Jesus, Moses, and Mohammed:
The Buddha also goes into the forest, has conferences with the leading gurus of the day, he goes past them, He comes to the bo tree, the Tree of Illumination, undergoes three temptations. They’re not the same temptations, but they are three temptations, And one is that of lust; another is that of fear; and another is that of social duty, doing what you’re told. And then both of these men come back, and they choose disciples, who help them establish a new way of consciousness in terms of what they have discovered there. These are the same hero deeds; these are the spiritual hero deeds of Moses, the Buddha, Christ, Mohammed.
Lust, fear, social duty. I guess one could find parallels between lust and hunger, both corporeal desires. But fear? The one that truly brought me up short, however, was social duty. I read a little on my own, and learned that Buddha was trying to convey that as he embarked on his hero's journey, he earned the derision of many around him because it meant turning his back on family, work, and social ritual. Like lust, like fear, these were impediments to becoming his true self, obstacles on the path to nirvana, to bliss. Each had the potential to become an idol separating man and the divine.
All this goes a long way to explain why we live as we do, with these radically different myths illuminating the journey our culture prescribes, or proscribes. Our value system is hiding there in plain view.
Would we ever in a million years embrace as heroic the idea of turning away from our duties to work, to family, to country? We do hear those stories from time-to-time, from Gandhi to the protagonist in Jimmy Buffett's ode to adult irresponsibility, The Weather is Here, I Wish You Were Beautiful:
Well now that's just the start Of a well-deserved overdue binge Meanwhile back in the city Certain people are starting to cringe His lawyers are calling his parents His girlfriend doesn't know what to think His partners are studying their options He's just singin' and orderin' drinks
A nirvana of sorts, I guess, but deep down don't most of us roll our eyes at folks who walk away from their life to find it, who (ye gods!) take a cut in pay to go write or take a stab at running their own shop?
Maybe the source of our disdain for holy fools in the Christian West is that often dreadful bit of poetry and prose that stands as the foundation of Judeo-Christian and Muslim myth, the Hebrew Bible. As Joseph Campbell once observed, Old Testament gods reflected a worldview shaped by "lots of rules and no mercy". The fact that the far-right these days is so obsessed with the OT instead of, say, First John, perhaps reveals the source of their mean edge and complete lack of empathy or compassion. Old Yahweh wasn't much for either, and his followers spent a lot of time simpering and pressing their foreheads to the carpet in meek submission, lest they find themselves smitten. Some hero's journey. But that god really isn't interested in such an exercise.
Most mornings these days I try to dial up the Satucket webpage for daily scripture reading, a practice I let fall by the wayside after my dust-up with the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. The last few days have featured readings from Second Samuel, with David on his adventure of a lifetime, slaughtering and plundering to the glory of God on his way to establishing the Davidic line. Hard to find much there to guide today's journey, at the end of July, 2021, in a space crammed with deadlines and demands and a whole panoply of distractions that feel on the brink of consuming me as I lie in bed at three in the morning grinding my teeth and battling workplace dragons. Frankly, I find little in scripture lately that has anything relevant to say to this moment, and I roll my eyes at folks who try to shoehorn a message of hope into all that conquest and murder.
Then again I've been to seminary, sort of, and know this body of literature is a collection of campfire stories and love poems and hymns, a story a few tribes in the Judean foothills told about themselves and their origins. Their myths, in other words. But one can't discount the Hebrew Bible simply by calling it a collection of myths; in some ways that observation is more indicting, because these myths reflect their distilled truths about themselves and the way the world works. It's a brutal, rule-driven, sometimes arbitrary place. And our society is the legacy of that worldview.
Maybe time to go find some better myths.
But now I have to wade back into the world here in my pajama-clad Tuesday morning. I have more work and worry than I can say grace over, and on the near horizon a long separation from P to sleep on an air mattress on my office floor and blow on the coals of my law practice lest they go out in my absence. A hero's journey, or a detour on that quest? I guess it's what I make of it.
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