People say that what all we’re seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. – Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
In this address I intend exploring aspects of Joseph Campbell’s ‘hero’s journey’ as a way of understanding the Hebrews reading, chapter 11 verse 29 through to chapter 12 verse 2. The Hebrew’s text is not history viewed as a series of events or character studies, but history as mythology. I do not mean by this untruths: I mean events explored as metaphors that stretch the imagination.
Myth awakens in us the meaning of life. The faith heroes mentioned here are figures of national drama whose exploits triggered courage and persistence in the face of tragedy; the writer saw them as markers of human destiny. They were women and men who seized the moment; they grasped their unique destiny with both hands. The culmination of the Hebrews account brings the focus to Jesus, the dynamic hero of faith, who for the joy before him pursued his destiny. Joy, more profound than all pleasure, is rooted deep in the hero’s journey.
Heroes have punctuated every stage of my life: this may be a moment when you also recall the lives of those who have inspired you. In conversations following this address you may be willing to share your own hero encounters. I suspect that like mine they may be a mixture of saint and sinner. What captured our imagination however was their ‘rapture at being alive’. As their presence receded they remained metaphors of life open to possibility.
I remember in years of uncertain atheism reciting a line from Swinburne’s Hymn to Proserpine: ‘Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath’. Religion seemed such a treadmill of broken dreams and false hopes. And then came the sudden conquest by the Galilean whose insistent humanity awakened me to my own humanity. The expansive metaphors of religion stretched the imagination and made me ‘actually feel the rapture of being alive’. Life’s adventure was beginning.
I read this text from Hebrews with that same sense of growing delight. The stories recited from Genesis to Judges, recounting the lives ‘of the prostitute Rahab … of Gideon, Barak, Samson and Jephthah, about David and Samuel and the prophets’ lack historical credibility. Nothing about their lives seems to signify them as markers of faith and ‘the hope of resurrection’. And yet, I grasp the writer’s intention to take the broken humanity of Israel’s saints and point us to the courage of persistence. They are not models but metaphors of an endlessly creative life. They speak to people struggling with life’s journey, withstanding suffering and disappointment, motivated by ‘the rapture of being alive’.
The reference of the metaphor in religious traditions is to something transcendent that is not literally any thing … The images are outward, but their reflection is inward … Just sheer life cannot be said to have a purpose, because look at all the different purposes it has all over the place. But each incarnation, you might say, has a potentiality, and the mission of life is to live that potentiality. How do you do it,’ My answer is, “Follow your bliss.” There’s something inside you that knows when you’re in the center, that knows when you’re on the beam or off the beam.
Here, as Campbell does, I shift the image to a modern setting. For six years I worked alongside a CEO inspired by the insights of Joseph Campbell. I watched him hold the attention of thousands of employees at National Conferences, then move desk to desk, outreach program to outreach program, youth in crisis to youth in crisis.
With seemingly no more preparation that his own sense of destiny he could catch the eye of a politician or a leading banker. He built the organisation on his grasp of ‘the experience of being alive’. He persistently asked each of us on the senior management team to join in a spiritual journey where our personal ‘myth’ or ‘dream’ – to use Campbell’s words – might pull us ‘into accord with the rhythm of the universe’. At every management meeting he drove home to each of us the life possibilities we carried into the workplace: we were working as an integrated team to translate our dreams into realities.
These were six amazing years in my life where the experience of working in such dynamic company taught me in a fresh way ‘to follow my bliss … and actually feel the rapture of being alive’. The very heart of this lay in the rediscovery of story-telling. I recreated there the wonder of interpreting the myths or religious stories that had stagnated into dogmas and doctrines. Through story-telling I could release within me ‘the possibility of human experience and fulfilment’.
I want you to engage the ancient mythology of the Epistle to the Hebrews in this spirit. The list of heroes scarcely bears investigation. From a moral perspective almost all fall well below any level of acceptability. In their time they were responsible for invasion, occupation and ethnic cleansing. And yet the writer visions them as people ‘who through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, and gained what was promised’.
When my mind reverts to the workplace I recall the collision of saint and sinner in each of us. We frequently struggled with our own failing capacity to live honourably. This is a modern take on the world of the ancient writer to the Hebrews. The challenge then and now is to face our mixed motives; with them and despite them we discover a potential to strive for ‘what was promised’. With them and despite them we commit ourselves to be motivators of change and participants in working for something better. Work becomes an ‘experience of being alive’ prompting those around us to grasp the possibility of their and others’ transformation.
For a moment longer I hold onto the modern metaphor. One of the highlights of those years was to visit Triple Care Farm at Robertson in the Southern Highlands. This is a joint venture between the Sir David Martin Foundation and Mission Australia. The farm offers a residential, rehabilitation program for young people aged 16-24 mostly referred by the courts. Their stories are about recovery from addiction, abuse, crime, loneliness and despair. You watch these young people learn skills and the first stages of a trade program and you sense their discovery of being alive. All through, the staff struggle with each stage of development. As you watch and listen you know that the heart of that discovery is grounded in courage.
These heroes of modern faith parallel for me the writer’s list of saints in ancient Israel. Without trying to second-guess the many heroes of your experience, we hold in common the life and teaching of the Galilean. The Hebrews writer was transfixed by Jesus’ sense of destiny. We all know the struggle to add meaning to our lives but deep down, what binds us as Christians, is the ‘experience of being alive’. This, said Joseph Campbell is ‘not about our journey to save the world but to save ourselves … [and] in doing that [we] save the world. The influence of a vital person vitalizes.’
I assess that is why the list of faith heroes in this text reaches its climax with Jesus, ‘the pioneer and perfecter of faith’. He is not offered as one more in a lengthening sequence of heroes. They by contrast are a surrounding company of witnesses, but Jesus, says the writer, is the man who completed his task. In the language of the text he ran his course: ‘for the joy lying before him he perseveringly endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.’
Jesus took the hero’s journey living his life ‘in accord with the rhythm of the universe’: impelled by ‘the rapture of being alive’, he took the courageous journey with his own unique sense of destiny. I had never thought about reading the text this way until I began to match the themes with those of Joseph Campbell. Here was another way of understanding Jesus’ ‘saving act’, his work of redemption. This is not one more monotone on substitutionary atonement, not a repetition of Jesus suffering for me, life for life, blood for blood, a sacrifice to appease the wrath of God. Here is the journey of hope taken by one man to its climax. And be beckons all of us to choose the path that will open each of us to our own unique sense of destiny. The key to his life and ours is perseverance.
Abelard‘s idea was that Christ came to be crucified to evoke in man’s heart the sentiment of compassion for the suffering of life, and so to remove man’s mind from the blind commitment to the goods of this world. It is in compassion with Christ that we turn to Christ, and the injured one becomes our savior.
Each day we set out on a spiritual journey of discovery. The circumstances never remain the same and so the journey always has an uncertain direction. The path is never obvious. Campbell again reminds us: ‘If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.’
Hope like this shapes a way of being Christian that is never locked into some past set of rules. All engagement with others can only be grounded in how we share our humanity. Christ is the metaphor for the road we follow: we do not seek to live his life or die his death: we are not driven to save others without first saving ourselves. And the pathway is always and only ‘the rapture of actually feeling alive’.
So, reassess your response to the opening words of Hebrews chapter 12 as my challenge to translate its metaphors into your own creative daily living:
Let us also throw off every encumbrance, every sin to which we cling, and run with perseverance the race for which we are entered, our eyes fixed on Jesus, on whom faith depends from start to finish: Jesus, who for the sake of the joy that lay ahead of him, perseveringly endured the cross, despising the shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God (translation based on the New English Bible compared with R C H Lenski, Interpretation of the Epistle to the Hebrews).
A Meditation Homily based on the Epistle reading for the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Hebrews 11:29-12:2.
Bill Lawton
15 August 2013