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Living a Heroic Life
Summer is often the time we wish for throughout the year and, if especially if you have kids, can’t wait to get away for some rest and relaxation. How do you spend your summers? Do you use it to jet off to the beach? Maybe you spend time at home with family and a barbeque. Maybe you take your children on an adventure. Before the summer comes to a close, we would like to introduce you to an adventure of a lifetime. (And it might even take a lifetime to complete). We’d like take you on a journey of a self-discovery with the greatest reward you could wish for, the hero’s journey.
Based on what Joseph Campbell calls ‘the monomyth of the hero’, Richard Rohr gives us a tour of the hero’s journey in our book club feature Falling Upward. This journey is vital in building up a character to who we now know them to be. Breaking the journey down into five stages, Rohr uses this template to illustrate how the heroes of old achieved their successes. In this post, we will take a look at each stage of the hero’s journey and how we can apply them to our own lives.
If you’ve read our previous post, you probably have a good understanding of who a hero is in God’s eyes. Now we know God’s standards of a hero . . . how can we become a hero today?
‘They live in a world that they presently take as given and sufficient.’
To become a hero, we have to first start our own ‘hero’s journey’. It is often very easy for us to become comfortable where we are, or as Rohr puts it ‘live in a world that [we] take as given and sufficient’. After all, isn’t God’s love and care the best? Why would we need to change anything if he is meeting all our needs, just like he promised? In what ways are you comfortable in your life? How could you better stretch your aspirations?
‘They have the call or the courage to leave home for an adventure of some type – not really to solve any problem, but just to go out and beyond their present comfort zone.’
We don’t always have to leave our home to start an adventure, but rather we have to step out of our place of comfort. And that takes courage. Now that you have identified your ‘comfort zone’ you can begin to ask ‘how can I start my adventure?’ Courage is an important theme in the Bible as discussed in our previous post.
‘On this journey or adventure, they in face find their real problem! They are almost always “wounded” in some way and encounter a major dilemma, and the whole story largely pivots around the resolution of the trials that result.’
Our real issue in life is to die to ourselves. And often, our wounding is of our ego. Jesus instructs us to take up our cross and follow him more than once in his teachings. And in taking up our cross, we will often endure a variety of trials and have to give up everything we hold dear. That may mean fear of death in other parts of the world, or the disapproval of our own family. In what ways do you think you need to die to yourself? How can you become more humble?
‘The first task, which the hero or heroine thinks is the only task, is only the vehicle and warm-up act to get him or her to the real task.’
The second stage of the ‘hero’s journey’ is the most important. We really have to ask ourselves, are we prepared to give up everything to follow to call of God in our lives? For some people that may mean selling every possession you have to go out into the mission field. Jesus has asked this of others as shown in Mark 10:21. For others, it may mean taking a job you hate so that God can do his work. Abraham answered the call to sacrifice his only son. Paul preached converted and left his old life behind to preach the gospel, against all fear of death. What do you think your real task is?
‘The hero or heroine then returns to where he or she started, and “knows the place for the first time”, as T.S. Eliot puts it; but now with a gift or “boon” for his people or her village.’
For us today, the end of the hero’s journey often marks the end of a lifetime serving God. For the heroes of old, they may have only spent less than a year of their life on their journey before going down in history as a hero. In real life, it often takes a lot longer with family commitments and our careers. For us as Christians, it will often take our entire lives to achieve the ultimate goal: becoming renewed in Christ, being one with God and spending eternity by his side. It will often be our life’s work completing the hero’s journey but as long we start it, that’s all that matters.
So in the words of Richard Rohr himself, we’d like to leave you with this thought:
‘What are you going to do with your resurrected life? That is the heroic question.’
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