Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, New York
In his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the great mythologist Joseph Campbell describes the narrative pattern of the hero myth as follows:
A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are encountered there, and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.
Campbell chronicles this narrative process of the hero myth through seventeen chronological stages, each infusing the protagonist with new experiences that gradually transforms his or her character into its destined ideal: a hero who has undergone adventure, transformation, and return to become the boon, or a blessing, to those yet to undergo the journey themselves. The “thousand faces” of the hero’s journey refers to the multiple iterations that this universal, mythic journey manifests. Underneath, though, for Campbell, there is only one transformative monomyth of adventure, transformation, and return.
This weekend one of the most paradigmatic of these hero journeys hits the big screen in the highly anticipated adaptation of The Odyssey by the great filmmaker Christopher Nolan. The Bible, too, is full of these hero journeys beginning with Abram who is transformed into Abraham and his grandson, who we hear about today, Jacob who will be transformed into Israel.
Up to this point in the story, Jacob, whose name means “supplanter,” has usurped his twin brother, Esau, at every turn. Even at his mother’s bidding, Jacob will come to assume and own his identity as a trickster all to get what was not rightfully his, his father’s blessing. Even though a twin, he is not the first-born twin. He is the second…and his supplanting nature is memorably depicted in the story even in his birth with his tiny hand firmly fixed on his brother Esau’s equally tiny ankle. Ever-grasping Jacob refuses to stand in the shadow of his brother and rightful inheritor of the blessing of the father and the promise of God. So, all of his life, he grasps and strives and connives to supplant his brother to be somebody his society and religion said he could not be. And yet, the irony at the heart of the story is that all along Yahweh, his god, had supplanted custom and already chosen him to be the son of blessing. But to realize this, Jacob has to go on a hero’s journey of adventure, transformation, and return.
The story today picks up with Jacob on the run, living in fear of his brother’s retribution. It’s here in the moment of his own, personal existential crisis that he meets his match. With a stone for his head, he lies down and dreams of a ladder connecting heaven to earth with God’s messengers, angels, ascending and descending on it. But the message does not come from these messengers but directly from God standing right beside him. God’s message is a message not of castigation or reproach but one of assurance and promise. Jacob learns that his god is with him to fulfill the promise of Abraham through him, just as he so desperately desired. As he rouses himself, his eyes are awakened to new dimensions and exclamation says, “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it! How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” For us, today, the journey ends here…but not for Jacob. His transformation is only beginning and won’t be complete before having to wrestle with this god and be perpetually wounded in the fight. Jacob will indeed be the vessel through whom the blessing of God flows, but it’s through a wounded, limping, humbled vessel…one who has gone through the fire and whose ego-ambition has been supplanted by God.
But this is a lesson for another sermon in the weeks ahead, today the focus is on a very particular stage of this hero’s journey. The truth discovered at this stage is a truth that appears again and again in the journey of spiritual maturation…it is the moment of awakening. Ironically this happens while Jacob is asleep. And maybe there’s a lesson in this irony…it’s only when we let go of control in our wakened life that the divine in our subconscious minds can make itself known. And what is the revelation that here awakens Jacob? It is the fact that his God, Yahweh, the God of the promise, is with him in this deserted place with only a stone for a pillow. It’s the insight that it’s in the ordinary where the extraordinary is discovered and that he is now in God’s house (the literal meaning of Bethel) …that it’s when you’re worn down by running away from the thing you fear most and have to just stop over sheer exhaustion that you encounter the awesomeness of God and the gate of heaven.
Jacob’s journey of awakening and discovery reminds me of another hero’s journey, the journey of Thomas Merton who chronicles a very similar experience. After living about sixteen years as a Trappist monk in rural Kentucky, Merton, suffering from chronic back pain, goes to downtown Louisville to see a doctor. While walking on a busy street corner he is suddenly stunned by what he sees. He describes it as follows:
In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness…. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun…. Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed…. I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.
“How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” Sound familiar?
I have often wondered if anybody else on that busy day on Fourth and Walnut saw what Merton saw. Probably not! But why did he see it? Was it a moment of total sovereign revelation? I don’t think so. Merton had spent sixteen years giving himself over to the monastic way of life and learning how to open himself up and listen deeply with the ear of his heart. His spiritual senses were attuning themselves to the presence of God everywhere. He was, in other words, ripe for something like this to happen. And it did! “The gate of heaven is everywhere” is Merton’s great insight…and he challenges us to awaken our spiritual senses to see it, hear it, taste it, touch it, and smell it in the everyday, ordinary moments of our seemingly mundane lives.
Pope Francis used to repeatedly say that God is a God of surprises and that we never know when God is going to surprise us. We, therefore, need to develop what he called “a contemplative gaze” so that we don’t miss those divine surprises.
So, at the heart of our journey in our life with God is found one of life’s greatest lessons. With Jacob we must close our eyes to the world around us and “fall asleep,” as it were, to the phenomenal world and awaken to the numinous depths within. It is there that the awesome presence of God awaits us. We don’t have to wait until Sunday morning or a moment of crisis to encounter this presence. It abides with us! And with Merton we give ourselves to lives of prayer and deep listening, ever sensitizing ourselves to the “deep calling unto deep,” so that with Pope Francis we can awaken from our slumber and return to our awakened state each morning ready for the adventure in God that awaits us.
One further lesson in the Jacob story…this process of awakening to the vision of God in the hero’s journey is not easy and comes at a price. It’s on a very hard, uncomfortable stone that you will have to sometimes lay your head. It’s not what we would have chosen, and it is often what we wrestle with God to accept…but it is this very stone which becomes the catalyst of awakening and is transformed into a monument to God.
The lesson Jesus teaches us today is that in this process of transformation there are weeds encroaching on us our whole lives. Patient endurance, putting up with the weaknesses of body and behavior, as our Holy Father Benedict memorably put it, is not just a necessary burden, it is the very virtue transforming us into someone who will one day shine like the sun. For Jesus, and for those in him, the good news is that the adventure we’re on is one much greater than any hero’s journey…and the transformation and boon of blessing far exceeds anything previously imagined. We’re on a journey not just of adventure, transformation, and return…we’re on a journey of adventure, transformation, and transcendence into a whole new mode of being…what he called eternal life…and that this eternal life isn’t in some far away kingdom reserved for us when we die…but in the simple, but pregnant, moments of our everyday lives. Let anyone with ears listen! And let anyone with eyes see…we’re all shining like the sun!
