Thursday, August 10, 2017

Heroes" Descent



A Reflection for X Pentecost (proper 14)      All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Southern Shores, NC August 13, 2017                                                Thomas E. Wilson, Rector
Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28    Psalm 105, 1-6, 16-22, 45b             Romans 10:5-15                Matthew 14:22-33
The Heroes’ Descent
This summer we have been taking a quick tour of the Book of Genesis. The Revised Common Lectionary has an option to open the Hebrew Bible in a more structured form from the seasons after Pentecost. In Year A, the current year, the lessons are chosen from the books of Genesis, Exodus, Joshua, and Judges which highlight the promises of God to God’s people from the creation and their reactions to that promise. Year B, next year, will look at the Prophetic tradition of God calling the people back to the promise and their reactions to that call. Year C, in two years, will focus in on the Wisdom traditions. 

These short glimpses into each lesson remind me of when I lived by a river or pond, and there were always flat stones near the edge which we would pick up and skip across the surface of the body of water. I used to wonder what the rock was able to see each time it skimmed over the surface. If all we do is just focus on the short selection for the week, what is called a “pericope”, then it is like reviewing a movie based on the previews. When we do that, we do not really encounter the fullness of the saga, only the outline of the plot.

I would like to give you an assignment:  I’d ask that you read the Joseph saga beginning with today’s lesson and read the hero’s journey story. Like all hero’s journeys, it begins with a departure.  For Joseph, he is separated from his family by his brothers’ jealousy and their betrayal of him. The next stage of a hero’s journey is the descent, entering into loss.  For Joseph, it is a descent into the pit, the descent into slavery, the descent into the dungeons. But the descent is when the hero usually finds the depths of her or himself; it is a vision quest using dreams to find a deeper spiritual identity. The next step of the hero’s journey is the return, and for Joseph, it is the reconciliation with by his brothers, reunion with his father, and the giving of grace instead of revenge.

In Hero stories and myths, the Hero has encounters with spiritual forces of great power which he or she must face and grapple with as a way of finding the way home. In this story, Joseph is so self-absorbed that he does not understand how he is feeding the resentment of his brothers. Joseph does not understand that he comes from a long line of intense and sometimes murderous rivalry. It begins in the very nature of Paradise with the rivalry between the serpent, one of God’s own beloved creatures’ resentment, and the LORD. In that myth, Humans will descend as a result of that rivalry, but with God, it becomes an upward fall into a deeper relationship with God. 

But even in that deeper relationship, there are more failures due to resentments: Cain and Abel, Noah and his neighbors, Abraham and Lot, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Rachel and Leah through to their children. That resentment grows into hatred and fantasies of murder. In today’s story, the brothers stop short of murder but send him into the living hell of slavery in a foreign land far from his home and the ones who love him. Joseph has already had some encounters with the divine spirit in his dreams, which he interprets for his own advantage. It is only when he enters the descent away from the center of his own ego that is he able to empty himself to encounter the divine spirit for the healing of himself and the world in which he lives. Joseph’s wounds will heal, and he himself and his dreams will be the instruments of the healing of his family.

The Gospel lesson for today from Matthew is part of the Hero’s journey, a story of descending into healing, not of an outsider but a member of the inner circle, Peter. Peter is in a ship in the middle of a storm. The ship is a numinous and archetypal symbol of the church, a vessel that takes one across to the other side, to the home from which they have originally come. It is no accident that the main body of the church is called the “nave”, the place where all the rowers worked together to help each other get to the other side, to home.  Peter has a vision and sees Jesus walking across the stormy waters and asks Jesus to call to him and join him. Peter’s unconscious wants to be in an impossible situation and triumph. His ego is screaming for him to prove himself, so he calls to Jesus to act as a prod to his ego. Jesus, echoing the words of the deeper unconscious, says, “Come”.  Peter comes and then is overwhelmed by the impossibility. Carl Jung in The Interpretation of Visions writes:
“For the unconscious always tries to produce an impossible situation in order to force the individual to bring out his very best. Otherwise one stops short of one’s best, one is not complete, one does not realize oneself. What is needed is an impossible situation where one has to renounce one’s own will and one’s own wit and do nothing but to wait and trust to the impersonal power of growth and development.”

Peter, in his descent into the water, finds that impersonal power of growth and development that is in the person of Jesus, which we can call all sorts of things like the spirit, the power greater than ourselves, God:  the one who was there for Joseph in his descent, the one who was with Peter in his descent, the one who is with us on each of our descents to bring about healing and growth.

To come home is to descend away from our ego and fall upward into the arms of God. The 13th Century Persian Sufi poet, Rumi, wrote: “Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of learning. It doesn't matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times. Come, yet again, come, come.”


The Hero’s journey is, in essence, the story of coming home for each of us. We are born, if we are lucky, into a home where we are seen as favored. If we are seen as favored, we tend to spend our time chasing success and focused on ourselves, where the world is as only as big as one’s own shadow. Then we leave the home where we were treasured, where the world we lived in was known and trusted, and we enter a world that is much bigger, where there is much to learn and new successes and many more losses, which make us who we are. Sometimes it feels like we are all alone and we have failed, but that is only a feeling, not a fact, for God is always with us. Then, if we are able to empty ourselves of our own self-centeredness, only then are we able to allow a deeper vision which allows us to accept healing for ourselves and others. Then we are able to return to the state of knowing that we are treasured and find ourselves wise enough to understand what to treasure. As T.S. Eliot writes in Little Giddings:  “We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

The Heroes’ Descent
Wanting to prove self by jumping into the storm,
Then being overwhelmed, we descended to limits
Of what we could do and turned to deeper spirits
For that is the beginning for any life to transform.

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