A Reflection for X Pentecost (proper 14) All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Southern
Shores, NC August 13, 2017 Thomas
E. Wilson, Rector
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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