A New Awakening, Part 9

As I said in my last post in this ongoing series on how a "new awakening" of spirituality that is more aware of the wisdom of myth can benefit us today, elevated suicide rates among baby boomers following midlife are a symptom of the spiritual deficit faced by our society. We today are not exposed in a serious way to the old narratives that once informed the lives of people going back thousands of years. It shows up as an overweening emphasis on youth and a failure to learn how to properly move from youth into old age.

Confirmation that myths are crucial to our spirituality comes from Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, a book by Fr. Richard Rohr:

Western rationalism no longer understands myths, and their importance, although almost all historic cultures did. We are the obvious exception, and have replaced these effective and healing story lines with ineffective, cruel, and disorienting narratives like communism, fascism, terrorism, mass production, and its counterpart, consumerism. ...

... myths proceed from the deep and collective unconscious of humanity. Our myths are stories or images that are not always true in particular but entirely true in general. They are usually not historical fact, but invariably they are spiritual genius. They hold life and death, the explainable and the unexplainable together as one; they hold together the paradoxes that the rational mind cannot process by itself. As good poetry does, myths make unclear and confused emotions brilliantly clear and life changing.

Myths are true basically because they work! A sacred myth keeps a people healthy, happy, and whole — even inside their pain. They give deep meaning, and pull us into “deep time” (which encompasses all time, past and future, geological and cosmological, and not just our little time or culture). Such stories are the very food of the soul ...

Fr. Richard Rohr

Rohr, who is a Franciscan friar and priest, calls the wisdom of myth "transrational," which means ...

... bigger than the rational mind can process; things like love, death, suffering, God, and infinity are transrational experiences. Both myth and mature religion understand this. The transrational has the capacity to keep us inside an open system and a larger horizon so that the soul, the heart, and the mind do not close down inside of small and constricted space. The merely rational mind is invariably dualistic, and divides the field of almost every moment between what it can presently understand and what it then deems “wrong” or untrue. Because the rational mind cannot process love or suffering, for example, it tends to either avoid them, deny them, or blame somebody for them, when in fact they are the greatest spiritual teachers of all, if we but allow them. Our loss of mythic consciousness has not served the last few centuries well, and has overseen the growth of rigid fundamentalism in all the world religions. Now we get trapped in destructive and “invisible” myths because we do not have the eyes to see how great healing myths function.

The blind Greek
poet Homer

Rohr interprets The Odyssey, the ancient epic by the blind Greek poet Homer about the journeys of the hero Odysseus, as mythic confirmation of the need for "a new and second journey," once the hero's first journey has been completed. The Odyssey is mostly about that first journey, but it hints at the second:

Instead of settling into quiet later years, Odysseus knows that he must heed the prophecy he has already received, but half forgotten, from the blind seer Teiresias and leave home once again. It is his fate, required by the gods.

Teiresias's prophecy had been stated this way by Homer:

Then came also the ghost of Theban Teiresias, with his golden sceptre in his hand.… When you get home you will take your revenge on these suitors of your wife; and after you have killed them by force or fraud in your own house, you must take a well-made oar and carry it on and on, till you come to a country where the people have never heard of the sea and do not even mix salt with their food, nor do they know anything about ships, and oars that are as the wings of a ship. I will give you this certain token which cannot escape your notice. A wayfarer will meet you and will say [your oar] must be a winnowing shovel that you have got upon your shoulder; on [hearing] this you must fix the oar in the ground and sacrifice a ram, a bull, and a boar to Neptune. Then go home and offer hecatombs [one hundred cattle] to the gods in heaven one after the other. As for yourself, death shall come to you from the sea, and your life shall ebb away very gently when you are full of years and peace of mind, and your people shall bless you. All that I have said will come true.

What does all that mean? Rohr points out that:

• Odysseus had been traveling through Hades (the kingdom of the dead) when he heard the prophecy. In modern psychological understanding, Hades symbolizes the deconstruction of his conscious ego and his consequent ability to hear, and half-remember, Teiresias's words.
• Teiresias's golden sceptre symbolizes the "divine source," the "authority from without and beyond," of Teiresias's message.
• The "country where the people have never heard of the sea" symbolizes the need for the second journey to take Odysseus from his island home, Ithaca, to the mainland, i.e., it betokens that the "part" is being reconnected to the "whole." This is, Rohr says, "what makes something inherently religious: whatever reconnects (re-ligio) our parts to the Whole is an experience of God."
• Going "inland" from the sea symbolizes the connection Odysseus must make to his "interior world, which is much of the task of the second half of life."

Rohr then interprets the further symbolism in the pithy prophesy of Teiresias, culminating in Odysseus ... 

... finally living inside the big and true picture; in Christian language, he is finally connected to the larger “Kingdom of God.” Odysseus ultimately will “live happily with my people around me, until I sink under the comfortable burden of years, and death will come to me gently from the sea.”

Odysseus is ready for death once he has made the second journey. The first journey was about his mastery of life's manifold challenges. The second, about his gaining the readiness for inevitable death.

Is this something that we in our culture are being taught today, by our formal religions or by the culture in general? Sadly, no.

More to come later ...