A New Awakening, Part 17

I have in this ongoing series been investigating the wisdom of myth as it informs what I'm calling a hoped-for "new awakening" of spirituality in our society. I take as one of my main reference points the book and PBS television series The Power of Myth, in which, during the mid-1980s, Bill Moyers interviewed at great length the scholar of comparative mythology Joseph Campbell.

Fr. Richard Rohr's book Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life tells of a spiritual maturity that we gain only in, loosely speaking, the "second half" of our life. It is a fundamental change that sets how we act and think and what we are like apart from how we once acted and thought, and even who we once were. Yet first-half-of-life religion and second-half-of-life spirituality, however different they may seem on their face, are both absolutely valid and both equally needed.

That it is possible for us to shift gears spiritually, and that until we do so we never finally learn to do our own "sacred dance," is something of a riddle. In our early years — including much of our young-to-middle adulthood — we are, Rohr somewhat wryly says, understandably fixed on "externals, formulas, superficial emotions, flags and badges, correct rituals, Bible quotes, and special clothing, all of which largely substitute for actual spirituality." Only in our later years, if we have done our first-half task aright, does "this burning, this inner experience of God" become possible for us.

Richard Rohr

"Early-stage religion is largely preparing you," Rohr writes, "for the immense gift of this burning, this inner experience of God, as though creating a proper stable into which the Christ can be born." Put another way, "The first task is to build a strong 'container' or identity; the second is to find the contents that the container was meant to hold."

Yet, oddly enough, says Rohr, "Most of us are never told that we can set out from the known and the familiar to take a further journey. Our institutions and our expectations, including our churches, are almost entirely configured to encourage, support, reward, and validate the tasks of the first half of life."

That phrase, "further journey" crops up again and again in Rohr's text. It might well have been the author's alternate choice for the book's title. And here's a key thing: Before we can embark on our "further journey," we have to experience "some kind of falling," says Rohr. There has to be some sort of "necessary suffering." Accordingly: "In legends and literature, sacrifice of something to achieve something else is almost the only pattern. ... In Scripture, we see that the wrestling and wounding of Jacob are necessary for Jacob to become Israel ... and the death and resurrection of Jesus are necessary to create Christianity."

In his sadly now-out-of-print book Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word, Jesuit father Thomas M. King writes of a "second baptism," not by water but by "fire and spirit." It typically follows, he says, a parlous "night of the soul" in which old verities collapse and crumble around us. This "dark night" comes only after the bright day of our original devotion to God on High ... or to whatever other "enchantment" we have aligned ourselves with or been captured by. Our baptism by fire and spirit accordingly comes only after we have first undergone an intermediate time of questioning and disenchantment.

This is a paradox. First must come an "enchantment" — our original fealty to a religion, cult, or philosophy — after which our continued growth toward full spiritual maturity demands that we undergo a "disenchantment": we must leave behind all that originally brought us certainty, comfort, and security. Here we undergo the proverbial hero's journey. We need to journey far out of our original comfort zone, and then find that the problem we are actually called to solve in life isn't the one we initially confronted. Or, rather, we may find that it is the same problem, but that it is now somehow transformed.

This hero's journey, with a problem that we are called on to solve — and actually do solve — has a twofold outcome. The internal, spiritual result is that we finally learn to do our own "sacred dance." The external outcome is that we return from the journey with a boon to offer our community, our society, our land. Our compatriots — in Jesus's term, our "neighbors" — can now live life more abundantly in an everyday sense because we are now capable of living life more abundantly in an inner, spiritual sense.

Lord of the Rings author
J.R.R. Tolkien

I consider this the import of what happens to Aragorn in J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy tale The Lord of the Rings. Aragorn is introduced as "Strider," a quasi-lowlife gifted in hunting, tracking, and living rough. It gradually becomes apparent that his present identity represents his fallen, "dark night" —or "dark knight"? — state, as he was born to be a king. He has for various reasons been dodging his destiny, but the quest of the Fellowship of the Ring to defeat the evil Sauron, along with his power-mad henchman Saruman, entangles Aragorn and elicits from him unstinting leadership and heroism. At the end of the narrative, he resumes his true identity and once more sits upon his rightful throne to rule his subjects in justice, abundance, and peace.

Aragorn's original "life problem" — whether and how to rule — can't be solved until he takes his hero's journey. When he comes home in triumph, the reality of his boon betokens that his original problem now has a solution, where it didn't before. Now he can reign over a peaceable kingdom that is no longer under dire threat from the forces of evil, personified by Sauron and Saruman.

All this sounds abstruse, stated baldly and without the candy-coating of mythical narrative. The mythical "hero's journey" — which Joseph Campbell ably documented in his 1949 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces — is, after all, but a metaphor. It symbolizes in narrative form the transition from first-half to second-half spirituality, from baptism by water to baptism by fire and spirit, inevitably by way of a dark night of the soul.

* * * * *

Clearly, Rohr considers his book to be mainly about second-half-of-life spirituality and the transition to it from the first half's distinctive preoccupations. Yet he does not short-shrift the first half of life. While we are young, he says, we must learn to "value law, tradition, custom, authority, boundaries, and morality of some clear sort. These containers give us the necessary security, continuity, predictability, impulse control, and ego structure that we need, before the chaos of real life shows up."

Put simply, our inner needs in the first half of life revolve around lawfulness. Rohr states, "Here is my conviction: without law in some form, and also without butting up against that law, we cannot move forward easily and naturally ... we have to have something hard and half good to rebel against."

This notion is indeed a subtle one. There has to be an authority figure who sets limits and boundaries for us, a set of rules, and a moral tradition that we take up in a respectful way. But we also must come to rebel against our society's "hard and half good" rules at some point.

Why the need for lawfulness and the need for rebellion, in proper sequence? Rohr says: "You need [to build] a very strong container to hold the contents and contradictions that arrive later in life. You ironically need a very strong ego structure to let go of your ego. You need to struggle with the rules more than a bit before you throw them out. You only internalize values by butting up against external values for a while. All of this builds the strong self that can positively obey Jesus — and 'die to itself.' "

What a conundrum! If what we ultimately seek, spiritually speaking, is to let go of our ego, how odd it is that we must start by creating a very strong ego in the first place. That clearly means we need to build our egos on something other than quicksand.

Writers on Christian spirituality
Richard Rohr and Thomas King
suggest they are all true,
in proper sequence ...

Yet we also need to, by acts of defiance and rebellion, chip away at the very foundation of our ego structure. That is what happens in our youth after we "butt up against" the norms of tradition that have been laid down for us by earlier generations. If we try to short-circuit the process by skipping over the crucial first stage, we will fail to gain the boon of the second stage.

Rohr states it this way: "In fact, far too many (especially women and disadvantaged people) have lived very warped and defeated lives because they tried to give up a self that was not there yet."

It seems that the full human "spirituality sequence" — the early preparation for our "hero's journey," the journey itself, and our ultimate return in triumph — is thus composed of a "baptism by water," early obedience to tradition, later rebellion, an inevitable "night of the soul," and then "baptism by fire and spirit" — at which point we have finally learned to do our own "sacred dance"!

A New Awakening, Part 16

I have in this ongoing series been investigating the wisdom of myth as it informs what I call a potential "new awakening" of spirituality in our society. I take as one of my main reference points the book and PBS television series The Power of Myth, in which, during the mid-1980s, Bill Moyers interviewed at great length the scholar of comparative mythology Joseph Campbell.

Diane Rehm of NPR

President Obama, before leaving on his recent tour of Africa, gave an address laying out new administrative policies to address climate change. The World Bank similarly called for concrete steps to combat global warming. I heard one reporter, Ruth Marcus, speaking on the Diane Rehm show on National Public Radio, call Obama's plans "the sleeper story of the week" — in view of Supreme Court decisions affirming gay marital rights but casting a shadow over minority voting rights, and of the Senate's passage of a comprehensive immigration bill.

Granted that gay rights, the voting rights of ethnic minorities, and immigration are issues of the first rank, why does the environment rate below them in prominence? Why does having the president finally sign on to controversial, long-awaited climate initiatives deserve a "sleeper" designation? Why is the environment always number eleven on the top ten list of urgent areas of political concern?

Is this "the environment"?
Where are we humans?

There are all sorts of contributory reasons, but I think the root cause is revealed by a careful scrutiny of the word "environment." The word suggests that the world is neatly divided into two parts: us, and everything around us. Everything other than us is "the environment," meaning something that is akin to a house that we live in, but are not of. We can modify our house at will to suit our likes and dislikes, or we can let the whole thing fall down around us if we want. After all, a house is just a thing.

Our instrumentalist view of the world is, however, just an illusion fostered by our religious orientation, Joseph Campbell tells Bill Moyers in The Power of Myth. They are discussing the ubiquity of snakes and serpents in various cultures' creation myths. In other cultures, Campbell says, the serpent represents “immortal energy and consciousness engaged in the field of time, constantly throwing off death and being born again.” The serpent in those cultures does not betoken evil.

But that changes in the Genesis account of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden:

Genesis 3:1: "Now the serpent was more subtil
than any beast of the field which
the LORD God had made."

“MOYERS: In the Christian story the serpent is the seducer.

“CAMPBELL: That amounts to a refusal to affirm life. In the biblical tradition we have inherited, life is corrupt, and every natural impulse is sinful unless it has been circumcised or baptized. The serpent was the one who brought sin into the world. And the woman was the one who handed the apple to man. This identification of the woman with sin, of the serpent with sin, and thus of life with sin, is the twist that has been given to the whole story in the biblical myth and doctrine of the Fall. ... The idea in the biblical tradition of the Fall is that nature as we know it is corrupt, sex in itself is corrupt, and the female as the epitome of sex is a corrupter.”

Our culture has, of late, done a great deal to X-out the traditional ideas that sex is corrupt and that women, temptresses all, are corrupters of men. But the Genesis idea that nature itself has been corrupted by Original Sin continues to encourage us to treat the natural world as a somehow tainted thing that we can legitimately scorn and at the same time exploit.

But this view of nature inherently distorts our understanding of who we are and what our life is all about, in Campbell's view. We as a species spring, via evolution, from what we now characterize as "the environment." Campbell says that the Garden of Eden, in a myth-aware view, symbolizes a state of being that is prior to the splitting of a primordial, eternal, timeless unity into a series of pairs of opposites: man and woman, life and death, good and evil, and so on. Thus do we live in a world where everything has its opposite. In our world of time, and of death following life, says Campbell, “the essence of life is this eating of itself! Life lives on lives ... .”

Chief Seattle
of the Duwamish Indians

The spirituality of cultures outside the orbit of the Book of Genesis, Campbell tells Moyers, encourages “the reconciliation of mind to [these] conditions of life.” Genesis, though, points us as Peoples of the Book — as Jews, Christians, and Muslims — toward a life outside this temporal world. It is a longed-for life, but it is one in which we can no longer say, along with Chief Seattle:

“The perfumed flowers are our sisters. The bear, the deer, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadow, the body heat of the pony, and man, all belong to the same family.”

If this world is not our true home, all of what Chief Seattle wrote is nonsense. But if our true home is right here in this Earthly Kingdom, we had better find ways of inflecting our traditional religions toward the urgency of saving and preserving our "environment." And that isn't going to happen, I don't believe, unless and until there is a new awakening of myth-aware spirituality in the land.