Telling Stories that Matter
This is the text of a sermon I delivered to the Boise Unitarian Universalist Fellowship (BUUF) on Sunday, July 22, 2018.
I teach a popular online course at the College of Western
Idaho called “Survey of World Mythology.”[1]
Every semester, my students start the course thinking that they are going to
learn about Zeus, Hera, and maybe Thor—and in all fairness, Thor is why I initially
wanted to teach the course.
About three weeks in, we get to the part where I introduce
Jesus as just one of many examples from world religions of the “dying god”
archetype, and there’s the delicious sound of young minds being blown. “What?
We’re reading Christian scriptures as myths?” Well, yes.
Stories, wherever they come from, have power. Stories can
shape our cultures—and our individual stories can shape our values and our sense
of meaning in a world that might otherwise feel like pure chaos.
A possibly spurious[2]
quote attributed to British novelist John Gardner famously asserts that there
are only two basic stories in the entire world: the hero’s journey, and a
stranger walks into town. Today, we’re
going to talk about the first kind of story.
In my world mythology class, I spend an entire unit on the
hero’s journey. This universal archetype, a story that exists across all world
cultures, was described by anthropologist Joseph Campbell in his seminal 1949
work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The
book heavily influenced George Lucas—so I guess we have Campbell to thank for Star Wars (well, at least the good
movies, the ones that the young folks call four, five, and six)[3].
What is it about the hero’s journey that makes it such a
powerful story for pretty much every human being?
Joseph Campbell outlines 17 stages of his monomyth[4]—but
we’ll be here all day if we try to get through all of them, and I know some of
you have brunch plans. So I’d like to focus on just three elements of the
hero’s journey and consider how these elements apply to the stories we are
telling about ourselves in the world, right now:
- Answering the Call
- The Belly of the Whale
- Ultimate Boon/Freedom to Live
Let’s
Start with Answering the Call.
Here you are, minding your own business. Maybe you’re
working a desk job. Maybe you are surrounded by small children who are
continually asking you “why?” and demanding peanut butter and honey sandwiches.
Maybe you’re a modern day Jonah, preaching to people who comfortably agree with
you, your Facebook friends, your book club group, your progressive liberal
friends.
Suddenly, everything changes. The telephone rings. An email
hits your inbox. You see a social media message from a long-lost high school
friend.
Campbell says that
the call to adventure is:
to
a forest, a kingdom underground, beneath the waves, or above the sky, a secret
island, lofty mountaintop, or profound dream state; but it is always a place of
strangely fluid and polymorphous beings, unimaginable torments, super human
deeds, and impossible delight. The hero can go forth of his own volition to
accomplish the adventure, as did Theseus when he arrived in his father's city,
Athens, and heard the horrible history of the Minotaur; or he may be carried or
sent abroad by some benign or malignant agent as was Odysseus, driven about the
Mediterranean by the winds of the angered god, Poseidon. The adventure may
begin as a mere blunder... or still again, one may be only casually strolling
when some passing phenomenon catches the wandering eye and lures one away from
the frequented paths of man."[5]
When did the call come to you? How did you answer?
If you’re like me, the call has come many times, and I’ve
answered in different ways. Sometimes I’ve been like Jonah—Run away! Sometimes
I’ve proudly crossed the thresholds and stormed the barricades. But my most
important calls have been the last kind Campbell describes—the calling by
accident. When an anonymous blog I wrote about parenting a child who had a then
undiagnosed mental illness, titled “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother,”[6]
went suddenly viral in 2012, I wanted to run away. But I answered the call. I
put my name on the story and told our family’s truth about just how hard it is
to raise a child who has mental illness, without a village to support us.
Think for a moment about the accidents in your life that in
hindsight, changed everything. What truths do you need to tell?
Next,
let’s look at the Belly of the Whale.
This idea comes straight from
the Biblical story of Jonah and the whale, and I think it’s important to
remember that, like Jonah, whether or not we accept the call, we can and
probably will still end up in the fish’s belly at some point in our lives.
But it’s not as bad as you
think. In fact, Campbell describes the image as one of rebirth. He says:
The hero…
is swallowed into the unknown and would appear to have died. This popular motif
gives emphasis to the lesson that the passage of the threshold is a form of
self-annihilation. Instead of passing outward, beyond the confines of the
visible world, the hero goes inward, to be born again.[7]
The belly of the whale is
where we have to do the hard work that accepting the call requires of us. I
suspect that it’s where many of us are right now.
According to NBC News:
Across America today, rates of
depression and anxiety are rising dramatically. A 2018 Blue Cross study found
that depression diagnosis rates had increased by 33% since 2013—and that’s for
people who have health insurance. Our teenagers are especially hard hit, with
experts blaming everything from social media to video games to the loss of
community.[8]
In the belly of the whale, we are alone, and we feel
helpless. Do you feel helpless right now? Does the endless and exhausting news
cycle—children in cages, women’s reproductive rights under threat, politicians
who sold out our country to a foreign power—feel overwhelming to you?
I think that collectively, what we’re really experiencing is
a cultural belly of the whale. We wanted something different for America. We
believed in our Unitarian values of “The inherent worth and dignity of every
person; and Justice, equity and compassion in human relations”[9]
but it all feels so helpless, so hopeless.
That’s why we have to learn to write and revise our stories.
We’ll be reborn, and we’ll tell the tale. But right now, we may not know what
the meaning of this story is, to ourselves, to our communities, or to our
nation. Rebirth isn’t easy.
Finally,
let’s look at the Ultimate Boon and Freedom to Live.
The ultimate boon is that grand meaning of life that we are
searching for—but it may not turn out to be what we think it will be. Remember
that great final scene in Indiana Jones
and the Lost Crusade, where our hero has to choose the cup of Christ from a
whole shelf full of glittering golden goblets? The cup he chooses, the Holy
Grail, is made of clay, a carpenter’s cup, simple and unrefined.
Sometimes we don’t know what the meaning is until we sit
down later, like Tolkien’s Bilbo Baggins, to tell our story of “There and Back
Again.” The act of telling may in itself help us to discover what the story’s
point is.
Campbell says:
What the
hero seeks through his intercourse with [the gods and goddesses] is therefore
not finally themselves, but their grace, i.e., the power of their sustaining
substance. This is the miraculous energy of the thunderbolts of Zeus, Yahweh,
and the Supreme Buddha, the fertility of the rain of Viracocha, the virtue
announced by the bell rung in the Mass at the consecration, and the light of
the ultimate illumination of the saint and sage.[10]
Grace. I
really like that word. I personally define grace, though I don’t completely
understand it, as the power of good that pervades the world. Of course, you
don’t have to be religious to find your ultimate boon, your grace. This
spiritual energy may even exist in the absence of energy, in nothingness.
Ultimately, I think what the
story of Jonah and the Whale tells us is that we can run but we can’t hide from
our calling, so we may as well find some ultimate boon in it. For me, that boon
is the freedom to live without fear
What are we afraid of? Well, first and foremost, the
greatest fear of all: fear of death.
Campbell’s hero conquers death by understanding that, as the
Latin poet Ovid wrote in his Metamorphoses,
“Nothing retains its own form; but
Nature, the greater renewer, ever makes up forms from forms…. Nothing perishes
in the whole universe; it does but vary and renew its form.' Thus the next
moment is permitted to come to pass.”[11]
In other words, fear not:
Death is change, not end. This is the point of most major stories about endings
and beginnings, and for the hero, this knowledge is the ultimate freedom.
But now,
a warning! We have to be careful how we use our stories.
This impulse to tell stories can be a powerful force for
good—but also for evil. As one example, the Nazis were really good at telling
stories that gave life meaning—at the expense of 14-year old Anne Frank and six
million other innocent people. Stories—especially overly simplified ones--can
be dangerous. Don’t think for a minute that it can’t happen here.
In her popular TED talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,”[12]
Nigerian author and feminist Chimamanda Ngoze Adichie observes:
The single story creates stereotypes,
and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are
incomplete. They make one story become the only story. . . . The consequence of
the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition
of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than
how we are similar.[13]
Do we tell ourselves stories that contain stereotypes? I
know I do.
The Atlantic Monthly’s
psychology editor, Julie Beck, makes the same point in her article, “Life’s
Stories.” She writes:
The redemption story is American
optimism—things will get better!—and American exceptionalism—I can make things
better!—and it’s in the water, in the air, and in our heads. This is actually a
good thing a lot of the time. Studies have shown that finding a positive
meaning in negative events is linked to a more complex sense of self and
greater life satisfaction.
The trouble comes when redemption isn’t
possible. The redemptive American tale is one of privilege, and for those who
can’t control their circumstances, and have little reason to believe things
will get better, it can be an illogical and unattainable choice. There are
things that happen to people that cannot be redeemed.[14]
In other words, we need to understand that our story is not
the only story—and that the stories we hear about others, maybe even about Donald
Trump supporters, are also not the whole story, or the only story.
Listening to others’ stories, especially stories from
marginalized people, is at least as important as telling our own, maybe
more—and Facebook doesn’t make it easy. We have to look for what psychologists
refer to as disconfirming information—stories that challenge our assumptions
about the way the world works.
This brings me to the last point I want to make:
We
Need to Revise and Retell Our Stories
Sometimes we don’t know the meaning of our stories until
years later. Sometimes we have to rewrite our old stories to accommodate a new
narrative. This task—telling stories that matter—is not accomplished in a
single draft. It is, in fact, the work of a lifetime.
Julie Beck notes that how we tell, revise, and retell our
stories affects who we are and how we see ourselves. She writes,
In telling the story of how you became
who you are, and of who you're on your way to becoming, the story itself
becomes a part of who you are…. Storytelling, then—fictional or nonfictional,
realistic or embellished with dragons—is a way of making sense of the world around
us.[15]
What are the themes of your hero’s journey? What calls have
you answered? Would you answer them differently today?
What whale bellies have you endured, or are you enduring
now? How will you be renewed, reborn, when you emerge?
Finally, if you’ve found the ultimate boon and the freedom
to live, congratulations! Also, I’m sorry. When I was 35, I thought I had
everything figured out, too, and I was pretty smug about it. Spoiler alert: I
didn’t have it all figured out, and now I know that I probably never will.
Fortunately, as Beck says,
A life story is written in chalk, not
ink, and it can be changed. Whether it’s with the help of therapy, in the midst
of an identity crisis, when you’ve been chasing a roadrunner of foreshadowing
towards a tunnel that turns out to be painted on a wall, or slowly,
methodically, day by day—like with all stories, there’s power in rewriting.[16]
In the end, there’s no right or wrong story, no best path.
There’s your story. How will you answer the call? How will you escape the belly
of the whale? What will you tell us about freedom to live when you return from
your journey? The story may change 1000 times, and the hero may have 1000
faces, but in the end, your hero’s journey is just that: yours. Per aspera ad astra—through hardships to
the stars.
[4] Here’s a link to the Joseph Campbell
Foundation, where an overview of his life and work can be found https://www.jcf.org/
[5] Campbell, Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 48
[7]Campbell, Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 77
[10] Campbell, Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 155
[11] Ovid Metamorphoses,
quoted in Campbell, Hero with a Thousand
Faces, p. 209
