This past month three members of the Living Room, a mental health support group that I co-facilitate, shared reflections in my church's worship service based on the biblical story of the prodigal son, a favourite parable for many Christians. One of them compared the prodigal sibling’s journey of becoming lost and then coming home to God to the hero’s journey as described in Joseph Campbell’s famous book, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces.” Seeing the prodigal’s journey as a hero’s journey helped me reframe this story of lostness as not a story of sin that we, as humans should avoid, as it is often portrayed by Christian theology. Rather, this journey of leaving home and becoming lost is a necessary part of the hero story that every human needs to travel to experience a coming home to God. Let me explain. In Campbell’s hero’s journey, a person encounters a challenge that they must face in life. In addressing this challenge, the person leaves home, experiencing many trials or tests. Eventually they face their biggest fear and challenge, one that threatens to destroy or kill them. Upon conquering their biggest challenge, they return home a hero, a transformed person, someone very different than the person they were in the beginning. What would it look like to interpret the prodigal parable through this lens? The prodigal story involves two siblings who struggle with their father who symbolizes both our parents and God in this story. This struggle with home life, their original holding environment, is true with every human being. In the first years of life, we experience life in a merged state. We experience God, life, our parents and ourselves as one and the same. Our inner world and outer world are one. This inner world could be called our home state as a child. This inner world is also our home state that we, as adults, settle into when we allow ourselves to become centred and fully present to our experience. This is the purpose of centring prayer or meditation…to help us spend time and develop intimacy and understanding of our home state. However, no set of parents hold their child’s experiences perfectly. As a result, each one of us as children experienced at times much frustration and pain in our childhood home state. There were times that our tears (sadness), temper tantrums (anger), and fears were held poorly by our parents or family environment leading to experiences of trauma for us. Each difficult experience broke our basic trust in life, parents, and God. Each unresolved traumatic experience of broken trust is stored in our soul and becomes part of our inner life and home state that gets triggered every time something in the outside world touches these wounds. By the time we enter our teen years, we have had many experiences of broken trust. As a result, our inner life or home state can be quite challenging to live with. We often have many critical inner voices that judge us. We, many times, struggle with negative feelings of anxiety, depression, hopelessness, anger, hatred, unlovability, and worthlessness. We frequently find our motivations very divided pulled in many directions, or sometimes stuck in a place of lacking ambition. This painful inner world and home state is what causes us to go on our hero’s journey to find salvation/wholeness and our true home. We believe our true home cannot be found in our inner world and current home state with all of its turmoil. Within the Diamond Approach, it talks about two dominant ways that people cope with this painful home state. Some people follow the hero’s journey of the prodigal sibling. Others travel the hero’s journey of the elder sibling. Most of us find ourselves on a hero’s journey that involves aspects of both the prodigal and elder siblings’ journey. The prodigal’s hero journey involves trying to find wholeness by looking to the outside world. Since we find it hard to experience love, compassion, truth, strength, joy, and power at home in our inner life, we conclude that it must be found outside ourselves in the outside world. We look for love and approval from others. We look to get happiness and fun from buying things or making lots of money. We seek strength by becoming friends with people we view as strong or seek roles that involve power. We soothe our anxiety through eating, watching TV, being busy, or medicating ourselves, sources of peace all outside ourselves. Like the prodigal, we believe that what we are longing for can only be found in the external world. We often will sacrifice everything on this hero’s journey, all our resources, like the prodigal did, to get what we are missing in our inner home state. The elder sibliing’s hero journey is different. Instead of looking to the outside world for what is missing in their life, we conclude that life and God are untrustworthy. We reason, “I can’t trust God and life to provide what I need, but I can trust myself.” We become the managers of our home state. When anxiety arises, we dismiss it by saying it should not be there, and repress it. We are often quite critical of ourselves for any experience or emotion that arises that we believe should not be there. We take this management approach to many of our negative experiences. When it comes to others, our criticalness often turns outward and we often judge others for not living proper lives or living up to our expectations. We often feel quite justified as the elder sibling illustrates in the parable unable often to extend grace to others when they fail to live up to our expectations. In the end, due to this criticalness, our hero’s journey involves judging and pushing away all internal experiences and other people that threaten our standards that we strive so hard to live by to achieve our self-made home state of peace, love, truth, etc. As a result of all this managing, our mind, where all of this mental processing happens, becomes our new home. In this mental space, we don't feel intimately the emotional and intuitive dynamics of our inner world and home state found in our heart, gut, and body. In fact, we often can feel quite disconnected from the inner dynamics of our soul below our heads. This is quite OK to us for we no longer trust this inner world where God's spirit live, moves, and reveals itself. Each of these hero’s journeys comes to a crisis point. For us who travel the prodigal’s hero journey, we find ourselves in a place where we have lost almost everything associated with our original home state. In our search for wholeness in the outside world, we often lose touch with our own experiences of love, peace, strength, truth, etc. that can arise from our internal world. We find ourselves starving at so many levels in our lives, starving for love, value, truth, compassion, inner strength and all the other spiritual experiences that bring life to our inner world. From this place of starvation and desperation, we finally realize that the outside world does not contain what we are longing for. We begin to look inward again and in doing so, we get in touch with faint memories of a time in our original home state when we did feel loved and cared for by God, life and our human loved ones. A longing develops that shapes the direction of the next stage of our hero’s journey as a prodigal. We decide to turn homeward, inward in search of our true home state hoping that, when we encounter God’s spirit again there, God will accept us. It is interesting to note in the parable that the prodigal does not expect to be accepted by his parents. Rather, he anticipates earning his place within his parents’ home, just like all of his parents’ farm helpers, just like his elder sibling has done for all of these years. We, as modern-day prodigals, often approach God and spirituality with the same attitude. We anticipate that we will need to manage our lives in the same way as the elder sibling did so that we can experience love, peace, compassion, strength, joy, etc in our inner life again. We cannot imagine God forgiving our painful history of guilt and shame from chasing life in the outside world. This is what we anticipate our future hero journey to become…one similar to what our elder sibling has been living. The crisis point for us who follow the elder’s sibling story is different. In the parable, the crisis is triggered by the parents showing love and grace to his younger prodigal sibling, a grace and love the elder sibling had never experienced from his parents. The elder sibling challenges his parents, “'How can this be? I've served you all these years, and I never disobeyed your instruction. Yet you've never given me as much as a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when this child of yours returned, after gobbling up your estate on prostitutes, you slaughtered the fattened calf for him.' Then his parent said, ‘Beloved one, you are always with us, and everything we have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad because this sibling of yours was dead and is alive. He was lost and is found'” (Luke 15: 29-32). For those of us who identify with the elder sibling, we totally understand the unfairness that has happened. For years, we have served God by striving to manage our inner home state with the hope that these managing strategies would cause us to have experiences of God’s grace, love, compassion, strength, etc.. However, these sacred experiences were always elusive, always beyond our ability to experience them deeply. The more elusive these sacred experiences were for us, the harder we tried, but always to our frustration. Then we encounter prodigals in our faith communities, and when we see them come home to God and have profound sacred experiences, we are beside ourselves. How can this be? This is totally unfair. We find ourselves at a crisis point, but a very different type of crisis than the prodigal. For the prodigal, they come to realize that the wholeness they are looking for is not found in the outside world. This realization causes them to return to their home state, return to their internal world hoping a gracious God ca be found there, a God who will embrace them somehow despite their failures and sinful past. For us who resonate with the elder sibling, the crisis feels very different. It feels like a faith crisis for God appears to be totally untrustworthy. God shows grace and gives blessings to the prodigals but to people like us, who seek to manage our life experience so that we are faithful followers of God, God seems so stingy with these spiritual blessings. Like the elder sibling, we harbour a lot of anger because of God’s seemingly inconsistencies. In our case, our crisis point often turns us away from the God we believe in. We see no point in trying to please God anymore and so we start to follow another journey, not a journey of trying to please God, but a journey of trying to please ourselves. In trying to please ourselves, we start to listen to our inner experience, our home state, something we never did very well when we were trying to please God. In turning away from the God we constructed in our mind and believed in all our life, we open ourselves up to experience the true living God whose spirit moves within the inner experience of our true home state. Our sense of centre moves from our mind and expands downward to include our heart/feelings, gut/will and physical body, all experiential aspects of our human soul. To our surprise, this pathway of rejecting the God we believe in actually leads us on our hero journey home, a journey very similar to the prodigal’s homecoming hero journey. What does this home stretch of the hero journey actually look like? What does it mean to return home, to turn inward and discover God’s spirit in the inner life of your home state? It means developing a very different relationship with the present moment where we experience our home state. Rather then looking externally to avoid feeling the dis-ease of our home state, like the prodigal did, or managing the inner life of our home state by operating from our heads, like the elder sibling did, it means becoming more intimate to our inner world. Matt Licata, in his book, “The Path is Everywhere”, describes this journey home in this way:
“What would it be like if you took the day off from becoming someone or something different? Or just hours? Or moments? To set aside the grand project to improve yourself, heal your past, be someone different, or to learn something new. To figure something out, to manifest new things or experiences for yourself, to replace what is here for something different. To dare to allow in the life-shattering possibility that nothing is wrong, nothing is truly missing, and that your life is not a project to be solved, but a mystery to be lived. “To take a walk on this new day knowing that you are fully connected. That there is nothing you must first learn or solve or understand or even heal in any conventional sense. To allow in the implications that you might not need to improve this moment. For these implications are revolutionary. To allow in for just a moment the possibility that you have everything you need to fully participate here, in the sacred word that is all around you, with all of its glory, confusion, excruciating hopelessness, pure hope, causeless joy, and shattering heartbreak. “It can be exhilarating to allow this in, to give yourself to this, just for a few moments. And also disorienting. The mind will scramble to find the reference point to a problem to orient around and defend against the utter spaciousness of being. It’s so open here, but the mind contracts in response to so much space. Wait a minute, there’s something wrong, isn’t there? I could have sworn something is wrong? There must be something that needs to fixed, healed, shifted, or transformed; some more growth, understanding, insight, more realization which must first occur before I can fully show up here, fall to the ground in awe and gratitude, and commit to this life” (p. 116). These words of Licata capture the shock of the prodigal’s journey when we come home and find God waiting for us in our inner home, a God wanting to embrace us fully without any regard of our painful past. Our minds will think, “This can’t be happening. I don’t deserve this.” Licata’s insights also capture the shock of the elder sibling’s journey when we come home and begin to experience the many spiritual blessings of God. We will say to ourselves, “How can this true? For so many years, I've tried to please God but rarely experienced God’s blessings, but now when I give up on God and follow what brings life to my inner world, I discover God’s spirit blessing my life in ways I cannot imagine.” In the end, both hero journeys bring us back home to God, changed, transformed, totally different than the people we were at the beginning. Even though our hero’s journey was challenging, even quite scary at times, we will never regret the journey we have been on. How can such a hero’s journey ever be called a journey of fallenness or sin when it really is a journey of discovering life, wholeness, ourselves, and God in all of their fullness? Questions to Ponder?
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