When setting out on our advent journey, or any form of spiritual quest, it might be important to first let go of some assumptions about the nature of the pilgrimmage we are undertaking. For white men in particular, we must contend with a cultural inheritance based on the heros journey.

Here is the definition from Wikipedia;

In narratology and comparative mythology, the hero’s journey, or the monomyth, is the common template of stories that involve a hero who goes on an adventure, is victorious in a decisive crisis, and comes home changed or transformed. Earlier figures had proposed similar concepts, including psychoanalyst Otto Rank and amateur anthropologist Lord Raglan.^[1] Eventually, hero myth pattern studies were popularized by Joseph Campbell, who was influenced by Carl Jung‘s analytical psychology. Campbell used the monomyth to analyze and compare religions. In his famous book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), he describes the narrative pattern as follows: A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

Leaving aside the masculine grandiosity and ego-centric nature of what might be described as the hero complex, the idea of transformative struggle leading towards personal victory and public triumph over an as-yet-to-be-defined ‘enemy’ has considerable cultural power in ways which may be very unhelpful on our ordinary Advent journeys. One consequence is that we tend towards theologies of opposition in that we unconsciously set out not towards connection but towards conquest.

The prevalence of the ‘superhero’ genre within popular culture has always facinated me, at the same time as repelling me. What might this say about us? I tried to capture some of this in a poem;

Superhero



Tonight I am made new

The atomic spider bit deep, and

I am freak show, staring down from high buildings

My laser vision scans, searching

For photogenic girls to save 

From comic-cut villains, whose role is crucial, because

Every empire needs a convenient easy evil

To scare children to their beds and 

Parents to their polling booths



Yesterday I was just like you

Commuting through the same crowd towards

Jobs where work is anonymous. My weekend too

Was consumed by compensatory distraction

A movie perhaps? 

We watch masked heroes high in their 

Plastic palaces

Or zombies massing over the border wall.



If we are all extraordinary

How could I be special? 

After all, I eat communists for breakfast

We see this in part in the way that we come to define the spiritual ‘problem’ that we set out to overcome. Most religious movements see to do this – after all, our society certainly needs to address many problems, but the particuar problem focus of our hero struggle is not neutral either. Even the best heroes can cause collateral damage.

For much of my early life, the religious focus I was exposed to was the problem of sin. Particularly sexual sin, which was the worst kind. If we (or I should say if I) was purer then the world might be transformed. My job was to make others see it that way too even if I was a very flawed hero. The life-or-death nature of this struggle was after all eternal.

Later, I characterised the ‘problem’ more in terms of poverty, inequality and injustice . My job was to overcome the brutalising, degrading nature of trauma associated with these things. I worked as a social worker on the ragged edge of the welfare state, trying to rescue people (including myself.)

There is sin in this world. There is injustice. We need people to challenge and rescue, but this advent journey is not towards a battlefield, It is towards a baby.

Here is a picture of my brother holding his little nephew. I love it, in part because it captures the vulnerbility of both. It has no grand purpose, but it is laced with a deep significance, a supra-humanity.

So, shall we let go the hero, at least for a while? There may be battles ahead that need to be fought, but there is also fragility and humility to be encountered, if we lay down the swords for a while…