It’s All About You and Not At All About You

In the 1980s, I read Ernest Becker’s masterful 1973 book, ”The Denial of Death.” I was reading the book while the New York Mets were winning Game Six of the 1986 World Series, one of the most astonishing comebacks in the history of Major League Baseball. Most agree that the book, like the game, stands the test of time.

Becker devoted many pages to the work of Otto Rank, a protege of Sigmund Freud. Rank’s work does not have quite the hold it had fifty years ago, but one of his books, ”The Myth of the Birth of the Hero,” is quite helpful. Rank collected over 70 examples of hero myths and identified five common elements:

1. An infant is born to noble or divine parents or is the child of a deity and an earthly maiden. His or her origin is preceded by difficulties in the parents or their community.
2. The extraordinary signs attending the birth of the infant arouse anxiety in the ruling king or the infant’s father, who set out to kill or banish him.
3. The infant is exposed to die, surrendered to the sea in a basket, is sent away or escapes because of the intervention of benevolent forces.
4. The infant is rescued, sometimes by animals, a humble woman, or a fisherman and brought up in another land.
5. The hero, now a young adult, returns to overthrow the father or renew the community through his or her leadership.

In “The Denial of Death,” Becker wrote about the universal call toward heroism in these myths, which is innate to our species. Joseph Campbell popularized these elements in his definition of the hero’s journey.

As Campbell described the hero’s journey, an ordinary citizen is called onto an extraordinary journey on the road of trials. Initially, she rejects the call because, hey, it’s a road of trials! But now she is miserable because she knows she has been called and has rejected the call.

Amid her misery, a spiritual advisor comes into her life. It is always a Yoda-type figure with great wisdom gained through adversity. The wisdom figure gives the hero courage to answer the call onto the road of trials, and sure enough, it is a road of trials. 

No surprise there. But it gets worse. She finds herself in a deep, dark cave, utterly lost.

It is Dante at the beginning of the “Divine Comedy.” “In the middle of the road of my life I awoke in a dark wood where the true way was wholly lost.” 

It is Shakespeare’s “Macbeth.” “Life is but a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” 

It is John of the Cross’s ”Dark Night of the Soul.”

You are completely and utterly lost, and that is when you realize it is all right, because lost is a place too. That’s right, lost is a place too. 

And there are things you can learn in the place called “lost” you cannot learn in any other way—a certain wisdom, maybe, or a tempering of the ego that allows the soul to surface.

My favorite television show of all time was “Lost.” Marooned and time-traveled on a mysterious island in the Pacific, the characters spent six seasons coming to grips with and accepting their lot among the lost.

As the seasons progressed, the characters came to peace with their time in the place called “lost,” which is when they finally began to discern a path forward. The final season brought redemption to each, with the protagonist (Jack, if you are a ”Lost” fan) being the last to find his way.

In the final analysis, the show was rather spiritual and quite Christian. Carlton Kuse and Damon Lindelof were the showrunners. Most of their work is spiritual. 

The final season gave an interesting spin to the notion of purgatory. If you’ve read my memoir, “As a Woman, What I Learned About Power, Sex, and the Patriarchy After I Transitioned,” you know the show played a significant part in my decision to transition genders.

Spending time in the place called “lost” is essential to the hero’s journey. After you learn the lessons that can only be learned in that difficult place, you finally see the light at the end of the tunnel, and this time it is not an oncoming train. 

You are back on the ordinary road of trials, which feels like nothing, given what you’ve just gone through.

This is when you realize your destination has never been the Holy Grail. It has always been to bring back the Holy Grail, once found, as an offering to those from whom you have departed. 

The hero’s journey is, at the same time, all about you and not at all about you.

After returning with the offering, there may or may not be another journey onto which the hero is called. For Odysseus, after his epic trip across the sea, his final call took him so far inland that no one knew what an oar was. Once there, he had to plant an oar in the group to honor the god Poseidon. Only then was Odysseus free to move into “sleek old age.”

It does not feel like I am free to move into sleek old age, though I am older than dirt. I am still in the midst of this present journey.

I have lost track of how many journeys I have been on since I woke up to the fact that a life that does not bring you alive is too small for you.

I am yet again in the place called “lost,” which is all right because, well, it has to be. There is no use in fighting it. I must live into it and the lessons it is trying to bestow. 

For the record, if you keep answering the call onto the hero’s journey, you will keep getting lost. It is the nature of things. 

Eventually, you will find your way. That is also the nature of things. 

And if you keep faithful to the call, you might lessen the world’s suffering a little while you are on the journey. That is about all we can hope for, and it is quite enough.

And so it goes.

Editor’s Note: Good Faith Media is an exclusive media partner with Wild Goose Festival, which will take place July 11-14 in Union Grove, North Carolina. As a Wild Goose Festival leader, Paula Stone Williams will host a much-anticipated 2024 co-creator kick-off gathering with Starlette Thomas and others called “Rest and Resilience.”