Transition.
The mythic hero [is] someone who ends a journey with one of two kinds of heroic acts: A physical act in which the individual gives his or her life in sacrifice for others, or a spiritual act, in which the hero returns to share an extraordinary experience and thus deeply benefits the community.
~ Joseph Campbell
pentecost, week 1.
How was the Easter season for you? The 40 days of Lent is a long span to hold the tensions of Journeying toward death and resurrection. Immediately following Resurrection Sunday, we begin another span—this one is 50 days… but the tone is decidedly different! Jesus’ last words to the disciples were of profound hope, anticipation, and discipline. “Wait!” he tells them. “Don’t rush headlong into enthusiastic proclamations and church-planting. Wait for a fresh encounter with the Holy Spirit, a baptism, an empowering.”
We call this season Pentecost, and it runs from April 1 to May 19 this year. Also known as Eastertide or Paschaltide, this season has its roots in the Greek pentecoste, which means 50th day. Surely that upper room must have felt electrified as these followers gathered in celebration and intercession. It was a time of sacred transition.
Most of us find ourselves in some kind of transition just about all the time! While some seasons are almost entirely about transition (which would be true for Kellie and myself right now), something is changing in our lives pretty much constantly. Not unlike the natural seasons. What’s changing in your world right now? Have you named it? Have you felt the feelings of it—the little micro-deaths and micro-resurrections? Have you let go of what has run its course… and opened your heart to receive what is coming alive?
On the Long Journey Home (our blog theme for this year), the path is full of such transitions. And part of growing up spiritually and emotionally is learning to manage these shifts, whether internal or external, with grace and hope.
If you’ve followed my scribblings over the past seven weeks, you’ve gotten a Cliff Notes version of Odysseus’ journey (with nine defining stops) from Troy to his home Ithaca a mere ten years later. The man who returns is a very different man than the one who set sail… because that’s what journeys do. They grow us up. If we let them. What I haven’t told you is that Odysseus’ journey didn’t start then; it actually began ten years before that when the Trojan War first launched to rescue Queen Helen who had been stolen from King Menelaus by Paris, prince of Troy. Homer tells this prequel in The Iliad.
Often regarded as the first substantial pieces of European literature, these epic poems not only capture generations of oral traditions, but they offer compelling archetypes for our own personal journeys through life, which we’ve been exploring particularly through the lens of the Enneagram. But there’s a more fundamental transition depicted in the contrast between these two volumes: The Iliad represents what Richard Rohr calls the “first half” of life, and The Odyssey represents the second half (or better, the transition to the second half).
The Iliad is a story of war, hubris, challenge, and vengeance. In this tale, the major figures pit their egos against one another in very testosterone-laden fashion. This conquest correlates to our own early adulthood where we define ourselves by our tribe, our religion, and our certainties. Perhaps not as dramatically as Odysseus, we still establish our sense of self by us versus them, right versus wrong, the good guys versus the bad guys—and all those lines are clearly drawn.
And then we fall.
“Falling Upward,” Rohr calls it in his landmark book of that title. Some kind of major devastation (or series of them) batters all our previous certainties so thoroughly that we feel utterly lost, like we have landed in an entirely new and unknown world where the rules have changed. The ego that was so necessarily built up in the first half is now systematically dismantled and deconstructed. It is profoundly uncomfortable—just ask Odysseus—but it opens the door to a new and glorious world.
As we enter into Pentecost together, may this transition be a time of incubation. May the waiting be preparation. Don’t rush it. Savor the pause.
growing your soul
Between The Iliad and The Odyssey, where do you find yourself these days? What’s in transition for you, and where is God in that?
serving our world
When it comes to “serving your world,” this can be driven either by the ego or by the mature self. The ego isn’t bad, but it cannot produce the results of the mature self. Where do you find yourself in this story?
takeaway
Wait. Hope. Believe.