One of my favorite books as a child was a book entitled Gods and Heroes. It was an illustrated collection of Greek myths written for children. To this day I can see Zeus in my mind’s eye. My mother read it to us over and over until the cover finally fell apart. I still remember the battles of the titans and the gods, the exploits of Odysseus, of Hercules, Perseus, Achilles….of Prometheus the fire bringer. Of course, the Hero is an archetype in every culture…the one who is able to overcome evil…the one who is able to rise to their full humanity and conquer seemingly unconquerable tasks through feats of bravery and strength. Joseph Campbell’s book The Hero with a Thousand Faces is a marvelous compendium of literary and oral accounts of the heroic figure in cultures all around the world, both ancient and modern heroes in our collective lore, from Aeneas to Luke Skywalker….and the many ones over the ages who are called on to save their people from the darkness of our world.
James Joyce reminds us in his masterpiece Ulysses, a modern retelling of Homer’s The Odyssey, that the heroic is also manifest even in the most mundane circumstances of life; that the heroic is not limited to grand feats of the seemingly impossible, but that the potential for the heroic exists in the everyday life of each of us….perhaps as simple as an act of kindness, mustering the will to forgive, choosing tenderness….Rearing children calls for acts of the heroic almost on a daily basis….speaking out and acting for the good, in whatever context, requires our calling on the heroic with which we are endowed as people of God.
Heroism requires consciousness, the ability to put things in perspective, and it requires learning from each other in community…I would argue that the figure of the hero throughout the world’s mythology is a representation of enlightened community…communities empowered and emboldened to overcome the slings and arrows of life that we surely will encounter….Certainly Jesus is one such hero… Jesus who represents a heroic community that understands, has the perspective that love is greater than death, that compassion will thwart injustice, that mercy will undermine oppression, that inclusion and hospitality will engender dignity. These virtues of the Jesus movement found in the followers of Jesus over the centuries are heroic. They stand against the evil in our world on a day to day basis, often unseen, but also sometimes in startling ways.
The light that is coming into the world is the light of the heroic….bear it with honor dear brave and strong people of God, for the world needs the hero, the heroine…always has, and always will.
