{"id":23424,"date":"2024-02-18T14:32:54","date_gmt":"2024-02-18T19:32:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=23424"},"modified":"2024-02-19T09:44:39","modified_gmt":"2024-02-19T14:44:39","slug":"23424","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=23424","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Graves Into Gardens ft. Brandon Lake | Live | Elevation Worship\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/KwX1f2gYKZ4?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Hero\u2019s Journey<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Richard Rohr uses the framework of the \u201chero\u2019s journey\u201d to describe the path of spiritual transformation. He points to&nbsp;<\/em>The Odyssey&nbsp;<em>as a powerful metaphor:&nbsp;<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The universe story and the human story are a play of forces rational and nonrational, conscious and unconscious, involving fate and fortune, nature and nurture. <strong>Forces of good and evil play out their tragedies and their graces\u2014leading us to catastrophes, backtracking, mutations, transgressions, regroupings, enmities, failures, mistakes, and impossible dilemmas.<\/strong> The Greek word for&nbsp;<em>tragedy<\/em>&nbsp;means \u201cgoat story.\u201d&nbsp;<em>The Odyssey<\/em>&nbsp;is a primal goat story, where poor Odysseus keeps going forward and backward, up and down\u2014but mostly down\u2014all the way home to Ithaca.&nbsp; [1]<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The hero\u2019s journey is a key myth that keeps repeating in different cultures. I learned about it from mythologist Joseph Campbell. The hero or heroine\u2014the gender really doesn\u2019t matter\u2014must leave home or business as usual. They have to leave what feels like sufficiency or enoughness. There is a sense of necessity in discovering the bigger world. We\u2019ve got to know there\u2019s a bigger world than my home state of Kansas, or wherever we\u2019re from.<strong> In&nbsp;<em>The Wizard of Oz<\/em>, Dorothy has to leave Kansas\u2014and she\u2019s taken away by a tornado. We usually don\u2019t leave home willingly. More often than not, we\u2019re taken there by some circumstance, shipwreck, accident, death, or suffering of some sort.<\/strong> That\u2019s called the<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>DEPARTURE<\/strong><\/span> The hero <strong>has to lose or walk away from their sense of order and enter some kind of disorder.&nbsp;<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Then there\u2019s the&nbsp;<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>ENCOUNTER<\/strong><\/span>. After the hero leaves their castle or their stable home, they <strong>have to experience something bigger, something better, something that is more real and more demanding of their real energies.<\/strong> Of course, that takes different forms. <strong>In the Gospels, after his baptism, Jesus goes into the desert for forty days.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Surprisingly, the third stage of the hero\u2019s journey is the&nbsp;<strong><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">RETURN<\/span><\/strong>. The hero\u2019s journey is not to just keep going to new places, making the trip a vacation or travelogue. <strong>We have to return to where we started and know it in a new way and do life in a new way.<\/strong> We are not somehow \u201cbeyond\u201d the order and disorder of our lives; we\u2019ve learned how to integrate both of them. <strong>This stage of return is so rarely taught. What is good about the order, what is good about the disorder, and how do we put them together? That is the \u201creorder\u201d or the return.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>We have the&nbsp;<em>departure<\/em>, then we have the&nbsp;<em>encounter<\/em>, which will always lead to some kind of descent away from status, away from security, away from ascent. Eventually something happens, something gets transformed, and then there\u2019s the&nbsp;<em>return<\/em>. [2]<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Falling Down and Moving Up<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Father Richard identifies the heroic journey as <strong>a type of \u201cfalling upward\u201d into a new way of being:&nbsp;<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>A down-and-then-up perspective doesn\u2019t fit into our Western philosophy of progress, nor into our desire for upward mobility, nor into our religious notions of perfection or holiness. \u201cLet\u2019s hope it is&nbsp;<em>not&nbsp;<\/em>true, at least for me,\u201d we all say. <\/strong>Yet the Perennial Tradition, sometimes called the wisdom tradition, says it is and will always be true. St. Augustine called it the passing-over mystery (or the \u201cpaschal mystery,\u201d from the Hebrew word for Passover,&nbsp;<em>Pesach<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Today we might use a variety of metaphors: reversing engines, a change in game plan, a falling off the very wagon that we constructed.<strong> No one would choose such upheaval consciously. We must somehow \u201cfall\u201d into it. Those who are too carefully engineering their own superiority systems will usually not allow it at all.<\/strong> It is much<strong> more&nbsp;<em>done to us&nbsp;<\/em>than anything we do ourselves, and sometimes nonreligious people are more open to this change in strategy than are religious folks who have their private salvation project all worked out. <\/strong>This is how I interpret Jesus\u2019 enigmatic words, \u201cThe children of this world are wiser in their ways than the children of light\u201d (Luke 16:8). I\u2019ve met too many rigid and angry Christians and clergy to deny this sad truth, but it <strong>seems to be true in all religions until and unless they lead persons to the actual journey of spiritual transformation.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Falling down and moving up is the most counter-intuitive message in most of the world\u2019s religions, including Christianity.&nbsp;<em><strong>We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right.<\/strong>&nbsp;<\/em>That just might be the central message of how spiritual growth happens, yet nothing in us wants to believe it. I actually think it\u2019s <strong>the only workable meaning of any remaining notion of \u201coriginal sin.\u201d<\/strong> There seems to have been a fly in the ointment from the beginning, but the key is recognizing and dealing with the fly rather than throwing out the whole ointment!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>By denying their pain and avoiding the necessary falling, many have kept themselves from their own spiritual journeys and depths\u2014and therefore have been kept from their own spiritual heights.<\/strong> Because none of us desire, seek, or even suspect a downward path to growth, we have to get the message with the authority of a \u201cdivine revelation.\u201d So, Jesus makes it into a central axiom: T<strong>he \u201clast\u201d really do have a head start in moving toward \u201cfirst,\u201d and those who spend too much time trying to be \u201cfirst\u201d will never get there<\/strong> (Matthew 19:30). Jesus says this clearly in several places and in numerous parables, although those of us still on the first journey just cannot hear this. It has been considered mere religious fluff, as much of Western history has made rather clear. <strong>Our resistance to the message is so great that it could be called outright denial, even among sincere Christians.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>====================<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large is-resized\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/image-1-500x167.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-23408\" width=\"262\" height=\"88\" srcset=\"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/image-1-500x167.png 500w, http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/image-1-300x100.png 300w, http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/image-1.png 600w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 262px) 100vw, 262px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-table\"><table><tbody><tr><td><strong>Sorrowful Yet Always Rejoicing<\/strong><\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.withgoddaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/Screen-Shot-2022-05-01-at-4.52.17-PM-300x239.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-11993\"\/><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-table\"><table><tbody><tr><td><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" width=\"auto\" height=\"15\" src=\"https:\/\/mcusercontent.com\/87188c8737bc50c1a2fb8e2c9\/images\/b66516eb-1f2d-8d90-0e02-d4223f78f6f7.png\"><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/withgoddaily.us2.list-manage.com\/track\/click?u=87188c8737bc50c1a2fb8e2c9&amp;id=3f9e3dafc2&amp;e=f52fc38132\" target=\"_blank\"><\/a><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/withgoddaily.us2.list-manage.com\/track\/click?u=87188c8737bc50c1a2fb8e2c9&amp;id=0231d47787&amp;e=f52fc38132\" target=\"_blank\">Click Here for Audio<\/a><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/withgoddaily.us2.list-manage.com\/track\/click?u=87188c8737bc50c1a2fb8e2c9&amp;id=511e605e0d&amp;e=f52fc38132\" target=\"_blank\"><\/a><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" width=\"auto\" height=\"35\" src=\"https:\/\/mcusercontent.com\/87188c8737bc50c1a2fb8e2c9\/images\/b66516eb-1f2d-8d90-0e02-d4223f78f6f7.png\"><br>Van Gogh\u2019s painting of olive trees was intended to represent Jesus\u2019 suffering in Gethsemane. He gave the trees a vaguely human form in order to \u201cmake people think\u201d more than if he had depicted Jesus explicitly. Another noticeable difference from traditional depictions of Gethsemane is the brightness of Vincent\u2019s painting. He did not paint the shadows of a garden at night, which would fit what the gospel writers tell us. Instead, his garden of olive trees is under a blazing golden sun. Like so many of his paintings, this one is dominated by yellow, van Gogh\u2019s color for divine love.<strong> The trees writhing in pain appear to be stretching upward toward the infinite joy of God.The simultaneous mixing of joy and sorrow is a common theme in Vincent\u2019s paintings and in his life.<\/strong> He said, <strong>\u201cIt is true that I am often in the greatest misery, but still there is a calm pure harmony and music inside me.\u201d <\/strong>This paradox should be familiar to anyone who belongs to Christ. The Apostle Paul described himself as a common jar of clay that nonetheless contained a priceless treasure. He said he is afflicted, perplexed, persecuted, and wasting away\u2014and yet, he saw these momentary troubles as nothing compared to the eternal glory that awaits him. Later, he described himself as \u201csorrowful yet always rejoicing\u201d (2 Corinthians 6:10).<br>      This paradox captured van Gogh\u2019s imagination as a young man. In 1876, he preached an English sermon on the topic. He said:\u201cSorrow is better than joy\u2026for by the sadness of the countenance, the heart is made better. <strong>Our nature is sorrowful, but for those who have learnt and are learning to look at Jesus Christ, there is always reason to rejoice<\/strong>. It is a good word, that of St. Paul: as being sorrowful yet always rejoicing. For those who believe in Jesus Christ,<strong> there is no death or sorrow that is not mixed with hope\u2014no despair\u2014there is only a constant being born again, a constantly going from darkness into light<\/strong>.\u201dPerhaps this explains why he painted his version of Gethsemane in bright sunlight. The terrible suffering of Jesus in the garden was not the full story. Through his suffering, there would also be resurrection, new birth, the defeat of evil, and the reconciliation of all things to God. This is what Vincent tried to capture with his painting. The contorted olive trees reaching up to the sun represent Jesus\u2019 journey and ours from darkness to light. There is pain, but there is also hope. There is sorrow, but there is also joy.<br>         Good Friday contains the mystery of our faith. <strong>The cross is a paradox we are invited to embrace even as we fail to comprehend it. <\/strong>It is a moment of unimaginable sorrow and pain; of injustice and cruelty. It represents, as Jesus said when he was arrested, the \u201chour when darkness reigns\u201d (Luke 22:53). And yet, <strong>it is simultaneously the moment when darkness is defeated, when injustice is disarmed, and when our sorrow turns to joy. <\/strong>In these uncertain times, when there is so much fear and suffering, the cross reminds us as van Gogh preached, \u201cthere is no death or sorrow that is not mixed with hope.<br><br>\u201dDAILY SCRIPTURE<br><br><a href=\"https:\/\/withgoddaily.us2.list-manage.com\/track\/click?u=87188c8737bc50c1a2fb8e2c9&amp;id=75592673d4&amp;e=f52fc38132\">ISAIAH 61:1-4&nbsp;<br>2 CORINTHIANS 4:7-18&nbsp;<br>MARK 15:33-39<\/a><br><br>WEEKLY PRAYER  From Bernard of Clairvaux (1090 &#8211; 1153)<br><br>You taught us, Lord, that the greatest love a man can show is to lay down his life for his friends. But your love was greater still, because you laid down your life for your enemies. It was while we were still enemies that you reconciled us to yourself by your death. What other love has ever been, or could ever be, like yours? You suffered unjustly for the sake of the unjust. You died at the hands of sinners for the sake of the sinful. You became a slave to tyrants, to set the oppressed free.<br>Amen.<br><br>The post&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/withgoddaily.us2.list-manage.com\/track\/click?u=87188c8737bc50c1a2fb8e2c9&amp;id=26f5d83ebf&amp;e=f52fc38132\">Sorrowful Yet Always Rejoicing<\/a>&nbsp;first appeared on&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/withgoddaily.us2.list-manage.com\/track\/click?u=87188c8737bc50c1a2fb8e2c9&amp;id=fbd9aa251f&amp;e=f52fc38132\">With God Daily<\/a>.<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Hero\u2019s Journey Richard Rohr uses the framework of the \u201chero\u2019s journey\u201d to describe the path of spiritual transformation. He points to&nbsp;The Odyssey&nbsp;as a powerful metaphor:&nbsp; The universe story and the human story are a play of forces rational and nonrational, conscious and unconscious, involving fate and fortune, nature and nurture. Forces of good and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23424"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23424"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23424\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23433,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23424\/revisions\/23433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}