Origins

In the missions crucible of France, I read a book. I was living in Lille, a city in the northern tip of a country filled with monasteries and cathedrals. Beggars huddled at their thresholds. Tourists crossed those thresholds to marvel. In the raw wet winters, everyone ducked in to get warm. I went to connect to the ancient roots of our faith.

You might think the book I read was a great spiritual classic, maybe by a French saint, a Spanish mystic, or the history of Christianity in France. I was battling my way through culture and language shock, wondering how my faith would survive. Bible studies, fellowship, and worship were no longer spiritual nourishment but exercises in speech patterns and vocabulary. Without that nourishment, my spiritual life was withering. Would its roots hold?

While still learning the French language, I began teaching English. My grammar improved in both languages and an early call to write clamored for attention. I responded by registering for an online course whose text was The Writer’s Journey, by Christopher Vogler. That was the book I read, reread, and still read.

I experienced the same “pleasurable shock of recognition” the author described as he discovered mythic structure, the book’s topic. This literary device, known as the Hero’s Journey, could be used to produce an infinite variety of stories—ones that work. My imagination exploded as his did— “an electrifying reorganization of my life and thinking. . . the sensation that the Hero’s Journey exists somewhere, somehow, as an eternal reality . . . a divine model.”[1]

The pilgrimage aspect of faith took on new resonance as Vogler summed up the Hero’s Journey: the passage of a soul through life.[2] From that point on, I began a journey into story (myths), creating with fellow pilgrims a way to walk in this world as followers of Christ. We practiced spiritual disciplines. We lived in community for short periods of time. As we prayed, ate, sang, and wept together, we forged eternal bonds of spiritual friendship. We press on to know more of God and walk in His ways, glimpsing glory as we go.

A moveable monastery if you will. Or a Mythic Monastery, built on the True Myth who told stories everywhere He went and calls us into His metanarrative.

For a graphic presentation of the Hero’s Journey, hop over here!

[1] The Writer’s Journey, 2nd Ed., Christopher Vogler, Michael Wiese Productions, CA, 1998, 2, ix

[2] Ibid, x