The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.
The Christ
Heaven is a new pair of glasses.
Fr Ed Dowling SJ
Change the way we look at things and the things we look at change.
Wayne Dyer
A miracle is a shift from fear to love.
Marianne Williamson
Last week I alluded to the fact that Christopher Nolan’s new film tells a good story in a superb, fantastic fashion. I commented that, while a great story, an interesting and highly important story — in these times of widespread fear, xenophobia, animosity, and lack of integrity in public and professional life — it is not the story captured in roughly 12,109 lines of six-foot dactylic hexameter (Homeric hexameter) attributed to the Ancient Greek poet, Homer.
Following the hero Odysseus on his ten-year journey home to Ithaca after the Trojan War, „The Odyssey“ is arranged in 24 books composed around the 8th or 7th century BC, several centuries after the destruction of the historical city of Troy at around 1200 BC, during the collapse of the Late Bronze Age.
The poem begins in media res („in the middle of things“) with Odysseus trapped in enchantment on Calypso’s island, in a state of on-going lethargic intoxication and „forgettory“, while his family and subjects yearn for his return. Meanwhile, his home is occupied by a band of unscrupulous suitors vying for the hand of Penelope, his wife.
The narrative then looks back and forth through flashbacks and concludes with his return to Ithaca, as a transformed human being.
In his recently-published work, „The Wisdom of the Odyssey“, one of our leading cotemporary Homeric academics, Phil Cousineau, highlights the contrast between the outward journey towards war and victory at Troy, and the onerous disoriented, decade-long, return journey to his wife, son and subjects, stating that: While the Iliad asks: „How should one face death and earn honour?“, the Odyssey asks: „How should one live after war and find one’s way home?“
In terms of the metamyth (or monomyth, as Joseph Campbell called it), we can see that, read together, the two epics (Iliad and Odyssey) trace an apparently complete arc of human experience.
The Iliad explores how to fight and win, the price of anger, and the search for honour in the face of mortality while the Odyssey explores how —by means of engaging in inner work — to return, recover from conflict, rebuild relationships, and remember one’s true identity.
In that sense, the Iliad is about winning a war, while the Odyssey is about learning how to live once the war is over. This shift from glory to wisdom is one reason the two poems continue to be read — over more than twenty-five centuries later — as complementary works on the Human Condition, rather than as separate stories.
In the already mentioned work „The Wisdom of the Odyssey“, Phil Cousineau presents Homer’s epic not simply as an ancient adventure story, but as a practical guide for living. The book is organised into 24 chapters, parallelling the 24 books of the Odyssey, — which, in turn reflect the 24 letters of the Ancient Greek alphabet — with each chapter drawing a life lesson from the action.
Let’s look at some of the central lessons. First and foremost is the concept of responsibility (response-ability): We must take responsibility for our own lives, our own destiny.
The first section is made up of four books — the Telemachia — with the focus on Telemachus, Odysseus’s only child, born of Penelope, his devoted wife. A baby when his father departed for Troy, he is now coming of age, conflicted between the illusion of helplessness and the call of courage.
Helplessness in the form of doubting the return (survival) of his father and resentful of the wasteful suitors — 180 vain, predatory, and greedy men — who, in the hope of winning the hand of Penelope, pose an existential threat to him while eating the royal family out of house and home.
His intuition tells him, on the other hand, that it is time to listen to his heart (courage coming from the Latin „cor“, meaning „heart“), to develop the courage to search for news of his missing father in Pylos and Sparta. He has never been beyond the „comfort zone“ of home and does not wish to defy his mother’s wish that he remain by her side.
Every life throws up such conflicts. We become aware of them only when we are sufficiently awake. Do I remain apparently helpless in the comfort zone, all the while paying a high price for this „comfort“, or do I grab the bull by the horns and set out on my own hero’s journey?
Telemachus opts for the latter. The action begins.
Before he sets off, he elicits the council of a mentor. Here we have the second lesson. Make use of the possibility of guidance of one who has already been through the mill, one who has gained life experience, one who has learned the lessons of life, often the hard way.
Here we cannot fail to see the parallels between the myth and the journey from active addiction to recovery and Emotional Sobriety. The addict, having hit bottom, sick and tired of being sick and tired, admits the problem (taking responsibility) and seeks the help of those who are further along the path (fellows, and specifically, a sponsor).
Further lessons become apparent as the action unfolds.
Life is a journey of transformation, not just a series of changes, passing milestones, or chalking up achievements. On his tumultuous and challenging return journey to Ithaca, Odysseus is not only changed but truly transformed.
As a Transformation Coach, sometimes people ask me about the difference between change and transformation. My answer is always the same: If the caterpillar opts for mere change at the expense of transformation, she may become a super-duper caterpillar but will never come to know the joys of flight.
The crucial difference in the process of transformation is the necessity of death. Reform will not cut it. We need to be prepared to die. Since we are all naturally afraid of death, most people balk and turn back to some form of „business as usual“.
Not Odysseus. Not Telemachus. Not me.
In my case, it was a matter of desperation. It was: „Transform or die“. Seen from this perspective, we may regard alcoholics and other (substance and process) addicts as „the chosen ones“. We are faced with an existential necessity to be transformed or to succumb to a miserable death, a form of suicide in instalments, dying on the vine.
The real goal, after Recovery Phase I (sustained abstinence) is becoming wiser through adversity. There is no destination to be reached, no finish line. A wise person, in this context, is one who shifts from being reactive (impulsive, fear-driven, unconscious, unaware) to being response-able (aware of the gap between stimulus and response and capable of regulating the autonomic nervous system before making a conscious choice to respond to the stimulus in an appropriate manner each time).
Practice makes progress. Any successful transformation is made up of roughly 20% insights and 80% practice. Most endeavours (the expensive seminars, workshops, courses, etc.) fail because there are plenty of insights on offer and little or no practice imparted, practice which could be customised and integrated into a daily mental fitness regime.
With mental fitness comes not only response-ability but also resilience. By maintaining our practice through repeated setbacks (they will happen!), the time required to return to mental balance and calm becomes ever shorter while the hijacking of our minds and hearts becomes less frequent.
Defeats, losses, failures, and shipwrecks are not interruptions of the journey — they are the journey. The journey to Ithaca is Ithaca. Cousineau emphasises perseverance while underlining the importance of grieving every loss and hardship along the way.
Another universal lesson we discover in the epic poem is as follows: Home is both a place and a state of being. As an immigrant myself, I have wallowed in the self-pity of not belonging anywhere. Then, in a moment of clarity, I realised that I am one of the lucky people who can genuinely call two cultures „home“. The next expansion was the realisation that: Everywhere is beautiful and nowhere is perfect soon followed by: I, too, am beautiful and forever imperfect.
Ithaca symbolises belonging („to be longing“), identity (Self, not self), and purpose. „Homecoming“ means recovering one’s authentic self after whatever wounds we suffered in early childhood (and especially our response to them in terms of default scripts of thinking, feeling, and behaving) and becoming fragmented by life’s demands.
Love trumps cleverness, strength, reputation, and everything else. Although Odysseus is famous for his intelligence and cunning, his enduring motivation is love — for Penelope, Telemachus, Ithaca — indeed for life itself.
Cousineau argues that love — not mere strategy — is what ultimately sustains Odysseus. In recovery, I have come to the realisation that love is the only true medicine. It works where all else fails.
The way we practice hospitality — and this is a theme deeply explored by Christopher Nolan in his film — reflects character. The Odyssey repeatedly contrasts generous, compassionate hosts with abusive, scheming, and manipulative ones. How we welcome strangers becomes a measure of civilization and humanity.
Xenos (Greek for „stranger“) can be used to refer to guest-friends whose relationship is constructed under the ritual of xenia („guest-friendship“), to which explicit reference is made several times in the film.
In this usage it is commonly translated as „guest-friend“ to distinguish it from the Greek word „philos“, which was used to refer to already familiar friends and relatives. These categories were not strictly bound by the law of xenia.
The Greeks believed that strangers could be gods or goddesses in disguise, so they were kind and respectful to strangers, because if they were gods, their hosts could be the recipients of divine blessings. If, however, they were unkind to a stranger, divine retribution might result. Here we also have the Law of Karma at work.
My intuition tells me that this is one of the main points Nolan wishes to get across to his audience. „Build long tables, not high walls“ is a way of putting it. At a time of regular Gestapo-like ICE raids in the US, it is a message which will resonate with many who are cognizant of their own ancestral wanderings and the origins of the United States itself.
Twelve Step fellowships honour the ritual of xenia. The only desire for membership is the desire to stop drinking states TraditionThree of AA. The concept has been adopted by all subsequent fellowships (of which there are now roughly three hundred operating throughout the world today).
Identity is discovered, community formed, and healing brought about through storytelling. Odysseus repeatedly tells and retells his own story. Twelve Step meetings afford us the opportunity to share our experience, strength, and hope and hear that of others.
Newcomers identify when they hear stories at their first meetings. This is the magnet that draws them over the threshold of fear of death (of the old ideas) to make way for the birth of the new. Narrating our experiences and the solutions we have found helps us understand who we are, integrate adversities, and form bonds with people dealing with similar issues, regardless of age, race, heritage, social standing, sexual orientation, etc.
Homer also shows us that patience can be a form of strength. Penelope’s endurance is as heroic as Odysseus’s adventures. Her intelligence, restraint, steadfastness, and ultimate trust in the power of love demonstrate that courage isn’t always dramatic. In the rooms of recovery, we often hear: „Don’t quit before the miracle happens.“
Further topics explored in depth by Homer, and which get sparse attention in this latest film adaptation include: The role of adaptability in developing wisdom, the fact that rigidity tends to lead to destruction while flexibility enables survival.
Then we have the consequences of hubris. Pride repeatedly prolongs suffering — for Odysseus and others.
Humility — seeing things as they are rather than how we are — allows growth, where arrogance blinds us.
Homer also explores the psychological aspect of monsters. Calypso, the Cyclops, Sirens, Circe, and Scylla can be read as symbols of enduring human struggles such as temptation, addiction, ego, fear, impossible choices, distraction, memory and forgettory, etc.
On that last point, Homer points out that memory provides the anchor for self-actualisation, indeed is indispensable for the recovery of the True Self. Remembering one’s origins, family, and values prevents us from becoming lost in the world. Forgetfulness, by contrast, represents losing oneself. Most of us, on setting out on this journey, have little or no memory of the pre-verbal phase of childhood, the first four years.
Recent clinical and scientific research is beginning to demonstrate how important our experience — and specifically our response to our early childhood experience — is in how we later deal with life. Any person who has not worked through the wounds of adversity in childhood (we all have them) will be driven through life like a cork on the ocean, at times in a winter storm.
In the progeny Twelve Step Programme of ACA (father: AA, mother: Alanon) we call such people untreated Adult Children. The ACA definition of the Adult Child is the composite of the Inner Child, in all its aspects, and our adult selves, the accumulation of the sum of our experiences and survival strategies, both seen and unseen, digested and undigested, debilitating and liberating. We all have our own odyssey.
Cousineau connects Homer’s poem to modern life, suggesting that illness, career changes, travel, relationships, and aging all become elements of the hero’s journey.
Today, Jungian and existential psychology views metamyths as the ultimate organizing principles of the human mind. Carl Jung argued that humanity shares a „collective unconscious“ filled with universal archetypes. A metamyth is the highest-level narrative structure that organizes these archetypes, helping humans process trauma, growth, and existence.
Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth (the Hero’s Journey) is a prime psychological metamyth. It is an overarching pattern found across global cultures that symbolizes the psychological process of individuation — leaving the comforts of home, facing the shadow self, and returning emotionally and spiritually integrated.
Existential psychology, as represented by Jung, Frankl, Irvin Yalom, etc. suggests that we humans suffer from „meaninglessness“, that it is we who must provide the purpose for our own lives. A metamyth provides a grand, overarching framework in which the individual’s personal suffering and daily efforts are infused with a sense of cosmic or historical importance.
Nolan’s story — valid and legitimate in the world today — is a subset of Homer’s story, with emphasis placed differently on various aspects of the Human Condition. My contemplations have led me to conclude that even Homer’s story is incomplete. This is because the Iliad and the Odyssey are both products of the paradigm of patriarchy.
Bell Hooks in her challenging and astute critique, „The Will to Change“, points out that patriarchy is a fear-driven energy field of domination and subjugation. Its dismantling can be achieved, not by force, by violence, but by compassion, awareness, education, universal cooperation, and the willingness to let the old — unworkable — ideas die.
Recent archaeological finds demonstrate that patriarchy is not the only option available to humankind. In „The Chalice and the Blade“, feminist archaeologist Riane Eisler pointed out almost fifty years ago that a culture based on cooperation rather than domination thrived — like no other — for centuries on the island of Crete.
Our current global culture is addictive, destructive, and obsolete. This includes aspects such as capitalism, our scorched earth policy regarding agriculture, rapidly declining biodiversity, and the poisoning of our streams, rivers, lakes, and oceans.
A paradigm shift means changing not just how we see a thing but the quality of how we see all things. It’s a fundamental transformation of perspective, providing a larger context and a novel filter through which we view the world afresh. As long as we are in the frame, we can never see the full picture.
Marianne Williamson writes: The paradigm shift most needed now involves the dismantling of a thought system based on fear, to a thought system based on love. It’s a spiritual transformation from a sense that we are separate from the world, to the recognition that we are one with it. Everything we see outside us is simply a reflection of our thoughts. Therefore, until we change our thoughts, the world outside us will not fundamentally change.
All wars begin with othering the other. The environmental crisis began with humanity demystifying nature. A lack of reverence for life itself is at the core of every problem in the world. All the external problems in the world had internal origins. And only there can they be ultimately solved.
That’s why a revolution in consciousness occurring all over the world today is our greatest hope for fundamental change. Yes, we must do everything we can to treat the symptoms of darkness, but only light will cast it out.
It is time to complete the Epic Poem, so eloquently and wisely begun by Homer. The third book could be entitled „Recovery.“ It is being written, one day at a time, right here and now.
