The Hero’s Journey Home
Becoming an Author in the Story of Life
The universe is a story, written on pages neatly bound in its spacetime grid. If we could see it all from the outside — if we could, for instance, peer back at our universe from beyond the event horizon of a black hole — we would see, not just a collection of galaxies in space, but every event across time. We would see the story of the universe from beginning to end. And if we looked closely at our world, we would see not just a planet we are making into our home, but a galaxy of events, as if the world was a great big book, with us as characters in it. It has been said that we are the universe becoming conscious of itself. And this is how the story ends: with the characters becoming self-aware, and finding their place as the co-authors of the story. We get to choose the final chapter; we get to be the characters who walk out of the story, who don’t end with the closing of the book. But suffering is the road to becoming real.
For whatever reasons, we find ourselves here, in a cruciform universe, in a bittersweet world — with so much beauty juxtaposed upon such a brutal nature that at every turn wants to sink its teeth or its claws into you, and where you are caught up in an endless struggle for survival, for competition; gasping for air against a hundred weights that are trying to drown you. And in the end, you lose. The human condition is a bittersweet struggle; there is a priceless beauty in our noble defiance against the brutality of life, against the forces of atrophy and decay, against the inevitability of death. And love, love is our greatest act of defiance. To choose to go on loving, knowing that everything you love, everything you create, will be taken from you, and crushed into the dirt. This nobleness of spirit — that man, without knowing why, guided on by only a flicker of hope, chooses to bear the burden of being without becoming a monster — this is why the gods are in awe of men.
There is a kind of glory in enduring this intolerable sentence; a kind of nobility to the madness of not abandoning this impossible dream. But it’s not what we would’ve chosen; it’s not all that we were made for. Our story isn’t condemned to repeat itself in an endless cycle; there is a purpose to the struggle. We are birthing something new into the universe, something that is going to change it all. To be able to stand before the fire of being, and hold its gaze, though it burns you alive — without letting it destroy you, without it hardening your heart to stone. To go on loving, even in the face of death. This is the beauty that transforms the world. This is how we transmute our cruciform universe. This is how we rewrite the script. When we have finished the task of bringing heaven to earth, we will have finally come home.
“And I saw a new heaven and a new earth … and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.” (Rev. 21:1-4)
