The Hero’s Journey Guidebook
Mapping the Story of Your Life
Ben Pugh
The Hero’s Journey Guidebook
Mapping the Story of Your Life
Copyright © 2016 Ben Pugh. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Resource Publications
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paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-0836-0
hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-0838-4
ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-0837-7
Manufactured in the U.S.A. December 12, 2016
Scripture taken from the New King James Version (NKJV). Copyright © 1979, 1980, 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapters 1:1–1:2 have been adapted from my “Have You Heard the Call?” Methodist Recorder (September 11, 2015). Used by permission.
Chapter 2:1 has been adapted from my “Getting Past Your Grumpy Old Troll,” Methodist Recorder (February 2016). Used by permission.
To my mother.
Introduction
“. . .the unnarrated life is not worth living.”1
What’s true? What’s real? We can’t agree anymore about what life means. We call this “postmodernity.” It is a particular episode of our culture. The old verities are under threat. We have come to realize that even science cannot explain everything. This loss of consensus is, of course, not a permanent state of affairs. It has happened before: the Reformation, the Enlightenment. New definitions of reality are soon put forward but, for a while, everything seems to be up for grabs. For the generation or so of people that live through these big cultural shifts, some matrix has to be found that rescues them from the nihilism and anarchy that lies in wait. It was during just such a time—the early eighteenth century—that the modern novel came to birth.2 We tell ourselves stories as a way of recovering a shared understanding of who we are and how we got here.
As with previous cultural reboots, no-one is sure of anything at the moment. The system is in the process of restarting, and has been since the sixties. People are anxious. Many are risk-averse while others are adrenaline-junkies. Overall, we are witnessing a retreat from adventure, all compounded by an all-out siege on our culture from Jihadi terrorism. The anti-establishment, world-changing confidence of the Swinging Sixties, leading to the playfully postmodern Nineties, has given way to the pallor of the Post 9/11 world. It is starting to look as though we haven’t even the courage to be fully postmodern any longer and modernity’s prized ideals of regulatory control and secular peace have bounced back. It seems we can no longer stomach the dizzying freedoms of unprincipled relativism. Some things, after all, are just plain wrong. But an equally ridiculous moral certainty keeps taking hold with all the attendant witch hunts, allegations and scandals. The external threats seem to compound our war on each other.
But there is hope. Culture has an instinctive ability to rebuild itself around some new set of ideals. Two new ideals are emerging. Firstly, the new consensus is looking like it will be heavily committed to pragmatism. What works, and only what works, is true and valuable. In a world in which no single perspective on something can ever be final, such pragmatism is one of the only options left to us. Individually created truth is only of use to anyone else if tried and tested. This is perhaps most marked in the context of church. It is there of all places where we expect high principles and strong theoretical underpinnings. Instead, even the most fantastical ideas about the binding of territorial spirits are propagated because of anecdotes about how such methods have apparently worked. In the recent past, church growth conferences attracted huge numbers of disillusioned pastors of tiny churches in the hope that even a model from South Korea might work for them in Milwaukee. The challenge to everyone, if pragmatism is to dominate, will be how to let it rule us in a way that is dignified, visionary and creative rather than crass, unprincipled and utilitarian.
Community is the other main outcome of postmodernity. In a community, a tribe or a team, we all pool our perspectives in the hope of negotiating some degree of consensus. And so it is that TV and radio shows that would once have been hosted by one presenter are now presented by a team, a posse of jesting colleagues who all have a say. In universities we learn collaboratively, research reflexively and write multi-voiced. In our post-industrial world some experiment with leaderless organizations3 and many try to reform our politics so that it is structured on a human scale: devolved and less bureaucratic4—and so we should. Please, more of that!
And as we gather to rebuild our fractured world, as we try pragmatism cemented by community, we tell stories. Stories provide the plan. Stories give the architecture of the world we are trying to build. Stories speak of life in a way that is not open to empirical experiment in any scientific sense yet they are profoundly pragmatic. Stories tell the community what works at a deep level, a level only decipherable by the community that owns them and tells them. These stories speak to the depths of our being in a way that nothing else could ever do. They are profoundly therapeutic: they rebuild relationships, they restore hope, they confirm common values.
In this book, we will be exploring the power of narrative using an adaptation of a particular matrix. Christopher Vogler, in his book of advice for screen writers, called it the Hero’s Journey.5 This is a structure, a story spine, that you can lay over your life as it looks so far. It is like a retrospective Sat Nav. At the moment, you look back upon your life and there are many roads and seemingly random changes of landscape. It is difficult to read. You’re not sure what you’re looking for, what you should pick out that shows you the path you have taken, why you have taken it and where it is leading if you stay on it. The Hero’s Journey matrix will, like a Sat Nav, illuminate the roads that matter. It is my hope that as you read, you will reflect upon your life and find that the path and its trajectory become clear. I hope also that you will begin to see that your life makes sense as a life that God cares about; that you will begin to see where he has interjected and called you in some way to some particular adventure or series of adventures.
The main ideas of the Hero’s Journey originate from the pen of a mythologist called Joseph Campbell. His book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, first came out in 1949. The whole idea is of a hero and his adventurous journey into some cavernous underworld to obtain the secret of everlasting life for everyone else. This basic story line is, according to Campbell, so pervasive in human cultures that he refers to it as the “monomyth.” In other words, there is really only one myth, many variants. Campbell’s insights were popularized via Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey to become a hugely influential way of both analyzing and helping to create the great stories of Hollywood. Star Wars was soon analyzed in this way, and Vogler himself was invited to analyze the storyboard for The Lion King while it was still being written. His input helped to give the baboon Rafiki a more meaningful role as Timon’s Mentor.
Today, any Google search will reveal just how many blogs there are out there advising screen writers and novel writers on how to use this model. It has become almost ubiquitous largely because, as Campbell claimed, it is a structure which already underlies