The Heroine’s Journey: The Final Chapter In Our National Story
“God doesn’t look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearances, but God looks at the heart.” It’s one of the thousands of lessons they drill into you in Sunday School. Over the years I’ve road-tested these lessons. This one managed to hold up. It continued to serve a purpose, as an exercise reminding me to always look beneath the surface at people’s hearts.
Politics makes it tough though because I can’t look at people’s hearts without feeling their emotions. As I watched the inauguration, I didn’t realize how hard the intensity of emotions would hit me. The broad political spectrum of people I love is an electric ball of competing emotions: pain, hope, betrayal, relief, anxiety, love, anger, and optimism.
Within minutes following the inauguration, the first wave of Facebook posts arrived. Some friends couldn’t wait to clap back their political rivals. They searched out posts from months ago just to comment, “See, Biden was elected. I told you so!” Others posted a laundry list of economic indicators: today’s interest rates, S&P closings, and gas prices– marking-the-tape on Trump’s economic gains in tacit hope things don’t improve so they could return the “I told you so!”
Each impulse emerged from the same place: thinking with the head and not seeing the heart.
Heroism, the power of our collective dream, and the promise of possibility have historically drawn people to America. Our motherboards are American made, hard-wired software with heroic impulses from the factory in Detroit. It fuels our desire to dream, to rise up, and escape limitations. It‘s what gets dust in the eyes of grown men watching movies on the Disney channel.
The hero’s journey is by nature an outward one. It compels us to leave our small town, quit our dead-end job, tell off our boss, and embark on an adventure. We cinch up our gear, strap on armor, pull the sword from the stone, and conquer the three-headed hydra. Then, we can return, standing fully in our power, with the elixir of life to cure the village people. This is the same heroic urge that took us to the moon. However, as necessary as the hero’s journey can be, it was only ever half the equation. It was never meant to end there. The second half of the journey is much scarier than a hydra.
This last weekend I interviewed my friend Sara, a professional book doctor, for my podcast, Who Gnows? She explained how the heroine’s journey is vastly different. Where the hero is happy with the material trappings of success, the heroine knows there is a road farther she must travel. Deep within her soul, she can feel things are deeply wrong. She must take an internal journey deep into the underworld to achieve true healing and reconciliation.
As a husband and father of two daughters, Sarah’s explanations helped me understand why Mulan is unanimously the favorite Disney movie for the women in our household. Alongside Brave, it’s an attempt by Disney to finally recognize the different challenges women face on their journeys. Women have software too. Everyday life tries to scrub their hard drives and make them forget.
Mulan is shamed as a young girl for not fitting traditional feminine ideals. She must tie up her hair and adopt the armor of male warriors. Under these pretenses, she completes the hero’s portion of her journey, creating an avalanche that destroys the Huns. Mulan’s journey however has just begun. She cannot keep pretending to be a man. The etchings on her father’s sword haunt her. She must be loyal, brave, and most importantly– true to herself.
Versions of the heroine’s journey have been mapped through time, most notably by author Maureen Murdock a student of Joseph Campell. My friend Sara described how what comes next for the heroine is different as told in a version of the Sumerian myth of Inanna.
Queen Inanna wants to visit her grieving sister and looks to attend the funeral of her recently departed brother-in-law, the Bull of Heaven. There is a catch. Her journey requires a visit to the underworld– the land of no return. Accompanied by Ninshubar, her second in command, Inanna descends into the underworld where her sister Queen Ereshkigal reigns. She must pass through seven gates. At each gate, her sister’s gatekeeper strips away Inanna’s crown, scepter, spangles off her hands and feet, and every other layer she uses to identify herself as royalty. This level of vulnerability would be unthinkable to a male hero off to slay a dragon. For the heroine’s quest, it is essential.
When Inanna finally arrives, she is naked and fully human. There she comes face-to-face with her sister Ereshkigal who is enraged and ugly, a dark embodiment of everything Inanna is not. Infuriated at the impudence of her sister who has intruded on her kingdom Ereshkigal lashes out, turning Inanna into a corpse and hangs her from a hook on the wall.
In Inanna’s absence, her kingdom suffers, prosperity wanes and crops fail. After three days and nights, Ninshubar seeks help from all the male deities who decline her request, stating she got what she deserved. She finally beseeches Enki, Inanna’s father god, who is not like the other male deities. He has mastered both his masculine and feminine aspects. He crafts two sexless beings or “galla” from the dirt about his feet to aid Nishubar in her quest to save Inanna.
“The galla,” Sara explains, “do nothing like demanding the body of Inanna. They don’t ask Ereshkigal questions. They don’t try to take Inanna. They just sit with Ereshkigal while she rages. And when she rages, they rage with her. And when she cries in sorrow, they cry in sorrow with her. And when she moans in pain and agony, they moan with her. This goes on for days until she is spent. Finally, she feels so much better and says to the galla, ‘Thank you so much for what you’ve done for me. What can I do for you?’ So, they ask for the body of Inanna which they receive.”
Inanna’s body is returned home where she revived by the Water of Life only to discover her consort Dumuzi has usurped her throne. Dumuzi is promptly sent to the Underworld to balance the scales as payment to Ereshkigal for Inanna’s release. Through the process of journeying to visit her sister in her moment of grief, Inanna has managed not only to have helped heal her sister, she herself has become whole and the land is returned to prosperity.
The heroine’s journey provides us a model for the complimentary journey we must complete as a nation with a clear indication as to who must lead this stage of the journey. We’ve climbed all the mountains, gone to the moon, and now Mars. We continue to go farther-and-farther outward when the final healing quest lies here, on earth, deep within ourselves.
The psychologist Carl Jung found within the pages of the Bible, and also throughout the ancient stories of other cultures, parallels and truths which map out the human condition. Each of us and our society at large contains elements of these characters.
We all possess classical male (animus) and female (anima) impulses. At different stages in our personal and national journies, there is a time and a season to activate those impulses. We have a heroic Self (ego) crafted in our youth as our family, church, and political groups tell us we should and shouldn’t be (like Mulan). Then, there is our Shadow (Ereshkigal), a Frankenstein of all our cast-off parts, reassembled deep in our subconscious, locked away, and raging for being ignored and unwanted.
It is no secret that in our country’s youth, who got to choose our idea of Self. We’ve literally carved their images into mountains, blocks of granite, and the pages of history. When political leaders like Mike Pompeo say America is not a multicultural nature, he is reinforcing his political idea of who we are as a nation to a room full of white male signers of the Declaration of Independence. He’s relegated to the underworld the women who raised those signators and the slaves who worked-and-built their plantations which housed and fed them. They have been raging in the Underworld ever since. Every time they are shamed, blamed and credit for their achievements are reassigned– their anger grows.
The anger we saw over these last few years was the voice of our nation’s Shadow. It is asking why there have been 46 successive presidents without one Inanna to lead the way. Its rage is the anger of countless people of color whose ancestor’s hands literally built the wealth of this nation– for free–and never received the payment they were promised. It is the rage of a people who fail to see images of themselves, side-by-side, as equals, in our oil paintings, movies, history books, and monuments. It is the rage of the poor as well who are called trash and are then shuttled under bridges so as to not blight our brochures.
We’ve had four years of pursuing greatness, smashing that animus button asking for more, more, more. We’ve adopted outward, fiscal tallies of the hero’s journey to keep score as to our greatness, with no regard as to the heroine’s scorecard: healing, reconciliation, and true wisdom. This is not a zero-sum game. It doesn’t require ignoring or downplaying the importance of GDP, gas prices, or even white men like myself. Our economy doesn’t have to lose for our country to win. It means we must take a national journey of healing, the heroine’s journey, to bring balance, justice, and equality to our land for the first time. For that journey, the scoring system must be different as will those who will need to lead it.
We need to follow scouts who know where to find the grieving sisters and brothers in our collective underworld. They need to be reinforced by the second wave of helpers willing to sit with our Ereshkigal's, to let them rage in protest, write op-eds and start conversations in churches, schools businesses, and barbershops around this nation. If this were a video game, we’d be looking for characters whose anima, empathy, and love XP were off the charts. Stripped down to her most human, the only weapons the heroine has at her disposal in the underworld are empathy and love. We must sidle up and sit with the rage and not do, but simply be with our Shadow for as long as it takes to heal. Healing is a natural process that cannot be rushed.
This begins with me and goes contrary to everything I’ve been taught. Look at the guest list of my podcast. Where have I been looking for answers? Until Sara, it was all men.
As a young boy, you learn “being a man of action” was the ideal. In sports, our high fives and back pats came when you “got in there,” “made it happen,” and “didn’t wait around for it”. The same high fives continued in the world of business. Our, male Self identifies rewards with the animus, like a dog treat. Passivity, waiting for an answer, or patiently sitting with someone (without trying to fix them) are negative traits, aspects of the Shadow. This was odd to me and a source of mixed messages, because in our male-led church, after telling me to look with the heart, they would always say to wait on the Lord. Only then, he would give you the desires of– not your head, but your heart.
My most deeply meaningful and satisfying experiences in life have come through waiting, not doing. Most notably, waiting brought me my best teacher, friend, and wife. Kristen was the teacher I ignored for a few decades because my ever-doing animus knew better. When our children born and would cry in the night, being a man of action never fixed the situation. Her sensitivity and intuition, patiently listening to each child individually, and crafting a creative, compassionate response, always did the trick. When Kristen’s facing a problem, she doesn’t always jump right in and start fixing things. She often sits with it and mulls it over until the solution comes to her. She’s hardly ever wrong.
As men, we tend to believe the power of the anima or a woman’s intuition is great with babies or comforting grieving people, but when it comes to wars, businesses, fixing, and building things there is no practical application. It is an odd belief. Any student of history, business or science will tell you that some of the world’s great inventions and innovations have come in dreams and moments of receptivity, not action.
Every day at work, male business owners come to me and ask me for ways to improve their economic growth through referrals. I show them cold, hard facts that prove it starts with compassion, empathy, user experience, and caring for people. Everything they want is on the other side of that chasm. If they would give those experiences, people would naturally refer. But, they don’t always believe me (in spite of the evidence). They are creatures of habit and animus. They want to do something, to take action and see results today. They want steroids, to give a bribe in the form of a gift card, and watch someone say yes, even if it’s for show.
Will power and action are more demonstrably visible forces. We trust only what we can see, oh we of little faith. “Thinking and doing,” are prized in a patriarchal society, while the “feeling and being” are devalued as a weakness.
If we are to judge our country’s success over these next 4 years, it will not be by our GDP, gas prices, or interest rates. It will be by whether we as a nation have the courage individually and collectively, embark on the heroine’s journey inward. Can we elevate and acknowledge women and their capacity to heal? Can we make space for different types of people so their full aspect isn’t forced into the shadows? Can we support our nation’s efforts to strip back the false layers of Self we’ve applied? Can we sit for a while with the criticism, pain, and discomfort to give our Shadow the time to heal? Our monsters may yell, they will undoubtedly be angry (we’ve locked them in the dungeon after all), but we must remember: when Innana returned, not only was she whole again, she healed the land.
If God looks beneath the surface, to the heart, then the pain felt must be immense. If God is the source of all things, then by definition that must include both our anima and animus? Our only way out of this, our final journey, and the true test of our nation's greatness are whether we can see as God sees, not separately, but as One, through the heart. That will be the measure of our success.
For more on the heroine’s journey, check out the Who Gnows? Season 2, Episode 2 with Sara Stibitz entitled, “Book Doctor, Heal Thyself.”
