I ponder the hero … Someone that triumphs over adversity and evil…
I’m not so sure about the Stranglers’ choice of heroes…Leon Trotsky, Lenny Bruce, Elmyr de Hory, but–Sancho Panza was a pretty cool guy for putting up with Don Quixote though–and we all love Shakespeare–right?
Ponder George Washington, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Martin Luther King Jr, John Wayne played many heroes…all superheroes are heroes of course. Distinctive hero brands include the military, athletes, do we have current day heroes? I think we do, but they are not big names…or are they? Have any “heroes” let you down as of late?
Do you ever think about us as heroes? Sure… you and me… we could be heroes.
Erwin McManus’s thoughts….There is a hero within you waiting to be awakened. Some were born to be the hero of a story of epic proportions, others perhaps the hero for one small child sponsored across an ocean. Both require a hero’s soul and have a hero’s call. While you can’t do everything, you were created to do something of incredible importance. The tragedy is if you try to be everything and do everything, you may so diffuse your effect that you will not optimize who God made you to be and what he created you to accomplish. This is why you need convergence. You need to bring together all of your talents, gifts, passions, intellect, energy, time, and resources and harness them in such a way that you focus on the mission God has given you for your life.
McManus echoes a bit of what Joseph Campbell came up with years prior. Campbell was a man of true adventure – he travelled the world throughout his life, searching for stories and experiences
“The adventure of the hero is the adventure of being alive” – Joseph Campbell
Campbell’s term monomyth, also referred to as the hero’s journey, refers to a basic pattern found in many narratives from around the world. This widely distributed pattern was first fully described in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). An enthusiast of novelist James Joyce, Campbell borrowed the term from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. As a strong believer in the unity of human consciousness and its poetic expression through mythology, through the monomyth concept, Campbell expressed the idea that the whole of the human race could be seen as reciting a single story of great spiritual importance, and in the preface to The Hero with a Thousand Faces he indicated it was his goal to demonstrate similarities between Eastern and Western religions. As time evolves, this story gets broken down into local forms, taking on different guises (masks), depending on the necessities and social structure of the culture that interprets it. Its ultimate meaning relates to humanity’s search for the same basic, unknown force from which everything came, within which everything currently exists, and into which everything will return and is considered to be “unknowable” because it existed before words and knowledge. The Story’s form, however, has a known structure, which can be classified into the various stages of a hero’s adventures like the Call to Adventure, Receiving Supernatural Aid, Meeting with the Goddess/Atonement with the Father and Return.
You see this is the essence of all great stories and all great myths regardless of culture or age….We still see it today. George Lucas had already written two drafts of Star Wars when he rediscovered Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces in 1975 (having read it years before in college). This blueprint for “The Hero’s Journey” gave Lucas the focus he needed to draw his sprawling imaginary universe into a single story.
I can’t say I buy Joseph Campbell’s spiritual baggage, but I do agree with McManus. We all long to be heroes and to accomplish something heroic…we can even probably find our lives somewhere in the blueprint above.
There are heroes today…it’s you if you so choose.
For me… I have to go back to an earlier post… No matter what…always, always… Trust your cape….
Stranglers in London 2011…great hair…
Whatever happened to Leon Trotsky?
He got an ice pick
That made his ears burnWhatever happened to dear old Lenny?
The great Elmyra, and Sancho Panza?
Whatever happened to the heroes?
Whatever happened to the heroes?Whatever happened to all the heroes?
All the Shakespearoes?
They watched their Rome burn
Whatever happened to the heroes?
Whatever happened to the heroes?No more heroes any more
No more heroes any moreWhatever happened to all the heroes?
All the Shakespearoes?
They watched their Rome burn
Whatever happened to the heroes?
Whatever happened to the heroes?No more heroes any more
No more heroes any more
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