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The hero is us: bringing a new, religious vision to life is a great adventure - Essay
National Catholic Reporter, Jan 25, 2002 by Rich Heffern
Campbell appealed to people, Kennedy pointed out, because he showed them the real vitality that lives in religion. "His views were a treat for the spirit, showing that religion is not about harsh rules and regulations but about those stories that tell us God is at work in our midst. Joseph Campbell was all about the rediscovery of the primacy of our individual religious experience."
In his own recent book The Unhealed Wound, Kennedy looks at the ancient Grail myth of Parsifal, the hero who heals the sexual wound of King Amfortas, as a way to understand the sexual problems in the church today. "Every one of us has suffered sexually from a church that insists that rules and regulations are more important than our experience," he writes. Yet especially in the area of sexuality, we are called to listen to our own hearts. The king in the story shows us that, if you try to keep yourself apart from nature, the wounds will not heal.
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The problem of pedophile priests acting out their fantasies or the rapes of nuns by clerics are particularly heinous festerings of that unhealed wound, Kennedy said. In the church, the male-led fight against the body, especially the female body, continues as a top priority, even though none of this seems to have been important to Jesus, Kennedy said. Yet so strong is the defensive attitude of church authorities that they think nothing of denying the faithful the Eucharist and the services of priests.
What's more, according to Kennedy, people are longing now for that poetic church, the nurturing symbol-maker and religious storyteller. "You could see it on the streets of lower Manhattan following Sept. 11. The sidewalks looked like church sanctuaries with the candles and pictures. There the church was waist deep in human experience, so different from the church trying to impose meaning from above. There can be a generous, humane understanding that arises from this kind of church. It has nothing to do with damnation, hellfire or canon laws, rather with seeing every moment in the sacramental nature of reality."
Campbell's primary message was that religious stories are about us, about how we live today, says Kennedy. "The story of a Virgin Birth reminds us of the spiritual possibilities and fecundity in each of us. The Promised Land is about realizing some of those spiritual possibilities. Religion is far richer in this sense than a literal interpretation of the stories can provide. We can exult in the freedom of having a spiritual life that does not follow a blueprint but is open to the geography of the universe," Kennedy said.
Earth in the heavens
Campbell showed us that the moon flights and the accompanying photographs were theological moments as well as historic ones. "They ended a great cleft in our spirit, proving to us that Earth is not below and heaven above. Earth is in the heavens," said Kennedy. "Carl Jung said that the proclamation by Pius XII of the assumption of Virgin Mary in the 1950s was nothing less than Mother Earth returning to the heavens."
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