A Trail of Adventure
A Trail of Adventure
Bishop Barron on the Hero's Journey
Hello Heroic Hearts! If you’ve listened to our podcast for awhile, you know that the Hero’s Journey has served as our interpretive key for understanding and describing the heroic lives of St. Joan of Arc and St. Thérèse of Lisieux. In Joan’s case, the analogy is explicit: a young peasant girl receives a “call to adventure” from heaven, leaves her “ordinary world” of Domrémy, and embarks on an epic quest to save France and crown the rightful King. Through battles, victories, imprisonment, and martyrdom, Joan of Arc shows us the courage of a hero in every phase of her journey.
In St. Thérèse’s story, the outline of the so-called “monomyth” is strictly interior, following the contours of her soul’s journey from the ordinariness of a young girl to the magnanimity of a great saint along an itinerary of prayer, obedience, and suffering. Like Joan, Thérèse shows us what courage looks like when we’re up against various enemies—especially that of our own pride.
In this week’s homily from Word on Fire, Bishop Barron takes up the Hero’s Journey in the context of the Old and New Testaments. From the stories of Abraham to Jesus Christ, the Bible invites us to see own own lives in the context of this journey which is, after all, nothing less than the process of conversion and our entry into the abundant life. Enjoy!