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 all the great myths of human history. Writers use it to help them pick out what is latently already there in the tales they are creating. This is perhaps why it is such a strong model: it merely picks out and identifies more clearly the elements that tend to turn up in any given story. Writers produce these elements unconsciously because they are already the kind of stuff that life is made up of.
What I am doing here is simply applying this template to real life from a faith perspective: analyzing real life stories of faith in the same way that screen writers analyze made-up stories to help bring out more clearly the things that life is really made of. This, I hope will help us analyze our own stories to discover a divine purpose in them.
The reason for the appeal of fictional stories is that they speak to us, and they do this so well because we see ourselves in them. In that sense, fiction is true. Jesus himself knew this as he spoke of the Kingdom of God in made up parables. Fiction is more true than life itself because it hints so strongly at the answers to our “why?” questions. Fiction tells us the meaning of life in a very immediate, intuitive way. This is what I hope The Hero’s Journey Guidebook will do for you as we explore the model in relation to real life in the same way that it has been explored in relation to made-up life.
Following Vogler, I’m giving your life’s adventures a three act structure: a short beginning, a long middle and a short end. Within Act 1 is your call to some particular action and your initial response. In Act 2, assuming you rise to the call, however falteringly, you face your ordeal, your test, out of which you emerge a better person with your priorities right and your deepest needs met. Towards the end of Act 2, there is a decisive battle. You win the fight. This results in Act 3, the journey back. In Act 3, there are still some obstacles to overcome but, basically, you are now on your way to living happily ever after. I will illustrate all of this with the stories of those that have travelled this way before.
You are probably right now coming to the end of one adventure, as well as being at the beginning or middle of another adventure. There is often some overlap. Recognizing such an overlap is a useful coping mechanism as it means that you can take courage from the great victories you are winning in one area of your life while you face the more difficult earlier stages of another adventure.
I am anticipating that many of my readers have picked this book up because, in their hearts, they want to follow Christ more authentically. This is not to exclude those who may be only exploring faith in God, but, to help with the desire to follow Christ, I have offered suggestions right at the end of each chapter about how the Hero’s Journey motif might be indexed to the life of Christ. Interestingly, not all of it can, and that despite Campbell’s original claim, which he does not adequately support, that the story of Christ is basically the same as that of every other mythical hero. There is no way, for example, to tie any episode from the four canonical Gospels into the Ordinary World, though this is, admittedly, part of Vogler’s adaptation and only implied in Campbell’s original version. But neither do we find Christ being “called” to his adventure within the Gospels, though clearly we could shoe-horn a Call in somewhere if we tried. The New Testament assumes that Christ’s ordinary world was heaven (Phil.2:6 strongly implies this), where he also received his call, so to speak, to come as Redeemer.6 There is also no very obvious Refusal of the Call. The closest we get to that is his dialogue with the Father in Gethsemane, which doesn’t happen until we are almost at the climactic moment of the whole story. Other elements, however, are very pronounced. What is normally termed the “Tests, Allies, Enemies” stage occupies virtually the whole of Christ’s earthly ministry from the calling of his first disciples to the Approach, which starts with the Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem and finishes with his arrest.
This very long Tests, Allies, Enemies section underlines a point that I will make when we get there, which is that this long test is entirely true to life. Relatively few fictitious stories alight here for quite so long—the writers don’t want their readers or viewers to lose interest. Exceptions would be those stories that are clearly framed around the idea of an odyssey or quest, such as The Wizard of Oz and Finding Nemo. In these stories the oversized Tests, Allies, Enemies section is made interesting by all the weird and wonderful personalities that are encountered along the way. In real life, the road is every bit as long as Dorothy’s but the characters we meet might not be quite so thrilling or amusing. Great reserves of patience are needed before eventually there is a change of scene: we finally come to the edge of something great. For this reason, I have chosen to call that chapter The Long Road.
And, perhaps, herein lies my main concern. Sure, I am concerned that readers would not miss their calling, and I am concerned that they would not fail to share the elixir once it is all over, Most of all, though, I want to help you see that this long period of testing you are going through had a beginning which was filled with promise, and that it has an appointed end which will overflow with blessing.
Discussion:
1. What are the most striking changes that you have noticed in Western culture during your life time?
2. What would you say has been the most decisive moment of your life?
3. Where would you say your life is going at the moment?
1. Kearney, On Stories, 14.
2. Many consider Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, to be the first true novel. It has the characteristic elements of totally believable realism and a continuous linear narrative that later became so familiar.
3. See the fascinating book by Frederic Laloux: Reinventing Organizations: A guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness.
4. I am thinking of David Cameron’s efforts in the direction of a Big Society.
5. Vogler, The Writer’s Journey.
6. In the Reformed tradition this is described as the Covenant of Redemption, more of a pact between Father and Son than a call as such: Berkhof, Systematic Theology, 265–271.
1:1. The Ordinary World
At the start of any great adventure story there is the “once upon a time. . .” part. This is where everyday life for the hero-to-be is portrayed. It is invariably humdrum. We are given the impression that this day could be any day in the hero’s life. Clark Kent is filing, Neo is working on a computer in a cubicle in a large impersonal office, Alice is sitting beside her sister on a river bank feeling bored, Indiana Jones is lecturing a class of inattentive archaeology students. In the Bible we find Joseph wandering the fields looking for his brothers, or David looking after a few of his father’s sheep.
The difference, of course, between their ordinariness and our ordinariness, our dead-end job that we’ve been in for twelve years,
