Pagan Homer and the Path to Salvation

     Three years ago we begin a formation program in lay ministry. Now we have concluded our course of study and reflection. All of my peers have spoken of discoveries and delights in a curriculum that drew from scripture, church history, sacramental theology and other domains, such as leadership and human development. Many accounts have been presented about how this program has been found to be personally meaningful, and individually enriching. Most seem ready to “focus our vision” and find ways to speak the voice of the word in the welter of the world. All we have to do is come up with an answer to the question, “Quo Vadis”?
     Before we can reply to that query, we need to recall the story of the Roman god, Janus, he of the two faces that could look forward and back at the same time. He was the divinity of gates and doors, of tasks completed and new enterprises undertaken. The month in which we had our last class meeting and the first of the final presentations bears his name and evokes an apt image of dual vision. Taking a cue from pagan mythology might seem an odd way to begin a retrospective on a Christian course of study but the pagans were here first and I believe they have much to teach us. Indeed, I’m going to reach back before Rome to ancient Greece, to a poet who sang his story-song before the written word had found its form. Homer, the writer who in most ways first rendered for us the welter of the world, provides the literary equivalent of the journey, the trip outward, and the recorso, the trip back, that has so many analogues in spiritual pilgrimage. That movement is found in Homer’s epic poem, the Odyssey.

                                                               

     The story is familiar. Odysseus, Ithaca’s king, leaves kith and kin to join the Akhaian forces in their war on Troy, occasioned by the abduction of Helen. When that war is won (thanks in part to Odysseus’ trick of the Trojan horse) Odysseus begins his journey home. It is a long journey fraught with peril and it takes many years for him to arrive safely.
     When I was a classroom teacher, I taught the Odyssey more than a few times. In leading students along the twisting path of Odysseus’ travels, I constructed a comprehensive question—alliterative in pattern and twenty-six words in length—that invited attention to the core of the journey. I would like to share this question with you because I think its constituent elements apply in important ways to the spiritual journey we have been on together.

     Here’s the question:


Why does the homesick homeseeker have to go through a period of being homeless at home before he can lay hold of the haven of home?


     Let‘s take a look at the parallels.

     Odysseus is a “homeseeker” in that he has been away from Ithaca for twenty years. As Christian pilgrims, human beings are also are in quest of their spiritual home, union with God, for “our hearts are restless till they rest in thee” (Augustine). We were cast out from our original home because we were at war with ourselves, drawn to walking and talking with the Lord in the Garden of Eden (Genesis), but fascinated by the forbidden fruit of the knowledge of good and evil which Satan used to lure Adam and Eve into transgression. Given the expulsion from Eden and the company of the divine, we are “homesick” and seek to find the place of meaning and repose that we knew before original sin.
     The middle part of the question, “have to go through a period of being homeless at home,” deals with the purgatorio of wading through the welter of the world. Odysseus’s world was different from ours but the obstacles were fierce. For Odysseus, returning to Ithaca required surviving encounters with Kyklops, the Laistrygonians, Skylla and Kharybdis, the Seirênês and Kirkê. Monsters, on land and sea, malevolent malingerers, and predatory femme fatales plagued him. Our demons assume different shapes. They exist more in our inner landscape than our outward terrain. But we have to overcome indifference, inertia, incompetence, insecurity, and inconsistent performance. Some of those forces are in others; some are in ourselves. And as we struggle with them, we may feel far from home, bereft of the hospitality of the heart that heralds welcome. In other words we can be “homeless at home.” Odysseus was in this state because he was in disguise. He arrived on Ithaca under the cover of a false identity. He had to do reconnaissance in order to determine upon whom he could rely when he emerged to attack the suitors of his wife Penelope.

                                                         

     “Lay[ing] hold of the haven of home” meant that Odysseus had to slay the suitors who had sustained a siege of his spouse and his house. He moved from the submergent self of disguise to the emergent self of personal declamation. We may need to make an analogous movement. As a Woodstock forum in Philadelphia recently observed: “we are becoming a do-it yourself church for the laity.” (Thomas Reese, S.J.). To the degree that is the case we may shape our lay ministry mission by drawing on our own creativity and imagination as well as the content of the formation program we have moved through.
     The qualities of creativity and imagination are what we seek to evoke and confer on those we minister to. We want to identify "beatitude," and call out the blessedness that God has created in others; we seek to confer on them an awareness that the goodness of creation inheres in their hearts. We offer them the “Balm of Gilead, “to make the spirit whole and save the sin-sick soul.”
      So again the lay ministry question, “Quo Vadis”?   What is the caring core of the phrase “to minister.” We know that etymologically it means to give aid in the form of physical help or spiritual succor. That would seem to be a purpose that would be universally supported. But such is not the case. The work of lay ministry is seen by some as obstructive and presumptive of the prerogatives of the ordained ministry. There can be conflicts with church authority. What should we be prepared to accept and what should we be ready to resist? The beginnings of some answers can be found in a modern poem by Cavafy, a Greek poet. In his eponymous poem “Ithaca,” Cavafy sets down a reflection on Odysseus’s home and metaphorically our ultimate destination. Here are the last stanzas.


Always keep Ithaca fixed in your mind
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for long years;
And even to anchor at the isle when you are old,
rich with all that you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.


Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her you would never have taken the road.
But she has nothing more to give you.


And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not defrauded you.
With the great wisdom you have gained, with so much experience,
You must surely have understood by then what Ithacas mean.


Finally, and more concretely, a brief video clip, based on a force of nature that will show you beauty and beatitude in one fell swoop. I want to introduce you to my spiritual advisor. You will see him rejoicing in his God-given charism. The clip is only 25 seconds long and it ends with the advice he gave me when I asked him what I should do in ministry.