In his 1949 classic book, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” Joseph Campbell talks about the final stage of a hero’s journey, the return to his home.
Campbell describes three stages in the journey: leaving home, the transformation and returning home. The hero’s journey, Campbell claims, is the over-arching story that is repeated across cultures and generations—“The Odyssey,” King Arthur’s legend, “Huckleberry Finn,” “Star Wars,” “The Lord of the Rings,” “The Matrix,” Buddha and Jesus Christ.
Campbell says that in this final stage the hero returns home, but as TS Eliot writes, it is to “know the place for the first time.” It is at this stage that the hero becomes the master of two worlds, the world through which he journeyed and the world of his home to which he returns.
In Campbell’s framework, today’s feast, the Ascension of Christ, is Christ’s homecoming. He is now the master of two worlds, heaven and earth.
While Christ follows the same pattern of Campbell’s overarching story, there is a key difference from all other stories. In the other stories, the hero journeys from home, here on earth, and the journey takes him to another world and brings him back home to his earthly existence. For Christ home is in heaven, the eternal Kingdom. He journeys from eternity to the temporal world, returns to eternity and gives our temporal existence an eternal value.
Furthermore, in Christ’s story the Ascension, the return home, is followed by the sending of the spirit, Pentecost. It is the spirit of the Risen Lord being fully alive in our midst now and it is this spirit that is with us and guides us until he comes again in glory. But all these are for another reflection. Let us focus on the Ascension.
Coming full circle and knowing where we started for the first time. Tracing our roots and understanding it more deeply who we are, and what our mission is.
Let me share my story of “ascension.” I have shared this in a previous reflection, but let me reflect on it again from the perspective of the ascension. I hope this will help you reflect on your own journey and story.
Sense of mission
My own sense of mission began in 1980. For years I struggled with the burden of coming from a broken, dysfunctional family. It was when I started teaching that I realized the purpose of all this. Among senior high school students, around five to eight students in a class of 42 or so would be somewhat burdened by the same struggle.
Then I understood how my “woundedness” would serve as source of my mission, to help young people heal their similar wound and discover their own mission. It was then I made the offering and commitment to teaching.
In discovering this mission I also discovered then and more so through the years who I am.
For a few years—some of the happiest in my life—I enjoyed a peaceful, joyful life of teaching. I saw myself being able to do this for the rest of my life. At one point, it was even clear to me that my future partner and family will have to embrace this mission of teaching and the life that comes with it.
At the same time, the call to journey, the call to priesthood was a nagging question. When I first gave in to the call and went through the application process, half-heartedly, I must confess, the Jesuits told me they needed to know me more before accepting me. It was one of the happiest rejections I had, joyful that I could continue to teach.
Then almost two years later, as I was turning 24, I decided I had to put it to rest. Try it one more time. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, at least there would be no what-ifs later on.
I left home; not so much the physical home, but the home of my heart and soul—teaching. I spent years in formation and studies pursuing what I thought might be my calling. I still had hoped and had expressed the desire that I would go back to teaching as my apostolate or work. But journeys are not that simple.
For years I was obedient to the call of the journey. I studied to be an administrator and convinced myself that it was the closest I would get to teaching. Good enough for me! I loved my years as principal and—I am discovering more and more now—the students, teachers, and parents who believed in the kind of school and education I was advocating also loved our years together.
Yet the journey took a twist. I was taken out of what was the closest I could get to teaching. I said “yes” with the faith and conviction that my moving to the job I was asked to do was good for the school and its mission. How naive of me then.
I rolled up my sleeves and buckled down to work, setting a timeframe, targets, deliverables. Eventually the deadlines became “moving-targets” as people sat on decisions and we missed deadlines. We adjusted. The goal and the mission were too important to be petty.
As all this was going on, I continued to discern and struggle; it was between doing something important and doing something that was at the core of my identity and mission. The struggle, the tension was between two goods in search of what would be the greater good. What is God’s will?
Transformation
There were three moments of transformation in my journey. The 2003 Holy Week retreat helped me reclaim my story and gave me a renewed integration. My Christmas 2004 recollection put closure to my final job at Ateneo; standing before God in the silence of solitude and prayer I was honestly able to say to him, “Lord, you know I did my best doing this job; time for me to go and move on—or move back—to what is closest to my heart and soul.” These led me closer to home.
The third moment was in the morning of May 7, 2005, a Saturday, my late father’s birthday. I was with my spiritual director, the late Fr. Benny Calpotura, SJ, and he was “grilling” me about my desire to work with teachers from the public schools. Then midway through the conversation he asked, “What good would your teacher formation work do considering how overwhelming the problems are in the public school system?”
Very calmly I responded, “Father, I thought about that and it is clear to me that if I form even just one good teacher every year for the next 25 years of my active life, I will be doing God’s mission for me.”
He gave me his distinct Fr. Benny stare and said, “Go! The movements are very clear. God wants you to do this work. Go!”
To this day I clearly remember the feeling at that moment. I felt warmth in my body, a sense of relief and a sense of sadness, as if a part of me had died. In this seeming paradoxical state I felt a very quiet, simple yet deep sense of freedom. Relief and freedom because I knew that this is indeed God’s call I am pursuing. Sadness because one could not simply walk away from a major part of my life (close to 40 years)—I studied at Ateneo for 16 years, starting 1964; worked there as a high school teacher for three years; lived there from 1985-2005, save for years that I worked at Ateneo de Zamboanga and studied at Fordham University and Gonzaga University. It was a home that I loved dearly. But it was time to leave and continue my journey.
Home
July 2005 I was granted a leave of absence and a year later I formally asked to be dismissed from the Society of Jesus; September 2006 my decree of dismissal was issued, which I signed Sept. 11, 2006.
I returned “home” and again pursued what I had discerned was my mission—to work as a teacher, work with public school teachers. It was not easy, but sometimes—often, perhaps—one had to suffer, to sacrifice in the journey to pursue one’s dream and to follow God’s call.
Returning home—coming full circle—was my ascension. To teaching I returned with the dream that creating more caring environments in schools, our public schools, is a way of making our world a bit better, bringing it closer to “the new heavens and the new earth.”
Do we also become masters of two worlds? I don’t know. But we do become at peace with two worlds, our imperfect temporal world and, infused with meaning and a sense of mission, it lies at the threshold of eternity. This is the guarantee of the Lord’s Ascension—“What we have done will not be lost to all eternity. Everything ripens and bears fruit in its own hour.”—“The Remembering Garden,” by Roseanne Sanders