If the Greek tragedies and hero journey tales endure, it is because the hopes, flaws, triumphs, struggles and failures they catalogue are not Greek, but human. The battles they describe, and the casualties of love and war they bring so vividly and painfully to life, are both universal and eternal.
Anyone who doubts this point should see a segment that ran this week on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer on PBS. A segment that ran on February 3rd told of a theater project called “Theater of War,” currently touring Marine and other military bases around the country. Four actors read aloud from Sophecles’ tragedy Ajax, in which a soldier comes loose of his hinges after serving with Achilles and the Greek Army, and ends up killing animals, thinking they’re the enemy, finally committing suicide in his agony of what we would now call post-traumatic stress syndrome. His wife describes him before the suicide as having that “thousand yard stare”—a characteristic well known to any spouse trying to cope with a partner recently returned from, or traumatized by, war.
Theater of War takes that play, and other Greek masterpieces of war and humanity, and has actors perform the lines in a dramatic reading for veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan combat theatres. Discussion follows. At one reading, veterans lined up with comments and questions for over three hours, each one quoting a line, or lines, from the plays they had heard.
Despite the fact that the tales were written in the 5th century B.C., the Greek plays still bring soldiers to tears, because they speak so powerfully to the universal journey of a combat soldier. The challenges, the strength, the cost, the pain … it’s all been felt and wrestled with before. And somehow, that realization is able to bring comfort to the soldiers of today.
That is the power of a hero’s journey. By telling a story that is universal in its elements, although specific in its particulars, the hero’s journey … a tale of being thrown out of normal life and challenged through tests and trials, from which tragedy or triumph mix or prevail in a scarred but far wiser soul … reminds all of us that we are not the first, and we are not alone. There are others who have experienced all of this before us. And in their stories, we can find beacons to show the way forward, kernels of wisdom or, sometimes, just the companionship of understanding comrades to comfort us in the dark.
Not all hero’s journeys are those of warriors, of course. And in the next morning’s New York Times, I found an accounting of a young woman who’s on a quest that could only be judged a hero’s journey. For it has already changed her life and taken her far away from home.
Lisa Shannon, a woman who ran a stock photo business with her fiancé in Portland, Oregon, saw and heard about the atrocities happening to women in the conflict regions of the Congo on Oprah. Lots of people saw and heard about those atrocities, of course—on Oprah and in many other places. But in Shannon’s case, the experience turned her world around. She did a 30-mile fundraising run for the cause, and started organizing other runs to raise money for women in the Congo. But, as often happens, as she focused more on her passions, the other aspects of her life were neglected.
Along the way, she lost both the stock photo business and her fiancé. But what struck me was her answer to whether she minded those losses or not. “Technically, I had a good life before, but I wasn’t very happy,” she told columnist Nicholas Kristof. “Now I feel I have much more of a sense of meaning.”
That is, of course, the reward of a hero’s journey—or any passion-driven endeavor. Most of the time, it’s not the easiest road. But just as often, it’s one so rich with meaning that some of the other sacrifices cease to seem like costs. We may leave home, but we find a home that can travel with us.
And as Lisa Shannon and the Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are discovering, we also sometimes discover unexpected traveling companions—from a woman survivor of rape and violence in the Congo who plans to run one of Shannon’s races, despite having only one leg, to Greek warriors whose voices still reach out across the centuries to tell struggling veterans that they aren’t as crazy or alone as they might imagine they are.
Lane Wallace is the Editor and Founder of No Map. No Guide. No Limits.
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A soldier’s homecoming–which can be difficult even upon return from a just, victorious, and widely-supported war–is surely far more painful when his country was defeated, when he loses faith that his cause was just, and when he finds that his efforts and sacrifices were not appreciated by those who remained at home. All of these factors afflict the returning German WWI soldiers in Erich Maria Remarque’s “The Road Back,” a better novel IMNSHO than his much-better-known “All Quiet on the Western Front.” Highly recommended.