Kindle Notes & Highlights
Unlike any other classic story, the story of Jesus offers us a living relationship with the protagonist. The implication is that his story becomes our story, if we are in union with him.494 Christian baptism symbolizes our participation in Jesus’ death and resurrection (Romans 6). In him, we actually get to live out the “monomyth.” His death slaughters the dragon of all our egotistical vices. His resurrection rebirths us.
14 A Self-Image Problem The Breakfast Club
Five high school students must spend their Saturday morning together in detention. Their punishment: write an essay. The topic: “Who you think you are.” This snapshot comprises the “inciting incident” from the 1985 movie The Breakfast Club. Initially, each of the five teenagers comes with a label: “the brain”; “the athlete”; “the basket case”; “the princess”; “the criminal.” Partly imposed by others, these images govern the identity and behavior of the protagonists. By the end of the movie, the five have outgrown their labels. Their essay summarizes their new insight: “Each one of us is a
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When you were growing up, did others put any labels upon you? Or, perhaps you gave yourself a label? Whether imposed or self-defined, how did the...
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What does your email handle reveal about you? Is it merely your given name(s) with some numerals thrown in, or does it reveal more of your sense of self?
As an on-ramp, I invite you to consider the story of creation in Genesis 1.
Being human—sharing God’s image—means performing (in a finite fashion) the role that God performed in the story of Genesis 1. Bringing order out of chaos, or form out of formlessness. Perhaps as an artist, generating a creative product; or as a scientist, classifying and synthesizing phenomena.
Consider these four modes of conscious experience:
imagination/intuition/aesthetics.
fixing/transforming?
Magician
intuition
vessel
wisdom: healing; transforming
The magician obviously inhabits quest narratives, since wisdom is frequently the explicit thing lacking and searched for. Furthermore, the magician’s use of wisdom to heal or transform obviously meshes with plotlines of rebirth.
Some Jungians romanticize the archetypes. They encourage their clients to find and claim the particular archetype or myth that has organized their life. Life then becomes a process of affirming and living out this myth. However, our goal should not be to identify with an archetypal pattern, or to allow a mythic expression of it to make our lives what it will. For when we romantically identify with any archetype, we cease to be viable human beings moving towards wholeness [emphasis his].502
What plotline does Moore advocate for our lives? An extended metaphor. Ascent/journey to a “center” of life-renewing power and integration; a movement from “chaos” to “cosmos”; an exodus from the “wasteland” to the “sacred space” symbolized by the mountain/city of ancient religions.
Interestingly, there are four main players on Israel’s stage: prophet, priest, king, and sage. (That plurality may testify to the danger of reliance on a single archetype as guide.
Thus far, Old Testament archetypal characters form part of the narrative grammar of the Christian story, since the New Testament writers use the images of prophet, priest, king, and sage as lenses for understanding the life of Jesus.
The Wizard and The Porcupine
Powlison tells the story of Jim, who (reluctantly) approached him for marital counseling.510 Jim’s wife found her husband cold, distant, self-protective. In this story of growing alienation, an upward turn followed Jim’s epiphany: “I’m just an old porcupine and always have been.”
Powlison offered Jim an alternative self-image: a sheep in God’s flock.
Jefferson A. Singer tells the sad story of Rich, a habitually-relapsing heroin addict.511 Rich’s childhood was disrupted by divorce, resulting from his Harvard-educated father’s descent into alcoholism. Rich became a loner, a bookworm, who “imagined himself as a scientist or physician, someone with mastery over the world . . . Rich called this image of himself the Wizard.”512
At one particularly low point, Rich seemed to sense the need to replace the unhelpful self-image with a humbler reality, namely, “A recovering drug addict . . . who needs to do an honest day’s work and accept where I am in life.”516 However, Rich was unable to locate this embryonic self-image within a hopeful narrative.517
Why did the Porcupine change, whilst the Wizard remained trapped?
In archetypal “rebirth” plotlines, decisive change comes via a gift or agent external to the protagonist. (Think of folktales like Snow White or Sleeping Beauty.) However, secular western culture imagines the protagonist as a “solitary individual agent who must carry the entire weight of moral existence through the exercise of free choice.”518 This autonomous individual rebuffs the outside agent who offers the gift of a new narrative image of self. In other words, it’s hard for the secular western self to receive God’s grace. To overcome this hardness, argues Rossi, the autonomous self must be
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The New Testament presents the cross, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus as the inauguration of a new world (recall our discussion in chapter 10). The Spirit invites us to live “as if” this new world is here, “already now,” and to play according to the rules of the new creation.538
15 According to Script
Script Theory
As you go through life, new and unfamiliar circumstances confront you on a daily basis. What enables you to navigate these new scenes? The answer may be a mental folder of scripts. Ways to play your role. Scripts inherited and acquired. Big scripts for major life goals, and small scripts for daily experiences on the way to your destiny. Your inventory of scripts governs your behavior in particular scenes.
Script theory dovetails pretty well with the basic theses of my book. Most scripts, major or minor, can be seen as versions of the archetypal plots we discussed in chapter 8. This parallel, between scripts and archetypal plots, works both for big overall life-scripts and for smaller scene-governing scripts, because scenes are plots in miniature. Scenes tend toward the same basic five-phase structure of complete narratives (the five-act pattern discussed in chapter 7).546
Background Scripts
These scripts are ingrained habits that autopilot us through rudimentary spatial, temporal, and social tasks; awareness of which side of the road to drive on; how much time it takes to get to school; conventions for conducting a conversation; and so on.
Ideological Scripts
Ideological scripts provide “an account of . . . central values, guidance for their realization, sanctions for their fulfillment, their violation, and their justification, and celebration.”548
Scripts for Trajectories These scripts govern small scenes of daily living, “episodes” of some length, and even lifelong personal narratives. Trajectory-scripts determine the benefits we seek, the price we are prepared to pay, and the risks we are willing to take. In terms of five-act dramas, such scripts focus on the outcome at the end of act five, the positive emotions of such outcomes, and the means of reaching those destinies.
To classify such scripts, we may start with our basic human tendency to view life-experiences through a grid of positive/negative values. (Blessing/cursing; life/death; dream/nightmare; feast/famine; paradise/wilderness; heaven/hell—however we subjectively define these contrasts.)
Accenting the Positive Tomkins lists numerous scripts designed for (re-)experiencing positive states or psychological “affluence.”549 Individuals governed by such scripts tend to have enjoyed a large storehouse of positive experiences, and desire more of the same.
Ultra-Ambiguous Experiences
Some of us are haunted by past experiences which combined a perplexing fusion of the intensely positive and the intensely negative.
I witnessed these scripts first-hand when I lived in a dormitory for single guys, populated with an abundance of “nerdy” male seminary students. They (or should I say we?) nearly all shared a common experience, generating hyper-ambivalent responses. They invited a girl on a date, and she said yes! The days leading up to the date became a paradise of anticipation. Sadly, the evening did not produce the desired second date, leaving the male in the wilderness of rejection.
Toxic Experiences Some among us are victims of events where there is no mix of positive and negative experiences—only the overwhelmingly negative—experiences of extremes of intimidation and humiliation. Tomkins offers a brief discussion of the scripts that tend to be lived out by such victims. Reading his account, I was struck by the loss of narrative options for these victims.555 No utopian quests. No hope of remediation. Mostly scripts of damage-limitation.
Scripts for Responding to Setbacks
In terms of our plot archetypes, sedative scripts are microcosms of the quest for “paradise restored”—with paradise defined as the emotional equilibrium that preceded a disconcerting event.
Please note: I am not primarily listing these as recommendations! Rather, I intend the list as a tool for self-examination.
When you’ve encountered setbacks, have you ever minimized or suppressed your negative reaction? Have you ever practiced some form of denial? (“It’s no big deal!”) Some cultures emphasize keeping our emotions under control. If we grew up in such a culture, our scripted response to setbacks may be a stoic effort to dam up the torrent of emotions before they burst forth.
Rituals of Lamentation
The authors of the Old Testament were no strangers to suffering. Interestingly, their preferred response was to write poetry! In doing so, they gave us a rich inheritance of wisdom in dealing with setbacks.
Lamentations is a little-read poetic book of Scripture. The book reflects on the traumatic event of the destruction of Jerusalem at the hands of the Babylonians. Even fewer people read it in Hebrew. But, if you do, you notice something remarkable: the “acrostic” structure of chapters 1–2 and 4. The first verse starts with the (Hebrew) letter A, and each new verse begins with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet. (In the central chapter 3, this pattern is tripled: three verses begin with A, the next three with B, and so on. The Hebrew equivalent of an “A through Z” of grief.) The grieving
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The Psalms provide us with many more examples of the poetry of suffering. A big chunk of Psalms 1–150 are known as laments. Their disciplined poetic form, their careful literary structure, make them perfect scripts for dealing with setbacks.
