Enjoy highlights from our Faith & Moral Courage event series: read the conversation between Dr Bayo Akomolafe and Father Adam Bucko. To watch the full event and discover more content from Faith & Moral Courage event series, subscribe to our YouTube channel here.
Father Adam Bucko:
I want to address this question from my own perspective and context. I grew up in Poland when it was still a totalitarian state. Then at the age of 17, my family, looking for a better life, immigrated to the US. Initially, we came here as undocumented immigrants. The last 25 years of my life have been spent accompanying young people struggling with homelessness on the streets of New York City.
When I hear the word hero, what comes to mind is something fed to me by the totalitarian regime. You might have seen some of the Polish films that were quite popular in the West, such as The Men of Iron and The Men of Marble in the 1970s and 1980s. Those films follow a story of someone who was called the ‘labor hero’. A labour hero was someone who could work beyond the norm. For example, in films, a labour hero is able to lay down 35,000 bricks per day in order to rebuild our dream, to rebuild the socialist Poland. Those were the days of Stalinism. What that meant, of course, is that labour heroes had no life. He had to work 24/7. The government selected him because of his obedient personality and character. Overnight, they turned him into this kind of a rock star because those short films were played on national television.
So, my first association with the word hero is someone who sacrifices everything, who lets go of their own personal needs for the sake of the whole. Of course, within that framework, the whole is quite problematic because the whole claims to be the same as the Communist Party that governed Poland at that time. Whoever has different opinions from the Communist Party, that simply means that they have not yet awakened, that they have a false consciousness.
My second association with the word hero goes against this paradigm, and that is the heroic priests of my childhood. People who spoke truth to power, who advocated nonviolence and who were not afraid to gather people and turn heartbreaks into public prayers. They were not afraid to call out the heroic images that we were seeing on TV and call it spiritually bankruptcy. It seemed to me these priests were in touch with a kind of a greater power that was running through them and animating them…A lot of those priests, including my parish priests, were killed by the government.
A third association with the word hero is something I learned from PBS once I arrived in the US.
This was Joseph Campbell’s version of the heroic journey. And to be quite honest with you, as a young person who came here looking for an identity but also aware of the shadows of communism and capitalism, that heroic journey was very attractive to me. But very soon, I realised that there are some limitations to that journey. This articulation of the journey enabled me to say yes to something that I felt was emerging in my heart and allowed me to articulate my calling in life. I was being called to serve among the homeless on the streets of New York City.
However, after a few years of doing that work, I realised something that takes me to the heart of the critique of the hero’s journey. We had set up a centre near Times Square where young homeless people who were rejected by religion, who were rejected by their parents, who were rejected and victimised by society, could come and feel at home. The way that I portrayed myself at that time was that I had all these skill sets connected to the calling that I felt was mine to claim. I was utilsing those skill sets trying to fix people’s lives. Somehow I was approaching every person as something that I wanted to solve. I wanted to help them to turn their pain into something that could be heroic, where the wounds could become gifts utilised in service to a dream. Those dreams were oftentimes very much in line with the kind of capitalist individualistic society. In a world where the only theology that you have is a reality TV theology, how do you articulate your dream? How do you articulate your calling? After a few years I reached a tremendous crisis where I felt that my work was actually not really helping people. I was failing at accomplishing my dream at being the person who could help people to fix their lives.
One of my monastic mentors advised that instead of trying to see people as problems to be solved, that I needed to approach every person in the same way that I was approaching contemplative prayer. What is contemplative prayer about? It’s about putting whatever we know about God and about the world to the side. It’s about being present to the pain and the joy in us and around us and bearing witness to that. It is about allowing ourselves to fall apart and get shattered as a result of the pain and the joy that we are feeling. So that’s what I started doing. I started approaching every person like that, taking out all the professional buffer behind which I could hide. In most cases it was bearing witness to their pain and helping them to hold that pain. Those experiences of accompanying homeless youth turned into experiences of falling apart, of being broken into pieces, being shattered. What I started discovering is that when we consent to that shattering, we realise that underneath it all there is this presence that I call God that is longing to flow into our situations, begin to pick up the broken pieces from the floor and begin to reassemble them. Our wounds literally become gifts. Our skill sets are being used, but not in the way we would think. In the end, it’s not really clear who’s helping whom. It’s not an individualistic journey. The process for that is openness and receptivity and a willingness to be broken by the pain and by the joy that we feel in us and around us. Whatever that energy is, it can capture us, it can use whatever we have and turn it into something that is useful. We become an expression of God’s love and compassion in the world.
I think the hero’s journey can be helpful at times. But then eventually, if you’re doing the hero’s journey correctly, I think the hero needs to die. The hero needs to say I’m done. The hero essentially needs to give up and to proclaim that sense of perilousness with confidence and joy. This process of dying to self is known in the Christian tradition as the process of the Dark Knight, which John of the Cross articulated in other traditions… A consent to perilousness creates a container into which the divine can descend and then pick up whatever is there on the floor and begin to resurrect and transfigure it into something that becomes our unique gift to the world.
The world often tells us that when we hit the wall, we should reinvent and reimagine ourselves.
The danger with that, is that it sets us up to resolve the problems we are facing from the very same place from which a lot of those problems were created to begin with. Instead, the mystical journey offers a slightly different component to the hero’s journey. It invites us into the process of consenting to powerlessness. Divine grace is never individualistic. It always has communal goods to turn us into instruments of whatever is good for all.
Dr Bayo Akomolafe:
It’s a beautiful line you’re straddling there by noticing that the hero’s journey is not to be jettisoned entirely. We cannot just say we’re done with it. But we’re in a time when it is becoming increasingly difficult to situate our yearnings within that framework. So we need to do other kinds of moves and other kinds of things. Let me tell everyone here a story.
If you know me, you know I always tell stories about my children because they are the impediment in my own hero’s journey. My book, These Wilds Beyond Our Fences, is about my conversations with my daughter. It’s about me trying to pray for and with my daughter since she was around two-years-old, when I wrote the book. She’s now nine. It’s about how I can intercede and meet a world that is larger than our relationship and yet just as small as our relationship. In some sense, she stops me from pursuing the hero’s journey, and I want to speak about what happens when things get in the way. Wendell Berry said that the impeded stream is the one that sings. Places of impediment are rich and dense places of possibilities and generativity.
We’re in Richmond, Virginia. I was a new dad and I decided to experiment with the legacies of parenting I had received as a Yoruba person growing up in West Africa. I was going to say yes to everything that my two-year-old daughter said for me to do that day. I would try to do everything she said I should do. I told her this, and she rubbed her hands with glee. She says, let’s go swim. As if she knows that I am afraid of water and I don’t know how to swim. Swim, Dada. I said, yes, let’s go do it. I figured the swimming pool in the residential complex somewhere in Richmond had a safe region. I could wade in the water without literally drowning.
However, she decided we had to swim in the lake. I tried to convince her, no, you’ve gotten it all wrong. But she insisted. We started to walk to the lake, and on the way she said, dada, pull off your slippers. This almost felt like a Moses moment, like you’re in front of the holy of holies. You’re in front of something holy and sacred and dense. I pulled off my slippers. She said, wear mine, okay? Wear my own flip flops, and I’ll wear yours. So we exchanged. It was beginning to get a little bit awkward now, and I wasn’t exactly sure where this was heading. We got to the edge of the pool, and I wasn’t exactly sure what was going to happen, but I wanted her to lead the way. She just kept quiet. There was this elderly silence that defined our standing together there. I wanted to tell her about her people, about her multiracial heritage from India and from the Igbo and from the Yoruba and from Iranians and from the English. And as I started to speak, she said, don’t say anything, Dada. And the hero image that I had cultivated up to that time started to be composted.
It’s also being composted in my relationship with my son, who is four years younger than Alethea. He’s on the autistic spectrum. And just like Brother Adam, at some point I wanted to save him. I wanted to redeem him from his autism. Now I know better. I was trying to gentrify him, to pull him from his autism into the safety of neurotypicality. As if I didn’t know better. My son keeps on refusing that gentrification, that gesture of recovery and rehabilitation. There’s something about him that veers away from capture. You might think of the hero’s journey as a place-making technology. It’s how we ritualise place and story the world. Of course, all stories are embellishments. All stories are rituals, attempts at framing and understanding what the world is doing. In the story of the hero’s journey, we are the centralized figures. We are stabilised and the hero’s community is stabilised. There is this teleological movement from an opening and then arriving via tempestuous middles at an end where we lift the trophy and say, we’ve won.
We’ve depended on this framework for a long time. It’s so ubiquitous. It’s in Disney stories and Disney flicks. Everything we can think of has this idea that we will summarily arrive at the end of this journey and pierce the tape and declare victory. It’s a story we’re telling about climate chaos. It’s a story we’re telling through our social justice movements. What Joseph Campbell may not have anticipated was the stage becoming an actor. Let’s take, for instance, the story of climate chaos. The recent draft of the IPCC Report, the 6th Report Assessment Report, is a hero’s narrative through and through. It basically says that the world is in trouble. If we don’t do our utmost to save the world from reaching and breaching a threshold 1.5 degrees celsius, then we’re all in trouble, and we risk losing the world as we know it. But if we rush in, we can stop the explosion from happening. However, that takes for granted our centrality and it does not take into consideration what the world around us is doing.
I just want to notice how the hero’s journey framework is premised on a world that is supposedly dumb and unintelligent, that does nothing but serve as a background to human sociality. I think this is where we need to maybe start to speak about the monster’s journey. I humorously call it the monster’s journey because a hero’s journey is in part dependent on the participation of a monster who must always fall down to the sword of the hero. We have lived on this participation of the monster, and now the monsters are on strike. The monster is refusing and repudiating our claims to exclusivity, and now we’re witnessing an insurgency of the invisible. The monster is not just a two horned creature to the side of things. The monster is the dense, incredible, exquisite, almost erotic intelligence of a world that will not fit neatly into our frameworks. Modern civilization is the story of sanity. Now we are witnessing that sanity being invaded or upended by the claims of the monster to which we’re highly and heavily indebted. In our indigenous ways of thinking about the flowing, fluid, promiscuous becomingness of things, God is the crack. God is not a figure at the end of history. God is the impediment that stops continuity, that invites a deepening of our embodied relations with the world. God becomes the refusal to just perpetuate the familiar with which we’re used to. There are many theologians who think about God as a trickster. I’m fascinated by the idea of God as a trickster. A trickster God within the Yoruba tradition was always inviting us to pay attention to the sideways, to the sidelines, to the things that are not in the picture, to the more than binary, to the more than other, to the more than human.
I’m just going to wrap this up by saying that a hero’s journey feels like a beautiful framework that is also simultaneously an impoverished account of the kinds of politics that we need today. The invitation to examine the hitherto unexamined lives of the world around us is not supported by the hero’s journey. Non-teleological, non-legible politics doesn’t start from a beginning and arrive at an end, it wanders like my child. That wandering experimental politics is the kind of work that I feel that the hero’s journey cannot accommodate. We need to make space for it.
Father Adam Bucko:
Even though we may be aware that the hero’s journey and the framework it presents has limitations, nonetheless, in a lot of our circles, somehow we’ve embraced this idea of overacting. As if, whatever is inadequate or problematic in the world, the correct response is essentially workaholism…I think what I hear from you is this need that we really have to stop, to do less, to say no before we can even be in a space to say yes.
My question is very personal, in a sense, about your journey towards embodying that new paradigm that you so beautifully articulated in terms of boundaries, in terms of choices that you’re making in your life, in terms of choices that you make in relation to your family, in relation to your public kind of presence in the world. How do you think about what is the right action, what is the right way of being?
Dr Bayo Akomolafe:
I felt that the harder I worked the more I could probably lay claim to this politics that I’m hoping to convene along with others around the world. There’s something deeply ironic, maybe even paradoxical, about giving more or seeing more. Then that becomes a situation that engenders less and less of what we actually yearn for.
I’m thinking of the entomological phenomenon called the death spiral, where ants go round in circles. It’s called a death spiral for a reason, because eventually they get exhausted and they die in that circle. That feels like a shocking figure of human activities and how we’re caught up in causal dynamics that repeat themselves in our bid to arrive.
It’s a matter of where you stop. These are the limitations. My daughter has learned to seize my laptop. She literally takes my laptop away and hides it from me so that I don’t get to work at all. And then we write stories together. You might say, for instance, that’s no way to respond to climate change. To respond to climate change, we all need to be on the roads and stuff like that. But that feels like what an ant would say to the other ant in a dead spiral.
To those people who convene or articulate courage as persistence, I think this is the time to think of courage as lingering in places of impediment. It’s those places where we don’t know what to do, don’t know how to go forward. That’s where the work is. It’s in those places where there is no funding or there’s no forward movement, where things get awkward. That’s where there’s a profusion of grace. I think awkwardness is the profusion of grace, not the absence of it.
Let me see if I can frame a question for you. I grew up in a church and I no longer identify as Christian. I travel along the lines and the choreographies of Yoruba cosmologies. One of the most sticky things about the theology of my upbringing was eschatology. The story of destiny, eventual heavens, teleological purpose. The hero’s journey seems to be a theological articulation of eschatology, or at least one articulation of eschatology. It’s deeply arrowheaded. It’s heading for a direction, just like most of our politics is.
Would you say something about the non-eschatological, non-teleological potentials of Christian mysticism? Would you speak to a different configuration of this beautiful fidelity, this beautiful faith that does not cohere or arrive at a cartography that leans always forward? What about the spirituality that bends to the side, that washes feets and appreciates the flower on the highway to heaven? Instead of thinking only in terms of heaven, is there a way we can think along those lines?
Father Adam Bucko:
Speaking of Christian eschatology and in general Christian theology, I think it’s very important to acknowledge that a lot of all the basic frameworks that we possess emerged and were codified after Christianity hooked up with the Empire. For example, whoever grew up Christian has heard about the original sin. One of my older friends and mentors, Matthew Fox, some years ago wrote a book, The Original Blessing. For that and for a few other things, he got kicked out of the Roman Catholic Church. The point that Matthew makes is that original sin is something Jesus never heard about. It’s a perfect concept if you’re trying to run the Empire, because it means that essentially there is something fundamentally flawed in us and we cannot and should not trust our own intuitions. We need someone else to govern us, to manage us, and to tell us what is right and to help us distinguish between the right desires and the wrong desires.
I think the antidote to linear and teleological eschatology in a Christian framework could be a mysticism based on the concepts of incarnation, meaning that everything around us and in us is soaked with something that we call the divine. In a Christian sense, whatever that thing is, we tend to think of it as a person. But we have to understand that God is not a person in a way that you and I are persons. So I think the shift that could happen in the Christian tradition is that we begin to understand our spiritual practices and theological concepts as functional narratives that can enable us…So we’re moving that imaginary goal into something that we can actually touch right here and right now, where what we experience is actually aliveness and freedom. That freedom then, at least in some Christian traditions, leads us and gives us a sense of courage to say no to a lot of the things, including religion, that tries to box us in and prescribe a path that is oftentimes very much connected to whatever the church wants, whatever the empire wants.
I think that is the shift that I try to make in my daily life when I walk away. The opportunity is there to really be present to my daughter, to be touched by her unpredictable beauty, to let her run and maybe try to imitate her by following her into the woods where normally maybe I wouldn’t go. And allowing every breath that I take to be an infusion of life, an infusion of curiosity, an infusion of something that enables me to be present and to say yes to life that is ever surprising, ever creative.
This content is a segment of an extensive event series exploring what faith and moral courage look like in an age of polycrisis. Where does extraordinary courage come from? What can we learn from people who’ve risked everything to live up to their values? What forms of courage are especially needed in our age of unravelling, uncertainty and risk? How can we inspire ourselves and each other to grow our capacity to brave our limits? Are there insights from the world’s spiritual and faith traditions that can help us grow our courage?