He’s Not the Messiah, He’s a Set of Instructions for Change.

A Reflection on Easter, Cycles of Death and Rebirth, Psychic Change, and the War in Iran.

Comedy has a way of shining a light on the absurdity of our shared belief systems, whether those be social, political, or even spiritual. And Monty Python's Life of Brian is a masterclass. It takes the story of Jesus’ death and demonstrates that the literal, physical aspects of it are hardly worth celebrating. Filled to the brim with social commentary scantily dressed as well-worn tropes, the film eviscerates the human tendency to seek external solutions to our internal condition, warning that messianic thinking is little more than an accident born of our desire to blame someone else for our own bad behavior.

I found myself thinking about this film as I woke up to all manner of ill news around the world on this overcast Easter morning. The American military is engaged in a war in Iran that is, on its face, a war over resources, but has of late taken on the curious dimension of being elevated in certain circles to a holy war that may usher in the second coming of Christ. At least, that’s what the freshly re-named Secretary of War has touted, and whistleblowers inside the military have confirmed. The question I found myself asking is: why, and why now?

While history certainly has plenty to say about this moment, I believe the answer lies not in history, but in myth. Specifically, I believe our best answers lie in myths about death and rebirth. In every world mythology and in every hero story, the motif of death and rebirth appears at a common juncture in the narrative. Renowned psychologist C.G. Jung identified this commonality in myths as a symbolic representation of the death of the ego and the process of individuation—that is, the lifelong psychological process of integrating the conscious and unconscious minds to become the unique, whole person one was always meant to be. To Jung, the hero serves as a metaphor for the human psyche. He explicitly identified the story of Jesus as perhaps the most complete, well-formed process of psychic individuation among all of humanity’s mythologies.

It is a matter of historical irony, therefore, that the narrative providing the most complete ‘set of instructions’ for individuation has been weaponized to fuel behaviors used to avoid inner reflection. But to get at the core of why this is the case, I look not to the history books, to the deeds of great men, or even the reflective writings of medieval theologians. I look instead to my lived experience and my work on my novels.

From the outset, I created the character of Hasting to be a morally and spiritually bankrupt man. He was, after all, attested in the sources as ‘The Scourge of the Somme and Loire.’ I wrote him with the idea that he was the Big Bad Wolf telling his side of the story of The Three Little Pigs. He is an unreliable narrator who tries to justify to you, the reader, why he’s doing what he shouldn’t be doing, or better yet, not doing what he should.

None of this is his fault, mind you, as he lived a very hard life during his childhood, in which he had to become exceptionally self-centered and self-seeking to survive. Indeed, those behaviors and later character traits did help to protect him as a child, but as he grows older and gains power and influence, they start to get in the way of his ambitions. They make him rash, volatile, unpredictable, and worse, unlikable to his peers to a degree that it affects his reputation (and to him, reputation is EVERYTHING). By the end of book one, he begins to realize all of this.

How then, you might ask, was I able to take such a villainous, wretched creature and make him likable enough that readers want to keep following his story (my series has a 75% read-through rate, according to my publisher)? All I did was follow Jesus’ lead.

I am not a particularly religious person, but I do believe in Jesus. To be more precise, I believe in the power of Jesus' story. Whether he was a flesh-and-blood man is entirely beside the point. He’s very real insofar as his story is OUR story. His life, death, and rebirth are an archetypal process of change we all recognize, experience, and share with our fellow humans. We recognize when this story is playing out in another person—whether consciously or unconsciously—and when we do, we cannot help but root for that person. Why? Because it is a common struggle we all know and understand on a fundamental level. It is a process that unites us all because we all share a common, deadly enemy: ourselves.

I have heard it said that inside each and every one of us is the fundamental concept of God. And while that may be true, I think it is also appropriate to say that inside each and every one of us is a fundamental understanding of the process of individuation. You need look no further than the Disney Corporation to know this to be true, for they have used the Hero’s Journey story structure to great commercial success. What’s essential to understand is that, no matter how far down the scale we have gone, we are redeemable if we become willing to change.

For Hasting, all I had to do was to instill in him that willingness to change. That’s it. And he’s not always willing. He has to come back to it, over and over, just as we all must recommit to our own willingness to learn and to grow at regular intervals. But so long as Hasting is willing, I can put him through the sequence of internal and external circumstances that lead to psychic change over time.

I don’t do this with him all at once, either. With the story of Jesus, we see the process of death and rebirth play out once. That’s all the story needs. But for we mere mortals who must continue to live in a world of frequent and persistent temptations and distractions, it is an internal process that must continue for our lifetime. For Hasting, it means that every novel I write, he goes through a separate process of individuation, whereby by the end of the novel, he comes away with a little more wisdom. Each new novel, however, confronts him with a new set of circumstances that reinitiates the process. Never does he re-emerge from a novel a perfectly individuated man, but rather a slightly better one.

That’s the secret sauce for Hasting. Readers root for him because he’s living the same struggle they have lived or are living. He is a mirror for the internal process of change we must all go through when confronted with major external and internal challenges. His life, as written in my novels, is as much a story of adventure and triumph as it is a companion for those who have embarked on their own quest for the ultimate boon of spiritual growth.

Hasting is a fiction. He’s not real. He’s inspired by a real person, or at least someone we believe was real. And if someone were to take his story literally, they would miss the true value behind his experiences. All they would see is the inherent violent horror of the age Hasting lived in, upon which they would project their worst impulses, breeding within them a deepening cynicism over the value and virtue of humanity.

It is here that I return to the odd things happening on the global stage on this Easter Sunday morning. To me, it appears to be an expression of a society that has missed the point of Jesus’ story. The ‘second coming’ narrative demonstrates the deep cynicism that has taken over modern [American] Christianity, many of whom, particularly evangelicals, have interpreted Jesus’ story in a literal sense. The ‘Second Coming’ narrative is not a story of death and rebirth, but of vengeance and retribution. Its adherents desire an ‘End Times’ to bring an end to their perceived worsening external condition that began after the Romans nailed their messiah to the cross. There’s no rebirth in such a narrative, only death. They may say ‘he is risen,’ but what they really mean is that he’ll be back to destroy their perceived enemies. Like the Terminator, “I’ll be back.”

I’ve heard it said that people won’t be willing to change until the pain of staying the same exceeds the perceived pain of changing. That’s what it took for me. It took the disease of alcoholism to bring me to my knees. I nearly lost it all, including my life. In the wreckage of my disease, I found hope. Once a staunch atheist, I opened up to the universe, offering myself as a blank slate. And that’s where the story of Jesus found me. Not in my pride or arrogance, but in my surrender. To survive my alcoholism, I had to die and be reborn, not once, but many times, repeating the cycle over and over, whittling away at the character defects that had served me in childhood but had brought me to ruin as an adult. Like Hasting. Like how the myths intended.

So, I leave you on this Easter Sunday with my hopefulness. In the words of Rocky Balboa, “If I can change, and you can change, then everyone can change!” May this day be an opportunity to reflect on our willingness to change and the process of individuation as the common link between us all, and may that common link help us to create a better world. I send my love to everyone who is struggling (which is everyone), even to those who are carrying out atrocities in the name of their religion. May the wisdom of Jesus’ teachings reach their hearts, minds, and spirits today.

Happy Easter,

C.J.