Essay On The Hero's Journey By Paul Wilkes

There are many challenges that each of us go through that shape who we are as people. Everyone will go through them and most likely have regrets about some of their choices. Some of us use religion to push through these challenges and others just try to come to terms with life itself. Paul Wilkes like many of us went through his own challenges and shares them in this memoir. Everyone struggles to find their faith or purpose and a lot of us will stray away from it depending on what challenges we go through. From Wilkes mother’s death, college issues, marriage, journalism, fall towards drugs shows that he went through his own challenges. Exploring his responses to these challenges will show the journey he went on to find his faith.
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When he went to school he was forced to work any job, so he could have some food. He did not have the luxury of his dad sending him money for everything as his dad had to work tough jobs. He felt jealous and as if everyone with money was lucky which then led to him isolating himself from people. This led him to drinking but who can blame him as many people his age would turn to that as well. Wilkes struggled with his faith in college when he went to Gesu church because he could not get behind what was expected from him. He says, “I was not very good at articulating my faith in the discipline of apologetics.” (Wilkes 39) He did not believe in a having a personal
This did not go well with his future wife. It seemed that he was always pushing her away or coming up with excuses because he was afraid of commitment. His time as a hermit did not go well for him because he continued to drink and could not find the path he was looking for. The loneness that comes with being a hermit also made him start to go crazy. He describes this as acedia which is, “the opposite of desire, an abandonment of faith, the absence of caring, a subtle but even worse agony.” (Wilkes 181) He finally during one Easter Sunday had an epiphany which allowed him to clearly see what he had to do. He says, “Only when a person is able to stand of to the side, at a distance of a few decades, does the truth become clear.” (Wilkes 184) The truth was that all the challenges he went through were not an example of what he would become. This is very true when it comes to dealing with time and its effects on someone’s life. When we live in the present we may look at a situation only for that moment rather than what we will feel in the future. For Wilkes he spent a lot of time wondering what his meaning was and how God fit into that. He did not see into the future that mistakes made, or loss of faith did not define his whole