We all grew up dreaming we could be President one day, "we all" meaning white American males, of course. It was a harmless myth (at least for boys of northern European stock), set as a goal before the nation's (white, male) children to get them to aspire to greatness. The reality, however, was that only one in how many millions would actually become President. Much like the mythology of achieving movie stardom or becoming an NBA player, such dreams are beyond reach for all but a handful.
In my high school graduating class, the Class of '73, Brian Wheaton was voted most likely to succeed. Brian was a likeable guy, but the reason we all knew he won that vote was because his family was the richest in our small town, having dominated the industrial output of our community for generations. Brian's timing was off and by the time he came of age, the family business was losing its grip. I don't know if he even aspired to be an industrialist – he was gracious and shy about the honor and I understand his present vocation is pastor – but that particular village myth had dissipated before the century ended.
Even more harmful myths come in the form of sainthood for the cream of prior crops. We live in an increasingly cynical age with antiheroism the new norm. And yet the supposed superhuman achievements of those who have gone before only further fuels our cynicism. In a brilliant piece, "Getting Their Guns Off," in the May 2010 issue of The Atlantic, Jon Zobenica takes to task both the iconoclasm of generational exceptionalism and its opposition. A friend of mine and I, looking for a light evening in the 70s and arriving too late for Jim Henson's "The Muppets," took in "The Deer Hunter" by accident. That, in one title, is my definition of "its opposition."
Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation was not the first attempt at sainthood manufacturing and it won't be the last. We Americans do it with our Founding Fathers. The Roman Church has been doing it for centuries. And we less saintly Protestants have our own versions as well, particularly with our impossible missionary tales. I remember reading Courtney Anderson's To the Golden Shore: The Life of Adoniram Judson years ago and thinking it the first such biographical work that didn't place a full halo on the protagonist. Judson's efforts were remarkable, but here was a hero who was also approachable with truly human feelings.
Therein is the danger in the myth of exceptionalism. It is only useful if it inspires. Instead it places greatness beyond reach of mere mortals – what can any generation achieve after "The Greatest Generation" title has already been handed out? To be truly useful, a myth has to approach reality. The Greek pantheon of deities is a sordid bunch that occasionally aspires to greatness, but even in their humanness, they give a measure of direction to humans. Yet we don't need our gods to be so debased to inspire, only approachable, and debased gods are uninspiring as less than human.
In the Judeo-Christian pantheon, the heroes start off human but, in becoming locked up in unexamined Scripture and tradition, don halos and float above the earthly plain of humanity. In actually, the Bible does not gloss over their humanness and gives us lots of passages to stutter over when having devotions with our young children. In the end, saints of yore like Sarah and Jacob and David and Martha are just, well, folks like us. And these saints were not human only until they encountered God, they remained human ever after, even greats like Peter and Paul and Barnabas, who draw punches across the pages of the New Testament long after the power of Pentecost has descended on them all.
But what of the God of these saints of yore? Here is perfection, is it not? What then of my theory of approachability? I cannot speak for the "Judeo" part of that hyphen, but I can say that in Jesus we have the ultimate in approachability. In Jesus, God is both transcendent and immanent, soaring higher than we will ever reach and can ever dream of approaching and yet bending so low as to become, like Lewis' Aslan, a mere kitten in touchability. That bending low is less a pat on the head than a connecting side-by-side as "brother."
I see in Jesus what I can find in no one else – a human being who brings God's elevator down to my level so that I can step on and ascend with him who became like me so I could become like him. And yet we all need equally approachable human saints who bring Jesus to us.
Why then do we bury the saints in our lives under a pile of useless halos? Why are we so quick to compost their yuck, lest anyone see and be tainted by it? Are we so insecure of God's power that somehow without perfect heroes we will not ourselves aspire to greatness?
We do not need examples who have gone where we can never hope to go, for then they are not models for us to follow as much as they are floodlights of cynicism-producing glare on our own fallenness. In exposing the sheer humanity of all these human greats both in biblical and historical times as well as our own time, we do not debase our own future achievements, we simply make greatness all that more achievable.
No comments:
Post a Comment