Blue Cord

My previous post about my original blog at Xanga got me reading over some of my posts from that blog. One in particular I still think is a good read. Although I moved many of my Bible-related posts to Blue Cord, this one never made it. So, to ensure that it gets included on Blue Cord - and because it is related to All Saints’ Day - I thought I would repost it here. It was originally posted November 5, 2005.

Original post:

I have been thinking for some time about the concept of heroes. The genesis of this line of thought lies in this past summer when my favorite baseball player, Raphael Palmeiro, was found to have used performance enhancing drugs and lied about it to Congress. It reminds me of my first experience with a fallen hero. When I was a teenager, I found out that my hero James T. Kirk from Star Trek was played by an actor who was quite egotistical.

As I have gotten older, my concept of heroes has changed, whether they are fictional or real. I used to focus on those people who had accomplished great things: the adventurer who overcame great odds, the scientist who made great discoveries, the athlete who performed well. I still admire those people, but they are no longer my heroes. The quality that makes someone a hero now is his or her ability to deal with failure, especially moral failure.

This change in thinking has come about because of my change in understanding about the Christian life. Back in youth group in church, I thought of myself as a good person. I didn’t do the things that the “bad kids” did. I didn’t do drugs or have sex before marriage or stay out late. I was a good kid. That, to me, was what it meant to live as a Christian.

I can no longer have such delusions about myself. I know myself now to be a failure in so many areas, including the moral realm. I don’t pretend now that I am better than others just because I don’t do what some versions of Christianity have defined as the obvious sins. Instead, I know that my sin goes much deeper, affecting all areas of my life. I recognize sin as brokenness. I am not a sinner because I sin; I sin because I am a sinner.

The question for me now is how I deal with it after I have failed. How do I incorporate my failure into my self-understanding? Do I have the courage to recognize the sin and name it as such, or do I go on deluding myself that I am a good person? How do I learn to live with myself, knowing myself to be capable of the kind of things I have done in my life?

The heroes I seek now are those who have come to grips with the sinful condition of humanity and have learned to move on, not by denying their sin but by overcoming it. Palmeiro has not done that. He has continued to deny wrong doing even in the face of overwhelming evidence against him. And he has blamed others for his fault. This, much more than his use of drugs (which was bad enough), is the reason he is such a fallen hero for me.

As an aside, I also have trouble with his drug use because it goes against the essential honesty of baseball (baseball as a concept, that is, not as they way it is actually played in the major leagues). Baseball is always about who plays better. Everybody comes to the game equal in the eyes of the game, with only their difference in skill to make them a good or bad player. And even when you are winning, you still have to give the other team their chance. You can’t just hold onto the ball and let the clock run out like you do in football and basketball. You throw the ball to the other team and give them a chance to hit it. Drugs are a way of succeeding without having to have as much skill. What you are saying is that you don’t care what skill the other guy has, you are willing to use artificial means so it will look like you are better than he is. I despise that in life as much as in baseball.

Who then are my heroes now? There are many of them, both fictional and real. My father is one, for he as much as anyone knows what it was to experience personal failure repeatedly and still have to go on living. He did not do it as well as I would have liked, which is why he died during a drinking binge at the age of 53. But he did not give up trying. It is a shame that he died knowing only some of the respect that I have for him because of that.

Dostoevsky is another (the picture to the right is me next to his grave). I know I have mentioned him several times is recent posts, but my visit to St. Petersburg has renewed my interest in him and his literature. Dostoevsky was addicted to gambling. Repeatedly he would lose everything he had and have to start over again. But he always did start over. He incorporated the experience into his self-understanding and moved on. And he passed that understanding, which is in reality an understanding of all people, on to us in his writing. The genius of Dostoevsky is not that he overcame gambling, which he never truly did, but that he never allowed gambling to overcome him. He kept moving forward and never gave in. The same is true of Rashkolnikov, Dostoevsky’s “hero” in Crime and Punishment. The salvation Rashkolnikov receives at the end is in recognizing what he has done and accepting the penalty for it.

Being someone with several aspects that are not only acts of sin but lifelong problems, I draw strength from this. One of my problems is depression, which is not a sin in the sense of something I have done wrong but is certainly sin in the sense that it is a part of my brokenness. (I have other sins that are wrongs I have done and still do, but this is the one I chose to mention here.) It is not that God cannot overcome this, but that God chooses not to. What God does is give me the strength to move forward, recognizing this as a part of who I am but ultimately not the final word. Paul had to deal with the thorn in his side, but God refused to take it from him. God’s answer was that God’s grace was sufficient to make it through (2 Cor.12:7-10).

I have come to rely more on that grace and the recognition that it allows me to be honest about my brokenness. I do not have to hide the evil parts of myself, even from myself. I can acknowledge them with such and still continue. I think this is why Leviticus is so powerful. In it, God meets us where we are, demanding holiness from us, but knowing that we will not reach that standard. In those cases where we fail, God provides the sin offering and the restitution offering, the sacraments of grace. God does not abandon us in our sins, which allows us to recognize them for what they are. This makes the people of God the most honest of all people. As Christians, we can be honest because of grace, not because of our goodness.

Thanks be to God for those people in my life, famous or not, who provide me with examples of how to go on living in the midst of brokenness. They are my heroes.