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.

Last week, Barry Bonds hit his 756th* career home run, passing Hank Aaron as the all time leader. The asterisk, of course, represents the fact that this record is somewhat tainted, due to Bonds’s use of performance enhancing drugs.

I don’t particularly like Bonds. He is a very arrogant player. This is especially evident when he hits a home run. He - like many others - stands at the plate, nonchalantly admiring his work as if to say, “Of course I hit a home run. What did you expect?”, before beginning to trot down to first base. This does not mean I don’t respect him as a player, though. No matter how many drugs you take, you still have to manage to put the bat on the ball. In this regard, Bonds is like Ty Cobb. Cobb was one of the meanest SOBs to ever play the game, but he was still a great player.

Bonds’s milestone got me thinking about performance enhancing drugs, especially because I spent ten years taking such drugs. I never took anything like steroids or human growth hormones, but I never needed to. I am not an athlete. But I did take antidepressants, and these certainly enhanced my performance as a scholar.

One of the primary symptoms that finally got me to go to a psychologist was the loss of short term memory, something that is often associated with depression. While I was a student, I would be translating some Hebrew or hieroglyphics the night before a class. I would look at the word I needed to translate and then turn to my lexicon. By the time I had turned two or three pages in the lexicon, the letters of the word had rearranged themselves in my head and I no longer had any idea what word I was trying to find. It would take several attempts before I retained the word long enough to find the definition.

For a philologist, such a problem is fairly severe, but it would create difficulty for any scholar. When things are not retained in short-term memory, they never get transferred to long-term memory and therefore do not become a part of our working knowledge. Since knowledge is our stock in trade as scholars, depression makes scholarship difficult.

Once I was prescribed antidepressants, however, the problem went away. This means I am able to do my job better because of antidepressants. That would seem to me to be the very definition of performance enhancing drugs.

It could be argued, of course, that the drugs Bonds took were banned by baseball, while scholarship has never banned antidepressants. (And given the number of scholars I know who take them, this is probably a good thing.) But this points to the fact that rules in baseball and scholarship must be based on something. If merely making you perform better makes a drug illegal, then surely antidepressants would be banned.

Another difference between steroids and antidepressants is that steroids are supposed to make you perform at levels above that of a normal human, while antidepressants simply make your body functional normally. The unstated assumption in this, however, is that we know how a body functions normally, that there is some sort of baseline human against which we can measure ourselves. Such a human is supposedly perfectly healthy, with no physical or psychological problems.

I have never met such a person. This is not surprising, since this person exists only as an abstraction. Everyone has problems of some sort. Theologically we call this our fallen nature. One thing that the Calvinists have right is that sin corrupts everything. It does not remove all goodness, but it does infect every aspect of our being, including our bodies and our minds.

And so, I freely admit that any success I have had as a scholar is due in part to performance enhancing drugs. Antidepressants may not have given me the ability to function as a Hall-of-Fame scholar, but they have allowed me to play the game. Without them, I would never have even made it into the minor leagues.

I received the Augsburg Fortress fall catalog in the mail a few days ago. On the cover is a book I am quite interested in reading. It is entitled Defeating Depression. It is written by Howard Stone, a pastoral counselor and professor emeritus at Texas Christian University.

One of the things that intrigues me about the book is the fact that Stone himself suffers from depression. I am hoping that as a pastoral counselor he will deal with not only the psychological issues but also the theological ones.

I have struggled with chronic depression for the past ten years. Unlike high blood pressure or cholesterol, which you may have but not notice, depression is something of which you are constantly aware. It is something that I have to fight against on a moment-by-moment basis.

The reason I hope Stone will address it theologically is because my battle with depression has had an impact on my theological anthropology. It has been a struggle not to allow such an all-encompassing condition to define who I am. In addition, I have had to deal with questions concerning how depression affects my self-understanding and how I relate to others. What does it mean to be a Christian whose mind is constantly malfunctioning? What does constant irritability intersect with the command to love others? Having wrestled with these questions myself, I would love to see how someone else with theological training has dealt with depression.

In some ways, I feel like the Gerasene demoniac:

No one could restrain him any more, even with a chain; for he had often been restrained with shackles and chains, but the chains he wrenched apart, and the shackles he broke in pieces; and no one had the strength to subdue him. Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always howling and bruising himself with stones (Mark 5:3-5).

I long for the day when I can get to v.15, so people can come and find me sitting in my right mind.¹

1. Please note I am not saying that I am always howling and bruising myself. It is merely metaphorical. But certainly no medication has been able to shackle this disease. [back]