The TV series Heroes is the latest cult viewing for many people. Instead of depicting the adventures of super-heroes like Superman, Batman, Spiderman or the X-men, it starts from a completely different premiss. It imagines quite ordinary men, women and children, suddenly finding that they have developed extraordinary powers of flight, strength, invisibility, self-healing, ability to bend space and time, and so on. Is this, as some people theorise, the next step in evolution, making these individuals the forerunners of a new super-humanity? Or is something more mysterious and sinister at work? Part of the attraction of the series is that we don’t know: there are all kinds of questions that leave us guessing, and keep us turning on week after week looking for answers, yet finding only more questions.
Another part of the appeal, is that in some deep way we all desire, and yet distrust, heroes. We all need people we can look up to, admire and maybe strive to emulate. Yet we have also become sceptical about the possibility of anyone having qualities which set them too far apart from the rest of us. Maybe this is part of the fascination of celebrities, who have come to be tawdry substitutes for the heroes of old. Their wealth, beauty and fame fascinate us; yet who would really want to live that life of shallow, broken relationships, constantly in and out of rehab because of drug or alcohol dependency? They are the living proof that all the money and fame and popularity in the world don’t bring happiness.
The celebration of All Saints at the beginning of November, has been the Church’s traditional way of focusing and using that human need for heroes. For centuries the lives of the saints provided the inspiration and the entertainment (and yes, sometimes it was fiction at that) for Christian people. The saints provided the models of how they might live, and stirred them up to try to emulate them. Many of the great saints have special holy days of their own: these are, if you like, the super-heroes of the faith. All Saints’ Day celebrates all the rest, the ordinary men and women who nevertheless, for love of God and by his grace, developed extraordinary powers of godliness, devotion, healing, preaching and the like. The importance of the ‘ordinary’ saints, is that it’s much more possible for us to think “I could be like that!” and to pray for the gifts, and work at the discipline, that will help us accomplish it.
St Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, was one of those super-heroes who learned the spiritual impact of having Christian heroes. As a young man he was a soldier, using all his strength and skill and physical courage in the cause of war. But when he sustained a severe and crippling injury, he was left convalescent for many months with little to amuse him. Having exhausted all his favourite reading matter, which was tales of knights and chivalry, he was forced to turn in some disgust to what was left: some lives of the saints. Yet when he began to daydream, and to fantasise about being one of these very diverse kinds of hero, he found a remarkable thing. Daydreaming about being a great knightly champion left him feeling strangely flat and depressed. But when he imagined himself living the life of one of the saints, he was left feeling inspired, energised, clean. He described this as a feeling of consolation, as opposed to desolation, and the contrast became a central feature of the spiritual method of his famous Exercises.
You could easily try this, and see if it doesn’t work for you. Read the biography of some great Christian (whether or not they are actually called ‘Saint’), and imagine what it would be, or what it would cost you, to become like them. Some of my personal Christian heroes are people like John Wesley, Charles Simeon, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Of course I don’t expect to match their personal excellence and achievement - they were all exceptional individuals. But I can try to imitate their single-minded devotion to God, their whole-hearted attachment to the work they believed he had given them to do.
We do all need heroes. How much better, if the heroes we choose for ourselves are good Christian ones, who have made a real and significant difference to the world, for God and for good.
Published in the Marston Times, November 2007