DEAR EDITOR:
To the pantheon and realm of angels we pray and ask for
guidance, but do not assign hero status. It is of humankind that we
bestow that honor.
DEAR EDITOR:
To the pantheon and realm of angels we pray and ask for guidance, but do not assign hero status. It is of humankind that we bestow that honor. It is he who is like us with our foibles and flaws that has attained against great odds or with fortitude of spirit that is elevated to the hero plane. The one requirement is that the hero share with us human imperfection.
It is an interesting phenomenon that we are the most affected when that requisite of hero status is shown to us. Media and print column-inch coverage of five-touchdown performance levels shows our absorbed interest when the hero mirrors our humanity and flaws.
In Christianity. Jesus is the closest to the hero when He shows us his humanity while hanging from the cross. As evidenced by the abundance of crucifixes and crosses we are most in communion with Him when he shows us his blood, flesh, doubt, and suffering.
Rabbi Harold Kushner, author and biblical scholar when discussing human fallibility put it this way: “The question is not whether or not we will make mistakes, whether or not we will get some important things wrong from time to time and feel terrible about it. Of course we will. Anyone who takes the moral demands of a human life seriously will make his or her share of mistakes. The question is, how shall we deal with our imperfection, our sense of inadequacy?”
Rabbi Kushner puts error and forgiveness in religious terms when he states: “Yes, religion can make us feel guilty by setting standards for us, holding up ideals against which we can measure ourselves. But that same religion can then welcome us in our imperfection. It can comfort us with the message that God prefers the broken and contrite heart that knows its failures over the complacent and arrogant one that claims never to have erred.”
The short book “Not Fade Away, a short life well lived” chronicles the life of a young man at the end of his life’s journey cut short by illness. Peter Barton was a mover and shaker in the technology arena and decided to record in book form his innermost thoughts and actions on the last leg of life’s run. The sincerity, genuineness and honesty of the telling is striking because he is at a point in his life where masks, acts and facades have no meaning. Things have been distilled to the essence. This is what Peter Barton had to say when he was very close to the end of existence as we know it.
“Redemption. There’s another word I’ve never really thought about till lately, another one for which I don’t pretend to have an airtight definition. But if there is such a thing redemption, it doesn’t happen only once, or all at once. I think we’re redeemed at every moment we find something good among the bad, something joyful in the sorrow, something to continue being grateful for.”
For me, I think Jeff Garcia is something good among the bad, Jeff Garcia is something joyful in the sorrow, Jeff Garcia is something to continue being grateful for.
John G. Filice, Gilroy
Submitted Wednesday, Jan. 21
