When I was a kid my comic book hero was Thor. I always thought that the other guys were a bit of a joke. Discharging massive volts of electricity and stopping speeding bullets and throwing flames were just not real! My hero did something that was bona fide. He could fight.
Plus, he was everything I was not... long blonde hair, thin waisted (Mom always took me to the JC Penny husky department for clothing), a mind with wings, secure enough to wear a cape and, dear Zeus, look at those muscles! But clearly the long lasting impression was this: he used a hammer. No spiderwebs shooting from his wrists to entangle the bad guys, no footlong razors popping from his knuckles, no invisibility tricks. Just a hammer.
My, how things change, do they not?
My hero today is Harlan Hubbard.
I can't thank you enough for his biography you gave us... the best book I've read in years. Keenly aware that with every turn of the page I was nearing the end of the book, which felt like the end of a friendship. I watched Harlan, this slow, small and quiet (but oh, so significant!) gentleman let himself be shaped by everything and everyone around him. No resistance. No fight. No cape.
Lauren Winner paraphrases another author in the book, Still:
"Stories told with heros at the centre of them are told to laud the virtues of the heros - for if the hero failed, all would be lost. By contrast, a saint can fail in a way that the hero can't, because the failure of the saint reveals the forgiveness and the new possibilities made in God, and the saint is just a small character in a story that's always fundamentally about God."
It's the saints like Harlan, not the heros, that encourage me to say this:
When I was young I wanted to be who I wasn't,
but now I just want to be who I am.
