I wish I were a celluloid hero like Errol Flynn!
(a boyhood fantasy)
How thickheaded could the apostles of Jesus have been? Three times – while en route to Jerusalem – he tells them that when he arrives there the chief priests and scribes (experts in the Law of Moses) will have him arrested, condemned to death and hand him over to the Romans who will mock, spit upon, scourge and execute him! And yet each prediction fails to register with them.
After the first prediction Peter actually takes Jesus aside and chides him for having such morbid thoughts. After the second prediction the disciples are still arguing over rank, over who should have seniority over whom. Then, after the third and most detailed prediction of his violent death, we read today’s Gospel where the disciples James and John (much to the indignation of the other disciples) ask for high places in Jesus’ administration.
It’s as if any negative conclusion to Jesus’ mission must be brushed away like some annoying fly, a nuisance more than a real probability. They imagine they are on some glory road, destined to be better off than they were when struggling fishermen, able to lord it over others instead of being lorded over. They have made a fantasy of Jesus, imposed their own fantasies upon him. They are blinded by such fantasies more so than the actually blind beggar Jesus will heal in next Sunday’s Gospel.
They are like the character in the James Thurber story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” Mitty is driving his wife to the hairdresser but somewhere in his head he is flying an eight engine Navy seaplane through a winter storm, revving up the engines while the crew trusts that the “Old Man” will get them through. The daydream breaks up when the wife says, “You’re driving too fast!” Then once he lets her off, he is driving past a hospital and soon he is a world-class surgeon working on the ductal tract of a millionaire and friend of the President, worried specialists allowing him to take over the operation. Until somebody shouts, “Look out for that Buick!” and Mitty returns to the real world.
Which makes me wonder, in this early season of our presidential campaign, what kind of daydreams our candidates are having. Or should I say utopias, right or left? Do they have any inkling that political success is too often but prelude to an agony of conflict often to an extreme degree – even crucifixion? Do they hear the predictions of the Gospel that service (as in the case of Jesus) entails more suffering than glory? The one president I can think of who did anticipate such suffering was Abraham Lincoln – who knew his Scripture – and he persevered to the end – a very Christ-like figure.
I still remember the thought that crossed my mind when – after 22 years in monastic life (from the age of 15 to 38) – the Church permitted me to return to the lay state and marry. I thought: “I’m letting myself in for a lot of grief.” By that I meant, after so long a bachelorhood, I was engaging myself to people so intimately, so dependent on me, children, spouse . . . economically on my own, competing for jobs, possible rejection, having no “entitlement” to respect any more. Grief, vulnerability, my own journey to Jerusalem without illusions. And yet amid such uncertainties, such heartbreak (as with the death of a son), such demands that offered no convenient escape . . . was I not in fact experiencing simultaneously (as Jesus also predicted) a resurrection from the dead, from the deadliness of daydreams, from a world unfamiliar with flesh and blood, the stuff that makes lovers of us all?