Thoughts to ponder at the beginning:
Heroes may not be braver than anyone else. They’re just braver five minutes longer. – Ronald Reagan
Without heroes, we are all plain people and don’t know how far we can go. – Bernard Malamud
The first time I visited my close friends in Belgium, the United States was deep into the Vietnam War. The U. S. wasn’t too popular overseas. I sometimes felt uncomfortable and apologetic when people discovered I was an American.
One day, my Belgian family took me to their camp in the Ardennes. You may recall the Ardennes endured intense fighting during World War II. The Battle of the Bulge took place in Bastogne, an Ardennes town, for example.
We stopped at the butcher’s shop to lay in supplies. At the counter, we conversed with the butcher, an old man, or at least he seemed so to me at the time. My heart warmed when the mother in my family gestured to me and told the butcher, “This is my American daughter.”
The butcher’s face brightened, “Oh,” he said. “Our liberators.”
I was both pleased and taken aback. I was so accustomed to feeling ashamed of being American, it never occurred to me that my folks could be viewed a heroes.
Recently someone asked me, “Who are our heroes today?” Not our Unitarian Universalist heroes specifically, but our cultural heroes. Who are they? In a day when public leaders risk being torn from stem to stern by the media – right wing, left wing, or centrist media, take your pick – how are we to elevate heroes for our children to follow? Who are the exemplars or ethics, courage, generosity, love?
Heroes provide important sources of inspiration. Sometimes they also galvanize us into action, their ethics and example leading the way. Rosa Parks, for example, inspired the Montgomery bus strike with her courageous refusal to give up her seat on the bus. The Montgomery bus strike was, itself, one of the tipping points of the entire civil rights movement. Rosa Parks’ action was heroic, and it helped inspire courage in the countless people who followed her.
It is important for our children to know whom we glorify and why. Our children need exemplars to follow, they need to know the strong characters and courageous actions that have wrought good in our world. They need hope and a sense that good human beings can make a difference.
So, by the way, do adults. Ernest Hemingway once said, “As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.” In some ways, I wonder if adults might have the greater need. As we grow and experience the world – and the myriad ways human beings can fall short of the mark – perhaps we need heroes to reorient us, and restore a sense of hope, especially at times when we are discouraged.
Who lights the way for us when we need a torch bearer? I asked you who your heroes were. And the emails rolled in. Among us we celebrate many heroes. They fall roughly into two categories: People heroic on a large and public scale, and people heroic on a smaller and private scale.
Here are the public heroes you lifted up:
Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Jr. the Dalai Lama, who worked for nonviolent change.
William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Abraham Lincoln, who worked against slavery.
Rosa Parks, little Ruby Bridges, James Montgomery, the Freedom Riders, John Lewis, who worked in the civil rights movement in the U. S.
The U. S. Coast Guard who have conducted myriad and storied rescue operations.
Oscar Romero, martyr for the poor of El Salvador.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who died for his opposition to the Nazis.
Kathy Kollwitz, artist who used her creativity to show horrors of war.
Cesar Chavez, farm worker, organizer for justice for farm workers.
Henry David Thoreau, naturalist, social critic, abolitionist, tax resister, philosopher, historian, and leading Transcendentalist.
Baal Shem Tov, founder of Hasidism and the “mysticism of the everyday.”
Anne Frank, witness of the Holocaust.
Erasmus, essayist and wisdom teacher.
Vincent Van Gogh, follower of a dream.
E.R. Schumacher, economist of “small is beautiful, economoist as if people mattered.
Stephen Biko, South African martyr for freedom.
Sojourner Truth, abolitionist and preacher.
Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Workers.
Nelson Mandela – one of the greatest men of his era.
Howard Zinn – historian, author, playwright, social activist.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton – American social activist, abolitionist, and a leading figure in the women’s rights movement.
Margaret Sanger – American birth control activist, sex educator, and nurse.
David Ortiz – baseball player with a high degree of professionalism who displays great modesty, despite his incredible talent. “He just does his job and does it superbly well,” you told me. Also a contemporary gentleman, who won’t talk about his divorce publicly, saying, “That’s my personal life. This is my ball game. They don’t mix. I won’t talk about it.”
Thomas Merton – Catholic monk, peace activist, author, bridge builder between eastern and western religions.
Two Mainers made the list:
Elizabeth B. Noyes who used her significant divorce settlement to buy great art (Renoir, Monet, Homer, Picasso, etc.) for all major museums in Maine, including Bowdoin’s and Colby’s. She also set up a foundation that assists new business ventures in Maine.
Harold Alfond: owner/CEO of Dexter Shoes. When the factory had to close in the 1970’s, he offered training to his employees so that they could gain the skills needed to find other employment. He built academic and athletic buildings
at Maine’s colleges and universities. And, he began a fund that awarded every baby born in the state of Maine $500 in a post secondary fund to which family and friends can easily contribute over the years.
The list could go on and on. I imagine some of you may have thought of folks to add to it. I would add Bill McKibbon, environmentalist and author who has written extensively about climate change and Joanna Macy, environmental activist
and Buddhist practitioner of what she calls “deep ecology.”
I suspect few people set out to be heroes. Instead heroes are created by a combination of character, work, and circumstance. Heroes place their finger on the pulse of the world they occupy, sense a need – for action, for truth and witness, for assistance – and address that need. If the need is great enough, and addressing that need is radical and transformational enough, a public hero is born.
Often acts of heroism spring from adversity – war, oppression, poverty, natural disaster – as human beings set out to alter, for the better,the course of history. Heroes are people who try to transform bad to good, misery to joy, oppression to justice, violence to peace.
We need our heroes – for the work they do and perhaps even more importantly, for the work they inspire us to do. But, there’s something about human nature – whether it’s envy or insecurity or self-dissatisfaction – that wants to tear a hero down, too, that wants to knock the people we elevate down to size. “Being a hero is the shortest profession on earth,” Will Rogers said. The media excels at digging up the dirt and spreading it around. These days, in our high tech society, where communications rocket around the globe, the high can tumble to the depths pretty quickly. But the media wouldn’t engage in that kind of reporting if the public did not crave it.
I worry such negative attention could inspire fear to act in heroic ways – fear to draw such laudatory attention to oneself because of the unfavorable scrutiny that could follow. On the other hand, regarding our heroes on a human scale might help us to access our own inner heroes and act. After all, our heroes are just as human as we are. For example, the person who suggested David Ortiz wrote, “I’m told that at one time he was suspected of drug-enhancement. I don’t know. I don’t believe or disbelieve it. I just realize that heroes are human and probably no hero can be heroic in all circumstances all his or her life.”
Which brings me to the flesh and blood heroes in our midst, the ones we live beside day by day, the personal heroes we know, whose fine qualities snuggle up right next to their warts. A few of you wrote about that kind of hero, too.
M. H. wrote that her hero was her husband: “He was very even tempered, he looked for and saw the best in everyone and was very accepting of everyone. He spoke up when he saw someone hurting others and didn’t interfere with what was none of his business.”
H. T. wrote about her daughter, Susan: “She was born with mild retardation and learned to live joyfully with that and had many friends. She contracted auto- immune liver disease at age 16, was a transplant candidate and learned to live courageously with a couple of serious surgical and many medical challenges for 25 years. In spite of all that, everybody remembers her bravery, happy nature, and amazing smile. She died at age 40 from a stroke.”
C. B. wrote about her mother: “She raised 4 kids during the depression and WW II, kept us dressed well and warm, house was spotless. Watched her eldest son go off to the Korean War and return. She did amazing things with a little money. My mom wasn’t a fantastic cook, but we never went hungry. I know my mom may not qualify for this sermon because she didn’t fight in a regular war, but believe me she fought in a way all through her life.”
K. G. wrote about her aunt: “She is a heroine to me because she’s faced a lot of trials and is still full of fun at age 91. In her first pregnancy, her baby was born early, at six months, when my aunt was home alone. The baby lived four days. This occurred in 1949. It followed the death of her 19-year-old brother in WW II in 1944 and the death of her father in 1947. My aunt went on to have three more sons, the last of whom is mentally retarded. With apologies for this litany of suffering, which my aunt would never roll out like this, I mention that her eldest surviving son died at the age of 51 of a brain tumor. Her husband has died now, but he was a loving partner who shared these joys and sorrows gently and graciously…Anyone may suffer tragedies, but I look to my Aunt Anna as a role model for doing so without noticeable self-pity or discouragement, and, most amazing of all, without losing her sense of humor.” K. G. goes on to say she is fortunate to have her aunt “to lead the way in humble and joyful living.”
That is the stuff of daily living – our ways of relating to people, illness, and adversity. The stuff of ordinary people bringing to light admirable character qualities to face extraordinary circumstances – wars, economic adversity, loss, physical and mental challenges. That kind of heroism can exhibit itself in an ongoing way, as it did in the stories you told me about your loved ones. Or it can even be fleeting and temporary: M. T. wrote of her admiration “when I catch someone just offering any human kindness to anyone else: opening a door, catching something that’s about to drop, or even a smile. They melt me.”
What do we tell our children? That heroes abound. We tell them who are heroes are and why. And we tell them the seeds of heroism live in everyone.
This is the time of year when we honor our dearly departed loved ones. The turning and falling leaves, Hallowe’en and its roots in All Saints Day and All Souls Day remind us of death and loss. Some of you have brought photos and mementos to display in the front of the church to commemorate your loved ones. Whether or not you brought something, I invite you to look inside the sanctuaries of your hearts and call to mind someone, gone from you now, but whose private heroism has inspired and guided you in your living. If you feel comfortable doing so, call out their names into the circle of our community.
And now find one word to describe a heroic quality of that person’s character. If you feel comfortable doing so, call out that characteristic into the circle of our community.
For these heroes and their honored qualities – and for the ones that remain unspoken, we give our thanks and praise.
“The Truly Great,” by Stephen Spenderi
I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history
Through corridors of light, where the hours are suns,
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the Spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.
What is precious, is never to forget
The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.
Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light
Nor its grave evening demand for love.
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog, the flowering of the spirit.
Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,
See how these names are fêted by the waving grass
And by the streamers of white cloud
And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.
Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun
And left the vivid air signed with their honour.
“The Truly Great.” http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/241980