What do we expect of our heroes and our spiritual leaders?
How true is our view of the world as heading rapidly to hell? Do nostalgia and
fault-finding lead directly to an apathetic stance of "I can't change the
nature of the world so why bother trying"? These questions have been
fermenting in my head since I saw "Lincoln" a few weeks ago, which I
highly recommend you go and see, whatever your political leanings or taste in
films. Anyway, with the assistance of some seemingly coordinated external
proddings, I find myself wanting to write about this stuff.
The other night I was over at my in-laws' place for my
brother-in-law's birthday party. Things were winding down, and the topic of
conversation was the similarities and differences between the Hindu faith and
Buddhism. Somehow Gandhi came up, a subject near and dear to my heart, and Jon,
my brother-in-law, asked if we knew that Gandhi had slept with young girls in
his bed. It was some sort of self-prescribed test of character or willpower, I
guess, and he didn’t always pass. I was skeptical, we were all stunned and each
denied any knowledge of the sort. Worth mentioning here, I had just seen the
film “Water” which takes place in a revolutionary India and centers on a
widowed girl of perhaps 7 and her eventual escape from terrible conditions to
the safety of Gandhi’s care. Needless to say I wasn’t exactly eager to accept
this new facet of Gandhi.
Jon continued, “I’ve heard Mother Teresa wasn’t really all
that good a person either.” What? “Apparently the conditions there are terrible,
the treatment at her hospital…” and here I interrupted, as I am wont to do. “The
Missionaries of Charity’s homes for the destitute and dying are more about
aiding people to die in a loving environment than providing medical treatment,”
I asserted. Which wasn’t news to Jon, as that wasn’t what he was talking about,
which is what I was afraid of. He was talking about a seeming megalomania (my
words) on Mother Teresa’s part that took the form of some Draconian rules
enforced on the volunteers, absurd misuses of money that could have done real
good, and actual abuse of the patients. I hope that isn’t the case, yet on
reflection, I wouldn’t be all that surprised if it were. Anyway the
conversation continued on somewhat awkwardly, as I was militantly reluctant to
acknowledge Mother Teresa’s possible shortcomings and even tried to press Jon
for his sources. God help me, I am ever so tightly bound to my views on the
world and my personal heroes, so much that it seems to take multiple lessons
for me to grasp a point.
You see, that morning at church, Pastor Michael’s sermon discretely
alluded to Dr. Martin Luther King’s adultery, stressing that King urged his
audience to view him as an ordinary man who was just as full of faults as
anybody. This might’ve been tied to a passage in Luke about John the Baptist,
but I can’t recall for sure how. Maybe that John appeared to be a lunatic, what
with the bug-eating and the camel-skin and (I imagine) the dreads. Maybe something
about his being mistaken for Christ by the crowd who sought baptism and having
to rebuke them, that he knew he was nowhere near as holy as they wanted to
believe he was and that only Christ could claim that. At any rate it got me
thinking about how we sometimes discount the great works someone has done when we
find out they are terribly broken and human after all, like my knee-jerk
reaction to some of the stuff I read about JFK once I was an adult. But I didn’t
manage to hold that train of thought in my grasp, I so rarely do, and it
slipped away just like it had the week before, at the movies.
When we left the theater after watching “Lincoln”, I was
struck by the realization that our political system has ALWAYS been totally
crooked, that the cry of my parents’ and grandparents’ generation that things in
Washington used to be so much better was just so much self-deluding drivel. All
systems of power are systems of manipulation and inequality, and seeing a great
man accomplish great things by very unethical means made me take stock of our
world anew. I’m not a convert to a “the ends justify the means” system of
thought, but I am once again attuned to just how very complicated things are,
how unlikely anything is to be completely black and white when considered in its
entirety. Take my uncle Steve, who was once involved in the effort to build and
teach at some school in Cambodia or thereabouts that was funded by Pol Pot’s
wife. I don’t know the specifics, but is the school any less important or noble
a cause because of its contributor’s ties? I don’t think so.
But I have to admit to struggling with accepting even the
possibility that my heroes, the people who I have decided in some small degree to
pattern my life after, were terribly flawed individuals. It’s almost as if I
fear the wondrous deeds they’ve accomplished, their messages of service,
selflessness, and justice, would be somehow meaningless in the face of these awful
potential revelations. Like my striving to emulate the noble qualities I have
viewed them as possessing is somehow less relevant. Which is ridiculous. That’s
like not voting at all because the candidates aren’t who you’d like, or
ignoring the emotional impact of the speech in Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator”
because its fiction. It’s dismissing the words of our nation’s founders because
they held slaves, or saying that Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” isn’t good music
because of his creepy "alleged" child abuse and Mr. Potato Head face. The world
is full of all sorts of people, none of them without fault and all of them
capable of terrible things. If I dismiss the good in our world that’s done by
the bad, what the hell am I left with?
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