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Exploring the intersection of sacred and secular.
Growing up, I dreamed of being powerful — not the political power, or even power over others, but powerful in my own right. Of course Superman’s power was alluring, but what I needed was healing.
Hello, Fellow Humans
For those of you madly looking for a comments section to tell me that if someone manages to leave a mark, Superman does heal, and fast, the trouble is that when you really dig into him, he’s utterly vulnerable. He’s an orphan. He grew up in a nation destined to betray him — and not for his dubious legal status — but because he was too much: too strong to be controlled, too principled to be useful.
The problem with power isn’t (only) that we tend to give it to cowards who think violence is strength, but that so few understand that power is always a function of consent. Superman may be the strongest being around, but what he has isn’t power as much as capacity. In fact, it took a little while for Superman’s creators to figure this out, since he was first written as more of an antihero, part spy who infiltrated evil gangs and part prize fighter who never encountered a problem he couldn’t punch his way out of. In Action Comics #3, our hero lured an evil robber-baron and his dinner guests into a mine, trapping the owner there until he found Jesus or OSHA. It’s good to know that ham-fisted woke agendas — like providing safe working conditions — are a staple of the genre, not a recent innovation as some seem to believe.
Hopeless Healing
This is what led me to Wolverine. Yes, of course I wanted his claws — always take footlong indestructible claws if you have the choice! — but I realized that no amount of strength would ever be enough without healing, and I wanted Wolverine’s ability to heal from any wound. The problem was that my wounds weren’t physical most of the time.
Despite having a mouth quick enough to talk myself out of fights as quickly as it talked me into them, what I couldn’t talk myself out of was the trauma of persisting in a system that punished people — like me — who lack the capacity to sit still, stay on task, and be quiet. While that didn’t guarantee success, it helped folks stay out of the system’s crosshairs. It could have helped save me from words that felt like weapons.
I don’t understand why you don’t try. You have so much potential if you’d just apply yourself and try. Let’s make a plan, because if you put in enough effort, you can be so much better than you are now!
And I did.
My trouble was never that I didn’t try.
I. tried. so. hard, but even Wolverine’s healing factor couldn’t touch my wounds.
The Life Equation
Like most of life, real superpowers don’t need a lot of CGI. Jesus’ most powerful miracle — the one that caused people to try to make him king by force in John — wasn’t turning water to wine or raising the dead. He fed them when they were hungry. I needed a power much too ordinary to be interesting, a little-known power of a lesser-known superhero, Martian Manhunter — and it wasn’t because he could shapeshift to fit in. I’d learned that trick too, but just like Superman’s strength, its usefulness is surprisingly limited.
Martian Manhunter had the power of empathy gained through hardship. He had the ability to heal people’s psychic wounds — but it wasn’t because he could control minds and bend people to his will. Yes, using his powers could offer a sense of relief to people as a bandage over a wound almost all of us share, but contrived comfort isn’t true healing.
The most powerful thing he had to offer was gained through his own suffering. After the White Martians murdered almost every other Green Martian, after he lost his family and fled his home, and even though he couldn’t fix any of it when hardships broke him like they break us all, he gained the ability to transform his suffering into empathy. Empathy tells us that our ending isn’t in our breaking, but that in the crucible of our suffering, we can choose our ending or our rebirth. This is the theology of the cross.
In the space where we’re broken and hopeless — in the moment when death has won — this is where we encounter salvation. The one who conquers death must first succumb to it. The one who offers life is the one who’s faced its loss. I don’t offer this as the veiled threat of preaching for conversion, but as an antidote for what ails us all in this time and place where so many of us feel powerless, broken, divided, and afraid. It’s here we discover the truth that we don’t become heroes on account of any capacity for power — power is too easily broken.
We become heroes when, through our own breaking, we learn to love others back to life.
Eric Wolf is a local Lutheran pastor, and he’d love to buy you a coffee, tea, or beverage of your choice to tell him about your faith, your ideas about meaning, or whatever “sacred stuff” means to you. Reach him at [email protected]! To learn more about Eric and his writing, visit his blog at Love Sees Color.