Good Guys and Bad Guys; Heroes and Villains

The sage author, mythologist, and theorist, Professor Joseph Campbell argued that the story of humankind is one of 'the hero with a thousand faces'. But he would have never portrayed us singularly as good guys or bad guys.

Each of us, though on a heroic journey from the moment of birth to our final breath, has inherent qualities of both darkness and light. At one time or another, we can be as good as an angel or evil as a demon. This day in age we seem to have forgotten that there are no absolutes. As we divide into tribes, it has become easier to characterize those who are not quite like us as bad and those in our camp as good.

View fullsize

Richard Boone as Paladin on “Have Gun Will Travel”.

When I was a boy, back in the dark ages, you could always tell the good guys from the bad guys by the color of their hats (good wore white and bad wore black). Our heroes were cowboys after all. John Wayne was the quintessential good guy. Ask anyone. Shane (Alan Ladd) would testify that Jack Palance was a villain and just plain evil. No doubt about it. Things started getting a little hazy though when Richard Boone showed up as Paladin on the TV show “Have Gun Will Travel. He was a hero in a black hat. What the heck?! So it goes. Just when you think you've figured it all out...

Perhaps it wasn't Hollywood that understood the nature of people so well. Rather it might have been the kindly Father Flanagan who asserted 'there is no such thing as a bad boy.' This is not a naive statement. It's the truth. God, who is the essence of love, never created a human being who was bad.

Gregory Boyle, a Jesuit priest in Los Angeles, has worked with gang-members for decades. Barking to the Choir is about “how to love people. How to really love people. And how to know God when you see God.”

No one can question the fact that horrible things happen to people and evil exists. Recent history confirms this of course. Things of satanic proportions happened in Rwanda during the hundred days of slaughter and ethnic cleansing...or with the gassing to death at Auschwitz of 800 Gypsy children in one day at the hands of Adolph Hitler. And on and on. It's easy to hate perpetrators who commit atrocities. There is no excuse for what they do. Consequences for such actions are necessary and justice must be served. But in the midst of our righteous condemnation we can easily forget that there is a bit of good in the worst of us and a bit of bad in the best of us. By grace, and grace alone, have we been spared from whatever drives people to do such things.

Gregory Boyle in his book Barking to the Choir tells us that; "There are no monsters, villains, or bad guys...There are only folks who carry unspeakable pain. There are those among us who deal in the currency of damage. And there are those whose minds are ill, whose sickness chases them every day. But there are no bad guys. Jesus seems to suggest that there are no exceptions to this. Yet it's hard for us to believe him."

I guess we need to rethink our positions on who is wearing the black hats. We should also consider abandoning our tribes to rejoin the larger human family. We can't afford the divisions any more. No exceptions. Let's try harder to believe that guy who Gregory Boyle was talking about.

Grief Transformation; Cocoons and Butterflies

We have spent a month together this May delving into grief. From the Five Stages, to coping, and even celebrating.  There is always more to say. But one point always comes to the surface, as it did for my friend Elisabeth Kübler-Ross twenty-five years after an awakening she had three miles from Lubin, Poland at Majdanek Concentration Camp in 1946. The story she told me and recounted in a short book she wrote, The Cocoon and The Butterfly, provide perhaps the best understanding of the transformative power and nature of grief.

In 1992, while helping my patient and friend, Michael, through the struggles he was having with terminal illness and alienation from his family, I had a long conversation with his mentor Kübler-Ross. Her straightforward advice was that he should come back to her ranch in Head Waters, Virginia for a retreat.  Our talk then took another turn as I asked her why she chose to work with death and dying, particularly with children, which had been the focus of her medical career.  For the first time, EKR elaborated with me about her life.  Her initial one-word-response was this; "Butterflies." Then she went on to tell me a story.

In 1946, Elisabeth, one of three triplets born to her parents in Zurich, Switzerland, had at age 19, decided that she would become a physician.  World War II had ended in Europe the year before.  Elisabeth told me she felt compelled to join the International Voluntary Service for Peace in an effort to help decimated communities and provide assistance to countless refugees.  It was her visit to Majdanek Concentration Camp that changed everything.  The SS killed tens of thousands of an estimated 90,000 Jews deported to Majdanek.  Three gas chambers were used to choke the life out of prisoners, many of them women and children.  It was in the children's barracks and at one of the gas chambers that Elisabeth saw the butterflies.  She was sorting shoes on the floor of one of the gas chambers when she noticed the drawings.  Children had used their fingernails and rocks to carve butterfly images on the walls.  Hundreds if not thousands of the etchings were in the barracks as well.  She was shocked, shaken, and bewildered.  How could these little people, condemned to forced labor and death find a place in their hearts to draw butterflies....and Why? Though she did not have an answer, EKR made a decision then and there to become a psychiatrist and to work with children who were suffering and terminally ill. It was in 1971, as she recounted, after sitting at the deathbeds of many hundreds of children that her answer to the Holocaust puzzle came.  She told it to me in these words;

"The little ones were no longer in cocoons.  Now they were butterflies.  They would be set free from the hellish concentration camp. No longer prisoners of their bodies.  No more torture. No more separation from their mothers and fathers.  This is the message they were leaving for me and for all of those left behind.  I have used the image of the butterfly for the past twenty years to explain the process of death and dying."

The pain and suffering of horrific losses have the power to change us and to shape our lives like no other force.  After we descend into the darkness there will come a possibility of liberation.  We see this in the lives of people like Elie Wiesel, a child survivor of concentration camps, who went on to "combat indifference, intolerance, and injustice through international dialogues and youth-focused programs".  We witness the incredible work of John Walsh whose little son Adam was brutally murdered in Fort Lauderdale at the hands of a child molester.  John has gone on to expose every kind of crime as he advocates for justice with his television shows and writings.  Of course, there are many more like Elisabeth, Elie, and John.  They each have been transformed, taken from predictable lives, thrown into a cave of darkness, and have emerged with wings.  They point us to the possibility of new beginnings. They also give us a message that there is something more. Like the children of Majdanek, they signal to us that there is something more powerful than death.

When a caterpillar begins to spin her cocoon the most incredible things begin to happen.  Woven into what appears to be a shroud, the little creature starts a cycle of death.  Then, in an unexplainable moment, it becomes a goo of nothingness.  From that goo, a form appears and new creation begins to take shape.  Soon, with an incredible struggle that empowers its wings, a butterfly breaks forth from the cocoon.  She loosens, exercises, and then flies into the sky.  What a miracle.  So it is for each and every one of us.  EKR saw it happen without exception when her young patients transitioned from life.  As she was so fond of saying; "Life doesn’t end when you die. It starts.”