The non-hero’s Hero’s journey

I will abdicate my freedom of my Minister’s Corner in newsletter to the recent words of Heather Cox Richardson.  Following our meaningful MLK gospel concert, and the drama of the political moment we are living through, I just found her words inspirational and practical all at once.  She writes…

“You hear sometimes, now that we know the sordid details of the lives of some of our leading figures, that America has no heroes left.

When I was writing a book about the Wounded Knee Massacre, where heroism was pretty thin on the ground, I gave that a lot of thought. And I came to believe that heroism is neither being perfect, nor doing something spectacular. In fact, it’s just the opposite: it’s regular, flawed human beings choosing to put others before themselves, even at great cost, even if no one will ever know, even as they realize the walls might be closing in around them.

It means sitting down the night before D-Day and writing a letter praising the troops and taking all the blame for the next day’s failure upon yourself in case things went wrong, as General Dwight D. Eisenhower did.

It means writing in your diary that you “still believe that people are really good at heart,” even while you are hiding in an attic from the men who are soon going to kill you, as Anne Frank did.

It means signing your name to the bottom of the Declaration of Independence in bold script, even though you know you are signing your own death warrant should the British capture you, as John Hancock did.

It means defending your people’s right to practice a religion you don’t share, even though you know you are becoming a dangerously visible target, as Sitting Bull did.

Sometimes it just means sitting down, even when you are told to stand up, as Rosa Parks did.

None of those people woke up one morning and said to themselves that they were about to do something heroic. It’s just that when they had to, they did what was right.

On April 3, 1968, the night before the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a white supremacist, he gave a speech in support of sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Since 1966, King had tried to broaden the civil rights movement for racial equality into a larger movement for economic justice. He joined the sanitation workers in Memphis, who were on strike after years of bad pay and such dangerous conditions that two men had been crushed to death in garbage compactors.

After his friend Ralph Abernathy introduced him to the crowd, King had something to say about heroes: “As I listened to Ralph Abernathy and his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself, I wondered who he was talking about.”

Dr. King told the audience that if God had let him choose any era in which to live, he would have chosen the one in which he had landed. “Now, that’s a strange statement to make,” King went on, “because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around…. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.” Dr. King said that he felt blessed to live in an era when people had finally woken up and were working together for freedom and economic justice.

He knew he was in danger as he worked for a racially and economically just America. “I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter…because I’ve been to the mountaintop…. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life…. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!”

People are wrong to say that we have no heroes left.

Just as they have always been, they are all around us, choosing to do the right thing, no matter what.

Wishing us all a day of peace for Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2026.”

Thank you Heather.

I remember being a junior in college and being twenty and the President of three student activist groups, I was filled with a pretty inflated, frankly ridiculous sense of my potential. 

One Saturday afternoon having returned from a Habitat for Humanity workday, I stood in the shower and for one fleeting moment as I scrubbed my scalp I pondered the question that if by the end of my days I would have accomplished all Martin Luther had, would I be satisfied.  There was a brief pause, and then a fairly quick, and reluctant shrug as I said to myself that I suppose I would have to be.

I am chuckling with a touch of embarrassment to even write this. 

Thankfully, although I suppose with a touch of wistfulness, I must confess those heady, frankly ridiculously ego driven days of me saving the world are long gone. 

Today, as I write this, Wed Jan 21^st, clergy from all around the country will begin to convene in Minneapolis.  Trek was among them.  I would love to be there.  But, having just returned from three weeks away, I choose not to be among them.  However, now not with my fingers in soapy hands, but on a keyboard, I will be with about 500 others will stand in front of an ICE facility in a protest that I have watched expand from simply a Wednesday gathering at noon of a hundred people to a nearly daily protest.  

I guess the lesson in Heather’s piece, and my own reluctant experience, is that you don’t have to expect yourself to be perfect in this, or any one moment.  However, I believe, as she does that we do need to hold ourselves to a standard of resistance that is linked not only to our comfort, but an unrelenting calling as a citizen and person of conscience.

If you are active in the resistance to this general assault on our collective values…well, …then thanks.  If you are not, take a minute to pause and ask yourself how much hero you feel like you can, should, and need to be.

That action, that pause, and subsequent action might help you get through this difficult moment as an American, and person of conscience.  And, I will be in that struggle between comfort and conscience right beside you.

Steve