I’ve been thinking about how long it took to tell myself the honest story of who I am.
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It was my mother who gave birth to my Gloried Self with dozens of oft-repeated stories, like the one about the old woman who lived in our neighborhood when I was a toddler. When Mom would push me past her yard in my Taylor Tot (before they were called strollers), the woman would sternly instruct her, Don’t buy this child shoes, buy him books instead, because he’s such a smart little boy.
Why did she buy and repeat this old woman’s tale? What was in it for her to have an exceptional child? I was her first-born of five, and she was already late into her twenties. After nearly three decades of a harsh life, a remarkable child might soothe her and give her hope that her luck was turning.
Whatever her reasons, her message to me throughout my childhood was that I was the smartest, the cutest, the bravest little boy in the world.
I soon adopted boyhood heroes whose feats reinforced my sense of glory. I would grow up to hit a baseball like Ted Williams, whose batting average the year I was born was .406, the last major league player to hit over .400. I would preach like Billy Graham, at whose Crusade meeting in the Hollywood Bowl in 1951 I first decided to be a Christian, the beginning of my journey to becoming a preacher myself. I would inspire people as John Kennedy did when he turned prose into public poetry as my own political interests were awakening.
On Sept. 15, 1951, The LA Times reported that Billy Graham brought the old-time religion back to Southern California with a rousing Hollywood Bowl revival to start a 16-day “Crusade for Christ.” Photo Credit: LA Times
I fed my inner legend, and it grew. Captain of my high school basketball team. The first in my extended family to go directly from high school to college. I married my high school’s head cheerleader (as if I needed a third cheerleader, after my mother and me!). President of my graduate school class. I climbed the professional ladder until, by my early thirties, I was a blazing success, a hero in my own eyes and in the eyes of many others.
But the underlying story was very different. Despite my mother’s insistence, I never was the smartest boy around, nor the cutest or bravest. I was an ordinary kid and then an ordinary man with delusions of grandeur that defended me from the truth about myself and my anything-but-extraordinary growing-up.
Though I was captain of the basketball team, I was an average player surrounded by two teammates who made the all-city team. I’ve always been athletic, but never great at any sport. I was raised by Depression-era parents who dropped out of high school before graduating; not surprisingly, I was a C student until my third year of college.
With my modest academic background, for two decades beginning in college, I lived in fear that I’d be found out by my new and properly educated friends as the intellectual fraud I feared I was. Despite my worst fears, by my mid-thirties I was a charismatic parish leader in a black robe that cloaked a young man terrified of failure.
Which, not surprisingly, is what I brought down upon myself. The entire exalted story – my mother’s and mine – crashed before I was forty; I destroyed my career as a pastor when the fiction of my Glorified Self collapsed under the weight of my misbehavior. Clearly, not the cutest nor the bravest any longer, and certainly not the smartest.
It’s now been decades that I’ve been exploring this strange continent that is my soul. Looking back, I realize how difficult it’s been. When the old stories still survive, even though you know at some level that they’re not true, it’s hard to exchange the familiar for the unknown, the comfortable for the genuine.
Do I really want to examine the truth about myself? Do I need to? But when I found myself at the bottom of the hole I’d dug for myself, I knew that the only way up, the only way out was to figure out what I’d done to myself to wind up in this dark place.
So I started seeking honest answers to difficult questions: Where do I come from? Why am I so afraid? Whom can I trust to help me? Question by question, step by step, I left behind the lies and the confusion and began to discover who I really am.
Then more: What are my genuine capabilities and genuine weaknesses? What is right and what is wrong for me? What do I actually believe about God? A few steps closer to the light.
After a while, I was able to dissect long-held, self-deprecating convictions that no longer stood up to honest scrutiny; I discovered that I’m really not as bad as I often thought I was.
Finally, I’ve been able to embrace those pieces of me that are smart and loving and strong, no longer the smartest, the cutest, the bravest, but well-educated, kind and resilient. And the questions keep driving me: What do I want? What is the next right thing to do? Who loves me enough to accept me as I am?
This exploration of my story is a habit now; the questions are there every morning. And it’s still a surprise to discover new pieces of my story, to excise the false and embrace the authentic in this continuing quest to know who I really am: no longer a Glorified Self, but a complex, unfinished and Real Person.
That's what I've been thinking - how has your story changed?
Blessings,
– Rick