As I listened to the late John Lennon knock it out of the park, I slipped into the Wayback Machine. It was the summer after my sophomore year in high school. I was a fifteen-year-old kid at a “Record Hop” at North Eastham, Cape Cod, around mid-August. They played forty-fives off an old record player for the summer kids immediately after Labor Day at a town hall that had no practical purpose. If not for the summer folks, the Cape back then would have been nothing but dunes, crabs, and saltwater.
The guy running the show put on the Beatles’ “Twist and Shout.” Fifteen seconds into it, all the kids had stopped dancing and were singing the song at the top of their lungs. When it was over, everybody laughed and clapped.
Now this overweight guy with gray hair (and a bald spot in back) started coughing before he could get to the chorus. But he still laughed when it was over.
Time Bandit
Time. It yanks us through history before we even know we are in it. One moment I’m fancy free at a dance with buddies I’m convinced I’ll have for the rest of my days. And then I’m a thousand miles and decades away, an out-of-shape old geezer heading home after putting in another eight hours. And the string connecting it is a song John Lennon recorded in 1963 on a day when he had a terrible cold, which is what made those lyrics so raspy.
Climbing out of the Wayback Machine and sitting behind the wheel of my bucket of bolts, I wondered about the kind of kid I was and the kind of guy I had become. And I wondered about the kind of guy I wanted to be — maybe the kind of guy we all want to be.
But Dante found himself in a dark wood after he had “wandered off from the straight path.” It was the beginning of his journey, his Divine Comedy. Along the way he was blocked by the Leopard, representing fraud; the Lion, symbolizing violence; and the She-wolf, which meant, well, as the old moralists used to say, “concupiscence” — a Catholic word that we use for over-the-top sexual temptations because we don’t like to come out and say “over-the-top sexual temptations.” (Though, if the truth be told, “concupiscence” sounds dirtier.)
Dante’s literary pilgrimage — composed in the early fourteenth century and considered one of the “Great Books” of Western culture — was a guided tour through hell, purgatory, and heaven. Our pilgrimage is usually not so dramatic, though we often find ourselves in that dark wood. It’s an Everyman kind of feeling that for me seems to burp up to the surface in a car drive home after a rough day or on a bar stool in a town far from home. There are a lot of ways to describe it — it can be as simple as ennui, or as complicated as that “quiet desperation” the philosopher described as a man’s lot in life. But I prefer to call it the “what-the-hells,” as in, “What the hell am I doing with my life?”
Scripture tells us that the just man sins seven times a day. I think the just man gets a case of “what-the-hells” at least as often. It’s wondering why I do what I do, and why I can’t be the person I would like to be. It has nothing to do with a lack of, or certainly an abundance of, money, power, or sex — the great triumvirate of our sins and ambitions. It’s more like slipping away from a fundamental purpose and not being able to get back. It’s not about how I make a living, but how I live. It’s falling into the trap described by that heady theologian “Broadway Joe” Namath to the TV cameras over a game of eight-ball back in the 1960s: He was just trying to get by. It’s reaching a point, which I seem to reach seven times a day, where I know I can be better but have lost the ability — or the energy — to do so. Or even to figure out how.
When the rubber hits the road, what we really want out of our lives is happiness. Not three-beer happiness, I-got-a-raise happiness, or the-Steelers-made-the-playoffs happiness, but that quiet contentment that comes with living a good life. It’s not created by the circumstances of our lives, but rather it is the circumstances of our living. It’s how we walk the road, how we live the pilgrimage.
A Little Scripture
We all remember the story of the rich young man. It is mentioned in similar form in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. In the Gospel of Luke (18:18–30), the rich young man is identified as an official. Jesus has just told the disciples not to prevent children from crowding around him: “… whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it” (18:17). As if on cue, a rich man approaches Jesus and asks him what he must do to gain eternal life.
Jesus replies that the man already knows the answer to that question: Keep the commandments. The rich man replies that he has done all of that from his youth. He presses Jesus, like a gambler wanting the sure thing. What more can I do? What will guarantee eternal life?
It’s easy to imagine Jesus pausing for a moment and reading the man’s soul. A fellow who confesses to keeping the commandments perfectly might not have quite the right impression of himself. So Jesus responds that if keeping the commandments is not enough, here’s what you need to do: Sell all you have, give it to the poor, and come follow me.
You can almost hear the music going flat in the background. Like the old rock song from Meatloaf, the rich fellow thought he could do anything for love, but he couldn’t do that.
Jesus watches him walk away and remarks to his disciples, “How hard it is for those who have riches to enter the kingdom of God!” (18:24). To which the disciples respond, “Then who can be saved?” And Jesus gives an answer that just about sums up Scripture: “What is impossible with men is possible with God” (18:27).
Which gives me a lot of hope.
The thing that always strikes me is that Luke, Matthew, and Mark tell us that the rich official, or the rich young man, walked away sad because he had a lot of stuff. The usual explanation is that he fell short: He couldn’t bear to part with his riches. But I always thought that he was sad for a deeper reason. He wasn’t being offered an impossible task. He knew he could do it. He could give it all away; he could live the great life, starting right then and there. But he decided not to.
So he was sad, not because he couldn’t do it, but because he could. He had pressed Jesus for an answer, and Jesus had told him what he could do to make the run for sanctity. And he gave the Meatloaf response.
Benign Mediocrity
When given the option for greatness in life, it’s easy to opt out time and time again, until it becomes a habit. And it has nothing to do with preferring money or power or sex. It has to do with a more subtle temptation: benign mediocrity. It’s more comfortable to be ordinary than a saint. Or at least, that’s what it’s comfortable to believe.
A lot of our little battles in Dante’s dark wood are created not just because we choose sin but because we avoid good. Good seems too hard; mediocrity seems so easy. We look at what we admire in others and decide we just don’t measure up — without realizing that the key to understanding the great life is that it’s not just how we are created to live but the way we want to live. Dante puts it right:
How I entered there I cannot truly say,
I had become so sleepy at the moment
when I first strayed, leaving the path of truth.
And “leaving the path of truth” is so easy to do on the pilgrimage. It’s not always a matter of some great sin, some great wrong that yanks us off the path. It’s usually just becoming “so sleepy” that we lose our place, as in a book we don’t earmark for the next time we pick it up.
When I wore a younger man’s clothes, I had a little patter to get the ladies giggling. I’d explain to them that the key to understanding men is that none of us has layers. It was my “Shallow Man” theory, meaning, what you see is what