How We Define Ourselves

In baptism we are named a child of God. What a title this is – to belong to the One who both sets the bright stars in space and knows the burnt-out cinders in our hearts. What a title this is –giving us dignity unmatched anywhere else.

There are so many way we can be defined that make us smaller, less significant, less noble than God would have us be. Even good parts of our lives just that – parts – and not our definitions.

I just finished reading Vivian Stringer’s personal story, Standing Tall: A Memoir of Tragedy and Triumph. Stringer is the successful basketball coach at Rutgers University whose team endured Don Imus’ infamous comments in 2007. She and her team handled the ensuing firestorm so well because of her refusal to let one part of life define her team. Her players are never just basketball players; their involvement in sports is a great opportunity but it’s never everything. As she keeps saying, “Don’t let it define you.”

Stringer is a coach who cares about the whole person. “I’m not just a basketball coach; I’m a woman and a mom and a friend. I look books; I love music. I care deeply about politics and social issues, both in my own country and in the world. There’s far more to me that simply being a basketball coach, and my girls are far more than just basketball players.” (241-241)

So when Imus berated her and her team, dragging down all her efforts of years of coaching (so she felt), she did what entirely in character: she stood tall, along with her team, and showed the world who they were – strong, poised, capable, proud. As she said about her team at their press conference, “They epitomized everything that is right with the world. They looked injustice and adversity in the face and turned it into a teaching moment” (277). Basketball players all of them, but giving a whole person response. Call it character.

Here’s a dignity that comes from a deeply rooted spirituality – deep in the waters of baptism too – that we are children of God and possess a dignity that is higher and wider and deeper than anything else in all the world. Stringer coaches and teaches that basketball never defines a person; this is just one part of what makes her book written with Laura Tucker an inspiring read.

Standing Up Straight

Before Studs Terkel died in October, Alex Kotlowitz interviewed him for the January/February 2009 issue of AARP The Magazine. I thought this piece a good note for beginning a new year.

In his 96 years, Terkel had seen ups-and-downs aplenty, and he remained an optimist to the end. He insisted that “Hope dies last…. Without hope, you can’t make it. And so long as we have that hope, we’ll be okay.” Terkel himself found that hope come alive in people helping people. “Once you become active helping others, you feel alive.”

Terkel, who had lived through the Depression, was emphatic about putting too much hope in the rich and powerful. “The lessons of the Great Depression? Don’t blame yourself. Turn to others. The big boys are not that bright.” He was thinking about our current economic mess.

His words, however, made me think about deeper matters of human hope, about what to do when the feelings just don’t come, and about ultimate grounding for hope. His words made me think about those times “when all supports are washed away.”

I think of Jesus and his resurrection from the dead. Jesus dead. Life ended. No more hope. And yet he rises – God raises him! The last word is not death but life. The order is reversed in Jesus: not just the usual from life to death, but from death to life.

Here is reason to hope. What happened with Jesus is our story too. We were baptized into it, drowning sins and rising to new life. In our dead ends, God is doing something new. In Jesus we see it before our very human eyes and dare hope again when all was gone.

The feelings we get when we “turn to others” and help them, as Terkel urges us – perhaps these feelings are hints of the eternal truth we see in Jesus. We have reason to hope after all.

No wonder Christians call this “Gospel” meaning “good news.” Jesus is hope’s bottom line. He make us stand up straight.*

*See the AARP article for Terkel’s story for the standing up reference.