Why are you cast down, my soul?

It wasn't until Bibly Study after 9:00 mass this morning that I could fully appreciate how much meeting Aron Ralston hit me the other night. I think I had seen Aron as some kind of spiritual powerhouse: a Lazarus figure. I mean, there was NO WAY it was humanly possible that he could survive three days alone in the canyon let alone six, and to cut off your own hand and then have the werewithal to rappel 65 feet alone and walk for four hours . . .the story is beyond amazing.

So I suppose I had in my mind a picture of a man who was spiritually fulfilled. He had almost literally died and come back to life . . .I mean, past the point where any faint glimmer of hope was lost/ where he, himself, had fully expected to be dead. . .and he came back. I mean, I thought meeting him would be inspirational because of all the faith he would have. Or perhaps I thought there was really something amazing about him, like he was some superhuman, Odysseus character who just happened to be somehow superhumanly strong or clever and who just also happened to be the one who was stupid enough to get himself into the situation he had found himself in: the one man in a hundred who had the stuff that it took to get himself out. In other words, I gave him the credit for his survival as if God saves this level of mercy and grace for his special extra-strong, extra-faithful ones; the ones he's blessed with an extraordinary level of whatever thing it is that makes you extra-favored by God. (which naturally excludes me, in my mind, as I don't see myself as epic hero material.)

But the reality was very different, I think. He might be smart, and he might be resourceful, but the guy I heard speak was fully human, fully weak as the rest of us, and, perhaps, just as confused about why he is alive as any of us would be in his shoes. When I met him, I was struck, I think, with just how human he was. He was tired. He had self-doubts about the fact that he had had this vision of this little boy he would someday have and now -- after three years in the public eye -- no potential mother had made herself known. (He said something about how he was "still looking for the woman" to the woman in front of me as he signed her book. She had asked him about the vision of the little boy he had had his fifth night in the canyon; this vision had played a part in the fact that he had not ultimately given up.) I don't know why this struck me so much. . . wait, yes I do. It struck me that this very human guy -- about my age, skinny, tired, with doubt in his eyes -- would have been the one to receive this kind of heavenly miracle. There was nothing superhuman about him. Furthermore, I think I believed that after having experienced practically a literal resurrection, one would be some sort of spiritual powerhouse -- with the kind of faith crises I experience daily as some part of a distant past; as if this sort of experience would banish the struggles you would have with God and with your faith and it would be all smiles and being-born-again stories and evangelism from there on out. And it never occurred to me that someone like that would struggle with the exact same struggles I have in my faith everyday, and that he could have just as many doubts.

And is this fascination simply a cover-up for the fact that I heard him express his sadness over his lack of a mother for his son, and I have spent the last several years every bit as sad over my lack of a father for mine? I don't know.

But I think meeting such a starkly human Aron. A skinny lad with big circles under his tired eyes who had to hold the paper down with his claw so that he could struggle to sign his name with his left hand (he had always been right handed before) was humbling for me, because it showed me a glimpse of the kinds of things God can do, and it gave me a hint that if God cares that much about even a tired kid who has had to relearn how to write his name, then he might also care about a brand new single teacher with anxiety problems who can't seem to get her balance right.

So, for both Aron and me in our respective struggles, I would like to offer this psalm, which gives a voice to stuff I find hard to express and impossible to understand or solve on my own:

Why are you cast down, my soul?
Why are you disquiet within me?
Hope in God; I will praise him still.
My savior and my God..

from Psalm 42