Character of the Day

Movies are pow­er­ful. Our psy­ches take on the roles of char­ac­ters pretty eas­ily. Whether we want to admit it or not, our par­ents, sib­lings, influ­en­tial friends, and men­tors live within us for­ever. If we over-identify with some­one, we can lose who we are. Integrity means learn­ing from and even imi­tat­ing wor­thy char­ac­ters around us, while main­tain­ing a core per­son­al­ity that is unique. In an enter­tain­ment sat­u­rated world, it is not easy to do.

Though I limit my expo­sure to pop­u­lar movies, I still have some favorite char­ac­ters that I study. I even replay parts of some of their movies to get a feel for the char­ac­ters they por­tray and the char­ac­ters they are in real life. Noth­ing beats actu­ally being around another per­son to sense his or her essen­tial char­ac­ter and to get a feel for some for their men­tors. I noticed in grad­u­ate school that I started sound­ing like a cou­ple of my favorite pro­fes­sors. I did more than pick up their aca­d­e­mic spin, I found their thought pat­terns sur­fac­ing in the way I expe­ri­enced life itself. Time has allowed that to fade, but I keep some of those pat­terns as tools.

Never lose the essen­tial you. Keep some wor­thy men­tors around — liv­ing or dead. I wish I could have met Moses when he was herd­ing sheep at midlife. Eli­jah must have been the Al Pacino of his day, mixed in with a lit­tle bit of Rambo. I still won­der what he would be like at a foot­ball game or a col­lege debate. Are these “greats” more like us or unlike us? I wish I could have known Albert Schweitzer per­son­ally. Though I have picked up a sense of his char­ac­ter through his books, I still would have pre­ferred just hav­ing a meal with him.

Like Hol­ly­wood pro­duc­ers and writ­ers, I am in the imag­i­na­tion busi­ness (though I pre­fer the term “faith”). For a few min­utes each Sun­day I try to bring the per­son and work of Jesus to life. While doing so, I try to get a sense of his char­ac­ter too. In a token way, we have an abbre­vi­ated meal with him every Sun­day. Still, noth­ing would beat a one-to-one con­ver­sa­tion with the man him­self. In the mean time, I am enjoy­ing all of the char­ac­ters cre­ated by God — both liv­ing and dead (great writ­ers and “com­mon” peo­ple I meet each day).

Right now I am try­ing to play the role of me on planet earth. I am a lit­tle over half a cen­tury into it. It is my ver­sion of “The Agony and the Ecstasy” (the movie of Michelan­gelo as por­trayed by Charl­ton Hes­ston). I doubt that I am that tal­ented, but I know the extremes of the soul. My char­ac­ter role of the day has just begun. I won­der how it will be played today. I won­der about yours too.