Noble Living

I once read a lit­tle phrase that goes some­thing like this: “The noblest thing a per­son can ever do is take a bro­ken life and live it.” It is an idea that has echoed around inside of my soul for a lot of years. It has given me hope and put my life back on track a num­ber of times. If we would be hon­est, we are all pretty bro­ken. What makes a “saint” is admit­ting the flaws but still striv­ing toward an ideal sense of being. In the­o­log­i­cal terms: It is accept­ing your­self just the way you are by Divine grace.

Sec­u­lar­ism is cruel. It defines “accep­tance” along extremely nar­row lines; it also glo­ries in bring­ing down any­one that rises above the mun­dane crowd. In short, it is a self-hate trip tied to a mate­ri­al­is­tic point of view. It ridicules the roman­tic as a dreamer and casts all reli­gion into the trash bin with­out seri­ously inves­ti­gat­ing the mer­its and potentials.

It takes a roman­tic to hob­ble for­ward with head held high. It takes a noble mind to con­sider the com­plex­i­ties and con­tra­dic­tions of life with­out cav­ing into cyn­i­cism or despair. Nobil­ity is not the result of edu­ca­tion or cul­tural refine­ment. It is any per­son will­ing to reach with a pos­i­tive imag­i­na­tion toward a higher per­spec­tive. Most of all, it is tak­ing the heap of prob­lems and phys­i­cal flaws that accu­mu­late through a life­time and refus­ing to define your­self by them.

If you can play while in a wheel­chair or look through a storm cloud with an imag­i­na­tion that sees blue skies on the other side, you are one of them. I used to work out at the gym with a man that could only work out the right side of his body, because his left side had been par­a­lyzed from a stroke twenty years pre­vi­ously. He was about 40 when I knew him. He did more with half his body than some in weight room could do with all of their body. He is one of them — a noble per­son that can take a bro­ken life and still live it.