Don’t be surprised when our heroes are deeply flawed

Everybody loves a hero

An image to create

The antithesis of everything inside ourselves we hate

But you had better close your eyes

When it’s time for them to die

Because you’d hate to think the life you built upon them was a lie

— “Left Me a Fool”

Indigo Girls

A reader writes to me about my Father’s Day column. He’s exactly my age. His eldest son is the same age as my eldest. He suggests we’re living parallel lives more than 1,000 miles apart. He writes warmly about being a dad.

Notwithstanding the occasional crazy, corresponding with readers is my favorite part of being a writer. So I write back.

I notice that the surname is uncommon. In fact, the only time I’ve ever seen it before is on the cover of one of my all-time favorite books. This book changed my life. I read it every couple of years. I’ve never met the author, but I have revered him. Smart, smart, smart.

“Any relation?” I ask whimsically.

“Oof,” is how the reader starts his answer. My hero author is the reader’s father. A lousy, absent, unavailable father, the reader proceeds to explain. They haven’t communicated for more than 20 years.

I feel like a toad. Billy Crystal’s face looms in my mind as Miracle Max from the movie “The Princess Bride.” “Thanks for reminding me,” Miracle Max says. “While you’re at it, why don’t you give me some nice paper cuts and pour lemon juice in them!”

The reader was more than gracious to me, actually. Painful histories with fathers turn out to be just another part of our parallel lives.

Oof is what I felt, too. My disappointment was deep. The author’s definitive work was an inquiry into values! How could anyone this smart and this inspired let 20 years go by not relating to his own son? I called my clinical psychologist little sister to lament my fallen hero.

“Lots of otherwise brilliant and gifted people are inept at parenting or marriage,” she said matter-of-factly. “Doesn’t negate what they have to offer the world.”

Well, of course.

A week later, a friend gives me the last written work of Henri Nouwen, Dutch Catholic priest, who died in 1996. The guy wrote 40 books, and I had read 39 of them. My favorite Nouwen one-liner: “I am deeply convinced that the Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self.”

Nouwen did not then go on to describe what religious institutions would commonly do to that vulnerable self, but we’ll save that for another column.

I was delighted — until I turned the book over and read the fly leaf. This book was Nouwen’s personal journal to himself, written during a time when he was in therapy, a time of loneliness and great anguish.

Loneliness? Anguish? I felt a sadness rise in my breath. A sense of unfairness. It isn’t right that a man this beautiful, this authentic, a man whose words have shaped my own spirituality in countless ways could …

Could what, Steven? Lose his faith? Feel the weight of his own emptiness? Suffer the limits of his own humanity? Where do you think the power of his writing comes from, Steven? Do I have to remind you? The brightest light emerging from any human being is inevitably tied to the depth of that same person’s darkness.

Ah, another hero bites the dust. I was starting to notice a theme.

Then another letter from a reader. A woman. She happened on my column, liked it, searched and read other columns online. She praised my work. Said I was, intellectually and artistically speaking, an oasis in this Las Vegas desert. Based on this letter alone you’d think I could start a bidding war over my column between the New York Times and Chicago Tribune.

And yet …

Being connected to my words is not, in the end, the same as being connected to me. Not the same as knowing me. Because, in the end, to know someone is finally to encounter places inside of them dark and derelict and broken. Same goes for anyone interested in knowing themselves.

We need heroes. But all our heroes turn out to be flawed. Because everyone turns out to be flawed.

Maybe the most heroic thing we can do is to stop being surprised by that.

Steven Kalas is a behavioral health consultant and counselor at Clear View Counseling and Wellness Center in Las Vegas. His columns appear on Tuesdays and Sundays. Questions for the Asking Human Matters column or comments can be e-mailed to skalas@review journal.com.