Written by Christopher Reeve was an unknown Hollywood actor when he was chosen in 1978 to play the leading role of Superman in the films of the same name.
Originally, Superman was a comic strip serialised in newspapers in the USA and beyond. (I read it every morning before going to Junior school and discussed it with my friends.) It was about a child who falls to earth from another galaxy and is endowed with superpowers. He is adopted by the elderly couple in mid-west USA who found him and, under the name Clark Kent, grows up and behaves like any other human being – except that in his Clark Kent existence, he is very much a wimp.
Remarkably, however, in a time of trouble or crisis for someone, Kent changes into his Superman persona, discarding his outer clothes in a closet or telephone booth, and then overcomes the violent and bad people causing the trouble.
Comparisons could be made between this super-child who became Superman and another ‘super-child’ who came to earth in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. However, we have to resist doing so. Unfortunately, some people see the adult Jesus as no more than a kind of Superman they can turn to when in a spot of bother but give up on Him when they don’t get what they want.
Years after the Superman films were released, Christopher Reeve suffered a tragic accident (in 1995) when he fell from a horse and became paralysed from the neck down. He could breathe only with the help of a ventilator and computers. In an astonishing and very moving interview, he was asked on TV if he considered suicide or getting someone to ‘pull the plug’ (now known as ‘assisted dying’). He confessed that he did but decided he had more to live for – his wife and children – than die for. When pressed by the interviewer, Barbara Walters, why he would want to go on living like this, he said he’d discovered something in his paralysis which made him want to go on. When asked ‘what’, he replied that ‘there is more to life than the body’.
It’s a simple yet profound message which many of us go on to discover for ourselves. Although Christopher Reeve learnt it in tragic circumstances, he found that living for his family made his suffering worthwhile. Living for and serving others can make our suffering worthwhile also. Frederick Nietzsche summarised this principle so succinctly when he said that “He who has a ‘why’ to live can bear with almost any ‘how’.”
That ‘there is more to life than the body’, the mere corporeal or material, is one of the reasons why the Creator of the universe actually took on the form of a human body, beginning as the tiny and vulnerable child of a poor Palestinian couple. In becoming human, Jesus shows us the dignity and wonder of what it is to have a body, to be human, made in God’s image and likeness. He also shows us, as one of us, that when the body breaks down, fails and eventually is no more, there is more to Life than the body.
Michael Campion
Holy Name, Jesmond
25 December 2022
Sunday Mass: Saturday 4pm, Sunday 10am 