Dark Night of the Soul

Captain America Rises, by Shelton Bryant @ deviantart.com

There is that part of every hero story I love when things look impossibly bleak. The hero has been defeated, for now, and is missing, crippled, or seemingly dead. The villain reigns and wreaks havoc. The people suffer. Superman wrapped in kryptonite. Thor without his hammer. Batman unmasked. Captain America, the chiseled-chin member of the Greatest Generation and all its red, white, and blue heroism and American values lost to the world, frozen in a block of ice.

I think we’re at that point in this national story of ours.

Things look impossibly bleak. A pandemic is growing exponentially as I write this, from one case to more than 100,000 cases in the last three weeks, deaths in the thousands, and soon to be tens of thousands. People isolated from one another in their homes, afraid and scraping by each day, or afraid and protective of some hoard of milk, bread, and toilet paper.

Meanwhile, the villain reigns. A monster clawing and biting and rending at the foundation of this more perfect union. But unlike some movie phantasm, this monstrosity is not one figure, real or imagined. Instead, it is the hydra-headed, shape-shifting villain of political division, the nightmare monster of our national politics. These days it mostly takes the form of a split down the middle between us and them, in whatever form the Us and the Them take, but mostly seen these days as the Red versus the Blue, the Republicans versus the Democrats, the Left versus the Right.

The people suffer and the monster grows. We attack each other on social media. We lob Molotov cocktails of half-truths and memes and propaganda and accusation and threat and uncivil war. We meet the enemy, and though he is us, every day the division grows, the distrust festers, the annoyance becomes fear and sometimes even hatred and sometimes even violence. The monster grows because we do its dirty, destructive, deadly work. The monster grows because we are afraid: afraid of this virus, of people who live down the block who think and act differently, of people we've known all our lives. And nothing feeds the monster more than our fears.

So we are there, in the dark night of the soul. Just this week I myself have had painful exchanges with people I love because of the monstrous division that separates the Us from the Them. What happens now? Do we wipe each other out? Do we turn away? Do we disintegrate? Does the monster win? I am afraid the answer to any of these questions could be yes. All could be lost. The night is that dark.

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In the hero stories I have always been drawn to, the dark night of the soul is the moment just before things get better. At this point in the story there is often a symbolic death and rebirth. The hero goes through a dark night of the soul and who the hero was dies and transforms to the hero the world needs right now. (As a religious term, dark night of the soul refers to a spiritual experience during a time of crisis that will turn a person towards faith and the Creator. As a term in story or popular culture, it’s when the hero faces some dark truth, and in facing it, finds the answer or insight that was previously unknown, but that holds the key to defeat the villain and restore the kingdom.) The hero finds a strength that would not have been possible without the defeat, turns to see the day dawning with the light of clarity and purpose that would not have been possible without the darkest of dark.

I wonder if this dark night of our national soul can get us to that dawn.

There is no stable, healthy, prosperous future for us without defeating this division, and by us I mean US in capital letters, the United States, where there is and has always been room for the Left and the Right and the Red and the Blue, and where in fact our checks and balances on each other and our diversity of thought and purpose and priority were a national strength, not a national threat. To do it, we need the actions of a hero.

But of course, there is no Captain America frozen somewhere in a block of ice that can be thawed to rescue us. That Captain America, that Greatest Generation hero, is frozen inside each one of us, waiting for the warmth of the new day. We are greater united than we ever could be divided, and in our unity we have the power to defeat any threat: any villain, any threat to our public square, even any pandemic. We are greater than social media bombast, propaganda, and the guerrilla warfare of meme.

Captain America was created during World War 2, when citizens united around a fight against Facism, came together in community gardens and rubber drives and citizen patrols. The first issue hit the comic book stands in March, 1941, when Hitler's war machine was rampaging in Europe and plans were soon to be made in Japan to attack Pearl Harbor, waking up the sleeping hero.

Truth be told, in the stories I really love, the hero isn't all that super. Rather, the hero is a simple, ordinary person who does good deeds because he loves his home and his neighborhood and family, and finds peace and harmony and a good meal with loved ones the greatest treasures on earth. It doesn't take superpowers to want to live in peace and harmony with one another and to make and take the decisions and small, ordinary steps to make those things happen. That's what kills this many-headed monster, anyway: ordinary people who decide to be decent to one another and live in harmony, and the neighborhood we love so much stretches from sea to shining sea. After this dark night of the soul, the best we can work towards is a day when we all step into the light and see each other as neighbors, clap each other on the back with a laugh and say "good to see you again, old friend."

This pandemic is a real threat. Many have died already. Many more will die. I am afraid heartbreak will come to all of our homes, if not tragedy itself. But the threat of the pandemic is not larger than the threat of what it could do to deepen the division between us/US.

On the other hand, the pandemic could be the division between the dark night of the soul and the day that dawns next, when we have what we need to defeat the monster. We could spend our time in isolation as the dark night of the soul of this nation, when we find the strength and courage and clarity of purpose that would not have been possible otherwise.

A new day will dawn in our national story. Who will we be when it does?

The Most Meaningful Hug I Ever Had

The woman who would later become my wife was there, and she hugged me, but that’s not the one I mean.

I do, however, remember the words we spoke to one another as we embraced under the basket at the visitor's end of the court. "God," she said, looking up at the scoreboard, "I never wanted anything so bad in all my life."

And I remember my response. "And I spent my life never wanting any other thing."

We let go of each other and I headed toward the locker room, sweaty and wrung out. I thought I loved her, but I didn't know a damn thing about love and it would take me years to figure it out. But that’s another story. The most meaningful hug I ever had was still a few minutes away.

I walked in to where the rest of my team was stretched out on the concrete floor or sitting folded and collapsed like card tables put back in the basement after Thanksgiving. Almost everybody in that room was in some sort of conflict with his tears, how men cry, fighting it, but losing it a little in each long hard breath. A few couldn’t hold back and were sobbing like little kids. Even my best friend Doyle, team manager, short and way too stocky to play basketball, had been crying like a baby across the room.

As I moved from the door of the room to the locker where my clothes hung, I chose not to share in the emotion of my teammates. I would not cry over losing that game. We were the number two ranked basketball team in the State of Michigan, and five minutes earlier the number three team had beaten us in four overtimes in the championship of the regional tournament. They were moving on to the quarterfinals and we were not. My basketball season and career was over and the careers of my best friends were over. Done. Lost. Gone. Forever.

We had utterly and completely lost that game, but I wasn’t going to cry about it. I didn’t want my last emotion in a high school basketball locker room to be anything other than pride in all that’d been accomplished, so I began to change back into my clothes quietly, out of respect for my best friends in various stages of buttoning up their clothes and their emotions. And as I pulled my slacks back into place around my waist and threaded the belt through the loops, I became aware of the reverence and silence around me. Not one person was speaking in that locker room. Not one. It was as quiet as the shock of the first stages of grief, or the funeral of someone taken from this world too soon.

After some moments I became aware of motion and muttering behind me. Our coach, Bud Magrane, was moving around the locker room, player by player, hugging and saying something personal and private to each one of us. After a few moments he came to my side, and I turned and hugged him.

I hugged him out of respect for what he’d lost: his son, my dear friend, was a senior, too, and his kid was now irrevocably lost to him (it was two and a half months until graduation and adulthood soon after). I hugged him out of respect and gratitude for how hard he’d pushed us to achieve what we’d achieved:  forty-five wins, four losses, two straight years rated in the top ten in the state as one of the smallest schools in Class A, the largest, most competitive category of schools in Michigan. It was an honor to be a part of that team. Finally, I hugged him for how much he meant to me personally. He was my good friend’s father and that meant for years he had welcomed me in his house, his pool, at his table. He truly cared for me, and a few years later I came to know how much when he reached out to me, knowing about my dad's losing struggle with alcohol, to tell me that I could call on him whenever I needed the advice a father gives his son and couldn’t count on my own dad to be there for me. I never took him up on that, but when I hugged him in that locker room, the roots of that bond were there and I felt something very much like the love a son feels for his father.

But that’s not the most meaningful hug either. That comes next.

When Coach Magrane moved away from me to go on to the next person, I gathered my bag and moved by myself through the door that separated the back part of the locker room from the exit to the main gymnasium. I was surprised by a figure standing off to the side of the narrow hallway in a white jean jacket. My older brother Skip had made his way from the stands to wait there for me. He held out his arms and I dropped my bag and hugged him and finally began to sob.

Only he in the whole world really knew what I’d lost, what basketball meant. Only he knew of untold hours in the driveway at home in Niles, practicing, practicing, playing, drilling, shooting, shooting and shooting until the skin on our hands was cracked and bleeding from the cold and the pounding, and our heads throbbed and steamed under the winter glow of the street light that sat in the shooter’s corner of the pavement. Only he knew. 

A year before, a night hauntingly like this one, he had been on our high school team, and I sat on the bench in the second overtime of a regional game and watched him swat at a shot thirty feet away from the basket that somehow got over his fingertips and found the net as the buzzer sounded and ended his high school playing career. That night he’d almost single-handedly rescued our team and season in the last minutes of that game, like how he’d rescued my sense of self that year from a bad relationship and showed me how and why a Harbaugh boy can find true love in the game of basketball. He knew all these things as he held me. And I remember he waited until I was still enough to hear him and said, simply, "it’s over."

That was the most meaningful hug I ever had. I walked away from him and out into the gym and through it to where our bus waited. I walked away from the most meaningful hug I’d ever had, completely understood and changed forever. Much of the boy in me was sloughed off in my brothers strong arms, and before I stepped on that bus to head for home, I looked up. Through a hole in the sky I could see a deep blue tomorrow behind small points of light littered around a slice of winter moon. The gray-brown clouds were tossed across the sky that night, old and withered, like pieces of shed skin. Shivering and raw, I adjusted the strap of my gym bag, and stepped up into the tremulous darkness of the bus.