Thank God for You, Peter Parker

[Spoiler alert: details of Spider-Man: Brand New Day are included in this article.]

-

The last thing Peter Parker does in Spider-Man: No Way Home is buy a cup of coffee.

He has just saved the universe, and the price of saving it was himself. To put reality back together, he agreed to let Doctor Strange cast a spell that erased him from the memory of every living person. Not his secret identity. Him. His best friend Ned no longer knows he exists. MJ, the love of his life, no longer knows he exists. They are alive, they are well, and they have never met him.

So he walks into the shop where she is working. She is standing right there. He gets close enough to say something, and he decides not to. He orders his coffee. She is kind to him the way you are kind to a stranger. And he walks out into a city of eight million people, not one of whom knows his name.

I have been reflecting on that scene for two weeks now, and I finally understand why I can’t stop thinking about it. It is not the sacrifice. Superhero stories are full of sacrifice; that is the genre.

It is that nobody knows.

He saved them all, and not one of them will ever thank him.

-

I should tell you where this is coming from, because I would rather write this honestly than write it usefully.

I have wanted, for most of my life, to matter.

Not in the abstract. I have wanted to be the person who made the difference, and I have wanted people to know it was me. I have wanted a legacy. I have wanted the work to have my name on it. I have made peace with the idea that meaningful things cost you something, and I have told myself for years that I was willing to pay.

But I notice, when I am honest, that the price I imagined always included the recognition.

When I was a pastor, I didn’t mind putting in the hard work of preparing a Bible lesson or sermon, as long as I got to stand in front of people to deliver it and be told be a handful of people afterward that “it blessed me so much” or “made a real difference in my life.”

Now that I’m a coach, I don’t mind investing hours of conversation on coaching calls and hours offline thinking through what my clients need and working to improve my craft, as long as the positive feedback keeps coming and I can let everyone know about the real results that someone got working with me.

Of course, part of that is normal. Human. We want to feel like our sacrifices mean something. We are hard-wired by a God who created us for a purpose to know and feel like our lives have purpose and are meaningful to others.

But all that doesn’t change the fact that my willingness to sacrifice has historically been attached to a need for recognition.

I did not mind the cost as long as the cost was eventually visible. I was prepared to bleed. I was less prepared to bleed anonymously.

Which means, I’m sorry and humbled to say, that what I actually wanted was not sacrifice. It was glory with a sacrifice attached to make it respectable.

And here is what unsettles me about that. It is not a modern neurosis, and it is not just my problem. It is the oldest religion in the Western world.

-

The Greeks had a word for it: kleos. Glory, fame, the report of you that survives you. In the Iliad, Achilles is offered a choice between a long, quiet, forgotten life at home and a short life ending at Troy with a name that never dies. He picks the name. Every Greek reading it understood that he had chosen correctly. That is arete fulfilled: excellence made visible, virtue that is seen.

The Romans took the same instinct and built an empire out of it. Gloria. The triumph through the streets. The bust in the atrium. The inscription on the arch, which is still there, which is the point.

We have not gotten over it. We have digitized it. Every one of us now carries a small illuminated device on which we can publish our good deeds instantly, and we do, and we tell ourselves that we do it for awareness or for encouragement, and sometimes that is even true. But underneath is the same ancient hunger: let it be known, and let it be known that it was me.

The Christian claim is that this is a lie so old we mistake it for a virtue.

Christ, in the Sermon on the Mount, addresses it directly and without any softening. Do not do your good works to be seen. When you give alms, do not sound a trumpet. Do it so secretly that your left hand does not know what your right hand is doing, and your Father, who sees in secret, will reward you (Matthew 6:1-4). He says of the ones who perform their goodness publicly that they have received their reward already. That is not a threat. It is an accounting note. You wanted the applause. You got the applause. The transaction is closed.

-

There is a phrase I have never been able to shake: do good and disappear.

I first heard it when I watched Audrey Hepburn’s movie, The Nun’s Story. It comes from a French nurse named Geneviève Hennet de Goutel, who died in the First World War. The words were painted over the door of a ward in the Belgian convent hospital where she trained, and they became the shape of her short life. She is not famous. Almost nobody has heard of her, which, if you think about it for a second, is the most complete endorsement of her philosophy imaginable.

My friend Reid Kapple, who is an extraordinary and faithful pastor in Kansas City, says something similar that I have never gotten over: I want to preach the gospel and be forgotten.

And Rich Mullins, who understood this better than most and died in a wreck on an Illinois highway at forty-one, put the diagnosis exactly: if your life is motivated by your ambition to leave a legacy, what you will probably leave as a legacy is ambition. He did not say you would fail to leave a legacy. He said you would succeed, and that the thing you left would be the thing that drove you. Ambition reproduces ambition. Love reproduces love. Whatever you actually ran on is what your children and your employees and your parishioners will inherit, no matter what you told them.

-

I am a Catholic and my Church has a name for what I am describing. We call it the hidden life.

Consider the arithmetic of the Incarnation. God becomes man, and the public ministry, the part with the miracles and the crowds and the four written accounts, lasts about three years. What about the other thirty? He was in Nazareth, in a workshop, doing joinery for neighbors who thought he was the carpenter’s boy. The Gospels record almost nothing about it, because there was almost nothing to record.

Thing about this: God the Son spent ninety percent of his human life doing ordinary work that nobody wrote down.

Blessed Charles de Foucauld built an entire spirituality on those thirty years. He went into the Sahara to live them: no crowds, no results, no converts, killed at the door of his hermitage in 1916, having founded a religious family that consisted, at the moment of his death, of exactly himself.

Saint Thérèse of Lisieux entered a small Carmel in a small French town, never traveled, never preached, never did one visible thing, and died at twenty-four. She is a Doctor of the Church. Her whole insight, the Little Way, is that the smallness is not an obstacle to holiness; it is the material of it. Pick up the pin off the floor for love, she said, and you have done something in the economy of God.

And I think this is the thing that our culture has no category for, and I did not have a category for it either until fairly recently. We assume that impact scales with visibility. That the size of a life is measured by how far the report of it travels. The Christian claim is that this is simply false as a matter of fact. That the causal structure of the universe does not run through publicity. That the woman praying in an empty church in a town of nine hundred people is doing something real, something with actual effects, whether or not anyone including her ever sees a result.

George Eliot, who was not a believer, saw it anyway and wrote the truest last sentence in English fiction. She said that the growing good of the world depends partly on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so bad with you and me as they might have been because of the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.

Unvisited tombs. And the good keeps growing anyway.

-

But I want to press my meditation on this further, because there is a harder version of it that Peter Parker’s coffee shop scene points to, and it is the version I have the hardest time with.

It is one thing for good to be done in secret. It is another thing to do the greatest good imaginable, in public, and be unrecognized by the very people you did it for.

That is not hiddenness. That is something closer to grief.

Peter Parker did not choose obscurity as a spiritual discipline. He chose to save people he loved, and the cost was that those specific people would never know him. MJ does not owe him anything, because in her world he never did anything. She is not ungrateful. She is not capable of gratitude, because she has no idea. That is a strange and specific kind of loneliness, and I think it is the actual cross he carries in these films, more than the fighting.

I cannot write that sentence and not think about Good Friday.

Jesus came to his own, and his own did not receive him (John 1:11). And the world he died for went on. It is going on right now. There are people reading this sentence in a country built on Christian foundations, driving past a hundred crosses a week, who have never once considered that a man was tortured to death two thousand years ago on their account, and there is nothing in their day that will make them consider it. The sacrifice was total, public, and historically documented, and it is met, mostly, with the mild indifference you show a stranger in a coffee shop.

If you have ever poured yourself out for people who did not notice, you are not doing Christianity wrong. You are doing the thing itself.

-

And now let me shift gears, because everything I have written so far can degenerate into something ugly if you stop here.

There is a version of this meditation that ends with the noble solitary sufferer, unrecognized and unbowed, carrying his secret cross alone, and that version is a spiritual disaster.

The hiddenness becomes a performance with an audience of one, and the one is you.

The new Spider-Man movie will not let you rest there, and neither will the Gospel.

In Brand New Day, a police captain who has watched Peter give New York City everything finally tells him the truth: he has no community, he knows nothing about the people he works beside, he does not even know the names of her children. He is saving everyone and connected to no one. And her point is not that he should stop. Her point is that he is a human being, and human beings need rest, and friendship, and to be known by somebody.

Now look at the upper room. On the last night of his life, in the middle of the discourse where he institutes the Eucharist, Jesus stops and redefines the relationship: Henceforth I call you not servants… but I have called you friends (John 15:15). Not followers. Not staff. Friends. Saint Thomas Aquinas builds his entire theology of charity on that verse, arguing that charity simply is friendship with God, and citing John 15:15 as the proof (Summa, II-II, q. 23, a. 1).

And then, having called them friends, he takes three of them into Gethsemane, tells them that his soul is sorrowful unto death, and asks them to stay awake with him. He does not ask them to fix it or advise him or take the cup away. He asks them to be near him while he suffers. They fall asleep. He wakes them and asks, with what has always sounded to me like real hurt, whether they could not watch one hour with him (Matthew 26:38-40).

He is God. He knows how the night ends and how the story ends. And he did not want to be alone, and it wounded him that they could not stay.

Aelred, the Cistercian abbot of Rievaulx, wrote a book about this in the twelfth century. In it, a young monk asks whether he might say of friendship what Saint John says of charity, and put it flatly: God is friendship. Aelred admits that the phrase is strange to the ear, and then says he will not hesitate to grant it, because the one who abides in friendship abides in God, and God in him.

So the hidden life is not the isolated life. Do good and disappear, yes. But not into solitude. Disappear into a community that knows you, one that will never write you up and could not care less about your follower count or the global reach of your “brand.”

-

Okay. Now, finally, there is a third thing in this movie, and it is the reason I wanted to write about it at all.

The antagonist turns out not to be a monster. She is a young woman, Jean Grey, with enormous power and enormous grief who has been used, and who is, like Peter, entirely alone. By the end her power is spilling across the city and she cannot stop it.

He does not defeat her with strength. He has plenty of strength; strength is not the tool that works. He defeats her by letting her into his mind. He opens himself and lets her see the grief, the fear, the loss, a memory of his aunt, all the things he spent the whole film hiding. And the seeing changes her.

Saint John Henry Newman took as his motto a line borrowed from Saint Francis de Sales: cor ad cor loquitur. Heart speaks to heart. Not power to weakness. Not argument to opponent. Heart to heart.

I look at the state of things in our nation and world right now, at the anger and the division and the sheer volume of people shouting past each other, and I am convinced that none of it gets fixed by force. Not by winning an argument, not by taking down the government or the church or any other institution, not by overwhelming anybody. Those methods have been tried continuously for thousands of years with a consistent record of failure.

What actually changes a human being is being seen by another human being who did not have to bother.

Which is, again, the strangest claim my Church makes. The decisive moment of history is not a battlefield. It is a man nailed to a piece of wood, unable to lift a hand, and we call that the victory. The Easter Preface says it better than I can: by dying he destroyed our death, and by rising he restored our life. Not a conquering king. A suffering servant. The strength was in the weakness, and the weakness was chosen.

-

So here is where this leaves me, and maybe you.

If you are a single mother who got up at five, again, and nobody has said a word about it, and nobody is going to: what you did this morning has effects that run out past the edge of what you can see. If you are working a job in a small Kansas town where the population sign has been going down since before you were born, and no one will ever write about your life: the growing good of the world is partly dependent on you, and the tomb being unvisited does not undo one hour of it.

Nothing you have done in love is lost. Not the unwitnessed part. Not the misunderstood part. Not the part they will never thank you for. Someone sees in secret, and the accounting is not being kept in the place where you have been looking for it.

Do good and disappear.

Just do not disappear alone. Lower your web-shooters, take off your mask, and connect with a Ned or MJ. Let three people in the garden with you. Let somebody see the fear. That is not a failure of the hidden life; it is the shape the hidden life has always had, from the workshop in Nazareth to a convent in Lisieux to a bad night in an olive grove, when God himself, on the most soul-overwhelming evening in history, asked his friends to stay awake with him.