June 22, 2006

  • Dear Will,


    You do not know me, and I do not know how to get this letter to you except in this way.  On June 28th a new Superman movie will open. I await this new film with mixed emotions. I am glad to see my favorite superhero come to the screen again, but I will miss seeing your father, Christopher Reeve, who was the greatest movie Superman I ever saw. I do not know if June 28th will be a harder day for you than any of the others since you were 13 and your father died in 2004 at the age of 52, or since your mother died last March at the age of 44. If it is a harder day, I ask you to please take some comfort in the condolences of a grateful public for the courageous example your parents set and for your terrible loss. May God comfort you and receive their souls into the place where their souls are together and where illness and injury have no power and cause no fear. I am also thinking about how your father did not merely play Superman. Your father was Superman.


    The fundamental spiritual engine of the Superman stories is the fact that even superpowers exist in a world with insurmountable natural and moral evil. Disease and greed, injury and tyranny, are so widespread that even a superhero with unlimited powers cannot overcome them. If it were possible for Superman to vanquish all evil, he would be God, or God's chosen Messiah, and that cannot be true. So the great question arises about Superman, and about your dad, “From whence the effort?” Why try to overcome evil when evil cannot be finally defeated by anyone except God? Your father's fight against his spinal-cord injury and your mother's battle against cancer tell us the reason. The poet T. S. Eliot put it this way: “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.” In a world that only names champions when they win, Superman and your parents give us another model of what it is to prevail in the battle against evil and death. It is the courage to always try—to try your best, with every fiber of your being, with all the powers God has given you and never give up. It is the courage to continue the struggle that is the power of Superman and the inspiration of your parents to us.


    Superman is a great superhero with a spiritually acceptable mission.  The mutant X-Men are fun, but they seek merely to exist. They are not dedicated to “Truth, Justice and the American Way.” Batman is motivated by vengeance, not virtue. Spider-Man is transformed by an accidental spider's bite and not by the loving gift of parents sending their child from a dying planet to a planet “capable of great goodness.” Jor-El's gift to Kal-El is your parent's gift to you. You, too, have been given a great legacy that is also built on a great tragedy.


    Superman began in 1938 fighting slumlords, and then Nazis, and then all who sought to limit freedom and impose tyranny. This sense of mission is what enabled your father to set his goal as not merely enduring and coping with his injury but in mobilizing the public to support all the efforts to find ways to reverse the effects of paralysis. I will contribute to his foundation in your name and his memory.


    The Nazis believed in an übermensch, a Nietzschean superman who would assure Aryan domination of the world and the brutal extermination of all others. Superman is the American mirror opposite of that arrogant and genocidal dream. Through our Superman we express our hope that the freedoms we have here in America ought to be the legacy of all people on planet earth.


    The Superman comics and movies are not mere stories, they are popular legends, and your father and your mother were noble translators of that democratic and virtuous American legend to a grateful nation. May God comfort you in the months and years ahead. In every way that truly matters, your parents have taught you to fly.


    In grateful blessing.