Inspirational Tragedy

My husband and I were watching a documentary on The Discovery Channel on Roman vice which originally aired a couple of years ago.  One of the remarkable things in it was the martyrdom of the Christians, the remarkable thing being that the Roman emperors, Nero specifically, sought to present the Christians as criminals but, ironically, the martyrs faced death with such bravery that they ended up converting many more people to the faith rather than being dissuaded from it.  How can this be?  And,  yet, it has been this way all along.  The idea of inspirational tragedy is, in fact, the very source of the continued popularity of the Greek tragedies.  Ms. Hamilton writes on page 231 of "The Greek Way"...

"In the Greek tragedy, the figures are seen very simply from afar, parts of a whole that has no beginning and no end, and yet, in some strange fashion their remoteness does not diminish their profound tragic and individual appeal...  There is only one other masterpiece that can help us to our own understanding of this method, the life of Christ."

I asked myself recently what it is that I wanted out of spirituality.  Not just out of Christianity, but out  of Spirituality in general.  The answer was, first of all, to eliminate the fear of death, both my own and of my loved ones.  And the second answer was to add depth and flavor and excitement to my living days.  In short, I want to get the most out of life, and to believe that what I do matters, that what everyone does matters, and to understand how it matters, and how it is that what we think - what our attitudes and intentions are - matter along with what we do.  And the person who exemplifies not only a life that matters, but the conquering of death itself is, for me, Jesus Christs.  In the same way, the ancient Greeks looked to the bravery and honor of Achilles and Odysseus as examples of how to act in the face of death and temptation.  They had a different view of the afterlife than I have, but what unites us, what unites all peoples throughout history, is the need to live a life that matters. The writers of the Gospels and Homer painted their heroes with broad, fuzzy strokes precisely because, if they were illustrated in too much detail, the reader would not be able to identify with them.  We do not know what their favorite song was, what their pet peeve was, what kind of hair gel they used, did they prefer talipia or sea bass, no.  Those things, which we in America seemed to have an insatiable curiosity about in our own celebrities, did not and do not matter in someone really worthy of emulating.  What matters was their character and how that character naturally produced action and the sum of those actions ultimately produced lives that matter.  

And that's what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown - a life that mattered.