Heroes, Heroic Virtue

Weekly column
I have never been much for letting the boys have posters on their walls. One boy might go through a short phase of wanting Famous Athlete A on his wall and I usually just hold him off for a bit until that phase passes. His love for the player might not diminish, but the urge for a pictorial tribute seems to.

It’s not that I don’t want them cheering for a particular athlete or even a particular team – I just don’t want those people elevated to hero-status in my home.

This sounds odd, I know, and when I think about other boys from other eras loving certain athletes I totally see the point. My husband loved Hank Aaron, for instance, and the thought of him as a boy with a Hank Aaron poster on his wall is very sweet indeed.

Why I don’t extend this same courtesy to my boys I’m not sure. But I felt vindicated in my methods recently when revelations about all-around good guy Tiger Woods came to light and children (and parents) the world over are having to readjust a whole host of conceptions, not just of him but of clean-cut athletes across the board.

The truth is, what this situation makes perfectly clear, is that we really know nothing about these men and women except what they want us to know. Maybe it doesn’t matter (it’s not like we’re asking these people to babysit our kids or anything), but what gets tricky is when they do such a good job with image control that we start to believe the hype.

Fortunately, my boys haven’t caught on to the extent of this recent drama. I was relieved the other day when my 11-year-old explained the situation to me.

“Tiger Woods hit a golf ball that hit a fire hydrant that bounced back and cut him in the lip.”

Fair enough, I thought, and we left it at that.

In the midst of all these recent revelations, of realizing how easily duped we can become, I am reminded of the importance of my boys having real heroes to look up to. It’s great that the world is filled with people who are really good at sports. I’m glad they can make a nice living off their skills. That doesn’t mean I have to invite those people onto the walls of my boys bedrooms and hold them up as anything other than a person with athletic prowess.

The real heroes, I point out to my sons, are those people who live with virtue. They are the men and women who inspire us to be the best people we can be – not the best athletes, but the best human beings.

Of course we look to the examples of the saints – what a beautiful thing our Catholic faith offers us in elevating these men and women. We seek inspiration from the way they lived wholeheartedly for God, how they chose righteousness in the face of hardships and trials.

The lives of the saints also remind me to seek similar inspiration from all those heroes right in our midst – people who do great things, who choose the road less traveled because of their great love for God.

Heroes are all around us. They are the people who perform lofty, overwhelming feats –and also the people who go through life making a million good choices that no one might ever notice, who do the right thing even when (and especially when) no one is looking. They are the people who love their neighbor for no other reason than that person is made in the image of God.

Of course, these days my boys are more drawn to heroes of the cape-wearing variety, but they are also learning what really makes a person heroic.

My boys are lucky, because their lives are filled with these very kinds of people. They are learning that when they need a hero, they don’t need to look very far.