The sage author, mythologist, and theorist, Professor Joseph Campbell argued that the story of humankind is one of 'the hero with a thousand faces'. But he would have never portrayed us singularly as good guys or bad guys.
Each of us, though on a heroic journey from the moment of birth to our final breath, has inherent qualities of both darkness and light. At one time or another, we can be as good as an angel or evil as a demon. This day in age we seem to have forgotten that there are no absolutes. As we divide into tribes, it has become easier to characterize those who are not quite like us as bad and those in our camp as good.
When I was a boy, back in the dark ages, you could always tell the good guys from the bad guys by the color of their hats (good wore white and bad wore black). Our heroes were cowboys after all. John Wayne was the quintessential good guy. Ask anyone. Shane (Alan Ladd) would testify that Jack Palance was a villain and just plain evil. No doubt about it. Things started getting a little hazy though when Richard Boone showed up as Paladin on the TV show “Have Gun Will Travel. He was a hero in a black hat. What the heck?! So it goes. Just when you think you've figured it all out...
Perhaps it wasn't Hollywood that understood the nature of people so well. Rather it might have been the kindly Father Flanagan who asserted 'there is no such thing as a bad boy.' This is not a naive statement. It's the truth. God, who is the essence of love, never created a human being who was bad.
Gregory Boyle, a Jesuit priest in Los Angeles, has worked with gang-members for decades. Barking to the Choir is about “how to love people. How to really love people. And how to know God when you see God.”
No one can question the fact that horrible things happen to people and evil exists. Recent history confirms this of course. Things of satanic proportions happened in Rwanda during the hundred days of slaughter and ethnic cleansing...or with the gassing to death at Auschwitz of 800 Gypsy children in one day at the hands of Adolph Hitler. And on and on. It's easy to hate perpetrators who commit atrocities. There is no excuse for what they do. Consequences for such actions are necessary and justice must be served. But in the midst of our righteous condemnation we can easily forget that there is a bit of good in the worst of us and a bit of bad in the best of us. By grace, and grace alone, have we been spared from whatever drives people to do such things.
Gregory Boyle in his book Barking to the Choir tells us that; "There are no monsters, villains, or bad guys...There are only folks who carry unspeakable pain. There are those among us who deal in the currency of damage. And there are those whose minds are ill, whose sickness chases them every day. But there are no bad guys. Jesus seems to suggest that there are no exceptions to this. Yet it's hard for us to believe him."
I guess we need to rethink our positions on who is wearing the black hats. We should also consider abandoning our tribes to rejoin the larger human family. We can't afford the divisions any more. No exceptions. Let's try harder to believe that guy who Gregory Boyle was talking about.
