My Heroes Have Always Been Rugged Individualists
...and I used to be blessedly at peace with that until I 'got' the fact that that's not the Catholic, and therefore Christian, way. I used to consider, for example, that what one produces was purely a societal issue and not a God one. I saw modern society as a construct I did not completely buy into and thus wasn't beholden to. But there is someone who includes even as he transcends society and who does deserve my buy-in: God. And God does not want rugged individualists, I’ve been pained to learn. If I were Al Gore I'd demand a recount.
I think my appreciation for cowboy poetry was about that - about dreaming the dream of living in nature, shorn of every responsibility except for self and immediate family. My heroes had always been rugged individualists be they Christian or foe: Edward Abbey, May Sarton, Robert Ringer, Emerson, Thoreau, Sol Gordon, Norman Vincent Peale, golfer Mac O’Grady, cowboys, indians, marathoners, George Sheehan, Andy Rooney. I think Billy Graham and singer/evangelist Pat Boone influenced me to a much greater extent during the '70s than any saint or pope. I recall reading a wee bit of John XXIII's Journal of a Soul but I was so ignorant of saints that I now feel a bit forlorn that I sentimentally chose as a confirmation name the name of my grandfather. It was still about heritage in 8th grade; appears I didn't have a favorite saint and though I've recently read about St. William I think it's fair to say we're not on a first-name basis. I like to think St. Anthony's favors in the immediate post-Confirmation years would've made a difference if I'd been confirmed later, but then again I'd always considered his favors of a universal nature and not personal: he had to help me, since he was the finder of lost things and I was prone to losing things.
I figured that God makes many different kinds of people and a certain percentage are going to be individualists by the luck o' the draw. But it's really hard to read the gospel and believe that, isn't it? It doesn't seem there aren't too many Thoreaus in that drama. Was it the absence of serious catechesis in my formation that lead me to find these influences outside the Church (i.e. nature abhors a vacuum), or was it my own predilection for individualism and growing up in America, the epicenter of rugged individualism, that led me to those seers? Perhaps it’s a both/and?
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