My family never attended church. My father is a devout
atheist and my mother is, at best, a non-practicing Catholic. The only times I
remember being in a church before my thirties were weddings and funerals.
Religion was an alien world to me, one that I felt little need to dip my toe
in.
That’s not to say that I didn’t find ideas and philosophies
that influenced me and continue to influence me to this day. They weren’t what
anyone would call “books of faith” or anything like that, but they were
important to me and gave me a lot to think about. They helped me find my way
and establish something firm to stand on in a world where the people I knew all
seemed to have conflicting beliefs and convictions, and where I had a hard time
deciding who was right and who was wrong.
In 1989, I was eleven years old when I bought my first comic
book and really discovered Spider-Man. Actually, if I’m being honest, my first
comic book was an issue of a licensed Real Ghostbusters comic that I
found at Stater Bros. while my mom was grocery shopping. I begged and pleaded
for her to buy it for me, as only an eleven-year-old can, and she finally
relented. I loved it, but there were only a few issues available on the spinner
rack at the time, and once I finished those two or three comics I was hungry
for more. Not knowing much about the other titles on display, I picked a
character I at least recognized from Saturday morning cartoons. Outside of a
children’s read-along book I had when I was younger, The Spectacular
Spider-Man #150 was what I consider my first “real” comic book.
That started a lifelong fascination with superheroes. From
Spider-Man, I learned that with great power comes great responsibility. For
those who don’t know, Peter Parker at first squandered his powers trying to
make a profit and looking out for himself until, one day, he refused to stop a
mugger he could have easily apprehended, a mugger who shortly went on to murder
his Uncle Ben. As Spider-Man, Peter vowed to never look the other way again. He
realized that if it was within his ability to help, he had a responsibility to
do so, especially when people couldn’t help themselves. For an eleven-year-old,
that’s heavy stuff. It goes deeper than just watching people in colorful pajamas
beating each other up. It’s a way of life writ large. From Spider-Man, I moved on
to other comics: Thor, The Infinity Gauntlet, The Avengers,
Captain America and others. I found myself mostly drawn to Marvel
characters, but I also collected a lot of comics from the Denny O’Neil editorial
run on the Batman titles. One of the things I learned from all those writers,
artists, and characters was that the differences between us all as human
beings, whether they be ethnicity, nationality, language, religion, or any
number of other differences were inconsequential. What mattered was that all
people are important, all people deserve the chance to live in peace, to live
according to what makes them happy and what they believe, and to be protected.
Most of what divides us as people is trivial in the grand scheme of things.
Then came 1990. Over the summer between 6th and 7th
grades, I was at a family event at my aunt’s house. I’ve never been a hugely
social person, so I wandered into a side room and turned on the TV. This was
well before the age of hundreds of cable channels, so the channel-surfing
options were limited, but it just so happened that one of the local stations
was airing a rerun of the most recent Star Trek: The Next Generation
episode. I had never seen it and I was barely aware of the show in general, but
that afternoon I was hooked. There was something about this group of people who
were very clearly an extended family and their determination to do the right
thing, save their father-figure, and protect the innocent people on Earth that
captured me. I spent the whole summer watching every rerun I could and awaiting
the Fall premier that would wrap up the cliffhanger that ended the previous
season. It was the Summer between parts one and two of “The Best of Both Worlds”
and the start of my attachment to Star Trek in general. Those themes of
progressiveness, inclusion, scientific curiosity, and duty have been a part of
my life ever since.
A few years later, Babylon 5 premiered, and provided
me with a five-year run in which the stories and themes resonated on a similar
level while giving me even more to think about: media bias, faith, fascism, good
and evil, order and chaos, whether we are bound to follow one of two divergent
paths or whether we have the freedom and responsibility to forge a third path,
our own. It was J. Michael Straczynski whose writing first taught me the two
most important questions in anyone’s life. “Who are you?” and “What do you
want?” It was through his work that I realized it matters what order you answer
those questions. Deciding what you want is much easier than figuring out who
you are, but if you decide what you want before you understand who you are you
can end up going wildly off-course and finding yourself in places you never
thought you would and where you never wanted to be. That’s something that
happens all too often in our goal-oriented, materialistic society. Wants are
much easier to define than identity.
In the years since, I’ve been exposed to a lot of religion,
mostly in the form of evangelical Christianity. That’s an entirely different
ball of yarn to unravel, but one thing I’ve heard over and over again is that
you have to read your Bible every day, every single day, to feed your faith and
maintain your identity. And they’re right. They’re absolutely right. But it’s a
broader truth than even they realize. I struggle every time I stray from the
things that shaped me, that I truly believe in, even if I don’t believe in the
literal, factual truth of the stories. I don’t believe superheroes are literally
real or that Star Trek or Babylon 5 represent our actual future.
But those stories don’t have to be factual truth to have power or for the
themes and ideas they represent to resonate. If I don’t constantly reinforce
those ideas in myself, I start to wander and forget what shaped me. But
eventually, I always come back. I always come full circle. And I’m starting to
realize how important it is to stay with those ideas in some form, to keep
reminding myself who I am. Because that’s the first, most important question of
our existence: “Who are you?” Without that, it’s all too easy to get lost.
