Heroes and painful memories

IN the Hebrew Bible, in the second chapter of the book of Daniel, there is a story about King Nebuchadnezzar having a troubling dream.

Nebuchadnezzar is identified as the person responsible for destroying the temple built by King Solomon and initiating that period of Jewish history known as the Babylonian captivity. This is the period some six centuries before the birth of Jesus which inspired the writer of Psalm 137 who longs, as an exile, for Jerusalem and all that it meant as a spiritual home. The Psalm includes those memorable words of lament: “How can we sing the songs of the Lord while we are in a strange land?”

This period of exile gave birth to stories about the faithfulness of those who held firm to their beliefs in spite of the circumstances in which they found themselves. These stories would be passed from generation to generation - told as a way of inspiring hope and impressing on waverers the efficacy of holding fast to the faith of their ancestors. One of those stories is Nebuchadnezzar’s dream where not only does he seek an interpretation of his dream; he seeks out someone who can begin by telling him exactly what the content of his dream was. When this story was told, you can just imagine the faces of young listeners when it was revealed that the hero of the day was a young Hebrew captain by the name of Daniel. He was the one who could tell the King what he had dreamt and then he goes on to interpret its meaning. And, of course, it is Daniel’s God, the God of Abraham of Isaac and ofJacob, who is the real power behind the story.

It was a dream about “an enormous, dazzling statue - its head made of pure gold, its chest and arms of silver, its belly and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron and its feet partly of iron and partly of clay.” It is a great old tale and it is a great pity that so few people now know or hear these stories or get any time to contemplate the truths that they were created to convey. It is the feet of iron and of clay which are the weakness undermining the whole structure and it is this ancient story that has given us the modern idiom of “heroes having feet of clay”. It describes perfectly the problem when we find that someone we admire has a dreadful weakness or a deep character flaw.

The poignancy of this image is not lost on any of us who have been following the Black Lives Matter movement and who have been giving some thought to the heroes that we celebrate in our history and particularly in our statues. Many of these did heroic things and left a tangible legacy, but, dig around and you find that they had feet of clay. It’s not that many articles ago that I wrote about Jean Vanier who was described as “one of those living saints” and it was heartbreaking to discover that the hidden side of his character was that of a manipulative abuser of the women who should have been able to trust him implicitly.

Many of these did heroic things and left a tangible legacy, but, dig around and you find that they had feet of clay.

It is a hard line to judge whether the good that a person contributes to the whole should be commemorated when, publicly or privately, they are guilty of practices which contradict what they claim to stand for. In this brief article I have no time to offer an in-depth analysis of how we should assess the balance sheet of the lives of those who have shaped our history; but, I am going to say that there are few heroes whose feet were not or are not made partly of clay and it is a good thing to consider that sometimes in the honouring of heroes we bring to the surface painful memories for others. □

This article appears in the November 2020 Issue of Life and Work

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