MJ & the Futility of an Earthly Legacy
Posted: June 28th, 2009 | Author: Rich Wagner | Filed under: Culture | Tags: legacy, significance | No Comments »
In the aftermath of the death of Michael Jackson, there have been a flood of articles around the web discussing Jackson’s legacy as the King of Pop and what MJ will be remembered for as the decades pass — his seven Top 40 singles from the mega-successful album “Thriller”, his charismatic on-stage performances, his leading edge music videos, and so on. And yet what struck me about this conversation was how hallow it all sounded. After all, in 50 years, how important will the song “Billie Jean” to people? How many lives are changed by the “Thriller” video? Don’t get me wrong - I’m not trying to pick on Michael Jackson. But all of this discussion on his long-term importance just highlights the inevitable hollowness of any earthly legacy. Not just MJ’s, but yours and mine as well.
As we consider the recent deaths of celebrities (Farah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, Billy Mays), it is natural for all of us to consider our own mortality and legacy that we’ll leave behind. I speak on this issue from my book The Expeditionary Man. The following is an extended excerpt that seemed especially relevant right now. (Note: While I am talking specifically to fathers in the text, these same lessons are applicable to everyone.)
A look to the past is the best gauge to determine what is really important now. We’re rarely objective in the moment.
A man is hardwired for adventure. Perhaps it is not surprising then that many men will spend their entire lives sprinting forward in pursuit of what makes their pulse race and blood flow. Professional success, changed lives in ministry, creative works of art, sporting competitions … you name it. However, once in a while, a man cannot help but stop, turn his head around, and look at the trail behind him. He wants to know that the struggles and sacrifices that he has made in pursuit of these exploits do matter. Therefore, as powerful as adventure is to a man, it cannot survive very well on its own. No, there is a flipside to adventure that is equally important—significance. A man craves adventure, but he needs one that really means something in the long run.
You see this truth played out in the life of climber Reinhold Messner, which is ironic because his life motto—I am what I do—seems to deny the need for any long-term significance at all. Messner is considered by many to be the greatest mountain climber of all time. He was the first to solo climb Everest without supplemental oxygen in 1980, a feat that many considered impossible. He was also the first person to climb all of the world’s “eight-thousanders,” the fourteen peaks above 8,000 meters (or 26,000 feet). But even Messner discovered that these sorts of solo adventures, by themselves, do not satisfy. “When I finished the 8,000-meter peaks, I understood, now I could only repeat myself,” said Messner. “What I did is boring now. But I like to go somewhere where everything is new, and to begin again an activity.” As such, he gave up climbing mountains and now looks for new adventures by taking expeditions to the most remote regions of the earth.
Messner reminds me of a modern-day Sisyphus, the mythical king who is destined to forever roll a huge rock up a hill only to have it fall down again. Messner is continually “pushing” an adventure up a slope. But as he gets to the top, it falls back down before he experiences any lasting meaning or fulfillment from what he just performed. His adventures, as incredible as they may be, are disposable to him. They are nothing more than a been there, done that. As a result, in order to live, he has to move on to the next adventure. Reflecting on this outlook, his brother Hansjorg wonders whether Reinhold may also believe an opposite motto: If I cease to do, I will not be.
Reinhold Messner is not alone. As I have openly shared in this book, I was an adventure junkie for many years of my life. I was relentless in pursuing the Next Great Opportunity through my job and always seemed to have a stockpile full of ventures. The Dotcom Boom only added fuel to my fire when entrepreneurial ideas, startup opportunities, and blockbuster IPOs were swarming around Silicon Valley. Everyone with ambition was looking for that “killer idea” to jump on board with and go public. However, even though I was in the midst of this exhilarating storm and at the peak of my professional success, I felt empty. I couldn’t help but stop and turn my head to view the trail dust behind me. But when I looked around, I was chilled by what I saw … there was nothing, no lasting legacy at all. I am consumed with identifying the next hot technology and revolutionizing the Web,
I admitted to myself. But am I doing anything at all that has eternal significance?
God has an impeccable sense of timing. At the same time I was wrestling with these questions, Paramount finally released the Oscar-winning film Braveheart on DVD. Because it was one of my all-time favorite movies, I purchased the DVD on the day it came out. As I sat down to watch it soon after, I found myself initially captivated and eventually haunted by a single line spoken by Mel Gibson. You’ll recall the scene in which William Wallace is in prison on the night before he is to be executed. Princess Isabelle comes in to talk with him and to try to give him poison so he won’t have to face the pain of torture the next day. When she talks of her fear over his death, he replies, “Every man dies; not every man really lives.” Oh, I had heard that line before, but I felt like Gibson was delivering that line to me personally as I watched it this time around. What does “really lives” mean? I wondered. Am I living a life that matters? Or is my time that I am spending on earth a “ho hum” in light of eternity?
“Every man dies; not every man really lives.”
Significance is such a tricky thing to have a proper perspective on in the present tense. The things that matter to me so much today are, by and large, forgotten about days, months, and almost certainly years from now. I look back and think about things that occupied my time a decade ago. My software baby—a software product I dedicated all of my creative energies to—is long gone. No one still uses it. Even the company I committed my heart to is no longer around.
Suppose, in cleaning my attic, I stumble across a magic “do over” pencil. Using this supernatural device, I am able to return to earlier times in my life to erase activities that proved insignificant and pencil in activities that I should have done instead. Silly idea, I admit, but you get the point: a look to the past is the best gauge to determining what is really important now. We’re rarely objective in the moment.
Kim and I traveled to England several years ago for our anniversary and had a chance to spend two nights at Eastwell Manor, a castle hotel that has a history spanning over 900 years. Each of the rooms in the hotel are named after a person associated with the manor. We stayed in the Robert Curtoys room. Robert was the eldest son of William the Conqueror, an army general, and one of the first owners of Eastwell Manner in 1099. As I read through a small booklet in the room describing his colorful life and dangerous exploits against King Henry I, I was struck by the importance of his adventures as the centuries pass. Not only was his short life a brief flicker in the span of human history, but his legacy today seems little more than a placard on a second story corner room of an aging stone castle.
I am a film buff and have a love for the classic films from the Golden Age of Hollywood. Movie stars during this era were larger than life, and in the center of the glamour stage was Humphrey Bogart. Bogie was a superstar; he was not only adored by ladies, but he was a “man’s man” as well. His career had everything an actor could ever want: over twenty major films, an Academy award, and a starring role in some of the greatest films ever. One of my all-time favorite roles in film is Bogart’s portrayal of Rick Blaine, the cynical bar owner in Casablanca. Yet, as much of a fan as I am, I have to admit that, in today’s era of postmodern realism, his acting style looks archaic and his tough guy characterizations seem cliché. Hollywood has long since passed him by.
No professional athlete has ever walked away from his sport better than John Elway did. Elway was a perennial all-pro quarterback and considered by many to be the greatest clutch player in the history of the game. He retired at the peak of his success—winning back-to-back Super Bowls and receiving the Super Bowl MVP award. My favorite memory of Elway was seeing him play at Mile High Stadium in a divisional playoff game back in 1992. It was perhaps the most thrilling moment I’ve ever experienced in sports when, with 1:46 left on the clock, Elway single-handedly took his team down the field 76 yards to defeat the Houston Oilers 26-24. I remember the chants of “Elway! Elway!” filling the stadium as he walked off in celebration. But now, years removed from the Elway era, those chants have long since died. His gridiron legacy, as great as it was, has become an NFL Films highlight reel and a bust in Canton.
Closer to home is a man I’ll call Ted Jones, an elder at a church we once attended. He possessed a strong sense of authority and genuine humility—a rare combination that made him the prototype of the servant leader. Yet, the leadership hat that he loved to wear at church rarely made it through the front door of his home. His business stole his time and his church stole his heart, leaving little time leftover for his family. Ted will leave a legacy of impacting people’s lives at his church, but the impact on his only child remains a question mark to this day. His thirty-year-old son is now walking far from the Lord and has no interest in coming back.
When I look at the lasting influence of these men, I am struck by the realization that a man’s earthly legacy becomes more and more two-dimensional as the years pass. Robert Curtoys is but a Wikipedia entry, Bogart is reduced to images on a strip of cellulose, and John Elway is a name on the Mile High Ring of Fame. I am reminded of a scene in the movie Breach in which an FBI agent sums up his legacy at the agency when he retires, “I could stay there another hundred years and still just be an afterthought … But I’ll get my portrait on that twenty-five year wall, right? Now that’s something.” Is it really, Mr. Hanssen? I asked myself when watching the film. Who really cares about a retiree’s picture on a wall? Time has a nasty way of flattening a man so that he will fit conveniently into a newspaper obit, an investment portfolio, or a wall-hung portrait.
A man’s earthly legacy becomes more and more two-dimensional as the years pass.
There is another type of legacy, however …
Every man who decides to live as an Expeditionary Man will have a new role to play, a new adventure to pursue, and a new summit to climb. But as he does this, something else happens: his life takes on a new significance. His legacy is changed from something flat into something three-dimensional; it becomes more than a static memory of the past, but a dynamic, real-time, ongoing heritage that survives forever. Above all, it becomes exactly what Maximus is driving at in Gladiator when he utters that great line, “What you do now echoes in eternity.”
In this cookie-cutter world, every man is far more replaceable than what he would like to think he is. Robert Curtoys and Humphrey Bogart were soon outdone by greater army generals and better actors. Even the legend of John Elway is slowly being surpassed by the likes of Tom Brady and Payton Manning. When I resigned from a company several years ago, I secretly hoped that I would get an email from a coworker a month or two later that said something like Boy, we need you back … You were so much better than the new guy … It’s just not the same anymore. No, I never got that email. I too was far more replaceable than I imagined.
I have one calling in which I am considered irreplaceable in the eyes of the Lord—as a father. God does not mix and match here; he never willingly sends in a replacement.
Surprisingly, this truth holds for a man in service to Jesus Christ. God may use me as an author to reach thousands of people through my books, as a teacher at my church to disciple dozens of others, and perhaps someday even as a missionary to minister to many people in Haiti. But God has plenty of other authors, teachers, and missionaries at his disposal. If he does not use me, he can certainly use someone else to get the job done.
But I have one calling in which I am considered irreplaceable in the eyes of the Lord—as a father. God does not mix and match here; he never willingly sends in a replacement. As the father of my three sons, I am the only one in this universe positioned to live out the principles of Deuteronomy 6:5-7 and Proverbs 22:6 with them. I am the only one to whom God has entrusted this adventurous responsibility of guiding Jordan, Jared, and Justus from childhood to adulthood. My wife is right alongside me as a partner, of course, but our father and mother roles are clearly distinct in Scripture. We complement, rather than override each other. A mother or another relative can compensate and fill in if a father is not living out his calling, but it’s never the same.
In the end, the lasting significance a man hungers for is gained by establishing an unquenchable faith in the soul of his kids. And then, once that legacy is firmly on track and managed, a man can begin to impact the rest of the world.
My brother-in-law Mark lost his job last week. Like any other weekday, he arrived at his office at 8:25am, likely scanning his Blackberry on his walk across the parking lot to see what his busy schedule held for him. But instead of a day filled with meetings and customer calls, he was promptly ushered into a conference room, sat down by an HR rep, and summarily laid off. Thanks much, but we just don’t need you anymore. To Mark, the sudden loss was devastating—and not just for economic reasons. He loved that job. His view of who he is as a man was largely defined by that role—a vision scratched out forever by an accountant’s pen. 
