The Just Man Justices

Chris Jones' excellent profile of Roger Ebert has been making the rounds the past few weeks. And for good reason. It is a moving piece, a beautiful and surprisingly joyful portrait of a man going head-to-head with his own mortality. Ebert, the esteemed film critic, has been battling thyroid cancer for eight years, enduring surgery after surgery to rid his body of the poison that took parts of his salivary glands, his mandible and, ultimately, his voice. His communication is today limited to scrawled notes on loose scraps of paper and the Internet, specifically his blog, which he seems to update on the hour. Jones had the good sense to include in his masterful piece parts of Ebert's moving post about death. Ebert writes:

I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can't say it wasn't interesting. My lifetime's memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris.

I'm inclined to believe almost completely Ebert's take on the great beyond, even though as a young Catholic I was told tales about purgatory, St. Peter, grace and all that. But it's hard not to see in Ebert and his courage in the face of death something at least resembling a soul, or something akin to God's grace. Bear with me here.

In a recent post, Alyssa Rosenberg highlights an Ebert line about how the act of writing makes him whole again: "When I am writing," Ebert explains, "my problems become invisible and I am the same person I always was. All is well. I am as I should be." From these words, Rosenberg draws a straight line from Ebert to the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and his concept of inscape, the sudden, revealed presence of God (higher power, if you prefer) in a person.

For Rosenberg, Ebert’s words, typed out in the quiet darkness of his illness may be, "the purest lived expression" of Hopkins' inscape. To underline her point, she references Hopkins' poem "As Kingfishers Catch Fire," specifically the line "what I do is me: for that I came." A year ago this month, I referenced the same poem to describe LeBron's 52-point triple-double against the Knicks at Madison Square Garden.

I say more: the just man justices;

Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God's eye what in God's eyes he is--

Christ--for Christ plays in ten thousand places

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through features of men's faces

Although Rosenberg and I come at this from different angles (she's really talking about creativity and the writing life), our sentiments are in accord about the mysterious, inspiring revelation of a higher power through a person at his or her best, or most complete, be they Roger Ebert, LeBron James, or an anonymous nurse or everyday factory worker. Witnessing, as it were, the expression of a person’s soul, seeing, hearing, or reading the very thing that makes them them, is unmistakable, powerful, and awesome. It rattles your core.