Superman

Strangely enough, people look for the human in the divine and the divine in the human. We are just as easily led to seek out the super in supernatural and the ordinary in the extraordinary. Which is why we give kryptonite to Superman, angst to Batman and immaturity to Spiderman. We want them to be one of us. But we dress them up in costumes and masks because we also want to set them apart, to make a distinction and to isolate them.

I suppose we have a fascination for them because we want to live in a world where power is tangible. We fashion icons of heroism that can look at a villain straight in the eye and not move an eyelash in one moment and just as easily weep over a sleeping child in the next. We want them to have complicated relationships because we can't imagine what it's like not to have them. We want them to fall in love and we want them to experience the agony of unrequited love because we all know what that feels like. We give them alter-egos because we all wear masks. We want them to have that indomitable will to do good because that is what we all aspire for. And we want them to have that superhuman struggle to choose between saving the person they love and saving humanity because we've all imagined that we were in varying forms of that dilemma at one point or another. But ultimately, we all want to have saviors who can suffer for us and suffer with us.

And that is why, the God-made-man-savior makes so much sense. When he first came, people were rather disappointed. I suppose they wanted him to be more heroic, to leap over tall mountains and to spew fireballs from his palms. Sometimes, we find ourselves questioning why he chose to walk the earth when he could very well have run at the speed of light, why he allowed his wrists to be nailed to a cross when he could just as easily have fashioned invincible silver bracelets and why he would forsake a utility belt for carpenter's tools. And yet, when we are confronted with his powers, of his turning water into wine, calming the wind and waves, conversing with the dead, walking on water and rising from the dead, we seek solace in his agony in a garden, his thirst on a cross, his grief over death and his joy at a wedding.