• Articles by Aaron Welty
• The Belfast Oxford Tour
• Surprised by Joy by C.S. Lewis.

Transcript

Welcome to Questions That Matter, a podcast of the C.S. Lewis Institute. I'm your host, Randy Newman. I get the pleasure of doing this and talking to people about how heart and mind discipleship works its way out in their lives. And my delight today is to talk to my good friend, Aaron Welty. Aaron has spoken on a number of different college campuses and some other settings about the heroics of weakness. And that's going to be the topic and the question we explore in Questions That Matter, is how do we think about weakness or trials or struggles?

Let me tell you a little bit. Aaron is originally from Michigan. He now lives in Washington, DC. He works for the government with the Federal Aviation Association. No, that's not right. FAA. What does FAA stand for?

That's Federal Aviation Administration.

Administration. I was close. He has served on the staff of Lake Ann Camp for over a decade. He does a lot of speaking about the heroics of weakness. Aaron, welcome to Questions That Matter.

Thanks for having me, Randy. It's good to just get to hang out with you and talk with you.

Yeah. I should tell people Aaron and I first met on one of our C.S. Lewis Institute Belfast & Oxford study tours, and we just ate it up. We just loved it. And let this be a nice little commercial for that study tour. If you've never gone, it's magical, and if you're a C.S. Lewis fan, you will just be captivated by it. I will tell you, Aaron and I sat in the in the chapel where C.S. Lewis first preached the sermon “The Weight of Glory,” and we both listened to it on audio and read it from our phones and then just delighted in, like, “Here we are! We’re sitting right where people were sitting when they heard him.” Anyway, Aaron, tell us, what do you mean by this intriguing phrase the heroics of weakness?

Well, Randy. I believe that weakness can actually be heroic, and I believe this not only because we find it in stories in our culture, stories in our culture that our culture deeply loves, but we also find it in the greatest story ever told. We find it in the story of Jesus in the Gospels, because in the cross and the resurrection, we see Jesus embrace essentially the greatest weakness that humanity has, or dual weaknesses, entropy and death. And He does this as a way to save the world and to conquer death through the resurrection.

And one of the things that J.R.R. Tolkien, who wrote The Lord of the Rings, is remembered for, in addition to something like The Lord of the Rings and discovering Middle Earth. Not creating, but discovering Middle Earth. That's how he framed it and phrased it. One of the things that he's known for is this idea of this literary term eucatastrophe, right? The good catastrophe. And the idea of a sudden turn of events that ultimately avoids impending doom. We see this in The Lord of the Rings with the destruction of the ring, deep into Mordor, into Mount Doom, while everybody else is surrounded by the orcs. They all think they're going to die. And we see this in The Lord of the Rings, and when he talks about this in his famous essay, “On Fairy Stories,” he talks about it in saying that the eucatastrophe, the good catastrophe, of human history is the incarnation, is the birth of Jesus that we celebrate at Christmas. And the resurrection is the eucatastrophe, or good catastrophe, of the story of the incarnation, of the story of Jesus. So you've got one of the greatest literary minds of the twentieth century, who also was really good friends with C.S. Lewis, saying this idea that I'm putting forth in what I write and my understanding of things from a literary perspective is rooted in my understanding of the importance of essentially Christmas and Easter and what we celebrate at those times as it applies to human history.

Let me just stop you there for a second. Give you a pause to breathe. I want to tell people. As you can tell, Aaron can talk about this. He gets juiced up and excited about this. So I had him come and be a guest lecturer when I taught a class at Patrick Henry College, and the students loved it. In fact, they just found how very disappointed they were with me lecturing all the other times. And then I was able to help connect him with the CRU movement at George Mason, and he spoke in a number of places.

But yes. There’s this theme of a hero conquering but conquering through weakness. And we see it in a million stories. And, as you're pointing out, Lewis and Tolkien said that's because they were pointing to the ultimate true story, where that happened on the grandest scale. So keep going, say some more. And I've also heard you talk about the heroic ending versus the happy ending. Tell us about that as well, as you continue talking about the heroics of weakness.

So when we look at this idea of weakness, even the apostle Paul talks about this, in 2 Corinthians chapter 12, when he's writing about how he asked God to take away this thorn that he had, this infirmity that he had. He asked him more than once. He asked him three times. And each time, God said no. And He said, “My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is made perfect in your weakness.” So even Paul was rooted in this idea that weakness is important. Weakness actually enables things. This is how we see it scripturally, but how do we also see it in terms of present pop culture? I always think of Iron Man when I think of this, from the Marvel movies, the Marvel comics, more recently, in the last fifteen years, the Marvel movies. When you think about the story of Iron Man, he’s nearly killed, and then he's kidnapped by terrorists. And being nearly killed puts him in a place where he has his own health challenge. He has a heart condition that he's dealing with. Because there’s shrapnel in his chest trying to claw its way into his heart and eviscerate his heart. And so what does he do while he's in captivity? He builds a miniature power source, power reactor, that he's able to put in his chest to keep the shrapnel at bay. And he does this while he's kidnapped in a cave with a box of scraps. And this arc reactor that he builds ends up being the power source for the original Iron Man armor that he uses to escape. And so part of what you're seeing, just at the beginning of his story, is this idea of he's embracing this reality of weakness that he's faced with with his heart condition, but embracing this weakness ends up being his path to freedom. And it’s how he escapes the terrorists.

And then a couple movies later, when he's talking about this with Bruce Banner, who transforms into The Incredible Hulk, he’s talking about this, and he talks about how the arc actor in his chest, the thing that's keeping him alive, he specifically refers to it as a terrible privilege. He doesn't say anything else about this terrible privilege, but I've spent more than a decade now thinking about this phrase and thinking about this word usage, and what I believe is happening here is Tony is talking about how the circumstances that led to the creation of his Iron Man persona, they were terrible, but this persona that he has embraced and the good that he's been able to do via that persona in the world as a superhero, that's a privilege, right? And so you have the terrible enabling something that is a privilege. And I believe that part of what Tony's story communicates to us is that the heroic can emerge from the terrible. The heroic can emerge from the terrible, and purpose can arise like a phoenix out of places of personal pain.

Oh. Well said, Welty. Well said.

Thank you.

I probably should tell our listeners, Aaron and I have become such good friends that we’re on last name basis. It’s hard for me to call him Aaron. I call him Welty, and he calls me Newman, and I hope that doesn’t cause problems for people. But this theme, I love it. You see this theme in so many Marvel comics, Marvel movies. You see it in Star Wars. I mean, you are the biggest fan I know of that whole genre. But for you, it's not just a silly, shallow, “Oh, this is an escape.” No. For you, this is some of the deepest thought about some of the deepest topics. So I love hearing you talk about how you see it in this episode of Star Wars or this page in a Superman comic book. But let me dig in a little bit further, and I want to our listeners to know Welty and I have talked about this a million times, and I've asked him if he'd be willing to share about this, and he has said yes. Because this topic of the heroics of weakness, this isn't just a theoretical concept that you like or that you've read a whole lot of comic books. But this is a reality you face every single day. Tell us about some of the physical challenges you face and how the heroics of weakness help you.

Terrible privilege. The idea that we all have a terrible privilege of some sort. We have challenges, we have difficulties, we have trials and tribulations that we wish we didn't have, that we wish that God would take away and remove, just like Paul wished it. It's something very personal to me because I have my own terrible privilege, and it's called cerebral palsy. What that means is that, because of some birth complications that happened when I was born ten weeks premature in the early eighties, I ended up in a situation where damage to the brain led to the cerebral palsy situation that I have lived with for over forty years. And that's on top of the fact that doctors didn't expect me to last the first day, the first hours.

One of the stories that's part of family lore related to me is that, the day I was born, my grandmother was there because she was a nurse at the hospital, but she was there with my mom. But the day I was born, as soon as I was born, there was a group of doctors and medical professionals that took me away from my family, and there's a chunk of time that can't really be accounted for. And the story of that chunk of time is that I was taken somewhere else in the hospital, and these doctors were going to decide my fate. They were going to decide what was going to happen to me. And these doctors didn't really want to put in the work. They were like, “We know what's going to happen to this kid. We know he's going to die, and so let's acquiesce to that reality.” But the other part of the story is that there was a nurse that worked at the hospital that knew my family, that knew my grandmother, worked with her, and she kind of stepped in, and she stood in the gap for me, and she said, “No. We know this family. We know this is the first grandkid. We have to do everything we can.” And they did, and I was eventually medevaced to U of M Hospital, and I spent a lot of years, a lot of time in my early years, in and out of the hospital and stuff.

But the thing when I think about that story is this nurse looked at me and saw possibility and potential when all these doctors saw was a premature problem they didn't want to deal with.

You know, I've heard you tell your story, and we've talked about it, but every time I hear it, I hear new details that I don't think I heard or remembered. And I just think so highly of how you… well, we've talked about this a bunch. You're very aware of these challenges because they're undeniable. But you don't let them define you. And I’ve heard you say, “This isn't the whole story of my life, but it's not nothing. It's somewhere in between. It is not my primary identity. It's not even my secondary identity. My identity is in Christ. My identity is in that I'm a person, a human being, and I'm a person who happens to really love things like Star Wars and stories and literature and seeing all of these smaller eucatastrophes pointing to the ultimate big good catastrophe. So those are the major themes of your life, but the challenges of getting around and, well, everyday things like eating and all of this has certain challenges. So connect those dots for us a little bit, Aaron. How does the heroics of weakness play out as you find physical pain a reality, or those kinds of things?

Even when I think about this and I talk about this, even when I think about characters like Iron Man, Tony Stark, characters like Charles Xavier from The X-Men, who is a paraplegic and doesn't have use of his legs and has a really cool hovering wheelchair, I don't talk about this in terms of disability, right? Disability is an inability to do something. That's what the word means.

Yeah.

I talk about this as medical and mobility challenges, because when you talk about it like that, it doesn't mean you can't do it. It doesn't mean you have an inability to do something. It may mean that it's harder. It may mean you have to think about it. It may mean that you have a very unique way of dealing with it, like the phoenix rocket car that you've seen that my dad built for me many years ago, and I used it to get around Washington, DC, and we’ve been on national news with it and other kinds of stories. But I don't think about it as an inability to do something. And one of the things that was very helpful for me, and I referenced it earlier, was 2 Corinthians 12 with Paul, because, like Paul, when I was a sophomore at Cedarville in Ohio in college, I went to God, and I begged Him to take this all away.

Hmm. Yeah.

And God said, “That’s not what I'm going to do.”

Yeah. Yeah.

And so I wanted God to prescribe painlessness for me. I wanted God to wave his hand like a Jedi mind trick and take it all away.

Yeah.

And God said, “I think I'm going to prescribe perseverance for you instead. That's what I did for Paul, essentially, so I'm going to do that for you, and if you're in the same company as Paul, then you're in pretty good company.” And I've spent probably the last twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two years of life kind of living in a reality, that on this side of space-time, God's not going to take it away. Instead, like with Tony Stark's terrible privilege, like with Charles Xavier being a paraplegic and not being able to use his legs, in part because, if he's able to use his legs and he's able to walk, then his mutant power, his telepathy, doesn't work. Like those two individuals, those two characters in particular, I've accepted that it is through this, it is through the cerebral palsy and how I wrestle with it and reckon with it and live with it, that God's going to do what He's going to do, instead of a miracle of healing. And I've come to refer to this as, in prescribing perseverance for me, God actually did the greater miracle.

Have you thought about your spiritual legacy? If you were to die tonight, would you leave behind a clear message to your family, friends, and the whole world about your faith in Christ? Your love for them? Your hope for them? If not, what do you need to do to prepare for your leaving this earth? We have a resource on our website with answers and guidance in a new video by Joel Woodruff, our president of the C.S. Lewis Institute. And I think it's really helpful, and it gives guidance and insight about how to think through these issues and then how to prepare for them. And there's an informative, easy to understand format laced with I think some really good stories. So check it out at our website, under Spiritual Legacy. Or if you like, cslewisinstitute.org/spiritual-legacy.

Yeah, yeah. Amen. I'm sure that… well, I don't know. Maybe some of our listeners are wrestling with this. It really is a complex and difficult issue, because sort of the crazy maker, if I can use a non-theological term, is that sometimes God does heal people. Sometimes He does. Sometimes we pray and ask Him to heal, and He does. And the paraplegic gets up and walks, and takes up his mat and walks and goes away. Or the demoniac gets the demons cast out into the pigs. And so sometimes He does that, but sometimes He says, “No. That’s not how I'm always going to work. I don't always work that way.” You read that list in Hebrews 11, and there are some people who were rescued out of the lion's den and rescued here and rescued here. And then others suffered. Sawn in two. It’s like, “Wait a minute. Wait a minute! Could I sign up for the first list and not the second one?” And God sometimes says, “I'll put you there, I'll put you there, and that's My choosing.” So let me point it in this direction for you. Okay, so how has this terrible privilege worked out in your life as a privilege? You've already talked about it a little bit, but what has this enabled you to do? Or ways that you've ministered? How has that turned out to be the privilege, beyond just perseverance?

Right. Well, so one of my really good friends, who I met through camp about twenty-five years ago, a guy named Ken Rudolph. One of the things that he shared with me, and that he sometimes preaches on, is the idea that pain provides a platform. Pain provides a platform. And when I go to camp in the summers for two weeks and am part of that leadership program for these high school students—basically imagine summer camp meets Top Gun. It's kind of like that, right? Where you're doing all of these things like they’re flying in the planes in Top Gun and doing all of these crazy outdoor adventurous type things, but you're also spending time in the classroom, listening to people and listening to teaching and hearing about people's lives and what they’ve walked through and what they've learned and things like that.

One of the things that Ken will talk about when he introduces me to the students is he says, “Part of the reason that we have Aaron come back and do this every year is because he is familiar with pain. He's not a stranger to pain, and we want you to see an example of somebody who navigates this relatively well, because your life…. You may be sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years old, getting ready to go into college. Your life is not going to be easy. It's going to be difficult.”

And so when I talk about these ideas of the heroics of weakness or even the idea of pursuing heroic ending with the students, part of what I realize is I'm not necessarily talking to them as they are today. I am speaking to their future selves. I'm speaking to those, to the individuals they have not become yet, because there's going to come a point in their life, later on down the line, when I'm probably not even there, and the Holy Spirit taps them on the shoulder and says, “Hey, you remember when you spent that week with Welty in camp, and he talked about all that stuff you didn't quite understand, but you knew it was important? This is the moment why.”

The toughest thing for me, as a speaker, especially when I'm talking about these things with a faith-based audience, is that realization that the moment that the light bulb comes on in their life most likely is going to be a moment you'll never see, especially as it relates to something like the idea of pursuing heroic ending, right? Because we live in a culture where we're told, “Do everything you can to achieve the happy ending you want, to achieve the life that you think you deserve.” We see it in our movies. We see it in TV. We hear it in music. It’s all over the place, right? And we often define that as some kind of success that is either relational, occupational, or financial, or some combination. You see it in romantic comedies, you see it in Disney Princess movies and some of the old animated stuff, all kinds of movies. But with what I call the hollow Hollywood happy ending, you don't necessarily see what happens next. Sometimes you do. Like Hans and Leia at the end of Return of the Jedi, right? They get together and then, when you watch the sequel trilogy, set thirty years later, you can figure out what happened in the intervening time. Or Aragorn and Arwen in Return of the King. You kind of get to see what happens next. There are appendices and stuff that you can read. There are visions that Arwen has of of a son and all of this.

But sometimes you don't really see what happens next. I think about the movie from the late sixties with Dustin Hoffman, The Graduate, where The Graduate ends with him busting in on the female lead’s wedding, getting her to leave the wedding and go off with him on a bus. And then they're sitting in the back of the bus. And they're smiling. Everybody on the bus knows something crazy weird just happened, and they don't know what to think about it. And then Simon and Garfunkel starts. And you just listen, and you watch the expression change from, “Oh, my gosh! Look at the thing we just did!” to, “Oh, my gosh! What did we just do? But we're kind of in it now.”

That’s right.

And then that's where it stops. I mean, Spaceballs spoofs off this, the Mel Brooks movie from the eighties. One of my favorites super hero movies, Spider-Man 2, spoofs this… It doesn’t spoof it, but borrows from it in a way that I absolutely hate, even though it's one of my favorites. And so that's the hollow Hollywood happy ending, right? But I think the best alternative is this idea of pursuing heroic ending, and in pursuing heroic ending, the idea is that the protagonist understands that the story is not about them. It's not about what they want. Their role in the story is ultimately about them facilitating redemptive good for others, often at great cost to themselves.

Luke Skywalker does this for the galaxy and for his father. Aslan does this for Edmund in Narnia. Batman does this for Gotham. Phil Coulson does this for his team and for the world in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D, an Avengers spin off. This idea of pursuing heroic ending—we already talked about the idea of weakness related to Jesus and the crucifixion and the resurrection. Pursuing heroic ending is what the gospels are all about. That's what Jesus is doing in the crucifixion and the resurrection, what we celebrate at Easter, even what we celebrate at Christmas with the incarnation. That’s the beginning of this. And so if Jesus is willing to embrace heroic ending, shouldn't we?

Oh, man! Preach it, brother! This is really good. You know, I keep coming back in my mind about how the Lord used stories in C.S. Lewis’s life to lead him to faith. I mean, we've already alluded to this, but he loved mythology, he loved Norse mythology, and he had to wrestle with the fact that he rejected the gospel, but he loved seeing these things play out in stories. And Tolkien and another friend, Hugo Dyson, challenged him to think, “Wait a minute! Maybe these little stories that you love are so popular and so common, you start seeing the themes all over the place. Maybe it's because they derive from a true ultimate story.”

One of the lines I love to quote often from Lewis's self-reflection in Surprised by Joy: He says, “Nearly all that I loved, I believed to be imaginary. Nearly all that I believed to be real, I thought grim and meaningless.” And so people today love these stories. They love these movies. They can't wait until the next Marvel movie comes out. And we could—I think some of us could be critical of them. “See our culture. They just like to escape. They just want fantasy. They just want entertainment.” Well, we do like fantasy and entertainment and distraction, yes. But why is it that they're always drawn to these stories where a hero comes in from another world or another kind of place. And this hero is like us, but not like us. And this hero comes in and defeats evil and conquers evil. Either that is pure fantasy with no purpose or it's fantasy pointing to the ultimate good and the ultimate hero. And you, you see this in a bazillion places.

I do!

You could have gone on with that list of where you see it playing out for quite a while. I love this theme, the heroics of weakness. And I really wanted to grab a hold of the hearts of our listeners. But we're coming toward the end of our time. What else do you want to say about that? Or what other seeds do you want to plant for people to start seeing this play out in their lives?

As we've talked about this—and you had alluded to the opportunities I had to speak to some of your classes. I'm thinking about somebody that there was in one of your classes that I got to spend some time talking to and really wrestling with some of these deeper ideas as it relates to fantasy and sci-fi and pop culture, right? Because this person loved it, but the environment they were in didn't necessarily appreciate it the way that they did. And we had a conversation, and as part of this conversation, one of the things we talked about was the generational nature of the story in Star Wars, between Anakin Skywalker, Luke Skywalker, and the generation that comes after them seems to echo the cycle that we see in the book of Judges, even to the point where I like to refer to Anakin Skywalker, who later becomes Darth Vader, as Samson in space. Because when you look at some of the overarching narrative pieces of Samson's story and some of the choices he makes and the role that he plays in Israel at the time, there's a lot of similarity between that and the role that Anakin Skywalker plays in the galaxy for more than thirty years in that story.

And so one of the things I would encourage folks to do is be willing to really engage with these stories. You talked about it as entertainment and escapism, and you're right. Most people, that's what they want. They want that entertainment. They want to turn their brains off for a couple of hours. But a movie is never just a movie. A TV show is never just a TV show. A story is never just a story. It wants to say something. It's trying to teach you something. And so as you engage with these stories, I would encourage people to think about it. And even use Star Wars as kind of a homework assignment, right? Watch Star Wars. Read Judges. Watch Star Wars again. Read Judges. See the similarities in the cycle. And you know kind of wonder and ponder, like we are, “How is it that this plays out this way? Where does this all come from?” and see where where that leads you.

You know, on this podcast I think I've referred quite a few times…. When we think about how do we reach out? How do we evangelize in our day and age? And we have a great model in Acts 17, where Paul preached in Athens. Well, not quite preached. He got up and gave a speech. Preach would be a sermon, like he preached in the synagogue in Pisidian Antioch in Acts 13. But this was out on a hill, where philosophers gathered and talked about the latest ideas, and he got up and gave a speech. But he quoted their poets. He quoted their songwriters or scriptwriters. I mean, they were poets in their day, but the poets of our day are the songwriters and the movie script writers, screenplay writers.

Yep.

And I love the way you do that. And we can do that. We can say to people, with a very positive kind of thing—I think some of us, we just want to critique it. “Oh, you're just escaping by watching Star Wars.” I think we need to come along and go, “You know, there's something in Star Wars that’s really great. I mean, there's this longing for good defeating evil and ultimate resolution. I think that's wonderful, and they sure do it really well, with high production.” There are reasons why we're drawn to these stories and that those could be really great gospel conversations. And I know you do this quite a bit with people because you like those poets.

I do. And it's funny that you mention Acts 17 and Paul being at Mars Hill at the Areopagus because, a number of years ago, because of this very reason and the things we're talking about, I actually went to Athens to climb that hill for myself as part of the journey into becoming this person that really loves this stuff and talks about this stuff, and I had the opportunity to go do that, much like the trip that you and I went on, focusing on Lewis and Tolkien and getting to walk Addison’s Walk for ourselves. I had the opportunity to climb Mars Hill for myself, and I had to take it.

Nice! Nice, nice, nice. Well, I know that you and I could talk for hours because we do.

We do.

But we’re not going to talk any more on this podcast. I just want to say, I want to say to you, Aaron, if there's anybody I know who embodies a Bible verse that you and I have talked about so many times, it’s you, and it's a 2 Corinthians 4:8, “We are hard pressed on every side but not crushed, perplexed but not in despair, persecuted but not abandoned, struck down but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body.”

Thanks be to God that He works through the heroics of weakness. Thanks be to God that He sets it up, so that pain provides a platform. I hope that this has been encouraging for our listeners. We hope that some of the links that I put below that can connect you to some more of Aaron Welty's thinking might be an encouragement. Check out our other resources on our website. We hope that all of this, all the work that we do at the C.S. Lewis Institute helps you love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind. Thanks.

Brought to you by the C.S. Lewis Institute and the Questions That Matter Podcast with Randy Newman