Heroes
I'm sure it's a consolation to all of us to learn that if we want to clamber up skyscrapers like Spiderman, or express our road rage not with rude hand signals but with the heat-ray vision of Superman, help is at hand. No longer do we have to wait for wizards, radioactive spiders or freak gamma-bomb accidents to bestow on us such unique abilities. No, nature will take its course.
If television is right - and when is it ever wrong? - most of us are only one gene mutation away from invisibility or bulletproof chest hair. Or, at least, so suggests the plotline of BBC2's hit series Heroes. It's a story based on the vision of the comicbook legends Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, whose X-Men, created back in the Sixties, proposed that teenagers might, through a gargantuan evolutionary leap, find themselves in possession of all sorts of natty powers.
It had to be a gargantuan leap, I suppose. It would have made a rather dull storyline if we'd had to wait several million years for the Incredible Hopping Man to become the Incredible Jumping Man, until eventually we ended up with a bloke who could fly.
So, in Heroes we have not a twentysomething from Tokyo who can (say) stop his coffee from going cold by turning back time a little, but one who can stop the clock wholesale, jump decades at a go and teleport himself right across the planet while he's at it.
I can't help but feel that the plotlines of Heroes and the X-Men films display a little disappointment with our progress as human beings. For all our technological advancement, they seem to suggest, we're no more civilised than our forebears, so if we're going to realise our true potential and transform from Homo sapiens to Homo superior, we'll have to depend on a force beyond our comprehension or control: Mother Nature.
Fortunately for us all, plumbing the hidden depths of our humanity to bring new treasures up into the light is much easier than it seems at first. The way has been marked. For what are the 'I am' statements of John's Gospel - 'I am the resurrection and the life,' 'I am the door,' 'I am the light of the world'- if not invitations to follow the One who has everything we need when it comes to becoming all we can be?
Jason Gardner
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