A couple of weeks ago, thanks to a kind friend in the brass section, I was able to attend the final performance of Lyric Opera Chicago’s premiere production of Terence Blanchard and Michael Cristofer’s Champion.
The 2013 work – which just this month won a Grammy for Best Opera Recording with the Metropolitan Opera – spins a tale based on the life of Virgin Islands boxer Emile Griffith, who reigned as welterweight, light middleweight, and middleweight champion during his professional career of 112 fights between his debut in 1958 and his retirement in 1977.
Central to the opera is Griffith’s tragic victory over then-welterweight champ Benny “Kid” Paret in their third fight.
The Knock Out (1907) by George Wesley Barrows [Public Domain]
A violent outing
Griffith had won the title from the Cuban Paret on April 1, 1960, via 13th-round knockout before losing it back to him via split decision in the rematch on September 30 of the same year.
On the morning of March 24, 1962, both boxers appeared at the weigh-in for that evening’s rubber match. In front of the assembled boxing and media figures, Paret taunted Griffith by flopping a limp wrist and spitting out the Spanish anti-gay slur maricón.
Forty-four years later, in a 2005 Sports Illustrated feature, Griffith openly discussed his own bisexuality:
I will dance with anybody. I’ve chased men and women. I like men and women both. But I don’t like that word: homosexual, gay or faggot. I don’t know what I am. I love men and women the same, but if you ask me which is better… I like women.
Back at the beginning of the 1960s, things weren’t so open. Reporters left the incident out of their write-ups, and New York Times editors replaced writer Howard M. Tuckner’s use of the term homosexual with the bizarre euphemism un-man.
To be publicly, spitefully, and vulgarly outed at a time of deep closets in arguably the most macho of all sports was painfully humiliating, and Griffith was more than ready to fight Paret on the spot.
In the match at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, Griffith’s immense rage sustained him through a knockdown in the sixth round. The dam burst in the twelfth.
Pinned in the corner and held up by the post and the ropes, Paret’s head rolled around in unconsciousness as the furious Griffith slammed in 29 unanswered blows in a row before the seemingly paralyzed referee Ruby Goldstein finally leaped in and stopped the fight, declaring Griffith the winner and once again welterweight champion.
On the live television broadcast, commentator Don Dunphy asked Griffith to watch and discuss footage of the fight’s ending in what was the first use of slow-motion replay on TV.
Paret was carried out on a stretcher. He never regained consciousness and died from massive brain hemorrhaging at Roosevelt Hospital 10 days later.
In 1992, 30 years after the Paret fight and 15 years after his own retirement, Griffith was savagely assaulted by five teenage muggers (one with a baseball bat) as he left a gay bar near the Port Authority of New York. Brutally battered about the head, he survived with a broken jaw, ribs, and spleen to spend four months recovering at Elmhurst General Hospital.
The head trauma amplified the brain damage from his long amateur and professional ring career, and he spent his final years suffering from dementia at a nursing home in Hempstead, New York.
The opera is as much about dementia as it is about boxing.
The way of things
The opera audience first sees Griffith late in life, sitting in his bedroom and contemplating a single shoe.
What is it? What is it for? Where does it go? Where does it belong?
He’s calmed and comforted by Luis, his companion, caretaker, adopted son, and lover.
Anyone with a family member anywhere along the path of dementia recognizes the moment and, if the performance is successful, feels it at a deeply emotional level.
Watching our loved ones move into the later stages of life can be physically painful. It can cause our hearts to hurt in our chests when we slip into a comparison of the person we knew in our own childhood and youth, the one who took care of us and guided us, with the one in front of us now who needs our own help and care.
The opera forces us to make this comparison throughout. In the Lyric’s production, a strikingly handsome and incredibly buff Justin Austin plays the focused young Griffith, often stripped down to boxing gear. Reginald Smith, Jr. plays the old Griffith, with an enormous girth, rumpled house clothes, and a general sense of distress.
The two performers appear onstage simultaneously several times, bringing the audience into the temporal confusion from which Griffith himself suffers.
The youthful boxer and the elderly ex-champion are parallel to the blushing bride and the sickly grandmother, the driven youth and the wandering grandfather, the intensely steel-eyed actor Charles Bronson of the 1970s and the puffy-faced plastic surgery disaster of the 1980s, the dangerously beautiful Keith Richards of the 1960s and the undying eldritch witherling of the 2020s.
Such is the way of things.
After the opera moves through the events of Griffith’s life – youth in the Virgin Islands, move to the United States, work as a designer of women’s hats, beginnings as a boxer, exploration of his own sexuality, rise to the championship, tragedy with Paret, brutal assault by muggers, and later cognitive struggles – it dramatizes his meeting with Paret’s adult son, a moment lifted from the uncomfortably artificial rendezvous that ends the 2005 documentary Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story.
In the documentary, Paret’s son appears distant from the moment, not quite providing the bath of forgiveness Griffith seems to so desperately need. In the opera, this moment is heightened into Griffith not necessarily receiving forgiveness from the younger Paret but instead realizing that he really needs to forgive his own younger self.
Then, after the big operatic finale of self-forgiveness with the entire cast of singers and dancers on stage, Griffith is back in the apartment where we first met him. Despite all the drama, the struggle continues, and Luis continues to care for him.
The ensemble finale is titled “At the End of the Day.” As great art does, it got me thinking about bigger things.
End-of-life issues
I don’t really care about mysticism.
I was probably ruined by early reading of Hilda Roderick Ellis Davidson, who I came to think of as the Dream Killer.
Her commonsense explanations of mythological mysteries – the eight-legged horse Sleipnir as “the bier on which a dead man is carried in the funeral procession by four bearers,” Valhalla as “a synonym for death and the grave, described imaginatively in the poems and partly rationalized by Snorri” – made so much sense that they squashed any small hope that the magic of the myths might just possibly exist.
Odin Rides to Hel (1908) by W. G. Collingwood [Public Domain]
As a practitioner of Ásatrú – a new religious movement that reimagines long-ago Norse and Germanic paganism as a modern practice in and of today’s world – I simply don’t have any attraction to Neo-Pagan theories about multi-part souls and afterlives in heavenly Viking halls.
I have just as little interest in online testimonials by today’s Pagans claiming that a character from Norse mythology appeared in their bed and whispered amendments to the Eddas as I have in congregational testimonials by today’s Christians claiming that a character from Biblical mythology dropped a dollar bill on the sidewalk to help them buy a lottery ticket.
There are a great many for whom these sorts of things are of paramount importance for their personal spirituality and their online personas. More power to them. Paganism has many theologies.
My interest is in public theology, in theology that – as Sebastian Kim wrote in a 2007 editorial – “interact[s] with public issues of contemporary society” and “engage[s] in dialogue with different academic disciplines, such as politics, economics, cultural studies and religious studies, as well as with spirituality, globalization and society in general.”
Rather than reflecting on what part of our souls goes to which location of cosmological cartography, I’m concerned with – for instance – what we choose to do as those we love approach the end of their paths and as we wander toward that dim destination ourselves.
If we believe the articles that our well-meaning mothers clip for us and forward to us, everything we eat, drink, breathe, and touch causes cancer. It sometimes seems inevitable that we’ll all get it, if our hearts and other organs don’t fail first.
Even if we manage to avoid The Big C, we can expect a decline in our cognitive faculties. Our memories will slowly fade, and our connection to the world around us will become as through a gauzy veil.
Having passed the half-century mark, I know that I can recall the details of a specific conversation in a kindergarten classroom in 1978 better than I can tell you what orchestral repertoire I performed a week ago. This situation isn’t going to change for the better in the next couple of decades.
What does Ásatrú theology have to tell us about end-of-life issues like this?
How does it help us to understand our experiences as we care for those with growing cognitive issues and as we develop those issues ourselves?
Heathen’s memory
We can point to Old Norse verses about respecting our elders or quote Icelandic sagas about responsibility towards the family, but that isn’t necessarily theology.
Theology can be built upon those sources – as strange as it may be to build a Heathen theology upon texts transcribed, edited, modified, and/or composed by medieval Christians – but theology must be built by us. It must go farther than simply pointing to literary sources or waving at secular academic analyses of archaeological finds.
Generic statements about elders and family can be teased out from many religious traditions. They can be found in platitudinal proclamations from many secular cultural viewpoints.
What does our own religious worldview have to say that is really different, that is so meaningful in such a unique way that it requires careful consideration? What special insights do we have that are worth sharing?
While attending the University of Chicago Divinity School, I wrote about ways in which the nature of Ásatrú ritual can provide new perspectives on climate change ethics, examining how unique elements of our practice can lead to fundamentally different insights on climate change issues than have previously been offered from, for example, Christian perspectives.
So, what is special about Ásatrú beliefs, concepts, worldviews, and practices that would enable us to enter the wider theological discussion of end-of-life issues?
Maybe a good place to start would be with – to paraphrase Jane Addams – the long road of Heathen’s memory.
For a new religious movement that only really began in 1972, we spend a great deal of our time engaging with a deep past.
Whether reevaluating the work of 19th-century scholars, reconsidering putatively pagan elements in folklore collections, studying medieval Icelandic texts, reading source materials about early Germanic migrations, or diving into incredibly ancient Indo-European mythologies, we are extremely committed to looking back.
The question at hand is, how can we pull all of that memory work into a modern theology of memory loss? How can we relate our dedication to remembering the past to our own experiences with those suffering from dementia in the present?
Within the Norse mythological world, we know that Odin has a paired obsession with learning about the events of the past and working to protect those he cares for in the future. We know that he has a great fear of losing his memory and a dedication to sharing symbolic gifts with humanity that relate to poetry and writing – traditional means of preserving memory.
Here is a place to begin constructing a theology for the end of life and the challenges of holding on to meaningful memories.
Among Odin’s many names are Alföðr (“father of all”), Gangráðr (“journey advisor”), and Kjalarr (“nourisher”).
Here is another kernel from which to begin growing a theology of our changing relationships to our parents, ourselves, and our children as we reach the last stages of our journeys.
This, of course, is not yet a theology. It’s merely an acknowledgment that there is someplace for us to begin building one or many.
At the end of the day
In the big ensemble finale near the end of Champion, the assembled cast sings:
When the fight is over,
and maybe you have won,
and maybe you have lost,
and maybe it was never worth
as much as it cost you.But rest now.
Rest, because it’s done.
The fight is over. The day is won.
And there is nothing more to say
At the end of the day.
Whether we are already the elderly boxer confusedly contemplating his shoe, the younger caretaker helping him get dressed, or the youthful dancer in the ensemble living blissfully in the ecstatic moment, these lyrics are about us now, soon, or in years yet to come.
I felt a pain in my chest during this number, when all of the cast members turn and communicate directly to the audience.
At this point in my personal timeline, I am nearer to the boxer than to the dancer.
All biographies end the same way, with the same final event. The telling may be different, but the story is the same. This is the basic truth of life that we weave so many beliefs around, that we cloak with so many assertions about souls and afterlives.
It’s hard to face the realities head-on. As Pete Townshend wrote when he was about a decade and a half younger than I am now, “It’s very, very, very, very hard. So very hard.”
Instead of turning towards the difficult truth, we deflect to learned discussions about tripartite this and subdivided that. Anything to distract from dealing with the deepness of the pain.
I’m not ready to deal with it, myself. But the gods don’t wait until we’re ready. Life doesn’t wait. Death certainly doesn’t.
Today, I’m trying to work through all of this and just beginning to line up some of the pieces to develop a theology of end-of-life issues from an Ásatrú perspective.
I’ll report back as it develops.
If I remember.
Remember those golden days, used to walk hand in hand
I was your friend, your fool, your lover, I was your man
I can see you there smilin’, looking straight in
You caught me unawares, I blushed, let’s set beneath this treeAnd I can’t get over the change in you
And I can’t get over the change in you
And I keep on remembering the old days
And I keep on remembering the old ways
“Remembering, Part 1” by Phil Lynott (1971)
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