Christopher Reeve and the Superman Experience

Today we could all draw benefit from reflecting on the inspiring life of Christopher Reeve, the star of the superman films, who died exactly seven years ago, on the 10th October 2004. Our story might well start when three hundred people paid $1,500 to take part in a weekend seminar on ‘Loving Relationships Training’, held in a hotel in midtown Manhattan. One was a tall, extremely good-looking blond in her early twenties, who lacked self esteem despite her popularity and lucrative career as a New York model. She paired up throughout the course with a dashing young man who also felt the need to sort out his private life. That man was Christopher Reeve, who despite his fame and wealth was also bedevilled by inner conflicts and doubts. Together these two troubled souls worked through a series of exercises designed to teach them that ‘All human beings are equal and equally worthy of loving and being loved.’ First they undertook to forgive their parents for any mistakes or slights they might have committed while they were young. Next, they had to exonerate the people who had denigrated them and they had come to regard as their enemies. They, too, had to be forgiven and welcomed into the loving fold. After that they were asked to record the ten words which best described their true characters, and then the ten words which defined the person they would most like to be. If they followed these exercises in their daily lives they were promised that they would be participants in ‘the mind blowing spiritual experience of Harmonic Convergence’ which would lead eventually to world peace. Reeve was not totally convinced by this assurance, any more than he had been by the pledges given during an earlier course of Scientology training, and a later brush with a group which practised hot tub re-birthing.
Years later suffered Reeves suffered an appalling riding accident, which fractured his neck and left him paralysed in all four limbs. For a while he felt intensely bitter. ‘Why me?’ was the rhetorical question which rarely left his thoughts. Then he found hope, not from Scientology or Harmonic Convergence, but by joining a Unitarian church, where the minister explained: ‘We see our church as a place where people can be true to themselves, where honest doubt is not taken for heresy, and where the beliefs of the past and the present become the inspiration for future growth and discovery.’ From that moment onward the chair-bound, paraplegic patient embarked on a new career, raising funds to support medical research into the treatment of spinal cord injuries. But his major contribution lay not in his tireless campaigning, but in the inspiration he gave to countless people who came under his influence. This was revealed in the tributes which poured in after his death, aged 52. ‘He had a unique optimism,’ said one of his colleagues, ‘a true belief at looking at the best part of a situation. He did not look on it as being an obstacle, he looked on it as a challenge.’ A similar comment was made by his friend John Kerry, a candidate for the US presidency, who said: ‘He met every challenge with a courage and character that broke new ground. He was an inspiration to all of us.’
Christopher’s on-screen feats and aerial journeys were faked, but his real-life flights of courage and hope were genuine, and at times as wonder-working as those of his celluloid alter ego. As he says in his autobiography Nothing is Impossible: “So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable. If we can conquer outer space, we should be able to conquer inner space too.”

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