Chaos and Harmony, Part I “Origin Stories”

I’ve always had a fondness for origin stories. I remember when my big brother gave me Stan Lee’s Origins of Marvel Comics for graduation. I loved reading “Issue #1” of The Fantastic Four, The Hulk, Spiderman, Thor and Dr. Strange, the first five in the legendary Marvel stable of superheroes.

But what I found I loved even more was reading of how Stan Lee, the creator of Marvel, fills in the backstory of each new creation. He was trying to carve out a living, of course, in the growing world of young adult comics. And he was competing with the more established DC brand. But his new creations weren’t just shrewd marketing: Stan was as playful as he was savvy.

What would it be like, he wondered, to have a superhero team without a secret identity? Crazier yet, What would the world do if a teenager was given super powers? He answered his own curiosity with the FF and your friendly neighborhood Spiderman (also the first superhero to be located in a real world city: Manhattan).

I found out that many of his creations grew out of his own childhood interests. The Hulk, for example, is his version of the misunderstood Frankenstein Monster. Thor brings to us his interest in the ancient world of Norse mythology and a chance for a comic book character to speak Shakespearean and still be cool. Dr. Strange emerged from an old radio program favorite called “Chandu the Magician”.

Origin stories inform us of what we long to know about any character of interest: How did they come to be who they are? Their origin – in the case of Marvel the origin of their superpowers – continues to haunt or drive them the rest of their lives. This is why we might enjoy the adventure of Spiderman’s second and third movies, but if you don’t know how his newfound power contributed to his uncle’s death you don’t know Spiderman. Not really.

So what if the character of interest is you?

We all have our own origin stories rooted in family history and circumstance. We all have those moments where our “superpowers” (gifts, passions, character) seemed to be birthed. But even those don’t fully explain us. There’s more to your story because it’s rooted in a much deeper origin than your birth.

To find that deeper place we go back to The Origin Story found in the Book of Origins, Genesis. It is there we get to read “Issue #1”. And it is there we get to see some of the playfulness as well as the savvy-ness of our Creator. He sets the stage for our becoming by telling us what happened In the beginning…