This is being written on October 7, 2011. Two days ago Steve Jobs died. He was, for design and management, computerization, style of work and communications, what Henry Ford was to transportation. The outpouring of responses to his family and to the news world has been astounding. It is greater (numbering millions of unsolicited responses) than was the news of Thomas Edison’s death in the early 1930s. (I was in grammar school, and remember vividly the solemnity and respect of my teacher in announcing that Edison had died.) The response related to Jobs is greater in that the population is so much larger and communications have become a hobby in electronics for the masses. Serious discussion is under way in analysis of the outpouring of response to the event, and wonder about what will happen to the Apple Corporation, which future is weakened because of the loss of its muse. Edison was the first inventor to carry his genius over to commercial production in companies to utilize his creativity for profit. Jobs carried the concept even further, demanding stern control of the entire business in which he was engaged. One of the numerous programs about Jobs’ legacy included a speech he made to adult graduates at Stanford University. The audience was astonished at his digression. He spoke about death in the speech, and that he and others did not want to die, but that death is really a good thing making room for the young, to discover, to do what they would find to do creatively, and pass to oncoming generations. Edison died, an old man, Jobs was only 56 years of age. I do not recall any definitive public statement either man may have made about God. Taken in his own demise, Jobs appeared to disbelieve.
We might speculate about these geniuses popping up in every age, doing their thing, and passing on. One study suggested that we may have had something over 4,000 (by 1950) in all the world – during the last 5,000 years. They are different than others. Often the world makes large room for them, and permits oddities, even arrogance and some deviancy, so to benefit from what they contribute to society. They seem to make great leaps forward, changing in a handful of years what might take centuries to achieve without them. Nearly all have important supporting persons, highly gifted, but just short of the genius elevation. Together these become what are sometimes called high flyers. It is a given that they can’t be controlled, or when they are they may rebel or drop out. One wonders why there is so much that is special about them, and what there is that seems so odd. Why are some so humble, and some so arrogant?
In the matter of religious faith, the genuine high flyers stand out with gifts from the Holy Spirit. One can’t imagine that persons could manage Moses, the Apostle Paul, Augustine, and others – certainly not Jesus Christ. There are persons who live in a different perception and context than the masses. Their power is not in wealth, or celebrity, or physical strength of their own, but in their gifts. They emerge, fly high, and sometimes end badly, prematurely, perhaps broken as did Samson. Jobs suffered pancreatic cancer which took him at the height of his creative gestures, but may have been the consequence of conduct practiced in his youthful years. Of course there are those at the other end of the continuum, who never learn discipline or the meaning of God’s creation, to care for and advance in the nature of things. They follow destructive behavior, sometimes dramatic, as those above add genius to constructive behavior. The in-between people seem to make up about 70 to 80% of the population, and may be overlooked. This vast majority of persons tend to play along with life, but in their sheer numbers they were the main emphasis of Jesus, even though they press on in their temporary glories, and human depravities. He was attended by the rich, in the Magi, and the poor, in the shepherds, in his birth. God redeems from every social context, but he insists on going most often to those who offer time, humility, penitence and faith in the graces of God. They are the ones who have a more sensitive concern about faith that reaches beyond earth. All persons, in any context, need to feel self-recognition and pray beginning: O Lord be merciful to me a sinner. In Christ the best, the worst and the in between are afforded mercy – and peace forevermore. All our needs can’t be met by that which marvelous nature alone provides. Faith provides the differential, in the will of God, if that faith is anchored in Jesus Christ. For persons and society that offers balance. Christ appears to be more fully understood and accepted by the masses between the highest good and the lowest bad. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020