St. Paul's Episcopal Church

... So this Lent, I commend to you the thoughts of a very cool guy, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan William, who explains what Christian religion/spirituality is all about: "It is about how God makes it possible for us to live a life that isn't paralyzed by guilt, aggression and pride. It asks us to come down to earth and face what's wrong with us."

We should be honest with God and ourselves about our faults and failings, because that's the only way to begin resolving and healing them. That's cool. ...

... The point is that McQueen and most other heroes of cool had something that went way beyond the simplistic, street-tough caricature of the rugged individualist with a bad attitude. That wasn't, and isn't, what being cool is all about. It has little to do with acting surly, and it doesn't even necessarily entail being a rebel.

It's really about knowing who you are and not being bothered by those who can't handle that.

It's about having integrity and guts and being unflappably secure in your identity and values. ...

You'll be glad to know that I've decided which saint I'll study for inspiration this Lent: Steve McQueen.

I understand that the younger generation has rediscovered how cool McQueen was, so much so that some popular rock star recorded a hit song about his coolness.

Suddenly McQueen again is hot in youth culture and on the Internet. Marketers are cashing in with T-shirts bearing his face.

He deserves to be the icon of cool, even posthumously. He did have a hand in the permanent canonization of the Ford Mustang as the coolest of cars. And let's not be coy; we live in Aggieland, where any drive on any street will demonstrate that the main purpose of the Mustang is to show that you're too cool to obey the speed limit. Check out any defensive driving class in the Brazos Valley, and you'll see what I mean.

In many of his film roles, McQueen personified coolness. In Bullitt, he was a cop too cool for the bad guys. In The Great Escape, he was a P.O.W. so cool that even the Nazis couldn't get him down.

We thought we had a new king of cool with the Happy Days character Fonzie, a 1950s motorcycle dude in a television sitcom. But all of that was ruined when Ralph Macchio showed up in the show wearing anachronistic '70s clothing, and the program's integrity went downhill from there.

I admit to a vested interest in McQueen, or at least a connection to him. In addition to being a movie star, he was also famous as a motorcycle rider, and one of his motorcycle-riding buddies was my dad. They met in Los Angeles and rode down to Baja a few times during the early 1960s.

The point is that McQueen and most other heroes of cool had something that went way beyond the simplistic, street-tough caricature of the rugged individualist with a bad attitude. That wasn't, and isn't, what being cool is all about. It has little to do with acting surly, and it doesn't even necessarily entail being a rebel.

It's really about knowing who you are and not being bothered by those who can't handle that.

It's about having integrity and guts and being unflappably secure in your identity and values.

In short, cool means being unfazed by other people's judgmentalism and being undisturbed by events.

Lent requires that kind of detachment and aplomb.

People who walked around with smudges on their foreheads on Ash Wednesday were proclaiming responsibility for their own sinfulness and need for repentance in a world short on accountability.

That ownership of personal and transcendent moral certitude is cool.

Jesus had it, and so did his cousin, John the Baptizer. They were unaffected by shallow morality and the status quo.

And that is why many Christians take this time, these 40 days leading up to the Easter day of resurrection and redemption, to take honest, soul-searching spiritual inventory, to see what's in there that's uncool, that causes distress.

So this Lent, I commend to you the thoughts of a very cool guy, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan William, who explains what Christian religion/spirituality is all about: "It is about how God makes it possible for us to live a life that isn't paralyzed by guilt, aggression and pride. It asks us to come down to earth and face what's wrong with us."

We should be honest with God and ourselves about our faults and failings, because that's the only way to begin resolving and healing them. That's cool.