Al Pacino and Elton Trueblood...Together at Last

In Al Pacino – In Conversation with Lawrence Grobel Pacino is asked about screen testing for the role of Michael Corleone in The Godfather.

Pacino - At first I didn't care if I got the part or not. The less you want things, the more they come to you. If it's meant to be, it will be. Every time I've stuffed or forced something, it hasn't been right.

Grobel - Yet you always knew you'd get the part, didn't you?

Pacino - You just get a sense of things sometimes. You just know it. It's kind of simple to assess something if you allow it to happen. It's when the ego and greed get in the way that it's harder to assess what the situation is. But if you step back and you take a look at it, you can sense what's going to happen. If I hadn't gotten the Godfather role, it would have surprised me, frankly.

Pacino was 39 or so when he said that. Throughout the 1979 interview Pacino bears a mantle of surety that stops short of arrogance. He is confident in his acting, yes, but not too confident. He ascribes to standards that are beyond the reach of his craft.

Because he reaches for his own high standards he creates a film and stage presence that consumes everything around him. “He had so much violence in him that he shattered the mystical line that allows the audience to feel comfortable. He scares the s*** out of me,” wrote Arvin Brown, reviewing one of his plays.

We are captivated by excellence, and Pacino’s career testifies that striving for high standards is the noble way to escape the mediocrity for which most of us settle. That truth applies to all us, whether plumbers or actors or preachers.

I am reminded of a gem given to me recently by my octogenarian friend Mary Mills. In the foreword to Elizabeth O'Conner's Call to Commitment, Elton Trueblood wrote this:

There are, at one point on this earth, men and women who have been so touched by the love of Christ that they tithe their time as well as their money, make their secular occupations into ministries, and pray and study and witness and serve. These same people have avoided spiritual pride by virtue of the fact that their standard is so high they never reach it. They are conscious daily of the contrast between their standard and their practice.

To see the great distance between where we are and where we would like to be is ambitious. But to see the distance between where we and where God would have us be is something altogether different. It is imaginative. It is visionary. It is spiritual.

Whatever it is, it can’t be found on eBay, but it can drag us out of bed in the early mornings and keep us at task until late in the night. It is to live audaciously close to God. It is to imitate God.

One of my Jewish friends goes so far as to say that striving for a high standard is part of being a tsaddiyq – a righteous one – and that the human grasp for the unobtainable is part of God’s way of finishing an unfinished creation.

So I pray the lyrics to one of my favorite songs, Sweet Tequila Blues by Chip Taylor/Carrie Rodriguez:

I keep looking for it,
I hope I never find.
If I get close to it,
Just put me on the train.

I pray for my children that they would be captured by a dream that forces them to stretch, and I pray for me that I never lose my restless stretching.

Between the second and third Sundays of Advent, 2006