A DIFFERENT KIND OF HOPE

When things are not going well with us, we tend to hope and pray that the situation will be reversed and that the old order will be restored even if the old order was not all that good – at least it was better than the present. That is our hope when stuck in a mess, when uttering the first word of prayer to God to get us out of the mess. Yes, we know that it can always get worse and that what we have now may be better than what can be. For certain we hope and pray that things won't get worse. We hope they will get better.

The outcome of our prayer, our hopes, our wishes and dreams is often totally in our hands. We hope to pass the final exam. It's all in our hands. Prayer won't help us pass the test; only study will. And sometimes what we hope for is both in our hands and in the hands of others. We need surgery. For our part, we hope the surgery to be successful, and hope the doctor, for her part, will do the best she can. And sometimes, after we've done our part and others have done theirs, the final outcome is still not fully in human control. It's up to God.

That kind of hope, a bad ending up good, is one we deal with all the time. So, too, are our hopes of making a present good even better. Those are universal hopes that know no time or place or circumstance or religion. Those hopes come with the territory of being human.

There is another kind of hope, however, that demands faith, first, last and always. As the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews reminds us, "Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." (11:1) Faith leads to hope, not the other way around. We have faith in the doctor or else we will not go under the knife. We have faith in ourselves, in our own abilities, or we will never pass the test. Faith precedes hope.

But as Christians it is the conviction of things not seen that make our hope a hope of a different kind. Such is our hope when faced with our own death, with the dying process. The conviction we have as Christians is in the resurrection, our own. Since we have no idea what death is like, we have no idea what we are hoping for when we say, when reciting the Creed, that we believe "in the resurrection of the dead and life everlasting.” But we believe and so we hope.

We don't like to think about dying, ever, and certainly not during this Advent season when all our thoughts are on new life, on Christmas. But the reason for Christmas, the reason why Jesus was born among us, was and is to give us hope for life beyond this life even if we do not know what that life is like. We will all surely die; but we live in faith with a different kind of hope.

Yet even more, Jesus’ life among was to give us hope in and for this life as well. We are not in control of the life to come, but we are very much in control of this life: what we do, what we say, what we believe. Advent is a reminder that if we want our hopes and dreams for this life to come true, to become realities, they will only become so if we live the life Jesus, the celebration of whose birth we anticipate, showed us how to live. Let us hope and pray we so live.

 

THE CONUNDRUM OF WEALTH

Last week Arlena and I took a bus trip with some family and friends to tour the Great Smokey Mountains National Park and the Biltmore Estate outside Asheville, NC. The Park is the only National Park that has no entrance fee. The Biltmore charges $49 plus and extra $10 if you want to carry along an audio about the mansion while taking a walking tour through it. If you don’t do the audio, you miss too much. The audio came with our tour package, thankfully.

The bus trip through the Park was like being submerged in God’s creation. Even though most of the leaves had already turned colors, they had also fallen to the ground. No matter, enough remained to stare in awe. Yes, I had seen beautiful fall foliage hundreds of time, maybe thousands. But every time there is the awe-factor, really, the God-factor, that can easily overwhelm and does.

The next day we drove to the Biltmore Estate. As the bus came around the final bend of the three-mile entrance way, there stood The Biltmore. It, too, was an awesome sight. The mansion has 250 rooms, over 40 bathrooms, a huge indoor swimming pool all contained in almost 179,000 square feet of space. All this and much more was the home for three people.

Yes, the staff lived in the house and many more were housed on the grounds giving employment to probably a hundred or more people and being paid “New York wages” as the audio informed us. Descendants of the first employees still live and work on the property. Yet, there is that nagging feeling that comes over you when you stand in awe of the structure, tour the building and grounds, try to calculate the millions of dollars it cost to build and furnish the place and think, “All this for three people!”

Over a million visitors come to the Biltmore each year. George Washington Vanderbilt, the grandson of Cornelius whose many millions were passed on to his hands, almost depleted his inheritance building the estate. He died prematurely at 51. His daughter had to open the estate for visitors in order to pay for the upkeep. His grandchildren are following their mother’s lead.

To me the Biltmore Estate is one of those conundrums of wealth. Just because one can built an estate like the Biltmore or, for the less-wealthy, $10-, $15- $20-million homes, should one? My wife and I live in a house too large for us. Should we? Most of us have more than we need even if we always seem to want more. Why? Low self-esteem? Or are we just greedy when enough is never enough but the joy of more never seems to satisfy – so we want more?

The Biltmore mansion is awesome and an example of what awesome wealth can produce. It is also a reminder that wealth can be used for selfish motives while at the same time serving the less affluent. It also asks, “Are there not better ways to use that wealth and still fulfill anything and all that one can desire and certainly, perhaps even more importantly, all one deserves? Actually, as the vista from the porch of the mansion and the road through the Park remind, God has already given us more than we can either desire or deserve.

WHAT COULD BE

Too many miles, too much caffeine, too restless to sleep all of which led to Arlena surfing the channels as we lay in bed. She stopped at the end of an old Murder, She Wrote. We had no idea what the story had been about but it must have been set around Christmas because Jessica was saying to Doc, “Christmas should be about what could be and not about what is.” Isn’t that so true?

Granted, this is not yet the Christmas Season no matter what the merchants want us to believe and to which they want us to respond by buying, buying, buying. However, what Jessica opined about the meaning of Christmas could be said not only about every season in the Church’s year but also about every one of us as Christians, namely, “Being a Christian should be about what could be and not about what is.” Even more: “Life itself should be about what could be and not about what is.”

Yet, more often than not we find the Christmas season and being a Christian and living our daily lives more about being about and responding to what is rather than what each and all could be. We get so overwhelmed by the present that we have little time and often no inclination to think about what could be, even what should be. And even when we take the time to ponder what could be, we throw up our hands in frustration because what is seems to be in control of our very lives.

Yes, there is very much good in what is. Life is not all that bad and not always difficult. But the good can always be better and whatever is not good also can be made better. But how? How do we make Christmas/being a Christian/life itself about being active, proactive in being about what could be? A quick and easy response might be to ask ourselves “What would Jesus do in such a situation?” The problem with that is that we have no idea what Jesus would do because we are not Jesus.

The better question to ask ourselves is “What would Jesus, my faith in Jesus, have me do?” Asking that question is the first step in making what is into what could be. That, in many ways, is the easy part. The hard part is actually doing what is necessary to make the present better, into what it could be were it not for our own sinfulness and selfishness. For the reason why things are not what they could and should be is simply that too many of us either like it the way it is for us or do not want to make the effort needed to make the changes that are needed.

None of this is a pretty picture, of course. But, then, when we look around and observe what is going in in the world about, the picture is not what it should or could be. Unless we are honest with ourselves about how bad that picture is in so many ways, and unless we resolve to do our part to do something about it, nothing will change. Individually we cannot make the world as it is into what it could be, but we can begin to make our own lives into what they could be. That is only a start, but a much-needed one.

MOTHER NATURE

Last week I was sitting in my office speaking with my wife as she walked through the woods behind our home. She told me that it was a gorgeous fall day outside and she was thrilled to be outdoors. When we hung up, I looked outside my window. Sure enough, the sun was shining, glistening off the waters of the Allegheny River. The temperature was in the high 50s and the wind was blowing. “Wow!” I said to myself. Good time for a walk.

Off I went to Dunkin Donuts a few blocks up for the cup of coffee that I needed and the donut I did not; but I was going to walk off the donut anyway, justifying to myself why I was defeating the purpose of the walk in the first place. On the way to the shop I encountered three men from one of the local yard-care companies blowing leaves off a property they were paid to tend. As fast as they blew the leaves from the grass, just as fast did Mother Nature’s wind blow them back. We all got a kick out of their futile work.

Earlier in the day I received a note from a friend who wrote to tell me that a former parishioner had finally died after a long, long bout with dementia. On the morning news were reports that the lava from the volcano in Hawaii was ready to destroy many homes in its unrelenting and unstopping path. And there was the news that Gordie Howe, the great Hall of Fame hockey player from the past had been struck down by a stroke. Mother Nature at work.

Then, of course, amid all of this news – and before and after and forever and ever – come the advertisements about how we can defeat, or at least delay, the ravages of Mother Nature: take this pill, go on the diet, visit this athletic club, have this surgery to make you look younger, etc. and etc. Of course there were the disclaimers that the pills were not approved by the FDA or that the side effects could kill or maim you before Mother Nature did. They may be able to make us look younger but they can’t actually make us younger. As for proper exercise and diet: that works only to a degree and especially to the degree we are willing to stick to it. Good luck on that!

Try as we might to defeat the realities of Mother Nature, in the end we always lose. That’s not so bad when we know what is in store for us when that end comes: eternal life when there is no wind to blow back the leaves, no pills to take to feel better, no surgery needed to make us look better, no exercise needed to stay fit. And if there is food in the life to come, I can eat all the donuts my heart desires and not put on an ounce. Wow!

But there is another “wow!” to consider, a “wow” in the here and now, in this life. In fact, the “wow” IS this life, the one God has given us and with which we are blessed despite the ways and whims of Mother Nature. Perhaps if we spent more time enjoying this life instead of fighting against it, in spite of the trials and hardships from Mother Nature from which no one escapes no matter how hard we try, we can look out our windows every day, in spite of any pain we may be in, and simply utter “Wow, wow! Thank you, God.”