WHAT DO WE REALLY NEED?

Back in the day, way back in the day, I remember overhearing a conversation between two mothers both of whom and whose families I knew. One was talking about her son whom she said was trying to find himself. My first cynical thought was that I didn’t know he was lost, but I really knew what she meant. He was at a stage in his young life where he really did not know who he was or even what he needed. And he was not alone.

I remembered that conversation while Arlena and I were watching Disney’s The Princess and the Frog. (By the way, there tends to be a lot of good theology in Disney animations and you don’t have to dig too deeply to find it.) There was a line in one of the songs that said something like this: “You need to know who you are before you know what you need.” Isn’t that the truth?

We know there is much that we tend to want and almost believe that we need. As we are unpacking from our move, we are discovering that we have a lot of things we thought we needed but actually wanted but really did not need in the first place. Our wants and our needs got mixed up in the moment. Now Goodwill and the Vietnam Vets are becoming the beneficiaries of our non-necessities.

If there is any consolation in this, and there is very little to be honest, we are not alone. Is the issue that, like the young man in the conversation, we’re still trying to find out who we are so that we can honestly discern between wants and needs or do we ever find out who we are so that we go through life searching for an elusive answer to one of life’s fundamental questions?

Is the real life-question “Who am I?” And is there an answer? Well, there had better be. And there is. I am a priest, a husband, a father, a grandfather for starters. I could add to the list. But who am I essentially? Is there a word that envelopes each and every one of these other words that I use to describe myself? And when I find that word, will it tell me not only who I am but also what I need?

The answer for me is “yes”. And that word that describes all of me is “Christian.” What kind of Christian I am and how I live out my Christian faith aside, it still tells me all that I need to know about what my needs are. The one need I have, the one need any one of us has who claims the name “Christian” is to make certain all my words and actions are loving, loving and serving the other first and foremost.

No matter what our vocation is at the moment – priest, student, husband, wife, child, boss, etc. – everything we say and do is to be said and done in a loving and serving manner. Until we come to that understanding about our life, we are still trying to find ourselves. Finding out who we are (Christian) helps us know what we need in living out the moment. We will be given whatever we need, but we have to live it day by day.

BEST FOOT FORWARD

Growing up we have all probably been encouraged when going out into the world to “put our best foot forward.” Sounded like a good idea. If we always did the best we could, always showed the best side of ourselves, we would make it in this world, whatever “make it” meant to us back then or to those encouraging us to look good to the world and all whom we would encounter in our journey through life.

Over the years we have tried to live out those words that sounded very wise – and they still are. The only problem is that in always trying to put our best foot forward we often fell flat on or face. We tried to do or best, or at least tried to do what we thought was expected of us, and we came up short, sometimes very short. And sometimes trying to do our best turned into a disaster.

We may have even been tempted to give up trying because we could never please everyone, because it seemed that there was always someone who found fault with our efforts even when we did the very best we could. The truth is that we have never stopped trying to do our best because we are personally never satisfied with anything less than the best we can do even if someone else could do it better – and probably did.

We stumble and fall when trying to put our best foot forward whenever we try to be more than we are and do more than we possibly can. We all have limitations. No one is all-powerful. No one has all the skills for every conceivable situation. No one. And so when we find ourselves in places where we would rather not be because the situation demands more of us than we can possibly do, if we try to pretend we can handle it, we wind up falling flat on our faces.

Putting our best foot forward demands that we are honest with ourselves about both our gifts and our limitations. It demands that we are honest and humble enough to admit that what is being asked of us is beyond us, beyond our ability to make an even adequate response. Putting our best foot forward in such instances means walking away rather than making the situation worse than it may already be.

My guess is that we have all been there. We have offered to lend a hand when the hand we offered was not capable of doing anything but making a mess of what was going on at the time. We offered the hand because we thought it was the right thing to do because, well, we’re supposed to help, are we not? No, we are not. Not when the help we offer won’t really help at all.

What happened, of course, is that we have learned the hard way. That advice early on in our lives took time to both root and to understand. We still, at times, walk into a situation when we should walk away because the best foot forward is sometimes, in reality, a backward step away.

WE HAVE THE WHOLE WORLD IN OUR HANDS

In one of our Eucharistic Prayers the celebrant says, on behalf of all of us: “You formed us in your own image, giving the whole world into our care, so that in obedience to you, our Creator, we might rule and serve all your creatures.” In other words, we, you and I, together and separately, have the whole world in our hands. Yes, I know, in the old spiritual we sing about God that “He’s got [bad grammar] the whole world in his hands.” And God does, of course.

But God has handed most of the control over this world to us, into our care. It is now up to us – and has always been so – to do the best we can in this world. We are to rule and serve everyone, every creature, at the same time. How we rule and serve will determine what this world looks like and what it will become, as it always has. This world today is the product of how those who came before us ruled and served.

We are in control. We rule. We serve. We rule and serve as one. The problem has been and continues to be that often when we rule, how we rule turns out to be self-serving rather than other-serving. When we are in charge of whatever we are in charge, do our actions serve us first and foremost or do they serve others first and foremost and who will reap the good or the bad from how we have ruled, from how we used our power?

That’s a touch question is it not? We know that power corrupts because power is intoxicating, very much so. There comes a high in holding power over someone or something. And it is so easy to revel in that power and then to abuse it, to use it to serve self rather than to serve those over whom we have that power. We see it constantly in our political system – no party being exempt. We see it throughout society throughout our world, and from time immemorial to boot.

Perhaps that is why the church in its wisdom and grace reminds us in that prayer of what our responsibilities are. To be honest, I’ve said that prayer hundreds of times and it was only the last time I said it that I actually heard those words in such a way that they almost made me stop in my tracks. They’ve haunted me ever since. They have forced me to stop and reflect upon the tremendous responsibility that is mine as an individual and all of us together have in being obedient to our God who has given this world over to us to shape and form.

Ruling and serving together. When we separate them, we have two classes: the rulers and the servers. But when those in charge rule to serve others, they are served as well. We know we get more joy and pleasure out of doing for others than when we use others to serve us, to give us pleasure. The temptation is always there to abuse the power and authority given to us by God and there are times when we succumb to that temptation. The world is in the mess it is in because of the abuse of power. I am partially guilty. We all are. It’s time to begin cleaning up the mess by being rulers who serve. That’s all of us.

AS SEEN ON TV

Wouldn’t it be interesting if for one twenty-four-hour day for one full week our personal life was secretly videoed and that at the end of the week the video was given to us for our eyes only? We could plug it into our VCR and watch. What would we see on the TV? What would what we see tell us about our life? Would we be proud or humbled? Would we be embarrassed and ashamed? What?

I began to wonder in this way as I was unpacking my books after our move, putting them in my bookcases and coming across Parker Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak. It’s a little volume he wrote almost twenty years ago but still resonates with me after all these years. Our life does speak whether we are aware of that truth or not. Think of the secret video. Whatever is on that tape speaks about who we are, about our values, about our faith, about our being.

Our life speaks about us and there is nothing we can do to prevent it. One of Parker’s points, in fact, the main one, is for us to be so in control of our life – what we say and what we do, and how we say and do – so that we are truly saying by our words and actions what we as faithful Christians want our life to say about us to anyone who crosses our path.

That is no easy task. In fact, it is a life-long journey in trying to become what we know we should be because we never, ever really get there. One of the reasons we do not is that, if you are like me, most of my days are humdrum and for the most part on most of those days I hardly reflect on how my life speaks to others or even the fact that it actually does. I go from day to day just going on and on.

That says a lot about me and, if you are like me, about ourselves in particular and our world in general. As Christians we are to be role models to others about what Jesus taught and what we say we believe. We know that but, again, are barely conscious of that reality on a day-to-day, let alone a moment-to-moment basis. We blithely give our life permission to say things about what it means to be a Christian when what we are saying is not that Christian.

Our responsibility is to be in charge of what our life is saying to others, even to ourselves. Perhaps the reason why we are so unaware of the fact that we are actually saying something by the way we live is that we hardly ever take the time to reflect on just what that life is saying in the first place. That would be one good reason to have our life videoed. Then we could actually see what our life is saying.

That isn’t going to happen, of course. That might be good. Sadly, if you are like me, we would be too embarrassed by what we see: a person who is unaware of the responsibility to let our life speak as Jesus would have us speak, as we would have it speak.

SLOWING DOWN

Not too long ago my younger brother, who will remain nameless to prevent further ignominy, decided he needed a generator just in case his home lost power. So he went to The Home Depot, found the section containing said generator, and pulled it off the shelf immediately tearing his rotator cuff and a few other parts of his shoulder. He is now presently recovering from surgery to repair the damage.

There was an even greater damage in that foolish act, one to his ego. He thought he was 45 instead of 70. Our Mom, in her 80’s, used to look into the bathroom mirror and ask “Who is that old lady staring back at me?” Our bodies age much faster than do our minds, if we are so blessed. Yes, yes, yes, she was and we were thankful she remained sharp as a tack almost till the time she died at 96+. My 97-year-old mother-in-law? We can’t get anything past her either, thankful as we are.

Slowing down in body is part of aging. A friend of mine said to me years ago, “I feel like a 36-year-old with chronic fatigue syndrome.” So how did he live a happy and contented life? He did by pacing himself, realizing his limitations before they got him into trouble (unlike my brother). And mostly, he did so by being thankful he had lived a long and full life knowing that it was all grace – and had been for years – from here on in.

We live in a society, in a world, that is, for the most part, always in a hurry. It is more than slowing down and smelling the roses. It is about understanding that God gave and continues to give us this life as along as God so chooses to do so, and to relish and revel in it to the best of our ability. That means, in the words of an old song, “Slow down, you move too fast. You’ve got to make the moment last.”

Easier said than done, of course, especially because of the unseen and often intangible forces that are behind us pushing us to get moving – and the faster the better. But it can be done. It needs to be done. And it is not just for us older people. Everyone needs to slow down, perhaps especially the young, who seem to have boundless energy and no boundaries and thus get into more trouble that they should. We elders know that from personal experience.

No one knew this and was more aware of this need to slow down than Jesus. He was always being pushed to do more and move farther to meet all those needs others had of him. But he could not meet those needs if he first did not take care of himself, physically, mentally, spiritually. That’s why he always took the time to do so.

We are no different. And, again, age makes no difference. We all have the need to slow down, rest and reflect, not just to prevent us from trying to lift something we should never have tried in the first place, but simply to reflect on how well we are fulfilling and living out our present vocation, whatever that happens to be.