TO SAVOR OR TO SAVE

You and I live in a world of conflict. The newspapers and magazines, radio and television are full of stories about mankind's inhumanity to mankind. But the greatest conflict goes on not in the world around us but in the world inside us. Every day we are torn between doing what we would like to do and doing that which we know we should do. It is a conflict between faith and fulfillment.

Something inside us tells us that we will not be fulfilled unless or until: unless we have this, until we can do that. Something else inside us tells us that that which we believe will be fulfilling is merely and empty glass. The conflict will not go away because we cannot escape the barrage all around us and inside us.

We want to be the Good Samaritan but we also want to say Good Riddance. We know we should help the person in need and yet we know that he will probably be a burden we would rather not carry. Do we stop and help or do we look the other way?

There is something deep inside us that knows what to do, what should be done, the desire to do the right thing. That something is our faith. But there is also something inside us that is not so deep. In fact, it is rather shallow. And because it is rather shallow, it is on the surface, right there at the top, demanding our attention. It is the desire to do that which is pleasing, satisfying, seemingly filling. It is the desire to use the good of creation for ourselves.

There would seem to be no real conflict between the shallowness of life and the depth of our faith even when the conflict takes place at the same time. But there is. Writer and wit E.B. White (Salt of the Earth): "If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning, torn between the desire to save the world and a desire to savor the world. That makes it hard to plan the day!"

We've all been there. We are all there, every day. Our faith fills us with the desire to save what is wrong with this world, to correct the mess that we are in. Our desire for fulfillment – to be all that we are and all that we can be, as deep as that sometimes is, as shallow as it often is -- shoves us more into the mess rather than helping us solve the mess.

The conflict will never go away, not because we will never save the world. It has already been saved. It will not go away because it's – we've – been too busy either wallowing in misery or wallowing in wealth. Our misery stems from the fact that we don't know how blessed we really are and our wealth creates a desire that is never satisfied.

The fact of the matter is that we can both savor the world and save it – or at least continue the salvation – by simply living out a life of faith. Faith helps us understand the goodness of creation that is to be savored and gives us the strength to use it in loving service to God, others and self. Saving and savoring are two sides of the same coin and not two different and contradictory ones.