AVOIDING THE TRUTH

There's a classic line, okay, semi-classic, in the Tom Cruise - Jack Nicholson movie "A Few Good Men." Lawyer Cruise is confronting General-and-Antagonist Nicholson about the truth. Nicholson rises from his witness chair and shouts at Cruise, "You can't handle  the truth!"

Most of us can't. Not the Gospel truth anyway; or perhaps I should say the truth of the Gospel. We may not be as contemptuous as Pilate who asked Jesus, "What is truth?" But we run from it, shy away from it, almost avoid it at all costs. For the truth of the Gospel message is very, very costly in terms of commitment and consequences. It comes at a price: that of our very lives.

Most of us, I suspect, pick and choose when it comes to the truth, like Nicholson's General. We choose that part which suits us and neglect, overlook or deny that which causes us anguish. Then in order to defend our denial of the whole truth, we turn the tables and accuse those who call us on the carpet of not being able to understand or, in Nicholson's words, handle the truth.

We also use the tactic of vociferously defending that part of the truth, that part of the Gospel message which suits us and which we can uphold. We make so much noise that those who would challenge us on the other aspects of the truth which we neglect can hardly get a word in edgewise. We become relentless in our pursuit of a partial truth, often very relentless.

We become crusaders for an issue that seems valid but which seems to become the only issue. But what we do in the process is miss the greater issue, the greater Gospel truth perhaps because it is so clear and so simple. That very basic message is that we must love everyone else with our total being, no matter who they are, no matter what they do., even what they believe.

But we do not. We claim that we love the sinner but hate the sin. But the sin that we crusade against subsumes the sinner and we can no longer recognize that fact. We claim we love Joe Smith but hate his adulterous ways. Actually we hate that Adulterous Joe Smith. We cannot seem to separate the two.

It is easy to condemn sins. It is very difficult to love the one who commits those sins or what we perceive to be sins: they may, in fact, not be sins, only that we have decided they are. Jesus loved everyone no matter what they did. He loved each person as a person. That was what brought about their conversions, not the condemnation of their sins.

Nicholson was right. As Christians, we do not really want to hear the truth of the Gospel because we would have to spend most of our time dealing with how we as individuals do not live out the truth of the message. That's no fun. It's more fun telling others that they can't handle the truth, that they are sinners. It's not fun realizing that at times we are no better than they, no fun at all.

AD-LIBBING OUR WAY THROUGH LIFE

 I saw a cartoon the other day of a husband and wife in bed, not being able to sleep. The husband says: "It's funny...when I was a kid, I thought grown-ups never worried about anything. I trusted my parents to take care of everything, and it never occurred to me that they might not know how. I figured that once you grew up, you automatically knew what to do in any scenario. I don't think I'd have been in such a hurry to reach adulthood if I'd known the whole thing was going to be ad-libbed."

A little comic license in that conversation. Not all of life, nor even most of life is ad-libbed. Most of the time we know what to do, what is right, what our faith demands. That does not mean that it will be easy to do what we should. It does mean, though, that knowledge and experience give us the courage to do what is right even when it is difficult, sometimes very difficult.

But there are indeed times in our lives when we simply are not sure what we should do, what is right, what our faith demands. But we have to do something. We have to make a response. When we do, while we are responding, or at least in hindsight, it often seems like we are ad-libbing our response. Our prayer is that before we act, we get it right or after we have acted that we got it right.

We all want answers, the right answers. We all want to know what to do, what our faith demands that we do – or not do. We want black and white. We want the church to be the place where the right answer is given to every question. We certainly don’t want our church to be the place where there are more questions than answers, even more and worse, a place where there is no answer.

And yet to believe that we have all the answers means that all the questions have already been asked. They haven't, of course. Moral and ethical questions keep being asked as we learn more and more about the human condition we live in. And when in our daily lives we come up against a question that has not been asked and for which an answer has not been ascertained and for which we have to make a response, we have to ad-lib, do the best we can.

There is a lot of controversy in the church today over certain questions, questions to which many demand answers, questions which some say are already answered but which others say otherwise. There are those who are unwilling to live with uncertainty, especially in this time of change, time of discontinuity. There are those who say that the church must be the rock of stability with rock-solid answers.

No one of us really wants to ad-lib our way through life. It would be too discomforting, sometimes too discouraging. Yet, there are times when we really do not have any other choice. We have to live our life of faith as best we can, not always knowing for certain, praying that our ad-libbed response is based on what we truly believe Jesus would have us do; and if it is not, asking for forgiveness, insight, and the strength to make amends if at all possible.

JAPE, DUSTY AND BIG D

For whatever reason, last week I was reflecting back on my days in seminary: twelve long years that actually passed quickly, as have these past 53 years as a priest. I thought about all those men, and they were all men back then, who passed through my life as I did with theirs. So many of them have passed on, of course, time waiting for no one and nothing, some in the prime of life, others after having lived a good, longer life.

There was Chuck who died of cancer at 54. He and I had entered seminary as high school freshmen in September of 1957. Chuck was usually "Charlie" to all of us. We all had nicknames (mine was "Willy"). There was E.J. (Skip, to others), Frenchy (who has a French name), Herc (for Harlan), Ishtvan (Hungarian for Steve), Eli (whose last name is Whitney), Tiny (who was anything but). But you get the point.

We even had nicknames for our professors/teachers: Monsignor Gerald Durst, whom we all called "Dusty" -- not to his face, of course! There was also "Jape" (for Joseph P. Marzen, our Dean of Men who was called "The Disciplinarian" back then, and rightly so); and "Big D" (our English teacher who stood 6"4").  These also are resting in peace with no more students to torment or to torment them.

Sometimes it takes a reminder to remind one of one's past and the people and places who were part of that past and who helped make us what we are today. When we reflect back on that past, what we discover, or at least what I have discovered, is that it was neither as bad as I had imagined it to be going through it, nor as good as I would like to have remembered it to be.

And even though that past has had an effect on our present lives, the effect is not as profound as we often attribute it to be. For depending on the present situation, it is easy either to romanticize the past beyond recognition or to indict it for all present failures and shortcomings. The past is never that good, that bad, or that powerful. And if it is, then we are still living in the past.

And neither are the people who have passed through our lives, no matter how long they were in our lives, no matter how strong of a hold they had over us at that time. They, too, were never that good, that bad or that powerful. For, I hope, we have moved on and so have they.

Jape, Dusty and Big D were truly powerful forces in our lives as young seminarians, mostly, upon reflection, for good, and sometimes, to be honest, for not so good. But so am I in my relationship with others. So are all of us, I suspect.

We are what we are partly because of our past. But who we will be depends more now on the present than on the past. That is true for us as individuals, as a church, as a diocese, as a community. We may well sing the praises of the saints of the past, and justly so. But we must always be in tune to the present if, in the future, we want this present to be remembered well.

WHERE HAVE YOU GONE, PETER, PAUL, AND MARY?

I'm a romantic. I think part of the good, old days were a lot better than today. Then, too, maybe I want to idealize that part of my history that shaped and molded me. Either way, I'll stand by my beliefs.

Part of those beliefs are the fact that much of the idealism my generation believed in, peacefully fought for and expounded centered around helping the helpless. That idealism was put into song and called us to our task. The Pete Seegers and Peter, Paul and Marys of my college days reminded us that putting another down in order to lift ourselves up was not only wrong but it was wrong-headed. It would come back to haunt us in the end. We were advocates of the Social Gospel.

Seminaries were full and they were full of idealists right out of college. The average age of those in seminary was 24-25. Today it is 45-46. The bottom dropped out of seminary enrollment about the time that the so-called Me Generation kicked in. Instead of others coming first, this new generation put them a distant second, expect where the other could be of use in making them even more comfortable and secure. Peter, Paul and Mary lost out to Looking Out for Number One.

The times? They aren't a changing very much. What is changing (and here I have no sociological proof expect my own assumptions, and you know what they say about assumptions) is that those who sold out to self found, twenty years later, that it was not all that rewarding or fulfilling. A few even went to seminary in order to serve those whom they may have once used.

The church, sadly and tragically for all involved including those who dropped out of being part of a church, did not recognize the loss of several generations until it was too late. Because of that we are older and grayer and want to know how we can capture young people again. We won't do it by catering to what the Me Generation desired: their needs. My opinion of the rapidly growing non-denominational churches is that they are Me-Generation Churches in disguise.

I say that not out of jealousy. Honest. I say it out of the conviction that our first call as Christians is a call to serve others, to serve, in the words of my favorite theologian, Robert Capon, the last, the least, the lost, the lonely, and the dead of this world. They are to come first, their needs. In Jesus’ own words: “I am among you as one who serves.” He did not need to add: “Go, and do likewise.”

If we are to capture the hearts and minds of our younger generation, we must do it by challenging them to think of others first, as Peter, Paul and Mary challenged my generation. What we discovered, if I may generalize, is that we have been rewarded one hundred-fold, although in ways we never imagined but better than we could have ever hoped for. There is more joy in serving others than in being served. We need to teach that, maybe re-learn that. And when we do, when my generation's grandchildren learn that, we'll need to build more churches. Guaranteed.  

LIFE IN THE MIDDLE

If one believes that the Bible is a commentary on life, and in many ways I truly think it is, then one can discern a short synopsis of life: life begins as good and life ends as good, but it is in the middle that we have our problems. Genesis begins by reminding us that all of creation, including and especially life itself, is good. It can be nothing else but good because God is good and God creates nothing that is not good in and of itself, including and especially we human beings.

The last book of the Bible, Revelation, ends with the reminder that the ending of life will also be good. There will be new heavens and a new earth when all will be well. No matter what has happened to us in this life, no matter how painful or tragic, in the end all will be well because we will be celebrating and living an eternal life with God, who, because God is who God is, will make all things well.

In the meantime, between birth and death, life is not always so good. In fact, as Genesis records in its parabolic manner, things went from bad to worse very quickly, from a simple sinful act of disobedience to brother killing brother in a fit of jealous rage to the whole of creation being damned because of humanity’s sinfulness. Yet starting all over after the Flood unfortunately did not correct the mess.

Life is, well, messy. It’s not a disastrous mess at it may sometimes seem to be but it’s certainly not pretty and certainly not something to brag about where one given the opportunity to sing life’s and humanity’s praises. In fact, we would be hesitant to do such because we all know that we are the makers of this mess and the reason why, in spite of our best efforts, little if any progress seems to be made – can be made.

We live in a confusing and unsteady world, a world made so not because God has abandoned us but because God gives us the free will to make foolish and selfish choices. But we go on. We have no choice. Well, we do, but let’s not go there. We go on because we want to go on because, in spite of the messiness of life, in spite of our sinfulness, in spite of the bad that sometimes clouds the good, there is much good about our own personal lives and life itself, more good than bad. And even when that which is not so good seems to have the upper hand in our lives, we know we are not fighting the battle alone. We have one another.

In many ways that is why we gather each week as a parish family. We come here to St. Brendan’s to support one another in our individual and corporate faith journeys. We prop each other up, hold one another accountable and know that God will give us both the will and the means to help clean up the messes we have made and become less messy in the future.

We live life in the middle, between birth and death, between those good times and, at the same time, experiencing the good of life itself that comes between the bad times. We are never discouraged and we never give up because we are fed by the Eucharist and by the love of one for another.

LIVING WITH UNCERTAINTY

Most people I know are quite comfortable living in a confusing and uncertain world where one does not always have all the answers. I find myself in this position most of the time, but not always. There are times in my life when I do not like the uncertain nature about life. There are times when I want to know what is the absolute right thing to do, what is the absolute right answer.

And because I cannot separate my faith from the rest of my life, the questions always boil down to one: What is it that God would have me do in this situation? Sometimes after much thought and prayer, I know what God would have me do. Now that does not mean that I will always do it. It only means that I know beforehand what I should do. I know that I should turn the other cheek. That does not mean that I always will.

Yet there are other times in my life when I just do not know what is right, what it is that God wills, what it is I should do. I know that there are those who believe that they have a lock on the truth, that they know what it is that God wants, and that they can quote chapter and verse to prove it. And then they do. The problem is that it is not that simple. For as soon as we use scripture to back up one belief, we can't play loose with it when it comes to other situations.

If, for instance, one believes a certain action is immoral and then cites chapter and verse, one must also say that women are forbidden to talk in church, divorce is wrong and we should stone our children when they disobey us – also citing chapter and verse. We hold that war is immoral. But then, is it? They killed people by the tens of thousands, if you go by the numbers, in the Old Testament, and did so in the name of God. They, and we, were also told that we shall not kill and should turn the other cheek. We can't pick and choose our sins or have our actions be sins on one occasion and justifiable on another depending on circumstances. But we do!

That is not to say that anything goes. It does not. But it also does not allow us to state that one sin is worse than another. Yet we do. We insist that killing is worse than stealing. And even killing and stealing have their degrees of guilt. But to restate what I have said so often, difference in degree makes no difference. We are all sinners. A sin is a sin is a sin and it does not matter the sin.

What matters and what is truly important, is that we clean up our own house before we start to try to clean up someone else's. It also means that there are times when we may even be uncertain not only about what needs to be swept clean but where to begin and what to do next.

We live in a sinful and confusing world where the temptation is for the quick fix and the simple answer. There is no quick fix, at least for the great issues of our time. There is, however a very simple solution but one that is not easy to live out: love everyone all the time. We're not there yet. In the meantime, the struggle goes on. With God's love and grace we will grow stronger and better each day.

ON NOT BEING SATISFIED

Psychiatrist Gerald May: "We have this idea that everyone should be totally independent, totally whole, totally together spiritually, totally fulfilled. This is a myth. In reality, our lack of fulfillment is the most precious gift we have. It is the source of our passion, our creativity, our search for God. All of the best of life comes out of our human yearning, our not being satisfied."

One can read what May says with mixed feelings. It can be a case of good news and bad news. The good news is that     our frustrations with our failures are part of our natural longing to be fulfilled, to be satisfied, to finally find what we are looking for. The bad news is that we may never know what we are looking for, cannot even define what it is that would satisfy and fulfill us. That could lead us to simply being satisfied with the status quo and never striving for anything more than what is. It can allow us to accept our failures as part of human nature, a what-did-you-expect-from-a-limited-sinful-human-being-? approach to life. It can do that.

But there is that part of us which prevents this in all of us. It is that search for God or, rather, our desire to draw closer and closer to our Creator. That desire, I think, is innate. It arises from the fact that it is God who has created us and that godliness is part of our being and we want to know and understand what all that means.

As Christians we are quite aware that we always fall short of perfection in our lives. We also will not allow ourselves to be satisfied with anything less than with what we know is to be our goal in this life. And that is to be as God-like as Jesus was as frightening as that can sometimes be when we actually are like that. Knowing that we will never totally arrive at that point in our life in this life does not deter us from trying every day to be better than we were yesterday and to be even better tomorrow. And when we fail to accomplish this today, we know tomorrow is another day and another opportunity to be a better person than we were today.

Nevertheless, knowing all this, there is still that nagging feeling, as May intimates, that there is always that possibility that we will find a way to be perfect, to be fulfilled, to be physically and spiritually altogether. If that were not possible, we would never begin to try in the first place. We don’t start off on any adventure or project knowing that we will absolutely fail. Perhaps the reason for our making the attempt each day to be as perfect and fulfilled as possible is that our Creator is perfect and we have that part of God in us that believes perfection is possible.

What all this means to me is that life will always be a struggle between being satisfied with what-is and never being satisfied because what-is is not enough and what-we-want-to-be is an impossibility – in this life, of course. Perfection and complete satisfaction only come, of course, in eternity.

In the meantime, the grace of God, which is the Holy Spirit living in and working through us, keeps us never being satisfied with what is, no matter how good it is, because we know we can always do and be better. And it keeps us from being dejected by our failures because we know we have tried our best even though we have come up short. I guess it means that there is good news in the bad news and bad news in the good news and that no matter what, God always loves us and will never abandon us. Never.