SPIRITUAL SUICIDE
God looked at everything he made and found
it very good
Genesis 1:31.
You will show me the path to life.
Psalm 16
I have come so that you may have life
and have it
in all its fullness.
John 10:10
On
Monday, I will have been a priest for 46 years. I can say with a bit of
confidence that God has, and continues to get, a bum rap. He has gotten a bum rap most often from the very
ones who act as his ambassadors – ambassadors sent to present him to a world
who needs desperately to feel the love of God.
Not
only is God getting a bum rap, but religion itself is getting a bum rap. Some
of the very ones who are anointed to announce God’s unconditional love are
spewing hate and calling it religion. As Blaise Pascal said, “Men never do evil so
completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” The
April 18 issue of the New Yorker Magazine has a cartoon of God looking down at
the earth with an angel standing at his side. The caption reads, “I’m beginning
to prefer those who don’t believe in me!”
I
for one, refuse to quit, drop out and turn it over to the religious
hate-mongers. I will go to my grave presenting a God of unconditional love and
I challenge all of you who have chosen to include this religious service as
part of your graduation to do the same. Religion today is in trouble, not so
much because of the power of its enemies, but because so many of its adherents
have surrendered. Edmund Burke was right, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." Those who surrender the battle, I believe, also surrender their right to criticize. When it comes to religion it has always been easier to take cheap shots from the sidelines than to get in the ring and do battle. I believe that if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.
Instead
of presenting a God who has created us in his own image and likeness, many of
us in the preaching business have created a God in our own image and likeness –stingy,
vindictive, grudge-holding and judgmental. Because I have tended not to join
them, I too have been their victim on several occasions. I have been raked over
the coals more than once for presenting a too lenient notion of God. I suspect
that Pope Francis, as popular as he is, is getting more than his share of
raking by some of the same religious types.
God looked at everything he made and
found it very good.
You will show me the path to life.
I have come so that you may have life
and have it
in all its fullness.
I
am convinced that God created each and every one of us, not to be his cringing slaves,
but to be all that we can be simply out of pure love. I believe he still looks at
us and finds us, underneath it all, very good. Because of that. I believe he
wants us all to have a full, happy, healthy and successful life.
God looked at everything he made and
found it very good.
You will show me the path to life.
I have come so that you may have life
and have it
in all its fullness.
Yes,
I believe with all my heart that God wants us to have a full life, but it’s neither
forced on us nor is it magic. It’s really a partnership to which we need to say
“yes.” We have to do our part. I not only believe it in the abstract, I have experienced
it in spades personally. W.H. Murray summarizes my
experience in this regard best when he said, “The moment one definitely commits
oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that
would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the
decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and
meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have
come his way.” In other words, find out what you want, really commit to it and if
it is truly good for you, God will shower you with more help than you can
imagine.
God looked at everything he made and
found it very good.
You will show me the path to life.
I have come so that you may have life
and have it
in all its fullness.
Yes,
I believe that God wants us to have a full satisfying life. However, I believe
it is really a partnership to which we have to assent. It is not magic. In my forty-six years of priesthood, I have
met so many people who want a God who works magic. They want God to “make it
all better” for them, but they are not willing to get up off their butts and do
something for themselves. They want it done for
them: God, the government, the church, their parents, their spouse or their
neighbors!
They
reminded of an old story I once heard. You may have heard it before, but it
fits! A religious man was caught in a
flood. As the water rose around his
house, he ended up on the roof. A boat
came by and offered to take him to safety.
“No, thank you, God will save me!”
Another boat came by and offered to take him. “No, thank you, God will save me!” Finally, a helicopter came and saw only his
head sticking out of the water and offered to take him. “No, thank you, God will save me!” Well, he drowned and went to heaven. When he got there, he was very upset with
God. “God, you promised to save me. Where were you?” God answered, “I can’t imagine what happened,
I sent two boats and a helicopter!”
It
has been a little over 50 years ago now, but I still remember it clearly, the
day I decided to take charge of my own life!
I have told it so many times that a few of you might be able to tell it
back to me, but many of you probably have not heard it so I will risk telling
it again. I was 21 years old, extremely bashful and chronically unhappy. I was scared to death of meeting new people,
of getting up in front of crowds, or allowing myself to try anything new. I worked like a dog trying to avoid these
situations. I was always hoping that
things would change, hoping that somebody would do something, hoping that I
could somehow avoid all of the “minefields” that I thought life offered. It took almost all my energy just to survive
emotionally. I worked very, very hard
avoiding as many new people and situations as I could. I even worked hard to hide my unhappiness.
For years I prayed continuously that things would get better for me, but they
didn’t! I wanted God to do something,
but he wouldn’t!
Then
one day, out of the blue, I decided to accept God’s help and come to my own
rescue by accepting a lift on some of those boats and helicopters! I was standing on a fire escape
at St. Meinrad with Pat Murphy, a good friend of mine. I was whining about how miserable I was, as
all unhappy people are so good at doing, when all of a sudden I blurted out, “I
am so damned tired of being miserable, bashful and scared that I am going to do
something about it myself, even if it kills me!
I’m going to take the bull by the horns and get over this!”
Beginning
that day, I decided to stand up to my own lazy streak. I decided to give up
blaming others. I decided to do hard things, on purpose, for my own good.
Little by little, step by step, inch by inch, I have gotten over about 95% of
my bashfulness. I still work at it, deliberately
placing myself in hundreds of new circumstances, placing myself before thousands
of new people and embracing hundreds of scary new opportunities. God did not
wave a wand over me and do all of this for
me, but once I “showed up for work,” God has continuously given me the courage
and strength to do what would have seemed "impossible" in the
past. Once I decided to do my share, God
was there to help. Looking back, I am amazed at the marvelous experiences and
unimagined opportunities I have had. One example - I have gone from being too
bashful to read in front of my class in college to speaking in front of
hundreds of people at a time, over one hundred times, in seven countries – all
because I stood up to my own cowardice starting on a fire-escape fifty years
ago.
Students,
no matter how many opportunities some people have, they want somebody to do it
for them! They are what John Sanford
calls “amniotic people,” people who go through life with their umbilical cords
still connected. Amniotic people want to
be taken care of. They want to find
strong people to lean on and make responsible for their happiness. They are convinced of their own helplessness
and powerlessness. The world and the
church are full of these kinds of people!
God looked at everything he made and
found it very good.
You will show me the path to life.
I have come so that you may have life
and have it
in its fullness.
Students,
today we hear a lot about suicide – the taking of one’s own life. It is such a tragedy and affects more and
more families – maybe some of you here today have been affected by it. Each year at our Blue Christmas Mass here at
Bellarmine, I am stunned by the growing number of people who have experienced
it in their families. My heart goes out to them.
However, there is another kind of suicide that
is growing even faster. I call it “spiritual suicide.” “Spiritual suicide” is the result of constantly
saying “no” to the many God-given opportunities to grow and change so that we
can claim that full and happy life that God wants for us! “Spiritual suicide” is a type of terminal
laziness, the result of a whole series of bad choices, the result of sitting on
our hands and then blaming God and those nebulous “circumstances” for our
unhappy lives, even after he has sent us fifty boats and twenty helicopters!
