Harold and Maude is an old movie about an eccentric young
man who is fascinated with death and an eccentric old woman who is fascinated
with life. They meet by accident while doing what they both enjoy doing -
attending the funerals of total strangers.
Maude, the eccentric old woman, is a serious student of life. She teaches
young Harold how to wake up and savor every delicious moment of life. In what
has to be the most crucial line of the movie, Maude says to Harold: "You
know, Harold, there are a lot of people who enjoy being dead!" Her point
is this - a lot of us are "dead" inside a long time before we're
buried. Norman Cousins put it this way. “Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.” Someone else puts it this way, "Humans, unlike insects, start out
as butterflies and end up in cocoons!"
Why do so many of us choose to go through
life half-asleep? Obviously, because a wide-awake life is so often scary and
painful! Do we not say that "ignorance is bliss?" and "what you
don't know won't hurt you?" Waking up is the riskiest business on earth.
We endanger the status quo, the way things are now! When we really wake up,
we disturb our comfort. If we don't have the guts to deal with the ensuing
problems and chaos that come to light, we endanger our very sanity.
We spend a lot of time making sure we don't wake up: sleeping too much, the
over use of drugs, too much work or an excess of entertainment. On the other
hand, we spend millions of dollars on therapists to help us wake up. We spend
millions of hours in self-help groups so that we can become more aware of
what's going on around us and within us.
We often use the words "religion" and "spirituality" interchangeably. Religion is about performing certain external acts. It is something that happens outside us. Spirituality is about waking up on the inside! Jesus said we needed both religion and spirituality, but warned of the dangers of mere external religious acts that are done without any inner conversion of the person doing them.
The work of spiritual growth is about resisting the temptation to deliberately
go to sleep, the temptation to avoid pain, the temptation to go through life
deliberately dull and unaware. The work of spiritual growth involves standing
up to our own cowardice in the face of life; resisting that part of us that
does not want to know. Most people resist this work because they fear finding
the worst about themselves when in reality, if they actually take a good look,
if they take their whole being apart and examine it, they will find that there
is much good and genuine about who they are!
Five years ago, I wrote a little autobiographical book about that very thing. It is called
"Between Courage and Cowardice: Choosing to Do Hard Things for Your Own
Good." We all live in a world between the poles of courage and
cowardice. Between those two poles, we choose either personal growth or personal
stagnation. In my book, I trace the hard decisions that I have made personally, from
age six to the present, unconsciously in the beginning and sometime consciously later on, that have contributed to the kind of person that I have
become. I believe with all my heart that we actually create the persons we
become. Our lives, as we experience them, are a result of how many times we
have chosen courage over cowardice, the road less traveled over the road most
taken. Aristotle was right, "Excellence is never an accident. It is always
the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution; it
represents the wise choice of many alternatives - choice, not chance,
determines your destiny.”
Today's text refers to all the waiting and
watching Christians would do until the Second Coming, whenever it does happen.
The "watching and waiting" is not about trying to predict anything,
but on "waiting and watching in joyful hope" and "living lives
of preparedness" for something wonderful, whenever it does happen!
The best way to prepare for death is not
to focus on dying, or tying to predict when the end is coming, but on living in the here and now; not focusing on the
future, but focusing on the present. It's not a tragedy to die. It's a tragedy to get to
the end of your life and realize that you never really lived. The tragedy is to
look back over your life and realize that you always took the path of cowardice to
protect yourself, to look back and realize you spent the whole time spinning a
cocoon around yourself to protect you from having to do something unfamiliar and uncomfortable.
In such a cocoon, we can live in a coma-like state. We spin that cocoon because the real
world is too much trouble, too much work. We prefer to go back to sleep.
Maude was right -"A lot of people enjoy being dead." They prefer
comfort over challenge, safety over growth, invisibility over visibility. The
ideal set of circumstances for them is a womb-like environment: warm, safe,
secure, with all their needs met. They spend their lives backing away from what
would really make life, life! It takes guts to stay awake, to be alert and to
be on guard. For many, that's just too much trouble! As Thomas Merton said, "The greatest temptation in life is to settle for too little!"
Jesus did not put us here to wait for
death, to predict and wait for the end, but to live fully! To live fully, we
must cultivate a "mindfulness" about life. We must learn the
discipline of staying awake, keeping a sharp eye out, looking around us and
being constantly alert. From the title of my book, we must "choose to do
hard things for our own good" and resist "the road most
traveled." To the extent that we accept our own call to be all we can be,
the mission and purpose of our own lives, we will work against anything, within
or without, that would hold us back!
The urge to go to sleep is powerful. We are called to resist it! We are called to live
"on purpose" and "with purpose." We must choose courage and
reject cowardice. In the words of Jesus, we "must be watchful and alert so
that he will not come suddenly and finding us sleeping!”
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