This is the third part of a series in which frank confession of a fault paves the way to spiritual enrichment. Enjoy...
Solitude often brings about the moments of our greatest peace or our greatest trial. Jesus knows what I'm talking about. According to the Gospels, he liked to retreat to deserted spots and commune with the Father—a welcome opportunity to recharge the batteries before stepping back into the fray (see Mk 1:32-39). I wonder what he prayed about? We cannot know for sure, but we can guess that these moments gave him the strength he needed to refocus his human nature on the tasks at hand—preaching the kingdom of God and bringing it about through healing, exorcism, and teaching.
But he also knew well the dangerous side of solitude. He spent forty days in the desert, tested by the devil. That can't have been a very pleasant experience, though it was a sweet victory he emerged with—proof that God was saving the world through him, and that evil didn't stand a chance. As soon as Jesus beat the devil in the wilderness, his public ministry began. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all agree on this decisive point: it was the first critical blow in the battle for humanity.
Like Jesus, we are all "driven into the wilderness" sometimes, forced to face down whatever demons (personal or otherwise) might come to cause us trouble. Such was my case today. Extended solitude made me keenly aware of a problematic tendency: I often feel compelled to love certain things even when I know I should be setting my heart on what is higher. In recent years, life has taught me that trying to answer inner longings with anything other than God inevitably results in frustration and pain. There is a hole in each of our hearts that only God can fill; "Our hearts are restless, Lord, until they rest in You," as St. Augustine so beautifully put it. And yet, as much as I realize this in theory, it is still very difficult to put into practice.
Thus it happened that later in the day, I found myself praying like a person sick with a fever, but with no idea of how to cure it. Thank God (literally), the right prayer came to my lips:
Jesus, teach me to love the right things.
Wishing to learn from the example of the Master, I tried reflecting on what Jesus loves. Almost immediately, the image of Jesus "moved with compassion" for a leper leaped into my mind (Mk 1:40-42). Jesus loved that man who came to him and said, "Lord, if you wish, you can make me clean." Why? Well, of course, he loved everyone, first and foremost. But let's look for a deeper answer by asking, Why is that story included in the Gospel? Perhaps it is to show Jesus' special appreciation for vulnerability. A severely sick man is ultimately vulnerable; he has no regard for appearances or pretense. He just wants to get well. One need only spend a small amount of time in a hospital to discover this. Hospitals are bastions of vulnerability.
I think Jesus liked the vulnerability of this man, because it was real. Again, there was no pretense. He wasn't trying to impress Jesus. He just wanted to get better. And Jesus was totally for it: "'I do wish. Be made clean.' The leprosy left him immediately, and he was made clean."
Jesus loves honesty. So should we, both in other people and in ourselves. When we identify our weaknesses and bring them to Jesus for healing and restoration, he responds. He always responds. I hope you, too, Dear Reader, may be willing to be vulnerable and honest with Christ, because this is the way he wants us. He can see through our masks. And he loves what he sees.
Sincerely,
Joezilla
This is the second part of a series in which frank confession of a fault paves the way to spiritual enrichment. Enjoy...
I confess: I am a kindergartener when it comes to love. Now mind you, I'm not talking about dating and romance and that sort of thing. I make no claims about my ability to sweep a girl off her feet (and were I to make such claims, I wouldn't publish them on this Blog!). No, I'm talking about real Love, the theological and ethical concept, the kind of love that impels us to capitalize its first letter. In short, I'm talking about the way Christ teaches us to relate to every other person in our lives.
It's kind of amazing, isn't it? We are told to love our neighbor as ourself, and we can easily understand this simple dictum. But do we really live it out? I often find myself confounded by Jesus' words that follow the Golden Rule in Luke's Gospel:
If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do the same. (Lk 6:32-33)
Whenever I read this passage, I have a sort of "Oh, yeah" moment in which I say, "Oh, yeah." I say this because I am reminded of how rarely I live this out in my daily existence. The autopilot of my life has not been programmed to include this sort of ethic. And that is an unfortunate fact for me, because this ethic is at the heart of all Christian ethics: God loves every person He created, and so we must love them, too. All of our interpersonal morality stems from this foundation.
As I said, I often neglect this core teaching of Christ. I am quite good at loving those who love me. I respond positively to people who like me, and that makes them like me even more. It's the exact opposite of a vicious circle. It's quite wonderful, in fact. And there's nothing wrong with it. Provided we don't live for human glory, it is right for us to love those who love us.
But the problem lies in the fact that I don't nurture such love for people who don't love me, or for people who don't know me. It is a rare and blessed mood that finds me choosing to love the random people I pass on the street. It is an equally rare and blessed mood that finds me choosing to love my enemies.
What lies at the heart of this problem, for me at least, is a dysfunctional understanding of love. I often unconsciously fall into the trap of dispatching love in a calculated way, "indirect egotism," in the words of Fr. Robert Barron: "I treat you well so that you will treat me well in return." When I dispatch love like a general dispatches troops, this is not love at all. Clearly, I need a higher understanding of love.
I think that this higher understanding can be illustrated by a simple equation:
LOVE = ATTENTION
This is the ideal to strive for: the object of my attention must be the object of my love. If I am looking at you, talking to you, thinking about you, or anything else, I must also be loving you.
This is what Christ did: "Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said..." (Mk 10:21a). Jesus loved perfectly. Yes, sometimes he was stern—like when he healed a man on the Sabbath whose hand was withered, and looked at his critics "with anger," "grieved at their hardness of heart" (see Mk 3:1-6). But even such a reaction, human as it was, was motivated by care, and charged through and through with love. He wanted better for them. Search the Gospels and find me a passage where Jesus acts out of pettiness or hatred. You won't find one. He was like us in all things except sin.
Inspirational author Phil Bosmans put it well when he said that we "shouldn't weigh out our love like a grocer." I am called by my God to love fully, truly, wholeheartedly. That means working toward making the object of my attention the object of my love. This is my ideal to strive for, demonstrated so wonderfully by Love Himself.
Attentively (wink wink!),
Joezilla
The following is the first of a series of posts in which the frank confession of a fault paves the way to spiritual enrichment. I hope that reading them proves as helpful to you as writing them does to me.
***
A gray midwinter morning in Chicago, about 11:00. I was driving to Loyola University, where I studied Theology for two years after college. Driving from the clean, green, comfy suburbs into the gritty city was an experience I chose to see as an adventure, but sometimes a particularly dangerous driver would threaten to shatter my optimistic view.
Today was one of those days. A fellow driver, speeding around me on a one-lane street via the the empty parking spaces by the curb, cruised ahead and turned off at a distant intersection.
A surge of anger within was followed by a mild flow of compassion for this impatient motorist, and I felt these words flow naturally to the surface of my thoughts:
God bless you...you idiot.
Those were the exact words.
I drove on, my heart expanding to feel a measure of compassion for this hurried traveler, and laughed at the oxymoronic nature of my "prayer." But looking back, I realize that even then, my judgment against him remained solid and intact. Who was I to judge this person? How could I know, for a fact, whether or not he had a compelling reason to speed around me? For that matter, how did I know it was even a guy? I had assumed both the gender and the guilt of this fellow human being.
I assume a lot of things. And I judge a lot of people. This, in fact, is the first of many confessions I will be making in this series: I am one of the most judgmental people I know. I'll even go so far as to say that if I've met you, I've judged you. Good, bad, or in-between, I have most definitely judged you in some way. And I am sorry.
Judging actions is another word for morality, and it is our duty to make such judgments every day. If we believe in our morality, then it is also our duty to take opportunities to encourage others to follow it. Otherwise, why do we follow it ourselves? But judging another person is not our job, and was in fact explicitly warned against by Christ. My most grievous fault.
Sometimes, oftentimes, my humanity gets the better of me. "God bless you, you idiot," that very human prayer that came straight from my heart, sums up quite nicely my condition as a Christian. I've been baptized; my sins were forgiven; my new life has begun. But like the kingdom of God that Jesus began on earth, my new baptized life has begun in time, and exists incompletely, imperfectly. I am a fallen creature endowed with supernatural grace; my mundane life is sprinkled with droplets of the divine. And though I believe the heavenly pull will prove stronger than any human force, I nonetheless find myself weighed down by nature from time to time.
The first step in fixing a problem is acknowledging it. So in future entries of this series, allow me to get some things off my chest. In so doing, I hope that you, Dear Reader, will find something that gives you hope and inspires you in your relationships with God, others, and yourself.
Sincerely,
Joezilla
