Uphill and Downhill

It seems natural that every man wants to improve his lot in life.  Whatever his level of wealth, he wants more.  Whatever his level of intelligence, he wants to understand more.  And whatever man’s inventions, he wants to make those inventions even better.  Man strives constantly to improve his lot.

So why does it seem that in matters of faith and man’s relationship to God, history seems to have shown that man takes actions to decrease his standing with God and decrease his chance for eternal happiness?  Bible history tells us how over and over God reveals Himself to man, shows man how to obtain great gifts to improve his lot in life, and yet instead of using these gifts or seeking to improve them, it seems man so easily forgets or rejects what God has taught.  It’s almost as if man has two minds, one which directs him uphill to improve his lot in life, and another which directs him downhill, to make his life worse.  Why does man seem so confused?

They forgot the things He had done,
the marvelous deeds He had shown them.
                        -- Psalm 78

I was at the chapel for First Friday mass yesterday when a couple arrived.  They looked around the chapel and seeing only me, whispered:  “We’re early.  There’s no one here.”  (What am I, I wondered, chopped liver?)  I think the little statement of these people reflects the answer to my question about man’s uphill and downhill trends towards happiness.  The couple were coming before God in His house, yet their thoughts were first focused on their own level of comfort --- were their neighbors there to affirm their choice to attend this mass?  They came, supposedly, for God, but their words said they valued their neighbors’ presence more.  They came to a party and instead of thanking their host for inviting them, first they ignored their host and asked each other “Where is everyone else,” as if the host were not important.

I think this simply illustrates what seems, to me, to be man’s confusion on seeking happiness.  He doesn’t seek total happiness; he more and more seeks only short-term happiness.  The things of this earth he wants more, and the things of eternity he wants less, because they are not immediate.  He wants heaven, but only if he can have it now.  Man seems unable to be content with delayed rewards, and tons of studies bear this out.  We see it in how few people plan for their retirement, and how many “poor” people demand houses and cars and big-screen televisions as their “right”, and right now.  And we see it in how many people want guaranteed incomes and medical care --- and even free cell phones, and they don’t want to plan to afford these things over some long period.  They want them now.  And although man is very independent, he is content to let others give him these earthly things if that is the only way to get them quickly, accepting a dependency for earthly rewards.

But God has never promised to “give” man heaven.  Some Christian groups strongly believe in “once saved; always saved,” and mistakenly believe heaven is a guaranteed reward, guaranteed now.  They believe they don’t have to work to achieve the reward of heaven; it is given to them merely because they say they want it.  But I don’t believe that is how man’s relationship with God works.  If heaven is given to man and man can assume it will happen, then how a man lives his life doesn’t matter, nor does his knowledge about heaven.  It will just happen, so he may as well do anything and everything to please the senses of his body --- even to killing you if he wants.

No, heaven is not guaranteed, and my making a commitment to God does not guarantee me heaven, any more than my saying “I do” guaranteed me marital bliss.  A commitment not lived out guarantees nothing.

So then, how does man get on a better track, from this divergent one it seems he is on?  If happiness is on a hill before us, man seems to want to climb if the hill is close, for short-term happiness, but is content to not climb or even go downhill from eternal happiness because it seems too far away.  Like retirement planning, how do we get more people to take small steps each day, so that they can reach the “far away” eternal happiness?

There are some who say the government must plan retirements for men --- social security.  But that is some men planning for others.  (Do these same men not ever err in their thinking?  Are they gods?)  I don’t have the definitive answer to retirement planning, but I can see that any answer must have a component which somehow satisfies man’s desire for immediate happiness.  And the same must hold true in matters of eternal happiness.  As we progress toward that reward, little step by little step, we need to feel some rewards of progress --- now.  That is a key question for all evangelists and self-growers in faith:  how to gain that sense of achievement or progress along the way.

There is no magic answer.  There is no way to feel as if you have climbed a mountain, if you haven’t climbed it.  There is no way to get a reward, if you haven’t earned it.  And you must have a faith along the way that the reward will be there at the end of the journey.

I like the movie Miracle on 34^th Street, where the little girl at the end says:  “I believe; I believe; I believe.  It’s silly, but I believe.”  And then a miracle happens; her belief is rewarded.  I think that our belief in our eternal reward and actions we take to achieve it will also result not only in that eternal reward --- which seems so far away, but also in more short-term rewards, the ones we need to satisfy our craving for immediate rewards.

I call those immediate rewards “consolations” from God.  Some of those rewards are answers to my prayers, just as I prayed for.  Some of those rewards are periods of peace in my life.  And some of those rewards are periods of peace in the chapel, where I feel very content, believing God is present with me.  In fact, all of these rewards I perceive, which give me the strength and encouragement to go on, are centered on belief.  I step out with a trust in God, a belief that there WILL be a reward, even a short-term one if I need it, but only having confidence in the long-term reward promised by Christ.

So I take actions to achieve short-term earthly rewards, to gain more money, to gain more friends, to gain more short-term happiness, but I also take other actions, actions to achieve long-term happiness.  I give time to the sick and lonely; I donate to the poor, and I spend time before God, only having faith that these latter actions will bring me eternal rewards, but trusting that if I weary of these things along the way God will give me short-term rewards.  And He does:  I have gained unexpected material rewards and friendships for my good works; I have gained wonderful hugs from crying strangers, and I have felt God’s presence --- and most especially in my hours of despair, when I really needed Him.

And all this began when I struck out with faith to do those things not only aimed at my short-term happiness, but long-term also.  And I went forward doing these things, with a dogged determination, even when it was inconvenient or hard to do, even when I didn’t see those short term rewards.  Because I had faith.  That’s where the achievement of man’s eternal, and short-term, happiness begins, with faith.  The rewards WILL be there.

I believe; I believe; I believe.  It’s silly, but I believe.

Halt! Who Goes There?

It’s the challenge of a guard to a stranger:  “Halt!  Who goes there?”  I was thinking about that as I pondered how much we protect ourselves and our egos.  We are the guards of our lives, and we don’t admit strangers.  It is said that it’s unusual for a person to have more than one or two “real” friends, people who they would reveal their innermost thoughts to, and whose words they would respect, even if they sometimes seemed unloving.  A true friend is a good, but rare, thing.  In part, we have few true friends because we all put up barriers to friendships, trying to protect ourselves from hurt.

We all question silently any new person we meet:  “Who goes there?”  While we can receive a superficial answer, a name or a description of the person, we all know that does not really define the “who.”  A more crucial question would be:  “Are you friend or foe?”  In some circumstances our very lives could depend on the answer to that question, and it’s scary to think about, so we don’t ask that one, but the former question goes at the same need for our feeling of security around strangers.  We can superficially accept strangers, having them near but not close, because we worry about somehow being hurt, and I think the hurt we fear is more an emotional than physical hurt.

Few people really get to know us, to become a real friend, because we don’t easily trust.  Even God finds it hard to enter many of our lives, because we don’t trust Him.  We think we need to protect ourselves from trusting almost anyone, for we know the dark secret about trust:  Someone we trust can hurt us deeply.  Someone we trust can make our life worth living, or make it a living hell if we feel betrayed.

At some point or another we’ve all felt betrayed by our human friends, which makes us leery of trusting anyone again.  “It’s happened in the past; it will happen again.  They’re only human,” we think.  That’s why we find it hard to learn the most critical thing which we must learn in our human lives: that God is not like anyone else.  God is not strictly human, and God does not betray us. 

We feel human betrayal and point to it:  “See!  You said you’d do this, and here is proof you didn’t.”  Or, “See!  I needed your support with me in my trail, and you were not there.”  We can look at certain actions at certain times and point to them:  betrayal.  And we feel friendless at those times, those times when we most needed a friend.  When we were hurting, we felt even more hurt, when those we thought of as friends, we felt as enemies.  There have been times when I felt this, and times when my friends have felt this.

But our friendship with God cannot be looked at in that way.  We cannot point to times in our relationship with Him, good times or bad times, because God is not in time. His relationship with us is on another plane beyond time; it is eternal.  There are no “instances” where He proves His love, or shows His betrayal.  Instances are in human time.

We may think:  “There was a time when I hurt deeply and needed God, but He was not there.  I was alone.”  As a true friend, however, God saw worse times coming and gently changed events so that the bad we felt happening to us was not worse, and was not something beyond what we could bear.  As a true friend, He protected us, although we may not have been aware of it at that moment in time.  That’s the hard lesson of life we need to learn.  He is a true friend.  If we call to Him and as a friend tell Him our heartfelt self, making Him part of our life, we can feel Him as a friend, and trust Him.  He will always see the bad approaching us --- outside of human time --- and protect us.  And He will celebrate our joys with us, too. 

And once, He saw a great bad approaching us all, and even died for us.

It’s a hard thing to learn, this trusting of God.  And the lesson starts with our trying to know Him.  There are lots of evidences of Him in this world, if we would only look.  And if we are serious, He will let us find Him.  And we can learn to trust Him.

And then in times of fear we will not have to look at unfolding events and people and say:  “Halt!  Who goes there?”  We will recognize Him for the eternal friend He is.  And we will face the trials of our life with much less anxiety, knowing we have a true friend by our side.  Always.

A true friend is a rare and precious thing.  And there is One waiting for you.  Always.

Review: A People of Hope

The People of Hope is, simply put, a book about New York’s Archbishop Timothy Dolan.  The book is a series of interviews he conducted with John L. Allen Jr., discussing topics ranging from his personal life story, to things impacting the Catholic Church and the people who sometimes call themselves Catholic.  It is a most open and honest book, a simple read.  As the author notes in conclusion, “Timothy Dolan is … the sort of guy you can feel comfortable with over a couple of beers, … a human being who’s flawed but who’s also genuinely interested in other people, … with real openness to alternative points of view, a refreshing change of pace.”

I don’t know if I can honestly say I enjoyed this book, as I might some others.  Although I learned much about Mr. Dolan the man and Archbishop Dolan the religious leader, I didn’t learn anything new about the Catholic faith, nor in general any unique defenses of arguments against the Church’s teachings or failures.  Oh, all those things are discussed, but Dolan is pleasantly open to discussing them, even things I might view as heretical and quickly close any debate about, but he doesn’t.  He acutely recognizes the value of each and every person, and treats them as such.  Perhaps that is a good reason to buy and read this book; there seem to be so few people like that. 

I expected Archbishop Dolan to be a man of deep faith, with towering prayer life, and of profound spiritual insight, but that’s not the man I read about.  In some ways I found his prayer life weaker than my own, and I felt him to be much more a manager of a business than a faith leader --- but even he recognized this in himself, and, I think, somewhat regrets he is not “more holy”.  But he expresses no regrets.  He recognizes that God has put him where God wants him to be, and given him talents to perform his duties, and he will do them tirelessly in the manner in which he believes God would have him do.  What more could we expect of a Church leader? 

I expect him to be a leader and voice of the Catholic Church in America for probably the next twenty years or so.  We need a man like him in the higher levels of the Church.

As usual, I think I can convey some of my delights with the book best by just offering some quotes:

•  Regarding homosexuals:  “When God looks at you, he sees a work of art.  That’s who you are.  You happen to be sexually attracted to men, but that doesn’t define who you are. … There’s that wonderful line from Pastores Dabo Vobis, that the great temptation today is to define our worth by having and doing, not being.  (P67-8) 
• Regarding Orthodoxy:  “I worry that we’ve become a glorified Rotary Club.  We’re so stumbling over the how of Catholic life that I think we’ve lost the who, meaning Jesus.  I know how that sounds, and I know it’s tough to define, but we had it once upon a time, didn’t we?  … It’s about reaching deep inside the human heart and stirring what’s best in it, and then boldly going out into the world and insisting that the better angels of our nature can prevail, that cynicism and ego don’t have to be the last word about the kind of culture we pass on to our children, and that the Church is an ally in every positive stirring and hopeful current in that culture.”  (P138-9) 
• Regarding his prayer and sacramental life:  “I go every other week, here in town, (to the sacrament of Penance).  I go down here to Saint Francis and stand in line.  I don’t identify myself.”  (P176) 
• And his prayers:  “There are times you, Lord, don’t make much sense at all, and I just love second-guessing you, but I’ve come to believe that even though sometimes it doesn’t make a lot of sense with you, it makes utterly no sense without you, and I don’t know where else I’d go. … I think God likes us to talk like that with him.”  (P184) 
• Regarding the Church:  “We’re married to her, you know.  She’s supposed to be our wife, and sometimes we see her with curlers and Noxzema.  Sometimes she is a dazzlingly beautiful woman, who we picture walking up the aisle on her wedding day, and sometimes she’s a nag.  Sometimes she lets us down, and sometimes we think, ‘How in the hell did I ever hitch up with this one?’  But in the long run, she’s the love of our life, and we’re head over heels hopelessly in love with her.”  (P188)

A passionate man, a humble man, who might boldly stand up to God --- surely we can trust him to occasionally stand up to a president.

Chen Guangcheng: Refuse Asylum?

I believe that sometimes we gain great insight into a problem, and its possible solutions, when we first view something seemingly unrelated “through new eyes,” and suddenly we see parallels we had not considered before, and solutions we didn’t realize existed.

This morning I read Psalm 102 with “new eyes”, and my thoughts drifted to two things in the news recently:  1) The Chinese activist/dissident Chen Guangcheng and the reason for his troubles with the Chinese government:  his criticism of forced abortions under China’s one-child policy, and 2) The Department of Health and Human Service’s mandate that all insurance policies in the United States include a specifically-designated fee to pay for abortions.

This is the time to have mercy …
He will turn to the prayers of the helpless;
He will not despise their prayers.

Let this be written for ages to come
that a people yet unborn may praise the Lord;
for the Lord leaned down from His sanctuary on high.
He looked down from heaven to the earth
that He might hear the groans of the prisoners
and free those condemned to die.

            --- Psalm 102

I know the moral-sounding logic of the Chinese government, which lures even some Christians to accept its abortion policy:  “Look, there are too many people here.  Many are starving and many more will starve.  Isn’t it a good thing to prevent this obvious starvation?”  And I know the moral-sounding logic of the HHS mandate:  “Look, there are some poor and weak women, and some who need abortions to save their lives, even if only for their mental well-being.  Isn’t this a good thing?”  The answer to both questions is only a yes if you begin from a flawed concept of morality.  The interesting point about Mr. Guangcheng is that he seems to HAVE a sound basis for his moral stand; a further interesting point is that Mr. Guangcheng is blind.  He is self-educated, and therefore likely has a sound understanding of natural law.

The Chinese government seeks to enforce its view of morality by imposing a huge penalty for anyone who seeks to have more than one child:  a forced abortion (or even sterilization, I’ve read).  It believes that a huge penalty will stop acts it wants stopped.  In the United States, I read an article that the mandatory paying for abortions by everyone is really a fine for abortions, and will in fact encourage everyone to have fewer abortions, to lower the fine on everyone, but of course that is a faulty logic.  A traffic ticket for speeding is designed to penalize and stop speeders, but if it should ever happen that governments decide it is a losing battle --- they can’t catch every speeder --- and decide instead to enact a “speeding tax” on everyone, the number of speeders will not decrease.  Rather people, who might have not have sped will rationalize “Well, I’m paying a speeding fine anyway; why not speed?”  The same holds true for a mandatory abortion fee:  it will encourage even unnecessary abortions, because the cost penalty is removed, and people of weak morality will be encouraged to weaken even further.

In China, some pregnant women are undergoing forced abortions; they must pay a horrible price.  In the United States, ALL people must pay the price for abortions.  In China if a woman morally disagrees with that policy, she is forced to obey.  In the United States if a woman morally disagrees with that policy, she is subtly encouraged to obey and her morality is deliberately tested in hopes of weakening it.  Which policy, I wonder, is worse:  the blatant wrong which you can see and fight, or the subtle one designed to weaken your resolve to ever fight again.  Mr. Guangcheng is said to be at the U.S. embassy in Beijing.  What a statement it would make to the world, not if the U.S. refused him asylum, but if he were to refuse the U.S’s asylum offer, because he deems U.S. abortion policies as bad as or worse than the Chinese.

Mr. Guangcheng is widely reported as being blind in the Western press, as a means of gathering sympathy for him.  From what little I have read about him, however, I suspect he sees many things very well, perhaps even better than many of us.  I pray that Mr. Guangcheng continues to see the truth about abortion, and that perhaps he might see even better --- and that we might also.