March 2009
The following is the introduction talk Bishop Gerald Wiesner gave at a Spiritual Development Day for Holy Spirit Roman Catholic Schools Association in Lethbridge, Alberta on March 16, 2009. The theme of the day was “Living our Baptismal Call”.
An integral part of our being as Catholic Christians is a consciousness of our baptismal call and the living out of this in our everyday lives. Our baptismal call, the living out of this call is a fundamental part of who we are. It is not something added on to us, it is not a garment we can put on and take off at random, it is quite simply who we are. Before reflecting more specifically on the Living of our Baptismal Call I would like to spend some time pondering aspects of our being, basic realities of who we are as human beings, created by God, and how these aspects permeate our entire being.
Ten “words” that make us whole
History has never been one of my fortes and I am not particularly fond of it, but recently I became aware of the Code of Hammurabi, one of the most famous of all early law codes, which both stabilized and promulgated the standards by which the king intended to order society. Until Hammurabi, law was essentially the whim of the king; laws could be created by him at any moment.
Hammurabi, king of Babylon, made a giant leap forward in the history of public jurisprudence. He bound himself and the citizens to 272 statutes, which he had inscribed on a pillar more than 14 feet high for all his kingdom to see. This Code brought order and stability to the land. For the first time, royal decree ceased to be arbitrary. For the first time, people were allowed to know the laws under which they would be governed and judged.
About four hundred years later, Moses, who had led the Hebrew people out of slavery in Egypt, gave the little band of wanderers another set of “laws” to live by. These laws, however, embodied the mind of God for them; they carried them into a society unique for its adherence not to the laws of Moses – subject to change by any ruler to follow – but to the law of God. They did not emerge out of human whim and fancy. They were irrevocable and unchangeable. They were to be written on the mind and in the heart of the Hebrew community for all time to come.
These laws were meant to be principles to live by rather than minutely defined prescriptions to be followed. These laws were clearly meant to shape a way of living, a lifestyle, an attitude of mind, a spirit of human community, a people.
The Ten Commandments were not made to be argued in a court of law. In fact, most of the items defined in the Ten Commandments were not legally enforceable at all. Many of them could not even be discovered in fact. How did anyone prosecute for “coveting”? How did anyone punish someone for not “remembering” to keep holy the Sabbath? How could anyone tell if, in the heart of a person, a “strange” god or two might not be lurking?
The point is that the Tend Commandments are laws of the heart, not laws of the commonwealth. They are laws that are intended to lead to the fullness of life, not simply to the well-ordered life.
Aristotle insists that the perfect life is one where we contemplate the best, most worthy things, the things of the highest merit. He argues that the perfect life commits us to dedicate ourselves to what it is that is worth thinking about. The Ten Commandments tell us what is worth thinking about in life. These are the things that last, that become spiritual ground on which our lives rest that become the path we walk on the journey to wholeness, from the smallest to the most expansive of human endeavor.
These are not so much new laws as they are a new vision of what it is to be a human community, a people of God. It is noteworthy that only once in Scripture are the Sinai Tablets called “commandments”. In fact in all other references they are referred to as the Decalogue – “the ten words”. It is these ten words, which over the years developed into ten ideas or concepts or ideals or propositions that make the twelve tribes of Israel a different kind of “people”. They are words about praise, human responsibility, justice, creation, the value of life, the nature of relationships, honesty, truth, desire and simplicity of life.
Written in the second person singular, “You shall”, and “You shall not”, the words are meant to be a whole new way of going about life for us all. We are told this time, not what the king expects, but what God expects – and we are each responsible for sculpting our lives in that mold. The Ten Commandments are, then, an adventure in human growth. We are not so much convicted by them as we are to be transformed by them. They are indicators, guidelines, lamp posts, light houses, to lead us to the fullness of life. They are invitations given to us by God to lead us to the peace, joy and happiness that God desires for us.
We need to realize that the commandments are about more than commandments. The commandments are not about restrictions; they are about things that make us whole. They are about the will of a loving God, that the love that sustains the universe should never die. Sometimes we fail to realize that the law and love are two sides of the same reality. Law teaches us how to love and so the love of the Creator demands the giving of the law. Thomas Merton wrote: “To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love.”
To live life with our arms open
Realizing how in our very being we are constantly called to more we can look at what that spells out to be in our ordinary everyday life.
The human being is a creature-in-search whose eternal compass is set to the interminable question, “For what?” For what are we really searching in life? Where should we go to seek it? How will we know when we have found it?
The questions ring across time, through great literature, in popular music, behind every major work of art. Every culture, every spirituality, every wisdom figure in every arena of life concentrates on finding the answer to the secret of living, the endpoint of life. Whatever the magnet that draws them on, whatever the tradition that guides them, these seekers walk the same way, they beat a single path and eventually they come to the same conclusion.
A Chinese proverb teaches: “The meaning of life is to see”.
The ancient rule of St. Benedict instructs persons “to listen”.
The philosopher Marcel Proust writes: “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes”.
In other words it is not so much where we go in life that matters; it is the way we immerse ourselves in it, open ourselves to it, see beyond its trappings wherever we are that measures the quality of the journey.
We are put here to love, not for the sake of the other alone, but for our own sakes as well. To dare to love another as a person, rather than as an idea, is to turn ourselves over to be shaped and reshaped in life. The people who love us do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. They release the best in us; they shoulder us through the rough times in life; they stretch us beyond the confines of our own experiences to wider vision, to truer vistas. They show us the face of our creating, caring God on earth.
Perhaps the deepest spiritual understanding we can muster here is that human love is the only proof we have of the love of God. It is also the only arms God has with which to love us here and now, clearly and warmly, joyfully and achingly. Sometimes, alas, it is only our arms that God has to love others.
To be human it is necessary to think again about what matters in life. We must always ask why what is, is. To be human is to listen to the rest of the world with a tender heart, and learn to live life with our arms open and our souls pierced with a sense of responsibility for everything that is.
It is said that most of life is a fluke. It is not nearly as rational, as strategized, as planned as we love to think it is. As John Lennon was fond of saying, “Life is what happens while you are making other plans”. The problem is that we insist on trying to impose form and shape, plan and design on everything we do. Just letting things happen is not a comfortable skill for most people. Control is what we want. Certainty is what we like.
But there is a place in the soul for learning to leap. There is a particular virtue to darkness, to just allowing things to happen rather than wrenching them to our own specifications, for being willing to do things differently for a change, for avoiding terminal caution, for simply falling into the arms of God for a day or two instead of having to run the universe all by ourselves.
Being able to take life as it comes, to enjoy a change of plans, to break the routine, to try different things, to break out of the rut we put ourselves in so we can become the rest of ourselves, to build our wings on the way down is the spice that is missing in a routine-ized world.
As we journey in life it is interesting to see how we search for joy and despise suffering. Yet, suffering is a natural part of life with much to teach us and much to give us. Suffering gives us freedom and new opportunities. Joy gives us rest on the long road of life and an appreciation for heart-stopping beauty in the midst of the worldly. Most important of all is that suffering and joy come from the same place. Whatever is giving us the greatest happiness right now is the only thing that can really cause us great pain. Whatever is causing us suffering right now is the place beyond which we must now move in order to be able to live life joyfully again. Suffering and joy move us from end point to end point in life. They are the finger of God beckoning us to grow beyond where we are right now so that new and wonderful things can happen to us again, still, yet.
Work is the priesthood of the human race
One of the most demanding, but often overlooked, dimensions of the creation story is that when creation was finished it wasn’t really finished at all. Instead, God committed the rest of the process to us. What humans do on this earth either continues creation or obstructs it. It all depends on the way we look at life, the way we see our role in the ongoing creation of the world.
Work is our contribution to creation. It relates us to the rest of the world. It fulfills our responsibility to the future. God left us a world intact, a world with enough for everyone. The contemplative question of the time is what kind of world are we leaving to those who come after us?
If I could deviate for a moment from sharing directly on the theme of work, I would like to share a picture of the world that we are living in. If the earth’s population were a village of 100 people, there would be
- 62 Asians, 12 Europeans, 8 Africans and only 13 from the Americas.
- 70 of them would be non-white
- 67 would be non-Christian
- 14 could not read
- 21 would be undernourished
- 1 of them would have a college education
- 2 of them would own a computer
- 59 percent of the entire wealth of that village would be held by only 6 people, and all of them would be white, male and from the United States of America
The world is tilting and tipping and is terribly out of kilter. As Christians we must acknowledge that God pronounces all of creation “good”, not just some of it good, some better, some best. How are we leaving the world for those who come after us?
The contemplative sits out to shape the world in the image of God. Order, cleanliness, care of the environment brings the glory of God into the stuff of the moment, the character of the little piece of the planet for which we are responsible. The ideal state, the contemplative knows, is not to avoid work. The first thing Genesis requires of Adam and Eve is that they “till the garden and keep it”. Long before they sin they are commanded to work. In the Judeo-Christian tradition work is not punishment for sin.
Work is the mark of the conscientiously human. We do not live to outgrow work. We live to work well, to work with purpose, to work with honesty and quality and artistry. The floors the contemplative caretaker mops have never been better mopped. The class the contemplative teacher prepares brings the very best of life in the student. The computer programs the contemplative person creates make life more possible for everyone. The persons the contemplative administrator serves get all the care that God has given us.
The contemplative is overcome by the notion of tilling the garden and keeping it. Work does not distract us from God; it brings the reign of God closer than it was before we came. Work doesn’t take us away from God; it continues the work of God through us. Work is the priesthood of the human race. It turns the ordinary into the grandeur of God. Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God. Our work enhances that grandeur of God in the world.”
Regret is the sand trap of the soul
As we look at our performance we should never brood over past mistakes and failures as this will only fill our minds with grief, regret and depression. Regret claims to be insight. But how can it be spiritual insight to deny the good of what has been for the sake of what was not? No, regret is not insight. In fact it is the sand trap of the soul. It fails to understand that there are many ways to the fullness of life, all of them different, all of them unique.
Regret is a temptation. It entices us to lust for what never was in the past rather than to bring new energy to our changing present. It is a misuse of the aging process. One of the functions, one of the gifts, of aging is to become comfortable with the self we are, rather than to mourn what we are not. When we devalue it, we bring everything we are and were into question, into doubt. We doubt the God who made us and walks with us all the way to the end.
There are banquets in our lives
Longing, too, is part of life. The only question is, “What do we long for?” Nobody is ever completely happy, completely satisfied. That’s not because we are failures; it’s because we are built that way. We’re supposed to want more, or why would we ever want God enough to go through life with a restless eye, watching. We need to be grateful for our longings. They are what take us to the next step in life and there are many steps to be walked before we are whole, before we are finally home. Someplace along the way in life we all need to long for God, for what really counts. The hard thing, the good thing, is that life itself will teach us that.
As we journey we need to stop and thank God – consciously – for the good things of the day. We spend so much time wanting things to be better that we fail to see our real gifts. There are banquets in our life and we don’t enjoy them because we are always grasping for something more: the perfect schedule, the perfect work, the perfect friend, the perfect community. We have to realize that God’s gifts are all around us, that joy is an attitude of the mind, an awareness that my life is basically good.
The following is an exercise I would like to suggest. Try saying this silently to everyone and everything you see for 30 days and see what happens to your soul: “I wish you happiness now and whatever will bring happiness to you in the future”. If it is said to the sky, we would have to stop polluting. If we said it when we see the ponds and lakes and streams, we would have to stop using them as garbage dumps and sewers. If we said it to small children, we would have to stop abusing them, even in the name of training. If we said it to colleagues and other persons, we would have to stop stoking the fires of enmity and competition around us. Beauty and human warmth would take root in us like a clear, hot June day. We would change.
“I wish you happiness now and whatever will bring happiness to you in the future.”
Most Rev. Gerald Wiesner, O.M.I.