Ok so its summer, and I am doing honest work as a hospital chaplain which is tiring stuff, so I haven't posted as much. I may post something on Ellacuria and Marxism soon just for kicks, but not yet.
Anyhow I am taking a long weekend at the Jesuit Villa (which is the unexpected result of spraining my ankle last week) and I have had somequiet time to think and realized I hadn't posted in a few weeks, so heregoes.
So I am here out on a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay staring off at our boat down on the dock and thinking about something I heard last night ironically enough while watching Star Wars Episode III of all things. Now I am not a huge Star wars fans, and I think any comparison between Jedi knights and the Roman Catholic Priesthood or life in a Religious order more specifically to be odious at best, however something struck me last night when I was watching the movie with two other Jesuits, and though I think it is applicable to my life specifically, it had broader implications for the life of a Christian as a whole.
At some point when comparing the life of the Jedi (the good guys) to the life of the Sith (the bad guys) young Anakin Skywalker, who is not yet Darth Vader, points out that the Sith draw their power from their passions, that they are focused inward, while the Jedi are completely selfless, and draw their power from their service to others. And here is the catch, I know I have in many ways lived on both sides of “the Force.”
The Gospels remind us that we can’t cling to closely to our lives or we inevitably lose them. If we become so obsessed with our feelings, with self-preservation, and self-care, we miss out on the things that make life worth living. We miss out on genuine relationship with friends and family, we miss out on experiencing beauty, joy, and love. We can miss the experience of being an incarnation of the Glory of God, which St. Iraneaus calls “The human being fully alive.” Christ himself points us out from ourselves and makes clear that the life of one who chooses to follow God is best exemplified by one is focused out onto the world which God made, and ultimately and most importantly on God himself.
So often the world tries to tell us that it is our angst that makes us interesting; that it is the thing which makes us special. It is some existential pain that is supposed to tell us that we are, in fact alive, and we (and by we I mean younger people specifically) buy into it. Look at the popularity of emo music, and Comic book super heroes who have “issues,” look at the popularity of the drama that goes on on T.V. Shows like “The Real (sic) World.” This is of course not the first generation to feel that angst, to want to be set apart by the passions which can rule us, and from which we can seek to draw some sort of strange solipsistic meaning. Our parents and grandparents did it before us, but somewhere it got out of control and became less about who a person is in the world, and more about what the world had done to the person. We have found this angst without responsibility and used it to turn our emotions into a decadent form of living by the drama we create. The result is a non-integral life focused not on gratitude but on mourning a life which will never exist. The result is a constant attempt to be immersed in the strange hedonism of suffering which individuates that person who is suffering precisely by their suffering.
As Christians we must learn better. The beatitudes lead us to the life of Christ itself, a life which is completely outward focused, a life which can be honest about what one feels, as Christ is in the garden and many other times particularly in the Gospel of Mark when expressing frustration at his disciples, but one which is convinced that it is beatitude which makes the person special, and it is the love of God, so often made manifest in the world around them, which makes them an individual. It is a life which can and should be dissatisfied with a world in which people starve and are oppressed, but one which fights for righteousness and liberation out of a sense of a deep and abiding love for others, and for Christ himself, and not one which is bound up in the salving of one’s guilt or the projection of one’s interior pain onto the situation of injustice. It is a life which can revel in the beauty of art, a life which can laugh long and hard with friends, a life which can savor the beauty of a sunset, and praise God in the conquering splendor of the sunrise. It is a life that looks less into one’s gut, and seeks to understand how what is within can help those on the outside. It is one that seeks to understand how all of our curses, pains, and agonies can become blessings to ourselves and the world around us. It is a life of beatitude, and the life of a man or a woman for, with, and united to others..
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