Ego-Drama or Theo-Drama?

"...love [means] that we allow ourselves to be parted
from that narrow view directed toward our own ego
and that we begin to move out from our own self,
in order to be there for others."

+Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI)

 

So, what's the story of your life?  Or, perhaps more pointedly, how do you frame the story of your life? 

In the Ego-drama, my life is all about me.  I am the author of the screen play.  I have the lead role; I also produce and direct the show.  Or, to use the image from Mark 4:35-41 depicted above, I am the captain of my own boat, and my fate is in my own hands.

When the storms of life blow up, I am sometimes surprised that they don't exactly fit with the script I've imagined.  There's always my crew to blame, of course, or the "god" of my own making, against whom I can rant.  But such intrusive realities ultimately threaten my world view, and nothing is more important than me defending my place in my drama.

In the Theo-drama, on the contrary, others take center stage.  The entire production, in fact, abounds with a depth and a meaningfulness because the story is not dominated by my pride, my self-aggrandizement, my agenda. When properly framed in such a theological perspective, my life is really a matter of playing an essential part in a story that's larger than life itself. 

Rather than succumbing to illusions of total control, I navigate my way into the Theo-drama by humbly saying "Yes" to the role for which I was quite literally born.  I embrace the fact the "my boat" is not really mine, but is on loan for a few scenes.  I open my eyes to the fact that the Captain is always on board, and all is well, even though I cannot foresee the resolution of the final scene.

How to Beat the Sunday Night Blues

www.catholicmemes.com

One of my great friends, with whom I taught for a number of years, used to describe the summer months in the following terms:  June is Friday; July is Saturday; August is Sunday night.

Maybe it's natural for students everywhere (as well as teachers!) to dread the end of summer and to be wary of the approaching school year.  But why does Sunday night seem to stymie the hearts of workers everywhere?  And as Christians, how might we begin to beat the Sunday night blues?

Here are a few strategies to help make the Lord's Day one of peace and joy:

• Make Saturday a "work" day.  Rather than a being on a 7-day-per-week treadmill, wouldn't it be nice to shrink the work week by one seventh and thereby etch out a legitimate day of rest? Maybe it's just me, but whenever I let a Saturday waste away, I find myself slammed on Sunday.  Whenever I take care of chores or errands or catch-up work on Saturday, however, then Sunday plays out much more pleasantly.
• Enjoy special foods.  St. Teresa of Avila once said that, to make a good retreat, one needs to eat well, sleep well and pray well.  When God made keeping the Sabbath Day holy one of the Ten Commandments, don't you think he had something like this in mind?  The old-fashioned idea of visiting family or friends on Sunday fits naturally with serving up some of our favorite foods.
  

An All-Season Love

Summer love makes all the headlines and captures the imagination of song writers.  But an all-season love is what people deeply desire. 

Each season brings its own unique flavor of love, of course.  Summer love is about energy and light.  Autumn love is a matter of reaping the harvest that’s been sown.  Winter love involves a hunkering-down and a tending of the fires.  Spring love rekindles and renews.

But an all-season love delivers the faithfulness and constancy needed in each passing season.  It gives witness to the supra-seasonal fidelity of the Lord, whose own love is mediated in and through the phases of our lives.

An all-season love knows that changes are not always linear and sequential. Sometimes they even seem to spiral in and through each other, according to some predestined double-helix design.

An all-season love speaks not only to passion and purpose, but also to desolation and even death itself.  More than merely riding the swells of a stormy sea, or grasping white-knuckled in the face of life's vicissitudes, an all-season love provides the baseline and the underlying rhythm which provides stability amid the daily fluctuations on our journey home.

An all-season love perdures because it alone is eternal.  It is the alternative to the using and the abandoning of worldly desires.  An all-season love saves us from being chewed up and discarded like last year's mulched leaves.

An all all-season love sees itself not in terms of choosing, but in having first been chosen.  It is defined not by its own thinking and acting, but by its primary stance of receiving and responding to the other. 

While a seasonal love is by definition a passing fancy of some sort, an all-season love embraces the gift of existence itself.  It breathes a quiet "Amen" to L. Guissani's insight, "I am because I am loved."

5 Steps to an Ecological Conversion

Laudato Si'

“'The external deserts in the world are growing,
because the internal deserts have become so vast'.
For this reason, the ecological crisis is also a summons to profound interior conversion.
It must be said that some committed and prayerful Christians,
with the excuse of realism and pragmatism,
tend to ridicule expressions of concern for the environment.
Others are passive; they choose not to change their habits and thus become inconsistent.
So what they all need is an 'ecological conversion',
whereby the effects of their encounter with Jesus Christ become evident
in their relationship with the world around them.
Living our vocation to be protectors of God’s handiwork is essential to a life of virtue;
it is not an optional or a secondary aspect of our Christian experience."
(LS, n. 217)

 

Is Pope Francis stretching the sometimes rigid boundaries of his brothers and sisters in Christ?  Or is he striking a bold new path between various extreme positions regarding care for our common home? Thankfully, the answer is "yes" and "yes". 

 

Of course, allowing ourselves to be stretched or daring to head down a bold new path is never a painless process. Here are five steps to begin that journey:

 

1. Begin with an examination of conscience--both personally and collectively.  Have I ridiculed environmental issues because they don't fit neatly within my current political or economic opinions?  Have I ignored an authentic "human ecology" which is intrinsic to real concern for the environment, e.g., by embracing political positions which support the destruction of the innocent or the harvesting of human life itself?  Have we been passive participants in our tired cycle of over-consumption, complicit contributors to what Pope Francis calls our "throw-away" culture?
   
   
2. Look for daily ways to Reduce, Reuse, Recycle :)  In one way or another, we have all been seduced by "the omnipresent technocratic paradigm and the cult of unlimited human power, the rise of a relativism which sees everything as irrelevant unless it serves one's own immediate interests" (LS, n. 122).  Dare I identify one area of my life where I could cut some consumption?  Might I look for ways to repair older items rather than just replacing them?  Could we dramatically cut the demand for sweatshop labor if we were bold enough to shop for second hand clothes?  Finally, if the mere act of recycling bottles, cans, and paper products has seemed like a bridge too far, might I start with this small step across a new bridge to a fresh start?

Ex-Apes or Artists?

G.K. Chesterton

Would Chesterton have been amused, outraged, or wearied by the sign I recently passed on a college campus? It promoted a lecture about human beings under the title of "ex-apes," alleging to address new insights about our understanding of evolutionary processes.

In a brilliant chapter of The Everlasting Man entitled "Man in the Cave", Chesterton lays out a withering critique of theories which want to reduce the human person to not much more than a mere beast.  This "Apostle of Common Sense" roots his reasoning not on mere hypotheses, however, but firmly in the facts. 

Just as the fact that there is something rather than nothing should compel us to look for answers outside of the closed-system of our physical world, so the fact that the first human beings painted pictures on the walls of caves should point us toward the deeper mystery which it reveals.  After all, a merely materialistic view of evolutionary processes cannot account for this quantum leap forward among all living beings.  Here's G.K.'s brilliant commentary for your enjoyment and reflection:

"...That is the simplest lesson to learn in the cavern of the colored pictures; only it is too simple to be learnt. It is the simple truth that man does differ from the brutes in kind not in degree; and the proof of it is here; that it sounds like a truism to say that the most primitive man drew a picture of a monkey and that it sounds like a joke to say that the most intelligent monkey drew a picture of a man. Something of division and disproportion has appeared; and it is unique. Art is the signature of man.