As a teenager I read the book, AReason to Live: A Reason to Die, by John Powell, a Jesuit. It scored 4.6 on the Google ‘Goodreads’.
Its an old book – 1972 – with an enduring message.
I think that books shaped my youth more than sermons. Today, its music (look at David Bowie); films (look at Star Wars, the Hobbit); and media (every image and all conversations interact and compete for followers, now called ‘friends’ and ‘like me’).
Identities are crafted by clever people and our youngsters are often a collage of competing values and driven by different spirits.
I do wonder where the wholeness comes in a collage; and I do not understand the present as well as I do the past. Like many older people I do not actually belong to the present in the way young people do.
Powell’s book was a persuasive reason to follow the noble and self-sacrificing spirit of Catholic faith back then.
It presented Jesus as a truly self-sacrificing man; a person of deep virtue and trust in God; a Jewish Galilean with a deep sense of Judaism and a refreshing and dynamic experience of God as love, compassion and mercy.
He loved the poor and disadvantaged in a special way and had room for and space to engage the wealthy establishment.
He was not married (which perplexed me) and had a virgin birth (which astounded me). But Jesus was special and I understood that much.
He had the right spirit (of loving service); followed a faith (which grounded him) and privileged the poor and needy (which inspired me).
This amounted to a reason to live and gave one a measure for one’s own humanity.
The gospel today communicates Jesus to us in a special way. God’s spirit is in Jesus in a way that I want my spirit to be. A spirit that directs me; drives me forward and blossoms into faith and hope.
Jesus is the one human being from God – he is Son of God. But also our person, when that person is divine.
He, therefore, is the one who most perfectly shows us the way to ourselves.
In language from Isaiah, Jesus is who he is through being a gift to others.
Precisely, this is what we are, we are ourselves when we are gift to others. We come home to ourselves when we go out to others.
This is Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s, Man for Others or, in the language of Vatican II, the one who is a ‘preferential option for the poor’.
Becoming a person is not about ‘self-discovery’. There is too much of that in the society of indulgence and endless introspection.
No, the journey to ourselves, as for Jesus, is to bring joy and happiness to others.
You know this in marriage and family; you can know it in the priesthood and, as we shall find out, in dying you find yourself. For, as is written in the tombs of the early Christians, “My night has no darkness!”
As John writes: “Whoever follows me will have the light of life and will never walk in darkness.”
