Perhaps the most important ethical shift in my life was a shift from feeling like I was owed something to feeling like I owe something. For so long I was overly concerned with the bad things that happened to me and the good things I had done. Everything was a calculation, figuring out just how much I had suffered and put into life and how much I should expect out of it. I lived in envy of those who had more and was constantly complaining about how unfair life was. At my worst times, heck probably most of the time, I'm still like that. But as I searched for the meaning of life and the truth behind the religious quest, it became clear to me that my main impediment to happiness and fulfillment, and really to relationship with God, was this basic attitude.
Strangely enough, it was a film about Buddhism that helped me move out of this pattern. The film is "The Razor's Edge", the story of a man who is psychologically damaged by his time in World War 1. Embarking on the search for a meaningful life, he separates from many of the people he loves most, who seek a shallower and easier existence. At the end he tells one of his former friends what his quest was all about, beginning with a reference to his commanding officer in the war, who had died saving his life: "When Piedmont died, I knew I had to pay him back for my life. Along the way I learned there's another debt, we all owe for the privilege of being alive." I remember when I first heard those words, they struck me to my core. They soon became the center of all my thinking on such matters, and later on I found powerful intellectual and emotional exposition of this same idea in Victor Frankl's MANS SEARCH FOR MEANING, an account of the triumph of the human spirit in the face of the Holocaust.
These ideas now form the foundation for my understanding of Jesus' sacrifice and the meaning of grace. It is the idea that all that you have and all that you are, that every breath you take is a gift, and more than a gift it is a gift that cost God the life of His Only Son. The idea that creation and salvation does not come at the whim of God but through the Pain of God is the idea that, ultimately, all suffering has to be seen in the shadow of God's suffering. I am happy only so long as I keep my eyes on that Truth. To see each day as a gift, as something that I don't deserve and as something that comes at a cost to the Divine Spirit is to free myself from resentment and live from a place of happiness rather than making happiness some ephemeral 'something' I seek out there, somewhere.
And that gift then comes to me as something I have to use for God's good purposes. I know I can't pay back what I've been given, but I can try, and I think the trying is important. If a relative gives you a car it is a gift to be sure, but it is a gift that comes with real responsibilities. To crash the car in a street race the day after you receive it is to have made the gift into a curse, likewise the grace Christ gives is freely given, but it comes with real responsibilities. It is the shift from a sense of being owed anything to owing everything. Paul's statement in 1 Corinthians 7 that we were 'bought with a price', is in truth the very foundation of a good and meaningful life. The shift from feeling you are owed to feeling that you owe is a massive one, but it is one I commend to anyone and everyone. Strangely enough responsibility is not the enemy of happiness, but its foundation.
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