Unfailingly Soothing Presentations of Christianity: What's Missing Therein?

There is a certain approach taken by some Catholics who are engaged in the work of evangelization that is very puzzling. And this can apply to priests or laymen. I've seen it in regard to both.

It's puzzling not so much for it's content--what it says--but for what it doesn't say, what it leaves out.

What is left out in such an approach as I have in mind? Simply, the cross.

There are good people, both lay and clergy, engaged in Catholic evangelization of a sort that focuses without exception always on the nice things, the warm-and-fuzzy aspects of Christian discipleship. In this approach, Jesus is always the tender one who soothes us and says soothing things to our heats. We are always the good ones, trying our best, messing up at times, but nonetheless basically striving in most respects to be like Jesus.

What's wrong with this? After all, Jesus, indeed, is full of mercy and compassion. He loves every one of us with a power and intensity we can't imagine. He is tender and merciful. It's true. But, if this is the only aspect ever mentioned about our Lord's relationship to us as we navigate life trying to serve Him, something huge is missing. The cross.

There is suffering in human life. It's a reality we cannot escape. The question I am concerned with here, is whether we will invite grace to inform and transform all aspects of our life--including our sufferings--or if we only see being a Christian as something unrelated, detached, set apart, from the deepest sorrows of life.

Jesus does indeed look tenderly upon us in our sorrows. But we forget from where He is gazing--He sees us (or, saw, in one great event both time-bound and eternal in the shock wave it sent through creation) from the cross. His passion--His free embrace of undeserved suffering for the sake of loving us so demonstrably, of pouring Himself out for us, of opening His heart for our benefit in a way that we cannot take lightly--was not a closed event meant only for Him to know in secret. Jesus' loving gaze upon the world from the wood of the cross was an open event. From that one place in time, He looked out upon the entire world, gazing into all human history past, present, and future, and invited us in to His open heart. He tenderly shares with us the grace to permit our hearts as well to join Him in giving ourselves in love for the sake of others.

It is a great absence and a great deficiency to share an enthusiasm for a relationship with Jesus Christ without also consciously seeking to help people freely accept Jesus' invitation to unite our sufferings to His Passion. In this way, our sorrows and pains become folded in to the greatest spiritual event in the history of the cosmos--the Redemption of mankind.

When we accept the grace to unite our trials big and small to the cross of our Savior, our pains take on a powerful meaning. They become little points of heat that help us to play a real role in welding the souls of those we love more strongly to the heart of Jesus. Our self-giving perhaps, with grace may become more meaningful and free when chosen in the midst of pain. It's not the suffering here that is good, but the personal act of welcoming the invitation to make it an offering of love for others.

The cross changes everything. Every single moment of pain, sorrow, trial, suffering, is potentially through grace a gathering point of spiritual power bringing our souls into Christ's salvation of the world.

Now, in heaven, Jesus no longer suffers. He is risen from the dead! But that monumental event of His suffering on the cross still looks out to us from that point; this spiritual lightening bolt began a re-creation of mankind that continues to reach out from the cross through all of time to today, tomorrow, and every day until Christ comes in glory.

It's a re-creation that He, because He loves us, wants us to freely participate in with Him. He has made available the grace we need to be able to join with Him in the greatest act (the salvation and sanctification of souls) that has ever happened.

When well-meaning evangelists speak to other Christian souls only about soothing things, they are missing an essential aspect of Christian life. They fail to invite us to allow Jesus to bring us into His heart poured out for the world on the cross. Such an overly safe approach runs the danger of reducing followers of Christ to mere passive recipients of salvation, rather than calling us to live according to the immense and unbelievable dignity of being welcomed to take a place in Christ's heart even as this great Heart suffered in love for the world.

Do We Have the Right to End Our Lives?

I fear there is something horrible taking place in our culture. And it has been gradually happening over the last couple of decades or so. What is this horrible thing? We are becoming, more and more, a society that has stopped believing that there is never a situation in which we may kill an innocent human being in order to solve the difficulty of suffering.

I have to believe that, say, 50 years ago, when my parents were teenagers, American society took for granted that we would never look toward killing as a way out of even the hardest situations. We handle our troubles and our sorrows by pulling together, sticking with one another, being there for each other, doing all that we can for each other. And as a nation made up mostly of people who believe in Christ, we pray. We look to Jesus on the Cross. And we trust in divine providence even when we don't have all the answers.

Or, we used to.

We are more and more a nation that no longer believes that our lives do not rest, ultimately, in our own hands. Increasingly, we consider ourselves masters of our own lives. But do we have the right even to end our own lives? Yes, even if it is for the sake of cutting short our suffering?

The fate of our society as a civilized nation largely rests on the answer.

More specifically, and of particular relevance today, may we choose to end a human life by withdrawing nutrition and hydration (food and water) from someone, in order to put an end to suffering?

Well, do we still heed the commandment, "Thou Shall Not Kill"?

No matter how it is done, deliberately killing an innocent person is a direct violation of this bedrock commandment. It is not ours to choose when or how we die. Our life is a gift from God. We do not, in the ultimate sense, own our lives. We belong to God. And He tells us, thou shall not kill.

Would it be OK to go up to a hospital bed of someone in pain, put a pistol to his head, and kill him? Why not?

If this would not be OK, then why is it OK to decide to kill somebody by starving and dehydrating him to death? In both situations, the result is the same--a dead person. And in both cases, death is the desired result chosen by those who make it happen. The intention is to kill. The only difference is that killing by pistol is messier and quicker. Death by starvation and dehydration is much neater (no blood on the walls; no loud bang), and much slower (days or weeks instead of a mere fraction of a second). But morally speaking, whether you kill by pistol or kill by removing food and water--you are just as wrong. You are doing the same thing: killing the innocent, taking life into your own hands.

If we accept that we may take life into our own hands and therefore may choose to kill suffering people by keeping food and water from them, we are not far from just putting a gun to their heads. Why not just put them in a gas chamber? Why not just stick a knife in their throat? Why not just put a bag over their head? In the end, there is no real difference.

For the love of God, may we reaffirm that we are a decent, caring, compassionate, God-fearing society. May we come to our senses and realize how shockingly sick and downright evil it is to even think that we might choose to kill the innocent, by whatever means.

In other words, please do not kill your mother or father, grandmother or grandfather, by starving them and dehydrating them to death. This is not what decent human beings do to each other. We do not kill as a way to escape our pain. Part of what makes us a civilization rather than a brutal mob is that in the face of even the biggest of troubles we do not turn on each other or abandon each other; we turn toward one another, share each others' burdens, and lift each other up in prayer. We hold each others' hands, we wash each others' bodies, we place food in the mouths of those who cannot feed themselves and provide water to those who cannot drink unaided.

Do we still believe that God has a mysterious plan, though partly hidden, for each of our lives? Do we no longer realize that we did not give ourselves the gift of life? Do we not know that God loves each of us no matter what? Do we not understand that as soon as we accept, in any situation, that we may choose to kill the innocent as a way to solve our problems that we will have at that moment become an inhuman, barbaric, decaying society that has chosen a path of hopelessness and despair over love and compassion?

Thou Shall Not Kill???

Unless we do it in a slow, bloodless, quiet way that seems so easy, by holding back food and water and  providing pain medication so our target starves and dehydrates comfortably? In a sane world, this is called murder.

Should We Not Always Want Others to Put On a Happy Face? Misplaced Optimism as a Denial of the Cross

It is a good thing to want to encourage others to have a positive outlook about life. But sometimes this desire can be used in an inappropriate way. Sometimes there is no escaping the bitter pill of suffering. Consider the situation of when a close family member or friend is going through very real, serious suffering (such as the death of a child or terminal cancer). Sometimes we Americans are too eager to urge others to "put on a happy face," when we should do no such thing. Such efforts may inappropriately remove an opportunity to engage in genuine compassion--a beautiful virtue.

I wonder if a tendency to overemphasize putting on a happy face is yet another way that American culture rejects the cross. By encouraging others to smile through their troubles no matter what, we conveniently escape having to “suffer-with” those who are afflicted. And we thereby deny those in pain the blessing of traveling the road of hardship with someone who loves them at their side.

Do we, perhaps, reject a cross that we are called to take up—the cross of compassion (suffering-with)—by removing the suffering face of others from our midst? If we always and indiscriminately get our afflicted loved ones to put on a happy-face those signs of grief which would otherwise beckon us to leave our comfort zones, put our arms around their shoulders and provide help and companionship as they endure a cross they have no choice but to bear remain hidden; consequently, we do not have to respond to the face of suffering. It is far easier and more convenient for us to respond to a fake smile than to respond to genuine tears. But if we live this way we are choosing the easier path when we should choose the harder one, and are less human than we could be, than we are called to be by Him who made us.

I have seen this in hospital settings. Visitors, highly averse to pain and suffering, coax a seriously ill loved one to play along and pretend things are OK. Then, after they leave, the patient is left to cry alone. No one to suffer-with him, to share his cross. One wonders who really benefits when a visitor discourages outward signs of grief: the patient, or the visitor who doesn’t want to deal with the full human depth and piercing reality of suffering?

[Thanks to Katie at The Linde]

The Absence of Heartfelt Concern or Genuine Compassion? Which Do we Practice in Our Own Lives?

While at my job (caring for the elderly in their home), I sometimes am exposed to more daytime television than I would otherwise desire as my clients tune in. I bring a book for times I am not busy, but the TV can't be avoided when it is on.

Tyra Banks (former supermodel turned TV personality) has a daytime TV show. Today on the Tyra Banks Show (I feel strange just writing that phrase!), I witnessed something I want to comment about. A teenage prostitute was a guest on the show. This girl, age 18, has been a prostitute since she was 14. She was first molested at age 9. She is still doing this--she claims by her choice--and doesn't believe she is likely to live beyond age 22.

I don't know what I could say about the awful awful situation this girl is in, and the horrendous reality that she sees no other way of life for herself. One's heart wishes you could somehow rescue her from her plight. Please pray. Pray for all women and girls who sell their bodies, by force or by choice, that somehow the grace of Christ would break in and set them free.

But I do want to say something about how Tyra interacted with this poor girl. I don't claim to know Tyra Bank's heart. And I don't know much about her otherwise. However, the manner in which she engaged this girl in a conversation about her life while taping the show was disturbingly detached. Sure, there was a model's smile, and the fashionable questions about how do you feel about such-and-such? But behind the smile and the questions about feelings there seemed to me to be a lack of serious concern for the whole person--a lack of a deeply human interest in the full human being in pain there before her. And this is terribly sad to see. There was a disconnect beneath the surface connection.

This is an example, I am sorry to say, of what I blogged about earlier. There is something deeply, horribly wrong with our essential quality as human persons if we can be in the presence of a terribly hurting and wounded person and yet not be able to break out of our own world of personal concerns and interests. A humane and civilized culture should be populated with people who respond with real compassion to the suffering of others.