RBWords

     There is a popular expression, "Get a life!" that is used for many purposes, mostly toward folks that one thinks are headed in the wrong direction personality-wise or seem to be on a "dead end" course!  The difficulty with the expression is that the "life" that one hears in the expression is often the very one that will lead to a "dead end" long before physical death occurs.  It certainly is not the one that Jesus speaks of in today's gospel scripture, which seems to be a small list of various quotations.  Carrying a cross does not seem to be the "life goal" of too many people.  They pay all kinds of money to individuals called "life coaches" to help them make some decisions about their "life!"

 

     I can remember the combination of amazement and amusement and perplexity among my family and friends when I entered religious life.  I seemed to be rejecting everything that I had gone to a fine university to learn how to acquire!  I did not see myself as rejecting anything so much as realizing that the students around me who wanted all those "things" were not very happy people.  I came to the conclusion summed up in the broadway song, "There's gotta be something better than this!"  I don't think my "cross" is heavier or superior to the crosses that others bear, but at least I chose it and I think I have managed with God's help to "save it."  Young men who enter our order [and others who enter religious life or full time ministry]speak of their earlier situations as "having everything and having nothing!"  The emptiness of their "successful" lives led them to look more deeply into their baptismal commitment and make some hard and radical decisions that reversed the words.  They now "had" nothing but as a result had everything!

 

     Our baptism offers us the same challenge.  Do we "have everything" and so "have nothing?"  Or is it the other way around?  AMEN