Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message
Do Not Lose Heart
April 22, 2020
“So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer selves are withering away, our inner selves are being renewed each and every day. For our current bit of suffering—so insubstantial a burden as to be almost nothing—is kindling in us a light glorious and substantial beyond any possible comparison, because we are looking not at what is before our eyes, but at what is hidden from our eyes; for what can be seen passes quickly away, but what cannot be seen lasts forever… For we know that when these bodies of ours are taken down like tents and folded away, we will find our true bodies—not tents but a great building for our dwelling place, ever-lasting in the heavens, made by God and not by human hands. … It is God who has given us hints of this bright future, by giving us his Spirit as a down payment of what’s ahead” (2 Cor. 4:16-17; 5:1-5).
Paul here is not disparaging the world in which we live, the world before our eyes. Elsewhere, Paul is very clear that he sees plenty of evidences in the world of God’s good intention and love in the world. Here Paul describes how things seem when we are suffering and having a hard time seeing any good before our eyes.
He says that what keeps us going in
such straits is the vision we have inside our hearts of the important
things. Recognizing that all human life
ends in sickness and death, he uses a commonplace from Stoic philosophy: the
world is changing and reliably unreliable.
What really matters by contrast—the true, the beautiful, and the good—is
unchanging. It is the vision of this in
our hearts and minds, he says, that saves us from “losing heart.”
The word Paul uses for “losing
heart” literally means “being beaten down by bad things.” He contrasts our sufferings, changeable and
limited in time, with the unchanging timelessness of the Shining Brilliance
around the person of God. This
brilliance is the glory of God, in Hebrew, kavod, that is, substantial
heaviness. Paul says that our “momentary” sufferings are
very light and insubstantial by comparison with this “weight of glory,” a
timeless beauty that our sufferings actually are creating in us, unseen. He says that the substantiality of God’s
light is a “hyperbole beyond all hyperboles,” immeasurable, timeless.
Paul is contrasting how things now appear with how things actually are.
For Paul, the hidden “eternal weight
of glory” or “timeless mass of Light” is actually the real thing, while our suffering is but a dim shadow, an unsubstantial trifle, that is passing away. The image in our hearts of what God has
promised, and what God is already actually accomplishing in us, drives away the
demons of hopelessness and helplessness that threaten to beat us down.
Paul is advising a path of
contemplation as a way of driving away despair, of being “renewed every day” so
that “we do not lose heart.”
My father used to sing a popular
song from his youth, “You’ve got to
accentuate the positive, eliminate the
negative, latch on to the affirmative, watch out for Mr. in-between.” This is just
part of what Paul is trying to say.
Paul tells us to contemplate the
“invisible things” which do not change instead of the “things before our eyes”
that do.
His argument parallels
Saint-Exupery’s belief that “It is only with the heart that one can see
rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
In order to break out of
hopelessness, you have to change the dialog going on inside your head. The dialog inside a depressed person’s head
is an argument that he or she can only lose.
Talking of constitutional melancholy, Samuel Johnson observed, “A man so
afflicted, Sir, must divert distressing thoughts, and not combat with them” (Boswell’s Life of Johnson).
It might be as simple as finding memories,
stories, or images that embolden and inspire us. In Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Chief Bromden finds his release
and freedom simply through continued memory of McMurphy’s bravery n standing up
to Nurse Ratched, as badly as that
turned out.
For Paul, the ultimate reassuring
image is that of God’s love and ultimate triumph over what is wrong with the
world. That is why he dwells so much
on “Christ, Christ on the Cross” and the
Risen Lord.
In the words of two African-American freedom songs, one a Spiritual and the other a Work Song, Paul wants us to “keep our eyes on the prize,” and our “hands on the plough.” He wants us to “hold on, hold on.”
Friends, occasional feelings of
hopelessness and helplessness are part of being human. They are almost guaranteed to appear, sooner
or later, in stress conditions like we see today.
You don’t have to be alone,
even in physical isolation and distancing.
Make a phone call. Talk with a
friend at a distance. Just as sharing
joys with another seem to double our happiness, sharing sorrows with another
seems to lighten them by half.
If you are truly depressed, you may
need to talk with a physician or counselor.
The medications now available can help put a bottom in your sinking boat
so that you can begin the hard work of bailing the water out. If you ever start thinking about doing harm
to yourself or others, you need immediately to talk to a professional for help.
For most of us, it may not be as
dramatic as that. But we must not resign
ourselves to being beaten down, and we must not, in Paul’s words, “lose
heart.” The actor Tom Bosley (the guy
who played Richie’s father on Happy Days)
said, “Many people think that depression is something you just have to live
with when you get older, but it’s not.”
We too need to talk and share. And we need to contemplate the glorious mystery
of God, Christ in glory, not immediately
evident before our everyday eyes.
Grace and Peace, Fr. Tony+
No comments:
Post a Comment