Choose Life

February 7, 2008

Thursday after Ash Wednesday

“Here, then, I have today set before you life and prosperity, death and doom. If you obey the commandments of the LORD, your God, which I enjoin on you today, loving him, and walking in his ways, and keeping his commandments, statutes and decrees, you will live and grow numerous, and the LORD, your God, will bless you in the land you are entering to occupy.” Deuteronomy 30:15-16

If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. Luke 9:23-24

Piety
Let us pray: God, you have set before me a warm and dry house, a loving family, a car and minivan, a big backyard (now about those falling leaves?), and an prosperous job. Yet all around there is homelessness, violence and despair in which I participate by my silence and failure to work for change. Help me to take up the cross of poverty and powerlessness that you carried. Help me to recognize and bear the cultural contradictions of Christianity in our First World living so that I may never lose Third World vision. Amen.

Study

The great contradiction, the great choice.

Today, we are told by the “authorities” that if we want to live a long and worry free life that we have to behave in certain ways. Exercise. Eat right. Stop smoking. Save for retirement. Do not drink and drive. Just say no to drugs. Control stress. Vote. Keep our relationships right. Protect the environment. We would not do all these things if they had no payoff.

Yet, Jesus tells us – and we recall the contradiction prophecy of Simeon once again – that if we want to save our life, we must lose it. Rather than pursue personal improvement, we must pursue getting closer to the Lord. That doesn’t rule out personal improvement, it is a path that extends beyond mere personal fulfillment. Moses sets out the goal this way:

“Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live, by loving the LORD, your God, heeding his voice, and holding fast to him. For that will mean life for you, a long life for you to live on the land which the LORD swore he would give to your fathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” Deuteronomy 30:19-20

Luke then reminds us that the journey is not as simple of a choice we make for life. It is the daily struggle for every Christian. We don’t just take up our cross on Sunday or Ash Wednesday or other holy days of obligation. Every day is a holy day of obligation to the cross that we pick up. We don’t just take up our cross during Lent.

We take up our cross daily.

We take up our cross hourly.

We take up our cross, minute-by-Calvary-climbing-minute.

Action
To understand the world
knowledge is not enough,
you must
see it,
touch it,
live in its presence.
and drink the vital heat
of existence in the very heart of reality.

Gallagher, Blanche Marie, B.V.M. Meditations with Teilhard De Chardin. Santa Fe: Bear and Company. 1988