“Make them Christian” – Living the Moral Life
Talk 2 – Glenaldale 2006
Part 1 - Becoming Christian
I will not bore you, my dear friends with the extraordinary boring ordinariness of my upbringing. Suffice to say that if you had the first 19 years of my life on tape you would spend a great deal of time with your finger firmly pressed on the fast forward button and a frustrated grimace on your face as you searched in vain for an interesting bit. Sure there were a few amusing moments amongst the humdrum sheer ordinariness of my life like the time my left lung collapsed and I got puffed out walking at granny pace to the emergency ward, or the time I got sent to my room for laughing at the funny face Damien pulled when he fell off a ball and broke his leg. But on the whole if you had met me at the age of 19 you wouldn’t have missed much. I was a pretty run of the mill Catholic boy with slightly above average looks who had got himself into uni, joined a youth group played a bit of sport and music, had a few girlfriends, had some vague beliefs and detested brussle sprouts.
Then in 2003, something amazing happened, I was chosen to lead my youth groups annual retreat weekend. Doesn’t sound very amazing you say. Your right it wasn’t very amazing it was highly stressful. What was amazing was the complete sense of burnout, disillusionment, restlessness and depression I felt when it was finally over. Antioch weekends are a pain in the proverbial to organise and run and this coupled with a big and incredibly boring uni workload and an even more boring part time job left me feeling first like taking a bubble bath for a month and hoping it would all be gone when I got out and secondly like there was something very large missing from my life, a gigantic piece of cheesecake that kept appearing on the horizon wobbling its cheesy centre at me then disapparating.
I had struggled with my faith for years, I went to mass every week, went to youth group every week and was generally nice to people but I had no really firm beliefs and didn’t try very hard to do anything about it. Thus it was that over the following few months something extraordinary did happen in my life, I made a decision to pursue my faith in earnest, to make a more concerted effort to reach out for the cheesecake that had taunted me for so long. The effect was almost immediate and it took a form I never would have imagined. At the prompting of a friend I went and did some study at a Christian College and in the 6 months that followed the joy and revelation that I experienced was unlike anything I have ever felt in my life. The things I began to understand and the truths I started to apply to my life are not really of huge importance, many faded and many have changed, what was important was that I made a decision to pursue God in my life, I didn’t really know what God looked like but I just knew that there was something more. I made a choice to be open to learning more about my faith, my religion and my life and in doing so I began for the first time to own my beliefs. After 19 years of attending church every Sunday I finally became Christian.
My own story is similar to that of the disciples on their journey to Emmaus. We pick up where the disciples have just told Jesus, who they don’t recognise, that the man who they thought was the messiah was killed in Jerusalem three days ago, that all their hopes are dashed and that to make matters worse his body had disappeared from the tomb…
Then he (Jesus) said to them “Oh how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! Was it not necessary that the messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?” Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them all the things about himself in the scriptures.
As they came near the village to which they were going, he walked ahead as if he were going on. But they urged him strongly, saying, “Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.” So he went in to stay with them. When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognised him; and he vanished from their sight. They said to each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?”
The disciples were a sorry lot as they tramped towards Emmaus, disillusioned with life, burnt out after the tumultuous events of the last few days. They had come so close to the God who had been promised to them their whole lives but in the end were unable to recognise him when he was standing right in front of them. Sound familiar? How often have you got frustrated at not being able to see a God who your family, your priests, your friends, your Parish assure you is there? I have faced that frustration many times, both before I began to own my faith and after. So what’s the answer, how did the disciples get from walking blind in vs16 to eyes opened in vs32? There was nothing very Harry Potter about it really it was all in all considering the implications of what we are talking about a pretty straight forward thing, The disciples simply invited Jesus into their lives. They didn’t know it was Jesus who was talking to them, but that wasn’t important, they had already made a decision to pursue God in their lives and when the time came to either part ways with this insightful traveller who they saw something in or invite him in they did the latter and the rest is scripture.
By making the decision to have Christ in their lives even when they could not necessarily see him the disciples made the jump from human to Christian. Emmaus was the beginning of the journey for the disciples; a whole new world had opened up for them. With the decision to invite Jesus in the disciples decided to mould themselves in Jesus’ image. This involved three main things,
- Developing a personal relationship with Jesus
- Gathering in a Eucharist community
- Living a moral life
Each is related to the other, but it is this third obligation that choosing a Christian life brings that is the focus of this talk.
Part 2 – Living the Moral Life
There’s something about the words “being moral” that seems to take all the fun out of life. It conjures images of getting told off for taking money out of the collection plate, faking a sicky or sneaking out of your dorm on a school camp to say hi to the girls in the next camp over (Incidentally, there is no next camp over and Fini has threatened to chop the legs off anyone who tries to find out). For the average Catholic, thinking about being moral either brings out feelings of guilt for our past transgressions, anger that we should be feeling guilty about things that other people don’t seem to have to worry about, hopelessness that we’ll never be as good as we should be, fear that what we’re being asked to do will take us well out of our comfort zones, confusion as to what exactly is the right thing to be doing and most likely some terrible jumbled mashed up Pavlova’ee combination of all of them. Sounds like a pretty morbid affair for something that in the end is supposed to be about growing closer to God and in turn growing in happiness and contentedness. More on that later.
So what is morality? Mum’s dictionary explains that morality is concerned with the distinction between good and bad, right and wrong behaviour. The question that obviously follows is how do we know what is good and bad, right and wrong behaviour? Well, there are a few popular secular views that have an answer for this very central question.
Popular Approaches
1. What is right is what makes you happy.
Bit of a dangerous idea when you consider that “happiness” can be found for $40 a pill in the car park of the local pub, for $60 a bag from your mates, mates uncle or for $7.50 a lick sip and suck of Mexico’s finest at the bar on any given night.
Then there’s the “happiness” that society sells us, the happiness that comes from clean skin, well cut muscles, nice polo shirts, fluffy dice, expensive jewellery, slightly unkempt roguish hair, lots of shoes, cd’s, bags, tops, guitars and possibly toasters if you are that way inclined.
Then there’s the “happiness” that our peers sell us, that going out and getting trashed is essential, as is hooking up with randoms, rocking up to work still drunk, getting chased by the cops, stealing street signs or garden gnomes and doing every assignment the night before or morning of.
Then there’s the “happiness” that our parents might sell us, that life is only good if you get good year 12 marks, get into a good uni course, graduate, get a good job, meet someone, buy a house, get married, have children and make sure they do the same.
If right is whatever makes you happy then almost anything could be right because everyone has different ideas of what makes them happy and of what happiness is. Accordingly, morality would be an entirely subjective issue, in other words you are the one who determines what is right and wrong in your life. Something is good if you say it’s good, there is no objective truth, the truth is whatever you want it to be. If you can’t handle the truth, no problem, just change it. Now this is all very nice and hippy, you know, “it’s all good man, just go with it, do whatever you feel, save the polar bear nation”. But as nice as sitting in a smoke filled hippy van decked out in colourful scarves and headbands and singing songs about bringing peace to the polar bear nation is, doing whatever makes you happy hits one little snag.
The problem with this very attractive philosophy is that in the end most of us have no idea about what makes us happy. After the tequila’s have worn off, the girl has gone home, the money has been spent, the mortgage has been paid off, the polar bears are blown away with the smoke, the kids have been brought up right and the gnomes have been put in someone else’s garden, there is still a sense of dissatisfaction, of restlessness, of yearning for something more. The ironic thing about this philosophy is that it is actually correct. What is right is what makes you happy; the problem is, people, when left to their own devices, are very thick-headed about what leaves them truly and lastingly happy and satisfied. We are built for God and only he can leave us satisfied. St Augustine put it a little more eloquently when he said, “Thou hast made us for thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in thee.”
2. What is right is being a good bloke.
I am lead to believe that this philosophy like many great ideas had its origins at the local pub somewhere in this bountiful pub-filled country of ours, where one bloke who happened to be Guido hatsis confessed to the other bloke after shouting him a drink, “ya know mate, I’ve never pretended that I was an angel, ya know, but I don’t rekon ya gotta be right, see, the old lady, she drags me off to church the other day and suddenly I worked it out mate, it’s so easy its genius right, that Jesus bloke, if ya get rid of all the kneeling and prayin, I rekon he was just tryin to be a good bloke.” That bloke said it to another bloke after shouting him a beer, who said it to another bloke after shouting him a beer and by the time final drinks was called a new moral standard had been set across our fair land.
Well, it’s not a bad philosophy I suppose, I guess being a good bloke is better than being a bad bloke. But, like any idea born from the yeasty residue at the bottom of a pint of Coopers Pale Ale it doesn’t hold up very well under scrutiny the next morning. Being satisfied with simply aiming in life to be a good bloke can be a convenient way of making yourself feel better about past wrongdoings but more importantly no matter why you might choose this philosophy, it highly underestimates and is totally inadequate for dealing with the complexities of moral life. How is a “good bloke” supposed to act when he knocks up a girl and she tells him she’s getting an abortion or when his depressed uncle indicates that life’s not worth living anymore and what’s he supposed to say to a mate who boasts about havin an affair or to an old family friend who smokes weed around her young kids. Being a good bloke doesn’t really help you decide what is right in these sorts of situations, Jesus does, but Jesus was far more than a good bloke.
3. What is right is what leads to the most positive outcome for the most number of people.
For those of you out there playing “Who Wants to Be a Philosophy Nerd?” the concept of doing what will result in the best state of affairs is called utilitarianism. This is the kind of philosophy you see played out on the silver screen. In the movies, its not very often that you see the bad guy get forgiven and rehabilitated, what the hell kind of fun would that movie be?! Much more common is watching the bad guy get shot, blasted, exploded, torpedoed, decapitated, incinerated, blended, sabred or electrocuted in a toaster (if you like those sort of movies). Who cares about the life of one crazy villain if killing him off saves the lives of millions of others? It’s the George Bush mentality, pre-emptive strikes, kill a few foreign people now, maybe some civilians if we’re unlucky and save American lives later. The large good outweighs the small amount of evil.
Makes a certain amount of sense right, I mean it’s not as though we want to do something bad, but if it prevents something worse happening then so be it, circumstances have forced our hand. In that respect it’s a pretty attractive moral philosophy and OK I suppose the fact that it underlies some of George Bush’s decisions is a reason to be instantly sceptical of it, but even despite this flaw it is still a very intuitively attractive philosophy for our mathematical minds.
So, what’s the snag, well, it is implausible to suppose that that we can reliably identify better or worse states or affairs, or even suppose that there is such a thing as “the best state of affairs” overall. For example, when we think about the morality of pre-emptive strikes we weigh up the badness of the action of killing people, depending on how many people are killed, how they are killed, how old and frail they are when they are killed, how innocent or evil they are when they are killed etc. We give the badness of the action a quantitative value in our mind, say -3. We then look at the goodness of the consequences of the action, and depending on how many people are saved, who these people are, how good they are etc. we give the goodness of the consequences of the action a quantitative score, say +8. We do the simple math and work out that overall the act of killing some people to save some people was a morally good state of affairs of +5.
The first problem with these wonderful calculations that we are all so prone to do automatically in our head whenever a moral dilemma arrises is that there is no way we can reliably judge the goodness or badness of an act and its consequences. The value you make up will be tainted by your beliefs about everything which might be a bit different to what is actually true about everything and by the fact that you are only guessing what the consequences will be. If it is possible that you can weigh up the true moral goodness or badness of an act and its consequences like we all try to do to some respect then the only person in existence who can do it properly is God… and his brain is a lot bigger than ours.
The second problem is that in doing these wonderful calculations we assume that actions and consequences are made up of the same moral stuff; that the goodness of one can cancel out the badness of the other or vice-versa. There is an argument that this is not the case, that there is a fundamental difference between the moral value of certain kinds of action and the moral value of the consequences of actions. It would be like doing an equation where you tried to subtract potato’s from the sensation of getting your armpit hair removed by an anti-wax, ex-weed pulling champion of Sweeden named Reg. The two are incompatible, one is a vegetable the other is a life changing experience. Accordingly, the badness of an action cannot simply be cancelled out by the goodness of its consequences; the means does not justify the ends. This is a view taught by the Catholic Church and brings us finally to looking at the Christian approach to morality, that view that we accept when we make the decision to invite Jesus into our lives.
The Christian Approach
The Christian approach to morality at its heart says that what is right is being in communion with God, doing God’s will in accordance with our nature. What is wrong is using our free will to turn our back on God, to be autonomous from God, to ignore God’s will. The scriptures tell us that God created us to live in communion with him, he made us in his image, he built the need to be with him into the fabric of our being. Instead of forcing us to love him and do his bidding however, he gave us the power to decide what we wanted to do. The fable goes that some among the first humans decided to make a go of it on their own thus tainting the rest of humanity with a certain pig headed belief that we don’t really need God at all. How it really happened and why it really happened are not really all that important, what is important is that no matter what our belief in God or what our social conditioning it becomes evident the older we get and the more situations we are faced with that some choices work in harmony with who we are and others do not. Adam and Eve, original sin, apples and snakes, all are just used to explain something that as we grow we begin to work out anyway, that some decisions fulfil our nature, leave us deeply happy, satisfied and content and others do not. These realisations are all well and good I suppose if we want to spend the rest of our lives experimenting with moral decisions to build a moral code that leaves us deeply happy and satisfied. Luckily we are spared this gigantic moral experiment by a compassionate God who has revealed the very code we are searching for in 3 forms.
- The life of Jesus
- Our conscience
- The teaching of the Church
1. The example of Jesus
When you consider what it is that Jesus tells us about how to live a moral life, it’s really too huge to take in all at once so its helpful to break it down to a few key phrases. Love God, love neighbour, love self, forgive.
The call to love God can mean many different things as God is present in ourselves and in each other, but it is often God’s presence in the environment and the creatures he created that we can see when looking to other people and looking inward isn’t working for us. We are called to show our love of God by respecting and enjoying the beautiful environment he has given over to our care. Not abusing our environment can be a difficult task in our modern world. Ignorance of the way we are both personally and as a community damaging the world around us is no excuse for continuing that damage. It’s up to us to find out how we can sustain the beauty of our world.
The call to love each other is often confused with the feeling of love that we feel for some people in our lives. Feelings of love are pretty hard to control (just look at the complicated relationship history of any Catholic youth group), and if we don’t have much control over our feelings of love then how are we supposed to love everyone? Unconditional love is not about a feeling, just like becoming a Christian and seeing God in your life is not about a feeling, it’s about a choice. It’s about recognising and controlling our emotions and thereby freeing ourselves to treat people right.
The call to love ourselves is not something that until recently I ever associated with living a moral life. I mean, sitting down in front of the telly watching a test match, whilst eating a 500gm medium rare steak, drinking Abbot Ale and simultaneously having your feet massaged doesn’t sound like the first step towards leading a moral life, and yet (as long as you don’t do it every day), it is. Taking care of yourself is just as important a component of living morally as is taking care of others. Taking time out, relaxing, doing things you like doing is firstly about enjoying the life you have been given and secondly about making yourself more able to be of service to others. You’re gonna be pretty useless in your ability to love other people if you can’t take care of yourself. This was a lesson that I learned the hard way when I was away at WYD. It wasn’t until the final week of the trip in Cologne and Assisi that I started to realise that in all the excitement and all experiences I really hadn’t been taking time out for myself, I really hadn’t been taking care of myself at a time when, to get the full experience from the trip, I should have been more than ever. I went for a walk by myself along the river in Cologne one afternoon and it was two of the best hours I spent in the whole 4 weeks. I sat on a stone wall and wrote and prayed as I watched nuns from Canada praying the rosary then dancing Africans hitting drums and wild eyed Italians singing chants. The stream of joyful humanity that past me put me in mind of what WYD was all about far more than a hyped up and finally miserable night out on Marionfeld or a glimpse of the Pope ever did. Sitting on that wall I understood why I had come and the only reason I came to this joyful realisation was because I took some time out for myself.
The call to forgiveness, to forgive others and to feel ourselves forgiven by God is obviously also at the heart of Jesus’ teaching and of what it is to live a moral life. In life we will inevitably be hurt by others, living a moral life dictates that we forgive these people for their wrongdoing against us. In forgiving another we free ourselves from the burden of hate and spite that we have harboured against them and we are able to move on. Forgiving another person does not mean forgetting what they did and opening yourself up to being hurt by them in the same way all over again. It means acknowledging the pain they have caused you and moving beyond the way the hurt made you feel.
Seeking forgiveness is also an integral part of living a moral life. Often the journey of living a moral life involves putting one foot forward and taking two steps back. We all make mistakes. In living a life the way Jesus lived his we set the bar very high. We do not always make it, as Fini so eloquently put it recently, “we sometimes smack into the bar and land with a pole up our date.” In writing this talk I realised that the last time I had sought out reconciliation was in the first week of our trip away. The reason for me seeking out the sacrament of reconciliation was because that morning for the first and only time on the trip the group had incurred the wrath of Fini for being all in all pretty useless. We kept wandering off, we didn’t really listen to the guide, we spent a lot of time complaining, etc. etc. There was no doubting that we and especially a few of us myself prime among them were definitely in the wrong. It was a relatively small thing and yet my reaction to it worried me, I spent the rest of the morning making excuses, trying valiantly to push the blame on other things and refusing wholeheartedly to admit that I was at all in the wrong. Eventually I went and saw Smitty, admitted my terrible attitude and felt a lot better about it. Reco freed me from the one manifestation of that attitude that day, but the attitude itself, one of always thinking that I’m in the right, didn’t go away as easily as that.
The experience of writing this talk has been much like the small and yet significant experience of that morning in France. Thinking about morality has made me confront other incidents and attitudes that I have been reluctant to admit were wrong and that have been impeding my growth. I have once again found it hard to admit to myself that I have done wrong; it’s something I was terrible at as a kid and is something I still find hard today. I fought against it for weeks as I thought about, prayed about and wrote this talk. I have once again underestimated the more ongoing continual need for the sacrament of reconciliation in my life. Some faults in our personality like mine to always assume I am right are in need of continual forgiveness. Only with this forgiveness can these faults be mended and can we get any closer to jumping that bar.
2. Our conscience
The second way God has revealed to us his moral code is through our conscience. I mean, it would be pretty hard to live life if you had to continually consciously refer to the teaching of Jesus in every situation. Our conscience helps to remember what is right in our daily comings and goings and it also prompts us to think more about what is right if we are unsure. As fantastic as this is and contrary to popular belief our conscience isn’t foolproof. Our conscience is something that is conditioned by our environment and as such it can be trained to have a skewed view of right and wrong. The conscience of a child brought up in a Taliban training camp is likely to be quite different to yours or mine. Where yours or mine might be horrified at the thought of blowing ourselves and others up, the unfortunate suicide bomber’s conscience may in fact encourage the act. A rather extreme example maybe, but it illustrates the fact that our conscience can be wrong. Just because we don’t feel bad about doing a certain thing doesn’t mean that we haven’t done wrong. We need to train and form our consciences to be more attuned to what is right and what is wrong. We can do this by making a more conscious effort to think about our actions, to reflect and read about and discuss moral living.
3. The wisdom of the Catholic Church
Finally we get to the third and possibly the most contentious way that God reveals his moral code to us, through the teaching and wisdom of the Catholic Church. Even for someone brought up Catholic his whole life, man that is a hard one to swallow. How many of us young Catholics simply write off what the church has to say on moral issues as outdated and conservative and don’t even give church teaching a look in? I certainly have in the not too distant past.
Lets get past what our friends would say and have a closer look at why this is such a problem for us. The Catholic church (unlike any other church) has 2000 years of discernment on moral issues at its disposal. For 2000 years people within the church have spent much of their lives debating the implications of Jesus’ life and teaching on how we should live our lives. This alone should probably give us pause to consider what it has to say.
However, we live in a culture that is grossly biased towards individual autonomy. Our culture values the individual working things out for themselves, approaching the world like McGyver, relying totally on his own wit and ingenuity to get him out of any tight spots that life throws at him. The very idea of trusting a moral authority like the church, of allying ourself with its beliefs and causes, when we don’t know everything about it, when we haven’t worked it out for ourselves is too much for most of us. We are brought up cynical of any organisation that seeks to convince us that life is a certain way.
Instead of being sceptical of Church teaching perhaps we should be sceptical of the cultural bias towards the McGyverish individual autonomy of today? On the backdrop of the last 2000 years our current cynicism is merely a cultural phase. Perhaps we should be putting more faith in Catholic teaching which has been rarely altered and thus is less susceptible to the cultural ideology of the day?
Something else that we must definitely take into account is the church’s claim that its teaching has been and is guided by the Holy Spirit. This is a big call, but it is not wholly ungrounded. The Catholic church began with the disciples, Peter was it’s first Pope, the same church that was nourished by the Holy Spirit at Pentecost 2 millenia ago is still in operation today. For centuries the ranks of the church have been filled with good men and women, honest people who have made the decision to invite Jesus into their lives. The teaching that they have helped shape has undoubtedly been touched by the Holy Spirit working in their lives.
Admittedly, less Christ centred men and women have also played a part in the church’s history, mistakes have been made, hypocrisy has reared its ugly head and the reputation of the Church has been somewhat tarnished. Are we willing to believe in the teachings of an organisation that has made mistakes, can we trust that it’s teachings are guided by the Holy Spirit? Can we trust our society that has brought us up to only believe in what you can work out for yourself?
Why do we struggle with the Church’s teachings so much? Perhaps it is also because the Church’s moral code presents us with an ideal that can seem daunting, unreachable, unfair, too hard, in conflict with too much that our society tells us will make us happy. We don’t want to face the issues, we’re too lazy to face the issues, we look for a way out.
It is true the Church does set the bar very high, so did Jesus. The bar is not as high as it is because God likes having a laugh watching us fall with a pole up our date. The bar is so high because we have the potential for holiness, the potential for lasting joy, the potential for true contentment, the potential for eternal peace. We have been given this one life and it will be decisive. We will be for all eternity the person we become, with whatever spiritual depth and moral character we do (or do not) develop. Our moral choices have eternal significance. It is our responsibility to make sure we make the right ones.