“Submit to God; resist the devil and he will take flight. Draw close to God, and he will draw close to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners; purify your hearts, you backsliders. Be humbled in the sight of the Lord and he will raise you on high.”
— James 4: 7–8, 10
Recently someone with whom I’m walking the path of recovery chided me for being selfish. She thought I should offer myself for a certain kind of service that, at this point in my life, work, and Benedictine oblateship, I feel is beyond me.
“This isn’t just about you and your self-transformation,” she said. “It’s about passing what we have on to others.”
My first reaction was an inward, “Excuse me? My whole LIFE is a service!” The prayer, the books, the talks, the columns, the 15 years of blog posts, the endless correspondence, the travel, the countless “favors,” the hours spent in recovery circles, both giving and receiving. In fact, in the recent past, I’d faithfully shown up in service to her for an hour each week for more than a period of two years!
But then I thought of Father Alfred Delp (1907–1945), a Jesuit priest arrested and imprisoned by the Nazis pretty much for the “crime” of publicly believing in Christ.
Author Mary Frances Coady includes the following anecdote in her book, “With Bound Hands: A Jesuit in Nazi Germany: the Life and Selected Prison” (Loyola Press, $13.95):
The Nazis who’d imprisoned (and would eventually execute) Father Delp were beating him and calling him “Liar!” because he wouldn’t give up the names of his friends. “I prayed hard,” he later wrote, “asking God why he permitted me to be so brutally handled — and then I saw that there was in my nature a tendency to pretend and deceive.”
Now that’s humility. They’re beating you and calling you a liar and instead of feeling sorry for yourself you reflect: “You know, I am actually kind of a liar.”
The woman in question may have called me selfish for slightly misplaced reasons but the fact is: I am selfish, in fundamental ways that remain hidden from me.
You bet I can think my prayer, work, and service are all about my self-transformation. I reveal myself in many ways in my writing, but is the revealing itself a smokescreen for what I don’t want to, or can’t, reveal? We can be of huge service, but the ways we want to be of service are not necessarily the ways God wills for us to serve.
In a painful and yet somehow delightful way — the delight that comes when our inflated egos have been punctured — my spiritual companion had put a finger on my pulse. She sees me as the world sees me, not as I see my own self-curated image.
In and of themselves, of course, my character defects are of zero interest. The point is that she’d invited me to ask what Pope Benedict XVI, in a 2013 general audience, invited all of us to ask: What really counts in our life?
“Being converted means not shutting ourselves into the quest for our own success or own prestige, our own status, but rather ensuring that every day, in the small things, truth, faith in God, and love become the most important thing of all.”
Let’s face it: we could all strive for less selfishness and more service in a thousand ways each day. And as the psalmist observed: “It is good for me that I was humbled, so that I might learn your status” (Psalm 119:71).
In Matthew 6:14–15, Jesus teaches his disciples the Lord’s Prayer: “If you forgive others their transgressions, your heavenly Father will forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your transgressions.”
There it is, so simple, the key to inner peace.
Can I forgive others for seeing me, in spite of my best efforts, as I am: often lukewarm, divided, hypocritical, inconsistent, stubborn, self-righteous, forever out for myself, blind to and powerless to correct my worst defects, and in some sense a fraud?
Can I forgive others for seeing in me the faults I so eagerly and clearly to my mind see in them?
Can I let others off the hook for their tiny, petty slights and hurts and in turn be open to forgiveness for my own massive sins? Can I one more time be prepared for my innermost being to be renewed and to put on the new man? (Eph. 4:23–24).
Father Delp wrote a stunning series of Advent meditations. Let us honor him by praying with him during Lent. Let us ponder his humility in the face of violence, imprisonment, and almost certain death.
Before he was hung by the Nazis, he wrote, “I will honestly and patiently await God’s will. I will trust him till they come to fetch me. I will do my best to ensure that this blessing, too, shall not find me broken and in despair.”
