A call to die (to self)

 

Death doesn’t necessarily sound all that inviting to most people.  When I was 6 or 7-years old, my mom and dad would visit my maternal grandparents quite often.  We had to drive past Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery to get there.  Looking at the headstones and mausoleums would get me thinking about my mortality every time!  I got proficient at recognizing landmarks and knew when we were getting close, so I would always hide my head and try to think of something else or fall asleep because the thought of dying terrified me.  I was afraid to look death in the eye.

The Gospel I reflected on today brought this memory back.  I realized that I’ve matured in my faith to where I am no longer terrified to contemplate death.  So, how should we look at death?

First of all, death, literally speaking, is a passing from this world to the next.  When our time comes in accord with the will of God, we should welcome it and anticipate our full immersion into the life of God. 

But in John’s Gospel, Jesus speaks of death on another level.  We should see ourselves represented by the grain of wheat that achieves its potential only by falling to the ground and dying.  In that natural act, it is planted in the fertile soil and grows, producing an abundance of good fruit (John 12:20-33).

How should we see ourselves represented in this natural action?  We do so by embracing death to self so that we can be planted in the fertile soil of the grace of God and produce an abundance of good fruit.

Dying to oneself means that we let go of all selfishness in life.  First, all intentional acts of selfishness must be let go, but then even unintended selfishness must be let go.  What is “unintended selfishness”?

Unintended selfishness is a way of referring to everything in life that we hold on to and cling to simply because you want it for ourselves.  This could include even good things such as a loving relationship.  It’s not that we should do away with good things in life, such as loving relationships; rather, we mustn’t cling to anything, even good things, for selfish motives.  Love, when it is authentic love inspired by God, always is detached and selfless, looking only toward the good of the other.  This is the purest death to self that we can live.  When this level of love is lived, that of complete selfless detachment, God enters into our lives and into each particular situation of our lives, bringing forth an abundance of good fruit.  This is a gift that’s more powerful than anything we can do on our own; it’s the fruit of a total death to self, transformed by God into new life.

As believers who have lived from the 20th century into the 21st, we are beset by a collage of images we will never forget, even if we desired to do so.  Images of the trench warfare of World War I, the bread lines of the 1930’s and families with unemployed breadwinners, the death camps of Nazi Germany, the scarred survivors of the atomic blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki , screaming children running for their lives during the Tet Offensive in Vietnam,  the sight of the Twin Towers collapsing to the ground with thousands of innocents trapped inside, the ugly and horrifying images of journalists, aid workers , and Christians  being slaughtered by terrorists, the onset and mismanagement of the COVID pandemic — all of these and more are part of our life circumstances.   In addition to seeing and feeling the suffering of this magnitude, we experience our own pain and suffering in the circumstances of life from death of a loved one, to unemployment, to worry and concern for a child or grandchild or parent or a friend, to personal illness, to the ordinary advancement of aging.

Scriptures invite us to vividly remember that Jesus was no stranger to suffering and that we, His followers, will need to deal with suffering in our own lives as well.  Does Jesus desire for us to suffer?  I think not.  I believe in a Jesus who wants us to do everything in our power to eliminate or minimize suffering in life.  After we do this, we’ll find, as did Jesus, that there’s just some suffering in life we just can’t do anything about.  It’s at this point that we’re invited to unite ourselves with our Crucified Lord, to make ourselves one with Jesus in His sufferings so that we might receive His Divine strength in our neediest moments and become one with Him in bringing about new life and a renewed, more profound relationship with God for ourselves and for all of God’s People.  These are the moments when we, like the Greeks in John’s Gospel, look for Jesus, when we most desire and need to see Jesus.  Our Scriptures also invite us to understand that in these neediest of life’s circumstances, we’ll see the Suffering Jesus and will recognize the immensity of His love as the foundation of His sacrifice for us.

United with our Crucified Lord through our own unavoidable sufferings in life, we’ll be fortified and empowered by Him to take a “Walk of Faith” with Him through the garden of life.