The Value Of Life - 9/09
THE VALUE OF LIFE ~ 6/09/09 (pm)
I want you to think for a moment about what is the most valuable item you own. I won’t include people in that because we don’t own people. It might be your house or your shares or your investments. I hope not, because while those are valuable we are talking about what is most valuable and they hardly come into that category. It might be a particular ‘sense’ like sight, or hearing , or taste, and that I can understand. For me however I think the most valuable item (and we’re excluding other people) would be life itself, because without life we have none of the other things. As Jesus said, “What shall it profit a person to gain the whole world and lose his own life? What could a person give to buy back that life?’ (Mark 8:36,37).
Obviously we can think of life on various levels. We’re not dividing ourselves up, but we can think of different facets of life as we experience it.
On one level Jesus words apply to biological life. Life on the embodied level. I get a bit uncomfortable when people become so spiritual that they almost denigrate the body, and as a result they go on to denigrate things like human sexuality and pleasure and all the sensations that are part of our embodied existence. One of the early heresies was known as Gnosticism, and amongst other things Gnostics thought that material things including the body were evil. But we agree with the Psalmist when he says, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made…I know that full well.” (Psalm 139:14).” Even when Paul talks about our bodies as ‘clay pots’ (2 Corinthians 4:7) he isn’t denigrating them. He is simply acknowledging there is a certain fragility about them and we are not indestructible. But everybody’s body is wonderful. Without exception, even if we’re beginning to slow down and have aches and pains and a few sags where we didn’t used to have sags
One of the great contributions of modern science is that it has helped us to understand that. We all know the word DNA. Cells replicate themselves in the body and they know how to do it because of the DNA. Someone has estimated that our DNA controls more than 5 trillion chemical reactions in our bodies every second. Five trillion! How could you despise your body when that goes on? It is almost impossible to comprehend. Yet at times we fail to acknowledge the wonderful complexity of our bodies as we go about the business of seeing, hearing, moving, eating, tasting, smelling, thinking, remembering, and generally being ourselves. What a wonderful creation each of us is, and every other person, and what a wonderful gift life itself is.
Recently I quoted St. Augustine who 1700 years ago said:
·‘Men go abroad to wonder at the height of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars; and they pass by themselves without wondering.’.
Life is a gift and to the very best of our ability we have a responsibility to care for our lives on that level. Things don’t always lie within our control, but insofar as they do we all cherish the gift of life and mourn when someone loses it, especially prematurely. ‘What shall it profit a person to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? For what can a person give in return for their life?’
Jesus’ words apply however on another level as well. As many of you know the word translated as ‘life’ can also be translated as ‘soul’ or as ‘true self’. It’s the word ‘psyche’ from which we get our modern words ‘psychology’ and ‘psychiatry’. So in addition to life at its most basic level - being alive rather than dead - Jesus words can also be translated, ‘What shall it profit a person to gain the whole world and to lose his (or her) own true self.”
Thomas Merton, the Trappist Monk wrote: ‘For me to be a saint means to be myself…Therefore the problem of…salvation is the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self.’ He went on to add, ‘Trees and animals have no problem. God makes them what they are without consulting them, and they are perfectly satisfied. With us it is different. God leaves us free to be whatever we like. We can be ourselves, or not as we please. We are at liberty to be real, or to be unreal. We may wear now one mask and now another, and never, if we so desire, appear with our own true face’.
Haven’t you occasionally come across people who seem to mirror everyone around them, but you’re not sure who they are? They have lost their real self. Somehow you feel they are playing a role, acting out what society or their family or partner or profession expects of them. But you don’t know who they are in themselves. Sometimes with a couple one person seems to be an echo of the other. Somewhere along the line one person in the relationship has lost his or her true self and become an echo of the other, and that is a great loss. As Jesus said, “What can a person give that is as precious as his or her own own true self?”.
We all play roles and there is nothing wrong with that. When you and I go to a wedding for example there is a way of acting that is appropriate there that would not be appropriate at, say a funeral. We acknowledge that. And there are things that you and I can say or do at home, that aren’t as appropriate in public. The same in talking to a friend as opposed to talking to a stranger. The difficulty arises when people can’t separate out their identity from their role. So even in the presence of God they end up playing a role - maybe the role of the good, perfect, Christian who never fails - as opposed to the real Christian who is always a mixture of strength and weakness, success and failure, faith and fragility, but who is our real self.
It is sad when people have to go through life playing a role and in the process lose their real self, because that is the person God loves and wants to work with, not some idealised person who exists only in our own mind. Jesus’ words are important for us all, “What shall it profit a person to gain the whole world (even the Christian world) and to lose his own true self.”.
And that true self includes our strengths, our abilities and our gifts, as well as whatever frailties we may have. Because if it doesn’t include a healthy acknowledgement of our strengths and abilities we are simply back into playing another role, that of “poor me.”
The Christian journey is to see and acknowledge our true self, that mysterious combination of strengths and weaknesses, gifts and abilities, insights and experience that we all embody, because that is the person God loves, uses, and believes in.
