Interrupting Our Journey

Let me share with you the results I got from a recent Amazon search on “spirituality.”

·      How to Read Your Way to Heaven;

·      The Art of Practical Spirituality: How to Bring More Passion, Creativity, and Balance into Everyday Life;

·      How to Read the Akashic Records: Accessing the Archive of the Soul and Its Journey: Revised and Updated;

·      The Game of Life and How to Play It;

·      How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now;

·      How to Be Free Without Fixing Yourself: 40 Ways to Spiritually Outsmart Your Own Nonsense, Using Ancient Wisdom;

·      Breaking The Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One

The self-help sections of bookstores and online are packed with books that are meant to allow a person to become a master of their destiny while also bringing them more into contact with the Divine. However, that search is always one that leaves us looking for more. We want to be certain – certain of our own justice and certain of our own salvation. It’s a normal human instinct to want to know that we are “doing it right.” The danger of attaching ourselves to these sort of “self-help” methods is that it will inevitably turn us in on ourselves and actually lead us farther from God if we let them.

In contrast to these Amazon titles, let me offer something else: “[T]his command that I enjoin on you today is not too mysterious and remote for you. It is not up in the sky, that you should say,'Who will go up in the sky to get it for us and tell us of it, that we may carry it out?' Nor is it across the sea, that you should say, 'Who will cross the sea to get it for us and tell us of it, that we may carry it out?' No, it is something very near to you, already in your mouths and in your hearts; you have only to carry it out."

For those of us who like “processes” and putting in the work to discover the secret to life, this revelation from Yahweh seems too simple. It seems that God is saying, “You know what to do. I’ve told you. Now, do it!”

The scholar of the law who comes to Jesus to question Him is like so many of us – a spiritual seeker. However, like ourselves sometimes, he wants to know that what he is already doing is enough, like losing weight by eating potato chips. Jesus’ reply is one that reminds him – and us – that we all live in a society, that no man is an island. The Lord brings into the conversation the concept of our “neighbor,” and that makes things a little different.

Life is made of encounters, whether we like it or not. We are always coming into contact with others, so lang as we are walking out our door. What Jesus is telling us is that these encounters reveal who we are and how we are doing with regard to our relationship with God. The Holy Father commented on this a month ago, saying, “We find ourselves in front of others, faced with their fragility and weakness, and we can decide what to do: to take care of them or pretend nothing is wrong.”

Simply having read a book about being a good person or “more spiritual” doesn’t make us good people – nor does simply showing up here at Mass. The first two people to encounter the poor victim on the road were a priest and a Levite, religious people, worshiping people. Pope Leo noted that “the practice of worship does not automatically lead to being compassionate.”

That compassion is what Christ wants of us. It is, in fact, what will lead to “inheriting eternal life.” The “Good Samaritan” is the one who stops what he is doing to pay attention to the other. He is the one who goes out of himself to be a good person. That is what God is asking of us!

Self-help books and programs are nice; however, as I said, they can turn us too far inward and allow us to forget about other people. That sort of selfishness was the sin of the priest and the Levite. Hearing this story of that journey between Jerusalem and Jericho should be a reminder to us that we are all on that journey. We are all confronted with others’ needs and our own lives. When we can set aside our needs for the good of someone else, that is when we are living in the peace that Jesus won through the blood of His Cross. It is that blood that washes our wounds and makes us whole.

As Pope Leo said, may we be capable of interrupting our journey and having compassion on another; because that is exactly what Jesus did for us.