There is an increasing body of psychological research and cultural commentary suggesting that our current generation of Americans has developed a problem with a sense of entitlement. Which is to say, we often think and act as if the world owes us something.
Now, this kind of behavior is typical of our fallen human nature. The parents and grandparents among us can, I’m sure, tell us how toddlers want what they want, when they want it – and a child’s temper tantrums are thrown because they’ve been told ‘no’ in some way.
Then, as children get a little older, they move onto bargaining and rationalizing to get what they imagine they are owed: “If you really loved me . . . But everybody else is . . .”
When we’re teenagers, we really have to struggle to grow out of this kind of self-centered sense of entitlement. We have to learn that we’re not just given a spot on the team, or a good grade in school – we have to earn them. We want to have the most fashionable clothes or the coolest technology, but we learn that they cost money, and we have to get an afterschool job to pay for them.
The problem is this sense of entitlement is insidious – it’s hard to grow out of completely. Some people get stuck in a kind of perpetual adolescence; they remain egotistical and therefore entitled. And even those who basically succeed at maturing past that phase of life still find that a sense of entitlement can rear its ugly head in any of us at any time.
Do you find yourself getting frustrated over being delayed by traffic, or being inconvenienced by having to wait in line? Do you easily get angry when something doesn’t go as you had hoped or planned? I know I find myself feeling this way often enough, and I have to admit that it comes, ultimately, from a sense of entitlement: “Why does this always happen to me . . . Don’t they know I’m in a hurry . . . why don’t they just listen to and do what I say?”
As you can surely appreciate, the reason this sense of entitlement is so problematic is that it can keep us from working hard for things, and even more importantly, it keeps us from appreciating all that we have as gifts from God. In terms of the spiritual life, this really is a deadly way of thinking – perhaps the deadliest: it brings us back to the Garden and to the Original Sin of Adam and Eve who grasped and took what all along God wanted and intended to give as a gift.
I think that’s the thought we need to have in mind in order to properly understand Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel. It starts with the Apostles saying to Jesus: “increase our faith.” This seems like a good thing to ask. But in His response, Jesus says: “when you have done all that you have been commanded, say, ‘we are unprofitable servants; we have done only what we were obliged to do.’”
At first hearing this sounds harsh. But if we think of it in terms of our human sense of entitlement it makes a bit more sense. You see, faith is itself a great gift from God – and the Apostles are right to ask for that gift, as we should too.
But in order to properly receive something as a gift, we have to be free from any sense of being owed. If we think we’re entitled to something – if we think we’re owed something, or even that we’ve earned something, then we can’t receive that thing as a gift.
So it is even with the gift of faith. In order to grow in faith, we must have the humility that recognizes God’s greatness and our weakness. We have to see ourselves as servants who have done nothing that could possibly deserve or earn the many good gifts God has given us. That kind of humility is the pre-condition for receiving an increase in faith. That’s why Jesus responds to the Apostles the way He does.
I think all of us, like the Apostles in today’s Gospel, long for an increased measure of faith. None of us think we have enough faith. And that’s especially true whenever we suffer some trial or loss. Just like the prophet Habakkuk, in our first reading, we cry out: “How long, O Lord? Why do you let me see ruin? Why must I look at misery?”
But think for a minute about the people we celebrate as having great faith – the saints. They are so much like us. None of them sought they had enough faith either! They too cried aloud to God in the face of suffering and in the weakness of their own sinfulness. And yet, the greatest difference between us is that they fought off the sense of entitlement that keeps us from receiving God’s gift of greater faith.
The founder of my Holy Cross community, Blessed Basil Moreau was well known for saying: “I am a simple tool in the hand of the Lord.” Doesn’t that sound precisely like what Jesus is teaching in today’s Gospel?
Or think of our patroness St. Thérèse of Liseux, whose feast day we celebrated this week. She was hardly perfect. The other sisters in the cloister certainly knew that and they told her as much! “I am not always faithful,” Thérèse admitted about herself, “but I never get discouraged.”
“I still am weak and imperfect. I always feel, however, the same bold confidence of becoming a great saint because I don’t count on my merits since I have none. Instead, I trust in Him who is Virtue and Holiness. God alone, content with my weak efforts, will raise me to Himself and make me a saint.”
You see? Jesus teaches us, and the saints show us that the necessary precondition to receiving the gift of faith is that we abandon our sense of entitlement, admit our weakness, and practice gratitude for God’s many gifts. As St. Paul makes clear in his Letter to Timothy, this admission of weakness does not “give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather [a spirit] of power, and love and self control.” We see that in Thérèse: she dared to believe that God would make her a saint! And God wants to do the same for us.
But in order to receive that gift, brothers and sisters, we must fight off the sense of entitlement that makes us imagine we are owed anything at all. Every day, we need to take stock of our failings and weakness, count the blessings we’ve been given, look to serve those who have received less than us, and pray in thanksgiving that we’ve been given so much more than we ever deserved.
Then, we can ask for an increase in faith, and be prepared to receive it as a gift. Then, like St. Thérèse, we can trust that God does indeed want to give us faith, and to make us saints! Friends, “the vision still has its time; it presses on to fulfillment, and will not disappoint. Wait for it, it will surely come, it will not be late.” Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment