Robert Barron: Become Someone for Others

Peace be with you. Friends, many years ago when I was a student at Mundelein Seminary, we had a great professor named Dr.Richard Issel. He was a psychologist and he taught these courses in counseling and one was called, I remember, The Psychology of Successful Parish Priesthood. I took all of his courses. He was a great teacher. And one principle I remember from Issel is this. He said, “If you want to be happy, stop worrying about being happy and get on with becoming fulfilled.” Happiness, and Aristotle knew this too, a long time before Dr.Issel, happiness is a kind of byproduct of fulfillment. The worst thing you can do is to turn inward and fuss about why am I not happy? How do I become happy? Forget about being happy. Become fulfilled and the happiness will take care of itself. Something similar I found in Jordan Peterson's reflections where he says, “Self-consciousness is equivalent to misery.” And what he means, I think, is this turning inward. The self-preoccupation is equivalent with misery. So you want to be psychologically healthy. Well, forget about yourself. Stop fussing about yourself and get about the business of fulfillment. It's a very helpful principle, I find. And I bet now those listening to me, when you find yourself most unhappy, it's that you're fussing about yourself. You're turned inward. You're worrying about what might have been and mistakes you made. Forget about that. Forget about being happy. Get on with being fulfilled. In other words, there's a kind of extroverted quality that's associated with happiness. Well, I always think of this when I come across our reading for today. We're reading from the Great Sermon on the Mount, Jesus' paradigmatic teaching. Jesus says to his disciples, “You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world. You are a city set on a hill.” So you say, “Okay, the sermon that Jesus gives is the key to happiness. It begins with the beatitudes. Beatitudo means happiness. So if I want to be happy, I better follow this.” Well, look what he tells his followers to be. Something for the sake of the other. So look at the first one, “You are the salt of the earth.” Well, in Jesus' time in the ancient world, long before refrigeration, if you wanted to preserve meat, well, you would salt it. You wanted to enhance its flavor, and that's true today, of course, too, you put salt on it. What's one thing you never would do if you have guests over to your house? “Well, I'm serving dinner and here's a plate of salt for you.” Salt is not salt for its own sake. Salt exists for the sake of the other. What's the role of the Christian in the world? It's not to be fussily preoccupied with his or her own happiness. Rather, it's to become something for the sake of the other. Salt makes things spicy and tasty and interesting. Salt preserves what's worth preserving. So what's the role of the Christian in the world? It's not, “Well, let me try to be as happy as I can be. Let me cultivate my own holiness.” No, you will become happy and you'll become holy in the measure that you become someone for others. So what does it mean to be salt, to be the spicy element within the society? That Christians would invade all the expressions of the secular culture, entertainment and sports and business and finance and everything. Christians invade that space in a spicy, salty way to bring something of the style and energy of Jesus into all these elements of life. See, a Christian should wake up every morning and say not, “Well, now how can I become happier today?” But rather, “How can I make the world more Christlike? How can I be salt for the world? How can I spice things up and preserve what's worth preserving?” I think everybody, your whole approach to spiritual life will shift if you think along those lines. And look at the second one. He says, “You are the light of the world.” Well, you never see light. Light in itself is not visible. Rather, light is that by which we see other things. You walk into a dark room and you're disoriented till someone turns on the light and then, ah, now I can see what's in the room. I always think here of the church in Rome has wonderful Caravaggio paintings, and they're in the dark, and you have to put little coins in a machine to light up the picture. And then boom, the light comes on and there's Caravaggio in all its splendor. And you can see it for a few minutes and the lights go out and you got to put more money in. “You, my followers,” says Jesus, “you're the light of the world. You are that by which things become more visible and beautiful and appealing. People will see beautiful things because of you.” Now see, what if you thought about your spiritual life in those terms? So my goal today is not to make myself happier. No, it's to make others happier. Being by my own style of being in the world, a light that illumines others. Or think of, I often use the example of halos around the heads of saints. How come they're depicted that way? Because the saint is a light for others. How should I live? Well, I look to a saint. A saint becomes like a luminosity on the road. Let's say I'm stumbling around in the dark, I don't know what direction my life should take. Well, then I see a saint, and suddenly the light goes on and I can see where I'm going. I think of the role that Thomas Aquinas played in my own life when I was a 14-year-old kid and Thomas was like a light going on. Or think of someone, they lost their way and they come across the story of a Maximilian Kolbe or a Mother Teresa or the Little Flower, and suddenly the luminosity of that personality lights up their path. They see where they're supposed to go. That's your job, Christian, in the world. What if you woke up every day and said, “That's my job today, is by my own sanctity to become a light for others to see”? And then this last image that we might not get as readily, “You're a city set on the hill.” Well, see, we've got GPS and everything else and maps to navigate. But in the ancient world, they had to navigate in a more, I suppose, clumsy way, but one of the ways they navigated was they'd see cities on a hilltop. Oh, you got to move in the direction of that city, or you have to come to that city and then you've got to move further west or whatever it was. The city on the hill was a means of navigation. It was a landmark that everybody could see. That's your job, Christian, to be a city set on the hill so that everybody can get their bearings from you. Does that make sense? We're all wandering around trying to make our way to God. Well, how do I find the way? Well, look, there's that city. Oh, yeah. Move in that direction. Well, that's exactly the role the saints play, isn't it? They give directionality to our lives. Well, what if you thought about your own spiritual life precisely in those terms? That your distinctiveness is not for you; it's for the sake of someone who's trying to find his or her way. Your salt, your light, your city set on a hill. This has occurred to me with all of this in mind, is look at Catholics in America, so my home country, how we kind of oscillate back and forth between extremes in a way. When Catholics arrived here, let's say, middle of the 19th century and on, we were arriving in a very Protestant culture. And so it was important for Catholics to maintain their distinctiveness. And so parishes and Catholic schools and a Catholic subculture developed. The stress was on distinctiveness. What makes us uniquely Catholic over and against the wider culture? Well, is that good? Yeah, because salt can lose its saltiness, and the light can go out and the city built on the hill can be razed to the ground. And so yes, you do have to be distinctive, but the purpose is not to rest in your own distinctiveness. The purpose is now to use your distinctiveness as a guide and a light and a spice for others. So think of this now. When Catholics first arrived here, they were stressing distinctiveness. Now, the years I was coming of age, after Vatican II, we went to the other extreme. The church was so open to the world that it lost a sense of what makes it unique. The biblical principle is always this healthily tensive principle. We are distinct, salty, luminous, elevated for the sake of the other, not for our own sake. What's distinctive to us uniquely Catholic is for the sake of the wider world. I'm not meant to crouch behind walls and cultivate my private Catholicism. No no. Indeed katholikos, Catholic means according to the whole. The church exists for the world. We're distinctive for the sake of the world. All of that is implicit in these great images that Jesus uses. Now, let me just close by drawing some attention to reading number one, which is from the Prophet Isaiah. So if you say, “Okay, what is it? What is this distinctive quality? What makes us salty and spicy and luminous and so on?” Well, listen what Isaiah says in our first reading, “Share your bread with the hungry, shelter the oppressed and the homeless, clothe the naked when you see them.” Listen now, “Then your light will break forth like the dawn and your wound shall quickly be healed.” It's really interesting now in light of what we've been talking about. What's the light? What's the light? These actions. Now, building upon this, the church develops the corporal works of mercy, which I've talked about a lot. Feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, visit the imprisoned, visit the sick, bury the dead. Concrete things. And when you perform these acts of love, what happens? Your light will break forth like the dawn. You'll be light for others. And then listen though, “And your wound shall quickly be healed.” What's the wound? “I'm just not happy. I'm just not content. What's the matter?” Don't turn inward and fuss about it. Remember Dr. Issel. You want to be happy, forget about your happiness. You want to be holy, forget about your holiness. You want the wound healed, turn your life into a gift for others. Salt, light, city on the hill, and it looks like these concrete works of mercy. Here's just the last thing from Isaiah that I'll add to the works of mercy. Listen, “If you remove from your midst oppression false accusation and malicious speech, then light shall rise for you.” There it is again. Where's the light going to come from? Well, he adds these, which I think are very relevant to us today: oppression, false accusation, malicious speech. Go online anytime of the day or night. How often now in the social media context we engage in just this kind of malicious speech, attacking people's characters, going after them. Remove that. You want to be happier? Remove that from your life and light will shine forth. Remember everybody, it's the extroverted move. It's the move out from yourself. The Christian exists not for herself. The Christian exists for the world. Light, salt, city set on the hill. And God bless you.