Robert Barron - Enter the Adventure
Peace be with you. Friends, last week I spoke about Paul to the Romans, this great text, this marvelous text by the first great theologian of the Church. And today we're reading from the very end of Romans, Romans 14. I wonder if you could put this statement up wherever you'd see it on your refrigerator, on your computer screen? Listen: "None of us lives for oneself, and no one dies for oneself. For if we live, we live for the Lord, and if we die, we die for the Lord; so then, whether we live or die, we are the Lord's". I think in many ways the whole Bible, the whole of revelation, is summed up in this statement. "None of us lives for oneself".
When I spoke about justification last week, I referred to that line from Paul: "It is no longer I who live, it is Christ who lives in me". It's not the old self that lived for itself. That's gone. Paul considers that rubbish. It's Christ who lives in me. I belong to somebody else. It's not my mind and its prerogatives, my will and its desires, my inclinations that matter. It's what Christ is thinking and willing and acting in me. I'm not my own. And Paul says that too: "You've been bought at a price". You don't belong to yourself.
Now, the reason I say this is so important for us is can you see how everything in our culture militates against this? I think that's why Christianity is struggling in our world today. I mean, we say the opposite. "No, no, it's your life. You decide, you choose. It's all about finding your voice, asserting your prerogatives". I mean, everywhere you listen in the culture, everywhere you look in the culture, you find the same message that you do belong to yourself and you've had it with other people telling you what to do. But the Bible is calling for a revolution, a conversion, a "metanoia". There's the word that we find in the New Testament, "metanoo," going beyond the mind you have.
The mind we have now in our culture is clearly, "I belong to myself. I am my own project". Uh-uh. You belong to another. I might've referenced this before with you, but Richard Rohr has done this work in the initiation rituals of primal peoples. And I find it very illuminating. This is across the cultures, it's around the world. There's a similarity in the way in which young men especially are initiated into manhood, into adulthood. It always involves a kind of stripping away of the self-regarding child and moving that child into the far greater space of powers that transcend him.
So I might've rehearsed this with you before, but typically a young man is ripped away from his home. Maybe in the middle of the night he was taken out of his sleep. He's scarified in some way. The tooth is knocked out or his face is scarred. He's physically marked. He's initiated into the lore and history of the tribe. But then in a culminating moment, he's brought out into nature, whether it's the tundra or the jungle or depending on the geography, and he's told to survive. He's got to make his way. And only when having survived this natural challenge, when he comes into contact with the power of God, only then is he to return to the tribe and function as an adult.
Now, Rohr sums this up, and I want to just juxtapose it to Paul's observation here. He sums this up in these principles: "The initiation ritual is meant to tell the young man, first, life is hard. Secondly, you're not that important. Thirdly, you're not in control. Fourthly, you are going to die. And finally, your life is not about you". Each one of those, even as I say them, and I've said them before, even as I say them, something is balking in me. And I bet you have the same experience. Think of this now in comparison to the attitude of a child. "Life is hard". Well, not for a child, right? For a child, life's easy. He's being taken care of.
People are bringing him food and sheltering him and keeping him warm or cool or whatever he needs. Life isn't so hard. "You're not that important". Well, not for a child, no. A child thinks he's very, very important. He seems to be the center of attention of his parents. The world does seem to revolve around him and his needs. "You're not in control". I don't know. A little child just can cry or make a funny face or smile or whatever, and parents bring him what he wants. He seems to be very much in control of his life. "You're going to die".
Well, a little child is probably not even aware of the fact of death. "Your life is not about you". Tell that to a little child. His life is all about him. That's all it's about. It's about meeting his needs and meeting his desires. "Yeah, I'm the center of attention. My life's pretty easy. I seem to be in control of these people. My life's all about me".
See, and the very point, everybody, the very point of the initiation rituals is to shake us out of that consciousness. Because as long as you live in that little world, you're not going to be alive. You'll be permanently a child, maybe at best an adolescent. You will never, listen now, enter into the adventure of being a true human being because you'll be in this little well-lighted space of your own self-regard. How dull that is. I mean, understandable, yes, for a kid, but how dull that is for an adult.
And that's why this initiation ritual is meant to do this painful work. Think of the scarification or the knocking out of a tooth. Yeah, life is hard, and it's really salutary for you to know that in your own body, that there's a permanent reminder to you in your own flesh that life is hard and that in fact you're going to die. Your life isn't about you. Rather, it's about this family and tribe to which you belong. It's about this natural world of which you are a very small part. And finally, it's about God and God's great purpose for you.
Can I make bold, everybody, to say this? I think our culture right now is stuck in a kind of permanent adolescence, this excessive self-regard, self-justification, safe spaces, protecting my ego, "don't tell me what to think or do," and, may I say, this disaffiliation from the churches. And I know everyone's full of righteous indignation about corruption in the Church, and God knows that's true. There's been corruption from the beginning. But it is very dangerous indeed, spiritually speaking, to disaffiliate from this transcendent source of meaning to one's life. Nothing will lock you into place more disastrously than a disaffiliation from God.
See, I think one way to look at this is this is the treasure buried in the field. That's what Paul's talking about. You don't belong to yourself. And when you discover that, that's when you begin to live for the first time. That's why you should sell everything you've got and buy that field. When you discover your moral purpose, that you're here to serve something way beyond your that's when you little ego and its needs, that's when you come to life. That's the pearl of great price. You've been looking for it. And you think you're going to find it in the goods of the world that serve the ego. There's my famous wealth, pleasure, honor, power. But that's what that is, is you're on this quest to find things that will satisfy your ego.
See, all you are at that point is a kind of advanced adolescent. Maybe you're using all of your intellectual powers, but you're serving fundamentally adolescent ends. Think of here, everybody, of all the hero stories, and we still love them. Many of the most popular movies are about that. What do they always hinge upon? Prescind for the moment from all the special effects and all the whizzbang computer stuff. What are those stories always about? They're about a self-regarding person who's living in a very small spiritual space becoming someone who breaks free of that precisely in love and service to higher goods and higher powers. Only when you break out of that self-regard to serve your family or your community or the wider society or ultimately the purposes of God, that's when you come alive. That's when you become a hero, listen, who can really be of help to those around him.
See, the permanent adolescence of our society is leading to all kinds of trouble. Both in here, yes, because you never come to maturity, but also to others, because you are here in a way to serve them. And if you're caught in this sort of adolescent feedback loop, well then you're not accomplishing the good you've been placed here to accomplish. How come the society, in many ways, is coming apart? Because everybody living in this permanent adolescence is not performing their mission, not finding their mission. I said this recently, maybe it was over at World Youth Day in Lisbon. Safe spaces, we're obsessed with those, a place where I can feel safe.
Again, I'm not against safety. There's got to be a modicum of safety if we're going to be psychologically together. But see how childish a desire that is. That's what children need and want, is safety. But I said to the young people at World Youth Day, a religion that places before our eyes someone who is nailed to a cross is not a religion putting a huge premium on safety. What do we put a premium upon? Accepting adventure, spiritual adventure. Following God's will. Dangerous? Uhhuh, almost by definition. Requiring real courage? Yes. Hard? Mm-hm, invariably. Involving the fact that your life is not about you? Absolutely. The very things the initiation rituals are meant to accomplish, preparing us for the acceptance of this mission.
Can I close with this? This is when I was out in California. I saw this sign. I think they were debating euthanasia or something at the time, and there was a big sign along the highway that said this: "My life. My death. My choice". That's our modern culture. Yep, that's it. "It's my life. It's my death. It's my choice".
Do you see everybody, first, how tiny that spiritual space is, and how repugnant it is to what we hear in Romans 14? Again, "None of us lives for oneself, and no one dies for oneself. For if we live, we live for the Lord, and if we die, we die for the Lord; so then, whether we live or die, we are the Lord's". What's the Christian answer to this? It's not my life. It's not my death. And it's not my choice. I've been bought at a price, and I belong to this higher power, Jesus Christ, living his life in me. And that's an invitation to real spiritual maturity and real spiritual adventure. And God bless you.