Legal Commentary

The Treadmill To Nowhere

By Kevin Funnell

The following is an excerpt from a homily given for Christmas mass four years ago by Father Timothy Heines(which I saved) when he was a parish priest. Prior to his bishop deciding to make him an academic, he saved my soul (or, more accurately, gave me a fighting chance of allowing Christ to save it) with words like these.

We need to accept the reality that much of the stress and anxiety we experience in our lives is the result of the hectic pace of our existence. Whether we realize it or not, whether we use the terminology of salvation or not, whether we intend or not, we need to realize that much of the busyness of our lives is an attempt to buy our own salvation.  If we can find the right mate, we will be happy.  If we can get the right job, we will be happy.   If we find the right house, the right neighborhood, the right schools, life will be good.  If we get that promotion, make that salary, whatever it may be?we will then be at peace. We will know love..  We will have security.

Those are all merely metaphors, expressions, symptoms of salvation.  Whether we realize it or not, we often are busy trying to save ourselves.  Perhaps not in the strictest, ?going to heaven? kind of theological way, but in a very real way.

How much of our lives do we spend speeding down blind alleys with our headlights off, pedal to the metal, racing toward personal fulfillment via the "acquisition" of property and/or people, only to find that we hit a brick wall? Then, as soon as we think we've wised up, we're off to the races again, soon turning down another blind alley in the never-ending, never-realized "pursuit of happiness." "Stuff" and "More Stuff." A culture built on the anthem of Madonna's "Material Girl." But there's never enough "Stuff," is there?

Many never discover that the uneasiness, the exhaustion, the stress are caused by the fact that nothing of this earth is good enough. They're never happy, and yet they continue to seek "Love" in all the wrong places, over and over and over again. They become increasingly jaded and desperate in the search for something...anything...to fulfill them. For some, the search leads them to the "hour of the afternoon" described by Gil Chesterton.

There comes an hour in the afternoon when the child is tired of 'pretending'; when he is weary of being a robber or a Red Indian. It is then that he torments the cat. There comes a time in the routine of an ordered civilization when the man is tired at playing at mythology and pretending that a tree is a maiden or that the moon made love to a man. The effect of this staleness is the same everywhere; it is seen in all drug-taking and dram-drinking and every form of the tendency to increase the dose. Men seek stranger sins or more startling obscenities as stimulants to their jaded sense. They seek after mad oriental religions for the same reason. They try to stab their nerves to life, if it were with the knives of the priests of Baal. They are walking in their sleep and try to wake themselves up with nightmares.
---G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

We've all seen such men and women. Turn on "Entertainment Tonight" and spend a half-hour in their world.

Some men realize late, some too late, that a lifetime spent in the acquisition of people and things was a lifetime spent on a fool's errand. Some men look back with regret, but with wisdom. Some men finally understand that we are not made for this world and that life's most profound truth will not be found in this Empire of Dirt.

Better late than never.

Full post as published by Counseling Kevin on September 06, 2010 (boomark / email).