“I believe there may be only five questions that truly matter. Five questions that humanity has been asking consciously and subconsciously ever since human life first began. Although we may be unable to articulate them, you and I are constantly wrestling with these questions. Whether we are aware of it or not, our existence is the search to answer these five questions. I believe we are seeking the answers to these questions directly and indirectly every day of our lives. How we answer these questions can determine the shape, the form, and the direction of our lives.
These are the five questions: 1. Who am I? 2. Where did I come from? 3. What am I here for? 4. How do I do what I am here to do? 5. Where am I going?
Spend a few minutes thinking about life’s big questions today and every day.”
Fr. Mike teaches us more about the divine and human natures of the second person of the Holy Trinity, the Word that became flesh, Jesus Christ. Jesus became like us in all things but sin; as such, he has a human soul, intellect, will, and body without losing any of his divinity. Father Mike tells us that in his human nature, Jesus thought with a human mind, worked with human hands, and loved with a human heart. Christ needed to learn things, and he increased in wisdom and understanding. The full humanity and true divinity of Jesus is a great mystery of our faith. Today’s readings are Catechism paragraphs 470-474.
Life can change in a single moment. This is not just the stuff of movies and fairy tales. Your life really can change in an instant, for better or for worse.
I remember sitting at breakfast in New York City, at the Athletics Club overlooking Central Park, the day I made my first publishing deal. John F. Kennedy Jr. was sitting at the next table. I can still taste the fresh cut slices of pineapple. Later that morning I walked into a publishing meeting that changed my life forever. A few short years later, I watched the news that John F. Kennedy Jr.’s plane had gone down off Martha’s Vineyard. A single tragic accident had ended his life.
Some life-changing moments lift up our hearts and make us feel like we are on top of the world, but others are soul-crushing. I was experiencing the soul-crushing variety.
Life can change in the blink of an eye, but most of the significant changes in our lives build over time before compounding into something wonderful or devastating. Anyone who has loved an addict or narcissist knows this all too well. As does anyone who has worked their whole life to develop a talent only to be discovered in an unexpected place at an unexpected time.
I have had more than my fair share of everything good that life has to offer. But it’s the unexpected nature of the worst experiences of our lives that exacerbates the way they devastate us. Something happens and because of it everything changes. You will never be the same, your life will never be the same, your heart will never be the same, but life presses on with or without you, relentlessly pushing you toward the unknown future.
Three times before I was forty, I sat in a doctor office and was told I had cancer. The first time I was thirty-five. I remember leaving the doctor’s office in a daze, my life had just changed in an instant. I was face to face with my mortality for the first time. I sat in my car for about twenty minutes before I even started it, and I have vivid memories of the whole world swirling around me. What seemed important an hour ago no longer mattered. People rushing here and there, going about their lives, oblivious to the fact that the whole direction of my life had just shifted. It’s a lonely feeling. The second time I was thirty-eight and the third time was the following year. The third encounter led to the removal of a large portion of my right kidney.
But nobody gave me cancer. It just happened. It was just part of life. There was nobody to blame, no one to harbor anger and resentment toward. That makes it easier.
It’s when a person intentionally hurts you, changes your life in an instant, that you face the darkest parts of yourself. It’s when a group of people decide to harm you, collectively or one at a time, that your faith in humanity is tested.
When we move low, back toward the soil from which we can learn the lessons of our true humanity, we are able to enter a kind of peace. Humility is not about struggle or diminishment but rather is the relief that we are not God, that we are mere creatures. Wendell Berry gives voice to this truth in one of his most popular poems, “The Peace of Wild Things”:
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
What precisely is the meaning of the temptations in the desert to Jesus’s humanity? That would seem to be the meaning and application for us today. In short, I see the three temptations as the primal and universal temptations that all humans must face before they dare take on any kind of power—as Jesus is about to do. They are all temptations to the misuse of power for purposes less than God’s purpose. They are sequentially the misuse of practical everyday power, the misuse of religious power, and the misuse of political power. These are the constant tragedies that keep defeating humanity. Jesus passes all three tests, and thus “the devil left him” because he could not be used for lesser purposes. If you face such demons in yourself, God can and will use you mightily. Otherwise, you will, for sure, be used!
But let me point out something we almost always fail to notice. We can only be tempted to something that is good on some level, partially good, or good for some, or just good for us and not for others. Temptations are always about “good” things, or we could not be tempted: in these cases “bread,” “Scripture,” and “kingdoms in their magnificence.” Most people’s daily ethical choices are not between total good and total evil, but between various shades of good, a partial good that is wrongly perceived as an absolute good (because of the self as the central reference point), or even evil that disguises itself as good. These are what get us into trouble.
