How many times and in how many ways does Jesus say, "What difference does it make if you gain the whole world but lose your soul?" How many ways does he say, “the last will be first”? He just can't say it enough. It’s everywhere in the parables and the miracles. Lazarus, the woman at the well, the Gerasene demoniac, the blind, the deaf, the withered hand, the tax collector, the many lepers, the widow, the wedding guests, the salt of the earth. And he never, never says you just have to turn back for a little while, he says, "By your endurance you will gain your soul." He means endurance in faith, in fidelity to God. A permanent turn is needed. Daily orientation is the ask. But believe it or not, it becomes less difficult the more you play the game of interior conversion. The magic happens one day, when you no longer want to turn away. You want to remain turned, and you completely forget about the old ways.
This is not like endurance in a marathon, or perseverance at work, or dedication toward achievements, or leadership in family life. This is endurance in turning toward God all the days, right up to the last day, to the end of your life, to the final hour. Knowledge, money, and self-mastery do not give you any endurance for this task. They usually turn you the wrong way.
Seven hundred years ago, in Book 1 of the Imitation of Christ, the author says something that our modern ears don't want to hear, since we hold knowledge so dearly today:
“As for knowledge, it comes natural to all of us to want it; but what can knowledge do for us, without the fear of God? Give me a plain, unpretentious farm-hand, content to serve God; there is more to be made of him than of some conceited University professor who forgets that he has a soul to save, because he is so busy watching the stars. To know yourself—that means feeling your own worthlessness, losing all taste for human praise. If my knowledge embraced the whole of creation, what good would it do me in God’s sight?” (Book 1, “Imitation of Christ.”)
Seven hundred years later that same conclusion can be found. What good is all this knowledge if I can't answer the bigger questions about life itself? What good is Google if there is only how and no why? If I know everything about the world, what good is that knowledge to me if I am without meaning? What good is money if I can only buy more stuff? In other words, what good does it do me to gain the whole world if I lose my soul in the process?
There is no way to turn back while our eyes are glued to phone and computer and TV screens and our ears only hear voices from the current culture of disbelief. If you are hung up on politics or gossip, you will remain turned away, indifferent, starving for meaning while your bite closes down again and again on only air. How difficult it was for me to break away from the trance of modern distraction and vice. I think of the movie The Matrix, where the computer cursor types out to Neo, “The Matrix has you.” It has us all. We believe we have the control, the power, that we are the rulemakers of our own lives. But that’s the trick. We are the controlled, the ruled, the servants of a sad and depressed culture, stroking our ego with beer and porn and memes and videos, pretending we’re not desperate for something more. As the old saying from Charles Baudelaire goes, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn’t exist.” The only way to break free is to shatter the illusion that you have control, and that will free your head to turn. The only way to freedom is through obedience to God, and the only way to the kingdom of heaven is through the Cross.
If you are angry at Christians, as I once was, about a rule that they follow, you might want to ask them, why aren’t they angry about the rules. How can religious people be so happy with so many rules? You can be assured that every Christian has vices, that there are rules that he wants to break. Without any mental strain at all, I can think of five rules right now that I like to break. There are temptations enough to satisfy even the most devout person. But instead of being angry about temptations and the rules, the convert does battle against them, knowing that the model that Christ provided is the way, the truth, and the life.
This acceptance of the rules is similar to why basketball players and fans are happy with the game of basketball when it’s played correctly, within the framework that it is intended to be played. Without rules, a basketball court would be chaos. It is exactly the rules that allow something beautiful to occur. Would you rather watch a badly refereed basketball brawl or a well-officiated basketball game? The latter of course, and you'll enjoy the game more because you aren't thinking about the rules. No, you are enjoying the game because there is agreement on the rules. Where no rules exist, you have lawlessness, you have chaos, and you have a mess. Where there are rules, you still get arguments, but you also get harmony. Without rules, you don’t even get to have a game. How baffling to think that rules bring happiness. Why? Forgiveness, hence, joy. With that joy, the rules are fine because those rules outlaw things that we humans have already tried, experiences that have already failed to fill our cup of life. Like St. Therese said, the rules are small inconveniences once you are drinking from the vine of Christian life.
It's not cool to be obedient, not in America. But now I don't really care what will make me cool for 40 or 80 years on earth, I want to know what God finds worthy for eternity, and the answer is in the four Gospel accounts of Jesus' life, the letters of Paul, and the lives of the saints. I don't care if a neighbor or a friend laughs at my faith. I don't care what arguments science or philosophy uses in attempts to tear down the Bible or the faith. I am the Merchant in the parable who has found the Pearl of great value. I am the one who finds the treasure in the field, who in his joy sells all to get the field. There is nothing that can disprove that Jesus is what he said he was. He literally is the way, the truth, and the life. I have to laugh when my former problems with literalism were resolved to the point that there are miraculous events in the Bible that I now receive…literally. And one of those literalisms that I believe is that "No one comes to the Father except through me." There is no study or syllogism or theory or axiom that can separate me from this Pearl.
Here’s what we don’t want to hear. The self must die to reach the goal. This is what keeps us from turning back to God. For our whole life we are told to promote ourselves, to work on our selves, to believe in ourselves. And then Jesus decides to tell us that the self must die. If you find the Pearl, you are strangely willing to let the self decrease and, ideally, disappear. “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me." Once you find the Pearl, the rest of the rules make perfect sense. That is why Paul can say without batting an eye, "It is no longer I who live, but Christ that lives in me." His old self is dead and gone. Saul is no more. Paul is reborn, like a child. He has turned back to God and found new life. Nothing is the same.
To cling to the self is the road to serfdom. To return like a child to faith is the road to freedom. To honor God above the self is the key to breaking out of your prison cell, and the key is already in your hand. To say yes to God, like Mary's consent to Gabriel - her great fiat of "Let it be done to me"; to let God's will take precedence over your own - "Thy will - not mine - be done" - as Jesus said in the garden the night before he died on the cross; to be selfless and honest in prayer like St. Therese in her "Little Way"; and most of all to be like a child saying his or her nightly prayer, or looking upon a manger scene at Christmas, or gazing at the crucifix at the wounds in Jesus’ hands, feet, and side; and finally to know, without a doubt, that God joined us here on earth as a helpless baby, weak, vulnerable, suffering like us, that he entered our world, came into this world with us to share our pain in order to take it away...this is how you find your way back to belief and find the innocence that you lost.
You will never find it in a book of facts. Your job will never give it to you. Your partner or spouse won’t deliver the fullness that you seek. Knowledge and status and politics will never come close to where you want to be. But as long as those things consume your thoughts and your time, they will distract you and keep you from ever receiving belief, from experiencing the change. You will sit far away from the joy that your heart desires, bristling at God, in denial, secretly afraid that those parables and miracles might be true, clutching this world's pleasures close to you as if they have any value, and calling those who pray to the heavens fools.
All of this keeps you away, because you don't like certain rules. Because you can’t let go. Because surrendering feels weak when it is the only act that truly requires strength. And in the end, you won’t experience the joy because you were too afraid to be open, too angry about the rules, and at last alone because you never even attempted to play.
