Seeking ourselves only brings us to ruin

2nd Sunday of Lent, Year A
First Reading: Gen 12:1-4
Second Reading: 2 Tim 1:8b-10
Gospel Reading: Mt 17:1-9

“Join with me in suffering for the Gospel,” St. Paul says in the Second Reading this Sunday.

“Gospel” means “good news.” Why should we have to suffer for it?

Psychiatrist, writer, and lecturer Victor Frankl, who survived four Nazi concentration camps, said that the “pursuit of happiness” in the American Declaration of Independence is “a contradiction in terms.” Happiness cannot be “pursued,” he said; it must “ensue,” for by its nature it is a “side effect,” a “byproduct.”

For example, “precisely to the extent to which someone is hunting, chasing, pursuing sexual happiness or pleasure, that person is doomed to failure. On the other hand, the more you give yourself, the more you forget yourself, in love or in work, for the sake of a cause to serve or a person to love, to that very extent you will become happy, precisely by not caring for happiness, precisely by overlooking and forgetting whether you are happy or not.”

Clearly, “giving yourself,” “forgetting yourself,” and “bringing yourself to naught,” as Jesus said, entail suffering. Since the Fall, we have tended to put ourselves first. However, that is not the way to happiness, Jesus warned: “He who seeks only himself brings himself to ruin, whereas he who brings himself to naught for me discovers who he is.”

“Man actualizes himself to the extent to which he is concerned not with himself, but [with] living out his self-transcendence,” Frankl said. That means being concerned primarily not with oneself “but with something other than oneself, or, still better, with someone other than oneself.”

Those who survived Auschwitz, he said, were those who were “oriented toward a meaning. Unless there was something or someone, a personal recourse for whose sake to survive, survival was scarcely possible.”

Everyone can find such meaning, he said. “But what can you do? You cannot command or order anyone to believe.”

Ultimately, what gives meaning to our life must overwhelm us by virtue of what it is. It must be someone who chooses us, rather than our choosing him; someone who engages our whole heart, soul, mind, and strength.

Only God can make such claims.

Peter, James, and John recognized these claims when Jesus was transfigured before them, as described in the Gospel Reading. Abraham recognized them when God told him to leave his father’s house, as described in the First Reading. However, St. Paul says that God calls each of us “with a holy calling.”

For some people, the calling is dramatic. For example, a woman told me that when she was about to despair of God’s existence, Jesus himself reassured her in a way that she could not possibly mistake or ever forget. Another woman told me that her mother, an avowed agnostic, looked up the instant before she died and said audibly, “Follow you? Yes, I’ll follow you.”

For others, the calling may be less dramatic. It comes at our baptism, perhaps when we are babies, and our parents have to answer for us. It comes again at our confirmation, when we are old enough to answer for ourselves. It comes every Sunday, when the priest holds up the host in front of us, saying, “The Body of Christ,” requiring us to answer “Amen!”

Just before his Ascension, Jesus told the apostles to “go into the whole world and proclaim the good news to all creation.” He promised that “the man who believes in it and accepts baptism will be saved,” but he warned that “the man who refuses to believe will be condemned.”

Notice the word “refuses.” We may be sure that God, all-powerful, all-loving, and all-merciful, “who saved us and called us with a holy calling,” gives everyone the evidence and the chance to believe.

Our job now is to maintain our belief, lest it die for lack of nourishment or become choked by the cares of this world.