On Dismas,
Greatness, Being Oneself and Love On Dismas,
Greatness, Being Oneself and Love On Dismas,
Greatness, Being Oneself and Love

On Dismas, Greatness, Being Oneself and Love

This Sunday is the 34th and final Sunday of the Church’s year, traditionally known as the celebration of “Christ the King of the Universe.”  Saint Paul said that Christ did not play on his divine majesty, but chose instead to become a human being in time and space to serve other human beings in the manner of a slave.  One of the titles of Christ is “Servant King.” Majesty/greatness and love are always linked in the Christian vision.  I have always suspected that this is why Christ the King of the Universe is celebrated in the same month as the celebration of All Saints (1st November).  On the feast of All Saints, we celebrate the great multitude of men and women (perhaps many from among our own family, friends and loved ones) who put Christ’s law of loving others first in their lives.  They realised that life was, as our Sisters put it, toute de charité - all about the loving service of others.  The saints made Christ king in their lives, serving others in love as he did.  That submission to his majesty did not humiliate or diminish them - it made them more alive, helped them to flourish, to become great.

This coming Monday is the funeral of a man called George Gilbody.  George was my club coach in my last four years as an amateur boxer in the north of England. He had been the captain of the British boxing team at the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games, 5 five-time national ABA champion and had boxed against all (defeating many) of the great amateur fighters of the seventies and early eighties (including future British, European and World professional Champions - a famous example was Thomas “The Hitman” Hearns).  With that naïve hero worship that kids display, I reasoned that if I copied George – basing my boxing style on his style, holding my hands like he did and trying some of the same moves – perhaps I too could get to the Olympics one day.  One weekend at a Crystal Palace training camp, Ian Irwin, then the Assistant Head Coach of the England and GB Teams, observed me sparring and at the end of the first round simply said, “Paul, a quick word. Stop trying to be George Gilbody. You look a bit like George, move like George, but you’re just not as good.  There is no way you can imitate someone else and be great. To be great, you have to be yourself.”

What pearls of wisdom: to have any chance of greatness, we have to be ourselves! It is important to be who we are, not someone else, if we are to flourish in life.  Being my true self is what God created me to be. To be great in God’s eyes is to be what we call a ‘saint’.  To be a saint, therefore, we have to be ourselves, not someone else.  We can learn and borrow elements from the lives of others, of course, but we will only ever be ourselves by letting Christ’s law of love find its own way of coming through the raw material that is us and our circumstances and out into the world.  Furthermore, being a saint does not mean being forever perfect - it is not about never putting a step wrong.  All of the saints sinned in small and big ways – just Google a few details about Paul, Augustine of Hippo, Dorothy Day (a Servant of God, even if not yet officially a saint), Ignatius of Loyola and the recently named Doctor of the Church, John Henry Newman (who was said to take offence easily and nurse consequent grudges forever). So, at the risk of over-simplification, it might be said that saints are just people who continually pick themselves up and try to get the false self (the self that pursues things other than love) out of the way to let Christ into their messy lives so that they can love more in this scruffy, untidy world. Only by love do we become the true self, the saint that God calls us to be.  Not to love is not to be a saint and not to be a saint is to fail life, whatever else we manage to achieve.  A key set of questions that repays pondering every day, then, is: Am I living a life of love right now?  Am I being my authentic self, the self that loves?  How do I live a life of love going forward?  Has the penny dropped yet that it’s toute de charité.

In the gospel at Mass this Sunday, Christ the King, Luke gives us Jesus hanging on a cross between two thieves.  In that scene, there is a complex mix of Christ and thieves, grace and sin, love and wrong choices.  Just as there is in the lives of all the saints and in our own complex lives.  One of the thieves laughs at Jesus. The other (whom tradition identifies as St. Dismas) has enough self-awareness to acknowledge that his choices in life have landed him in a bit of a mess.  He also has enough goodness to realise that the man in the middle is not there for the same reason as him and the other thief: “This man has done nothing wrong.”  He turns to Jesus for help.  Christ the King, in one of the last agonising gasps of his life, says to a man whose track record in love was at best patchy - but who also acknowledged that and kept on trying to do the right thing to the end - “Today you will be with me in paradise.”  It is only by trying to trust in and submit to Christ’s servant kingship, Christ’s law of love, that we find who we truly are and our real happiness.  We do this by doing what Christ did on the cross: offering our life, our blood, sweat and tears away to others in self-gift each day.  C. S. Lewis once said that unless we run a car on the fuel the manufacturer stipulates, the car will break down.  So if we don’t run our lives on the energy source that Christ the Servant King of the Universe stipulates - love - life simply won’t work out.  We will be unhappy in this world, never mind the next, if we do not choose love.

We could scoff cynically at this idea that life is toute de charité, as does one of the thieves; or we could do a Dismas and face up to the choices we have made that were not about love. Artists often work mistakes into their overall masterpieces, using a smudge or a rub of the thumb.  As The Good Thief discovers, so too does the Supreme Artist, Christ, with our mistakes.  God redeems our mess.  In the ancient world, “redemption” meant to pay a price to buy someone out of slavery, setting them free for a new life.  So redemption has come to mean that out of destructive, negative, awful situations, God can rescue things to work something new, creative and positive.  Out of awfulness, God can create something good. Yes, we may have allowed other things to reign in our life, submitted to other kings - power, pleasure, money, fame, popularity, or whatever particular poison ours has been.  But in Christ’s conversation with Dismas, we are challenged to stretch our imaginations to perceive that, despite all of those erroneous genuflections and all of the complications and unhappiness they may have brought into our lives and the lives of those we love, it is never too late to bend the knee before the true King of the cosmos.  There is still time to align our lives with reality, to use the days we have left in this world to try to live a life of ordinary, everyday, humdrum love.  At the end of last week, I shared a line of wisdom from an old Jesuit friend and mentor, Michael Paul Gallagher: Today might not have been and today will never be back again. Death makes life urgent for love.