13 October 2012

Special Edition: Humility in Our Nation's Capital

From the land of misleading titles I bring you this:



The St. Louis Cardinals have just had another amazing comeback victory to put themselves in the National League (ie "Real Baseball") Championship Series against the San Francisco Giants.  To reach this point, the Cardinals had to beat the Washington Nationals who were playing on their own home turf of National Stadium just down the street from the US Capital building.  It was not easy.  The Cardinals went into the 9th inning down by two runs.  In the end, the Cardinals rallied to win 9-7.

The significance of the game for this blog focuses on an earlier stage, however.  Adam Wainwright, starting pitcher for the Cardinals and previous hero of St. Louis World Series victories as a closer, did not have a good game.  He gave up three runs in the 1st inning and was pulled from the game after giving up three more in the 3rd with only one out. Things looked bad. 

Then came a turning point and the Cardinals began to rally.

St. Louis manager Mike Matheny pointed to one little-noticed factor as the key to winning the game:  "There was a voice. It was a Carp. It was Waino [the above-mentioned Wainwright] getting back out there. He could have hung his head but he came back out there. That dugout was on fire." Wainwright stayed engaged.  Every kid who has an interest in baseball imagines being the starting pitcher in that final game, holding everything on the line for the team.  They do not imagine leaving the game after 2 and 1/3 innings after giving their team a six-run deficit.

What is our reaction to failure?  Of course it isn't OK to fail at important things in life.  However, we still have to strive to be successful at the next opportunity.  Unfortunately, the next opportunity sometimes doesn't come in this life.  Some things we do have permanent consequences.  Adam Wainwright was never getting back into Game 5 to show he could make up for his mistakes.  All he could do was to suck up his pride as the would-be hero and stay engaged with his team.  He chose to cheer on his teammates instead of wallowing in his personal failures.  In the end, he was able to celebrate along with everyone else because his humility reminded him of being part of the team.  Their victory was his victory. 

In the same way, we Christians, when we have the gift of humility, watch the struggles of Christ to right our wrongs.  He carries the cross because he alone is capable.  If we stay engaged in the process, leaving our pride aside, we too can share in Christ's victory.

09 October 2012

Marriage and the Lessons of Humility


It is almost impossible to criticize the modern attitude toward marriage in an original way.  Having noticed the "new normal" of a massive divorce rate, we have reacted along two general routes:  1) accept that marriage is no longer a sacred institution and just feel our way through, even if this process involves massive changes in our understanding of what marriage is and we lose what familial and social cohesion we still have along the way, and 2) fight to put the genie back in the bottle, so to speak, by demanding that a society that has lost its grip on the concept of "truth" go back to living like past generations anyway.

As you can tell from the way I have described them, I find neither route completely acceptable.  If I have anything to add to the conversation about marriage (again, this point is not new or original) it is that we must look at marriage on an individual basis rather than as something to be controlled in sweeping demographic manipulations.  This is where the lessons of humility come in.  We must look at marriage as an element of our identity, just as humility requires us to embrace the painful truth that we must own our sins.

It is legitimate to practice within a marriage.  We learn to be better spouses partly by making mistakes.  My wife of just over two years and I (mostly me, I think) are constantly finding ourselves making decisions as if we were still single.  It is easy to, for example, make a purchasing decision that doesn't take the other person or the goals of the family into account.  It is easy to decide on a schedule for the day that takes the other person's assent for granted.  These are places where we know that we must better live up to our identity as married persons.  There is a distinction between this kind of practice and the idea that the entire marriage can be "practice."  If you make a wreck of your first marriage (or your spouse makes a wreck of it), you do not have the ability to call the whole thing "practice."  [please insert your own sports-related metaphor for this concept here]

In recent days I have heard about some extreme challenges in the marriages of some friends.  Quite frankly, my imagination recoils from some of the possibilities that can and do happen within marriages when one partner makes what seems to be the ultimate wrong choice.  Still, the fact remains that in a true marriage severance always does permanent damage to the partners.  Pope Benedict has recently commented, "Marriage, as a union of faithful and indissoluble love, is based upon the grace that comes from the triune God, who in Christ loved us with a faithful love, even to the Cross. . . Today we ought to grasp the full truth of this statement, in contrast to the painful reality of many marriages which, unhappily, end badly." As we are all made complete by the love Christ displayed for us on the cross--to the point we amend our identity and call ourselves "Christians"--we must also look on the love we promise to offer in marriage as demanding (at least potentially) as much from ourselves.  If we don't go to that cross, we will lose something of ourselves--something that cannot be replaced.