Ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time
(A-cycle) June 1, 2008
Our lives need a strong foundation. Without it, you lose your moorings. You begin to drift, to slide. You don’t know whether you’re coming or going. I found one example of that in the AARP magazine this month, an interview with Martin Sheen, perhaps most famous as the president on The West Wing. The interviewer says, “After you had a heart attack and a nervous breakdown at 38, you went to
Sheen says, “I did, yeah. I was raised Catholic, but it was a religion, not a way of life. After the heart attack, I came back to a faith more than a church. I came back with joy and with freedom and thanksgiving rather than with fear or trembling or worrying about eternity. I decided that what I really loved about the faith was the spirituality this church possesses.”
The interviewer says: “A lot of people would love to have the faith you have, but they don’t have that real dramatic crisis that leads you to say, ‘Wait a minute---I’m really off the track here. I’m leading a kind of empty existence.”
Sheen replies: “If you have awareness that your life is not full and that you are not yourself, that is, I think, the beginning of the journey toward spirituality. I don’t have a clue what God is; I really don’t. I would never, ever try and tell anyone what to look for. The only thing I would say is: the journey to spirituality is the journey to your own humanity. The more human you are, I think, the more godlike you are. And that is the genius of God.”
The interviewer says “I can’t imagine that in your twenties and thirties you’d have been with a journalist having this particular conversation.” Sheen, who is 67, answers, “No, I’d probably be drunk. But I got sober through Catholicism, through my faith.”
Faith provides a solid foundation. So do family and true friends. Martin Sheen gives a lot of the credit to his wife of 47 years. This week’s Sports Illustrated has a cover story about Josh Hamilton of the Texas Rangers, one of the most gifted baseball players ever, who was squandering his talent on booze and drugs until his grandmother sat him down and made him face his addictions. We needto pray for wisdom to distinguish between true and false foundations in our lives. Remember that wonderful movie “Moonstruck” about an Italian family. The father has been caught having an affair with a younger woman, and he says, “You come to a point where you realize your life has been built on sand.” And his wife replies, “Your life has not been built on sand. Ti amo.” I love you. That’s the real thing. Contrast that with the morality of the movie ‘Sex and the City’ which opened this week. A New York Times reviewer described it as full of narcissism, the worship of the self, and materialism, the worship of things like fancy clothes and uncommitted sex. That is sand. That is not for us who in the words of the letter to the Ephesians are “members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets with Christ Jesus as the capstone.” Ephesians 3-19 625.