Weekly HOMILY for November 11, 2006: Self-Betrayal

31st Sunday of Ordinary Time, Cycle B
Our Lady of Grace
November 5 2006

Self-Betrayal
By (Rev. Msgr.) Nicholas P. Amato


Bud and Nancy

Bud and Nancy have been married six years and they have three children, ages 5, 3 and 4 months.

One night a little after 1:00am Bud is awakened by the crying of their four-year-old son David. Bud thinks to himself, “I should get up and tend to David and let Nancy sleep.”

However, as he lies there very still, other thoughts begin to fill his mind, thoughts about Nancy lying right next to him. “She must hear him too,” he says to himself. He continues to lie perfectly still.

What begins is a little dialogue in his head: “Why doesn’t she get up and take care of the baby? he wonders. “Why should I have to do this?”


Leadership and Self-Deception

That is just the beginning of a true story, a story you may find very familiar from your own child-rearing days.

I read it in this book – Leadership and Self-Deception. And, while this work never refers to the Bible, it has many of the same important points to make about transforming our lives.

The book makes no reference to the two great commandments of love in today’s Gospel. In fact, it never uses the word “love.”

But, when I read the book this past summer, I realized that it gives some excellent insights into human behavior and into our becoming loving persons. Let’s go back to the book and I think you’ll see what I have in mind.


Two Significant Mistakes

Bud himself tells this story about caring for his crying baby.

He says that first he was seeing things only from his own perspective. He was thinking that Nancy was awake even though he didn’t know whether she was or not.

Bud says that he was treating Nancy as an object and not as a person. In effect, he was thinking of her and treating her as a foe or as an object to be used for his own purposes.

Second, Bud admitted that he betrayed himself. He betrayed and did not respond to his inner sense of what he should do – namely, get up and take care of David.

Bud assumes – and I might add correctly so – that we have this inner sense of what we ought to do. We Christians call this inner sense our conscience.


The Results

Then, in the book, Bud talks about the unfortunate results of (1) Treating Nancy as an object and (2) Of betraying his sense of what he ought to do.

He says that this objectifying of her and betraying of himself led him to self-deception. In other words, it led him into a distorted idea both of Nancy and of himself.

He started seeing his wife as lazy, irresponsible and selfish. He started blaming her for everything that wasn’t just right.

And, on the other hand, Bud started justifying himself and his decision not to get up and care for David. He saw himself as hardworking, responsible and doing everything to make the marriage and family work.

He saw himself as deserving of a full night’s sleep without any interruptions.

So, (1) Treating Nancy as an object and (2) Betraying his inner sense of what he should do led Bud into a lot of self-deception.

And, of course, one thought, one idea gives rise to another. The self-deception begins to snowball and starts to make serious inroads on the relationship.


Two Remedies

The conclusions that Bud and the book make are probably obvious.

First, we need to see each other as persons and not as objects. We need to treat others as persons like ourselves – with needs for rest and sleep, for affirmation and love, for accomplishment and fulfillment.

Think about how this might affect the way you see your spouse, a friend, an employee or your employer. Think about how this might affect the way we see Jews or Muslims, Hispanic immigrants or African Americans.

And second, we need to respond out of our inner sense of what we “ought” to do. In other words, we need to be true to our conscience.


Conclusion

Here’s a great application of what I’ve shared. The next time you get into an elevator at a hospital, your place of work, or doctor’s office and you hear someone walking down the hallway.

Do you hit the “open door” button or the “close door” button?

Or think what I’ve shared with you means when I feel the call to bury the hatchet and yet still try to justify my refusal to talk with someone.

For me, these insights have a lot to say about my relationships – one on one. They may also have something to say about the relationships we as a nation have with other nations.