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31st Sunday of Ordinary Time, Cycle
B
Parish Mission at St.
Michael, Poplar Springs
November 4 2012
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 10, 6 and 4.
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 then 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
In the book, Bud then 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’s the right thing 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 of what I’ve shared with you means when you
feel the call to bury the hatchet, but still try to justify your refusal to
talk to someone.
These insights have a lot to say about our
relationships – one on one.
