Have you ever felt weary, unfulfilled and unhappy? You don’t have to be unusual to feel this way once in a while. Most people feel that way at some time in their lives. We wonder if life is worth living, if its worth the effort to keep going. When we feel that way, we have just a glimpse of what it means to be lost. We feel inside us the need for someone or something to reach down and lift us out of our inner chaos. What we want is to be saved from our own emptiness and the world’s weariness. What we want is  meaning in our lives. Everyone wants to be fulfilled. In a theological sense, everyone wants to be saved, both from themselves and from the machinations of the world. How can this be done? There is an answer in Matthew’s gospel.

Jesus tells us: “The person who loses his life will save it” (Matthew 10 : 39). What is meant by this? This expression is called a paradox, a way of conveying the truth through an apparent contradiction. It is meant to make us think, so let’s mediate on its meaning.

Saving your life comes about in two ways:

The first comes from the realization we cannot be saved through possessions, power, and privilege. These material obsessions will only turn to naught and will leave us even more empty than we were before we had them. The world is full of examples of disappointed people who strove for happiness in all the above ways, in all the wrong ways. You are more important than money, than the exercise of power or the acquisition of positions of privilege in life. You are a child of God, and of the universe. Don’t throw your life away on the pursuit of material things that corrode and wither away. Lose your interest in those things if you want to rise to new life, if you want to know how to love the way the Lord showed us.

The second way is to put your trust in God, in a higher power than yourself. People who have turned to AA have learned the wisdom of this. We may study the gospels, we may be the product of a strict religious upbringing, we may imagine that we have it all together and can control every appetite and every inclination of our unruly selves. This, too, is an illusion. No matter how much we try, we must always rely on God and not on ourselves. He is the source of our existence, and without him, we can do nothing.

Only God can save us from ourselves, and fulfill our desire for happiness. Thus, Jesus asks us to lose our life in order to save it. Many people think that success is the key to happiness. But, they have it all wrong. They have it backwards.  If you are content doing what you love, no matter how small or great it may be, you will always be successful. Success is being yourself, not other people. Most people want to be other people. As someone said, its better to be a first rate example of yourself than a second rate example of someone else. Doing what you love, not lording it over others but helping them, is the key to a happy life. Losing ourselves to the attachments of material things and to the self, is the key to freedom and growth. A mother loses herself for love of her child. An artist loses himself for his art. The world of nature has to die to produce new life. So too with all flesh.

When we lose ourselves and touch base with the source of our being, we have a new feeling about ourselves and the world around us. This feeling is one of exuberance in the joy of living. To see and experience God in all of creation and know we can do nothing without his help, is to be part of something beautiful and permanent.

It is to be united with the source of our very being, and with everyone. 

—Fr. Hugh Duffy