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31st
Sunday in Ordinary Time
Cycle B
November 4, 2012 10:30am and 12 noon
Saint Margaret Parish, Bel Air
“I should get up”
There
is a story about a young married couple named Bud and Nancy.
One
night around 1AM, Bud was awakened by the crying of their four-month-old son
David. Bud says that he immediately had
the feeling that “I should get up and
tend to David and let Nancy sleep.”
Instead,
Bud confesses that he didn’t move. He
began thinking that Nancy must also hear David crying.
“Why doesn’t she get up and take care of the
baby? Why should I have to do this?”
Leadership and
Self-Deception
That is
just the beginning of the story.
I read this
in a book entitled Leadership and
Self-Deception. This book never
refers to the Bible or to the two great commandments of love in today’s
gospel.
In
fact, it never uses the word “love.” But,
this book – Leadership and Self-Deception
– gives some excellent insights into our human behavior and how to become persons
of gospel love.
Two Significant Mistakes
Let’s
go back to the story about Bud and Nancy and I think you’ll see what I am
saying.
Bud says first, that 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 as a foe or as a thing to be used for his own purposes.
And second, Bud says that he betrayed himself. He betrayed and did not respond to his inner
sense of what he should do – to get up and take care of the baby.
Bud correctly assumes that we have this inner sense of
what we ought to do. We call this our
conscience.
The Results
Then, in the book, Bud talks about the unfortunate results 1) of treating
Nancy as an object and 2) of betraying his sense of what he ought to do.
Bud says that this led him to self-deception – the words in the title of
the book. It led him into a distorted
idea of both Nancy and 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 hard-working, responsible and as deserving to stay in bed and
sleep.
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, this self-deception began to snowball
and hurt their 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, for affirmation, and for accomplishment.
Just think about how this might affect the way we see a spouse or a
friend, or an employee or employer.
Think about how this might also affect the way we see Muslims, Hispanic
immigrants, African Americans, and on it goes.
We need to see each other as persons and not as objects. We need to see others as persons like
ourselves.
And second, we need to respond out of our inner sense of what we should
do. In other words, we need to be true
to our conscience.
Think about what this means in this simple example. The next time we get onto an elevator, and think
we hear someone walking down the hallway heading toward the elevator, what ill
we do in that split second – hit the open button to wait for them or hit the close
button so we can just keep going.
We need to respond out of our inner sense of what is the right thing to
do. We need to be true to our
conscience.
The 2 Great Commandments
For me, these insights have a lot to say about the two great commandments
of love.
They can help us in our one-on-one relationships. And they may even assist us on a bigger scale
with the relationships between different ethnic or age groups, with the
relationship between members of different political parties, or with the
relationship between religion and what is often called secularism in America.
