As the new school year begins, so does the flurry of decision we have to make. Before the end of the semester many will choose classes, majors, minors, study abroad programs, clubs, scripts, Greek affiliations, friends, significant others, social destinations, jobs, careers, grad schools and wedding venues. The sheer volume of life-shaping choices going on around us is reason enough for all us to stop and take a deep breath. What will all the choices add up to? How can we know steps we are choosing will lead to a life well lived? How can we be sure that we are becoming the person God created us to be?
I have no answers, unfortunately, just more questions – two more, in fact, fundamental to the ones posed above: 1) What are you living for? 2) What, if anything, is keeping you from living fully for the thing I want to live for? Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk who lived in the mid 20th century in Kentucky, posed these two questions as central to discovering our very identity. He understood the inseparable nature of belief and action. He wrote, “If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for.”
In today’s Gospel, Jesus presents an unsettling picture of what can result from ignoring the crucial interplay between our actions and choices and what motivates them. In Luke’s Gospel, we encounter it this way: those who thought they were doing the “right” things find themselves on the outside looking in when the master tells them, “I do not know where you are from.” Jesus warns us to check what’s behind our actions. He challenges us to come clean: Do your actions really give evidence to what you believe?
To grapple with these questions honestly and consistently is difficult, even painful. Personally, I’d rather not, out of fear I may not like the answers. I fear I may discover that the way I live my life does not genuinely line up with what I say I am living for, or, even worse, that I refuse to give up what is keeping me from doing it. But that is the very reason I must. Asking these tough questions of ourselves gives us a way to check whether the values and purpose we claim to be about, as followers of Jesus, match up with the life-shaping choices me make as well as the ordinary, everyday ones.
A fifth-century Italian martyrology lists the death of
Clement I, fourth bishop of Rome after St. Peter, as circa 100 CE. Clement may have been a Jewish slave before
his baptism, and it's possible that he is the Clement who St. Paul mentions in the fourth chapter of
his letter to the Philippians. One colorful story describes how Roman
authorities banished Clement to the unforgiving salt mines in the Crimea. There he managed to convert many of the guards
and his fellow prisoners. As punishment the Romans tied Clement to an anchor and
threw him into the Black Sea. Some time later, according to this legend, the waters receded and revealed a beautiful tomb built by angels. Today the
Basilica of San Clemente in Rome is a popular stop for tourists and pilgrims.