Let’s Not Lose the “Why”?

Sometimes I need a reminder of why I do what I do.

Regina Bannan’s February 12 post did give us a reminder of all the good news we who work for justice and inclusion of all genders, races, sexual identities in our Church and its priesthood have had recently. And I’m cheered – in a somber kind of way.

The good news still seems to exist in a world of “ifs” and “maybes” and “at some points”, a world we have lived in for so long – almost 50 years – just in our organized efforts to champion the ordination of all genders who want to express their gifts in ministry. The binoculars I’m looking through are stuck on the side showing our targets at a great, great distance, and I cannot seem to switch to the side bringing them within reach.

But perhaps I need a lesson in “that’s not the point.” Maybe we all do.

I cannot imagine how distant a target as world peace must have seemed to activists during the Vietnam War in the 1960’s. How could they possibly continue in their work when they must have felt so profoundly discouraged, disillusioned or, maybe, just plain tired. Fortunately, renown and beloved Peace Activist and author, Jim Forest (who died very recent), received a letter from Thomas Merton at that time to help him – and now us – see the length and breadth of the struggle differently:   

Letter to a Young Activist (written to Jim Forest in 1966 – and, in 2022, to us)

Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.

The big results are not in your hands or mine, but they suddenly happen and we can share in them; but there is no point in building our lives on this personal satisfaction, which may be denied us and which after all is not that important.

The next step in the process is for you to see that your own thinking about what you are doing is crucially important. You are probably striving to build yourself an identity in your work, out of your work and your witness. You are using it, so to speak, to protect yourself against nothingness, annihilation. That is not the right use of your work. All the good that you will do will come not from you but from the fact that you have allowed yourself, in the obedience of faith, to be used by God’s love …

 If you can get free from the domination of causes and just serve Christ’s truth, you will be able to do more and will be less crushed by the inevitable disappointments….The real hope, then, is not in something we think we can do but in God who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see. .  – Thomas Merton

In his autobiography, Writing Straight with Crooked Lines, Jim Forest described his life as one of struggle guided by these 3 questions:

                 What is the right thing to do? Am I doing it? Where do I go next?

Worthwhile questions for all to ponder, act on, and then, as Merton says, let go and let the good happen.