Wasting our Life for God

Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time

    Bishop Mengeling, God rest his soul, was the consummate story teller.  And his life had many, interesting stories.  One in particular I remember is his vocation story.  Bishop Mengeling’s father, Carl H. Mengeling, was Lutheran, while his mother, Augusta, was Catholic.  Both were German immigrants to the United States.  Young Carl Mengeling (the one who became the bishop of Lansing) attended public schools, but still heard God calling him to be a priest.  But to go to seminary, he needed his dad’s permission.  In the 1940s in the Mengeling household, Carl was mostly business.  He loved his family, but didn’t often show affection.  For that reason, young Carl was concerned about telling his Lutheran father that he wanted to be a Catholic priest and go to seminary.  But, somehow, he related, he found his nerve and one day, on the front porch, young Carl told his father, Carl, that he wanted to go to seminary and become a priest.  His father said, “Why would you want to waste your life like that?”  Young Carl, guided by the Holy Spirit, found the courage to say, “You wasted your life when you married mother, because you loved her and wanted to spend your entire life with her.”  Bishop Mengeling said he had never talked to his father that way.  But, as you know because he became our bishop, Carl the elder gave his blessing, and Carl the younger went to seminary, became a priest, welcomed his father into full communion with the Catholic Church, and then became our bishop in 1996.
    Are you willing to waste your life for God?  Christ says today that if we wish to save our life, we have to lose it.  Following Christ takes a commitment, and sometimes we may have commitment issues.  Society definitely is changing, and people are marrying at a younger age, but until recently, and still to an extent, many adults didn’t want to make the commitment to marry.  They wanted to have the perfect job first; the perfect house first (where, all too often they sinfully cohabited with their significant other).  Or, they had concerns that if they committed to one person, they might miss out on someone better or more compatible.  Or, they just wanted to sow their wild oats and live unchaste lives before committing to one person.  No matter the reason, people had commitment issues.
    And this fear of commitment can easily translate into our relationship with God.  The world promises us so many things–power, money, pleasure, fame–and we chase after it like a mirage in the desert.  We may even come so close, only to experience those fleeting things poof away or cascade through our fingers.  
    Even if we gained everything the world offered, this life is fleeting, and so Christ warns us not to gain the world but lose our soul.  And, in reality, we cannot serve two masters.  We can either commit to the world or to Christ.  But even a person who gains the entire world and lives to the age of 100 has a short time of pleasure, power, fame, and riches compared to the eternity of suffering when one rejects Christ for fleeting goals.  
    But, if we love God–Father, Son, and Holy Spirit–no sacrifice is too great.  Jeremiah, God’s suffering prophet, mentions how his love for God and speaking God’s word is like a fire in his heart which he cannot hold in.  He realizes that remaining faithful to God caused him suffering, but he couldn’t help but remain faithful because of his love for God.  Jeremiah experienced calumny, ostracizing, and even captivity in a muddy pit.  But God’s love enticed Jeremiah to stay faithful and proclaim God’s word, however unpopular that word proved to be.
    In the end, nothing else satisfies us other than God.  We return to the familiar quote from St. Augustine’s Confessions, “You have made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”  That’s true on this side of eternity, but even more so after our death where our hearts are perfectly and eternally fulfilled in the presence of God, or are eternally restless in Hell, separated from our final end.  As King David said about God today in our psalm, “for you my flesh pines and my soul thirsts / like the earth, parched, lifeless and without water.”  

Statue of St. Peter from the Holy Land

    So are we willing to commit ourselves to God?  Peter, at the moment of the Gospel today, did not think Jesus should go through with what Jesus already knew was the will of God: to suffer and to die.  There was something else that Peter thought was more important than God’s will.  Later, he would change his heart, and even find himself willing to suffer for God, dying as a martyr while suffering crucifixion upside-down.  Maybe God won’t ask that of us, but God does us ask to give Him everything, to offer, as St. Paul said, our bodies to God as a living sacrifice, which really means offering all of who we are–body, mind, soul–to God, trusting that He is worth the price, and that He will not let our gift be offered in vain.  
    While Bishop Mengeling was not perfect and we should certainly continue to pray for the repose of his soul, I would dare say that he wasted his life for God.  Certainly, Bishop Mengeling loved God, and so no price was too much to pay, even when it meant giving up his own family as a priest, and even when it meant giving up his life to serve the Diocese of Lansing as our bishop.  In whatever vocation God calls you, are you willing to waste your life to serve God?