It doesn’t take long to notice how marriages are failing today, people are not able to get along either in their homes or in religious communities. The abundance of riches has not assured a strong ego worth.
JOY PRAKASH OFM
As a student in the 60’s I was corrected, reprimanded, ridiculed, nick-named and called by all kinds of names, but unlike the children of our day I did not even for a second think of suicide or of harming myself or others. I had thought I needed to grow up a lot more, and never stop growing up. That spirit still continues in my whole system even if failures and setbacks overwhelm me. And when I became a teacher, I thought the students under me would be of the same calibre as myself but when I corrected or admonished them, it was taken with so much resentment and unhappiness. Somewhere along the path of life, I thought something must have happened to the human race that I belong to. It doesn’t take long to notice how marriages are failing today, people are not able to get along either in their homes or in religious communities. The abundance of riches has not assured a strong ego worth.
It does not take long to realise that we are living in a terribly broken world, broken relationships and broken marriages. What is at stake? Self-esteem and self-worth have taken a beating today! Many children born into broken relationships and marriages are made to feel that they are not welcome in this world. With the easy availability and thoughtless use of contraceptives, parents are conveying the feeling, “I hadn’t really expected you, but once I found out I was pregnant, I decided to have you anyway….You were sort of an accident.” Once, waiting for a visa at a Consulate I overheard a group of young girls cursing their fathers and mothers for having brought them into this world! Our world is full of people who question whether it would have been better had they not been born.
Each of us “lives by the word”, though we don’t always notice that. A word can actually change the way one feels about oneself. I remember reading “The Dynasty: a Political Biography of the Premier Ruling Family of Modern India,“ by S.S. Gill. The author recounts the way Indira grew up in a joint family and found little sympathy and understanding in it. A skinny, sensitive and self-willed child, she was quick to take offence. She could never forgive her overbearing aunt Vijayalaxmi for calling her ‘ugly, stupid”. “This shattered something within me,” she confessed nearly forty years later, when she had become the Prime Minister. As a result of this shattered self-confidence, “I was so sure that I have nothing in me to be admired.”
Henri Nouwen says, “When we come to believe in the voices that call us worthless, and unlovable, then success, popularity and power are easily perceived as attractive solutions.” S.S. Gill says, “Indira wallowed in the most blatant kind of flattery poured on her by the bucketful by the swarm of sycophants that surrounded” her during the time of Emergency.
Our world is also suffering from the prevailing desire of everyone to be at the top. Therefore, families have become places where climbing the ladder of material progress is the only thing that is hammered into the children of our day. “We have to be better than others; we have to be the first ones in our tests, fighting for grades, certificates, prizes, incomes, and degrees.” In our self-esteem we depend too much on those outstanding qualities or else we become nobodies. Thus, we become jealous, mean, anxious, insecure, envious, and hateful, and we cannot form a community with others because of all that, because we refuse to live in a world we have in common with others, and refuse to live, or try to live within the margins of our common existence.
In the Jewish rite of bar mitzvah, the young man of thirteen is brought to the synagogue to be declared an adult by his congregation. He is given a leadership role. He reads from the Book of Genesis and gives a short sermon. Then, he is affirmed by the rabbi, and his friends and parents. The parents’ blessing for their son is : the father says, “Son, whatever will happen to you in your life, whether you will have success or not, become important or not, will be healthy or not, always remember how much your mother and I love you.”
This goes along with the Christian understanding of the person. Everyone is a unique image made by God: one that only that person and no one else is or has. Thomas Aquinas says that each and every one of us is a unique expression of God in this world. The world would be poorer if every single one of us were not here to express God in his or her special way.
The story of Zacchaeus gives a typical example of a lack of selfhood and how it made him a money man, who thought only of money, and dreamt money. And when Jesus visited him in his own house and told him, he is also a son of Abraham, it opened up in Zacchaeus, that short one-dimensional, money-making, money-lending, money-loving, money-smelling, money-man, quite another, a new dimension. He no longer has to ‘look’ big! That name, “son of Abraham” spoke of him in terms of eternity, of infinity, of an eternal promise, of divine life, and realities like that. That same invitation caused him to come down and open himself to his real dimensions and possibilities.
We are larger, bigger, divine sons and daughters of God; even heaven is not our limit, God himself is our limit.
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