Vanity, Thy Name Is...Me

18th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Cycle C

Most of us who are middle aged are sooner or later confronted with the reality of our parents’ dying. Oftentimes it is a long, slow, painful process, and we struggle to retain their, and our, dignity amongst all the medications and equipment and medical personnel and dirty linens and family squabbles and tears of joy and pain. But most of all we are forced to view our parents, the towering heroes of our youth, as fragile and weak and helpless. And we feel useless and the whole process seems to be in vain as we wrestle with our conflicting feelings. We wonder if it is all worth it, and we are humbled by the sight of what our loved ones have been reduced to.

But in the middle of the night, when we sit in vigil around the bedside, we are confronted by our thoughts and get ourselves focused on what is truly important in our lives, and it’s not all the things we thought were important before. All the peripheral stuff does seem to be vanity. It is our relationships that last. It is our relationships that give our lives meaning.

But I don’t agree with Qoheleth; all things in life are not vanity, and all things we possess are not empty and worthless. The treasures we store up most of all are our memories of those people and events that have formed us, both positively and negatively. Because it is through those experiences and the memories we have of them that we become the people we are today. That is how we grow in wisdom, because wisdom comes from learning from life’s experiences. We become wise when we use those experiences to improve on the way we treat other people. Wisdom helps us become better in our relationships and our relationships make us wise.

We all have possessions. The thing is not what we possess, but what possesses us. We know that it is so easy to receive the gifts but not the hand that offers them. I was visiting one of my little ladies at the nursing home the other day, and we were discussing how much things had changed for her since she had fallen and broken her hip. She no longer could do things for herself but needed help with even the simplest tasks. It was forcing her daughter to spend more and more time with her, and she felt guilty that she was taking her away from her family so much.

I asked her to think of when her children were little, of all she and her husband had sacrificed for them. I asked her to remember all the long nights sitting with them when they were scared or sick. I told her to recall all the times it was difficult to be parents, of all the joy and pain her children had given her. Was she ever resentful of those times? Did she love her children less because of them or did her sacrifice actually strengthen her love? Did she ever regret any time she was there to pick them up when they needed help? Of course not. Those times are often the ones she cherished the most. Why should she deny her daughter the same experience now?

Now her sacrifice for her children is to accept their help. The ultimate sacrifice we make is to submit to the fact that we need other people. We will all need to rely on our relationships at some time or other, when we are stripped of all the trappings of life and all we have is ourselves and those who love us. And we need to accept their help with humility and grace. Because they also have the need to help us. It’s not payback for all the times we helped them. No one’s keeping score. But we all have the deep seated need to sacrifice for those we love. Because we love them. We need to give and we need to receive with the same grace.

Someday it will be us in that bed and our families will be gathered around us in vigil. How we react to that situation will determine how well we die. In that way the gift and the reception of the gift are sacrament, and our death bed an altar.

I just read a book, Evidence of the Afterlife, written by Jeffrey Long, a medical doctor who claims to be an atheist. While in medical school he was struck by the fact that there had been no formal research done on near death experiences, and so he performed a ten year study on over six thousand people of all nations, races, ages and cultures who claimed to have had near death experiences and out-of-body experiences. One of his findings stood out to me. Virtually all the people who had what were considered true dying experiences, you know the white light, the tunnel, etc., also had an experience of a “judgment”. What they all had in common was that they saw their entire lives flash before their eyes in an instant, and what they saw was how all their actions and their inactions had affected other people. Even people who they didn’t really know very well were affected positively or negatively by what they themselves had done. It stunned many of them to see just how important other people were in their lives and how important they were in the lives of others.

We will be judged on our relationships. How we have treated other people, not on what we have accomplished nor on the legacies we have left behind. Jesus said so. It is not all in vain. Jesus said so. We all touch other people in ways we never even realize. We are all building storage facilities for the stuff that really matters, whether we are aware of it or not. Those storage facilities are the hearts of those we touch.

I was just in Las Vegas a week ago. The epitome of materialism. Just like the rich man in today’s parable, Vegas doesn’t remodel, they dramatically blow up the old and build something bigger and bolder in its place.

What is in your storehouses? Are they filled with pretty baubles and toys, thinking that’s what will be your legacy? If so, maybe you need to tear them down every once in a while and start over. Fill them with all those little things that affect others. The gentle smiles, the small hugs, the thoughtful cards, the simple kindnesses we do along with the great sacrifices we make that we may not realize mean the world to others.

It would be a shame for us to live our lives without ever storing up the things that build up relationships. But it would also be a shame for us to never stop and realize that we are doing it. We need to step back and take the time to examine our lives every once in awhile to acknowledge the good we have done and see the deficiencies. And see the hope in our lives.

It may be easier to give up like the fatalist Qoheleth, to see everything as shallow vanity. To live just for the moment’s pleasure. Or to see no purpose to life or death. I choose not to. Because you see, even though I said goodbye to my mother for the last time yesterday, I was godfather an hour ago to a beautiful baby boy and tomorrow I will baptize another. As long as that continues to happen, life will never be in vain.