One of the best-known stories of the 19^th and 20^th centuries has been Charles Dickens "A Christmas Carol". We would be hard pressed to find anyone over the age of 10 that hasn’t heard this story. And there is a good reason for that. Scrooge, that cynical, miserly old man in this story has a major type of conversion experience, magnificently assisted by three different spirits over a period of less than 12 hours. At the end of Scrooge’s ordeal he is transformed into this cheerful, generous, bubbly lover of humanity who can miraculously see the beauty in everyone. What really happened to Scrooge underneath all the charming events and details of this story was that the nature of an old man’s faith was changed from money, to something intangible, represented by the spirit of Christmas. The nature of his ultimate concern was changed and he was transformed in the process. Faith has the power to transform the hearts and minds of men and women at any place and time; and gives us the power to transcend ourselves. This is the meaning of transcendence. It is the taming of the human ego.

Faith is a very mysterious thing. You can’t touch it with your hands. It’s not a physical thing you can see or smell. Faith is one of those ‘spiritual’ entities that a person, who favors dealing with a more concrete reality, can have great difficulty at times accepting. When I graduated from high school, I didn’t go off to some fine arts college, or even a liberal arts college. I went to an engineering school, Case Institute of Technology, where we studied the hard sciences. Our reality was physical, hands on, measurable, and quantifiable. My goals were success and academic achievement, as well as achieving excellence. I was on the fast tract. School demanded 100% of my time and energy. My schedule allowed me four hours sleep a day. The work- load was grueling. I accepted it because that was the price we were asked to pay to achieve our academic and career goals. Looking back on it now I see that my student life was devoid of any spiritual dimension. There was little love and support among the students, to be sure. We were too busy competing with one another. Although I occasionally went to church on Sunday morning, that peek at a different reality was totally over-shadowed by the academic boot camp in which we were immersed. By my second semester of my freshman year I was suffocating in despair, which one philosopher has called ‘the sickness onto death’. That was the most painful and unhappy time of my life. I was not psychologically ill, but I was spiritually wretched. Despair occurs when a person is cut off from their spiritual roots. It’s not like I didn’t believe in God, because I certainly did. I just didn’t have any time for Him. Faith is not just a set of beliefs that can’t be proven scientifically. Faith has to do with the nature of our ultimate concern. My problem was that my ultimate concern switched from God to academic achievement, study, and success. It wasn’t even a conscious decision. My academic success became my God, an idolatrous one. Experiencing that spiritual agony forced me to redirect my life.

I want to make a distinction between experiencing despair and going through hard times. If we have been alive any length of time, we have probably experienced hard times. They are the outward circumstances that seem to bring disorder, panic, and chaos into our lives, e.g., losing a job, a spouse or some dear loved one, experiencing some form of natural disaster, or going off to war. Despair has nothing to do with that kind of personal chaos. Despair occurs when we hold as our ultimate concern something worldly and finite, something undeserving of this level of concern. If we hold an eternal God as our ultimate concern, and work at maintaining a relationship with Him, we are better able to pass through these inevitable hard times without drowning in despair, in the spiritual sense. We may feel confusion, sorrow, a sense of temporary disorientation, and even emptiness for a while. But there will be a foundation underneath us, which is our faith, and that will carry us along and propel us through to the other side of the adversity.

"But whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lords’ glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit." 2 Cor. 3:16-18.

I took a short course not too long ago, which explored some of the universal human identity, or ego needs that we all seem to have to some degree or another. See if you can relate to any of these?

1. The need to control our lives, which often entails controlling or dominating others.

2. The need to be right or to justify ourselves.

3. The need to win, or at least keep others from beating us at some endeavor that we value.

4. The need to look good. For some of us, that means to look smart. Sociology refers to it as: "the maintenance of front’.

People spend a lot of time and energy in meeting these identity needs in addition to their biological ones. Try to visualize these forces in your own life. What does the moral dimension of our faith have to tell us about these needs? Should and could our faith deliver us or free us from some of our more self-centered needs? If in fact our faith can assist us with that, then in a real sense, our faith has helped us to transcend ourselves, or at least that part of ourselves that needs transcending.

So what about that first need to control or to dominate others in our personal quest for control of our own lives? It should be quite easy to recall someone close to us, probably a family member, present or past that has tried to dominate us. We probably at some time felt oppressed, even smothered a bit. The freedom that was denied to us by that person took on new meaning to us. Our freedom became a valued commodity and was threatened by that individual. Now try to visualize when you have dominated or controlled someone else, even if it was in a subtle unintentional way. We have all participated at some time in this activity. It’s not always a black and white situation, either. Teachers, parents, and job supervisors must exert some control over their charges if they are to fulfill their roles in a responsible and loving way. That’s not the kind of control that needs to be looked at. Rather, it’s the self-serving kind of control, which is perpetrated to enhance our own sense of security at someone else’s expense, which needs to be examined. And here our faith clearly says we are to love our neighbor as ourselves, and not use or abuse them for selfish purposes. Sometimes we can’t seem to control our need to control others, but if we can at least be conscious of what it is we are doing to someone else—somewhere along the way our behavior will modify itself, especially if we seek the help of the Holy Spirit. Our level of oppression of other people will diminish—as it should, if we are to love our neighbor out of our need to love God.

Let’s look at the second identity need—that need we all share to ‘be right’. This is such a common human need, although it is stronger in some people than in others. Hundreds and sometimes thousands of lives have been sacrificed to meet just one person’s need of being right. On the battlefields of wars over the centuries bodies have been stacked like cordwood in the process of proving some commanding officer, or general, or tyrant was right about some theory or strategy, or some moral or political principle. Power struggles among men in political, military, or even religious arenas have been going on seemingly forever. Human lives have been sacrificed as easily as pawns on a chessboard. This need to be right is a powerful and compelling need. If you are not quite sure this is something you do, ask yourself when was the last time you blamed someone for something? When we blame a person or group, we have already judged or condemned them and found them guilty. We have made them wrong and we have made ourselves right. The consequence can be that we hold resentment or a grudge against them. These resentments accumulate. They add up and don’t go away easily. They bog us down and cripple us. They are slow poison to us and to our relationships. We can become cynical and our perceptions of the world take on a darker hue. The Christian faith holds up a higher ideal, for it says that it is not ours to judge or to condemn. That is strictly God’s prerogative. God is right and God is truth. We as humans see as if through a glass darkly, as some brilliant writer once said somewhere in scripture. It is not ours to diminish in any way another person’s life for the sake of our need to be right. In one sense I think that is what Jesus meant when he said that in order to enter the kingdom of heaven, we must be like little children. Children don’t carry around all these stored up grudges and resentments. Their memories are uncluttered and relatively resentment free. We can work on letting go of negative memories and live in the present.

I need to say a few words about the last need ‘to look good’. One doesn’t need to be an astute observer to know that in the political arena ‘looking good’ is more than half the job. Each political entity has its own ‘spin’ doctors whose job it is to put a glowing interpretation on anything that is said or done by the particular politician they represent. And large corporations spend great quantities of money on public relations departments to help the corporation look good. One can even see it on the job with some supervisors that spend a lot of their time trying to make themselves look good to their supervisors, instead of spending their time directly on task or furthering their true mission. A good observer will be able to see this drive ‘to look good’ make its mark on the behavior of every individual. It is a universal need.

An example of this is evident in the scripture story of the apostle Peter denying Christ three times before the rooster crowed. Peter was afraid for his life. He did not want to be identified at that moment with the other disciples. He had an overpowering urge just to be one of the good old boys. So he denied his association with his Master, Jesus, three times. Behind our need to look good is usually a fear-- fear of death for Peter—fear of something else for us. As long as we are driven by fear, we will be prone to the need to ‘look good’.

How did Jesus respond when He was put before Pontius Pilate in a life-threatening situation? Did he try to justify himself? Did He try to put a positive spin on the situation? Did He make any apologies? In today’s lingo we would say He was a poor PR person for himself. Apparently Jesus was not concerned about looking good. He was concerned about doing His mission. He was secure in the love of His ‘Abba’ Father. His was a mission of love—nothing else mattered. The lesson our faith has to offer us is that each one of us needs to take on a personal mission of love. We need to keep our focus on that mission and direct our creative energies there. We need to take an honest, objective look at our own motives and reasons for doing things. We need to differentiate within ourselves what is coming from our ego and what is coming from the soft, sweet voice of love within us. We need to reexamine ourselves and rethink things. Then we will be better equipped to let go of ‘looking good’ and ‘being right’, controlling others, and ‘winning’. Our faith will set us free from the ego needs that become for us the obstacles to God’s grace. Our faith will transform our perceptions and understanding. We will grow beyond the small, limited, dark world of the self to a world where we can truly recognize the face of Christ in our neighbors. We will know that giving love is the only true reality.

I was discussing these ideas with a friend of mine, named John, and he said to me there was an opposite side to this problem of the human ego. There are a lot of people whose self-image is so low or underdeveloped, their self-worth so destroyed, that they are not free either. In other words, the person with the low self-image is as unfree as the person with the self-centered, highly developed ego. So what does the Christian faith have to offer this group? The somewhat glib answer is that we are the children of God and He values and loves us all. We are valuable in God’s eyes regardless of our human assets or liabilities because we are all one in the Spirit. Everyone is capable of faith, and of giving love and receiving it. But for the person with an under-developed faith and a handicapped self-esteem, none of that holds much weight. This group also includes a lot of young people whose identities are still in formation and whose self-esteem is still infirm. So how do we speak to these people?

The fact is you can’t give someone else a faith in God. You can share yours; you can talk about what you believe; you can be caring and supportive and loving—but you can’t instill faith in another person. They have to want it, and they have to reach out for it. But anything you can do to help another person take responsibility for themselves is a big step forward. Once they develop the skills for doing and thinking for themselves, they will be preparing for the big step—that of taking responsibility for their own religious faith. As Paul Tillich points out, we all have faith in something. We all have an ultimate concern that shapes our identity and agenda, even if that concern leads one down the path to self-pity, apathy, or seeing oneself as a victim. How many people in your experience feel they aren’t worth much because they aren’t winners or big achievers? They may feel the world sees them as losers—so they choose the loser or victim identity. To help that individual, one has to somehow encourage them to renounce their self-pity long enough to take one short step and take responsibility for that step. Then they can go on to step two and eventually to owning some significant faith choices. As John and I discussed this he reminded me of a mutual friend named Billy. Billy had cerebral palsy and was very disabled in terms of mobility and speech. Billy had a good family that provided lots of support—sometimes too much support. He went off to University for four years and got his bachelor’s degree. After graduation he had the drive to go out and find a job. He held the job for a short while, and then they fired him for poor performance. That’s when Billy must have had something of an identity crisis. He had to face the fact that his family had helped him to earn his degree in a major way. That degree probably belonged more to them than to him. John had been working with Billy for over 20 years though the HEC movement (Handicapped Encounter Christ). Billy would call John frequently for support and guidance. As it turned out, Billy did go back to college and took an accounting course and passed it with a ‘D’. So Billy called John on the phone with much excitement in his voice, and with all the pride he could muster he told John about his grade in accounting. So when John asked Billy why he was so exuberant about his ‘D’, Billy replied that he got that D all by himself, and he was so proud. John knew this was a tremendous break-through for Billy. It was a momentous occasion. The lesson John got from this was that it took 20 years of work to see Billy take that first big step by himself. And lots of perseverance, love, acceptance, and patience had to be invested.

Anything we can do to help other people take responsibility for themselves is a major first step in the process of developing a faith life. If and when they take their leap of faith, then it will be their turn to help someone else take their first step, without trying to do it for them. So what can we do to help someone take the first step? We can begin by having confidence that they can do it, and then communicate that to them—even if it takes 20 years. And we do that because faith is the road to freedom, a freedom everyone deserves. It is the road to being whole, and it is the road to salvation.

When we assist others in taking a first step, we begin the process of transcending ourselves. We transcend our individual identities and vision, and become the hand of God—performing small everyday miracles that build up the Kingdom of God. Our faith has begun to set us free.

Maybe it was best said by St. Paul in Romans 8:18-21:

"Consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God."

Thomas Vaillancourt, August 1993