Make a Difference

Recently someone asked me when I was going to start making a difference, or something to that effect. When I write “to that effect,” I mean that what he said had this particular effect on me, whether he intended it or not. We all make our own meanings out of things sometimes, and that day I made this meaning out of what he said:

When will you make a difference?

He might have asked me when would I stop goofing around and start making a difference. Or perhaps he asked when I would write a best-seller. Perhaps he wanted to know when I’d write a luminous book that changes peoples’ lives. Or maybe he wanted to know when I’d be on Oprah.

Or maybe I want to know the answers to these questions. Or maybe I already know that everyone dies. Living under the cloud of a death is a great leveler, and it illustrates how meaningless–from a human perspective–our accomplishments are. But a death sentence does not excuse one from fulfilling one’s potentials, either. Lately I’ve been wondering again about what, exactly, is required? Where is the manifesto with the manifest of the deeds I’m assigned to complete before I can be said to be making a difference?

The catechism of the Catholic Church says that “God puts us in the world to know, to love, and to serve him, and so to come to paradise.” It also says many other good things. In fact, I think that if people actually read the catechism, they would have an entirely different view of the basis of the Catholic Church and perhaps of Christians in general. And they would also see just how difficult, if not impossible, it is for human beings to make any sort of transcendent difference at all in our dark world.

But this idea about how hard it is to make a difference could be a cop-out, an excuse for failure. On the other hand, it may be the voice of wisdom. The only difference I can make has to do with my own life, if I can manage even that much. I keep an Aldous Huxley quote on my desk. It says, “I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.”

So, my answer to this question about when I’ll make a difference was that I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing; but already, by the time I answered his challenge, I was already failing to make a difference. Earlier this year I knew that I knew what I was supposed to be doing. But I’ve become sidetracked and I’m now so far off track that I can hardly see why I was supposed to be doing what I was doing, if I ever knew at all. Today, I don’t know that I knew why. And knowing why one is doing something is part of the mechanics of being motivated to actually do it. Or is it? I forget.

I’m reminded of the Apostle James, and how he wrote that we are all like a man who looks at himself in the mirror and sees his own face. Afterward, he goes away and forgets what he looked like. He becomes a forgetful hearer of the word, and not a doer. This is the life of the spiritual being: we have what we are supposed to do. We see it clearly reflected: there it is! But we turn away, and we become lost because we forget. We wander.

I’ve wandered. I’ve forgotten what this was about. I’ve imagined that my voice and God’s voice are the same. “I will ascend to the throne of God,” Lucifer said. What a useful story, the bright, angelic being, most beautiful and beloved of all, with his five deadly “I wills” in Isaiah 14. I will ascend, I will raise, I will ascend, I will sit, I will make myself.

I will make myself.

There it is, right there: the will to be the Creator. Not merely a co-creator with God, as if that weren’t enough glory. No, we want to make ourselves into whatever image we want, what we imagine is right and good.

When I turn away from the mirror that reflects true, I forget. I pick up another mirror, maybe a hereditary one, maybe the one of tradition, maybe a cultural mirror, maybe the mirror my Mother or my Father held in front of my face. That mirror is often not a mirror of love and compassion, the only mirror God has. Call Him what you will-the Divine, the Eternal, the Ineffable, the Mysterious, the Lover, Compassion-he has a hundred names. But by whatever name He goes, He is love. It’s that simple. And when love calls, one responds. But how?

I’ve responded by looking away and by forgetting that I don’t make my self. My self already is. She is right there, down in there somewhere and coming together like so many pieces of cut, faceted glass going into a beautiful stained-glass window. There’s a pattern and a design; but I’m not the one putting it together. I’m cooperating. Cooperating, that is, until I stop cooperating and start doing whatever I think I must do, need to do, or whatever is demanded of me. And then I go off-track because I’m essentially telling that deep inner voice, the one that knows, hears, and speaks only Truth, to take a hike. I’m telling the only spring of pure Wisdom that exists that I know better, and that even though Wisdom said to do thus-and-so, I am going to do this thing instead, because it’s needful and I must do it, there’s no alternative. And day ekes into night and I wake up weeks later and I’m lost.

Our classics book group has just finished reading Dante’s The Divine Comedy. Of all first lines of all time, other than perhaps Genesis, this is my favorite first line in literature. I hope you’ll take a few moments to read this, because it so beautifully expresses not only what actually happens in mid-life, but also what happens whenever we see where we are supposed to be going, and we’re on that straight road, and then suddenly we become lost.

Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray from the straight road
And woke to find myself alone in a dark wood.
How shall I say what wood that was! I never saw so drear,
So rank, so arduous a wilderness!
Its very memory gives a shape to fear.
Death could scarce be more bitter than that place!
But since it came to good, I will recount
All that I found revealed there by God’s grace.
How I came to it I cannot rightly say,
So drugged and loose with sleep had I become
When I first wandered there from the True Way.

I know that detours are also in the hand of the Divine; but if we have the power to become co-creators and to share divinity, then do we not also have the power of destruction and of absolute evil? I think we do, yes. And if so, then some of the greatest errors we make are those of omission, the ones that begin when we say, “. . . but it was only a small thing,” or “. . . but, I had to do this needful thing,” and “but you don’t understand.”

This is what has happened to me, which by saying I mean to refuse responsibility. Dante was an honest man, for he wrote, “I went astray . . . and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood.”

Allow me to rephrase: I went astray, and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood of mundane things and duties, which is no less frightening to me that waking to find myself in some medieval forest. Alone.

How will I make a difference? The answer is there, along that path called True Way.

Art: Woodcuts of The Divine Comedy,  Salvadore Dali