Last year at my 40th Demontreville Retreat, one of the exercises that we were given by the Retreat Master included a very challenging set of thoughts. The worksheet for the activity was labeled as “A Testament.” I took the worksheet and instructions home with me. It had fourteen tasks or reflections to complete. I did not desire to complete them during the retreat. It is now almost a year since my retreat, and I have decided to make the mental and emotional effort necessary to complete this “Testament.”
The worksheet started with these instructions:
Imagine that this is the last day of your life on earth. In the time that you have left, you want to leave a “Testament” for your family and friends. Each of the following could serve as chapter headings for your “Testament.”
7. These are the Sufferings that have seasoned me and made me more compassionate.
How to start talking about Sufferings without sounding like a whinny spoiled brat? Sure, I have had some downs, and I will mention them. But my life has not been anywhere near the life that I know other people have lived. In my 77 years on this earth, I have met people who have been through unimaginable and unspeakable sufferings. If anything has made me more compassionate, it is listening to their stories. Let me just tell you one that I recently encountered.
A week or so ago, I had a substitute teaching job for the JROTC program at our local high school. I looked forward to this work since the kids who take this program are usually UBER well-behaved. JROTC is a program staffed by Marine personnel with the blessing of the school administration. When I arrived, the full-time teacher was away but there was another staff member. He was a retired Marine Corp NCO. I will call him Nick but that is not his real name. Nick was missing a leg. He had served in the Gulf Wars and been hit with an IED or Improvised Explosive Device. He spent several months in a VA hospital but finished his tour of duty and retired from the Marine Corp.
Nick suffered from many other injuries and also had a form of degenerative MS which was slowly killing him. We talked most of the day as you can imagine two veterans would do. Nick had a family and two children. I met one of his kids and was impressed by her closeness with her dad, something I never experienced with my daughter. Despite his disabilities, Nick claimed no special privileges in life. He was positive and happy to be alive. He enjoyed working with the schoolchildren and trying to make a difference in their lives. Throughout the day, I detected not one bit of remorse or self-pity on Nick’s part.
When I left home at 18 and joined the military, I resolved never to blame my parents for anything I would experience in life. I was now an adult. It did not matter that I had an abusive father growing up or that I often felt like a “motherless” child. I was now an adult and my destiny in life was in my own hands.
I experienced suffering when I caught my first wife in bed with a co-worker and she wanted to leave me for him. I experienced suffering for nearly twenty years when my only daughter did not want to speak with me. She was married twice, and I was not invited to either wedding. She had two grandchildren whom I have only seen maybe three or four times in the last thirty years. I have improved my relationship with my daughter somewhat over the past five years. She and I get together for lunch each time I come back to Minnesota.
Am I a very happy person? Most of my friends would probably say no. My sufferings though are mostly self-inflicted. My thoughts on the life that I should have lived haunt me. Try as I might I can’t let go of the things I fucked up in this world. I can’t even forget the teacher in the third grade who told me to, “Shut my mouth and stop singing.” Seventy years later and it feels like if I try to sing, something awful will happen to me. I would rather jump off of a cliff than sing a note.
A number of years ago, I had a job which required me to do some collections from overdue purchasers of various products. I did a car repo, and I did not feel too bad about it since I thought, “Why should anyone have a brand-new car if they could not make the payments?” At this point in my life, I was still just scrapping by financially. I had never had anything more than a ten-year-old vehicle. I was still buying cars from the junk yard as well as used tires from the junk yard.
One day, I had to go out to do a repo on a guy who bought a TV set and was not making his payments. I went to the poor section of town and walked up to the address I had been given. It looked like maybe a three-room small bungalow. The yard was gated, and I looked for a dog. Not seeing any, I opened the gate and walked up to the front door. There was a screen door. The main door was open, and I could see into the house. I knocked loudly on the door as there was no doorbell. I could see a living room and a kitchen. Out of the kitchen, a large man started coming to the door. As he drew closer, I could see he had no legs. He was missing both legs and was walking with two crutches. He asked me what I wanted. I hesitated and then answered “Sorry, I must have the wrong house.” I went back to my office and quit the same day. I figured he needed the TV more than my company needed the money. I could not do a job that required me to take from poor people what little they had in life.
These are some of the sufferings that try men’s souls and women’s as well. In some sense, they are also our sufferings. John Donne (1572-1631) wrote, “For thee Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls.” The sufferings of humanity are all of our responsibilities.
My years working as an AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) counselor taught me that while I might have one or two things to cause me suffering, many other people have three, four, five or more problems. I cannot begin to describe all the inhumanity that I saw reflected in the lives of my clients. And then you have the “financially responsible politicians” who demand that many of these people get a job if they are going to receive welfare. A whole cadre of human beings who disparage and denigrate the less fortunate as “welfare queens, free loaders, leeches and parasites.” Many so-called Christians who forget the words of Jesus, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.” — Mark 10:21:
So that’s all Folks. My life has been a breeze. My friend Kwame always says that he is blessed. I never use that word, but I suppose I have been blessed. I have good health. I have a great wife. I have enough money to pay my bills and go on a vacation each year. My only sufferings in life now are watching so many of my friends and relatives pass away. I fear I might be the last man standing in a world that I feel increasingly alienated from.
Next Reflection:
- These are the Lessons that life has taught me.
Two thousand years ago, the Roman Empire started its decline after having been the greatest empire that the world had yet seen. Many historians point to the decadence of the Roman Empire during its decline. “Decadence” is defined by the Oxford On-Line Dictionary as, “Moral or cultural decline as characterized by excessive indulgence in pleasure or luxury.” The Romans had their “Bread and Circuses.” The Oxford Dictionary defines “Bread and Circuses” as, “A diet of entertainment or political policies on which the masses are fed to keep them happy and docile.” For many, football and politics are the bread and circuses or our American Empire. I think the rot and decay in America today goes much deeper than that. Here is my list of some of the decadence that I see in the USA today:
I have another T-Shirt where I list the “No Exceptions” groups that somehow seem to be conveniently overlooked by many Cultural Christians. The major fallacy that many Christians seem to observe is to define their neighbors as either someone in their own church or in their own social group. When Jesus included the Samaritans who were an outcast group at the time as his neighbors, this should have made it clear that you must go beyond your tribe or friends to include other nations, other ethnicities, other religions, and other people with different beliefs as your neighbor.
Despite attending forty 3-day Jesuit retreats and regularly going to church with my spouse, I remain adamantly somewhere between an Atheist and an Agnostic. See my blog 
I can see some positive sides to a church ideology that addressee inner spirituality, but I think it has serious drawbacks. You can focus too much on what I will call the “inner spirituality” of church members. The reasoning behind the emphasis on inner spirituality can be faulty. The theory is that if each member becomes a better Christian, they will be better neighbors towards others. If they feed the hungry and cloth the poor, they will be ridding the world of the evils that Jesus preached against. Unfortunately, these propositions are not evidenced by historical fact. For hundreds of years many Christians supported slavery and sexism by doing little or nothing to condemn or speak out against it. Furthermore, many Christians were major protagonists of racism and sexism. If their ministers spoke out against it, it obviously made little difference. Being a card carrying member of a Christian church never seems to correlate with ending war, sexism, racism, homophobia or even poverty. I think without an equal emphasis on “Outer Spirituality” Christianity is a worthless religion.
There are many definitions of spirituality. What does it mean to be a spiritual person? Some people lean towards accepting a higher being or creator. Some lean towards accepting a more conventional religious perspective. Many on-line definitions list several factors necessary to be a spiritual person. My own definition is much simpler. I think being a spiritual person involves two elements. The first is seeking meaning in one’s life. The second is seeking purpose. Meaning is inner spirituality. Purpose is outer spirituality. Meaning and purpose must go beyond what is simply good for oneself and must embrace what is good for humanity and the universe. Thus, a truly spiritual person is one who finds and balances inner and outer spirituality.
Thus, the uncoupling of Church and State in the constitution of the United States set the stage for a catastrophic imbalance between Moral Policy and Economic Policy. Over the years, the lack of influence in organized religions at the political level was abetted by the horrendous influence and power of Economic Policy. If Moral Policy was once the heart of a religion, it was supplanted by an Economic Policy which has become the main religion in America. This policy states that more is better and that you can never be too rich or have too much stuff.
What we once believed was a great political innovation to separate Church and State has led to this imbalance. There was no place in the state for religion and no place in religion for politics. America’s dominant dream for peace, justice and equality was replaced with a dream for more money, more power and more fame. The push by the State for this dream dwarfed any efforts by religion to provide a moral balance and the State had no legitimacy for morality. People are cast adrift amidst a chaotic and vicious ocean of competition for more and more stuff. No moral anchors exist that are powerful enough to counterbalance the tide of greed that this has brought to our shores. Guns have replaced morality as citizens arm themselves to prevent imagined attacks at taking away their STUFF.
I have often been accused of being a pessimist but there is nothing about this quote that is pessimistic. It is simply a fact that we must use our imaginations to see a different world and to believe that a different world can exist. As long as we are stuck in the same thinking that generated our problems, we are not free to consider alternative realities. We need more thinking about possibilities and the future. We are bogged down with what Dr. Deming called the “problems of today.” Deming said, “We must balance the problems of today with the problems of tomorrow.”
Aging Capriciously 