The ‘David Syndrome’ and How to Deal With it

 

Nathan confronts David

  
(This homily was given on February 27, 2022 at St. Pius X Church, Westerly, R.I., by Fr. Raymond Suriani.  Read Sirach 27:4-7; Psalm 92:2-16; 1 Corinthians 15:54-58; Luke 6:39-45.)

[For the audio version of this homily, click here: Eighth Sunday 2022]

You could call it the “David Syndrome”—named after David, the second king of Israel.  It’s what Jesus is talking about in our gospel reading today from Luke 6, in that section where he says, ”Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam [i.e., the plank] in your own?  How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me remove that splinter in your eye,’ when you do not even notice the wooden beam in your own eye?”

As I said, this syndrome—this disorder—is named for King David, because this is precisely where he was at after he sinned with Bathsheba.

Most of us know the story.  David was out taking a stroll on his rooftop veranda one evening and he spotted a young woman bathing off in the distance.  So he invited her over to his place for a little “coffee-and”.  Not surprisingly, it was the “and” that got him into trouble.  One thing led to another (as the old saying goes), and the woman—Bathsheba—ended up pregnant.

Now David could have repented and ended things right there, but instead he made the decision to take matters into his own hands and to try to conceal his sin.  He called Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah the Hittite, home from battle and tried to get him to go home.  He wanted Uriah to sleep with his wife, and thus to think that he was the father of the child.  But Uriah refused to go.  And it was right for him to refuse because at the time the nation was at war, and Uriah was a good soldier.  Good soldiers in Israel weren’t supposed to go home to their families when a war was going on.

So David arranged to have Uriah killed.  He instructed the leader of his army, Joab, to put Uriah on the front lines of the battle, and then to pull back from him at a certain point, so that Uriah would be exposed to enemy attack—a “sitting duck,” so to speak.  Well Joab, unfortunately, did what David commanded him to do, and Uriah was, indeed, killed.

So there was David—guilty of two deadly (what we today would call “mortal”) sins—and yet he felt absolutely, positively no guilt whatsoever—about any of it!  For him, life was great.  He had a new wife (he ended up marrying Bathsheba) and a new son.  And in his kingdom, it was business as usual.

Until he was presented with a problem—a problem that supposedly involved someone else.  The prophet Nathan, inspired by the Spirit, came to David one day and said, “David, I need your help. I’m trying to figure out how to judge this particular case.  There were two men in a certain town; one was really, really rich, the other, unfortunately, was really, really poor.  The rich man had lots and lots of flocks and herds (too numerous to count); whereas the poor guy had just one little lamb that he had bought with the little money he had. But he loved that lamb—and so did his children.  It was part of their family.  That is, until the day the rich man stole the lamb from the poor man and his family, and cooked it up as a meal for one of his houseguests.  He could have chosen one of his own lambs to feed his friend (he had thousands to choose from), but he refused to do that.  What do you think about that man, David?  What’s your opinion?”

David got angry and said, “As the Lord lives, the man who has done this deserves to die!  He should be executed!”

Nathan said, “Well, that’s very interesting, David, because YOU ARE THAT MAN!!!”

That was the moment David realized that he had a plank sticking in his eye—and a pretty big one at that.  It was also the moment when he began the process of removing the plank.  Thankfully it did not take long for the king to admit his sin to Nathan.  In fact, the very first words that came out of David’s mouth after Nathan confronted him were the words, “I have sinned against the Lord.”  Later on David would express his repentance in the 51^st psalm when he wrote: “Have mercy on me, O God, in your kindness; in your compassion blot out my offence.  O wash me more and more from my guilt, and cleanse me from my sin.”

Hopefully it’s now clear: the “David Syndrome” is the tendency we all have to see the sins of other people more clearly than we see our own.  David saw the sin of the rich man in Nathan’s story very clearly, but he was blind to his own.  It reminds me of the little story I read this past week in a commentary on today’s readings.  Some of you probably have heard this before.  It’s about 4 monks who had taken a vow of silence.  All four of them were walking down the road one day, when one of them stubbed his toe on a rock.  He said, “Ow!”  The second turned to him and said, “You idiot!  You broke your vow of silence!”  The third said to the second, ”You’re a bigger idiot than he is; you broke your vow of silence in telling him that he broke his!”  The fourth one just smiled and said, “I’m the only one who didn’t.”

Here we have four men, each of whom saw the faults of the other three more clearly than he saw his own.

That’s fallen human nature; that’s the “David Syndrome.”

I think it’s providential that we have this particular gospel reading on the Sunday before Lent begins.  (Yes, believe it or not, this coming Wednesday is Ash Wednesday!)

Lent is a time of year when we should focus in a special way on the “planks” in our eyes: the planks that we, like David, tend not to be aware of—or that we may tend to ignore.  That requires some introspection; that requires some honest soul-searching, which in Catholic terms is commonly referred to as an “examination of conscience.”

Examining our consciences is actually something we should get in the habit of doing every day of the year.  If King David had examined his conscience after he committed adultery with Bathsheba, perhaps he wouldn’t have added murder to the list of serious sins he needed to repent of. 

Ordinarily, planks are removed for us in the sacrament of Reconciliation—even big planks like David’s.  Hopefully we will all make the effort to get to confession at least once during the upcoming Lenten season.  (You’ll notice in the bulletin that Fr Najim has added a few more confession times during the weeks of Lent to make it more convenient for you to get there.)

All that having been said, my prayer for all of you is that this year you will have, not only a happy Easter, but also (and even more importantly) a “plank-free” Easter!

How To Love Your Enemies—Especially The ‘Instant’ Ones!

David spares Saul

(Seventh Sunday of the Year (C): This homily was given on February 20, 2022 at St. Pius X Church, Westerly, R.I., by Fr. Raymond Suriani.  Read 1 Samuel 26:2-23; Psalm 103:1-13; 1 Corinthians 15:45-49; Luke 6:27-38.)

[For the audio version of this homily, click here: Seventh Sunday 2022]

 

You’ve heard of instant coffee and instant oatmeal; you know about instant winners and instant rebates and instant feedback and instant messaging.

But you’ve probably never heard of “instant enemies”—until now.

And yet we’ve all had them in the past—and in all likelihood we will have many more of them in the future.

So we’ve got to be prepared to deal with them!—because of all the enemies we may have in this life, our “instant” ones are often the most difficult to handle. 

Jesus tells us in today’s Gospel to “love” our enemies.  That, of course, includes ALL of them, whether they are the instant type or some other variety! 

Now what’s interesting about this command is the fact that Jesus presumes that we will have enemies; he presumes that even the very best among us—even the greatest of saints—will have enemies here on earth.  Consequently he doesn’t say, “Love your enemies if you happen to have them”; he simply says, “Love your enemies (i.e., the enemies you ALREADY HAVE—and presumably will have in the future!).”

David, as we heard in today’s first reading, had an enemy in King Saul, who was hunting him down to try to kill him!  St. Paul, the author of today’s second reading, made a number of enemies during his missionary journeys.  (We know that because he wrote about them quite often in his letters, most especially in his Letter to the Galatians.)

Even Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, had some enemies—among them the scribes and the Pharisees and the other religious leaders of the day who were closed to him and his message.

Sometimes, of course, we may be the cause of the problem; we need to admit that in a spirit of humility.  Someone, in other words, might be our enemy because we have sinned against them in some way.  This is what makes us different from Jesus.  Jesus was perfect; if somebody was his enemy we can be absolutely certain that it was not his fault.  That’s not the case with us!  St. Paul says in this text from 1 Corinthians 15 that we all “bear the image” of the “earthly man” (i.e., Adam).  That means we all have within us the residual effects of original sin; we all have the potential to harm other people in pretty serious ways. 

So if that’s the reason someone is our enemy—because we’ve intentionally harmed them in some fashion—then the solution is for us to admit it.  We need to come to terms with our guilt and repent and seek reconciliation!   

That having been said, Jesus in this passage is speaking specifically about those times in life when someone else’s sin is at the root of the problem.  He’s speaking about those situations when someone else’s evil action has caused them to become our enemy.

And those situations can come upon us very quickly, can’t they?  As we all know, a person can move from the “friend” category to the “enemy” category in a matter of only a few seconds.  And I submit to you today that it’s those people—our “instant enemies”—that we usually have the most difficulty dealing with. 

Terrorists like the late Osama bin Laden, for example, are definitely enemies to all of us, but they’re rather distant ones.  They’re people, in other words, that we don’t deal with directly and on a daily basis (thank God!).  For us, to desire the good for them (which, incidentally, is what love is: to love is to make a conscious decision to desire “the good” for another); for us to desire a terrorist’s good (which would include his conversion and repentance and sanctity) really isn’t all that difficult.  It might be a lot harder for us if we’ve lost a relative or friend in a terrorist attack somewhere in the world in recent years.  But most terrorists are far enough removed from our day-to-day experience, that loving them in this way is relatively easy.

It can be much more difficult to “desire the good” for the guy who suddenly cuts us off on the highway, or who makes an obscene gesture to us in a crowded parking lot (not the St. Pius X parking lot, of course—no one would ever do such a thing there!). 

It can be very hard to love your own sister when she takes your toys or video games without your permission and ends up breaking them; it can be hard to love your brother when he connives with lawyers to take more than his rightful share of the family estate!  It can be very hard to love your spouse or your child when they lie to you about something really important; it can be hard to love your co-worker when he steals the credit for something that you did, and then happily gets the raise that you should have gotten.

What makes these situations so difficult is that these are people for whom we have had good feelings (or at least no negative feelings).  Then, all of a sudden, they do something to us and we have really bad feelings toward them.  In effect, they become our “instant enemies”!

So-called “crimes of passion” are committed by “instant enemies”.  The violence that comes from “road rage” is caused by instant enemies.  How often have people said things they have later regretted very deeply because they overreacted to an instant enemy?

It happens all the time.

This is why we must pray daily and ask the Lord to fill our hearts with his love—his forgiving, merciful, patient love.

But that’s not sufficient.  Prayer is essential, but it’s really not enough.  In addition to prayer, we also have to train ourselves to “think rightly” about other people.  That can help us to respond to them in a loving way whenever they become our enemies.   

Here we can definitely take a lesson from David in the Old Testament.  Now if there’s anyone who had a good reason to hate his enemy, it was David.  Saul, as you will recall, was the first king of Israel; but he had disobeyed God in a very important matter, and so the Lord took the kingship away from him, and he promised it to young David.

That wasn’t David’s fault!  It was Saul’s fault; but Saul hated David because of it and wanted to kill him.  And so he began to track David all over Palestine; he began to hunt him down.  Well, at one point the tables suddenly got turned: the hunter became the hunted.  Saul and his men were asleep in their camp, and David and his men found them.  Needless to say, Saul and his soldiers were like sitting ducks.  And Abishai, David’s general (as we heard in today’s first reading), immediately wanted to kill Saul in David’s name.

But David refused to let him do it.  And he refused because of how he thought of Saul.  He recognized this man—evil though he was—as “the Lord’s anointed”.  And so he said to Abishai, “Do not harm him, for who can lay hands on the Lord’s anointed and remain unpunished?” 

Abishai probably wanted to say to David, “Are you crazy?  This guy hates you; he’s out of his mind; he’s been tracking you for days, and now you’ve got him exactly where you want him.  End it; kill him, and stop this madness!”  

But David, to his great credit, had trained himself to “think rightly” about his enemy, and so he responded to him with love and mercy instead of hate.  David didn’t always do that with respect to his enemies, but he did do it here.  He “thought rightly” about Saul; he didn’t simply pray.

The fact is, every person we encounter in our daily lives is also “the Lord’s anointed”.  Did you realize that?  Every single person we meet on this earth has either been anointed—literally!—by God in the sacrament of Baptism; or if they’re not baptized they’ve at least been anointed with the “image” of God when their human soul was created.

We need to train ourselves to think of other people in this way—as God’s anointed sons and daughters—so that if they ever become our enemies (especially our “instant” enemies) we will still be able to love them and desire the good for them.

Because remember what Bishop Sheen once said: “The real test of a Christian is not how much he loves his friends; [the real test of a Christian] is how much he loves his enemies.” 

Who Defines ‘Love’ for You? Is it St. Paul, or is it Hugh Hefner?

 

Holly Madison and Hugh Hefner

(Fourth Sunday of the Year (C): This homily was given on January 30, 2022 at St. Pius X Church, Westerly, R.I., by Fr. Raymond Suriani.  Read Jeremiah 1:4-19; Psalm 71:1-17; 1 Corinthians 12:31-13:13; Luke 4:21-30.) 

[For the audio version of this homily, click here: Fourth Sunday 2022 ]

Who defines “love” for you?  Is it St. Paul, or is it Hugh Hefner?  (That’s a serious question, by the way!)

St. Paul shares his understanding of love in the text we heard today from 1 Corinthians 13.  It’s a passage of Scripture that you often hear at weddings. And that’s understandable, because it’s a beautiful text with a beautiful message.  But it’s also a tough message—an extremely tough message!  It’s not easy to love others in the way Paul describes here.  Listen again to his words:

Love is patient, love is kind.
It is not jealous, it is not pompous,
It is not inflated, it is not rude,
it does not seek its own interests,
it is not quick-tempered, it does not brood over injury,
it does not rejoice over wrongdoing
but rejoices with the truth.
It bears all things, believes all things,
hopes all things, endures all things.

Obviously for St. Paul, love was not first and foremost an emotion.  For Paul real love was a decision!  It was a decision to desire what’s good for another person.  It was a decision to sacrifice your own wants and to treat someone else as God would have you treat them.  In fact, you could insert the word “decision” into the text and the meaning of it would not change:

Love is [a decision to be] patient, [a decision to be] kind.
[a decision not to be] jealous, or pompous,
[or] inflated, [or] rude, [or to seek your] own interests,
[or to be] quick-tempered, [or to brood] over injury,
[or to] rejoice over wrongdoing.
[Love is a decision to rejoice] with the truth.
[It’s a decision to bear all things, believe all things,
hope all things, [and] endure all things.

This is love according to St. Paul, and believe it or not it’s the only kind of love that works in this life.  In other words, it’s the only kind of love that truly sustains relationships.  That’s why St. Paul says in the next line of the text that this kind of love “never fails.” 

And this is one of the most important reasons why we need a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.  You see, what St. Paul is describing here is really the love of Jesus.  This is the kind of love that he showed to others when he walked the face of this earth 2,000 years ago.  This is the kind of love which led him to sacrifice his life for us on the cross.  Jesus is the ultimate source of this love—real love.  Consequently, if we want this kind of love to be present in our lives we need to go to the source to get it.  Then we will be ready and able to show it to other people.

Contrast this, now, with Hugh Hefner’s version of love—which is basically selfish, manipulative, objectifying and hedonistic.  This thought about Hefner (who died in 2017) came to me last Monday night.  I was at my sister’s house on my night off trying to find something to watch on TV, since for the first time in about 5 months, there was no football game on Monday (either college or pro).

Well during the course of my “channel surfing” I came across a program on the Arts and Entertainment Network on Hugh Hefner and his Playboy empire.  I later found out this was one show in a series. As it said in a CNN article that I read: “The Playboy mystique and Hugh Hefner's legacy receive a serious debunking in ‘Secrets of Playboy,’ a 10-part A&E network docuseries that explores the dark side of the lifestyle Hefner sought to embody.”

Now please don’t worry, there was nothing graphic in the program.  It was TV-14, not TV-MA!  (I just wanted to clarify that before I went any further!)

This information about Hefner is important, my brothers and sisters, because like it or not this man continues to be a role model (even posthumously) for many people in our world today when it comes to relationships—especially relationships with members of the opposite sex.  He’s their guru of love!  Now from the way the secular media has always portrayed him, Hefner was kind and caring and “just a nice guy who was having a good time for himself in life.”  And all his many “girlfriends” (as he called them) loved him and were very happy living in his mansion.

Not so, many of his former girlfriends now say.  They describe a man whose love was, as I said a few moments ago, selfish, manipulative, and hedonistic—and who basically treated women as disposable objects.

He created an illusion of happiness and peace and love—but in reality it was just the opposite. 

Listen to a few of the things Holly Madison and another ex-girlfriend named Sondra Theodore said when they were interviewed on the program.  I wrote down a dozen or so of their statements …

“The fantasy of Playboy that he created did not allow for the consent of the women.”

“Hef controlled every aspect of our lives.” 

“Looking back at my time at Playboy, it reminds me of a cult.”

“With Hef, I don’t really know what’s true and what’s not….”

“I want to be the voice of the women who suffered the most at his hands.” 

“You had no idea you were being brainwashed.” 

“He would pit us [girlfriends] against each other.”

“It was all a lie. I watched girl after girl after girl show up fresh-faced, adorable, and then their beauty just washed away. … I saw clearly that we were nothing to him.”

“He was like a vampire.  He sucked the life out of all these young girls for decades. I know some really deep, dark secrets.  And now we’re speaking out. It’s all gonna come out.”

“People think I should have known exactly what I was getting into, that you're stepping into a cult there, but I absolutely did not. In my early twenties I didn't realize that getting into the Playboy world was a dangerous choice.”

“I felt that I was … in this cycle of gross things and I didn’t know what to do.”

“I believe that Hef pulled one over on the whole world.”

And sadly, from the grave he’s still pulling one over on a lot of people who are still trying to build their lives and relationships on his sordid and self-centered philosophy of love.

So who does define “love” for you—really?  Is it St. Paul, or is it Hugh Hefner?

The answer for each and every one of us should be easy; it should be very easy. 

And, hopefully, it is.

St. Paul, Clarence, and ‘The Holes’

(Third Sunday of the Year (C): This homily was given on Sunday, January 23, 2022 at St. Pius X Church, Westerly, R.I., by Fr. Raymond Suriani.  Read Nehemiah 8:1-12; Psalm 19:8-15; 1 Corinthians 12:12-30; Luke 1:1-4; 4:14-21.)

[For the audio version of this homily, click here: Third Sunday 2022]

 

In today’s second reading from 1 Corinthians 12, St. Paul says, “God placed the parts, each one of them, in the body as he intended;” or, as the verse is translated in another version of the Bible: “God has set each member of the body in the place he wanted it to be.”  (1 Corinthians 12: 18)

That line makes me think of a great scene from the movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life”—which is my favorite Christmas movie.

Clarence, the guardian angel of the main character, George Bailey, was trying to dissuade George from killing himself by showing George what the world would have been like if he had never been born.  But it wasn’t an easy task for Clarence!  For a long time, George convinced himself that the changes he was seeing in his friends, family and surroundings were just the work of his very creative imagination—or the result of some magic trick performed by Clarence.

What finally made it clear to George that what he was seeing around him was real, was when he tried to visit his mother (who, of course, didn’t recognize him and called him crazy), and when he went to the place where “Bailey Park” used to be.  (Bailey Park was the housing development that George had helped to finance through his Building and Loan Company.) 

In place of the beautiful homes that used to be there, all George saw in front of him were gravestones.  Clarence said to him, “Are you sure this is Bailey Park?”  George responded, “Well, this should be Bailey Park.  But where are all the houses?”  Clarence answered, “You weren’t here to build them.”

Then George looked to one side, and he spotted a gravestone that had the name of his brother, Harry Bailey, chiseled into it.  George had saved Harry from drowning when they were children.  Harry had gone on to become a war hero during the Second World War.  But the dates on his gravestone read 1911-1919.

As George knelt on the ground looking at the stone in disbelief, Clarence said to him, “Your brother, Harry Bailey, broke through the ice and was drowned at the age of nine.”

George immediately jumped up and screamed, “That’s a lie!  Harry Bailey went to war!  He got the Congressional Medal of Honor!  He saved every man on that transport!”

Clarence shot back, “Every man on that transport died!  Harry wasn’t there to save them because you weren’t there to save Harry!”

It was the perfect illustration of what Clarence had said to George a little earlier in the film: “Strange, isn’t it?  Each man’s life touches so many other lives.  When he isn’t around, he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he?” 

St. Paul would most definitely agree, based on that line from 1 Corinthians 12 that I quoted to you just a few moments ago: “God placed the parts, each one of them, in the body as he intended.”

According to the teaching of 1 Corinthians 12, we, together, make up the body of Christ, which is the Church.  This means that, individually, we are like the various parts of a physical body: we each have different roles, different gifts, different functions in God’s plan for the salvation of the world.  And yet, just as all the different parts of a physical body are supposed to interact with one another and work together for the good of the body as a whole, so too we in the Church (and in the world) are supposed to interact with one another and work together for the good of all.

That’s the will of our good and loving God.

So obviously what we do (and what we don’t do) in this life affects not only ourselves; to some extent what we do and what we don’t do affects everyone else, because our lives are so closely intertwined with the lives of others.  St. Paul makes that point here by saying that, if one part of the body suffers, all the other parts of the body suffer with it.

We all know this by experience, I’m sure.  If you have a toothache or an earache, for example, it’s not just your tooth or ear that suffers.

That one hurting part of your body affects your entire physical organism in a negative way.  And it ends up making you miserable—from head to toe!

It’s a terrible thing when one part of your body hurts and everything else seems to hurt with it. 

But do you know what’s even worse, my brothers and sisters?  What’s even worse is when you’re missing a part of your body!  What’s even worse is when all the parts of your body that should be there aren’t! 

Just ask anyone who’s had a part of their body amputated, or who was born without one or more of their limbs.

This was the lesson George Bailey learned from Clarence, when he got to see what the world would have been like if he had never been born.  He came to understand that he was a missing part of “the body”—and that his whole town was suffering because of his absence.

And so it is in the real world, when God wants people around, and they aren’t!

As Clarence said so prophetically, when a person isn’t around who is supposed to be around, “he leaves an awful hole.”

I ask you this morning, how many “holes” have been left in our world because of the shootings at grade schools in recent years, and because of the many other murders and acts of violence that take place in our country every day?

How many “holes” have been left in our nation because of abortion, since that horrific practice was legalized 49 years ago this very month?

Last I knew, about 63 million!

If God has a plan for each and every human person (and he does!)—a plan which involves their interaction with other people in the body of Christ and in the world—then what happens when someone who’s an important part of that plan isn’t there?

If you have a young son or daughter, for example, and it was part of God’s plan for that son or daughter to marry one of the children killed in a grade school shooting somewhere, how will your child’s life be affected in the future?  Or what if the person whom God wanted your son or daughter to marry was aborted and never made it out of the womb?

Or what if, in the plan of God, one of those murdered children was destined to become a great scientist—maybe the scientist who would unlock the secret to Parkinson’s Disease and discover a cure?

The “hole” that person leaves will certainly have a negative impact on my life!  I can guarantee that.

I remember seeing a cartoon several years ago that made the point in an extremely powerful way.  In this cartoon, a man looks up to heaven and cries out, “God, why haven’t you sent us people with cures for cancer and Aids, and answers to world hunger and all our social problems?”  A voice comes from heaven: “I did.”  The man says, “But, where are they?”  The Lord responds, “You aborted them!”

Among the almost 63 million who have been killed in the womb in the last 5 decades, don’t you think there were at least a few great scientific minds?  And perhaps a few economists, who would have had the insights that we need to turn our sick economy around?  And some doctors and nurses to alleviate the current shortage in our health care system?  And maybe even a few good priests and religious who could have saved some souls who otherwise will die in the state of mortal sin?

Clarence, the angel, was right: “Each man’s life touches so many other lives.  When he isn’t around, he leaves an awful hole.”

May God help us all to take this truth seriously, and then to make every effort—by our words, by our deeds, and yes, even by our votes—to prevent any more “holes” from afflicting our world.