c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University of Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph,”published by St. Martin Press.)

UNDATED _ We may be so obsessed with saving and perfecting ourselves physically that saving and perfecting ourselves spiritually seems almost a quaint idea these days.

When I was a seminary student many years ago, the spiritual director made everybody keep what was called a”sin book.”Everyday at noon, we gathered in chapel to examine our consciences and to make a numerical entry of how many times we had committed what was termed our”particular fault.” The latter was the failing we were struggling to conquer. An example, very big in pre-Vatican II Catholicism at large, was”making uncharitable remarks about my neighbor.” In the M.A.S.H.-like atmosphere of seminary life at the time, students, anticipating today’s computer hackers, often broke into, borrowed, inspected and altered the tabulations in each other’s moral logs. The practice that generated many hearty laughs in that period seems, like seances taken seriously in the Victorian era, barely amusing in our own.

Nowadays people volunteer to reveal their raging lusts and angers that make”uncharitable remarks”seem near to virtue. Has the pursuit of the good life completely overshadowed the pursuit of a holy life?

In the din of modern culture, most people use up their spiritual energy just getting through the day. Enough already, even the best of people say, their souls battered by the MTV environment. They feel, as Nobel laureate Saul Bellow put it,”The unexamined life may not be worth living but the examined life is driving me crazy.” Growing spiritually these days seems to require a good deal of flying blind. We settle for heading in the right direction through the dark night of the soul.

By what actions, then, do we save our souls or let them waste away?

Despite the decline in conscious spiritual self-examination, the basics of leading a good life have never changed. The events in which we save our souls have not changed since the time of Jesus.

He mentioned things that the religious leaders of his day overlooked: the widow’s mite, the sinner able only to ask for mercy, the sore-plagued beggar at the rich man’s gate, the draught of water given in his name. Blessed are those who are not self-conscious, theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.

The sign that we are not self-conscious is that we cannot remember doing good. That is, of course, because the first condition for committing acts of love is that we forget ourselves in placing the needs of others before our own.

And despite the fact that most people at least occasionally daydream about how modestly they would react if they were heroes in a plane crash or a hostage taking, we still save ourselves through things so small that they are hard to remember.

We are holy, despite small faults, whenever we forget ourselves to take care of others. We do not make note of them and that is when we are at our best.

The sense of how truly these moments are common is caught by poet W.H. Auden in his lines on a related subject:”About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window

or just walking dully along.” The long hours of our unromantic and seemingly unheroic everyday lives remain the portal to the Kingdom of God.

IR END KENNEDY