Seventh Sunday in Course 2014
Our family has for several years tried each February 2, or thereabouts, to watch the Bill Murray film, “Groundhog Day.” For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, the movie follows Bill Murray as Phil Connors, a weather forecaster for a 2nd rank TV station as he, for the fourth time, covers the Groundhog Day celebration in Punxsutawney, PA. A thoroughgoing, self-centered jerk, Phil finds himself repeating, over and over, the same day of his life, Groundhog Day in Punxsutawney. The flik is a morality tale for our age, a tale of the search for happiness.
As Fr. Robert Spitzer sees it, the pursuit of happiness runs down several roads, but two of them are dead-ends. Pursuing pleasure, Phil Connors’ first attempt, sees good feeling as the highest end of life. Faced with a life without consequences, Phil stuffs his mouth with fattening food, smokes all he wants, drinks more than anyone should, and tries for multiple one-night stands. But pleasure, he learns, is not the same as happiness. It goes stale and dry in the throat faster than week-old tortillas. And for those who pursue good feelings exclusively over a long time, they learn that physical, moral and spiritual illnesses tend to cut short their hedonistic lives.
Many believe that power over others, or being some kind of celebrity with thousands of groupies is the key to happiness. It gives good feelings, they believe, and also leads to an easier access to all kinds of exotic pleasures. But adulation, too, eventually turns sour in the stomach, and fame and power can fall away in an instant. Johnny Carson left the Tonite Show at the top of his game, but a year later, few ever thought of him. Jay Leno will learn the same lesson, as will everyone who yearns for and attains power, wealth and great popularity.
No, neither the pursuit of pleasure nor the desire for power and renown can bring lasting happiness, because, in the end, the appetites fade, power must be relinquished, and the applause is silenced. All these are external enjoyments, so none can endure forever. We can look to Jesus for the answer, as we always do, but first let’s consider Phil Connors.
Phil soon realizes that in the unchanging world of February 2, the only person he could change is himself. He finds himself attracted to a coworker, a lovely producer named Rita, and uses his predicament to find out her background and taste so that he might be attractive to her. It’s all a big, long “setup” that backfires. Phil is looking for pleasure, power, and adulation, not a committed relationship, and he gets a long series of slaps in the face as his much-deserved reward. In despair over his failure, he admits that he doesn’t even like himself, and tries repeatedly to do himself in. But even that wrongheaded move is a failure.
But the desire for true happiness, the knowledge that there is a transcendent good calling us, is impossible to eliminate. Phil starts over. Rita seems happy to him, and so he confides his predicament and enlists her as an ally. Rita’s appeal is more than skin-deep. She is authentically concerned about others. She does more than required in her service-occupation. (Incidentally, we learn that much of her attractiveness comes from twelve years of Catholic schooling.) Phil realizes that the goodness he sees in Rita is something he wants for himself. So he sets his eyes on a new goal–true self-improvement. He uses each February 2 to devour books from the local library. He takes piano lessons from an increasingly bewildered local teacher. He gets involved in the community by noticing problems both big and little, and doing things to help others avoid disaster. He catches a child falling from a tree, replaces a flat tire, saves a man with the Heimlich manoeuver. He even learns there are some evils that he cannot correct, and begins to understand that pursuing pleasure and honor and power are true cul-de-sacs on the journey to joy.
What Phil Connors learns in fiction, each of us must learn in reality. Our Lord Jesus Christ showed us the true way to happiness. St. Paul had it right: the wisdom of the world is folly in the divine vision. There are only two routes to joy, and both of them involve self-control, sacrifice and much suffering, and they run parallel to each other, so that our footsteps must fall on both paths. The first is generous service to others, giving of our time, and ability, and wealth and income to improve their lives, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, housing the homeless, teaching the faith, praying for the living and the dead. We call those the works of mercy, but they are really the works of Christ.
The second route, again laid out over the same territory and with the same destination, is the path of union with God. Recall that in the midst of His life of self-giving, of total generosity, He often spent whole nights in prayer, communing with His Father, with our Father. In order to be like Christ, to truly become the best version of ourselves, we must spend much time in prayer, in reflection over the Scriptures, in spiritual direction and intense study of Catholic doctrine. I can testify that there is joy in all those things, but only if we spend adequate time doing them.
There’s one thing more: running after pleasure, honor and power almost always end in misery for yourself and others. Pursuing the paths of generosity and union with God will never leave a foul taste in one’s mouth. We know that from the lives of Jesus and Mary, and those who followed them.
February, which is a month with many challenges, is also a time when the Church gives us a panoply of saints to learn this lesson from. There is Paul Miki, who with twenty-five companions was crucified in sixteenth-century Japan. Their work there was so valued by their fellow Catholics that when Japan opened up again three hundred years later, the missionaries found little pockets of Catholicism that, without priest or bishop or deacon, had maintained the faith in the face of three centuries of persecution. They really prayed on the cross for their enemies. We also celebrated Josephine Bakhita, a black Muslim slave bought and freed and baptized by Italians, who became a religious sister known for her cheerful and musical service to others. She, too, forgave those who enslaved her. There were Cyril and Methodius, Apostles of the Slavs, venerated by both Eastern and Western Churches, and the Seven Founders of the Servites, who made popular the devotion to the Seven Sorrows of our Blessed Mother. All of them learned the greatest secret of the universe, learned it from Jesus and Mary. Serve others, even those who hate you, in love and seek eternal union with God–that’s the road to happiness now and in eternity.
“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely [especially the yearning for pleasure and honor and power], and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, 2 looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.” (Hebrews 12:1-2) Blessed be His holy name forever.
