The Challenge Of The Napoleon Complex
Sermon
The Challenge of Starting All Over Again
A Sermon Series
Object:
And Jesus said to him, "Today salvation has come to this house, since he also is a son of Abraham. For the Son of man came to seek and to save the lost."
-- Luke 19:9-10
It was a welcome change from the rather damp and chilly ancient seashore capital of Caesarea. And it was a pleasant contrast to the moderate, but cool, Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee. I speak of Jericho -- Jericho of our text; Jericho, the residence of Zacchaeus; Jericho, perhaps the oldest city of history; Jericho, the City of Palms at the south end of the Jordan River; Jericho, 1300 feet below sea level at the northern edge of the Dead Sea; Jericho, a city once prominent in ancient history, and now again in the news as a center for the newly evolving Palestinian State.
When we descended the Jordan River Valley, we were struck by a scene that pleased the weary travelers of the centuries -- an oasis of palm trees in the desert, given life by an ancient spring still flowing for the abundance of crops in the region. "Here, taste the uniqueness of these Jericho oranges," said our guide. They were indeed delicious.
Still a major crossroads, Jericho was in Jesus' time the entry port into Judea from a major trading route to the East. Jericho was known for its figs and its forest of balsam trees, whose fragrance filled the air for miles around and from which the healing "balm of Gilead" was derived.
Jericho's balmy climate made it a favorite resort of the rich and powerful. King Herod had a beautiful palace there where he spent his winters. He died there and his son later rebuilt the palace to its luxurious splendor. It was also the home of many of the priests who took their turn serving at the Temple in Jerusalem. In fact, legend has it that on a calm morning the music from the Temple worship, 3800 feet above them in Jerusalem, several miles to the west, could be heard as the voice of distant waters. In short, Jericho was a beautiful, fragrant, balmy paradise.
And yet, there was anxiety in paradise, the anxiety of nothingness, of which nineteenth century philosopher-theologian Soren Kierkegaard spoke. The anxiety of nothingness is the dread realization of one's deep inward emptiness and powerlessness. It is the late-night awakening to fear and terror, the agonizing realization of one's transitoriness and relative insignificance. It is the terrifying awareness of one's smallness and brevity. It is the overwhelming consciousness of one's approaching death and our fear of total annihilation and forgottenness. It is the anxiety of nothingness.
Edward Albee spoke of it in one of his provocative plays. The upper middle-class couple, empty nesters and getting on in years, find their home to be strangely barren, and realize all the artifacts and mementos collected over the years to be hollow and stale. They cluster with their friends engulfed in a similar emotion -- the emotion of experiencing the dread, the overwhelming sense of emptiness and barrenness and insignificance.
Strange to say, the anxiety of nothingness was present in paradisiacal Jericho and, strange to say, it is present in most paradises of today. And perhaps stranger to say, it is out of the anxiety of nothingness we develop the Napoleon complex, a complex which assures us of somethingness, even, and yes, especially of great somethingness. It is the tremendous and often destructive overcompensation of the "Caesar or nothing" attitude.
Just how do we overcome the Napoleon complex, the anxiety of smallness or nothingness?
I.
The first step is to admit the anxiety of nothingness.
One of the amazing phenomena of our time is our almost total fascination with celebrities. We read about them with awe, fawn over them in public, pay them obscene amounts of money to look pretty, or to act, or to throw footballs, or to sing and dance, or even to read the news from a teleprompter.
For example, Paul McCartney of Beatles fame is worth $747 million, while his sovereign Queen Elizabeth is worth only a paltry $245 million. The men's basketball coach of the University of Connecticut makes $336,000 a year in salary, plus endorsements and benefits. The president of that same university makes only $136,000, while the average professor makes $74,000. So the basketball coach makes five times as much as the average professor in an institution dedicated to higher learning. It pays to be an athletic hero or celebrity or coach.
Just what is the origin of our fascination with celebrities and with the rich and famous? Why is it that people will purportedly line up by the thousands to pay that questionable
celebrity, O.J. Simpson, $135 for an autograph? Why is it we crave to be near a famous person, or even, as Tom Wolfe used to remark, to crave to be known by the maitre d' of the new "in" restaurant?
Underlying it all is the anxiety of nothingness, the anxiety of smallness, the anxiety of being only a four-foot nine-inch Napoleon, rather than a giant of a person, head and shoulders over everyone else. The Napoleon complex is the overcompensation not so much of those small in physical stature. It is the desperate overcompensation of those of us small in spiritual stature, small in self-esteem, small in our sense of soul, and in our small feeling of worth and importance.
Perhaps one of the more profound contemporary authors I have read in recent years is Ernest Becker. He won a Pulitzer Prize with his penetrating book The Denial of Death -- a book which he wrote while he was dying of cancer. Another of his books, Escape From Evil, is in many ways equally profound.
In his The Denial of Death, he speaks of our culture's avoidance of the reality of mortality. In his Escape From Evil he speaks of money as the new universal immortality ideology. All humans have an urge for immortality, says Becker, quoting Norman Brown and Otto Rank, two eminent authors in the realm of psychology. And the fear of mortality, the realization of our own death and the dreadful awareness of our finiteness and transitoriness, the anxiety of our nothingness, give rise to a Napoleon complex often expressed in money.
Becker traces the origins of money and notes its associations with sacred power. Round gold coins represented the life-giving power of the sun. Eventually, says Becker, the sense of power, the sense of immortality, come to reside in the money itself. "Immortality comes to reside no longer in the invisible world of power, but in the very visible one" -- in the accumulation of gold and stones, buildings and lands (p. 74).
Becker reminds us that the first banks were temples and the first bankers, priests. The coins often had on them the image of the gods. In fact, the word "money" comes from the Temple of Juno Moneta. Forgery was a sacrilege because the coins embodied the powers of the gods and only the priests were able to handle sacred things.
Thus, money became an invisible power. It gives power over other people, it frees us from dependence on family and social obligations, from bosses and friends. It creates distance and gives us the sense of immortality as we buy any experience we wish, and even buy people, most of whom have their price.
"All power is essentially sacred power," says Norman Brown in his book Life Against Death. And, Becker adds, "All power is in essence power to deny mortality... Power means power to increase oneself, to change one's natural situation from one of smallness, helplessness, finitude, to one of highness, control, durability, importance!" (p. 81). Becker goes on to say that, "In short, money is the human mode par excellence of coolly denying animal boundness, the determinism of nature" (p. 82).
So it was in balmy, beautiful, prosperous Jericho twenty centuries ago that Zacchaeus, whose name means "pure" or "righteous," accumulated a vast fortune by extorting taxes and customs for the Romans from his fellow citizens. He was hated for it, despised, rejected, a social outcast. So be it, he said to himself over and over again. I'll laugh all the way to the bank. Like most of us, he believed money would calm the dread and quiet the anxiety of nothingness. He thought the largeness of money and its sacred power would cure his sense of smallness, his feeling of insignificance, his low self-esteem, his fear of death and annihilation.
But he was wrong. The Napoleon complex is powerless in the face of so great a challenge. Thomas Hardy was right when he said, "If a way to the better there be, it lies in taking a full look at the worst." Yes, and confessing it -- confessing our finitude, our anxiety of nothingness.
II.
How are we to overcome our Napoleon complex? We need to come to terms with God.
Many people will recall this haunting poem of Edwin Arlington Robinson:
Whenever Richard Cory went downtown,
We people on the pavement looked at him;
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good morning," and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich -- yes, richer than a king --
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
If Richard Cory is the slim, imperial, archetypal Anglo-Saxon Protestant, well connected with wealth and pedigree, the idol to which the huddled masses yearning to breathe free aspired, Zacchaeus would have been more at home with the immigrants turned Mafia to achieve their goals.
One can imagine that Zacchaeus may have been an outsider from the start. His probably was not a respected family. His smallness of physical stature may always have made him the last to be chosen for athletic teams. Scorned, ignored and rejected, his psychological and sociological rebuff only accentuated the smallness he felt -- a smallness of insignificance, the smallness of the anxiety of nothingness.
Mafia types often become what they are because they have been rebuffed or ignored or rejected in the acceptable social and financial worlds of the well-established, well-esteemed Richard Corys. If they can't succeed through legitimate channels, they'll succeed through illegitimate. If they cannot win success with the
insiders, they'll take it with the outsiders, even the oppressors, like the Romans. So it was with Zacchaeus and his Napoleon complex. He would become significant at any cost.
And yet, Zacchaeus knew something was missing. He was tantalized by this Jesus who was constantly in the news. What did Jesus have that he didn't have? Why was he so popular? And was it true he associated with sinners and outcasts? Why would a man reputed to be a prophet, and therefore holy -- why would such a man associate with people like himself?
Sunday School children love Zacchaeus and sing about him as the wee little man who climbed the sycamore tree to get a good look at Jesus. And I love him too, because here is a man willing to come to terms with himself and with God, willing to admit his emptiness and his deep need of being reconnected with God.
As theologian Paul Tillich says, "We know we are estranged from something to which we really belong, and with which we should be united" (The Shaking of the Foundations, p. 155). Not only that, says Tillich, "we are separated from each other and from ourselves. We are a mixture of selfishness and self-hate. We are crippled by self-contempt and we sometimes strike out in acts of destructiveness like a Zacchaeus extorting taxes at the expense of his fellows. We tend to abuse others and even to destroy ourselves because we are estranged from the truth about ourselves and separated from God who is the ground of our being," says Tillich (p. 158-159). "We are separated from the mystery, the depth, and the greatness of our existence" (p. 159).
The way out of this separation, this despair, this dread, this sickness unto death is not by way of the Napoleon complex, not by way of making ourselves gods by association with celebrities or by making ourselves immortal by the accumulation of money.
Oh no, none of these. Instead, it is in responding to Jesus' inviting himself into our houses, into our lives, into our sense of selfhood. It means coming down out of the snooty, but despairing, self-righteousness of a Richard Cory, to accept the graciousness of the Son of God who dines with all kinds of sinners. And that is difficult, because many Richard Corys believe themselves to be good, to be righteous, to be pedigreed and "in" and secure, and in no need of salvation until on a calm summer night they put a bullet through their head, once they've seen through the Napoleon complex.
But the ostracized, despised, scorned outsider Zacchaeus got it right. Like many scoundrels he was at least conscious of his unrighteousness, his sinfulness, and all the contempt he had for the respectable, but hypocritical, insiders like the Richard Corys. And perhaps because of that, he was able to come to terms with himself.
And why? Because for the first time in his life he was really accepted, included, honored, and yes, forgiven. For the first time in his life, while dining with Jesus in his own house, he felt overwhelmed by grace -- a grace which said you are accepted -- accepted not because of your money but in spite of it; accepted not because of your pedigree or college degrees or social connections, but accepted in spite of your possession of them or lack of them.
You are accepted not because of a more-than-adequate background, but because of your realization that in the presence of God your background counts for nothing. It is your faith that counts, your openness, your willingness to repent, your readiness to relax, to place all nothingness and somethingness into the overwhelming grace of God.
And it is in that moment, says biblical scholar C.H. Dodd, in that moment when we are passive and God is active, in that moment wherein the Napoleon complex is completely overcome, and in that moment when the immense energy of the genuinely religious life is activated. And that's why Zacchaeus gave half his wealth to the poor, and made fourfold restitution to those he had defrauded.
And Jesus said, "Today salvation has come to this house," because Zacchaeus is no longer a son of Napoleon, but a true son of Abraham.
Prayer
Loving Father, Creator of the World, whose justice sits in judgment upon the evil of the world, but whose mercy withholds destruction until many can respond to your grace, we appear before you to acknowledge you as Lord and to submit our lives to you.
Daily the pressures of life bear down upon us. Week by week we are caught in activities which leave us little time for reflection and direction-finding. Many of us limp from one crisis to another hoping for the better day, longing for a time when we breathe free and come to our true and best selves.
So we come to you, Source of our life and Wisdom of the ages, seeking the life and insight you promise to those who call upon your name. Be pleased to refresh us in the pilgrimage of life. Endow us with that liberating self-knowledge which breaks the shackles of defensive conceit and fearful self-justification. Save us from succumbing to other people's false estimates of our potential. Deliver us from our tendency to slouch into the easy chair of fate or from our readiness to run with the herd because it is fashionable for the moment. When our integrity is challenged or our faith is insulted or temptation is strong, grant us the moral backbone to stand up for you and your Cause. Save us from spiritual timidity and moral compromise.
Loving Father, whose will it is not to judge and condemn the world but to judge and save the world, so judge us today, that we might with courage and honesty acknowledge our offenses toward you and one another. Believing that you wish to open us up to heal rather than to destroy, do the surgery on our souls that will remove the tumor of evil and restore us to wholeness. Cleanse us of all unrighteousness, and bring us again to the true joy of relationships which are honest and satisfying. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
-- Luke 19:9-10
It was a welcome change from the rather damp and chilly ancient seashore capital of Caesarea. And it was a pleasant contrast to the moderate, but cool, Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee. I speak of Jericho -- Jericho of our text; Jericho, the residence of Zacchaeus; Jericho, perhaps the oldest city of history; Jericho, the City of Palms at the south end of the Jordan River; Jericho, 1300 feet below sea level at the northern edge of the Dead Sea; Jericho, a city once prominent in ancient history, and now again in the news as a center for the newly evolving Palestinian State.
When we descended the Jordan River Valley, we were struck by a scene that pleased the weary travelers of the centuries -- an oasis of palm trees in the desert, given life by an ancient spring still flowing for the abundance of crops in the region. "Here, taste the uniqueness of these Jericho oranges," said our guide. They were indeed delicious.
Still a major crossroads, Jericho was in Jesus' time the entry port into Judea from a major trading route to the East. Jericho was known for its figs and its forest of balsam trees, whose fragrance filled the air for miles around and from which the healing "balm of Gilead" was derived.
Jericho's balmy climate made it a favorite resort of the rich and powerful. King Herod had a beautiful palace there where he spent his winters. He died there and his son later rebuilt the palace to its luxurious splendor. It was also the home of many of the priests who took their turn serving at the Temple in Jerusalem. In fact, legend has it that on a calm morning the music from the Temple worship, 3800 feet above them in Jerusalem, several miles to the west, could be heard as the voice of distant waters. In short, Jericho was a beautiful, fragrant, balmy paradise.
And yet, there was anxiety in paradise, the anxiety of nothingness, of which nineteenth century philosopher-theologian Soren Kierkegaard spoke. The anxiety of nothingness is the dread realization of one's deep inward emptiness and powerlessness. It is the late-night awakening to fear and terror, the agonizing realization of one's transitoriness and relative insignificance. It is the terrifying awareness of one's smallness and brevity. It is the overwhelming consciousness of one's approaching death and our fear of total annihilation and forgottenness. It is the anxiety of nothingness.
Edward Albee spoke of it in one of his provocative plays. The upper middle-class couple, empty nesters and getting on in years, find their home to be strangely barren, and realize all the artifacts and mementos collected over the years to be hollow and stale. They cluster with their friends engulfed in a similar emotion -- the emotion of experiencing the dread, the overwhelming sense of emptiness and barrenness and insignificance.
Strange to say, the anxiety of nothingness was present in paradisiacal Jericho and, strange to say, it is present in most paradises of today. And perhaps stranger to say, it is out of the anxiety of nothingness we develop the Napoleon complex, a complex which assures us of somethingness, even, and yes, especially of great somethingness. It is the tremendous and often destructive overcompensation of the "Caesar or nothing" attitude.
Just how do we overcome the Napoleon complex, the anxiety of smallness or nothingness?
I.
The first step is to admit the anxiety of nothingness.
One of the amazing phenomena of our time is our almost total fascination with celebrities. We read about them with awe, fawn over them in public, pay them obscene amounts of money to look pretty, or to act, or to throw footballs, or to sing and dance, or even to read the news from a teleprompter.
For example, Paul McCartney of Beatles fame is worth $747 million, while his sovereign Queen Elizabeth is worth only a paltry $245 million. The men's basketball coach of the University of Connecticut makes $336,000 a year in salary, plus endorsements and benefits. The president of that same university makes only $136,000, while the average professor makes $74,000. So the basketball coach makes five times as much as the average professor in an institution dedicated to higher learning. It pays to be an athletic hero or celebrity or coach.
Just what is the origin of our fascination with celebrities and with the rich and famous? Why is it that people will purportedly line up by the thousands to pay that questionable
celebrity, O.J. Simpson, $135 for an autograph? Why is it we crave to be near a famous person, or even, as Tom Wolfe used to remark, to crave to be known by the maitre d' of the new "in" restaurant?
Underlying it all is the anxiety of nothingness, the anxiety of smallness, the anxiety of being only a four-foot nine-inch Napoleon, rather than a giant of a person, head and shoulders over everyone else. The Napoleon complex is the overcompensation not so much of those small in physical stature. It is the desperate overcompensation of those of us small in spiritual stature, small in self-esteem, small in our sense of soul, and in our small feeling of worth and importance.
Perhaps one of the more profound contemporary authors I have read in recent years is Ernest Becker. He won a Pulitzer Prize with his penetrating book The Denial of Death -- a book which he wrote while he was dying of cancer. Another of his books, Escape From Evil, is in many ways equally profound.
In his The Denial of Death, he speaks of our culture's avoidance of the reality of mortality. In his Escape From Evil he speaks of money as the new universal immortality ideology. All humans have an urge for immortality, says Becker, quoting Norman Brown and Otto Rank, two eminent authors in the realm of psychology. And the fear of mortality, the realization of our own death and the dreadful awareness of our finiteness and transitoriness, the anxiety of our nothingness, give rise to a Napoleon complex often expressed in money.
Becker traces the origins of money and notes its associations with sacred power. Round gold coins represented the life-giving power of the sun. Eventually, says Becker, the sense of power, the sense of immortality, come to reside in the money itself. "Immortality comes to reside no longer in the invisible world of power, but in the very visible one" -- in the accumulation of gold and stones, buildings and lands (p. 74).
Becker reminds us that the first banks were temples and the first bankers, priests. The coins often had on them the image of the gods. In fact, the word "money" comes from the Temple of Juno Moneta. Forgery was a sacrilege because the coins embodied the powers of the gods and only the priests were able to handle sacred things.
Thus, money became an invisible power. It gives power over other people, it frees us from dependence on family and social obligations, from bosses and friends. It creates distance and gives us the sense of immortality as we buy any experience we wish, and even buy people, most of whom have their price.
"All power is essentially sacred power," says Norman Brown in his book Life Against Death. And, Becker adds, "All power is in essence power to deny mortality... Power means power to increase oneself, to change one's natural situation from one of smallness, helplessness, finitude, to one of highness, control, durability, importance!" (p. 81). Becker goes on to say that, "In short, money is the human mode par excellence of coolly denying animal boundness, the determinism of nature" (p. 82).
So it was in balmy, beautiful, prosperous Jericho twenty centuries ago that Zacchaeus, whose name means "pure" or "righteous," accumulated a vast fortune by extorting taxes and customs for the Romans from his fellow citizens. He was hated for it, despised, rejected, a social outcast. So be it, he said to himself over and over again. I'll laugh all the way to the bank. Like most of us, he believed money would calm the dread and quiet the anxiety of nothingness. He thought the largeness of money and its sacred power would cure his sense of smallness, his feeling of insignificance, his low self-esteem, his fear of death and annihilation.
But he was wrong. The Napoleon complex is powerless in the face of so great a challenge. Thomas Hardy was right when he said, "If a way to the better there be, it lies in taking a full look at the worst." Yes, and confessing it -- confessing our finitude, our anxiety of nothingness.
II.
How are we to overcome our Napoleon complex? We need to come to terms with God.
Many people will recall this haunting poem of Edwin Arlington Robinson:
Whenever Richard Cory went downtown,
We people on the pavement looked at him;
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good morning," and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich -- yes, richer than a king --
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
If Richard Cory is the slim, imperial, archetypal Anglo-Saxon Protestant, well connected with wealth and pedigree, the idol to which the huddled masses yearning to breathe free aspired, Zacchaeus would have been more at home with the immigrants turned Mafia to achieve their goals.
One can imagine that Zacchaeus may have been an outsider from the start. His probably was not a respected family. His smallness of physical stature may always have made him the last to be chosen for athletic teams. Scorned, ignored and rejected, his psychological and sociological rebuff only accentuated the smallness he felt -- a smallness of insignificance, the smallness of the anxiety of nothingness.
Mafia types often become what they are because they have been rebuffed or ignored or rejected in the acceptable social and financial worlds of the well-established, well-esteemed Richard Corys. If they can't succeed through legitimate channels, they'll succeed through illegitimate. If they cannot win success with the
insiders, they'll take it with the outsiders, even the oppressors, like the Romans. So it was with Zacchaeus and his Napoleon complex. He would become significant at any cost.
And yet, Zacchaeus knew something was missing. He was tantalized by this Jesus who was constantly in the news. What did Jesus have that he didn't have? Why was he so popular? And was it true he associated with sinners and outcasts? Why would a man reputed to be a prophet, and therefore holy -- why would such a man associate with people like himself?
Sunday School children love Zacchaeus and sing about him as the wee little man who climbed the sycamore tree to get a good look at Jesus. And I love him too, because here is a man willing to come to terms with himself and with God, willing to admit his emptiness and his deep need of being reconnected with God.
As theologian Paul Tillich says, "We know we are estranged from something to which we really belong, and with which we should be united" (The Shaking of the Foundations, p. 155). Not only that, says Tillich, "we are separated from each other and from ourselves. We are a mixture of selfishness and self-hate. We are crippled by self-contempt and we sometimes strike out in acts of destructiveness like a Zacchaeus extorting taxes at the expense of his fellows. We tend to abuse others and even to destroy ourselves because we are estranged from the truth about ourselves and separated from God who is the ground of our being," says Tillich (p. 158-159). "We are separated from the mystery, the depth, and the greatness of our existence" (p. 159).
The way out of this separation, this despair, this dread, this sickness unto death is not by way of the Napoleon complex, not by way of making ourselves gods by association with celebrities or by making ourselves immortal by the accumulation of money.
Oh no, none of these. Instead, it is in responding to Jesus' inviting himself into our houses, into our lives, into our sense of selfhood. It means coming down out of the snooty, but despairing, self-righteousness of a Richard Cory, to accept the graciousness of the Son of God who dines with all kinds of sinners. And that is difficult, because many Richard Corys believe themselves to be good, to be righteous, to be pedigreed and "in" and secure, and in no need of salvation until on a calm summer night they put a bullet through their head, once they've seen through the Napoleon complex.
But the ostracized, despised, scorned outsider Zacchaeus got it right. Like many scoundrels he was at least conscious of his unrighteousness, his sinfulness, and all the contempt he had for the respectable, but hypocritical, insiders like the Richard Corys. And perhaps because of that, he was able to come to terms with himself.
And why? Because for the first time in his life he was really accepted, included, honored, and yes, forgiven. For the first time in his life, while dining with Jesus in his own house, he felt overwhelmed by grace -- a grace which said you are accepted -- accepted not because of your money but in spite of it; accepted not because of your pedigree or college degrees or social connections, but accepted in spite of your possession of them or lack of them.
You are accepted not because of a more-than-adequate background, but because of your realization that in the presence of God your background counts for nothing. It is your faith that counts, your openness, your willingness to repent, your readiness to relax, to place all nothingness and somethingness into the overwhelming grace of God.
And it is in that moment, says biblical scholar C.H. Dodd, in that moment when we are passive and God is active, in that moment wherein the Napoleon complex is completely overcome, and in that moment when the immense energy of the genuinely religious life is activated. And that's why Zacchaeus gave half his wealth to the poor, and made fourfold restitution to those he had defrauded.
And Jesus said, "Today salvation has come to this house," because Zacchaeus is no longer a son of Napoleon, but a true son of Abraham.
Prayer
Loving Father, Creator of the World, whose justice sits in judgment upon the evil of the world, but whose mercy withholds destruction until many can respond to your grace, we appear before you to acknowledge you as Lord and to submit our lives to you.
Daily the pressures of life bear down upon us. Week by week we are caught in activities which leave us little time for reflection and direction-finding. Many of us limp from one crisis to another hoping for the better day, longing for a time when we breathe free and come to our true and best selves.
So we come to you, Source of our life and Wisdom of the ages, seeking the life and insight you promise to those who call upon your name. Be pleased to refresh us in the pilgrimage of life. Endow us with that liberating self-knowledge which breaks the shackles of defensive conceit and fearful self-justification. Save us from succumbing to other people's false estimates of our potential. Deliver us from our tendency to slouch into the easy chair of fate or from our readiness to run with the herd because it is fashionable for the moment. When our integrity is challenged or our faith is insulted or temptation is strong, grant us the moral backbone to stand up for you and your Cause. Save us from spiritual timidity and moral compromise.
Loving Father, whose will it is not to judge and condemn the world but to judge and save the world, so judge us today, that we might with courage and honesty acknowledge our offenses toward you and one another. Believing that you wish to open us up to heal rather than to destroy, do the surgery on our souls that will remove the tumor of evil and restore us to wholeness. Cleanse us of all unrighteousness, and bring us again to the true joy of relationships which are honest and satisfying. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
