David Quinn
The selfless life inevitably means self-sacrifice, writes David Quinn
American swimmer, Michael Phelps, has now won an extraordinary 23 gold medals. If he was a country on his own, he would rank something like No.35 on an all-time gold medal table. It makes him one of the greatest Olympians ever.
It goes without saying that quite apart from his natural talent, it is incredible hard work and self-sacrifice that has got him to where he is today. Was it worth it? For him it was. He is now a legend. But his personal life came off the rails for a time and threatened to derail his sporting career as well.
By the time this started to happen, Phelps already had two tremendously successful Olympics behind him, namely Athens in 2004 and Beijing in 2008. In 2009, he was suspended from competitive swimming for three months having been caught apparently smoking cannabis. He started drinking heavily and when he first retired after the 2012 London Olympics, he found nothing else to fill his life with.
A combination of marriage, reconciliation with his estranged father and reigniting his love for swimming put his life back on the rails and we have just seen the result of that in Rio.
Other highly successful swimmers have also seen their lives come off the rails, including Australia’s Ian Thorpe and Grant Hackett. It is the same in many other sports.
Excellence
What must be remembered is that anyone who succeeds at sport has to sacrifice a huge part of their childhood. Everything in their life has to take second place behind the pursuit of sporting excellence. If they don’t succeed in the end, or even if they do, the void left behind by retiring from their chosen sport has to be filled by something, and often it isn’t.
The question is whether all the sacrifices are worth it? It must be remembered that for every sportsperson who succeeds, thousands don’t. If you searched hard enough you would probably find former athletes who would tell you that the sacrifices weren’t worth it. But most would probably say that they were, even if they didn’t reach the top of their field.
For most of those at the Olympics, getting there is enough, and for those who don’t get that far, trying to get there is enough. Becoming the best you can be at something is reward enough on its own and means the sacrifices and hardships involved are worth it.
Do Christians believe the pursuit of moral excellence, as distinct from sporting excellence, is worth the sacrifice? Do they even believe it should involve any hardship or sacrifice?
In the US, something called ‘prosperity theology’ enjoys a certain vogue. The idea behind it is that if you have God in your life, then everything in your life will go right, all things will prosper and you will even prosper materially. If this isn’t a heresy, nothing is.
A while back I came across a Facebook page called ‘Karl Barth for dummies’. Barth was one of the great Protestant theologians of the last century. The people behind this Facebook page had posted a picture of Christians in the lion’s den with the caption, ‘God loves you very much and has a wonderful plan for your life’.
They weren’t mocking Christianity. They were mocking the idea that Christianity should come without a cost, without the cross, without any hardship or suffering. If every Christian believed that believing in God and following him should bring only good things, there would be no Christianity because no Christian would ever have been able to endure any hardship. They would have fallen at the first hurdle.
Imagine if we viewed our marriages in the same way, if we believed a marriage should bring only happiness at all times. This would mean that our marriages would fail as soon as the first major challenge came along.
Nothing could survive this kind of totally unrealistic expectation, and nothing should. If a marriage is worth its salt, it ought to be able to survive challenges. In fact, the challenges show it is worth its salt.
For example, can you really be said to love your spouse if you are not willing to care for them through a long illness, or to help them bounce back from say, a spell of unemployment?
Can we really say we love our children unless we are willing to stand by them when they make terrible decisions that mean their lives have come off the rails, maybe for an indefinite period?
Suffering
Fr Brendan Purcell, a priest of the Dublin archdiocese who is now based in Australia but who used to teach philosophy at UCD, has just published a book with Veritas called, Where is God in Suffering? The most difficult kind of suffering to square with belief in a loving God is physical suffering.
But an awful lot of the suffering that comes our way is either self-inflicted or inflicted by the behaviour of others; a spouse, a child, another family member, a work colleague and so on.
A lot of suffering comes our way precisely because we love those closest to us. You might regret it when you hear about someone whose life has come off the rails, but you don’t suffer because of it. You do suffer when it happens to someone you love because you care about them.
Pope Benedict has correctly pointed out that if you want to rid the world of suffering the first thing to go has to be love, because a huge amount of pain is caused when we see things go wrong in the lives of those we love. It is very hard to get through life without this happening not just once, but probably many times.
None of this applies only to the Christian life, of course. Any moral life means overcoming selfishness and that isn’t easy because the selfless life means, by definition, caring for other people, and that is going to involve pain at some point. It is facing into this pain and going through it that we become better people.
So the question is, do we think it is worth it? Do we think it is worthwhile becoming less selfish and more selfless? It would be a very strange Christian who answered ‘No’ to that question. The selfless life necessarily involves caring for others and that will inevitably mean self-sacrifice. Any other view is completely incompatible with Christianity.