DARE TO BE ONE IN A THOUSAND

DARE TO BE ONE IN A THOUSAND

Recently, I was giving a talk to a group of young adults preparing for marriage and was trying to challenge them with the Christian teaching on love and sexuality. They were objecting constantly. When I'd finished speaking, a young man stood up and said: “Father, I agree with your principles, in the ideal. But you are totally unrealistic. Do you know what is going on out here? Nobody is living that stuff anymore. You'd have to be one person in a thousand to live what you're suggesting. Everyone is living differently now.” I looked at him, sitting beside a young woman whom he obviously loved deeply and hoped to marry, and decided to appeal to his idealism. I asked him: “When you marry that lady beside you, what kind of marriage do you want, one like everyone else's, or one in a thousand?” “One in a thousand,” he answered without hesitation. “Then,” I suggested, “you'd best do what only one in a thousand does. If you do what everyone else does, you will have a marriage like everyone else. If you do what only one in a thousand does, you can have a one-in-a-thousand marriage.”

Our culture's demand that everyone be like everyone else is not so much malicious as it is despairing. The death of idealism is a child of despair, always. People are content to settle for an attainable second best only when, for whatever reasons (hurt, bad self-image, lack of hope) they have given up on ever attaining what is ultimately best. Today we need prophets. We need people who, when speaking of love, economics, values, sexuality and aesthetics, are compassionate enough to be empathetic to our real struggles. (Fr. Ron Rolheiser, OMI)