“For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it.” - Matthew 16:25
“Paganism declared that virtue was in a balance; Christianity declared it was in a conflict: the collision of two passions apparently opposite. Of course they were not really inconsistent; but they were such that it was hard to hold simultaneously. Let us follow for a moment the clue of the martyr and the suicide; and take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. “He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,” is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice.
He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying. And it has held up ever since above the European lances the banner of the mystery of chivalry: the Christian courage, which is a disdain of death; not the Chinese courage, which is a disdain of life.” - GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Chapter Six, The Paradoxes of Christianity
To me this has always been the ultimate paradox: losing ones life for the sake of saving it, or even the sake of finding it. The first problem is that many do not know that there is a problem. Or, at least, they are unwilling to admit it. Secondly, insomuch as man is a creature of habit, he will find it difficult to let go of whatever vice he holds or whatever source he seeks comfort in. But that is precisely what our Lord asks of us. He asks us to take His yoke, which He says it light. But it is only as light as the world.
If we are to live as Christ lives, which is exactly what being a Christian means: Christ-like, we have to somehow surrender all of our personal cares, joys, loves, fears, etc. to Him and replace them with the cares and business of the Father. We must forget ourselves and remember everything that is not us. Christ says real life begins exactly where our own lives end.
He wants us to be careless, to a point. And in other ways more careful than we’ve ever been before. We must not, for instance, worry where our next meal will come from. But when the meal comes we must eat it as if it’s our last. In other words we must dine with all the delight of a glutton and yet fast as if hunger doesn’t affect us. You see, we cannot focus on the meal, lest the meal eat us.
This paradoxical claim is simply the starting point of sanity. It is only when a man is lost that he can be found. And it is when he is found that he realizes that he has been sought after. God stands at the door in the wilderness that is our heart, and He knocks. If all we ever do is let the noisy cares of life keep us busy we can never hear the knocking.
This is the point that all the Saints understood and the point that everyone else seems to miss. We are to be still and know, as the Holy Writ says.
The first step towards a mystical union with God is silence. By silence I do not mean the lack of audible sound, but interior silence as well. To reach this point we must let go of the noisy things that fill our minds. We must lose ourselves. A woman in an uproarious soup kitchen feeding the poor is closer to this type of silence than a man on his couch reading the newspaper. The woman in the kitchen is not thinking about herself. She is thinking about others. Both people are focused. The one is focused on the headlines, or the Dow Jones, or a string of robberies. The other is focused on all things, except herself. This is the point where she begins to live.
Christ points us to the birds and the lilies of the field. He shows us how carefree and even reckless nature can be, and the He tells us to be likewise.
This is a very strange idea to modern Americans. We get so caught up with our jobs, our fitness, our families, our schedules, and such that we dare not take the time not to care. This is why the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to little children. They aren’t worried about these things. A child’s father and mother will clothe and feed them. If they are to be at piano practice at 6pm they still do not worry. If they have to go they will be taken there. They can’t tell 6pm from any other hour anyway. They are free. They are willing to be led. They have lost their life because it depends entirely upon someone else.
God asks the same from us. If He is truly Our Father, Abba, then it is foolishness for us not to rely on Him as our children rely on us. Even more so. For we are fickle, and imperfect humans who can and do forget, oversleep, and mess up. Our Father is God, all knowing, all loving, and all powerful. He will never make us late for our proverbial piano lesson. He, like the child, doesn’t care if it’s 6pm or midnight either. Chesterton said that, “we have sinned and grown old, and Our Father is younger than we.”
God and His children are not hampered by these trifles, so we must not be hampered. This is courage. This is freedom. This is being lost in order to be found. What seems to conflict is, in reality, the only resolution.
