BEING SOMEONE TO OTHERS

18th Sunday C Luke 12:13-21 –8/5/07 7AM Connections #1 A In Steven Spielberg’s movie AI, (Artificial Intelligence), David is the prototype of a new line of child robots programmed with the ability to love. Monica and Henry take David into their home. At first Monica is repelled by the spooky human-looking toy. But Henry explains to her that David has an imprinting protocol and if they decided to keep him then all they had to do was activate the code that would hardwire David’s emotional capability. This they did and David loved them with all the power of his mechanized ability. But the parents found it almost impossible to return his love. All throughout the movie, the robot boy, David, exists in the lonely blurred background of interpersonal relationships. His loneliness plunges him, like an Olympic diver, into his search for having his love returned. His search for being loved. In his novel, The Court, William Coughlin has one of his characters say: Love is not romance. It’s hard to describe. Maybe the best description is that love is the opposite of loneliness. In other words, it seems to me, that love is the need to be loved. However it is as important as remembering your zip code to keep in mind that if being loved is you goal, the only way to be loved is to be a person worthy of love. So what flashes on the screen of life is this question: How can you make yourself worthy of love? The gospel parable offers the answer. You can make yourself lovable by sharing what you have and who you are. For instance, you make yourself worthy of being loved by developing your abilities and sharing them with others. For example, sharing your ability to be present to others. How present are you, for example, to a woman who has had an abortion and is locked in the prison of guilt? Are you present to that woman with empathy, understanding, support? How present are you to someone who is divorced and struggling with the lonely task of being a loving single parent? A parent who may not be experiencing love from children who resent the divorce? A parent who sleeps alone at night with only an extra pillow for company? How present are you to a lonely shut in with a disease that causes her to be as immobilized as a broken down truck on the side of a desolate road? How present are you to a classmate who is constantly being shoved to the outer limits of school activities and extracurricular friendships? One of the main obstacles that blocks your being present to others is your self-absorption. By that I mean that you are so preoccupied with yourself that you pay little or no attention to another person. In the movie, "As Good As It Gets," the waitress, Helen Hunt, begins to tell her customer, Jack Nicholson, about her sick son. She barely gets started when Nicholson interrupts with something about himself. Helen Hunt shrugs her shoulders and walks away. And Nicholson is so self-absorbed that he doesn’t even realize what he did. Our gospel parable warns you against not sharing your possessions with others. But to share what you have with others, you must first be present to them. HUMOR There’s a humorous story about presence. A little boy flung open the front door. "Boy, Grandma, am I ever glad you came to visit us." "Why is that?" the grandmother asked sweetly. "Because now daddy will do his trick." "And what trick is that?" Grandma asked sweetly. "Daddy said if you came to visit us, he’d climb the walls." THOUGHT Always be someone to others.