Choosing the good life

I have a son who sports a scar on his forehead, an unwanted gift from a senseless attack on the streets of Launceston some few years ago. His assailant was drunk. Both he and the scar have healed, but it will remain a very physical reminder of that night, that incident, that moment.

Thank goodness no one can ‘read’ our lives when we meet them face to face. Knowing each other’s darker sides, or less flattering parts of our lives is something that will only occur with familiarity, friendship, quality time – unless it is splattered across the pages of your daily read. I truly admire those whose adolescent and young adult lives were blameless and pure. That wasn’t quite me and despite a desire to rewrite my early years, I had a good time. We were all young once. I’ll leave it at that.

It’s not a betrayal of family secrets, but alcoholism has touched my wider family with devastating effect – ruptured families, brain damage, death. It’s one of my greatest fears. We all know someone affected by alcoholism. Our young people’s obsession with binge drinking is a cultural aberration I link to the 6 o’clock swill mentality. They appear to have no fear of the consequences, of whose lives they will impact, of what damage they might cause. It is easy to close our collective eyes, because it is our common drug.

St Paul is utterly inelegant in his criticism (Ephesians 5:18): Don’t drug yourselves with wine, this is simply dissipation. Instead, he exhorts: be filled with the Spirit. Paul cautions that we should be careful about the lives we lead – ‘like intelligent and not senseless people’. And to be intelligent means being able to make good choices, to be able to think through and be responsible for the actions we take. When we do this and discern God’s will, then despite the wickedness that permeates our world (there are names we can give to these sins), our lives are empowered with the capacity to redeem the world in which we live.

In a week in which we have celebrated Blessed Mary MacKillop, we also remember St Maximilian Kolbe, a convert from Judaism and a Conventual Franciscan friar who died a martyr’s death at the hands of the Nazis in Auschwitz. How apt, then, it is that Pope John Paul II appointed him as a patron against drug addiction, and patron of drug addicts (because he was killed with a lethal injection). Here are but two lives which have contributed to the redemption of our world, wrought for us by Christ himself.

We each have such a role; we each have our contribution to make to build up the whole. It begins with you and me, with the choices I make.