One More Day Alive

http://www.azfamily.com/good-morning-arizona/inside/AUTHOR-CHRIS-BENGUHE-83199482.html

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It’s that time of year again to rejoice in the coming of Christ, Who redeemed us from sin and offers eternal love.

It’s also when many “non-practicing” Catholics return to church for their annual visit out of tradition, family duty or habit, even though their hearts aren’t in it and some may be questioning the existence of God altogether.

Let’s all support them because you never know when that thread of faith will pull them up from the abyss of despair and ultimately inspire the rest of the world too.

Case in point: Anne Rice, the best-selling author of “Interview with the Vampire” and the “Vampire Chronicles,” had an amazing awakening after decades mired in despair and a career devoted to writing about the undead and the damned.

She recently shared a few thoughts with me about her rich Catholic upbringing and how suddenly in the summer of her 18th year, she inexplicably lost her faith. There was no major traumatic event; it just happened.

What followed was an extraordinary career writing the fictional accounts of a vampire named Lestat, a desperate soul searching for meaning in an eternity doomed to darkness. Rice married the love of her life, endured the horrible loss of her daughter to leukemia, then the miraculous birth of her son.

Faith rediscovered

But just as nothing made her lose her faith, nothing particular brought it back; the latter just happened — one day in December of 1998, right before Christmas.

“I wanted so desperately to get back to God,” revealed Rice. “I was running around so afraid and in such a state of despair for so long. I wanted to stop running from things and run to God.”

But Rice had struggled for years with “deep sociological questions.”

“How could I believe in God if so many bad things happened in the world?” explained Rice. “I wondered if the Church was right on one issue or another. Then I realized I didn’t need to know all the answers. All I needed to accept was that I loved God and wanted to reconnect with Him through the Church. I could surrender to Him in His infinite mercy. It wasn’t about avoiding questions; it was about love.”

She went to confession that day, and received holy Communion afterward. She remarried her husband in the Church. Soon her random loss and rediscovery of faith started to make some inspiring sense.

“Catholicism wasn’t just a religion for me,” said Rice, “it was a way of life. It influenced everything that I wrote even when I was away from the Church. I thought I was an atheist writing that book [“Interview with a Vampire”] but why did I write about someone who was grieving for loss? Why did I write about someone who was lost and searching? It was me searching for my faith, searching for what I had lost.”

That faith guided her, even when she was “lost,” and eventually led her back to the Church.

“When you grow up Catholic you feel that you have to be connected to the meaning of life,” said Rice.  “When you break away from your faith, you still have that yearning. I never lost my desire to understand what the point of my life was.”

Since then Rice has devoted her life and career to the Lord. In her recently released “Angel Time,” she examines redemption, hope and the merciful, healing love of Christ for a hit man who retains an ounce of faith and is pursued by an angel until he comes to his soul’s senses — an experience Rice identifies with metaphorically.

“Coming back to the Church allowed me to replace a quasi despair about everything with optimism. I am no longer running around every minute afraid. Now I don’t feel like I am running at all. I am calm yet driven. I feel like life is a celebration.”

Hopefully this holiday a few “lost” Catholics can take solace in Rice’s redemption and might even celebrate their own. Merry Christmas!

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The recent tragedy surrounding “self help” author James Arthur Ray’s sweat lodge ceremony in Sedona, Ariz., which killed three people has stunned the spiritual community there and left many across the nation condemning the author for abusing a culturally revered ceremony that he knew little or nothing about not to mention violating city codes which he made no attempt to adhere to.

But what nobody is talking about is the bigger problem, and the bigger issue that Ray represents – a cancerous culture of success that has permeated the American psyche, if not the world’s, and has practically become a religion unto itself. It’s an addiction that Ray and countless others like him have tapped into for profit – one which promises that you can have anything you want, whenever you want and however you want it or as the cover of Ray’s book Harmonic Wealth reads, “The Secret of Attracting the Life You Want.”

Well as a Catholic self-help author, who does not ascribe to this point of view, I think it’s high time that we call this ridiculous charade for what it is – snake oil salesman claiming to sell the elixir of life when what they are really selling is death – usually spiritual but in this case actual.

For God’s sake have we not evolved enough to realize that our happiness cannot wait for the good times to roll around in a world where tragedies and tough times never cease?

The bottom line is that for all of us, there is a reality, and no amount of positive thinking or perception twisting rhetoric is going to make it go away.
We can make that reality meaningful and constructive, not by becoming obsessed with changing it, but by finding a noble purpose in the way we deal with it, that purpose is to love and be loved by others.

What if our problems, our inadequacies, our imperfections and our failures don’t make us less worthy or less important but even more important because they give others the opportunity to reach out and love us – giving their lives even more meaning – and they give us the opportunity to reach out to God?

That means none of us are dysfunctional or any less worthy of life, no matter what we do or don’t do, no matter how many mistakes we make, no matter where we go right, where we go wrong, how much we succeed or fail or how well we fit or do not fit into society.

Or as Author and psychologist Viktor Frankl put it, “We must never forget that we may also find meaning in life when confronted with a hopeless situation, when facing a fate that cannot be changed.” Frankl suffered the atrocities of a concentration camp during World War II where his entire family lost their lives, culminating in his wife’s execution in front of his eyes. After overcoming the compulsion to end his own life, he realized that the pain he was experiencing because of their deaths was proof of his extraordinary ability to love, and he wanted to go and love some more.

I guess sometimes only death reminds us of the value of life, and that every day is one more day alive, a miracle, and an opportunity to experience that miracle in oh so many ways.

Hopefully these three deaths will not be in vain but will remind all of us that’s life’s value lies not in whether the glass is half full or half empty but in the value of the glass itself. That glass of our lives is always valuable.

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Shakira –didn’t you know that you are supposed to be an egomaniac! You are not supposed to be tiptoeing around a university on your downtime expanding your mind by reaching outside of it and learning about others. You are supposed to be a totally self-absorbed, overly opinionated and undereducated narcissist like all the rest of the “stars”!

Oh wait a second – maybe it’s the other way around.

The most exciting thing about all the Shakira hoopla a few weeks back wasn’t the fact that she masqueraded as a boy to attend classes at UCLA last summer, although that seems to be what all the papers were talking about; it was that did so to blend into a classroom where she could learn something about history and about society because, in her own words, “’I needed a break from me. The universe is so broad, I cannot be at the center of it.”

That’s quite the contrast from the typical star mentality – one that really came to disgust me over the course of a decade long career as an entertainment journalist, one perfectly characterized by Ashley Simpson a few years ago when she declared, “I love to sing…I don’t do it for anyone else—I do if for me. I have had to learn that my voice is the most important one.”

Yes, it’s easy enough for most of us to dismiss stars like Ashley as nutty and narcissistic because we are adults and know they are. But what about our kids – they have not yet formed the confidence in their opinions and the knowledge needed to ascertain when an authority figure (yes stars are seen as such) is not only acceptable or not noble or worthy of their respect.

Where do you think Columbine killers Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris got the idea that their pain, their ideas, their anger, etc, were more important than the lives of those that they took? Could it be from the “stars”?

You see fame isn’t what it used to be. Once upon a time it was a byproduct of success owed to some great skill, craft or art; now it’s a goal to be achieved at all costs. Self-promotion has practically become an art form in itself. Actress and dancer Debbie Allen makes that point in the remake of the hit 80s phenom Fame.

I saw that firsthand from another perspective too after I quit my job as an entertainment reporter a decade ago and decided to lay low for awhile accepting a job teaching high school English for a year. I saw a whole lot of great kids who were being brainwashed by the media into thinking that they were at the center of the universe and that was ok.

Flash forward to 2009 and Shakira’s wonderful selfless quote. Now I don’t know how sincere she was when she said it, but it really doesn’t matter because at least she is trying to set a new standard, a new idea of what it means to be a star.

Is Shakira the exception that proves the rule of a self-absorbed media machine or could she be a harbinger of good things to come on the horizon of our fame and fortune front?

I don’t know but at least it is providing us some food for thought.

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Here’s a link to my latest TV appearance!

On Friday, July 24th, CatholicTV’s talk show “This is the Day” featured Reverend George Winchester, SJ, and Chris Benguhe. Fr. Winchester is a priest and a hospital chaplain. Chris Benguhe is a Catholic author and columnist for The Catholic Sun, the diocesan newspaper of the Diocese of Phoenix.

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I mean no harm to Michael Jackson—after all the harm he did to himself he certainly didn’t need my help. But I will do my best to help the millions of people out there who were duped into worshiping him to realize that maybe they would be a lot better off appreciating his talent for what it was – talent – not some sign that he was a savior, a hero, or any kind of role model, and instead focusing their love elsewhere like on their families, their friends and their God.

In my former life, as a tabloid reporter and celebrity editor, I spent way too much time talking about, writing about and worrying about what Jacko did or didn’t do, covering both of his molestation cases not to mention a litany of his other absurd adventures from gratuitous plastic surgery to deviant hobbies like collecting body parts of circus freaks to dangling his child from a hotel balcony.

All of it had one thing in common – it was self-absorbed, self-indulgent, and self-sabotaging behavior that did nothing to capitalize on his fame and fortune to make the world a better place, but in fact had exactly the opposite effect.

This was a man who could have truly made an extraordinary difference in the world, if only he realized that he was not above the rest of us. That he didn’t have the right to be “insane” and to waste his time, money, resources and his life allowing himself to go insane in public.

You see what makes us non famous people so lucky is that we don’t get that same pass. We must be accountable to others, like our bosses, like our friends, like mainstream society. That not only keeps us in line, but it keeps us contributing to society to the best of our ability.

But unfortunately we allow stars to do, say, act or self-destruct in whatever way they want, almost regardless of the cost to society, and why – because they are fun to watch, or because they have some special talent?

Well, whoop-tee-do! The bottom line is that the rest of the world needs us all to tow the line, to do our best to respect humanity- others’ as well as our own. And when we don’t, we are not respecting others, and we are leading others away from their own self-worth, from their own ability to love and respect themselves and down a self-destructive path that makes the world worse not better.

So to any of those supposed cultural and civic leaders out there right now calling Michael a hero (one of these misguided fools even claimed Michael sacrificed his life for us) ask yourself this question – who did Michael save by throwing away his life the way he did – nobody.

His “sacrifice” was nothing more than a self-obsessed series of snafus which didn’t do anyone in his family or the rest of the world any good.

Except for this – maybe every time another crazy star dies before his or her time, it exposes them and their lifestyle for what it really is and makes the rest us thankful that we get to live a more accountable life.

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