Fr Robert Spitzer 2005

Father Robert Spitzer, the 25th president of Gonzaga University, talks about finding meaning and purpose in life. He discusses the dangers of living for a comparative identity, where we constantly compare ourselves to others and seek status and power. He suggests that the way out of this self-created hell is to focus on a contributive identity, where we strive to make a positive difference to others and the world. He recommends making a list of ways to make a positive impact and living with that intention. For the ushers, please come backstage in preparation for mass. The best way to get here is through the south hallway. Father Robert Spitzer, the 25th president of Gonzaga University of Spokane, Washington, has been compared at various times to a whirlwind and to a speeding locomotive. He is a native of Honolulu who left a career in accounting 25 years ago to become a priest and has been serving the Lord at light speed ever since. Certainly a member of academia, he balances those responsibilities with ventures into the business world. He taught philosophy at Georgetown University and at Seattle University. Among his many degrees are one in philosophy from St. Louis University and a Ph.D. from Catholic University in Washington, D.C. He wrote the landmark book, Business Ethics. He gave a course based on this book to 50 different high-level organizations and put over 40,000 managers of various companies in the U.S. and Europe through the program. Many of his myriad students refer to themselves as Spitzerites. His fellow Jesuits jokingly call him Spitzer Enterprises for his ability to put new programs in motion and for his seemingly endless number of presentations such as one today. Fr. Spitzer averages 110 major business and public presentations a year. Gentlemen, please welcome Fr. Robert Spitzer. It is a huge honor to be with all of you here this afternoon. I'm so awed by the turnout here and especially by the organizers of the conference. I just think I'm going to do whatever I can to get all of this going on the West Coast as soon as possible, but you want to give all of yourselves a big round of applause. I sort of shouted myself hoarse at a Gonzaga tournament game the other day, so bear with me, but we did win, so it was worth it. But what I wanted to talk about was a little bit of a recap of what we have heard. All of our speakers have talked about meaning and purpose in life in some way or another, and I'm going to address that point a little bit today. They've also talked about ways of sort of, if I can use the colloquial, getting ourselves out of our own self-created hells. And they've all talked about spiritual life or how to develop a spiritual life in some ways, and I thought, well, maybe I'll just take these three points and try to synthesize them in a kind of Spitzerian bloviation, and here goes. With respect to purpose in life or meaning in life, fundamentally I talk about four levels of happiness, but the one point in this that's very important is this. We can either live for a comparative identity or a contributive identity. And if we're living for the one, we're not living for the other and vice versa, and the idea here is that the comparative identity is the easiest one to live for. It's the default drive. It's embedded in our culture, and unfortunately when we turn comparisons into an end in themselves and live for the comparative identity alone, it does really become a self-created hell. Here's just a thought for a second. You all want to be competitive. Of course you do. I want my students to be competitive. You all want to be high achievers. Of course you do. I want my students to be high achievers. You all want to be in some sense to at least have enough status to be able to open doors so that people will listen to you and you might have some good effect in the world. But the key thing with the comparative identity, whether it manifests itself as control or power, whether it manifests itself as status or popularity or admiration or respect, whether it manifests itself as winning versus losing, whether it manifests itself even in achievement, the one thing about the comparative identity that Jesus Christ warned us about again and again, pride coming before the fall, is that if we live for the comparative identity as an end in itself, it will start to begin to become what I'm going to call the comparative identity as comparison game. What we begin to do, if all that matters is status, if that's what really makes my life worth living, if that's what really makes me enter into human relationships, if that's what gives me a sense of energy and goals, if the only thing that matters is a comparative identity, I start saying who's achieving more and who's achieving less and who's got more popularity and who's got less popularity, who's more admired and who's less admired. And by the way, who's winning and who's losing, hopefully Gonzaga, and by the way, who's got more control and who's got less control and who's got more power and who's got less power and who's got... do you notice the neurotic tone in my voice increasing in intensity with each passing moment? The point I'm trying to get to is, if we make that comparative identity or status or popularity or winning or control, if we make that an end in itself, I assure you of this much, at the end of the day, that intensity about asking that because it's the only thing that matters in life, it's the only thing that'll make me happy, starts to produce a whole set of emotions. And those emotions are as follows. Jealousy. I just can't stand anybody who even has the possibility of doing as well as I do. And by the way, I hate you for it. And then all of a sudden, you begin to notice inferiority and then superiority. Oh yes, some days I have winning days and I feel oh so good about myself. And that winning suddenly turns into contempt. And that contempt, of course, you know how that goes. I just don't know. I'm doing so many more things than poor Joe over there. I just don't know how Joe can possibly live with himself, not having done as many things or accomplished as much or had nearly as much status as me. Poor Joe. Now Joe, being a very self-respecting person, catches the contemptuous look in my eye after a fourth of a second and is poised for flight. He, of course, is going to, he doesn't want to be around me. He's got enough problems as it is. He doesn't need me to make his day worse. And so, of course, the contemptuous find themselves lonely and the lonely contemptuous find themselves resentful. They resent people not coming up to them and obsequiously bowing before them and saying, Spitzer, what a great life you have by comparison to my own. Please accept my humble apologies. The point is, I don't see the neurosis in what I'm doing. I don't see the neurosis in what I'm doing. And you get the point. But then it gets even better. There's ego rage and ego blame, right? Because I get really angry that you're not admitting to my intrinsic superiority. And by the way, I can never, ever, ever make a mistake in public. You know, I can't even, you know, mispronounce a word like spectroscopy. Maybe you pronounce it spectroscopy in public. And somebody walks up and goes, you know that word, it's pronounced spectroscopy. And you pronounced it spectroscopy. And then all of a sudden you think, oh my gosh, I did that in public three times. You go home. You shut the door. You want to bang your head against the wall because the feeling of physical pain is so much better than playing that tape all over again. I can't believe I did that in public. Oh my gosh, people will think I'm human. Or even worse, uneducated. And then to top it all off, you start to have suicidal feelings. What I'm trying to get to is, when we put the comparative identity as an end in itself, something terrible happens and there's only one way out. If ego in, if trying to bring the world in the form of status, or winning, or power, or control, or achievement, if trying to bring the world under my dominion is my problem, the only way out is ego out. The contributive identity. To try and make a positive difference to somebody or something beyond myself. And that is sanity. Because the moment I stop living for, who's receiving more? Who's got more status? Who's got less status? Who's got more power? Who's got less power? The minute I, how can I stop it? It's an intrinsic part of my identity. You know, the other day a guy just walked into my office. He says to me, Sister, rejoice in me. My new book is about to be published and mine's still six months away. The dagger went into my heart right away. I was already in competition for doing the good for the kingdom of God. This is a part of our identity. It's unbelievable how deep it is. But it is the contributive identity that is our way out. And I give you two quick solutions to this. Two ways out of our own self-created hell. The first way is what I'm going to be, I'll call it just a list. Your homework assignment tonight, I'm an educator, I can do this. Your homework assignment tonight is to go home and to make a list of all of the positive contributions, all of the ways in which you can make a positive difference with your time, your energy, your capacities, your family, your situation, how you can make a positive difference to others in your lives. And just go through it from the most intimate to the least intimate kind of context. So kind of go first, well, what can I do for my family? How can I optimize the positive difference that I can make to my family and to my friends? And how can I make an optimal positive difference to my business, my employees, if I'm in a supervisory position, or to my colleagues? How can I make an optimal positive difference to the culture in which I live? How can I make an optimal positive difference to the kingdom of God, or to my church, or to my community center, or to the baseball team? How do I make an optimal positive difference with my time, my talents, my energy, right? For me, this is not going to be by playing basketball. This is going to have to be another way, because I don't play basketball well. So with my time, my talents, and energy, how am I going to make an optimal positive difference in my life? Now, when you do that, two things begin to emerge immediately. The first thing that begins to emerge is, I'm no longer living for who's better or who's worse. I'm living to make an optimal positive difference to the world around me. We are hardwired to make the world a better place. We want the world to be better off for our having lived. We cannot even stand the thought that the world would be not better off, neutral, or even worse off for our having lived. None of us, but none of us, wants to get to 80 years old and go, hmm, now what was the difference between the value of my life and that of a rock? And have to say, well, nothing. I didn't do anything more than the rock. That would be incipient despair. But luckily, God has created and fashioned us just in the opposite way so that we can actually make a difference by our lives. And in so doing, He has privileged us. Privileged us to want to make an optimal positive difference to family, to friends, to church, to the kingdom, to the culture if we're so lucky. For this we came. For this we came. And then if the comparative identity serves that contributive identity, so be it. If my status can open doors which will help me to serve the community and serve the church, great. If my contributive identity stands as the end of my achievements, then the achievements make sense. But the achievements as an end in themselves, they don't make sense. If my contributive identity stands as the end of my status, then it makes sense. It serves a greater purpose. But if status is an end in itself, it's only a road to a self-created hell. If my winning, right, I beat you at chess, I feel happy. And parenthetically, you don't. If that is an end in itself, if that's it, and it does not serve a greater master of making a bigger difference, then of course I have failed. I have lived for nothing. It is for naught like a rock. At the end of the day then, the first thing we must do for ourselves, your homework assignment, is to articulate the ways in which you can make an optimal positive difference to families, to friends, to colleagues, co-workers, employees, church, the kingdom of God, the community, the culture, the ways in which you can do it, and put it at the very end of your list, for this I came. Second way out of hell. The second way out of hell is to have the vision of one another that Jesus had of us. Love one another, He said, as I have loved you. They will know that you are My disciples by your love for one another. Therefore, love one another as I have loved you. The point I get to is this. Love begins by looking for the good news in the other. If we but see only the bad news, if that is it, then we will never make it to love because the bad news is our default drive. It will just kind of transfix us. Hold our attention. Occupy our thoughts. Go home tonight and try this little existential test with your spouses. Just look for the bad news. Let your default drive have a field day. And go ahead. Focus on what is irritating, what is stupid, what is weak, and very unkindly and then add history to it. Lo, these many, many years. Now, I want you to just ask yourself two questions about that. Number one, what is your mood like? Your anxiety level. Number two, are people mysteries, transcendental, unique, sublime mysteries, or are people problems that need to be desperately fixed? Number three, is life an opportunity and an adventure of grace as we heard our speakers say today in so many different beautiful ways, or is, in fact, life a problem? You take the calendar test. Open up your calendar. Look at what's coming for the day. And if you're sort of saying, oh, that guy's an idiot and I don't want to see him. That meeting's going to be a waste of time and I don't want to have anything to do with it. Oh, that guy is really going to undercut me and I just have to put him down. The whole day is just awful, but I'll put up with it. You're probably viewing life as a problem. Now, then finally ask yourself the final question. Well, am I a unique, transcendental, sublime mystery or am I a problem? You see, you can't love anybody else unless you in some sense love yourself and that's why Jesus said, love your neighbor as you do yourself. This is not a narcissistic thing. This is basically saying we have to have some modicum of self-respect Matthew Kelly's whole talk. We have to be the best version of ourselves. If we're a problem, we're not. And so I ask you to do what Gabriel Marcel says and that is, instead of focusing on the defaults rather than the bad news, to instead focus on the good news. To focus on the good news in the other. Begin then by looking for the little good things they try to do and the great good things that they try to do. Look also, while you're at it, for their delightful idiosyncrasies. Look too at gratuitous acts of kindness. You know, when you're really under pressure and you've got to have a file and things aren't going right and you shout out the door at the secretary, where's the file? I asked for this file. You know, and you get the stress in your voice and she comes in and she's really kind to you. When she should have said, here you bum, take it. You know, instead you go here. But she's genuinely nice, almost understanding without preparation the stress and trying to, gratuitous acts of kindness. Oh, by the way, don't forget a point I'll make in just one minute. Every human being's a transcendental mystery. Loving, ultimate and unconditional truth, love, goodness and being. Just with all their hearts. And if that is the case, you guys, I have to tell you, then we have to look at the mystery, the soul, the transcendentality of the other. Looking then at that unique goodness in the other. Empathy is a real possibility. Love begins with looking for the good news in the other because if we look for the bad news in the other, if we let our default drives have a field day, take the existential test, we cannot love it all. Here comes Joe walking down the corridor. There's that irritating, stupid, unkind and weak rat. But I'm a good Christian. So I'm going to love him anyway despite his totality of inherent defects. Because what does not kill me makes me stronger. Gentlemen, I must tell you, that is Stoicism, not Christianity. Jesus didn't ask you to be Stoics. He asked us to be in his own image, as Father Jordan said. And so of course, what we see then is, we need to start by looking for the good news in the other. Then the empathy will happen. And when that empathy happens, right, that understanding of the other in their weakness, even out of an understanding of myself and my own weakness, then we will find it easier to do the good for another. Easier to do the good for another than to do the good for ourselves. And that is agape. And that is love. And that is the way out of self-created hell. Two things I give you as homework assignments tonight to begin with. And then one third one, because there always has to be three points. Number one, seek the contributive identity over the comparative identity. And number two, look for the good news in the other instead of the bad news, for you cannot do both simultaneously. Last point, you can't do the first two things without grace. And grace is really aided by prayer. In other words, have you ever tried to put on your contributive identity and just keep it going for the whole day all by yourself? Have you ever tried to look for the good news in the other when you see a really problematic human being confronting you all by yourself? We need the peace to let go of our default drives. Let me repeat that. We need the peace to let go of our default drives. And so I give you this little discipline that I give to myself. This is a little discipline of prayer that aids the Lord who's just knocking on the door going, Spitzer, Spitzer, I'm here to give you the peace to let go of your default drives. Here I am right here, and I'm going, I want to bash into this wall as hard as I can. Just give me a minute. And of course, I keep God out, and bam, I hit the wall, and I go, He gave me what I wanted. The thought is, what we need to do in order to be able to pray very seriously, though, is we need to start with one central spontaneous prayer. You may have many spontaneous prayers like, Lord, make good come out of whatever harm I might have caused. Or, Lord, make some good come out of this suffering that I'm enduring. Right? That great, the Rogers Prayer, I'm going to call it from now on. Just so beautiful. But the key thought, of course, is there's one prayer that is the prayer of all prayers that Jesus says many times, Thy will be done. And the key thought to remember about that prayer is that Jesus' will, right, the second petition of the Our Father, is optimally loving, optimally good, optimally just, optimally beautiful and majestic, optimally salvific, optimally going to bring out the optimal amount of good in the optimal way through each and every one of our crazy acts of human freedom, like an orchestra master, His will is going to optimize love and goodness and salvation from everything we do. If you can remember that, then that prayer, Thy will be done, is so powerful as a spontaneous prayer. I say it 30 times a day. And the key thing to remember is say it in times of fear and so forth. When I was a little novice, a baby Jesuit, basically what happened was I tried of course to get this prayer in the form of St. Ignatius' prayer, the Sushi Pei, I tried to get it into my life more integratively. And we'd say, every night we'd have the Magnum Silencium at 10 o'clock p.m. and we'd say this prayer, Take, Lord, receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, my entire will. Whatsoever I have or hold You gave to me, I give it back to You now. Take it and dispose of it wholly according to Your will. Give me only Your love and Your grace, and that's enough for me, and I ask for nothing more. That's a long way of saying, Thy will be done. Now here's how the little baby novice was saying it. Take, Lord, receive all my liberty, but please don't crush it because I really need my liberty and my freedom in order to get my autonomy, in order to do some good in the world. And my memory, I really need my memory. It's really important for studies. So don't annihilate that either. And my understanding, but I like my intelligence. Please don't eliminate that and wipe it out either. And my entire will, but I need discipline. Why would You want to curse? Guys, this becomes not the prayer to alleviate hell. It becomes the prayer for hell. Now we have to remember for just a moment here, that God isn't going to crush our understanding. He's not going to give us a cross we can't endure. He's not, you know, I mean, I just, I listened to that testimony, the Rogers testimony. I'm just stunned by this testimony, and it was so beautiful and so well done. But you see, God's will is optimally loving, optimally good, optimally just. Look at the ministry He brought out of sheer tragedy. That testimony in and of itself is huge. And if that is the case, then you can say that prayer 30 times a day. Lord, I'm going to give a speech today, and I would really like it to be helpful to a lot of people. And I've got this little text here, and if that text is the one, well, then thy will be done. Thy optimally loving, optimally just, optimally beautiful, optimally salvific will be done. I really want it done. But if not, then crash and burn it. You guys, that's freedom. If it's God's will, you know it has to be optimal love and optimal goodness and optimal salvation. If it's not God's will, we don't want it to be successful. And if that is the case, then you can tell God with abject freedom, go ahead and crash and burn it. It's okay. I won't like it. It'll be like giving me a kind of a macular dystrophy eye disease or something, but I won't like it. But go ahead and crash and burn it, if that's your will. Thirty times a day, in times of temptation, in times of fear, in times of anger and resentment, thy will be done. And then follow it up with another just important spontaneous prayer. Lord, give me the peace to let go, to let go of my attachments to this world and put everything onto Your lap that Your will be done. That's how Jesus prayed. You think Jesus was sitting there running toward the cross? Well, in a way, He was, because it was the Father's will. But His prayer in the agony in the garden is, Father, if it be Your will, then let this cup pass from Me. But if not, then Thy will be done. Oh, for the freedom of Jesus Christ in His image. Point number two. All of the speakers have said this today, and I just repeat it. Create a ten-minute discipline in your life. By the way, my third point has three sub-points. And this is the second sub-point. Let's not get in there. But the key thing is, create a little discipline for yourself. And my thought about a discipline is just simply this, is to get ourselves so aligned in prayer, a rhythm of prayer every morning, so that maybe start off with just ten minutes or maybe fifteen minutes, whatever you can do every morning. It's the consistency that is the key to peace. And peace is the key to letting go into God's will. That ten minutes or fifteen minutes of regular prayer. And the idea is just simply to, if you want to use the Living Word Among Us, a book that's up there in that little book enclave there, or if you'd like to use the Magnificat, which they send directly to your house, or you prefer something a little bit more elaborate from one of the prayer books, but get a prayer book like the Magnificat or the Living Word Among Us, and try and do that ten to fifteen minute discipline every day. Because eventually, when you say those psalms and those New Testament readings and those reflections, and you think about them, you say them very meaningfully, even if but for ten minutes, the freedom it produces, the context it produces, is just so important. It gives me the peace to let go into God's will, so that when I say, Thy will be done, it really does occur, this freedom occurs. My last point, my third sub-point of my third point, the Holy Eucharist. This is the year of the Eucharist, and I do not have to tell you, after listening to Matthew Kelly and listening to, in fact, all of the speakers, what the Eucharist means in our life. It is so central. Matthew Kelly recommended getting a journal and taking a point from Mass, but the key idea is to remember, too, that the Lord loved you. And Matthew Kelly's analogy of the disease and the child was so poignant with respect to God the Father. But that is exactly what Jesus' plan was, was to give Himself unconditionally to us. And in light of that unconditional love, I just want you to know, take this, all of you, and eat it. This is my body, which will be given up for you. The word body, that we translate as body, is the Greek word soma, not sarx. Sarx means just flesh. Soma is the Greek word used to translate Jesus' Hebrew, and that word means person, whole person. So listen to this for just...it means flesh, yes. It means my will. It means my intellect. It means my whole soul. It means every decision I make. Everything that is me, my soma. Take this, all of you, and eat it. This is my whole person, flesh, body, spirit, heart, will. This is my whole personhood given up for you. Get it? What is Jesus' definition of love? Gift of self. Gift of self. There is no greater love that a man can have than to give his life for his friends. Gift of self. Listen to these Eucharistic words. Take this, all of you, and eat it. This is my whole personhood, my whole self, my whole being, given, given up for you. This is not only my personhood. It is Jesus' personhood, totally. And it is also an unconditional act of love. And it is absolutely and utterly transformative. And it will even transform the likes of this materialist when he was at Gonzaga as a student. It will transform the likes of me into someone who says, I think I want to be a priest. And all my friends go, are you kidding? That's you. Why would you, a materialist? And I wasn't a materialist anymore. I had changed because of the love of the Eucharist. I changed because of my integration into the mystical body. I had changed because of the love of Christ which dwells within me. This was quoted twice today. I have changed because the Holy Eucharist, the precious gift of that sacrament, in its utter transformative power, produced a miracle. Three things to begin a spiritual life. That spontaneous prayer, Thy will be done, Thy ultimately and optimally loving good just will be done. And secondly, that ten minute discipline from whatever prayer book we can garner that is helpful, that gives us the peace to let go into God's will. And last but by no means least, the Holy Eucharist in all of its beauty, Jesus' love, unconditional love, shed for us on the cross in the form of His life and His blood. In that beauty we will be transformed to choose the contributive over the comparative, to look for the good news rather than the bad news. And in the end there is love. And that was Jesus' will. Thank you so very, very much.