There Is a Someone Behind the Something

Homily for the Thanksgiving Liturgy at Notre Dame Preparatory School

There is an episode of The Office in which Dwight and Andy get into a funny back-and-forth argument over favors. Dwight wants to get Jim fired, and he needs everyone in the office on his side to do that. So, Dwight tries to win everyone over by bringing in authentic New York City bagels so they will all have to owe him one, which he can later cash in to get Jim axed. Dwight’s plan is thwarted, however, by Andy, who is characteristically too nice and polite to detect Dwight’s cunning and keeps trying to repay Dwight’s favor by one-upping him. But Dwight needs Andy to owe him one, and not the other way around, so every time Andy pays Dwight back, Dwight does something nice again for Andy. And it keeps escalating:

Dwight buys bagels; Andy shines his briefcase. Dwight gets the door; Andy gets the door. Andy fixes Dwight’s tie; Dwight preemptively changes the batteries in Andy’s wireless mouse. Andy buys the office lunch; Dwight insists on serving it. They are caught in a never-ending circle of favors. '

I think of that episode because it gets at something fundamental about our notion of gratitude that I think is fatally flawed. We can’t help but think of what other people do for us as somehow dependent on what we have done or will do for them.

This past week, one of my very closest friends needed to drop her car off for an inspection, so I gave her a ride home. As she got out of the car, she said to me – genuinely – that she owed me one. I said: No you don’t. That’s not how this works. It’s called friendship. Friends don’t think in a transactional way.

But this kind of this-for-that thinking creeps into our relationships and infects them from the inside out. I’m guilty of it as much as anyone. What we can’t comprehend is that someone would simply do something nice for us, not because of what we’ve done or are supposed to do in response, but just because they love us. And love does not demand or expect repayment.

But as we think about it, we might notice that in what we do for others we also expect others to repay us. To quote Taylor: Did you hear my covert narcissism I disguise as altruism like some kind of congressman? Tale as old as time, indeed.

This quid pro quo, this-for-that, I scratch your back and you scratch mine attitude affects all our relationships including and above all our relationship with God. We might start think that all there really is to life is just a series of transactions, of exchanges of favors. But if that is the case, then there is no real love in the world, but only self-love, and that is no world in which anyone really wants to live.

So, we need to ask whether there is more to life than this or not. And just when we have asked that question, we happen upon the answer: life. Of all the things you can account in your life for why you have them, the one thing you cannot explain is life. We can explain our own personal existence – why you or I exist – because our parents created us. But what we cannot explain is the simple fact of existence itself. One of the oldest philosophical questions put it best: Why is there something rather than nothing? If before there was anything there was nothing, then how can we explain why anything came to be at all? Nothing in the universe existed to merit or deserve its creation. Life, as such, is unexplainable.

I should say: it is unexplainable without faith. Because with faith we can see further and more deeply than without. In faith, we know that we exist and that all things exist by the free, unearned mercy of God. God did not need to create us. Nothing and no one forced his hand. He created the world and us purely in love. There is something rather than nothing because behind the something stands a someone, who is love himself.

We might know that is true, but we forget it. We get caught up in all the transactional relationships that mark our daily living that we start to think about our relationship with God in the same way. We think that God’s love is something we have earned or need to earn: that we will not have earned our Father’s love until we have measured up in his eyes and become – by our own strength – what he aspires for us to be.

It’s a tale as old as time. This way of thinking goes back to at least the 5th century, when Saint Augustine refuted the Pelagians who thought we had to earn our salvation on our own, without the help of God’s grace. Augustine taught us that grace is not given because we have done good works; but rather, grace is given so that we can do them in the first place.

What we need to happen to correct our way of thinking is for Christ to enter the temple area of our hearts, the space in which we carry out our relationship with God, and allow him to drive out those selling things and make his house once more a house of prayer. A house of prayer is a house of relationship, a house of love. It does not barter or exchange or one-up. Love gives freely or it is not love at all.

In this Mass – the Church’s greatest prayer of thanksgiving to Almighty God – may we pray for the grace to remember that all we are and all we have been given is not because of us but given for us in love by the Father, who wants nothing but us to be with him now and for eternity. Amen.

Homily preached at the Thanksgiving Liturgy at Notre Dame Preparatory School, November 18, 2022.