One of my heroes was born on January 8th, 1894 in the Kingdom of Poland, part of the Russian Empire. He received a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary when he was only 12 years old, during which she predicted that he would persevere in purity and become a martyr for our Faith. By age 21, he received his first doctorate degree in Philosophy. At age 28, he received his second doctorate in Theology.
He became a priest and witnessed angry demonstrations against the popes of his time, including Pope St. Pius X. He was a writer and a missionary, founding multiple monasteries in Japan and India. His health forced him to return home to Poland in 1936. Three short years later, the Nazis invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Life for this man would never be the same.
Despite his own health challenges, he was one of the few who remained in his monastery and even went so far as to open a temporary hospital there to help those in need. He spent three months in prison after his town was invaded, but was then released. He was given an opportunity to avoid future persecution, but refused to sign a document that would protect him as a German citizen because of his German ancestry. He went on to hide over 2,000 Jews in his monastery and began printing many anti-Nazi German publications from their printing house. On February 17, 1941, he was arrested and the monastery shut down. He was taken to the Pawiak prison for three months before being transferred to Auschwitz.
During all this, he never abandoned his priesthood. He remained committed to his identity and the Church. Mother Mary’s prediction would eventually come true when he volunteered his life to take the place of a man with a family who was being sent to be starved to death. After two weeks of starvation and dehydration, he still hadn’t died. The Nazis injected him with a lethal poison, to which he willingly gave his arm.
This man was St. Maximillian Kolbe. In my opinion, he is one of the greatest saints of the last 2000 years of Church history. He was the epitome of a warrior for Christ. He was a man he knew who he was and what he was here to do.
St. Maximillian Kolbe endured tremendous suffering and saw evil in its rawest and truest forms. He lived in both Russian and Nazi occupied Poland. He was a missionary to foreign lands where he undoubtedly saw the reality of extreme poverty. He was alive for both WWI and WWII, witnessing one of the harshest concentration camps from the inside. We have many great quotes from this man, but one that has always stood out to me the most was when he shared his thoughts the greatest evil of our time:
“The most deadly poison of our times is indifference” –St. Maximillian Kolbe
Imagine that. Imagine going through life having seen and experienced all that he did, seeing the absolute worst of mankind – then someone asks you, “what do you think is the greatest problem in the world today?”
Hate? No.
Violence? No.
War? Nope.
Poverty? Negative.
It’s indifference.
It’s apathy. It’s the fact that all of those things are happening all over the world and too many people simply do not care. People with the ability, resources, and oftentimes the awareness, do nothing to provide a solution. It brings me back to the timeless Edmund Burke quote, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to sit aside and do nothing.”
Are you one of the good people doing nothing?
Short term memory loss
It’s amazing to me how quickly we as humans can forget things. Have you ever had a day or a season in your life be so bad that you assumed everything after it would be relatively easy? I’m sure we all have. I know I have multiple times. This week, I reflected more and more on my time in the Dominican Republic on three different mission trips. Those trips were filled with love, service, and the Holy Spirit. The experiences I had there permanently changed my view on material goods and the bountiful blessings that are afforded to me as a middle-class American.
The most interesting part of my third trip was getting to see others go through these same experiences I had had multiple times now. This group was the biggest we had gone with yet, and definitely had the highest average age across the board. We usually traveled with other college kids, but this time had more middle aged people than usual. Some of them had allowed decades to pass between their last gritty form of service, and it showed.
It was amazing to see the unwillingness to submit themselves to certain discomforts for a ten-day period of time. Even once returning to the United States, it stunned me to see the quickness with which appreciation for the finer things in life (like warm showers, air conditioning, and fully functioning toilets) evaporated in that American air.
To be fair to my fellow missionaries, this experience of taking things for granted isn’t unique to middle aged, first time mission trip goers. We all do it almost every single day. Firmly aware of the injustices taking place around the world and even in our own country, we can barely afford the time to even pray for the victims, let alone contribute our time and treasure to the point of sacrifice.
One of the most devastating consequences of this return to comfort and ease is that we lose sight of all the experiences that once moved us to change the way that we live. When we go through a life altering experience, like losing a loved one or going on a spiritual retreat, we discover this deep understanding of reality. It pushes us to approach life in a new way. It drives us to cherish our time with loved ones, be more generous with our possessions, and to share the wisdom and insights from what we’ve learned with those we encounter. Almost each time though, as the hours and days pass, we get more comfortable as normalcy resettles around us. We forget these hard earned nuggets of wisdom and our lives look eerily similar to the way they did prior to the experience.
Many resolutions and commitments made on the tail end of trying times go unfinished because we sprint away from the pain, which is coupled with the wisdom, at the first opportunity. It takes great humility and courage to not take people and things for granted in your life. Why? Because it forces you to realize that you are not any different from those suffering from extreme poverty in other places in the world who were never given a chance at prosperity. It leaves you no choice but to actually live the lessons you learned, and we all know that application and doing are the hardest parts of changing. Personal comfort leads to indifference to the struggles going on in the lives of other people.
We can’t all solve every problem in the world, especially not on our own. But I’m willing to bet that we could all do a little bit more to help make the world a better place. I think one of the best places to start is evaluating the root causes of this indifference and apathy that we are plagued with, and examining how it might be in effect in our own lives. What’s keeping you from playing a bigger role in the battle between good and evil in our world today?
The Roots of Apathy
Victim Mentality
One of the first things that we lose when we are attentive to the needs of others is the ability to play the victim. Every time you turn on the news today, you will hear somebody blaming another person for their own misfortune. Whenever life isn’t going the way we hoped or expected, the easiest thing to do is look to our left and right in order to find someone responsible for our lack of success. I heard it all the time growing up in Harrisburg, during my time in the military, and even more now in my work for the Church.
Human beings often think that because they cannot control everything, they cannot really control anything. Sadly, we often spend so much time trying to control what we can’t control (viz. other people) that we seldom take time to really determine what is under our sphere of influence. You are the sum total of the choices you have made up to this point in your life. Sure, some people may have had a head start on you in a lot of ways, but you’ve also had a head start on many others as well. Do you focus more on what you don’t have and haven’t been given, or on what you do have and have been given in your life?
I constantly try to remind myself and other people that there are true victims out there in this world. There are people who have no ability to change their situation. These are the people who are victims of sex trafficking, slavery, wrongful imprisonments, and brutal dictatorships. These are child soldiers, people in caste systems, and prisoners of war. We don’t have to dwell on such depressing thoughts all the time in order to be grateful for what we have, but it does help to occasionally call to mind that there are situations much worse than the ones we find ourselves in.
“It could be worse” was a simple motto that often got us through difficult times in the Army. We would brainstorm situations that would actually make our current predicament more miserable. Sure, we might be wet, cold, and hungry, but at least we didn’t have to climb a mountain during this mission. You might have a heavy ruck to carry, but at least you didn’t also have to carry a 17lb machine gun along with it’s ammunition. You may have to go on a five mile run in the rain, but at least you were going to get a great big breakfast afterwards. It could always be worse.
Pessimism
The other side of this lovely coin is that wonderful opposing truth, “it could always be better.” While it is helpful in certain situations to think of how life could be worse in order to muster up the strength to persevere, there are also times where we must reflect on what could improve. More importantly, we should focus on the ways in which we can personally do something to affect positive change in our circumstances and in the lives of other people.
Pessimism runs rampant in our world today. We get so caught up in thinking of how bad things are and how bad things can be that we fail to dream of a better future, let alone start working towards it. A joyful life requires that we “rejoice even in our sufferings” (Romans 5:3). The exercise of imagining how your life could be worse is meant to bring you gratitude for hidden blessings, but it doesn’t end here. Gratitude should always lead to action through generosity and optimism. This thankfulness should shift our thinking from negative to positive, allowing us to see outside of our current pain and find creative ways to bring even greater joy to those around us. Even though I have a heavy ruck to carry, I’m now grateful that I don’t have to lug the big machine gun around. This should move me to go offer a snack or an encouraging word to the man who is carrying such a burden. When that gratitude ends with me, the process is only half complete. For most people, the process never even begins.
You get to choose the way you think. I’m willing to bet that you know an abundance of negative people. The common misconception is that these people are negative because of some outside forces or because of some determined “personality type” they’ve had since birth. In Man’s Search for Meaning, holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl says that the last of human freedoms is our freedom to choose how we will respond to the things we face in life, the freedom to choose our attitude. Negative people are negative because they choose to be that way. This blinds them from reality and keeps them from seeing the beautiful possibilities that could exist, which leads to apathy. If nothing will get better, why should you even try to change yourself or the world around you?
What attitude will you choose to have today?
Distractions
I know that the devil loves himself some distractions. Our Enemy has worked tirelessly over the past century to get us to be as busy and distracted as he possibly could, and he has done so with great success. Think of how obsessed we are with being busy. Ask anybody you know how they’ve been over the past couple weeks and the answer is almost always “busy, busy, busy.” Every person prides themselves on the level of busy they attempt to maintain. Sure, their “busy” schedule might include hours and hours of Netflix, social media, and time at the bar, but don’t you dare try and add something else into their “jammed packed” schedules.
Busy, in my opinion, often just becomes synonymous with distracted, i.e. operating life with no priorities. The constant noise and entertainment prevents us from having a moment to really evaluate our effectiveness and the true importance, or true pointlessness, of what we are doing. Life is all about your priorities. To be successful in the world’s eyes, just stay really busy, but to be significant, it’s going to take some serious intentionality. Distractions and busyness will keep you from caring about what really needs your attention.
Obsession with self
Toddlers are awesome. Their laughs are always adorable and they can be incredibly entertaining. They have such a pure innocence and trust those who take care of them so deeply. Then again, we don’t call that second year of life the “terrible two’s” for nothing. Small children can be incredibly difficult as they go through this gigantic perspective shift that allows them to see that the world does not revolve around them. There are other people who matter too, so the child can’t always have things his or her way. It’s a painful but important journey. We often evaluate someone’s upbringing by how well their parents helped them make this shift.
For some reason, our society is pushing more and more for this two-year-old mentality to be the norm for adults. We are pushing this idea that one’s self is the only person you should really care about. Self-love, self-care, and self-acceptance are touted as the greatest virtues of our time. They are elevated above self-stewardship and personal responsibility. The world pushes us to be more obsessed with gaining more “rights” and forgetting our responsibilities. In today’s society, you are told to flee from the consequences of your actions. Whether you become pregnant, have student loans, or choose not to work a job, there are people who say the consequences of those actions should be simply wiped away. Why? Because you should have a “right” to choose, a “right” to not have to be burdened by loans, and a “right” to a ‘living’ wage. You also should have a “right” to force your beliefs on other people, making them conform to new ways of pronoun, bathroom, and locker room rules through a new, deeply flawed approach to biology in general.
People’s feelings have been elevated above the English language, the religious liberties of others, and even the right to life for the most defenseless among us. We are empowering a small, yet very loud, minority to take away basic human rights such as the right to freedom of speech and religion, and even the right to life. This minority moves in the shadows behind the guise of tolerance and acceptance, while they actually fight to develop a society who doesn’t tolerate or accept those who disagree with them.
The purpose of society is to help one another protect our true rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. When we adopt this selfish thinking, we cease considering those rights in regards to others and only seek to protect them for ourselves. “Who cares if more African American babies are killed in the womb than are born in New York city? It hasn’t affected my day to day life, right?”
Self-obsession leads us to focusing on our own problems to the extent that we can no longer see, tend to, or even care about the needs of others. This tunnel vision in our own lives causes us to want to play the victim. Self-obsession leads to indifference.
The Way Out
Our lives require context. Whenever things are taken out of context, confusion ensues. We have to keep in mind that we are playing an eternal game in life. We are striving to live holy lives in this life so that we can worship God for eternity in the next. Never lose sight of the goal. We have to also keep in mind that we have a deep and heavy responsibility to leave this world better than we found it. We can’t do this if we are indifferent toward these duties. This undertaking can easily seem overwhelming, but it just comes back to these basic choices:
- Choose to play the hero, not the victim
- Choose to have a positive attitude
- Choose to rid your life of the people and things that distract you from what is most important
- Choose to be selfless – give yourself to God and others generously in every way that you can
These things are simple, but not easy. It takes time, perseverance, and accountability from the good people around us to even get close to mastering these things in our short lifetimes. The difficult things in life are often the most rewarding. Choosing to fight this battle, to be a light in the midst of all this darkness, is the best decision you will ever make.
