Rocky Balboa: A movie about a life worth living

As we dive into the dog days of summer and triple digit temperatures the time comes around to sit inside and watch a good movie rather than cooking in my own juices by daring to go outside.  My brother lives down in Las Vegas and he never has any pity whatsoever when I complain about the heat, but his his air conditioner isn't broken, mine is.  Regardless, the theme of our movie nights is living life to the fullest.  In chapter ten of John’s Gospel Jesus tells us, “I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly.”  This summer we will be examining just what exactly Christ means by this offer of abundant life.  Last week we started we watched Bella, a great movie about love, family, and adoption.  This week we are watching Rocky Balboa, which is the last movie in the Rocky series.  Rather than dealing with Rocky as a boxer who has some new fight or new challenger to overcome, it deals with Rocky as a retired boxer who is dealing with life after the death of his wife and the estrangement of his son.  This is one of my favorite movies of all times because the point of the movie is not whether or not Rocky wins the fight at the end, the point is that the fight is worth fighting.  When I say the fight I don’t just mean the boxing match, I mean the fight of living life every day to the fullest.  Here is one of my favorite quotes from the movie.  It is where Rocky is talking to his son, who blames his dad’s fame for why he is not able to get ahead in the world. 

“Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain't all sunshine and rainbows. It's a very mean and nasty place and I don't care how tough you are it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain't about how hard you're hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done! Now if you know what you're worth then go out and get what you're worth. But ya gotta be willing to take the hits, and not pointing fingers saying you ain't where you wanna be because of him, or her, or anybody! Cowards do that and that ain't you! You're better than that! I'm always gonna love you no matter what. No matter what happens. You're my son and you're my blood. You're the best thing in my life. But until you start believing in yourself, ya ain't gonna have a life.”

How true this is for us and God.  Life will beat us down, and we have to be willing to get back up again.  God loves us and will help and support us, but we have to be willing to move forward.  We have to be willing to trust in Him.  It is far too often that we take the way of cowards and back down.  We want to blame anyone we can for why we aren't who we know God has called us to be.  We don’t want to take responsibility for our actions or the consequences that they bring, but we have to. To live life to its fullest, to live it abundantly means standing toe to toe with the lies that the world presents and not backing down.  It means standing with Christ and the Church that he founded.  To truly live means giving nothing less than all you have and all you are every single day for the glory of the Kingdom of God.  Will life knock us down if we live like this, absolutely. Will Christ put us back to our feet and help us to win the victory in the end?  Indeed He will.  He has already won the victory, we just have to stand with Him in order to share in it.

Tough love and Baseball

One of my favorite movies of all Time is A League of Their Own, which is about the short lived life of women’s major league baseball. Towards the end of the movie one of the star players quits and decides not to play the following season.  The manager (Tom Hanks) asks her why and she tells him that it is just too hard. He responds, “It’s supposed to be hard.  If it wasn’t hard everyone would do it.  The hard is what makes it great.”  This pretty much sums up my faith life on an almost daily basis.  There are a lot of good religions out there, but if you want a truly great one, stick with the Catholic Church. As with all great things, however, it is hard.  Christ himself warned us of that fact when he told the Apostles, “If the world hates you, realize that it hated me first.”  Now things might not be so bad if the world would hate us for doing things that were relatively easy, but as a general rule it doesn’t. It usually hates us for the things that are hard.  The things that can challenge even the most dedicated and leave even the holiest weeping in frustration in an Adoration chapel somewhere.  Exactly what those challenges are will vary from person to person, but I really think that most of us have them. 

For me, one of my biggest struggles is with the fine art of Natural Family Planning (NFP).  It isn’t that I question the theology behind it, because I don’t. I understand the theology quite well; it is just hard to put into practice.  There have been many an occasion where fertility signs have been less than crystal clear and Katie and I have just wanted to scream in frustration. Before I got married I remember learning about

NFP and having it presented to me as though it were so easy a trained monkey could do it.  After all, it is all part of God’s plan for authentic married love, so there is no way he would make that extremely difficult or challenging right? Wrong, oh so very wrong at least on the challenging part.  It is true that NFP is one of the gifts God has given us to space our children and manage family size, but it is far from easy.  Then again, real love usually is.  Why do you think that part of the wedding vows involve the “for richer or poorer, sickness and in health” part?  Because real love is tough; and if you can’t make it through being poor and sick, than you don’t really have the level of love that Christ calls you to in marriage.  Real love is hard and real love is painful and it only takes a quick look at the Cross to remind us of that fact.  What is easier to forget is that real love is worth it.  In the pain and suffering of the moment it is easy to forget what real love is all about and just make the choice that will make us feel better in the short term. But love is a lot like Baseball, if it were easy everyone would do it.  It’s the hard that makes it great.