February 5, 2010
The Second Half
Keeping up appearances
BY DEACON JIM AND ANN CAVERA
This past week we began getting our house ready for prospective buyers. When we tried to see the overflowing bookshelves, stacks of magazines and cluttered closets through the eyes of strangers, we were horrified. What normally passes for housekeeping around here suddenly seemed woefully inadequate. Before we could even begin cleaning, we got word that a friend of a friend was house hunting and would like to see our home.
We quickly turned our cars into rolling storage spaces with armloads for the local resale store and clothing bank. There wasn’t enough time to begin going through stacks of magazines and papers and so we began jamming those things under the beds. Surely house hunters wouldn’t go looking under there. Finally, we gave up and stuffed everything else into one large storage space. If the rest of the house appeared shipshape, the lookers might forgive one messy area.
This house, though a hundred years old, has been given very good care for many years. We didn’t want anything to detract people from seeing the quality beneath our clutter. When the house hunters arrived, they seemed just as impressed as we had been the first time we saw it. We have no idea whether first appearances were enough to make a sale, but we’ll keep you posted. Now, the most difficult thing will be to keep up appearances so that anyone else who comes through will see the house at its best.
Did you ever notice how easy it is to let life become all about keeping up appearances? In this culture, people do everything they can to keep from looking older. A good portion of the national debt could be wiped out with the money spent on gym equipment, hair coloring and diet foods. Perhaps exercise guru Jack La Lanne, now age 95, put it best when he said, “I can’t die. It would spoil my image.” The perpetually young image many of us try to project leaves little room for aging gracefully, or for considering the reality of death.
When it comes to faith, are we what we appear to be? How often do we assure someone we will be praying for them and then forget to pray until days have passed? We can carefully dress for church and then spend the worship hour thinking about where we’ll go for lunch or where we want to spend our next vacation. Where faith is concerned, how often do we try to hide the messy places in our lives so that we can appear to be better than we really are?
In I Corinthians St. Paul says: “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace towards me has not been in vain.” (NRSV) We have come to grips with a simple reality: Like our house, we are old. No amount of face cream or vitamins is going to change this simple fact of life. By the grace of God, we are what we are. Today, many people have no home when it comes to faith. How many of them will buy the faith we offer if they discover we are less than we appear to be?
Deacon Jim and Ann Cavera are former residents of Evansville; their award-winning column is a regular feature of the Message. Contact them at www.catholicseniorspirit.com.