| Catching
a Three-legged Chicken
March
30, 2003 Homily
Fr. George Smiga John
3: 14 - 21
A man was driving down a country road and he noticed that there was a chicken
running ahead of his car and keeping pace with it. He looked at his speedometer
and he was driving fifty miles an hour. So he increased his speed to sixty, and
then seventy miles an hour. But the chicken just sped up. Outrunning the car,
it took a right turn into a small farm and disappeared behind the farmhouse. The
man was so astonished by the performance of the chicken that he pulled into the
farm and knocked on the farmhouse door. A farmer answered. The man said, "I
don't want to be bold, but do you know that you have a chicken that can run seventy
miles per hour?" The farmer said, "Oh I have a lot of chickens who can
do that. On this farm we breed three-legged chickens and they are very fast."
"Three-legged
chickens," said the man, "I never heard of that! Why would you want
a three-legged chicken?" "For very personal reasons," said the
farmer. "You see, I live here with my wife and my son and we all like drumsticks.
And so when we have a chicken dinner, we are always fighting over who is going
to get the drumsticks. But, with a three-legged chicken each one of us has our
own drumstick. There is peace in the family." "That's amazing!"
said the man. "I never heard of a three-legged chicken. Are they good? What
do they taste like?" The farmer shrugged his shoulders, "I have no idea.
We haven't been able to catch one yet."
Sometimes more is not better. Sometimes the very things we think are going to
help us actually pull us in the opposite direction. Just examine American culture.
There has never been a country in the history of the world where more people live
a higher standard of living than we do in America today. Longevity of life, discoveries
in medicine, and the amount and variety of food are all increasing. But the number
of sad people and people dealing with clinical depression is also increasing.
China, which has a much lower standard of living and where most people are struggling
to make ends meet, has four times less cases of depression than we have here in
the United States. Worldwide, the incidence of depression is on the rise especially
among the young and the affluent.
Now this shows that the things we have do not guarantee happiness. For all the
things that we posses, there are still many in our midst that live with emptiness,
a spiritual hollowness that robs us of joy. This can in part be explained because
it is easy to confuse two things: fun and happiness. Fun is an emotion that we
feel while we are doing something. Happiness is what we experience once we've
done something and are simply living. Happiness is deeper and more lasting than
fun. You can buy fun. You can't buy happiness. If
you have money and resources, you can buy a ticket for a Caribbean cruise or a
trip to Disneyland. You can choose to enlarge the square footage in your house
or buy a luxury automobile. All of these good things can be fun. But none of them
will necessarily make you happy. Our children today have the opportunity of playing
more sports with better equipment and better technology than anything we could
have imagined while we were growing up. I believe that all of these advancements
add to the fun of playing sports. However, that does not mean that children today
are more happy than the children growing up forty years ago. We as Americans can
travel, communicate and live in comfort on a scale that would amaze most of the
people in the world. But none of these advantages indicate that we will wake up
tomorrow more happy to be alive than a tribesman in the Congo or a peasant in
Ecuador. What
we have does not make us happy. Who we belong to does. If we can love ourselves
and give and receive love from others, that is the secret of happiness. If we
can live in those relationships, we can be happy despite what we have or do not
have. That is why Jesus' words are so important in today's Gospel. Jesus describes
our most important relationship, our relationship to God. Jesus says that God
so loved the world that He gave His only Son that we might have life. We believe
in a God who loves us and wants to give us life. Therefore, if we can open ourselves
to that love, we can in the same action open ourselves to the love of others.
Such love and such relationships are the only way of finding happiness. So,
do not confuse fun and happiness. If we can take God's love in and share it with
one another, that will make us happy. But do not be deceived. Our odds of being
happy through the fun we can buy or the things that we posses are very small.
They are about as good as the odds of catching a three-legged chicken.
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