SOUL SEARCH

The Yuppie in Us

Fr. Johnny C. Go, S.J., School Director

Mary the Queen Parish

07 May 2006

Posted Tuesday, 09-May-2006 1:15 PM

     There are two caricatures that symbolize two kinds of people.  The first caricature refers to a group of people known for their slogan: “Make love, not war!”  This person is called a hippie, very common in the 60’s and the early 70’s.  They were advocates of peace, among other things, and to put it mildly, were considered quite unconventional in their lifestyle.

     The second caricature I will show you is the yuppie—the term was coined back in the 80’s.  This type of person is best symbolized by the credit card.  As you probably know, “yuppie” stands for “young urban professionals” or “young upwardly-mobile professionals.”  The yuppie is more conservative than the hippie although we can safely say that many of the hippies in the 60’s and 70’s turned into yuppies when they grew older.  Their motto is “Work hard, and play hard!”  According to the stereotype, the yuppie is acquisitive and self-indulgent.  He is engaged in a fast-paced pursuit of material goods, caught up in the endless effort of “keeping up with the Joneses.”

     The question we should ask at this point is:  What about us?  Don’t we all of us have the yuppie in us?  Whether we like it or not, thanks to irresponsible forms of advertising, we all live in a culture of acquisitiveness and self-indulgence.  Some people cope with stress by going shopping.  We are sometimes made to feel that we must take advantage of every single “Midnight Madness” in town.  We sometimes end up believing that we have to have more to be more.

     But is that really true?  Is having more money or having more material goods truly equal to happiness?  I think you will agree with me that this is not true.  We know many people who enjoy material riches but are far from happy.  We ourselves have a similar experience.  We think we will be happy when we have something we want, but once it ends up in our possession, sometimes almost immediately we lose our desire for it.  So, what are we to do?

     I think our Gospel reading today can give us a little clue.  Our Gospel today talks about Jesus the Good Shepherd:  how he leads his flock away from danger and into safety, even to the extent of laying down his life for his sheep.  We are like sheep because given our weaknesses and sins, we are so easily lost.  And so each of us needs the Lord, who is truly the Good Shepherd.  Our Lord acts as the shepherd for the entire human race:  He gathers this lost flock of humanity and leads us back safely to the Father.

     But we can also say that in every person, in each one of us, there is, as it were, a flock of sheep, where every sheep represents a desire that we have.  When you think about it, every person is a bundle of desires.  We have many different desires.  And these desires are constantly changing:  Thanks to peer pressure and the constant bombardment from media, one day we want this, the next day we want something else.  It’s hard enough to have different and ever-changing desires; but sometimes we find our desires to be in conflict with one another.

     So many of us resort to what seems to be the most logical solution:  Most of us try to pursue as many of our desires as possible.  And because these desires come from all sorts of places, we feel pulled in all sorts of different direction.  We run around like headless chickens, and feel confused, scattered—“kalat.”   Indeed, sometimes we feel like a scattered flock of sheep, where every sheep wants to go off to a different direction.  We feel lost—and despite fulfilling many of our desires, still really quite unhappy.  In the end we end up exhausted, wanting something one day and working hard for it—only to find that by the time we get that one thing, we want something else. 

     The solution does not seem to be found in fulfilling all our desires; not even in fulfilling as many of our desires as possible.  If we fall into the trap of running after every desire we feel, we will really end up like scattered sheep.  We may end up having more, but we won’t necessarily end up being better.

     The solution lies not in pursuing every single one of our dreams and desires, but in sorting out which among them are truly worth pursuing.  And the dreams and desires most worth our while, the dreams and desires most worth our time and energy, the dreams and desires most worth our life—these are the dreams and desires that are from God.  We must learn to sort out which of our dreams and desires are the deepest ones, which of them are the longest-lasting ones. 

     And we can do that only if we listen for the voice of Jesus.  It is His Voice, the voice of the Good Shepherd that will finally gather our confused and scattered flock of selves together, and make us whole.  And so we must learn to distinguish the Lord’s voice from the world’s noise.

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