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Seduced by the Trinity

I was once, when I was about 21, at an Episcopalian picnic. I’m not exactly sure how these things happen to me. But I popped my collar and played croquet and sat around smiling politely and keeping my mouth shut on religion and politics for almost the whole day.

Then some guy asked me, “Do you know why I love being Episcopalian?”

And again, I kept my mouth shut. Decades off of purgatory for that one.

“Because Episcopalians can believe whatever they want,” he said. Like that was a good thing!

Don’t say anything, I said to myself. It is RUDE to talk about religion at a party, I said to myself. It’s not fair to start arguing with this poor man, I said to myself. He doesn’t have any idea what he’s getting himself into, I said to myself. Bite your tongue!!

But I was young and self-righteous and so very educated and, much as I tried, I just couldn’t let that one slide.

“Well, there are some things you have to believe, right?” I said sweetly. My plan, of course, was to point out that in order to be a Christian one had to believe in the divinity of Christ. Then I would establish the principle of non-contradiction,1 point out that either the Eucharist is God or not God, expose the inherent flaws in Episcopalianism, and BAM! make a new convert. Because I am that good. And it’s all about me.

“Like what?” he asked, genuinely curious.

“Well, either Jesus is God or he’s not, right? He can’t be both.”

“Why does it have to be so black and white? Why can’t it just be gray?” When I tell this story, he starts sounding like a stoner right about here.

“WHAT?” I shouted, genuinely shocked that anyone would say something that illogical.

“Well, he’s God now,” he continued. “But he wasn’t always God.”

“Oh!  Well you’re not a Christian at all,” I said with a smile, glad we had figured that out. Of course, with claim like the one he’d just made he was an Arian or an Adoptionist or maybe a Mormon, but certainly not a Trinitarian Christian.

Turns out people take offense at that kind of statement.

The conversation (if it merits the title) continued for two hours, with me pulling out Scripture and ancient prayers and him repeatedly dropping a beer can, making some point about truth being demonstrable, I think. It’s funny if I tell it in person. Here, I think, not so much. Suffice it to say that the difference we couldn’t get past, like many people in the first three centuries, was a disagreement over the nature of God.

Whether or not you’re a Christian comes down to this: the Trinity.

It’s hard to care about the Trinity–the doctrine, anyway. We come up with long arguments to explain the Eucharist and buy t-shirts to proclaim our commitment to chastity, but the central mystery of our faith gets little press. Sure, it begins and ends all our prayers (“In the name of the Father…”), but beyond that, nothing. I’d guess that many Catholics can’t even name the three persons of the Trinity. I’ve definitely heard some guess Mary.

Why? Because mystery is awkward. And maybe, for some of us, because it doesn’t make any sense. So we ignore it and hope it’ll go away.

The Trinity is our life’s destiny and greatest longing. -JPII

Our life’s destiny and our greatest longing–and we skim over it, dedicate one Sunday to it, and move on!  Or we mutter “One person in three gods…or in three persons…something about how one equals three…well, it’s a mystery, so you’ll never understand it anyway.”  I don’t know about you, but I think that’s pathetic.

The Trinitarian Shield

Well, that clears everything up, doesn’t it?

When we use the word Trinity,2 we mean one God in three persons, distinct but not separate. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit all possess the one divine nature, each possessing it fully. Yet the Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Spirit, and the Spirit is not the Father.

We’re not saying 1 = 3. We’re saying label your terms. 1 yard = 3 feet. 1 nature = 3 persons. This is not illogical. Supra-logical, perhaps. Beyond our reason but not contrary to it.

Think of it this way: God is like H2O (bear with me here).

But H2O exists in three phases: solid (ice), liquid (water), and gas (steam). Ice is fully H2O, water is fully H2O, and steam is fully H2O. But ice is not water and water is not steam and–okay, you get it.

Or, for those who are more musical than scientific, try this on for size:

Ignore the fact that middle C is doubled. Or pretend it has something to do with the hypostatic union.

Each of these notes is C–ask any musician. Gentlemen, sing a low C to a child and he will echo the note a few octaves up. They’re the same. And yet they’re not. High C has a frequency of 512 hz, middle C 256 hz, and low C 128 hz.3 Distinct but not separate.

Or we could pull a St. Patrick and use the shamrock. One plant, three leaves. (As an aside, a shamrock is St. Patrick’s 3-leaved explanation of the Trinity; a four-leaf clover is a pagan symbol of luck. You’re welcome to tattoo either on your butt, just make sure you pick the one that matches your convictions.)

I’m pretty sure St. Patrick looked a lot like this but with a miter instead of that funny hat. And clearly this picture was taken during Ordinary Time.

I could go on all day, but I think we’d do better to look at the nature of God.

God is love (1 Jn 4:16). But in order to be love, God must have a beloved. He could not be defined as love from all time if he were alone. If that were the case, he would have created us out of need, the need to have an object for his nature. But it is a fundamental truth believed by all monotheists that God does not need us. Peter Kreeft puts it simply: “If God is not Trinity, God is not love.” Because if he is not one God in three persons, he is either an egomaniac, eternally enamored of himself, or pathetically needy, creating an entire universe in order to fulfill the purpose of his being. None of those mesh with the testimony of Scripture.

The Fathers understood it this way: the Father is the Lover, the Son is the Beloved, and the Holy Spirit is the Love between them. They are eternally caught up in loving one another, eternally pouring themselves out as gift for the others.

What this means for us is that God doesn’t just choose to love us–he is love, which means that by his very nature he has to love us. He can’t stop loving us, no matter what we do.

It also means that God himself is community. The fact that we need each other is a manifestation of the fact that we are made in the image and likeness of God.

I think the doctrine of the Trinity is most important, though, because we don’t need to know it. We could be saved just knowing that Jesus came to save us, even if we didn’t understand how he relates eternally to the Father. God chose to reveal himself to us in his depths as Trinity not because he had to but because he wanted to.

Frank Sheed says (and really, just go read the whole chapter–it’s brilliant):

The revelation of the Trinity was in one sense an even more certain proof than Calvary that God loves mankind. To accept it politely and think no more of it is an insensitiveness beyond comprehension….

It seems natural that a God who is love would go to any lengths to save us (Rom 8:32), even dying for us. But to love us enough to reveal his inner workings–that’s extreme. I’d throw myself in front of a bus for a lot of people, but I’m much more hesitant to share my heart.

When we talk about the Trinity, we don’t mean some dry theology, drawing artificial distinctions between “person” and “nature” and calling everyone a heretic. We mean that God himself loved you so much that he wanted to reveal himself to you, a gesture so intimate it’s generally reserved for the marital embrace (in a perfect world). He wanted to be known by you–fully known and embraced.

Yes, it’s a mystery. Gentlemen, on the night you are married, your wife will reveal herself to you. And you will know her more fully and be enraptured by that knowledge. The next morning, she will still be a mystery. Each day of your life, God willing, you will understand her better. But she will never cease to be a mystery. And this mystery isn’t awkward, it’s fascinating, enticing!  In our personal lives, we find this alluring. Let’s look at God the same way.

The mystery of the Trinity is an invitation to unveil the beauty of One who loves you unconditionally. Why do you shy away?

  1. A thing cannot be itself and not itself at the same time, or X is not equal to not X. That is to say, murder can’t be wrong for you because you think it’s wrong but not wrong for me, because I don’t. Or a doughnut doesn’t become God just because you believe it is. No joke–someone actually made that argument to me once. [↩]
  2. Which, by the way, is nowhere in the Bible and comes to us solely from the Church’s authority, via the Ecumenical Council of Nicaea (think Nicene Creed) in 325. What’s that you say about sola scriptura? Oops, turns out you can’t be a Christian without Tradition. [↩]
  3. According to a million places on the internet. [↩]

Why Prayer is Boring

I once took a class on prayer. It was very interesting, I’m sure, but I still have no idea how to pray. I’ve even taught classes on prayer. I know there are all kinds of distinctions about mental prayer and vocal prayer and contemplative and mystical and meditative and on and on, but in all my many hours of “praying” (by which I generally mean sitting in a chapel talking to myself about things that have little to do with anything spiritual) I’ve only discovered three kinds: saintly prayer, snotty prayer, and boring prayer.

Saintly Prayer

When I speak of saintly prayer, I don’t mean the prayer the Saints generally speak of.  That’s often bitter and empty (à la Mother Teresa or John of the Cross).  When it’s not, it’s selfless and self-emptying.  It’s entirely about God, not about the one who prays.  I tell you, friends, I am not there yet.

Although I wouldn’t mind a little ecstasy now and again.

I’m talking here about the prayer that feels good.  The kind of prayer where you’ve got something to say and so your holy hour speeds by.  The emotional high of singing praise music or the comfort of finding meaning in Scripture that hits you exactly where you are.  I hope you’ve all experienced this–some peace, some joy, some answer in prayer.  It’s a beautiful thing, a true gift.  And for those of us who have felt God in this emotional way, the experience can strengthen us through times of emptiness.

This kind of prayer is nice.  It might strengthen your faith or give you a passion for sharing the Gospel.  That’s lovely.  But emotional highs are candy–they are not daily bread.  If your prayer were all lovely and happy and fulfilling, you’d soon stop praying out of love of God and start praying out of love of the feeling of prayer.  That’s not virtuous and it’s not love.  If prayer is about growing in love for God, it can’t always be fun.  There has to be struggle and sacrifice and trudging through months of blah if it’s going to mean anything.

Cherish the gift of prayer that touches your heart and stirs your soul.  But don’t seek that in prayer.  God made you for something better than thrills.

Snotty Prayer

I was talking with an 18-year-old boy the other day and he started describing his experience from the previous night.  It seems he was having a miserable time over a girl and he needed to pray it out.  So he walked as far away from his house as he could get, off into the wilds of Kansas corn, and fell to his knees, screaming at God.

“I was sobbing,” he said, “tears pouring out of my eyes, snot running down my face.  It was disgusting.  And one of the most inspiring moments of my life.”

God didn’t answer his question, the desperate “Why?” he was crying into the night, but he came away comforted anyway.  Because that prayer, that desperate, guttural cry to the one who made the universe and holds us in his hand–that prayer reminds us that we’re alive.  When life is good and pleasant, it’s easy to start feeling lost.  This is why people in this country are so rich but so, so poor.  We coast through a life that gives us everything we’ve ever asked for but leaves us empty.  Snotty prayer reminds us with a stab to the heart that we are very much alive.  The pain exhilarates in a way that joy rarely does and we begin to feel again, to strive again, to fight again.  Sometimes rock bottom is exactly where we need to be.

I think that snotty prayer is also a testimony to the depths of our faith.  We doubt God’s existence when we’re unhappy, but we blame him when we’re miserable.  We hope he’s not watching us when we’re trying to get away with something but we insist that he listens when we feel abandoned.  I have my doubts about God–we all do–but never when I’m snotty.  When I’m on my knees in the cornfield (or sitting in the driver’s seat of my car, more often), I know God’s there.  I scream, “Are you listening?  Do you even care?  Why won’t you answer me??”  But in those moments of desperation, it never occurs to me that he might not be there at all.

There’s a depth of faith, still beneath the rolling surface of daily mediocrity, that we doubt until we find ourselves raging against a God who, it seems, we knew was there all along.

This prayer is miserable, but it’s a blessing.  It’s a reminder that we’re alive, a reminder that God is, too.  And so, as much as it hurts, it’s beautiful.  But faith can’t be sustained by this kind of prayer, either.  For one thing, it would be exhausting.  For another, your face would probably start to chap.  But more importantly, prayer is more than emotion, positive or negative.  Faith can be strengthened by this prayer, too, this prayer which in its suffering is somehow more real than even the saintly prayer.  But what feeds our faith is much more mundane.

Boring Prayer

Maybe your daily prayer time is meaningful and directed without being thrilling.  Maybe you find peace in practicing the presence of God and the stillness of your meditation strengthens you to continue.  If so, I commend you (with slight bitterness and more than slight suspicion).  For the rest of us, let’s talk about how boring prayer is.

It really is, isn’t it?  No, not always.  And, in my experience, it becomes less so the more you practice it.  Until it doesn’t.  And you go to the chapel and check your watch every 2 minutes until your holy hour is up.

Maybe I’m just more ADD than most, but my half hour meditation sometimes feels like a herculean task.  I remember going to visit a former student when I was fresh out of the convent.  I was a professional pray-er.  She was 17.  We went to do a holy hour together and mine looked like this:

Dear Jesus, I love you so much.  Um, I really love you.  A lot.  You’re great.  (58 and a half minutes to go)  Um, help me be holy.  I really want to do your will.  Make me like you.  (57 minutes to go)

Imagined continued platitudes and watch-checking for another 27 minutes, then various books and devotions and such to fill my hour.  Meanwhile, Katherine knelt silently for an entire hour.  I was so frustrated–I’m supposed to be good at prayer!  I certainly practice it enough, right?

First of all, Meg, don’t be an idiot and quit comparing yourself to people.  Remember when Peter did that?

Peter turned and saw the disciple following whom Jesus loved, the one who had also reclined upon his chest during the supper and had said, “Master, who is the one who will betray you?” When Peter saw him, he said to Jesus, “Lord, what about him?”  Jesus said to him, “What if I want him to remain until I come? What concern is it of yours? You follow me.” (Jn 21:20-22)

Jesus basically says, “Peter, shut up and deal with your own issues.”

But I think the real issue is that I naturally look down on prayer that’s difficult.  I think it’s not real prayer unless I feel something.  Why?  The Christian life is difficult.  It’s even dull much of the time.  Why would prayer be any different?

Here’s what I think: a lot of the time, prayer is boring because it’s supposed to be.  If I went to prayer every day because I enjoyed it, it would have nothing to do with love of God.  Yes, sometimes I enjoy prayer.  More often, though, I go because it is good, because he is good, because I want to be good.  St. Thérèse said that when we want to leave prayer 3 minutes early, we should stay 3 minutes longer.  If I took her at her word, I’d probably have to double all my prayer.  But the point remains that the prayer we do not desire has the most merit.

People are always telling me that they don’t pray (or go to Mass or read the Bible or whatever) because they don’t “get anything out of it.”  But that’s exactly when you get the most out of it!  You get discipline and selflessness and the satisfaction of offering yourself to God not because of what he does but because of who he is.

Look at it another way: I hate to run.  I refuse to do it.  ((Seriously, if you chased me with a knife, I wouldn’t run.  If I’m going to die anyway (which I will–I couldn’t outrun someone in a coma), I at least want to die breathing.))

Running is awful because I’m so out of practice.  If I ran every day, I’m sure eventually it would become bearable.  ((That’s what they tell me, anyway.  And the crazies even say that running becomes fun.  That I do not believe.))

Prayer is similar.  We were made to worship but the Fall has us terribly out of shape.  We need to practice. And as we pray each day and gradually increase our time in prayer, we will learn to hunger for it and even to experience God, to “get something out of it,” if you will.  It won’t matter which of the Teresian mansions we’re in or what approach to prayer we’re taking because it will have transcended all that.  But I would hazard a guess that most days it will still be boring.

I do get saintly prayer occasionally and I cherish it.  And I even manage to rejoice in the gross, snotty prayer.  But it’s the boring prayer where I put my money where my mouth is, where I kneel before the crucifix and tell God I love him.

“Prove it,” he says, and keeps his mouth shut.

Mary, Ark of the Covenant

I struggled with the idea of the Blessed Virgin Mary for a long time.  I wasn’t raised with her and it’s hard to see how all that weird Catholic stuff with songs and statues and candles and parades isn’t worship.  I figured early on that I could just ignore it and be okay, but, as it turns out, you can’t really be Catholic if you’re not at least trying to be into Mary.  So I tried.

I started praying a rosary every day, I went to Medjugorje, and I even did St. Louis de Montfort’s total consecration to Mary.  But I still didn’t get it.

And then I found the key somewhere surprising–the Old Testament.  For pretty much everything I understand about Mary, I’m eternally (literally) in the debt of Scott Hahn, specifically his work in Hail, Holy Queen.  When I read that book, I started to see that Mary is literally all over the Bible–the ancients were just subtler than I wanted them to be.

Marian theology’s too much for one post, obviously.  Here I want to focus on Old Testament typology (foreshadowing) and Mary as the Ark of the Covenant.  I’ll share the experiences in prayer that led me to a deeper understanding of Mary some other time.  For now, let’s talk Scripture.

The Ark of the Covenant is an ancient artifact stolen by the Nazis that will consume you with lightning if you–oh, wait.  Not so much.

George Lucas didn’t get everything right.

The Ark was the center of God’s presence for the Israelites.  In Exodus 25, it is described in detail as acacia wood plated with gold.*  According to Exodus, the tablets of the ten commandments were placed inside (Ex 25:21).  Numbers 17:25 suggests that Aaron’s staff may have been placed there as well, but it’s unclear until Hebrews 9:4:

…the ark of the covenant entirely covered with gold. In it were the gold jar containing the manna, the staff of Aaron that had sprouted, and the tablets of the covenant.

So the Ark of the Covenant held the presence of God and contained the life-giving bread, the high priest’s staff, and the word of God.

See where I’m going with this?

The Ark was treated with reverence, not because it was God but because it contained God (in a sense).  It led the Israelites and was given a place of highest honor.

This is all on my mind because of the Feast of the Visitation yesterday, in which we celebrate Mary’s visit to Elizabeth.  We’re used to these words because we’ve heard the story so much: the infant leaped, how does it happen that the mother of my Lord should come to me.  But those Jews who read Luke’s Gospel would have been familiar with them, too, because the same words are used in reference to the Ark in 2 Samuel 6, where King David was bring the Ark of the Covenant into the hill country (Lk 1:39).  Check it out:

Then David came dancing before the LORD with abandon, girt with a linen ephod. (2 Sam 6:14)

When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the infant leaped in her womb. (Lk 1:41)

Now, I’m no Greek scholar, but I did manage to ascertain that the Greek word for dancing in the Septuagint (Greek version of the Old Testament) is the same as the word for leaping in the New Testament.

David said, “How can the ark of the LORD come to me?” (2 Sam 6:9)

Elizabeth said, “And how does this happen to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” (Lk 1:43)

Again, we’re seeing the same language here, only replacing Ark with Mother.

The ark of the LORD remained in the house of Obed-edom the Gittite for three months. (2 Sam 6:11)

Mary remained with her about three months and then returned to her home. (Lk 1:56)

So Luke’s definitely feeling this Ark of the Covenant business, but John makes it even clearer in Revelation.  Turn to Revelation 11:19 (right before Revelation 12, which we hear read from on pretty much every Marian feast day).

Then God’s temple in heaven was opened, and the ark of his covenant could be seen in the temple. There were flashes of lightning, rumblings, and peals of thunder, an earthquake, and a violent hailstorm.

Wow.  That’s pretty intense.  To give you some context, the Ark of the Covenant, which was the center of Israelite worship, had been lost for centuries.  According to 2 Maccabees 2, Jeremiah hid the Ark in a cave right before the Babylonian Captivity (around 587 BC).  So for 600 years, the most important thing in the world was lost.  And John saw it!  It was such a huge deal that there was lightning, thunder, hail, and an earthquake.  This thing is for real!

And then the chapter ends and John moves on.  “I saw the Ark!  It was epic!

“Then this other time I saw a lady.”

That’s how it reads to us, with a big, bold “Chapter 12” separating his proclamation that he saw the Ark from his description of the Ark.  But remember, John didn’t write in chapters.  He said, “I saw the Ark!  It was epic!  A lady in the sky with a crown of 12 stars….  She was the mother of all Christians” (Rev 11:19; 12:1, 17; paraphrased).

John is explaining here that Mary is the new Ark of the Covenant.  Just as the old Ark contained the life-giving bread, Mary contains Jesus, the Bread of Life (John 6).  Just as the old Ark contained the high priest’s staff, Mary contains our Great High Priest (Heb 4:14).  Just as the old ark contained the word of God, Mary contains the Word of God made flesh (Jn 1:1-3, 14).

“Okay, so Mary’s like some box,” says the voice in my head.  “So what?”

So what??  So everything!!

Seriously, understanding this is a huge step towards understanding pretty much everything the Church teaches about Mary.

The Immaculate Conception

(This is when Mary was conceived without Original Sin, not when she conceived Jesus.  Think embryonic Mary.  More on this topic another time.)

The Ark of the Covenant was specially prepared to house God’s presence (see Ex 25 again).  It was pure and holy, made specifically for a divine purpose.  If Mary is the new Ark of the Covenant, she, too, must have been prepared from her creation for this purpose.  She must have been pure, not by her own power but by the power of Him who created purity.  They wouldn’t have used a random box for the Ark; God wouldn’t have used a random sinner for the Mother of God.

The Perpetual Virginity of Mary

(Mary remained a virgin before, during, and after the birth of Christ.  Again, more on this later.)

The Ark of the Covenant was created for a sacred purpose and was made sacred by what it contained.  If one were to empty the Ark of its holy contents, one would not then use it as a jewelry box or a stepstool.  It was consecrated to one divine purpose; to use it for a worldly purpose would defile it.  Now sex is holy and beautiful (see this beautiful reflection by Elizabeth Hanna Pham for proof), but sex must be open to life.  And every baby besides Mary and Jesus is conceived with Original Sin.  For Mary’s sanctified womb to nurture fallen life would defile it, just as using the Ark for a good but profane** purpose would be wrong.

The Assumption

(Mary was assumed body and soul into heaven by the power of God.  She never suffered death, the separation of body and soul, as it’s a consequence of Original Sin.)

The Ark of the Covenant, as I said above, was made sacred by what it bore.  Middle Eastern culture has a strong sense of sanctity (and profanity) being contagious, if you will.  See pretty much the whole book of Leviticus for proof.

Having been made sacred, even if it had been emptied, it would have been honored.  It wouldn’t have been left in the desert to rot (can things rot in the desert?) and it wouldn’t have been broken up and tossed.  If Mary is the new Ark of the Covenant, she, too, must be revered even after she no longer contains the presence of God.  An empty Ark wouldn’t have been tossed; Mary’s body wouldn’t have been left to decay.  Since the options seem to be death (nope), immortality (I think we’d know if she was 2000 years old), or eternal life in the body (the Assumption), I think the logical answer is clear.

Reverence for Mary

No, the Bible doesn’t tell us to have parades and sing songs to Mary (although Luke 1:48 sure seems to suggest it), but that’s how Israel handled the Ark.  Luke and John both make it clear to the discerning reader that the Ark is a type of Mary.  So we honor her, we respect her, we pray through her, not because of who she is but because of whose she is and who he made her to be.

*These are the kinds of passages that make me want to skim.

**Profane, in this sense, does not mean evil but secular, non-sacred.

The Glory of Confession

As a high school teacher, I’m supposed to be opposed to be peer pressure.  “Don’t worry about what other people think,” I’m supposed to say.  “Be true to yourself.  Follow your heart!”

Sometimes your peers are less stupid than you, though.  Sure, it would be better to follow the Saints or wise adults or pretty much anybody over the age of 30, but peer pressure isn’t always bad.  In fact, everything good in my life is a result of peer pressure.

You see, if no one’s paying special attention, it’s pretty easy for a Catholic kid growing up in America to make it from First Reconciliation through Confirmation without making a second reconciliation.  It’s an unfortunate truth, all the more so when the kid in question lied in her first confession.  Yup—I told him I broke a cup and blamed it on my sister.  Not true.  She broke the cup.  What a pathetic way to enter into mortal sin.1

That’s me in the front strangling that kid. In my defense, he seems to be enjoying it.

Once I found myself in mortal sin, I just kept digging myself in deeper.  I had a field day with lying, cheating, stealing, and cursing.  I didn’t pray, and if you had asked me, I would have told you I didn’t believe in God.  I distinctly remember answering “I don’t know” while the rest of the congregation chorused “I do” during the renewal of baptismal promises at Easter.  Before I knew it, I was confirmed, having no idea if there was a God and not particularly caring.  I was actually late to my own confirmation because I was shopping.  Definitely ready to be a soldier of Christ.

That March was our confirmation retreat.  After confirmation.  Whatever.  Despite my penchant for breaking rules, I didn’t want to get in trouble, so I went.  On Saturday night, we were split into small groups, and as we discussed the great woes of our adolescent lives, the other girls went to confession, one by one.  Now, I didn’t much care what this theoretical God thought of me, but I cared very much what the other girls thought of me.  As I watched them go, I became convinced that if I didn’t go to confession, none of them would be friends with me.

There is no worse threat you can issue to a thirteen-year-old girl.

And so, unprepared as I was, I got up when it was my turn and walked to the cabin that was doubling as a confessional.  Fr. Mark Moretti was the patient priest who heard what was functionally my first confession and turned my world upside down.  That day, I was returned to a state of grace and was introduced to Jesus Christ, the love of my life.  Despite ongoing struggles with sin,2 I gave my life to Christ that day and haven’t looked back since.  The life I would gladly have tossed away on Friday afternoon became a joy on Saturday night, and has been ever since.  I owe my joy, my career, and my life to the grace that flooded my soul that chilly March evening.

Kind of like this only I was probably wearing a flannel shirt and Umbros. Oh, and no mohawk.

God Said So

“I’m sure that was very nice for you,” some of you are thinking right now.  “But I don’t enjoy confession.  Why should I go?”

The simple answer?  God said so.

Jesus said to his disciples, “Peace be with you.  As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”  And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.  Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them.  Whose sins you retain are retained.” (Jn 20:21-23)

The first part of this commissioning sets up an analogy.  In a throwback to SAT prep, we could say that the Apostles (today’s priests) are to Jesus as Jesus is to the Father.  Jesus was sent into the world with the Father’s power of reconciling man to God; the Apostles, too, were sent into the world with Jesus’ power of reconciling man to God.  They are being sent, one might say, in persona Christi—that is, in the person of Christ.

Now, Jesus didn’t do much after the Resurrection.  He hung out with some disciples, ate some fish, walked through some walls—all seemingly unimportant events with great theological importance.  So it’s important here that we look at what he said and at what he did.  Here, Jesus doesn’t just give the Apostles a job.  He breathes on them.  The only other time in Scripture that we see God breathing on someone is in Genesis: “The Lord God formed man out of the clay of the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and so man became a living being” (Gen 2:7).  Adam was clay, lifeless, until God breathed on him.  The breath of God made him more like God; it made him a man—something totally different from what he had been.  Jesus’ breath has the same effect on the Apostles: it makes them more like God.  It changes them into something different.  Here, they become priests, able to forgive sins with the power of Christ’s forgiveness.

When Jesus gives the Apostles the power to forgive sins, he isn’t just encouraging them to be forgiving, as he is in the Sermon on the Mount.  He’s telling them that the forgiveness they offer actually does something.  And it’s pretty clear that the Apostles are being told not just to offer forgiveness but actually to hear confessions in some form—how can they refuse forgiveness without knowing the sin and its circumstances?

The Epistle of St. James makes that even clearer: “Confess your sins to one another and pray for one another that you may be healed.  The fervent prayer of a righteous man is powerful indeed” (Jas 5:16).  James tells us that we can’t just ask God for forgiveness; we have to confess our sins to one another—to priests, if we’re reading it together with the Gospel of John.  From these two verses, we can see that Jesus has sent priests with a ministry of reconciliation, receiving penitents and forgiving them in Jesus’ name, by the power of the Holy Spirit.

And the Apostles clearly understood this role because the early Church gets it, too.  Hippolytus of Rome prays at ordinations that priests may “have the authority to forgive sins, in accord with your command.”  That was in 215 a.d.  In 248, Origen tells us: “[A final method of forgiveness], albeit hard and laborious [is] the remission of sins through penance, when the sinner . . . does not shrink from declaring his sin to a priest of the Lord.”

Sure, in the early Church it looked different from what we’re used to—they actually had to confess in front of the whole church and then do a penance that could take years.  (Makes you wonder why you complain about whispering to a priest who can’t even see you….)  But the basics of the Sacrament—the form, matter and minister—haven’t changed since the time of Christ.

It’s for Your Own Good

Our God isn’t arbitrary, though, and He doesn’t enjoy watching us suffer.  The Sacrament of Reconciliation exists for a number of purposes, all closely tied to human nature.

If you’re going to shape up, you really have to regret your past.  I don’t know about you, but I feel a lot sorrier for my sins when I have to say them out loud.  It’s all well and good to tell God you’re sorry about something—He already knows about it.  You have to be really sorry to be willing to accuse yourself of it to somebody else, though.  And since sin is rooted in pride, the humility required in the confessional is the antidote.  Besides, how many of us have withstood temptation simply because we couldn’t bear the idea of confessing it?

For those of us who have habitual sins to overcome, the process of examination of conscience and confession can be invaluable.  I had my conversion in the eighth grade, but I still cursed like a sailor—until I realized that I confessed cursing every time I went to confession.  Maybe a year after my conversion, I came to a sudden realization that confessing cursing meant I actually had to stop.  (There’s a funny story there about how I decided to quit cold turkey without asking for God’s help and ended up missing the bus twice and ripping my pants open at school.  Another time, maybe.)  Something about saying the same thing every time makes you desperate to change, in a way that I don’t think I would have been without that monthly reminder.

If nothing else (and this is true of all Sacraments), we need something physical to feed our senses, since we are physical and spiritual creatures.  My friend Katy and I were hanging out one night in high school after listening to a chastity speaker.  She said, “I’ve confessed my sins to God, so I know I’ve been forgiven, but every time I go to one of these speakers, I feel guilty and confess all over again.”  I didn’t know how to react to this—my sins are gone!  They’re not my own any more.   The experience of hearing the words “I absolve you” makes it impossible to deny that you are forgiven, loved, and made new in Christ.  Now, knowing this and believing it can be very different things, but when it comes down to it, a believing Catholic can give an exact moment at which her sins were forgiven.  However she feels about her past, she knows God, who gave us this Sacrament so we could experience the joy of certain absolution, has forgiven her.

There are any number of reasons that God gave us this Sacrament, and there are any number of reasons to take advantage of it.  Go because you can’t live with what you’ve done.  Go because you know there’s something missing in your life.  Go because you want to be at peace with the Lord.  Go because it would make your grandmother proud.  God is so desperate to forgive you, He’ll accept you for any reason—even adolescent vanity. You have nothing to lose but your sin.  You have everything to gain.

“Jesus said to the woman, “Neither do I condemn you.  Go, and from now on, do not sin any more.” (Jn 8:11)

 

Fast Facts about Confession:

  1. Catholics are required to confess all mortal sins (serious sins that you willingly committed, knowing they were wrong) at least once a year.
    -Even if you’re not in a state of mortal sin, this is a good minimum
    -It’s a better idea to go every Advent and Lent—better yet to go once a month!
  2. You’re only required to confess mortal sins (being specific about the sin and the approximate number of times you committed it), but you’re encouraged to confess venial sins
  3. If you forget to confess a sin, you’ve got nothing to worry about—it’s covered.  If you leave one out on purpose, your confession is invalid and you’ve added the sin of making a bad confession to your list.
  4. Your sins are forgiven at the moment of absolution (“I absolve you of your sins….”) if you are intending to do your penance.
  5. To be forgiven, you have to want to avoid those sins in the future.  You do not have to be certain that you will never sin again.  That would be ridiculous.
  1. I know, I was 7.  Believe me–I knew what I was doing. [↩]
  2. have I mentioned I’m kind of a jerk sometimes?  Yeah, that was here [↩]

A Challenge to the Church on Her Birthday

This morning, I went to Mass at the church across town, one I rarely go to.  I’m not sure that I’ve ever met the pastor, although many of my friends are parishioners.  After I received communion, Father asked me if I was an Extraordinary Minister of Holy Communion (a lay person commissioned to distribute the Eucharist).  I was fairly taken aback, as I don’t usually make conversation with Jesus in my mouth.  “Not here,” I said.

“The ciborium’s on the altar,” Father continued.  “Take communion up to the choir.”  Now I’m a good Catholic, so when a priest tells me to do something at Mass, I do it.  I went back, got the ciborium (bowl of consecrated hosts), and went back to the choir loft.

Now, I’m so much not a member of this church that I had to stop at one of the pews and ask for directions to the choir loft.  I was very confused that Father had asked me, of all people.  I don’t even know him.

But this is a small town.  And he knows me.  He knows that I’m a religion teacher.  He probably knows that I’m discerning consecrated life.  I would imagine that he knows I used to live in Georgia and I recently bought a car and I wear size 10 shoes and I hate bananas.  Because that is how small towns work.

People complain about small town life but, after two years, I’m sorry to go.  There’s something about being known by the people around you.  Sure, you can’t go to Walmart in your pajamas without being judged by your kindergarten teacher and your mechanic, but you also can’t fly under the radar.  Wherever you go, people are interested in you.  They ask what’s wrong when you look a mess.  They hear about your big news through the grapevine and are excited for you, even if they barely know you.  Strangers walk up to me and tell me they’ve seen my study guides.  How do you know me and why do you care?  Because it’s a small town and that’s what we do—we know and we care.

I’m a social person.  I’m such an extravert that I have to take breaks from work to talk to people or I’ll never accomplish anything.  So it stands to reason that I would enjoy always having someone to chat with.  I wasn’t surprised when, after years of suburban sprawl, I loved small town life.

I think, though, that small towns fill a need we all have: the need for community.  We need the accountability of being missed when we skip Mass.  We need the accountability of being noticed when we’re out two-timing our spouses.  We need to know that what we do and say does not go unnoticed, that our sins hurt not only us but the body of Christ.  Small towns sure as heck provide that.

We also need to know that we are needed, that we are known and loved, that we belong to something bigger than ourselves.  We need to know that people care about us.  Sure, it’s hard when people get gossipy or judgmental, but that’s the fault of fallen people, not of community.

I love living in a small town because it does for me what my parish rarely has: it provides community.  I’ve found few Catholic churches that really feel like family; not the way Atchison does, anyway.

There are a lot of reasons that Catholics leave the Church for various Protestant denominations: difficult Church teachings, bad Church music, and blah preaching are high on the list.  But I think a huge player in this game is the fact that Protestant churches are real communities.  They’re not just buildings where people happen to show up once a week.  In the best cases, they’re the social center of the parishioners’ lives.  This is where you see your friends, where you met your wife, where you go for love and support.

He was generally less enthused than I about the holy sacrifice of the Mass.

For Catholics, not so much.  Take this example: when I was 25, I spent half a year in a parish where I went to Mass every day.  In a crowd of about 40, I was the only person between the ages of 7 and 45.  I took my baby nephew with me every day.  At the end of my time there, Father still didn’t know my name.

I spoke with a Protestant friend about this.  She mentioned that she had started seeing someone but she didn’t want to take him to church with her.  “You know how gossipy church ladies get,” she said.

“No, actually, I don’t,” I replied.  “People at my church don’t care who I’m dating.  They don’t even know my name.”

This isn’t God’s plan for church communities.  Protestants have “church homes.”  Catholics go to a dozen different parishes depending on convenience.  In most cases, we don’t know each other.  We duck in right before Mass and hurry out after communion, eager to beat the traffic.  Churches try to combat this with soup suppers and doughnuts after Mass, but it rarely works.

It comes down to this: Catholics are really good at having the Church.  We’re not so good at having churches.  These aren’t communities.  We’re not walking together, supporting one another.  The Mass is all about community as we speak together in the plural voice, and yet we don’t know each other.  It’s ironic, the faceless anonymity we cling to as we celebrate the redemptive death of a God who commanded that we love each other as he loved us.  He loved us enough to die for us.  We don’t love each other enough to learn each other’s names.  Seems sketchy to me.

So I guess I’m really asking a question here.  What are we doing wrong?  Why are Catholic churches so rarely home to people?  Have you seen a church home done well–Catholic or Protestant?  What can parishes do differently to bring people in, to build relationships and genuine community?  Can this happen at the parish level or does it have to be part of some lay movement of like-minded people?  On this feast of Pentecost, the birthday of the Holy Church, can we figure out a way that our churches become our families?

I guess I just feel as though my church ought to be more a place of fellowship than the clearance aisle at Walmart.  Call me crazy.

 

Give me your thoughts in the comments!

On Hippies and Hypocrisy

A few years back, I was driving from Atlanta to Kansas City—easily a 14 hour drive, and I was doing it all at a stretch.  Alone.  No biggie, I thought.  I’ve done longer.  So I was cruising along, fist-pumping out the sunroof to the best parts of my favorite songs (okay, yes, it was Footloose) when disaster struck: Bonnaroo.  I started seeing signs telling me to expect Bonnaroo traffic.  I honestly thought it was some kind of imported Australian animal, so I called my sister to Google it.  Turns out it’s an outdoor music festival—think Woodstock but crunchier.

My sister’s roommate told me to go, but I was too excited about the prospect of reaching the land of barbecue and limeade, so on I went.

Until the traffic hit.

Now I’m from DC—I know from traffic.  In high school, I knew at least a dozen different ways to get to school, depending on time of day, weather conditions, and who was in office.  Showing up 2 hours late to school was excused if you were stuck in traffic.  I literally kept a book in my car for rush hour.  So traffic doesn’t generally bother me.

But this was no ordinary traffic.  We were stopped.  So stopped that some of the Bonnaroo folk were parking their cars, grabbing their…paraphernalia…and walking to the campsite.  They were laughing and strumming their guitars and looking all emo and I.  Was.  Stuck.

The longer I sat there, the more I started to hate them.  Those stupid little hippies with their “music” and their “camping” and their “free love.”  I gritted my teeth and turned up my mainstream 80s pop music to drown out the folk music I imagined coming from the flower children.  As I inched by crowds of androgynous people wearing Birkenstocks and throwing Frisbees, I felt old and angry and self-righteous.  Stupid kids and their stupid Bonnaroo.

I was 22.

Finally, after probably 2 hours of crawling, we passed the booming metropolis of Manchester, Tennessee and traffic picked up.  After that infuriating fiasco, though, I was low on gas, so I pulled off at the next stop to refuel.  And the stupid hippies were there, too!  Standing around in their “ripped jeans” with their “shaggy hair” and their stupid unwashed selves, they had the nerve to be getting gas at the very same gas station I was at!!!

Have I mentioned that I get really angry really easily?

I pumped my gas with a vengeance, burning with anger at these people whose fun was literally ruining my road trip when I caught a glimpse of myself in the gas station window.

About as ridiculous as I look here, just not in the same way.

I was wearing flip flops.  And jeans that were more holes than jeans.  And a 10 year old t-shirt from an island-themed musical.  My hair reached halfway down my back.  It had been blowing out the sunroof, so it was huge and frizzy.  And unwashed.  And held back by a bandanna.

I was one of them—I was one of the hippies!  And they were looking at me and smiling.  They thought I was their friend!  And I was NOT THEIR FRIEND BECAUSE THEY MADE TRAFFIC AND I HATE TRAFFIC!!!!!!

That was when I realized that I was absolutely ridiculous.

“Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own eye?” (Mt 7:3)

The trouble is, when I’m angry I don’t generally see people as people, I see them as obstacles.  When I’m annoyed at the airport, it’s not at the little old lady shuffling along but at that thing in between me and my gate.  When a kid won’t shut his mouth in class, I’m not mad at Ben, I’m mad at something that won’t stop making noise.  I reduce people to what they are and ignore who they are, but I get angry when others do the same to me, when they see only the bandanna and the ripped jeans and don’t know that I AM A SERIOUS ADULT WITH VERY IMPORTANT BUSINESS AND NONE OF THIS HIPPIE MUSIC NONSENSE!

But how can I expect people to bear with me, to love me, to see me for who I am if I won’t even try to do the same for them?  It’s an obvious problem in a crowd, surrounded by nameless, faceless strangers, or online, when you’re dealing with pixels, not people.  And it’s less embarrassing there; I mean, you’d have to be Mother Teresa to love each individual in the world, right?

I think this detachment seeps into the rest of my life as well, though.  That crying girl is keeping me from my dinner.  If my friend weren’t sick all the time, maybe I’d get to see that movie with her.  And it is just so typical of my sister to say something like that!

And here’s where I really struggle.  It’s not so much that I depersonalize those closest to me, lumping them in with all the other hippies instead of admiring their unique combination of dreadlocks with tie-dye.  It’s that I define those I “love” by my terms.  “That kid’s a hippie and isn’t it just typical that he’s smoking a blunt and wandering along with a Frisbee!” I say (figuratively), and that’s my excuse not to love.

You see, the more I can define people by their screw-ups, the angrier their screw-ups make me.  If my co-worker is rude to me once, I can ignore it pretty easily.  If she’s rude to me every day, pretty soon I’m angry even when she’s polite.  If my 2-year-old nephew, refusing to say he’s sorry, says, “I’n seethee!” it’s actually pretty cute the first time.  Once he’s said it 35 times in a day, I’m angry at him even before I ask him to apologize.

Dietrich von Hildebrand talks about this in Man and Woman: Love & the Meaning of Intimacy (which, admittedly, I have not read).  He says:

A representative mark of genuine love is found where each of the other person’s worthwhile qualities is looked upon as really his, as typical of him.  But his shortcomings are presumed to be deviations from his real self.  Where something undesirable is apparent, the expression “That’s not like him” is characteristic of love….  Where there is genuine love in response to the person’s beauty as a whole, it is to be expected that his negative traits will not be considered typical….  Love considers everything negative as a deviation.

It seems, then, that patience and real love are choices, not accidents.  When we choose to love someone, we choose to view all her faults as atypical.  Of course, I’m not saying that you should ignore the fact that your girlfriend criticizes you nonstop or that your boyfriend hits you.  I’m saying that when there are relationships we must maintain, the best way to do that is to refuse to brood over injury or rejoice over wrongdoing (1 Cor 13, if you’re keeping track).

Just as people falling in love somehow seem not to see each other’s faults, we can choose not to see each other’s faults.  St. Ignatius Loyola once said (I think—the internet doesn’t seem to agree) that we ought to say of every man we meet, “Jesus died for this man.”  For me, this is more powerful than trying to see Christ in everyone, because some people just don’t seem much like Christ.*  Serial killers, for example, or middle schoolers.  But Jesus died for them just the same.

When Jesus was hanging on the cross, he was thinking of me.  And he wasn’t thinking, “Oh, it’s just so like her to brag about that.  Ugh, she’s always trying to make other people feel small.  Oh, now she’s going to get mad about something stupid?  How typical!”

When Jesus thinks of me, he sees beyond my sins to the person I was made to be.  When we love as he loved, we choose to look beyond people’s flaws and see their true selves.  We refuse to be slaves to impatience and anger.  We love them as they are, just as we want to be loved.  We choose not to define people by their sins—even their constant sins.

Why do we demand to be treated as people when we treat others like things?  Why, when we see a splinter in our brother’s eye, do we look down on him instead of trying to help him get it out?  Forget about whether or not you’ve got a wooden beam—why do you hate people for their sin instead of trying to love them through it?

We’ve all got someone in our lives whose poor behavior is “just typical.”  Maybe your teenage daughter rolls her eyes every time you talk.  Maybe your mother asks you the same questions you’ve already answered over and over again.  Maybe your wife spends every dinner complaining about her day.  Here’s your challenge: refuse to see that flaw as part of that person.  Recognize that it’s not okay and choose to move on.  Because your daughter is so much more than her bad attitude.  And your mother is nosy because she loves you.  And your wife is so beautiful and so kind and so tired.  You are not your sin.  Neither are they theirs.  Judge not.

 

 

 

*Although if I’m really being honest I have to admit that if Jesus came today he’d probably be road-tripping to Bonnaroo right now.

The God of Failure

I hate failure.  I know, I know, everybody does, but I’m one of those type A folk who would rather be set on fire than get a B on a test.  I still feel the need to justify the C that I got on a Scarlet Letter test in 7th grade even though I hadn’t read the book.*   There’s something about failing that makes me burn with shame.  I lose sleep.  I’m honestly surprised I haven’t given myself an ulcer yet. And the thing is, I started life off pretty well. As long as success was about school and not souls, I did well. I achieved and achieved and achieved and was quite pleased with myself all through my academic career.

And then, apparently, the Lord decided that I was better than that.  And the failure began.

It was little things at first, things that didn’t overshadow the good I felt I was doing.  Students who hated me, friendships cut off; even leaving the convent after I had told everyone I’d be there forever didn’t seem too bad in the face of all the ways I’d succeeded.  Sure, there were failures, but overall I felt I was changing the world and winning souls for Christ.

Lately, though, it hasn’t been that easy.  Failure these days isn’t occasional, it’s daily.  Every day, some kid I’ve poured my life out for tells me my class is a waste of time.  Or makes really bad choices and lies to me about it.  Or listens to every word I say and then throws his life away at some party.  And there’s nothing I can do.

So my motto recently has been Mother Teresa’s: God has not called us to be successful, he has called us to be faithful.

Because the Christian life is not about success.  I suppose I should have figured this out the first time I noticed that the guy everyone was talking about was hanging dead on the wall.  Here I am worshiping a man who was executed naked while almost nobody looked on, and somehow I thought my life was going to look different?

When you follow a crucified Lord, you will be a failure.  You will fail at work because you refuse to compromise integrity.  You will fail in your pursuit of holiness because you are fallen.  And, as I have learned to my chagrin, you will fail in your service to the kingdom because it’s not about you.

This summer, mired in self-pity because I’m a total failure, I found myself listening to yet another homily on the Parable of the Sower (Mt 13:1-23 for anyone following along at home—does anyone else feel as though that reading comes up ten times a year?).  This time, though, Father wasn’t talking about what kind of soil we are.  He focused on God’s prodigality.  God doesn’t choose only fertile ground; he sows his seed everywhere on the off chance that it will take root.  He’s not jealous of his grace but lavishes it on even the most unwelcoming hearts.

God offers his life to every punk kid there is—even to me, self-obsessed as I am.  And when he asked me to take up my cross, he asked me to be crucified along with him.  Sitting in the comfort of my first world home, it seems it would be easy enough to suffer martyrdom (although I’m sure I’d feel differently when faced with the opportunity) or even to be persecuted for righteousness’ sake.  But this pathetic daily failure?  This inability to meet deadlines or love well or change hearts?  That’s a cross.

The central paradox of Christianity, though, is precisely this: it is our greatest defeats that are our greatest victories.  We lose all we have to be filled with the riches of the kingdom.  We mourn and are comforted.  We die to rise again.

Jesus failed—again and again and again.  He lost his disciples because he was too extreme (cannibalism—John 6).  He fell three times under his cross.  He couldn’t even keep those he loved most from falling into grave sin.  He is fully God and fully man, like us in all things but sin.  Like us especially in failure.

But Jesus’ defeat was victory specifically because it was redemptive.  And that’s what he’s called me to as well—a life of failure embraced for the salvation of souls.  He’s asking me to lavish myself on barren soil, to offer myself again and again to be crucified by those whose salvation I desire more than anything else.  And when, in the throes of passionate prayer, I offer my life to him as a sacrifice for souls, he takes it gladly.

(Seriously, though, you have to be careful what you pray for.  I once told God I’d do anything if he’d make my students holy.  I woke up the next morning with my eye swollen shut and then broke my tooth in half.

I’m warning you–if you follow Jesus, he might make you really ugly.

A month later, I prayed the same prayer, and again he took me at my word.  I walked into my apartment to discover green mold growing on everything I own.  Don’t tell God you’re willing to suffer for something if you’re not prepared to scrub cinder blocks for hours on end.)

And his promise is this: “In the world you will have trouble, but take courage; I have conquered the world.”  Not “you will conquer the world,” but “I have conquered the world.  The promise is that I will suffer.  And I will fail.  And as my life draws to a close, I may look back and see nothing gained.  But Christ has conquered the world.  And my life of failure will bear fruit, whether I see it or not.

We are an Easter people living in a Good Friday world.  We fall and we fall and we fall beneath our crosses.  But still we rise because the promise of the empty tomb leads us on.  So let’s ignore success and failure and broken teeth and broken hearts.  Let’s plant in whatever soil we find and forget about looking for fruit.  Let’s embrace our crosses and rejoice in defeat.  Because when we go before God, unemployment and divorce and teenage drama and middle school exams and pimples and even Bush Push 2005 will count for nothing.  We will realize, with Graham Greene’s whiskey priest, “that at the end, there was only one thing that counted: to be a saint.”

Let’s begin.

 

 

 

*But really, what teacher has a kid take a make-up test in a room filled with socializing kids??  I was so distracted I didn’t even finish!

Love Hurts

As a high school teacher, I hear some pretty sweet gossip.  Sure, they usually frame it as concern for their friends, but what it really is is rumor-mongering.  Because they don’t actually want me to do anything.  And they don’t really want advice.  What they want to do is voice their concerns about their friends in a way that poses absolutely no threat to them.  And so they come to me, they pour out their hearts about all the bad things everybody else is doing (concealing, of course, how drunk they were when all this happened), and they go away satisfied.  “I want to help,” they think.  “I really do.  But there’s nothing I can do.”

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately—about how so many of these kids can want to be good and so few feel strong enough to do it.  It’s because they don’t have any real friends.  Sore, they’ve got plenty of people who’ll stay up all night laughing with them.  They may even have a few who’ll stay up all night crying with them.  But they don’t have anyone with the guts to make them cry.

The world tells us real friends don’t make us cry.  Real friends are super-awesome and really fun and never judge ever no matter what.  I typed “best friend” into Pinterest for proof, and check out what I got:

Oh, that’s Christian friendship, right there.  Best friends don’t help you stay sober, avoid drunken idiocy, and prevent alcohol poisoning, but they’ll carry your drunk butt home after you’ve made a fool of yourself.  Best friends don’t help you process and forgive, they burn for revenge along with you.  And nobody better call you out on whatever got you stuck in jail—bail me out or come with me, but don’t you tell me not to screw up.

You want to know why good people gossip?  It’s because we don’t have the guts to be good friends.  We know our friends are screwing up and we want them to do better but we’re too interested in our friendship and not interested enough in our friends.

That’s what it comes down to, isn’t it?  The reason we don’t call our friends out on their nonsense is because we’re afraid they’ll be mad.  We tell ourselves that we don’t want to hurt their feelings, that we know it won’t help anyway, but really we just don’t want to lose the security and popularity of having that friend.

Think about it—don’t you have a few relationships like this?  A friend who’s dating a loser and everybody knows it but nobody’s willing to say something to upset her?  A friend who’s bordering on alcoholism but you don’t want to judge?  I know I do.  I claim to love my friends but I’m not willing even to risk being awkward to save their reputations, their lives, their souls.  What kind of love is that?

Jesus tells us that the greatest love we can have is to lay down our lives for our friends (Jn 15:13).  And then he puts his money where his mouth is.  He embraces his cross with joy because he would rather die than spend eternity without you.  And it’s a sweet image, isn’t it, this pristine Jesus hanging on the cross?  We wash his body and put him up in our churches and talk about all those nice things he said to sinners.  “Neither do I condemn you,” says sweet surfer Jesus with his kind eyes, and we shut the Bible before he tells the woman to sin no more.  We make stained glass windows showing the love the Father has for his prodigal sons but we skip Matthew 23 entirely.  Read it—the whole thing is pure condemnation.  The man who is Love incarnate yelled at people and called them names—because he is love.

Jesus ate with tax collectors and prostitutes and even Pharisees.  He loved them.  Really loved them.  Which meant that he wasn’t content to cover their sins with platitudes and let them go happily on their way to hell.  He loved the woman at the well and so he pointed out her sin.  He loved the Pharisees and so he called them a brood of vipers.  Jesus loved them exactly as they were but he loved them too much to leave them that way.  When we say love hurts, we don’t just mean that it hurts to love.  We mean that sometimes what real love does is inflict pain—knowingly, intentionally—in order to heal.

Now, I’m not advocating that you go storming into your best friend’s favorite bar and flip over the tables.  And I’m pretty sure that you’ll get arrested if you bring a whip to school for when people start sinning in the hallway.  But consider for a minute: do you have a friend who needs some tough love?  And are you really helping her by pretending everything’s okay?

If you have the guts to say something (after much prayer, of course, and with all the gentleness that the situation warrants), you’re probably going to suffer.  A real friend will (hopefully) see that you’re speaking from love.  But he may be furious.  He may stop speaking to you.  He may hate you forever.

But maybe he’ll change.  Maybe he’ll see your point and try to be better. Maybe twenty years from now, he’ll thank you.  Maybe you’ll find yourself in a real David-and-Jonathan kind of friendship where you love each other honestly and challenge each other to grow and in a hundred years we’ll list you together when we pray the Litany of Saints.

Or maybe not.  You may lose your friendship and gain nothing.  But you have to ask yourself: am I willing to suffer for this friend?  Would I rather be lonely, knowing that I did my best to help her grow, than secure in a shallow, fake friendship?

Or am I content to sacrifice my friend in order to preserve my friendship?  Because if you are, that’s not love at all.

This Christianity business is a lot messier than the greeting cards would make you think.  Christmas was more manure than glowing baby.  Easter was more creepy holes in the hands than pretty white lilies.  And real friendship is sometimes more about tears and discomfort than about hugs and laughter.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I have a phone call to make.

My Hopes for the Graduates of the Class of 2012

I’ve sat through a lot of commencement addresses, from Steve Case warning us about the internet crisis in Africa (you’re right, that’s the crisis we should worry about) to Alan Page extolling the virtues of affirmative action (irrelevance was the least of his issues). The only thing I remember my high school commencement speaker (Congressman Tom Davis) saying was that he remembered his commencement speaker saying he wouldn’t remember anything from that speech. Yes, I see the irony.

I sat through another yesterday, all filled with inspiring words about changing the world and following your heart (no joke—the day after I published that bit about not following your heart). I didn’t love everything she said, but it got me thinking about what I have to say to my kids, my babies who are going off into the world. I haven’t been able to protect them from much, but at least I’ve been around to help patch them up afterwards. Now I can’t do anything and it breaks my heart.

Every year that I’ve taught, I’ve kept the last ten minutes of the year to offer my last pieces of advice. It looks something like this:

As you go from here, I have so many hopes for you.

I hope you know that you are strong, you are beautiful, you are good enough, you are loved.

I hope you live for something. I don’t care what it is, Christ or music or family or whatever, but I hope you don’t just drift through life. I hope you live a life that means something, that when people look at you they see honor and integrity and love.

I hope you fight and struggle and question, that you never stop striving to be great.

I hope you conform to no one but Christ.

I hope you live in the Sacraments, that you remember what Christ sacrificed for you and never skip Mass Sunday. I hope that you never stop repenting, confessing, and striving again to be a saint. I hope you trust in the mercy of a God who loved you enough to die for you and never stay away from him out of fear or shame.

I hope you hunger for God, for Scripture, for the Bread of Life, that you pray every day, even when you don’t feel anything.

I hope you trust his Church but fight to understand all she teaches.

I hope the crosses you carry transform you. I hope you embrace the cross, that you find Christ in suffering. I will not hope that you do not suffer because I know that it is enduring suffering that makes you great, but I hope that when you suffer you cling to God and let him make you whole again.

I hope you find people who love you for who you are but want you to be better. I hope you are accepted and challenged, that the people you love are worth fighting for.

I hope that you’re caught up in a love so great it spills over to those around you.

I hope you dream big and ignore impossible.

I hope the world is a better place because of you.

I hope that when this life draws to a close you discover that all along you were led by a love that calls you deeper, that makes you greater, that brings you home.

And when you find yourself on the edge of eternity looking into the eyes of that love, I hope you throw yourself with abandon into his arms to be loved as you deserve.

I hope I see you there.

Congratulations, Class of 2012. Go out there and set the world ablaze!

Following Your Heart

I stumbled across a brilliant blog post the other day with advice for teenage girls ranging from awkward-but-true (“maybe you should stop offering your own breasts up for the ogling”) to touching (“You are beautiful.  You are valuable.  You are enough.”).  I nodded till my neck hurt and then offered my students presents for reading it.  I gushed about it and raved about it and then I moved on.  Because I am (allegedly) an adult and have learned these lessons.

Today in prayer, though, I was struck by this: “’Follow your heart’ is probably the worst advice ever. “

Amen!  Your heart is stupid!  Don’t look at me like that, you know this.  Remember that guy (girl) with the spiked (long) hair who wore those amazing JNCO wideleg jeans (um…that shirt she looked all cute in)?  Okay, so I was in high school in the 90s.  Forgive me.  But work with me here—that kid’s in jail.  You were so in love and everything would have been so perfect if your parents/friends/less attractive significant other hadn’t gotten in the way.  All you wanted was to follow your heart and be true to yourself but you were stuck following the advice of people who think with their thinking organs and not their blood-pumping organs.  And where did that get you?  Oh, yeah, prom pictures where nobody’s wearing an orange jumpsuit.

Despite the fact that anyone over the age of 12 knows this, though, following your heart is the only virtue left in American cinema.  Josie Geller follows her heart to the pitcher’s mound in Never Been Kissed.  Who cares if she outs an innocent man as a sexual predator along the way?  She’s being true to herself!  Or how about Cher from Clueless following her heart into the passionate embrace of…her stepbrother?  And nobody has a problem with that?

You see, when we’re “true to ourselves” above all else, we’re generally stomping all over someone else.  (Unless you’re so holy that you love others more than yourself.  In that case, may I suggest starting a blog to teach the rest of us?)  Our hearts may want to drown our sorrows, cheat on our taxes, and kick our children to the curb (figuratively, I’m sure).  A well-ordered mind, or conscience, or, dare I say, soul, knows better.

Now, I’m not saying every decision you make should spring directly from an Excel spreadsheet (although that is how I chose my last home).  I’m just saying that your heart isn’t an unfailing compass to happiness.  Because your heart is broken.  Maybe not broken in two, but somehow lost, confused, hurt, stony—broken.   There’s something in you that isn’t as it should be.  This is ultimately a result of the Fall, but more immediately caused by an absent father, a number on the scale, a demanding mother, a best friend who found someone better, a pink slip, a solo Valentine’s Day….  Your heart learns to long for things that will not fill it and runs from the One who will.  You need meat and potatoes but your heart grasps at Snickers instead.  And so following your heart without regard for consequences or kindness or truth, beauty, and goodness just leaves you clinging to the candy while you slowly starve to death.

So when I heard that line, I put a big check mark by it in my head and moved on.  But today, I started to wonder.  Doesn’t God write his plans in our hearts?  Can’t I trust my heart to lead me in his paths?

It struck me that the Christian life is about letting God tear from your heart whatever is not of him, letting him break and remake you.  As I suffer in obedience to him, he conforms my heart to his.  The more I love and seek him, the more my heart leads me in his ways.  The more I pray, the more my life is built on who I am in him, not who I am to others.  When I sit before the tabernacle and ask God to show me his will, I usually just mean that I want him to validate my will.  I grasp at the happiness he has for me without accepting the joy that he is for me.  But when I seek to love and serve and be consumed by him, the hardness of my heart is transformed into flesh—into his flesh for the life of the world.

St Augustine said, “Love God and do what you will.”  Not because the rest doesn’t matter but because your will is aligned with his when your life is about him.  So maybe “follow your heart” isn’t the worst advice ever—if you’re really following God.  Ten years ago, the most powerful desires of my heart were to get married and have babies—two things I no longer believe God’s calling me to.  I don’t think the deep desires of my heart have changed, but I’ve started to recognize what my heart is truly longing for: to be loved as I am, to give myself away, and to nurture others.  Gradually, I’ve learned to see what my heart truly desires and to listen to what God has written there.

I’m not there yet—of course I’m not.  I’m starting to trust, though, that my will is an accurate reflection of God’s will when it comes to the big things.  A friend asked me today how I know that God’s asking me to start this ministry.  I explained that God reveals his will to me in many different ways (more on those soon) but in this situation I felt a deep desire to do something that doesn’t naturally sound appealing.  I like to have plans and safety nets and instead I’m driving away from the people I love, leaving with no job, no home, and no plans to find either—and I’m thrilled!  When my heart rejoices in something that isn’t natural to me, I start to listen for God’s voice in that.

My heart is still divided on pretty much every front and there are many areas where “following my heart” would be as much of a disaster as it was when I was 15.  One day, maybe I’ll be so completely his that my heart is his heart.  Until then, I’ll let prudence balance passion and trust the thoughts of those wiser than I.  Pray for me!

 

Oh, and (because it was stuck in my head the whole time I was writing this) here you go: