I love St. Simon of Cyrene. I love that he was plucked out of nowhere, forced into a task he despised, and found eternity in the process. I love that he kept Jesus company on the road to Calvary. I love the image of walking beside my friends as they suffer and spelling them for a bit.
I love St. Veronica. I love that she stepped out of the crowd to wipe the blood and sweat from Jesus’ eyes. I love the risk she took to offer an act of human kindness in a sea of inhumanity. I love the image of serving my friends as they suffer, bringing some peace and beauty into their painful lives.
I love being Simon. I love being Veronica.
But lately I’m neither. Lately I’m Mary.
Normally, identifying with the Blessed Mother is a good thing, a sign that you’re doing something right. You’re trusting God or pointing people to him or interceding. But when the people you love are being tortured, being Mary just means you’re standing there doing nothing.
I don’t want to do nothing. I want to fix it. I want to love them out of their pain or take it over for them. I at least want to do something, say something to make it better, even just a little, even just wiping the sweat out of their eyes.
Veronica wipes the face of Jesus
But I’m not Simon. I don’t get to carry their crosses with them or for them. And I’m not Veronica. I don’t get to give them a moment’s peace. I’m Mary. I only get to be there with them, loving them in utter futility as a sword pierces my heart.
I hate being Our Lady of Sorrows. I hate standing there doing nothing, watching the people I love suffer. I hate waiting for a diagnosis, hearing about infidelity, watching depression. I hate going to prayer and begging, begging, begging to take their crosses from them and being told no. I hate being useless in the face of catastrophic pain.
And yet.
And yet, with all that he could have asked of his Mother in that moment of his greatest need, this is what he asked: just be with me. Just stand there and watch me suffer. Just love me in my pain.
And somehow, that nothing that she did was everything that he needed. Somehow, it bore fruit down through the ages for every one of us. Somehow, it is in her silent suffering with that Mary fulfills God’s plan for her. I’m sure she also wanted to be Simon or Veronica or Peter whipping out a sword or anyone doing anything. But she knew that being there and “useless” was good and right and beautiful.
Weinende (weeping) Madonna by Hermann von Kaulbach
Our Lady wasn’t Our Lady of Sorrows only on Good Friday. She suffered the day after the Annunciation and when Simeon told her the sword would pierce her and when they fled into Egypt and when Jesus was lost and when he left home and when he foretold his death and when she stood at his tomb on Holy Saturday and a thousand other times in between. Because her suffering with him, somehow, accomplished something.
I can’t say I get it. I don’t know what it does to suffer with someone, especially when that person can’t feel you there. But I know that it works for good because God gave that job to his Mother. The most powerful woman in history was left powerless because her helpless inaction was necessary and good and powerful. I don’t have to know how. It’s enough to know that when I am Our Lady of Sorrows, standing uselessly by as the ones I love suffer unimaginable pain, I am not useless. It is good to love them, even when that love seems impotent. It is good to suffer with.
If you are where I am right now, watching helplessly as those you love suffer, know this: it is not to no effect. You are not alone. Our Lady of Sorrows stands uselessly with you, holding you up as you weep and rage and faint from exhaustion. And somehow none of it is useless. Somehow, it is just what you need, just what your beloved needs, just what the world needs. And sometimes that’s enough.
After last week’s post on how every Christian is called to be a missionary, my friend Jenna asked me to get specific. What does it mean to be a missionary in everyday life? So I started brainstorming and here’s what I came up with: 100 ways to evangelize right where you are. While missionaries aren’t just evangelists, I feel like I pretty well covered the service and justice aspect of Christianity in the pro-life post. So I’m sticking primarily with things that are more directly about preaching the Gospel, but all those pro-life practices are ways to be a missionary too.
Not all of these tips will work for all of you. Some types of evangelization take a certain personality. Some will be helpful only with particular individuals (37, 45, 74) while others are more universally applicable (12, 68, 72). Remember: nobody is a project. Treat every person as a child of God, never as the object of a strategy, and you’ll be off to a good start.
Fall in love with Jesus.
Take your children to daily Mass.
Offer to help someone with small children at Mass.
Invite someone to go to confession with you–offer to take him to dinner afterwards to sweeten the deal.
Read the Catechism. The whole thing.
Take your baby to visit the residents at a nursing home.
Sign up for a holy hour in the middle of your prime social time. Then when you leave the bar or the football game to head off to pray, invite people to join you. You’ll be amazed what happens.
Call someone who’s hurting.
Take a picnic lunch to an area with a large homeless population.
Do your daily Bible reading on your commute. It gives your neighbor an opportunity to ask.
When catching up with a friend, ask “How can I pray for you?”
Step outside your comfort zone.
Dress as a Saint for Halloween, but don’t be lame about it. Kendra will show you how.3
Listen to your children.
Smile more.
Cross yourself when you pass a church.
If you know someone who’s sitting on the fence, be frank. Ask them if you can have 15 minutes to present a case for the Church.
Don’t be afraid to say you don’t know.
Bake cookies for prisoners.
Pay the toll for the person behind you. Ask the toll booth attendant to tell him you said, “Have a blessed day.”
Offer to go door to door inviting people to church.
Wear a beautiful piece of religious jewelry. When people compliment you on it, take it as an invitation to give a quick testimony.
Tell people about the Saint of the day.
Weep with those who weep.
Take a friend to an art museum. Hit up the Renaissance section and explain what’s going on with all the Saints and Bible scenes. Think of all the catechesis!
Call a friend out on unchristian behavior.
Go to confession.
Introduce yourself to people you see at church.
Learn to pray extemporaneously.
Invite a fellow parishioner to dinner.
When a friend is suffering, have a Mass said for him.
Change your language–say “God bless you” instead of “Bless you,” “Praise God” instead of “Thank God.” See if it doesn’t start some interesting conversations.
“Never let evil talk pass your lips; say only the good things men need to hear, things that will really help them.”5
Dress modestly but look awesome.
Have friends who aren’t Christian. Don’t try to convert them. Just love them.
Make beautiful Christian art–poetry, photography, music, sculpture. Give glory to God and draw hearts to him.
Never use apologetics as a weapon. If you get angry, take a step back.
Ask someone to pray for you–even if she’s not the type who would offer.
When you receive communion, act like you really believe, like you’re really in love. Your attitude will touch people around you and you’ll find your faith strengthened. It’s more about living what you believe even when you don’t feel it than it is about faking it, and the more you live it, the more you’ll feel it.
Take a friend out for a beer. Hang out. Just be friends.
Bear wrongs patiently.
Ask people’s forgiveness.
When you find yourself judging someone for not being Christian/Catholic or not being a “good” Christian/Catholic, make a list of five things about that person that make her a better person than you.
Remember that you can’t know the state of anyone’s soul.6
Fun fact: I was about to write pretty much that exact blog post with ways to dress as a Saint but be awesome about it–you know, St. Peter Martyr with a hatchet in his head, a Holy Soul with flames licking at your feet, mummy/Lazarus, a princess, a knight, St. Lucy with your eyes gouged out. But then I googled to see if there was a picture online of anybody ever dressed as St. Denis (carrying your mitred head under your arm–awesome!!) and I found that Kendra had done it dramatically better than I was going to. [↩]
Believers can have more than a little to do with the rise of atheism. To the extent that they are careless about their instruction in the faith, or present its teaching falsely, or even fail in their religious, moral, or social life, they must be said to conceal rather than to reveal the true nature of God and of religion. [↩]
CCC 847: This affirmation is not aimed at those who, through no fault of their own, do not know Christ and his Church: Those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience—those too may achieve eternal salvation. [↩]
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.
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.
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.
