goodness Archives - Held By His Pierced Hands

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.

Stoic JP — 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.

80s2 — 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.

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.