hypocrisy Archives - Held By His Pierced Hands

Bipolar Faith and Its Antidote

I’m staying with a dear friend who knows me very well. Because she knows me so well, she was awfully excited to tell me that we were going to the Chrism Mass this week. I think she was rather taken aback when I wasn’t gleeful.

“Can I tell you a secret?” I asked. “I actually kind of hate long fancy Masses. Isn’t that terrible?”

I went to the Chrism Mass with her and spent the whole time reminding myself that it was okay that it was taking so long. I knew I shouldn’t be, but I was kind of annoyed that I’d spent an extra hour at Mass. I mean. come on. It’s not like I avoid time with Jesus. I just wasn’t really excited about an hour added to my usual (lengthy) prayer routine.

Yesterday, I found the only Saturday morning Mass in town. I left the church basement where I’d spent the night with a bunch of middle school girls and headed over there before 8. After spending Mass remarkably lucid (despite my 3 am bedtime), I was ready to get some prayer time in and then head back for coffee. But no. They pray a novena. And not the kind the little old lady in the front starts while people file out, either. Everybody stayed. Even the priest. And it was loooong. Like, at least 7 minutes. I tried not to be annoyed (because Mass had been short anyway), but I wanted to be done.

I had the same trouble last night. Heading to bed, all I could think about was how long Mass was going to be this morning. I knew it would be exhausting to stand through that epically long second Gospel–especially since there’s always a crowd on Palm Sunday. People always seem to show up when they know there are cool door prizes like ashes and palms. I was annoyed in advance because I was going to have to spend an extra 20 minutes with the Lord.

I make fun of other people when they do this. “Oh, you’re annoyed that Mass was 65 minutes? Good thing Jesus didn’t get down off the Cross after an hour.” “Oh, Mass is boring? You know what else was boring? Dying on the Cross!”¹

But somehow I think I’m allowed to be annoyed at long Masses and extra prayers because I’m already doing so much. “If this were my only Jesus time all week, I wouldn’t mind it being long. But I’ve already spent 2 hours at church today!”

Pharisee.

The Lord blesses me with extra time with him–time when I don’t have a single other thing to do–and I want to get out because I’ve already done my time. I stay because I have to, not because I’m letting him touch my heart. And I was there in the first place because I feel I have to be, not because I’m seeking him.

I’m shocked every year by the two Gospels from the Palm Sunday Mass, by how dramatically the tone changes and how the congregation is swung from one extreme to another. We walk into the church shouting Hosanna and waving palm branches, welcoming our Messiah with joy. Not 15 minutes later, we’re crying out, “Let him be crucified!” I thought it was strange, this bipolar shift from worship to betrayal. And then I realized it’s no accident, not just a convenient way to get the whole story into one Mass. It’s the life of a fallen Christian, crashing from praise into sin without even noticing the change. It’s my life.

I praise him at Mass and then roll my eyes when the little old lady in front of me is exiting the church too slowly. I receive Christ on my tongue and then use that same tongue to belittle the sketchy or dull or tone-deaf priest. I revel in his presence during my holy hour and rage at the person who was supposed to relieve me when I’m stuck an extra twenty minutes. Hosanna. Crucify. God help me, today wasn’t just a particularly interactive Mass–it was my life in a nutshell.

I think it’s all of us, especially those of us who are good. When we’ve been sitting around all day playing Candy Crush, it’s not so hard to get up and change a toddler’s sheets. After all, it’s about time we did something worthwhile. But when we’ve played with them all stinking day and made dinner and washed the dishes and put them to bed and someone wants a drink we’re about ready to go NUCLEAR on their cute little tooshies.

When we’ve only spent 5 minutes with Jesus and someone asks us to pray a rosary, it seems like a good opportunity; when we’ve already prayed a rosary (and a chaplet and a holy hour and the Office…) it’s just too much.

Satan’s a clever one, isn’t he? He lets us pray and do good works, sure, but he makes very sure we only do the ones we want to do. And anything done because it’s your will is always less beautiful than something done out of humility and submission. My self-centered holy hour is far less pleasing to God than my reluctant Hail Mary. Hebrews tells us that Jesus was made perfect by obedience in suffering.² Of course he was already flawless, but humanity is perfected only in obedience. And so he was obedient to Mary and Joseph, obedient to Caesar, obedient to Pilate and the Sanhedrin, obedient unto death.³ Our powerful God opened not his mouth,⁴ submitting to torture and execution not despite having done nothing wrong but because he had done nothing wrong.

As Lent gears up this week and comes crashing to a bitter end tinged with Easter glory, join me in asking yourself: what am I holding back? What crosses am I refusing to bear because they aren’t of my choosing? How has my self-congratulation gotten in the way of my hearing God’s voice? Get to confession and then make this resolution for Holy Week:

I will thank the Lord for every cross. Even the ones that are just minor annoyances that become crosses when I reject them. This week, I will live in the Hosanna. When my life cries out for him to be crucified, I will bite my tongue until I can muster the strength to thank the Lord for his mercy in allowing this red light or betrayal or stomach bug or extra litany or terrifying diagnosis or awkward conversation or rejection or commercial break. I will rejoice in the small inconveniences and allow him to break down the walls of selfishness I’ve built around my pious practices and nice deeds. I will let my piety become prayer by letting him direct it; I will let my kindness become charity by stopping at nothing. This week, I will be a saint.

And next week I will do the same. Hosanna.

Yes, I’m kind of a belligerent jerk. You must be new around here. [↩]
Heb 5:8 [↩]
Phil 2:8 [↩]
Is 53:7 [↩]

On Four-Year-Olds and Pharisees

My four-year-old nephew loves to pray. Seriously, when I talk about that kid, I feel like I’m reciting one of those ridiculous medieval hagiographies that tell you how the blessed child refused the breast on fast days. But John Paul is a little bit of a robot and his lifelong obsession has been all things Catholic. I’m more than a little proud, of course, but also rather bewildered when he wants to pray all the time. On Sunday, he went to Mass, prayed morning prayer, read the Bible all during his “nap,” prayed a whole rosary, prayed evening prayer and the office of readings, did his Saint Andrew novena, and his Magnifikid morning and evening prayer. I’m pretty sure he spent more time praying than I did.

On a given day, it’s not unusual to hear the following lines out of this strange kid’s mouth:

Just a little light reading before bed.

“No, don’t just pray one decade. We want to do ALL the mysteries!”
“Oh, I’m Jesus! I’m walking on water! Now I’m TURNING WATER INTO WINE!!”
“For my naptime story, I would like Isaiah chapter 41.”
“May I please take the Bible to bed with me?”
“No, Mom, don’t turn off the light! Wait till I finish Proverbs!!”
“No, Cecilia, you can’t be Ruth! We’re playing Pentateuch! Ruth is a Historical Book!!!“
“My favorite confirmation Saint is Saint Caius. He was a pope and martyr.”
“Oh, could we please play the martyrdom of St. Ignatius of Antioch? And then we can play my canonization party!”

Really. All in one day. He doesn’t sound real.

So you’d think, given how much he prays, that he’d be less…well…awful. I mean, I know he’s four and life is just hard. I don’t fault him for tantrums over toys and television. What gets me are the tantrums he throws while praying. Yes, while praying. Not, of course, because he doesn’t want to pray. Because he wants to do it his way.

This week, we’ve prayed morning and evening prayer together every day. His idea. And while he’s been praying the Office with me since he was only just three (I’m telling you, he’s not real!), suddenly he can’t do it right. No, it’s not that he can’t do it right. He just won’t.

"We're traveling to Bethlehem!" Riding a leopard. Pregnant with a baby doll. Maybe that's from the Gospel of Thomas. Note John Paul's outfit: a purple "dalmatic" which was our compromise when he screamed and screamed "I want a chasuble now! I want a chasuble today!!" — “We’re traveling to Bethlehem!” Riding a leopard. Pregnant with a baby doll. Maybe that’s from the Gospel of Thomas. Note John Paul’s outfit: a purple “dalmatic” which was our compromise when he screamed and screamed “I want a chasuble now! I want a chasuble today!!”

He insists on praying the Magnificat during morning prayer or he screams “NOOOO” when I read my part (because he wanted to read it) or he starts whining about praying daytime prayer before we’re halfway through morning prayer. I’m mostly happy to ignore or to allow just to keep the peace, but he doesn’t want to keep the peace. So he keeps pushing and pushing–grabbing the breviary, starting a hymn in the middle of a canticle, insisting on starting the whole psalm over so he can be side A–until he feels justified in throwing a tantrum. While praying. Over whether or not to read the italicized text or how to pronounce a word.

No joke, I’ve had to interrupt our prayer to talk about not screaming and punching during the Office every day this week. The other day he kicked me (softly, because the sweet thing is gentle even when he’s enraged) for having the audacity to finish the concluding prayer. Last night he head-butted me in the face (again, so gently it wasn’t even uncomfortable, but it’s the intention we’re concerned about) because I folded the novena pamphlet to read the back instead of turning the whole thing around.

Basically, despite all this time in prayer, he’s obsessed with himself and getting his own way. But you know what? He has an excuse. He’s four.

What’s my excuse?

Because I do the same thing. I do good things but I’m so consumed with doing them the “right” way that I end up doing more harm than good. I get so frustrated at liturgical abuses that I make the Mass about me–my desires for good liturgy–instead of about Christ. I’m so intent on orthodoxy that I forget compassion. I turn everything into evidence to support my ideology or an opportunity to feel persecuted. I do acts of charity and vilify those who work with other populations. I do good for my own ends–either to be impressive in the eyes of men or just to show off to God.¹

James Tissot: The Pharisee and the Publican

You see, I’m a Pharisee. The problem with the Pharisees wasn’t that they wanted to follow the rules. Their problem (okay, one of their many) was that they had to be right. They had to have their own way–they were fine with it being the Law’s way as long as they had chosen it. And anyone who wasn’t doing things their way was wrong. And bad. And deserved to be crucified.

There wasn’t anything wrong with following the Law. God gave it to them, after all. And there’s nothing wrong with living the liturgical year or admonishing sinners or spreading the Gospel or feeding the hungry. But if you’re anything like me, it’s not always about love of God and love of neighbor. Often it’s just self-love–if you can call it love at all.

Pope Francis described one manifestation of this pride motivating good works in his recent apostolic exhortation:

“A supposed soundness of doctrine or discipline leads instead to a narcissistic and authoritarian elitism, whereby instead of evangelizing, one analyzes and classifies others, and instead of opening the door to grace, one exhausts his or her energies in inspecting and verifying.” (Evangelii Gaudium 94)

Our desire to be faithful can be distorted–as can our desires for social justice, transcendent liturgy, compassion, and all things true, good, and beautiful–when we, like the Pharisees, act out of self-love instead of love of God.

Satan’s a clever one. And when you start doing good, he can work with that. He can take your good intentions and twist them so you start resenting people who interrupt your prayer or judging people who serve differently. I think this is particularly dangerous during Advent–we start out buying gifts to please people and end up getting mad at people in the mall or the people we’re shopping for or the whole internet because things aren’t going the way we want them to. We decide to have a quiet, prayerful Advent and want to smack the sweet carolers we pass on the street corner. We go to confession so we can feel superior. We mean so well but it’s so easy to get caught up in ourselves and forget love of God and love of neighbor: the reason for the season, yes, but also the reason for everything.

God saw this in our little fallen hearts, this self-obsession, and knew that redemption alone wouldn’t be enough. Even brought back to him, we would still be so tempted to curve in on ourselves, so painfully inclined to make even selfless acts selfish. So he came down to show us what humanity was made to look like. He became man in an act of complete selflessness. The world actually does revolve around him and yet he lived as though he was nothing.

Via Maria Pureza Escano. — St. Anne and the Young Mary, by Maria Pureza Escano.

This humility begins at the Annunciation: the God whom heaven and earth adore chose to be conceived under shadow of scandal, most likely rejected by friends and family before he was even born. He was laid in a feed trough, worshiped by outcasts, and chased into exile. Each moment was a gift, each instance of pain or persecution accepted purely out of love.

Jesus didn’t use people. He didn’t heal them only to make a point–it was always about them. His conversations teach us something, yes, but they spoke far more deeply to the hearts of those he encountered. The one man in all of history who deserved to be wrapped up in himself quite simply wasn’t. When he spoke about himself–he who is the meaning of life–he was always leading us back to the Father, giving himself in love.

The reason the Gospels are so compelling even to those who don’t believe in the God they describe is that Jesus lived as we were made to: his entire life was about others. All the healings and the preaching and even the resurrection would have meant nothing if they hadn’t been selfless. If Jesus had preached to gain fame or worked miracles to demonstrate his superiority, he would have been a sham and a failure.²

Are you?

It’s a harsh question, I know. I ask it because I’m asking myself. How many of my “good works” are done out of honest love of God and man and how many are done out of pride or veiled selfishness?

John Paul is a fantastic kid, but his piety doesn’t necessarily correlate to holiness.³ I wonder how many of us are living lives of empty piety or charity. Oh, it’s better than giving up and embracing our baser inclinations. But is it everything the Lord is asking of us, this God who desires obedience rather than sacrifice? Is it really his will or have we canonized our own desires?

This nativity scene at Franciscan University has a cross as its focal point. It's all one mystery. — This nativity scene at Franciscan has a cross as its focal point. It’s all one mystery.

We don’t worship a God who merely loves. We worship a God who is love. God in his very essence is self-gift and while that’s supremely true in the dance of love that is the Trinity, it’s nowhere more obvious than in the Incarnation, the ultimate act of love that encompasses all the discomfort and tedium and ignominy and rejection and failure and suffering and death that God willingly embraced for us. Our God gave himself in love every moment of every day–and continues to do so in the Eucharist–that we might be strengthened to do the same.

So can I issue a challenge in the midst of all your shopping and creating and praying and practicing? Could you take a minute to ask yourself why you’re doing what you’re doing? Are you writing or decorating or speaking out of a desire to be more like that fragile God in swaddling clothes? If not, don’t quit necessarily. Just recognize it, repent, and ask for the grace to love. God became weak–there’s no shame in weakness. But a failure to love: that’s true failure.

If I speak in human and angelic tongues but do not have love, I am a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophecy and comprehend all mysteries and all knowledge; if I have all faith so as to move mountains but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away everything I own, and if I hand my body over so that I may boast but do not have love, I gain nothing. (1 Cor 13:1-3)

15 years ago I did a minor good deed and didn’t tell anyone about it. I’m still proud of myself for that. [↩]
And not God…. [↩]
It doesn’t need to. He’s awesome. I’m just making a point. [↩]

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.