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:
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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.
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
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.
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?
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)
