As I said before, saints’ days, most holy days and special topics (movies, books, gender, TC, synod) are and will be collected elsewhere. These posts are taking it month-by-month. More links at the end of the post.
But most of the rest of it is a manifestation of us privileged Westerners justifying career goals, personal aspirations, vanity and lifestyle, wearing it like the inspirational t-shirt we picked up on Etsy and comfortably leaning on it like our favorite inspirational pillow.
There’s not a thing wrong with seeking to flourish…thrive…follow your dreams….be your best self. But it’s not the Gospel, and it’s the Gospel of sacrificial love that we’re invited to put at the center of our lives every day, even as every day, we’re also tempted to replace it with something else.
It’s a tricky line to walk, as I’ve written before, countless times. We do have unique gifts that we’re called to use. It’s the purpose of those gifts – to turn over to the Lord’s will. But the temptation to put ourselves – without discerning our own temptations – at the center, rather than Christ, is a temptation as old as James and John’s request to sit at Jesus’ right hand right after he’d predicted his Passion.
Then throw 21st century social media, a decades-long focus on personality as the core appeal of the globe-trotting papacy, the temptation to power-trip, messiah complexes and the assumption that evangelization=establishing a personal connection with a really cool person, and oy….
An aspirational, achievement-oriented culture seeds anxiety as pervasive as the mushrooms in my yard this morning. Especially among the young. In addition, more pertinent to this writer’s point, are the heightened expectations of the Awesome Excitement and Fulfillment we’re all due – because that’s what we see everyone else experiencing, right? And isn’t our God an Awesome God? And if He’s around, and we’re right with him, shouldn’t we always feel Awesome, too?
A church that doesn’t fight this, a church that, in its institutions and official and unofficial spokespeople, feeds this is not truly counter-cultural.
Counter-cultural is remembering the lilies of the field, the whispers to Elijah, a teen girl’s fiat in a backwater village, a priest’s angelic encounter in the midst of his dull routine duties, a traveling evangelist mending tents. Counter-cultural is reminding ourselves of our creaturehood and that we only see through a glass darkly right now, and God is not about emotion but about trust that yes, He lives, in this moment, here, no matter how ordinary and even no matter how sad. Counter-cultural is encouraging, above all, the holiness borne of living in that actuality, wiping newborn bottoms and holding aged, frail, cool hands, pushing a wheelchair, sweeping a floor, listening when you’d rather not and, as Parker says, forgiving the idiots, even yourself.
Apertif…soutane…genuflect? (6/18)
Here I am, a 60-year old woman, writing a few things, tending to the people in her life in 2021, contemplating words noted down from a dead Palestinian scholar from a book written by a Canadian around the time I was born about the Writing Life in Paris circa 1929, around the time my mother was born. In Canada.
Almost a hundred years.
I don’t know what the connection means. I can’t explain, can’t think of a cozy, succinct circle to draw. All I know is that I like it.
I like the actual piece of paper and the photograph printed on paper surprising me, fluttering to the ground from the book made of paper that I bought in a garage in a real house from real people – the daughters, maybe, or granddaughters of the man in the picture – a mile or so from my real house – that somehow connects me to those people, and then to Palestine, to Paris, to Toronto, to all kinds of people, real people, trying to make sense of life, and caring enough about it all to leave their questions, if not their answers, behind for me to find.
ineffable…profligate….
…genuflect (?)
Abram’s home was in a land of idols. Of anxious worship directed at man-made objects of stone and wood, at the forces of nature, the points of light in the sky.
And in the midst of this time and place in which no sane person would have done anything else but shape his life according to these objects and forces, God spoke to Abram.
To yearn for a culture more sympathetic to our sense of truth and reality is reasonable, and to work to shape it is as well, and perhaps even necessary.
But just as we let life pass us by if we are constantly waiting for the perfect moment to act or we declare that we are just living for the weekend to come or for the kids to move out or for retirement – we’re closing our hearts to God’s usually startling invitation right now – if we convince ourselves that God’s reach is constrained by the world’s weakness, sin and misdirection.
Or even our own, right?
Hardly any of us, no matter how many solid individual bishops we know of, have much faith in the American bishops as a group. I’m just here to point out that this is nothing new. And the emancipation of enslaved peoples is a good way to understand that.
Just pick up any objective (aka, non-triumphalist) history of the Church in the United States and you will read that the leadership of the American Church (along with most Catholics south and north) stood in opposition to abolition of slavery and anything but gradual – very gradual – emancipation. I’m not going to rehash all that history here. It’s easily available. Last month, I highlighted this good, brief article in The Catholic Thing on the subject.
Charlotte was Both 