Category: What Satan Hates

Why Believe this Jesus-Pope-Church Stuff is Really Real?

Faced with so many Catholics, even the leaders of many Catholic institutions, openly rejecting the teaching of the Church, I had to ask myself last week: Why shouldn’t I go the same way?  If Georgetown and Notre Dame are allowed to call themselves Catholic, why should I feel compelled to avoid their purported errors?  If you can be Nancy Pelosi or Joe Biden and not be excommunicated . . . maybe they are the ones who are right after all.  Maybe the Catholic Faith is about our finding our own path, and each doing what he feels is right, and the Catechism is just so many suggestions, helpful to some, not required for all.  Maybe.

Having entertained that thought experiment, what convinces me to persist in my catechism-slinging?  Here’s my list:

1. Jesus was crucified.  If Jesus just wants people to go their own way, do their own thing, why die on the cross?  Those words: “Father forgive them, they know not what they do.”  The Jewish leaders who campaigned for the cruxifiction were, by Jesus’ own words, only doing what they thought they should.  If that’s not a sin, why forgive?

And if truth and the will of God can be molded to fit our situation, and there’s really no need to worry about fine details and firm definitions, why sweat blood in Gethsemane?  If the Father’s will is merely that we each do our own will, Jesus could have slipped off in the moonlight the way he’d done plenty of times before.

There’s a branch of dissenting Catholics who deny the crucifixion and resurrection, treating one or both events as mere myth.  In which case, sure, a mythical God feels no pain, the blood and the anguish must be just as fictional.  But I don’t think the Incarnation is nothing more than an especially glorious fireside tale, because of the next reason on my list.

2.  The Martyrs died for their faith.  An agonizing death for the sake of a little incense?  I don’t think so.  If the ancient faith were a mythical faith, Roman officials wouldn’t have written letters advising each other how to deal with those cantankerous Christians.  A mad man can gather a few suicidal followers for a short time; no one persuades synagogue after to synagogue throughout the whole Roman empire to face death rather than recant a myth, generation after generation.

It is possible the early Church was wrong, and Christianity is not true — plenty of men have shed their own bled in defense of a mistaken cause.  But those who give their lives freely, for the martyrs were never coerced by the Romans — the Romans urged them to spare their own lives with a few simple gestures — those who give their lives freely do so because they believe they must.  That the faith of the Church requires an absolute loyalty to Jesus Christ and no other.  A Christian can, and should, respect the honest unbeliever; but respect is something different from agreement.  In the early Church, “find your own path”, or in the Roman style, make Jesus just one more god in the pantheon, this it’s-all-good-enough Christianity was no Christianity at all.

3. I’m not ready to throw the saints under the bus.  Were all these martyrs and saints who insisted on one Lord, one Faith, one Truth — were they kindly people sorely mistaken?  Did the Holy Spirit’s promise to lead us into all truth tarry a while, and we didn’t get the real faith handed on until 1960-something?  When we canonize someone, we don’t claim their every word was Gospel, their every action impeccable.  Saints err.  This saint didn’t reason into the Immaculate Conception, that saint had a bad temper, and there’s an alarming amount of disagreement about dress codes and attachment parenting.  (I suppose the modern Church is very saintly that way.)

But every single saint, all of them, wrong about the same basic facts about the faith?  Saint Thomas Aquinas as a jolly old fellow who gave it his best on theology, buy the man a beer and tell him that really there’s nothing particular to know about Jesus, but thank you for getting so many Dominicans off the streets and into the university?  Saints Isaac Jogues and Kateri Tekawitha showing their remarkable pluck, and hey, there’s room in the celestial sweat lodge, relax and try some pantheism for a while, you look like you could do with a change  — it’s all the same thing anyway — hey, what happened to your hands, buddy?

Nope.  My brain just won’t go there.  Because of my final reason.

4. I’m sane.  I mean that in the most charitable way.  (And the most limited way.)  I spent two decades in school, learning “creativity” and “critical thinking”, which was education-code for “outlandish is good” and “If you can convince people, it must be true.”  I had a harrowing moment in business school when I persuaded my accounting professor the wrong answer was in fact correct — the assignment was to argue the assigned position, so I did.  It was wrong, and anyone with half a brain could see it.  But I could argue well. I persuaded her.  It was my first brush with the darkness of dishonesty.  After that I quit going along so nicely with inane assignments.  I graduated anyhow.

But I didn’t really learn how to reason — that is, to find the truth — until after I reverted.  In returning to the Church, I was beseiged by arguments against the Catholic Faith not from the anything-goes crowd, but from sincere and fervent evangelical friends.  The stakes were high: My own spouse was now a born-again evangelical (protestant) Christian.  Try telling someone five years into a happy marriage that he’s gotta start using NFP, and by the way, our marriage isn’t valid and we need to get a priest to fix it.  The man had good reasons to doubt the credibility of the Church before; now the ol’ Mother-n-Teacher is intruding into his bedroom and making his wife think crazy-wacky-papist-talk.

You can’t buy into “it’s all the same thing” when your good friends are giving you books telling you the Church is the Dominion of Satan.  You have to answer the question.  You have to examine the evidence, and decide one thing is true and another is false.  No quantity of parables about blind men feeling the elephant can make Satan and Jesus into the head and tail of a big grey spirituality that squirts water out its trunk.

I could choose not to know the answer about God — to be agnostic about Christianity the way I am agnostic about evolution.  (I don’t care enough about evolution to have an opinion on it, nor to bother forming one.)  But whereas I could in good faith believe that knowledge of God is unimportant, I could not in good reason believe there is no single answer about God.  Either evolution happened or didn’t, and if it did, it happened in either this way or that.  Species didn’t evolve for those who want that to be their truth, and get plopped down as-written for those who prefer a younger and more predictable planet.  Either Jesus is the Son of God, or he isn’t.  Either He founded a Church, or he didn’t.  Either the Pope is head of that Church, with the ability to teach authoritatively, or he isn’t.

A Catholic can in good faith be unable to answer these questions  — to lack the mental capacity, or the free time, or even the knowledge these questions exist.  But to know these questions abound, and in sound mind believe there are no absolute answers to them?  No.  As certainly as a child knows either the dog ate the cupcake or it didn’t,  sane Catholics know that facts are facts, whether we know the facts or not.   Good faith demands good reason.

The Making of a Lukewarm Catholic

Last week in the comments to “Catholics Acting Catholic”, Anna asks:

How? How does the modern church read the same scriptures as me and MISS that Christ is Lord, He is The Only Way, The. End. ???

The Church is made up not of partisan chunks, but of individuals.  Anna and I agreed it was unwise to speculate on what might make any one person lean this way or that in their approach to the faith.  But I don’t need to speculate about myself.  Before I was a pope-loving, catechism-slinging revert, I was agnostic.  And before that?  I was one of those other Catholics.  The catechism-optional, find-your-own-path types.

(Which is how I found my own path out of the Church — and later, following the same method, found my way back in.)

So, to answer Anna’s question . . .  What was it that made me, in 1991, a Georgetown kinda Catholic?  (At heart, if not in wallet.)  Thinking through it, my response is very simple: It was the religion I’d been taught my whole life.

My parents were both Catholic, but we barely went to church when I was little.  After I received my first holy communion at age 7, we quit attending Mass or CCD.  It was one of those parishes where they didn’t do confession until later, so I spent the next decade receiving communion, but never going to confession, or even knowing anything about that sacrament, except what I saw in movies.

Every year at Easter, my mom would say, “And we’re going to start going back to Mass every Sunday from now on,” and every year we wouldn’t.  But she didn’t give up.  In 1988 we moved from metro DC to a small Bible-belt town, and my mom argued it was social necessity for us to turn out a church every Sunday.   She was 50% southerner by birth, which gave her some authority as an expert on these matters, and plus you could count the baptist churches and know she was right.  We went to Mass.

It was kinda fun, after I got over my snotty teenage attitude.  Being Catholic in a baptist-methodist town was countercultural. In your face. Also I loved the God part.

We didn’t do anything crazy though, like praying at home, or reading the Scriptures, nothing Bible-Thumper like that.  We read the same newspapers — Wall Street Journal, the local paper, the diocesan paper.  We watched the same TV shows — heavy on the MTV during the day, sitcoms at night.  My sisters and I read good wholesome magazines for teen girls, like YM and Elle.  I thought the USCCB’s movie reviews were awfully uptight — I just ignored them.  If someone suggested maybe certain music wasn’t so edifying, I would have scoffed.  Paranoid types.  Throwbacks.  Idiots.

Our parish did offer Catholic sex ed, and we attended, but we also did secular sex ed — both at school and via everything we read and watched and listened to.  My parents no doubt wished they could instill a few Catholic moral values in that department, but they had no notion that it was possible — not even, perhaps, entirely convinced it was necessary.  One evening our Catholic youth leader did a presentation about Catholic teaching on sex.  Birth control wasn’t a topic — neither for nor against.  I raised my hand and asked her this: What if two people had promised to marry each other, and they were faithful and they really were going to get married and stay faithful — would it matter if they had sex before hand?

She was literally stumped.  Unable to say it was wrong.  Unable.

After all, she’d been raised in the same religion as me — the religion of the popular media and public schools and rosy planned parenthood commercials.  This was the faith of our nation.  Our religion was Modern American, flavored Catholic.

***

Why be a Catholic-favored American?  Well, for one thing it’s a beautiful faith.  The liturgy, the art — we had a gorgeous parish church, wonderful musicians.  There’s the sense of history.  There’s the McDonald’s factor, too — when you travel, you always have a place to fit in.   And just as I’d proudly say I was part-Irish or part-German, it was a pleasure to have a Catholic identity.  I expect I would have made just as fervent a modern American progressive-Muslim or progressive-Jew.  It’s a heritage.  You love your heritage the way you love your grandma, even if she does sometimes let slip a racist remark, and you know your better, but you never say anything because she’s your grandma.

And here’s the other thing, and this is the truth about many good Americans, whether pagan-flavor or Catholic-flavor or gay-flavor or you name it:  Nice people.  Kind people.  People who do good things for others.  People who try their best to be the best person they can be.  Faithful catechism-reading Catholics don’t have the corner on the Niceness market.   Nice is universal.

So why stick around a Church that I thought was wrong?  Well in the long run I didn’t, but my departure had more to do with being out of town on the weekends and falling in with non-religious friends than it did with an active dissent from the Church.   So what kept me claiming the name of Catholic for many years, until I finally gave up on the Christian thing altogether?

  • There’s God.  Humans are spiritual.  We don’t walk away from God easily.
  • There really wasn’t any conflict.

Oh, sure, you sometimes maybe heard or read some Catholic thing that you disagreed with.  But when find-your-own-path religion is the voice of the entire wider culture, and a prominent voice within the Church?  You go with it.

And that’s it.  I left for college (State U, no money for Georgetown) an exuberant, rosary-praying, sometimes-Bible-reading Catholic teen, but one who had no serious Christian discipleship, no serious training in the faith, and not a single voice pointing to a faith that was something other than American Mainstream Culture with incense and candles attached.   State U did the rest of the work  to finish off that remnant of a faith.

And interestingly, it was  the hardcore, this-is-not-mere-culture,  Do You Accept Jesus as Your Lord and Savior evangelicals who both cemented my final separation with Christianity . . . and brought me back into the fold. Whence a baptist deacon unwittingly plopped me down at Mass on a Wednesday morning in 1999.  And with a little help from  Jack T. Chick, I stayed.  And started doing what the Catechism said.

Book Review: Eric Sammons’ Holiness for Everyone

Eric Sammons sent me a pdf review copy of his new book, Holiness for Everyone: The Practical Spirituality of St. Josemaria Escriva, not because we’ve ever met or even know each other on the internet, but, I gather, because I really liked his first book, Who is Jesus Christ?  (Which I wholeheartedly recommend.) He’s smart that way.  I like this one too.

What is isn’t:  We have to start here, because it’s easy to guess wrong.

  1. Eric Sammons is not a member of Opus Dei, and this is not a how-to book on being a member of that organization, nor an account of that group’s history.  Opus Dei barely gets mention, other than to recommend two reliable books on the topic.
  2. This is not a colorful anecdote-laden biography of St. Josemaria.  The chapter that tells his life focuses is on his spiritual development — the details that help you understand the saint’s approach to holiness for ordinary people.

What it is:

St. Josemaria Escriva is a 20th century saint whose spirituality is very much in line with St. Therese of Lisieux, whose Story of a Soul was a bestseller during his formative years, and  Blessed Theresa of Calcutta, who was his contemporary and likewise informed by the spirituality of St. Therese.  Basic Catholic practical holiness — what you see in the lives of every saint across all of history.

St. Josemaria’s particular charism was the insistence that saintliness is not for the vowed religious only — an error of his time, and still a struggle among Catholics today.  We tend today to either fall into the get-thee-to-a-nunnery trap, or just dismiss saintliness as something that hardly matters anyhow.  St. Josemaria’s contention, and Eric Sammons’ as well, is that it is possible for you and I to actually be holy.  And that there are specific steps we can take to cooperate with God’s grace in working towards that goal.

As with Who is Jesus Christ, Sammons’ text is packed with information and insight, but still approachable for the average reader.   It covers similar territory as Christian Self-Mastery, but far more readable than that classic.  I personally found every chapter to be helpful for me — life-changing, even.

Who would enjoy it?  I’d recommend this for older teens and adults who want to be challenged with practical ways to grow in the Christian life.  This is not mere inspiration: expect to be pushed to make specific resolutions about your prayer life and penitential practices.  There are discussion questions at the end of every chapter, making this a great book club choice.

This would make an excellent post-confirmation course for 11th and 12th graders — either taught in a high school religion class, or as a parent-teen book study.  (Also think: Post-RCIA discipleship group.) Because the text ties to free, online additional reading (Escriva, assorted Encyclicals), it would be easy to make a rounded-out senior-high religion curriculum using this book.

This is an ideal introduction to the writings of St. Josemaria Escriva.  I picked up a (print) copy of The Way while I was reading this book, and coming to it already well-versed with how Catholic spiritual training works, I find The Way to be awesome.  I’m thrilled to have been pointed in that direction.  But I’d caution you: Do not read The Way without first reading Sammons’ book or some other similar work.  Taken out of context, St. Josemaria’s collected comments are a recipe for scruples, misunderstanding, and stomping off in a fit of exasperation or despair.  Combined with a healthy, balanced view of Christian spirituality, enlightened by a work like Sammons’, The Way becomes the perfect ’round-the-house spiritual cattle-prod  — think Imitation of Christ, Football Coach Version.

Conclusion: Highly Recommended for Catholics for ready to grow in their spiritual life, and looking for an approachable, step-by-step walk through how to go about it.

3.5 Time Outs: Vatican Spies

Thanks once again to our host Larry D. at Acts of the Apostasy putting the mmmmn in Church Militant since  . . . well, awhile.

It's electric. Except when it's not.

1.

You wanna know what’s better than bacon? Eric Sammons e-mailing to ask, “May I send you a review copy of my new book?”

I know!  I couldn’t believe it either!  I figured the SuperHusband must have driven to Florida in desperation, in order to beg a perfect stranger to please give his wife something, anything, that would help her grow in holiness.  He would have observed that I already had a large collection of freebie plastic rosaries, so please did Mr. Sammons know of anything else that might help?

Another possible explanation is that since I liked the first book, maybe I’d like the next one, too.

2.

I worry sometimes that if I get too many review books, it will cause me to neglect my local Catholic bookstore.  Fear not!  The kids are taking care of us.  For example – item #2 that’s better than bacon: This Sunday the “Roamin’ Catholic” bookmobile was parked at our parish.  Yay!  My favorite time of year!  And the 4th grader spots this DVD and asks, “Please can we get this Mom?”

It’s a pretty simple formula:  Child requests DVD about real-life Nazi-thwarting Secret Agent Nun?  Mom says, “Um.  Yes.”  We haven’t watched it yet, though.  I’ve been too busy yelling at the kids to clean the house growing in holiness.

3.

My biggest disappointment in reading Jack Chick tracts was the discovery that, through some bureaucratic snafu, I’d been cheated.  If I really became a citizen of Vatican City the day I was baptized, where’s my passport???  Ah, but now my son has rectified my problem, and issued me my secret-agent ID:

Don’t worry, I’m still gonna carry my regular ID as well.

3.5

 . . . delightful to read on a Sunday afternoon.  See the review just below this post, or click here.

EDITED to add: And yeah, of course it’s link day.  If you have one you want to share, we’re all eyes.

Hey look — I wrote something last week. Just not here.

In case you didn’t see it pop up at about 70 places around the internet (okay just four that I know about), here’s my contribution to Chris Weigand’s Lenten devotional series.  In which I accidentally ponder yesterday’s Gospel for year A instead of for year B, despite checking three times to be sure.  Happy accident, though.  I think the woman at the well has been getting more bad press than she deserves.

 

Catholic Blog Day: Penance

Welcome to the first Catholic Blog Day!  Read more here. The theme today is, fittingly, Penance.

Sunday afternoon the Superhusband and I sat around complaining about all the things that Catholics like to complain about.   “Too bad,” I finally said, far too late into our festival of grumpiness, “That we’re so lousy at prayer and fasting.”

Monday morning the readings came as no surprise:

Peacemakers, when they work for peace, sow the seeds which will bear fruit in holiness. (James chapter 3.)

When Jesus had gone indoors, his disciples asked him privately, “Why were we unable to cast it out?”

“This is the kind,” he answered, “that can only be driven out by prayer and fasting.”  (Mark chapter 9.)

I’m convinced there is a particular demon, I call him the church-ocracy demon, who tries to stir up all kinds of trouble in the Church.  He’s the one behind those weird bureaucratic moments where kind, loving Christians find themselves at odds, because each is trying to do the Lord’s will, and do it diligently.   He’s the one who tries to change the famous verse to read, “Wherever two or more of you are gathered in my name, there will be a policy, paper, or program that drives at least one of you to distraction.”

Jesus promised the gates of Hell would not prevail against the Church; we should not be surprised, therefore, when our parishes become the front lines of the enemy’s advances.  In order to win a battle, there must have been a battle to win.

The Church Militant is not an army of automatons.  There is a time for simply shutting up and following orders, yes.  Today we fast and abstain in part merely because the Church has said we will.  This is the day, this is how you will proceed; the direction is clear, and we follow it.  It is no hollow exercise, for certain; but nor is this the day, for example, to say with either jealousy or scruples, “Gosh, meat isn’t any big deal for vegetarians, shouldn’t they be made to do something extra?”  Eat less, pray more, today is the day, here are the orders on who what when where and how.

But the virtue of obedience is not the virtue of idiocy.  The critics of the Church imagine we are all little robot-agents, wired by microchip to a master-controller sending orders from his lair in a Vatican basement.  We do crazy things, after all, like saving sex for marriage, and only marrying one person at a time.  Surely there must be some kind of drug in the holy water, right?

Inside the Church, we pervert the virtue a different way, bickering over minutia, or actively dissenting from the clear teaching of the Magisterium, but then using the cover of “obedience” to spare ourselves the long, lonely walk to Calvary that comes from refusing to follow illegal orders.

But the church-ocracy demon comes into his own in the vast middle between extremes, where we are neither complaining bitterly the tile is just the wrong shade of beige, nor being asked embezzle funds or cover for a child abuser.  There is a great wide territory where it is difficult to find the balance between engaged, thoughtful participation in the life of the Church on the one hand, and peaceful, joyful obedience on the other.  And what does obedience look like, anyhow?

Good Christians disagree.  Good Christians who love one another, who love Christ, and love the Church, disagree about what policies and procedures need be put in place.  Sometimes we disagree lightly — mere tastes or preferences are involved.  Other times, we each feel the other is making a grave and damaging mistake.

The demon is not in the disagreement.  The demon is not in holding our ground when we honestly feel we must, even though it mean we find ourselves at odds with our friends.  The demon is in the voice that whispers bitterness, fear, jealousy, and rage into a situation that is, simply, two or more Christians disagreeing on some matter.

And it is only driven out by prayer and fasting.

 

Polarization and Politics

A friend recently resigned from her teaching position at a public high school.  The students were having intercourse in the classroom while she was teaching.  I assume this is a rare and extreme case; at the local blue-ribbon, top-rated public high school, the students show restraint, saving sex until they can get to the restroom.

I live in a cave, but I am not naive.  People of reproductive age will in fact reproduce.  What alarms is that the public school administrators are both persuaded they are unable to enforce a no-copulation zone, and also that they do not feel any obligation to attempt it.

These are public schools, so there are facts that don’t apply to, say, your local bar or brothel:

  • We taxpayers are required by law to send our money to these schools, under pain of fines, imprisonment, and forfeiture of assets.
  • Parents are required by law to send their children to these schools.  If they do not do so, their children can be taken from them.

Most parents do not have an alternative public school available.  Most parents cannot afford private school tuition.  Homeschooling is daunting for most and impossible for many; appeasing the authorities is an on-going problem.

But what stands out most about this problem: No one really seems to care.

Why isn’t this in the news?  Why isn’t this a hot topic at school board and superintendent elections?  How can a school be top-ranked, or a county promote itself as “A Great Place For Families”, when this is the atmosphere in which students are expected to learn?

Apparently there is a vast gulf between those who feel these sorts of things are a serious problem, and those who feel they are no big deal*.

I keeping hearing all these complaints that American politics is so “polarized”.  This is why.

 

*I don’t think this is a left-right divide.  Not at all.

More on Forgiveness

I want to elaborate on my last post.   Forgiveness is not easy, and there are lots of useful tips that begin with something like, “In order to forgive, first . . . [insert important, worthwhile spiritual point].”

But before all that:  In order to forgive, first someone must do something wrong.

Our culture is awash in fake forgiveness.  Part of it is linguistic — the words “I’m sorry” mean “I have sorrow”, and you can grieve many things, not only your sins.  The words “I apologize” have at their origin the idea of a defense, or explanation, that may well have nothing to do with guilt.  But we respond “I forgive you” to some of these innocent sorrows and defenses, and that can create the false impression that we are frequently forgiving when really we are not.

For example:

My mother-in-law is half an hour late.  I rant and stew.  How could she make me wait?!! And then she arrives, and it turns out there was a bad accident, she had left home early but was stuck in traffic for an hour [of course I didn’t have my phone with me, she did call], she is terribly sorry [she really is] that I was inconvenienced.  Well, I could say “I forgive you”, except she never did anything wrong.    She’s completely innocent.  If anything, I’m the guilty one, assuming the worst about her and getting mad before I even knew what had happened.

When we pretend we’re forgiving someone, but really they are innocent, that’s what I mean by “fake forgiveness”.    It is a genuine letting go of anger and bitterness, but it’s not the hard kind of forgiveness that Jesus demands.

Another kind of fake forgiveness is the “I understand”.   I once had a priest yell at me, in church, as I was saying my penance after confession.  He was a crotchety old man, hard of hearing, in a lot of pain due to various ailments, and probably fed up to here with other parishioners that were eerily like myself.  He was wrong.  A priest certainly should not march out into the pews and loudly and angrily continue the topic brought up in confession.  But I could understand.  Grumpy guy.  Grumpiness happens.  I was glad it was me and not some other person whose faith would be more easily shaken.  I argued with him, he took my point, two grumpy people satisfied to have each said our due.

–> But “I understand” can’t be the foundation of forgiveness.  It is a help, for certain.  It is the proverbial spoonful of sugar, that camaraderie and compassion for fellow sinners that makes it easier to overlook faults not unlike our own.  But Jesus asks me to forgive even the people who are just really, really bad.  The ones who have no excuse.

The nice thing is that many of us get to mostly wade in shallow waters.  We get to “forgive” innocent people, and we can comfortably go about excusing the genuine but minor wrong-doing that we face from day to day.

But what if we kept our perception of right and wrong perfectly clear?

To my mother-in-law, I wouldn’t say “I forgive you”.  I’d say: You haven’t done anything wrong.  Thank you so much for thinking of me, that is very thoughtful, but I’d be foolish to be mad at you when you are perfectly innocent.

And to Father Grumpy, instead of “I understand why he’s so crotchety, he’s old and over worked and his knees are killing him today”, It would be just:  That was wrong.  He should not have done that.  That was a real injustice against me, and against the sacrament, and against his ministry.  But I forgive him.  He doesn’t have a right to do what is wrong, but he does have a right to be forgiven, so I guess no excuse for me being Mrs. Grumpy the rest of the day.

***

Oh, I know.  These are ideals.  You think I’m any good at this?  No way.  I most certainly am not.  And I don’t guess I’m explaining it well, either.

But this is the staircase of depravity I was talking about earlier.  If I’m regularly patting myself on the back for “forgiving” innocent people, I’m fooling myself.  I haven’t got a clue about forgiveness until someone actually does something wrong.

And then if I explain away every real wrongdoing with a “he had a good reason”, “nobody is perfect”, “I’d be tempted too,” then I’ve missed my chance.   Of course I should understand — I could write a book on human weakness, of course I understand.  But I need to go beyond that.  Both so that my soul gets practice actually forgiving, and as a favor to my fellow sinners.

***

The first person who showed me forgiveness was a department secretary.  I owed her a form.  I didn’t fill out the form on time.  She came to my cube and said, “You didn’t give me the form.”

I made a thousand excuses.  I couldn’t bear to be actually wrong, because I didn’t know then that you could be wrong and still live.

And she kept saying to my every excuse, “I forgive you.  I forgive you.  Jennifer, I FORGIVE YOU.  (Now please shut up and fill out the form.)”

I finally shut up and filled out the form.

What? I had done something wrong?  And she freely acknowledged I DID SOMETHING WRONG?  And she wasn’t mad?  Even though I really had done something wrong?  At cost to her?  And she demanded nothing in repayment.  Not an apology, not an ‘I’ll make it up to you,” not even an “it will never happen again”.  Not even the pleasure of berating me for twenty seconds.  Nothing.

It was a completely new world to me.

***

And that’s the world I was talking about yesterday.  If that helps at all.  I know, I know.  Forgiving small things is so much easier.  Yes. Yes.  But it’s a start.   I think we kid ourselves if we say we can tackle anything bigger, before we’ve got a handle on how to forgive the little sins first.

And yeah, supernatural aid definitely required.

Grace and Generosity

Today in the car my eldest daughter was wishing for soft, cushion-y flip-flops.  “Maybe for your birthday,” I say.

“My birthday is in February.”

“So write a letter to Santa now, telling him what to look for on summer clearance in August.”

Children start composing letters aloud.

Then I suggest, “Wait a minute.  Not Santa.  Write to the Easter Bunny.”

Mr. Boy begins: “Dear Easter Bunny, I have been very good this year . . .”

And I correct: “No.  It’s Dear Easter Bunny, I have been very bad this year.  That is why I am thankful for Easter. If I were good, I wouldn’t need it . . .”

***

–> One of the advantages of homeschooling, is that the children labor under no illusions about mom’s sins.

Sometimes people who see me teach as a catechist get the wrong idea.  They see how I run a class for an hour (So much energy! So focused on the children! So kind! So enthusiastic!) and imagine my own kids must be getting that 16 hours a day.

Um, no.

Just because I can do something for an hour does not mean I can do it all day every day.

But the thing about being a catechist, is that there’s a certain pressure to be an unrealistically good person.  Talking to friends who have worked in ministry elsewhere (non-catholic, as it happens), it seems to be par for the course.  You’re a Christian Leader.  You’re a Teacher and an Example.  And if you screw-up, You’re Fired.

It isn’t enough to be competent at your work.  Your work is not only to teach what is right and wrong, but to somehow meet spec.  Our #1 message is that we are all wretched sinners in need of a Savior, but if you’re a priest / minister / catechist, you’d better not be especially needful of that Savior.

That’s not real.

I’m fortunate, in that although I certainly get tempted to commit enormous sins, I mostly stick to goofing off and yelling at my kids as the bread and butter of my sinfulness.  So I guess I have a job as long as I can keep that up.

But here’s what: Everybody faces temptation.  I have been very moved by the humility of ordinary Christians who will openly acknowledge horrid sins.  I did it, I should not have done it, I am sorry I did it, I will never do it again so help me God. 

Public ministry discourages that humility.  It discourages it slowly and insidiously, by first teaching you to deny the venial sins.  What will people think if they find out I ______?  Will they refuse to let me minister to _______ if they hear that I _______?  I am not alone among catholic volunteers in being a tad nervous about confessing to my own parish priest.  I work for the guy — what if he gets the wrong idea when he hears my confession?

[I do, anyway, though not as often as would be good for me.  A lousy prayer life is one of my other besetting sins.]

So I am unsurprised when I hear that some Famous Catholic is by all appearances guilty of some tremendous sin, but is unable to admit to having done wrong.  To see clerics justify their serious sins, and maybe even leave the church over them?  Well, I’ve seen other ministers brush off lesser sins.  It is a staircase.  At the bottom you put on a good face for the public; as unseemly bits seep out here and there, what you cannot hide, you must somehow justify.  By the time a serious temptation comes along, the habit of fleeing condemnation is long since engrained.

Forgiveness is only way out.

You want honest clergy?  Learn to forgive.  Not to deny, not to downplay, not to ignore.  To forgive.   Where sin abounds, grace must abound all the more.

The Christian paradox is that where grace abounds, sin loses its hold.  For if I know I will be forgiven, then I can admit I was wrong.  And if I can admit I was wrong, and only if I can admit I was wrong, then I can begin the work of repairing my soul.

The Rite by Matt Baglio

The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist, by Matt Baglio, Doubleday, 2009

I recommend this book, on the condition that you read the whole thing.  Otherwise, skip.  Just not healthy any other way.  –>> And no I have not seen the film, [which Father L. reviewed here, and has even more to say on the whole topic here]  and no I’m not planning to see the film, because I am too impatient to watch things when I could be reading instead.  Also I see on the author’s page that the paperback has updated material in it — my comments here are based on the edition above.

Anyhow, back to the book.  Here’s what it is, per the author:

The purpose of this book is not to promote any one faith over another, but to offer a detailed account of one priest’s journey from a rational skeptic to a practicing exorcist. I didn’t set out to write with any preconceived bias and as such the book is written in a straightforward journalistic style, which means that I give respect to the beliefs and testimonies on all sides, including medical science.

And that’s what it is.  We follow Fr. Gary Thomas (a real guy) as he heads to Rome on sabbatical in 2005, after being freshly appointed diocesan exorcist.  His travails are, wow, amazingly normal.  If you spend any amount of time in the Catholic Church, you will totally recognize the place.   You couldn’t write fiction like this.  Fr. Thomas does finally manage to secure an apprenticeship with a practicing exorcist, and the book version does clearly show the humdrum, hard, dull work that goes with the territory.

[Interestingly — the reports of boring catholic exorcisms match very closely to what I have heard described by evangelical protestants who have experience with boring exorcisms of their own.  Different details as far as the methods of the exorcists, but identical phenomenon on the recipients’ end.]

The author sticks to the straightforward, journalistic style all the way through.  It is not a “catholic” book in the sense of trying to evangelize or prove a point of the faith.  The reporting could come straight out of the Herald Tribune.  But it is a firmly catholic book in the sense that any book which earnestly reports the truth is necessarily catholic.

In addition to following Fr. Thomas’s personal story, the book explains catholic teaching on the supernatural in very clear terms.  There is also an examination of how demon possession relates to psychological disorders, including interviews with secular researchers who reject supernatural explanations.  [One of the first jobs of the exorcist is to find a qualified psychiatrist to rule out natural causes.]   One of the reasons I think it is important to stick with the book through to the end, is that it is not at all clear how things are going to turn out, or whether the book will ultimately end up affirming the catholic faith.  [It does.  It can’t help it.  Tell a true story, that’s what you end up with.]

The book follows Fr. Thomas through to his first “for real”, no-doubts-about-it exorcism, in 2007, after he is back home in the states and settled in to his parish assignment.  And here’s the conclusion, so you can rest easy, since if you are smart you will naturally be quite wary of picking up books on these sorts of topics:

These prayers do have power, he thought.  It was a visceral reminder that the age-old conflict between good and evil, sin and salvation, was far from over.  Not only did this validate his calling as a priest, and his choice to become an exorcist, but it was a powerful confirmation of one of the deepest mysteries of his faith.  Even though evil existed in the world, there was a way to defeat it.