It’s
Wednesday, and so time for the ‘papal examen’ once again. I have been taking
the Wednesdays to go through the Pope’s wonderful address to the Curia before
Christmas, which many took as a scathing rebuke of ‘those guys in the Vatican’,
but which have decided to regard as ‘a mighty fine examination of conscience
for all of us.’
We are at
the fourth of the fifteen ailments he listed in that talk. It is thus:
The disease
of excessive planning and of functionalism. When the apostle plans everything
down to the last detail and believes that with perfect planning things will
fall into place, he becomes an accountant or an office manager. Things need to
be prepared well, but without ever falling into the temptation of trying to
contain and direct the freedom of the Holy Spirit, which is always greater and
more flexible than any human planning (cf. Jn 3:8).
We contract
this disease because “it is always more easy and comfortable to settle in our
own sedentary and unchanging ways. In truth, the Church shows her fidelity to
the Holy Spirit to the extent that she does not try to control or tame him… to
tame the Holy Spirit! … He is freshness, imagination, and newness”.
Now, this
one is a bit of a challenge for me to write about. Anyone reading this who
knows me personally might accuse me of many crimes against God and humanity,
but would probably never accuse me of being hyper-organized in them. Getting
everything planned out to the last detail is not exactly my normal modus
operandi. Uh… yeah, no.
That being
said, let’s look at this. I live in community with a couple hundred people, and
do a fair bit of spiritual direction besides, so while I personally err on the
side of barely managed chaos, I am certainly familiar with the phenomenon of
excessive organization. I would have to say, mind you, that Madonna House tends
to avoid this particular trap in general. It’s a very well-organized, well-run
community, but we have learned over the years that the Holy Spirit not only
wants but demands room to move in our common life.
Whenever we
have erred on the side of getting things a little too planned out, God seems to
delight in throwing us a curve ball—essentially whatever we planned just blows
up in our face. We have experienced this over the decades so many times that
most of us in MH develop a pretty good sense of when we have organized things
just enough and need to stand back and leave the rest to God.
I think it
is fear and a lack of faith that might drive this excess of planning, this
desire to have everything nailed down. There is always, in Christian life, an
absolute need really to allow the Holy Spirit to work things out. We cannot
plan things so well as to be assured of a good outcome. So often, when we try,
we slip into a subtle egoism: what we are seeking is not God’s will and the
kingdom of heaven, but our own little ideas about what is supposed to happen.
I see this
struggle in lots of circumstances and situations. Perhaps most sympathetically
and understandably, I see it in the many good Catholic families I know. Mothers
and fathers worry about their children—that is the nature of things, and a good
nature it is. But it is a dreadful mistake to let that worry devolve into
trying to control every aspect of the child’s life, of the family’s life, and
to believe that if we just get everything organized rightly, establish the home
in perfect spiritual and physical order, then the kids will be all right, and
grow up to be good virtuous Catholic men and women.
Well, no.
Human freedom and God’s grace are these irreducible realities in every human
life. And this is not a bug, but a feature, as they say in the computer
industry. Human virtue and human sanctity grow out of the mysterious encounter
of the human soul with the Spirit of the living God, not from having everything super-organized. And we have to allow room
for that encounter to happen, messy and chaotic as that may make our lives at
times.
Waiting on
God and waiting on one another. Whether it is in a family, a religious
community, or the Roman Curia, this is the deep patience of the Gospel that we
need to ensure that it is God’s will and God’s kingdom, not our will and our
puny little kingdom, that we are building with our lives.
So it is a
matter of not fearing that chaos, that seeming disorganization. In truth, there
is a deeper order, a more profound organization that is occurring when we
choose not to plan everything out all the time: the choice to live under God’s
authority and listen to the Spirit in our daily lives, and so have our own
souls in right order before Him.
Yeah, I'd have to agree. I probably tend too far in the opposite direction (maybe not enough planning) but when I fall into excessive planning, it's usually a response to panic, forgetting who's really in control.
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