None Are Welcome

 We have deep respect for people with same-sex attraction, but we can’t pretend that they’re welcome on their own terms. None of us are welcome on our own terms in the Church; we’re welcome on Jesus’ terms. That’s what it means to be a Christian—you submit yourself to Jesus and his teaching, you don’t recreate your own body of spirituality.

Archbishop Charles Chaput, Erasmus Lecture, October, 2014

Reflection – This quote has been bouncing around on social media this past week, and I personally find it such a beautiful encapsulation of the heart of so many issues, that I wanted to close off the month of October—‘month of the Synod’—with it.

‘None of us are welcome on our own terms in the Church’ – this is a statement for the ages. I personally find it, not a harsh or unkind formulation, but actually something that thrills me and moves my heart.

I’m not sure why this is so. Perhaps it is because it has been many, many years since I realized that my own terms were so narrow and poor, tangled and twisted, that I would be much better off living on Jesus’ terms for the rest of my life.

I think that is it: it may seem that surrendering our own terms to live on Jesus’ terms, accepting Him and His teachings (which, if you are Catholic, you believe to have been entrusted to His Catholic Church without error) is a great loss for us, a terrible sacrifice, an acceptance of a life that is smaller and poorer, lonelier and bleaker.

All I can say is that my experience, which is far from complete, has been that as I simply forget about ‘my own terms’ – my ideas, my self-concept, my likes, my deepest convictions even – and throw myself into the arms and heart of Jesus, completely accept what the Gospel and what the Church teaches me about Jesus and about life, my life becomes richer, more beautiful, more joyous, more peaceful.  More. Simply more.

We think we know who we are. We think we know what our life is about. We think we know what is important. We think we know so many things. We are wrong. Even when we are right (IBELIEVEINGODTHEFATHERALMIGHTY, DAMMIT!), we are wrong.

Life is a perpetual surrender of the fortress of the self into the sweet captivity of the Lord, which is true freedom. Life is a perpetual collapse of our defenses, the dissolving of our lines of resistance, the white flag going up, the glum acceptance of our defeat at the hands of our Adversary—only to discover that He is the great captain of the liberating army come to cast down all tyranny from our souls forever.

It is all so much better than we realize—this loss of our selves and our certainties, our ‘terms’. God’s terms are better, and that is the great lesson every single human being has to learn, or perish.

And we all have to learn it—those ‘inside’ the Church most of all, perhaps. It is so easy for us to become smug and sure of ourselves, and so quietly substitute our dreary old terms for the flaming charity of Christ.

We all have to learn it—the gay and the straight, the married, the cohabitating, and the divorced, the faithful and the faithless, the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’. We all have to learn it. That contemporary hymn got it wrong: none are welcome, not the way we think we should be welcomed. All are welcome, but only at the cost of opening ourselves up to radical, complete, total conversion of heart daily, always, until the end of our lives when we finally lose our fight with God and our terms finally pass away—and we enter into the infinite, eternal courts of heaven and know ourselves at last to be what we always were becoming—sons and daughters of God caught up into the life of the Spirit, the life of the Son, the life and love of the Father.

None are welcome and all are welcome, and all in all are welcome on exactly the same terms, which is the mercy of God transforming us all into mercy, in a radical transformation the ‘terms’ of which we cannot measure or comprehend in any fashion.

It is all so much better than we realize it to be now.

Something That Resists Me

I experience the fact that [God] exists because I run up against him, and if ever it were I that had fashioned him, I should certainly have made quite a different job of it. As it is, I am obliged to accommodate myself to him. I am obliged to take him just as he is.

No, I never made him, in my image. I am the one who finally has to come down to doing things his way. And there’s the rub that makes me know I am in contact with the real: when I feel, that is, something which resists me, that I have no control of, and that, on the contrary, I must finally end up by adapting myself to, making way, giving up, against my will, all the while dragging my feet.

Jean Danielou, The Scandal of the Truth

Reflection – I’m going through some of my old files from my academic thesis and pulling out interesting quotes here and there. One thing that struck me around the Synod and the discussion surrounding it was the general need to ‘up our game’ intellectually a bit in the Church. I don’t mean to sound patronizing, as I firmly believe people are quite capable of being intelligent and thoughtful, but so much of what I read in the Catholic blogosphere during that time simply did not manifest that, much.

So I’m going a wee bit intellectual on the blog for a few days anyhow. It’s also good to remember some of these absolutely first rate theologians from the 20^th century who have to greater or lesser degrees been forgotten today (because, after all, they wrote their books more than ten minutes ago, and so cannot possibly have anything relevant to say, right?).

Danielou, for example, is fantastic, and as you can see from this passage, very readable. God is the One, here, who resists us, who thwarts us, who is Not Us, and to Whom we have to adapt ourselves, not have Him adapt Himself to us. It strikes me that this is more than a little relevant in the discussions around marriage and family life, human sexual expression and openness to life.

‘Do what comes naturally’ is the cry of our times. The right thing to do is the thing you feel most strongly like doing; such is our understanding of the natural law, commonly. Of course this is an incoherent position, as there is no shortage of people for whom what comes naturally is torturing animals, having sex with children, raping women… and nobody (except the perpetrators, I suppose) believes these things to be ‘the right thing to do.’

‘Do what comes naturally… ummm… unless you are hurting someone by doing so.’ That seems to be a way out of that particular quandary. But while that may work for us (sort of) as a rough and ready ethos for daily life, as a matter of strict logic, it won’t do. Philosophically, we have introduced a condition for moral action without any warrant or rationale. Why not hurt others? A sociopath will argue that there is no rational basis for that condition. We can simply say it and insist on it irrationally, but we are cheating by so doing.

The truth is, all the ways of trying to forge a human ethic without God and a moral law/natural law coming from Him founder on this precise point or arbitrariness. Utilitarianism, consequentialism, proportionalism—all of these fail to satisfy the question of the persistent five-year-old child: but why? It is only when we hit up against this Other, this One who made all that is, who is the source and sovereign Master of all that is, who gives it (and us) structure, meaning, purpose, and who thus has in our regard that most dreaded and despised word of our time.

Who has Authority, in short. We don’t like this, but this really is the only way to advance any kind of coherent ethical vision of life short of ‘do whatever the hell you please, and if what pleases you is to torture and kill me, please know that I am heavily armed.’ Without God, all things are permissible—Nietzsche and Dostoevsky really did have it right, after all. And we have to be clear that it really is ‘all things’ – not just the things that we enjoy doing or approve of or think we have a right to do.

But once we acknowledge this Authority, then ‘doing what feels right’ goes right out the window. The law of nature, the natural law, behaving in a way that is consistent with the structure and purpose of our humanity, means conforming our behavior to Him, not conforming all of reality to our own preferences.

It seems to me that in the Church we have placed so much stress on a sort of ‘feel good’ Christianity, advanced very strongly the (quite true) thesis that God wants us to be happy that we have failed to teach people that happiness comes on the other side of death to self and being crucified with Christ. 

And we are reaping the fruit of that poor and one-sided teaching in the present inability of so many people to conceive of the notion that God may want them to sacrifice their natural preferences and inclinations for a greater good.

But that is the God of the Bible, the God of all our Catholic tradition, the God we believe in. And so we have to get busy re-learning, re-teaching, re-presenting that God who is the One True God, and the Good News that this God truly brings us in Jesus Christ.

What Does Mercy Mean, Anyway?

‘Mercy’ has been the word of the day in many corners of the Church. What does it mean to be merciful, anyway? Does it mean that we stop teaching doctrines that have been intrinsic parts of the Catholic faith for 2000 years? Does it mean we never say anything to hurt anyone’s feelings? Does it mean we reverse 2000 years, again, of consistent practice and invite everyone unconditionally to the reception of the Eucharist?

Or does it means we essentially stay the course on these matters (which is my own firm belief), that we are to teach boldly and fearlessly the truth of God about sex, marriage, and family life, and continue to patiently explain why there is a connection between reception of the Eucharist and freedom from mortal sin?

But if that is the case, what does mercy mean, exactly, in that context? This is where I think we have to take very seriously that our Holy Father is calling the Church to examine the question of mercy, the call to mercy more deeply. My own firm belief is that the conversation has been utterly sidetracked by the question around communion and the related issues around annulments. It is not principally a juridical question, a matter of rules to be changed and ‘policies’ to be re-evaluated.

Mercy is not a policy. Mercy is not a program. Mercy is not something that a bunch of old guys in Rome (with all respect to them) are going to discuss, process, chop up, and then issue as a position paper or even as an apostolic exhortation, and then we will have dealt with the mercy question in the Church.

Mercy, and the call to be merciful, is something much deeper, much more personal, much more intimate. It is a call from the Lord Jesus to each one of us, a call that invites us into a Christian maturity, a level of commitment and engagement in the mission of the Church that is far beyond what many of us feel comfortable with or equipped for.

We want to just be told the rules, and then we have the rules, and then we keep the rules, and tell everyone else the rules, and if other people break the rules we can judge them, and it’s all nice and clear and simple. And spiritually infantile. Mercy calls us to become adult men and women driven by a deep concern for the salvation of souls and so engaged at every level of our being—our minds, our hearts, our bodies, our worldly goods—in what is factually good for the one in front of us, what this person needs right now from me.

I wrote a whole book on this subject, which some people at least have found helpful. Towards the end I pose the question ‘what does it mean to be merciful, anyway?’ This is what I wrote:

The life of mercy: our home away from home, the way home itself, and the constant choice that brings us there. The awesome inestimable reality of God’s mercy, the truth of His tender love and compassion, given to us so we can give it to others. And yet, as I have often said throughout this book, how hard it is for us to believe in this, to really accept it, to absorb it into our very being.

“The problem is that we cannot absorb this. This is how it seems to me. And the only way we can try to absorb it is to act like He does.”  Oh, so that’s the key! We can only absorb this deep truth of mercy by practicing it ourselves. To be merciful, as the Lord reveals to us, is blessedness itself, since it is by being merciful that we absorb the awesome joyous truth of God’s mercy to us, and are opened to receive this mercy into the depths of our being.

To be merciful – what is it? What does it mean to be merciful? Well, I don’t think it’s complicated. It is to be as generous as we can with whatever share of life’s goods we possess; it is to honestly try to refrain from judgments, harshness, accusation of our neighbors; it is to forgive our enemies from our hearts; it is to strive to become free of all anger, hatred, jealousy, bitterness, violence. To be merciful: it is the life of joy and freedom and beauty, even now, even while we still wait outside that final Door.

Going Home, 126-7

The sharing of our goods certainly includes the bold proclamation of the Gospel—our faith is the greatest good you or I have been given, right? It also includes being very generous indeed with our possessions. What are we doing to help people in difficult situations—unwed mothers, and the like? Anything? Teach, yes, but don’t be in the position of the lawyers who ‘put heavy burdens on men’s back and lift not a finger to help them.’

But in all that teaching, to truly, honestly, and deeply not judge people. Yes, there is truth, good, evil, and these are objective realities. But people are confused today, and the moral law is anything but clear to many millions of people. So don’t judge anyone’s conscience—period. Cut it out, right now! Neither you nor I nor the Pope nor anyone besides God Himself knows what is happening in the depths of anyone’s heart and mind, even if we do know that their choices are wrong and harmful.

And to live free of anger, hatred, bitterness—that is so crucial. We have to guard our hearts constantly against this. A person who presents Gospel teaching and the moral good with anger and contempt and scorn is… well, not very effective. And, honestly, not doing such a crack job in living out what they are teaching, either.

Mercy—it’s the word of the day, and it’s a serious word, a vital word, a word that pushes and pulls us into a depth of following of Christ, a depth of Christian maturity and evangelical generosity. Let us strive for it, not be distracted by misuses of the word, but reclaim it as the heart of the Gospel (which it is) and live it out today, as best we can.

Not Wicked, Just Wrong

Well, this will be my last blog post on the interim report of the Synod. The Synod itself is moving on past that phase, and the Internet with its usual goldfish-like attention span has gone in a few days from ‘It’s the end of the Church as we know it! The mark of the Beast is nigh!’ to ‘Report? Was there some report? Oh yeah…’ It is perhaps salutary for us to remark on that not infrequent dynamic in modern life whereby yesterday’s apocalypse becomes today’s footnote. Surely when the actual apocalypse comes we will be able to focus our minds on it for more than 72 hours, don’t you think?

I have concluded in all this kerfuffle that I must have some kind of anti-alarmist prejudice. I have indeed read various things written about just how terrible the report is. I… just am not seeing it, folks. I can’t join the panic party – I just… can’t. Partly, I know that I am not reading a Church document with any binding authority. So I can just read it. I don’t have to obey one word in this document (nice!).

It is not a perfect document. It is awfully poorly written, for one thing, which as a professional writer offends me more than perhaps it would someone else. Language should not just communicate truth, but also beauty, and this report is written by someone who has a tin ear for language, for sure.

There is an emphasis on the positive that may strike some as polyannaish, if not worse. More could have been said on the harm done by the morally wrong choices people make in their intimate relationships, especially when those immoral choices become constituent parts of those relationships (i.e. ‘living in sin’).

But the document is not—repeat, not—ignoring Catholic doctrine in favor of accommodation and relativism. Here is the paragraph which I believe is the guiding principle the report is proposing:

In this context the Church is aware of the need to offer a meaningful word of hope. It is necessary to set out from the conviction that man comes from God and that, therefore, a reflection able to reframe the great questions on the meaning of human existence, may find fertile ground in humanity’s most profound expectations. The great values of marriage and the Christian family correspond to the search that distinguishes human existence even in a time marked by individualism and hedonism. It is necessary to accept people in their concrete being, to know how to support their search, to encourage the wish for God and the will to feel fully part of the Church, also on the part of those who have experienced failure or find themselves in the most diverse situations. This requires that the doctrine of the faith, the basic content of which should be made increasingly better known, be proposed alongside with mercy.

OK, not well written. But the point is clear: people have within them a desire for goodness, for love, for meaning. Yes, they make terribly wrong choices based on the fact that our desires have gone badly awry (the document is weak on that point, I will grant).

But our pastoral outreach to people must be based on the fact that everyone is searching for something good, something true, something real. I have always firmly believed, my life experience and priestly ministry have confirmed, and I will go to my grave insisting, that there is very little actual wickedness in this world.

The people who deliver themselves over to monstrous evil do disproportionate damage and tend to generate a lot of headlines. The vast majority of people are not wicked; they (we) are blind. Not wicked, but weak. Not wicked, but terribly wounded. Not wicked, just wrong. And it’s all of us together—there are no ‘good people over here’ and ‘bad people over there’ – or if there is, it is strictly and exclusively the business of God to sort that out (cf. Matthew 25).

And so this paragraph, and the report that follows upon it, counsels that we both teach the doctrine of the Church regarding sex, marriage, and the family, and be merciful in so doing. It is not either-or; as always in things Catholic, it is both-and. That is how I read the report, and that is how I intend to carry on in my own priestly ministry and meager attempts to follow Christ.

Regarding the word ‘gradualism’, about which I may write more if I can find the time, space, and sanity to do so (my life is a wee bit hectic of late), I recommend this woman’s story as an example of gradualism working as it should. It is, by definition, a messy business—conversion, that is. Moral progress, that is. Hard to make sweeping generalized statements about; best left to the individual work of pastors and penitents and all us sorry sinners together.

In conclusion to this subject, let us be mindful above all of the call to pray for one another, of the commandment to be charitable to one another (when Christ said ‘Love one another as I have loved you’, I don’t think he added ‘But not if the ‘other’ is a bishop or cardinal – then you can be as mean and nasty as you please’), and to above all have a concern in deep humility for our own following of Christ, our own fragility and proneness to fall into sins of all kinds—pride, anger, judgment, vainglory, as well as the sins of the flesh—and to keep our eyes, minds, and hearts fixed on the Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ, from which flows an infinite and endless stream of mercy, blood red and water pure, which is the healing and salvation of all humanity. Amen.