You Like Me, You Really Like Me!...or maybe not

It has not always been easy being Catholic in this country.  From the early settlements of the colonies, English settlers took a very hostile view of those papists joining them in the new world.  It would take over 170 years before a Catholic would be elected to the presidency.  Otherwise, Catholics were to keep to themselves, shoulder outright hate, bigotry, and intolerance.  Then with the age of media, we were treated to some positive images of priests and sisters...singing and kindly.  We saw a Catholic Bishop, Fulton Sheen, have a hit TV show.  Then we elected Kennedy and something changed.  In a speech before Evangelicals in Texas, Kennedy basically promised that would not use his faith in the way he led, he would be a good little protestant dhimmi and be just like them.  No wonder the speech made Sen. Santorum want to puke.  He got elected and Catholics had an epiphany...all we have to do is chuck our faith if we want to be popular.  We could still retain the cultural identification as Catholic, we just didn't have to live any of it or publicly profess any of it.

Then, just off the heels of this epiphany came the sexual revolution.  We might have had problems with this or that teaching of the Church, but now we were free to just let loose.  What better way than to fornicate like bunnies and feel no tinge to that nasty old conscience! We could contracept our way into a new and freeing existence of  all the benefits of marriage without having to marry.  Women were told that marriage and family life weighed them down anyway, but why chuck that ball and chain and have to miss sex?!  When that stodgy old Pope Paul VI put out Humanae Vitae..well we just had in black and white just how out of it the Church was.  It wasn't just lay people either.  Many of those priests and sisters who stayed, after so many left, adopted this new 'freeing' mentality and , well, woo-hoo,  just went to town.  In fact the less that you could act or even look like one of those nasty old relics, the better.  Sure, some people got bent out of shape, but they were humorless puritans.

So we bolted from our faith, dumbed down...I'm sorry...breathed new life into the practices, and acculturated so much worldly wisdom,  that assuredly now they would like us!  65% quit going to Church much at all or completely.  It became fashionable to be a cafeteria Catholic, picking and choosing what teachings we liked or didn't challenge our favored sins.  Surely, the world would love us now!  Of course, the clergy decided that this would be a wonderful time to hand our detractors boatloads of ammunition (not to mention boatloads of money as well) and break their vows of celibacy with children, women, and men.  Okay, it was a small percentage of the clergy...a really small percent...but we bought the narrative that most priests had all the sexual restraint of a teenage boy in a brothel with his dad's credit card.  We bought the premise that most priests were gay or just really weird.  Surely, the world will like us now!  Our convents emptied out!  Our seminaries emptied out!  Surely the world would like as now! Yeah, not so much.

 Catholics are learning that you never negotiate with someone who wants you dead.  While those who abandoned their faith were lauded and gave themselves such non-offensive names like 'recovering Catholic" (get it?  Like a recovering alcoholic? because Catholicism is a disease?  Funny !  Oh never mind) and some became official spokesmen for the Church in the mainstream media and were trotted out like prize turkeys whenever a pope dared cross the pond and drop in.  All the better if a former priest of sister..better yet if a current one who just show how worldly they were in trashing the pope.   But for those who decided to stick it out, the attacks have been relentless.  The more faithful we are, the more they hate us, and we  have to happy with this. Really...happy?! The entertainment industry will continue to portray all clergy and religious as either dolts, Huns, gay, or criminals.   The media will continue to portray faithful Catholics as insipid, ignorant, intolerant, hate filled, half breeds, hypocrites, and nitwits.  The oh-so-smart academic types will continue to doubt our intelligence, our teachings, our rituals, and our faithful with little more than derision and scorn.  Maybe even the government will continue to try to strip away our rights.  SO WHAT!?  My attitude is : BRING IT!

History shows that whenever we are persecuted is when we grow.  When we take the moral high ground and stand our ground without returning their attacks with equal aggression, we prevail.  When we are forced to defend our ground, we have risen time and again to the occasion.  If this sounds defiant..well, that is the point! Truth be told, I don't want the world to like me and approve of me.  I don't need their stamp of approval.  I don't want to be the shape-shifting insecure about who I am person that allows the cool kids to dictate their likes and actions.  In Luke, the Beatitudes bless those who are persecuted and curses those who are liked and approved of by the world.  The Catholic who doesn't see their faith as something worth dying for is the Catholic who doesn't see their faith worth living for.  So to Hollywood...bring it on!  Music industry...bring it!  Government officials...hit us with your best shot!  Media...we're not scared of you!  We came before you, we'll be here long after you.  We have outlasted every kingdom, empire, and trend that has tried to destroy us.  We have survived every foolish self-inflicted wound with which we have struck ourselves.  That is because we have Christ promise that you would never prevail and crush us. We have the power of the Holy Spirit.  We know already who wins the war...and it isn't you!  So bring it...by the grace of God, we're ready! 

Transference, Barney, and Rebellion: Things to avoid in following God's will

The readings for this week have been so wonderfully apropos for this week where we as a Church remember vocations and pray for them during Vocations Awareness Week. Hopefully this isn't news to you.  The first reading are from I Samuel, with yesterday's being the call of Samuel.  This reading happens to be the 1st reading for this weekend.  While the young Samuel is mistaking the call of God for the voice of the priest, Eli, finally Eli understands that God is calling the boy and tells Samuel to respond with "speak, Lord, you servant is listening."  What a bold statement!  This statement is supposed to be at the heart of every Christian every day.  The responsorial psalm for that day (and coincidentally this weekend as well) has the response of "Here I am, Lord, I come to do your will."  Again, another simple statement that should be at the center of how we live. Were every Catholic to really capture this, all of the problems we experience within the Church would simply dry up.  Vocation crisis? Gone!  Scandals within the Church?  Never would have happened?  Numbers of practicing Catholics dwindling?  Not any more? I could go on and on with this list, the upshot is that if we were to live out these two simple sentences, there would profound change and great good.  So why isn't it happening?

My first guess is a what I would call a simple case of transference.  We become suspect when we hear that we are called to do God's will.  We transfer onto God what He means by that with what we mean by that.  We know that our wills can be awful self-centered.  We know that we can want other people to do our will because it suits us to have them to do so.  In this light, God comes across as a eternal me-monkey  with a colossal ego that needs to be stroked lest He go all Rambo on you.  We assume that God is every bit as self-centered as humanity and bristle at the idea of having to serve such a megalomaniac!   However, God is not such.  Instead of being self-centered, He is other centered, that is, he loves us and wants what is best for us now and for all eternity.  He watches out for us and want to protect us.  When He asks us to do His will, He asks us to be other-centered (that is to be truly loving) as He is and thus to watch out for the true good around us. 

My second guess would be what I call the "Barney Syndrome".  In this scenario we accept that God loves us.  We even believe that God unconditionally loves us and wants what is best.  Where the breakdown starts is that in believing these things we fail to make the jump that we are called to model out behavior on His.  God becomes the Great Enabler.  Instead of "Here I am Lord, I come to do your will", the response becomes "Turn the other way God, I want to do my will!"  God's job is to rubber stamp whatever I want to do.  Furthermore He is suppose to bless it as if I were doing His will!  This God doesn't have a hell because everybody gets into heaven, unless, like, you know, you're like Adolf Hitler and stuff.  The morality bar is set as low as needed to accommodate whatever it is I want to do.  The problem here is that if we enter into a relationship with God, a relationship necessary for heaven, then the love goes both ways. As with a good marriage where the two spouses are actively concerned with the other person's needs , our relationship with God is bound on our looking out for God's will (which as above said, looks out for our good) as He looks out for what we need.  God blesses this.  God, however, is not one to taunted, ignored, or dismissed.  He is not the great enabler.  He allows us to make our choice about whose will we follow and then bear out the consequences of those choices.

My third guess is outright rebellion. In the story of Samuel, Samuel is given to the High Priest, Eli, because Samuel is called to serve the Lord.  Eli has to sons who are priests as well: Phineas and Hophni.  They were self-centered men who has the audacity to steal from God what was His during the sacrifices.  Not only were they indifferent to God, they were outright hostile.  Their response to God wasn't "Here I am Lord, I come to do your will" it was "Go away God, I am going to do my will." Phineas and Hophni push away the hand of God because they have no desire for a relationship with God, especially a relationship that will require them to change.  Without God's hand, they are destroyed.  This story is repeated over and over again.  God does not want such things to happen, but He allows the consequences of our choices to happen if we are insistent upon it.  On a slightly separate note: why we think as Americans, that we can push God out of the public sphere, routinely mock Him and those in relationship with Him, replace Him with materialism,  lust for power, hedonism, and materialism, how we can surgically excise from any avenue of our school children's life, mock His existence,  pile corpse upon corpse with our violence, abortion, and disregard for the basic needs of other and then have the audacity to demand that His only job, if He exists at all, is to make happy and bless whatever it is I want...just baffles me!

The point is that we are called to rise above transference,  Barney, and rebellion and follow God in our lives knowing that His will is always oriented towards our collective best interest.  There is no reason to be afraid.  If we want the vocations we collectively need, it will be in having the faith to say "Here I am Lord, I come to do your will."  If we want true peace in our parishes and to be free from scandals of all sort, then again, we will have to conform our will to God's.  If we want true unity and peace in our country, it will come from living, actually living, the Gospel which calls us for defer to each other in imitation of Christ.  If we want strong marriages and family life, then it will only be through this mutual submission of will for the good of others.  God is not a rubber stamp to approve of a life divorced from His will, nor is he a giant purple doofus who enables reckless and selfish behavior, nor is He one who is to mocked.  He wants what is truly good for us and leads us to peace.  We have to want that to!  How will you, the reader, live up to "Here I am Lord, I come to do your will" today?  How will your life reflect that?

Toning down the rhetoric

In writing this post, I am getting that 'hypocrisy vibe alert' for I know that have been as guilty as the rest in participating in the to be mentioned behavior, but as of late, I have refrained from the behavior for the most part. I say for the most part because the St Louis Cardinals underachievement is rising to new heights.  The problem though is angry rhetoric.  There seems to be no shortage of it.  There seems to be no arena in which it is not just common but is now the norm.  Within the halls of our churches, the halls of governance, the halls of industry and finance, and within the lives of everyone, especially the famous, we feel the right and necessity to castigate at will.  Whether it is US representative telling a whole group of her fellow Americans to go to hell, the in kind responses to her, the accusations leveled at bishops for being too this or that,  the ripping apart of some starlet's personal choices, the constant stream of abuse we level at any authority figure, or any group to which we do not belong, we have turned our society into a dysfunctional group of busybodies where looking for anyone else's faults is the norm and displaying them for all to admire as if it were a museum gallery exhibit  is the goal.  The great melting pot has turned into a saga that makes the Lord of the Flies look like the Von Trapp family.  We have become a society of Mrs Kravitzes screaming "Abner, Abner" with such frequency that it feels like cat claws on a chalkboard.

Disagreements are a part of life.  How we should proceed as a country, as a church, and as a parish will always be there.  Each of the three have guiding principles that act as parameters for behavior and direction.  For us as Americans that guide is the US Constitution and its attendant amendments.  We may disagree  on its application.  But that disagreement can be handled civilly.  Do we actually think that yelling, name-calling, accusations and counter accusations about motivation will help anything?  We can really believe the cacophony of mobs will bring any peace?  Mob rules have never ended well, whether it is the French Revolution,  the Russian Revolution, the rise of Hitler, or even the bitter fruit we are seeing rising out of the Arab revolts in which minorities, particularly Christian minorities (Egypt, Iraq for example) are being persecuted.  There are ways to settle differences peacefully without bludgeoning each other to death.  There is no necessity for us to resort to hateful rhetoric, destructive behavior, or anarchy to get our feelings known. There is a different way. For we Catholics, it flows from our Catholic Faith.

As the country has the Constitution to ground the discussion, so we have the teachings of the Church and the Gospel.  Whereas we can amend the Constitution over time, the beauty of Catholic teaching is that it need not be amended, only applied.  The basic tenet of Catholic teaching is simple, it flows from the only commandment that Jesus gave us: Love one another! We are to love God with all that we are and to love our neighbor (that is anyone) as ourselves. Love, when used in the New Testament, is almost always translated from the Greek word 'agape', which means divine love.  What separates divine love from the other types of love is that it is completely selfless, attending to the needs of another.  Agape is willing to take on personal sacrifice and suffering for the good of another, to bear wrongs patiently, and show kindness. (cf I Corinthians 12-13). All of the Church's many teaching all flow from the question as to what does it look like to love God and our neighbor, recognizing the two are inseparable. Thus, it is from that vantage point of agape that we enter into discussion.  We also need to realize that discussion is more often not about persuading others to act as I see fit all the time, but to learn why things are where they are.  This is especially true when it comes to why the church does things the way it does and teaches what it does.  So many times we come in with our guns half cocked waiting the opportunity to fire instead of coming in with an attitude of understanding.  How we think this will produce anything but ill will and division is beyond me.  When we come in with the predisposition that the other party has intentionally wronged me and personally attacked me, there will be no room to listen or act fairly.

Therein lies the genesis of the problem.  This need for hateful and divisive rhetoric comes from a very dark place in the human soul: that the world must circle around me.  When we feel that it is everyone else's job to do as I want and see things as I see them, it is an obvious tip off that agape is not where I am coming from.  It is clear that my base is looking out for me and not for the other.  We can get so wrapped up in vested interests that we have no option but to feel frustrated and thus launch into hate filled rhetoric, presumptions of another person's malevolence, or personal attacks.  It is easier to deal with someone else's greed than to deal with my own, to decry someone else's inflexibility rather than deal with my own, and to be enraged about someone else's disrespect than to deal with my own.  If we hope to move discussion beyond such things, it will be in taking the focus off of 'me'. When we can look at problems and dilemmas from a vantage point of what is best for us or in what will be helpful for others, it will open our eyes, tone down the rhetoric, and open our ears to another.  When we address the true wrongs that we see, and we must, it always must be from the vantage point of inviting the person doing wrong to conversion of heart.  True conversion never comes from the end of a gun or the business end of a bat.  It does not come from accusations, yelling, taunting, or other un-christian like behavior. It comes from a genuine love and concern for the person, in wishing and wanting good for them.  Will it always work?  No.  But that does not excuse us from doing so.

The bottom line is this: Do unto others as you would have them unto you!  If you would not like your every fault and failing laid out for all the world to see, then don't do it to someone else!  If you do not want presumption of malevolence when you do err, don't do it to someone else!  If you want people to listen and understand, then afford others the same!  If you want people to treat your selflessly, then do the same for them!  If you wish to be the recipient of agape, then be the giver of it as well.  Whether that is within our families, workplaces, schools, parishes, churches, businesses, or governance, if we are true to the faith we claim, then agape must be our starting point for any discussion or correction.

Who is to blame?

For the past several weeks, our elected leaders have been rattling the partisan sabers over the budget, the debt ceiling, and the deficit.  Politocal pundits of all stripes have weighed in trying to find and level blame on who is responsible for the grinding halt that is our federal governement.  Of course, Republican pundits blame the president and the Democrats; the Democrats blame the House and the Tea Party; the White House blames the Congress and vice versa.  Of course, on blogs. class warfare reigns and it is so common for groups to villify the rich or the poor, both leveling the same accusation of the other side being a group of greedy societal parasites. It has gotten ugly. 

Truth be told, though, at the end of the day it is the American voter who is ultimately to blame.  WE are a federal republic, we vote for those who make the decisions.  We elected every single representative, senator, and president their post.  We were the ones who sent the conflicted message to them that we want loads of freebies (which the DNC picked up on) but we don't want to pay for it (which the GOP picked up on).  WE allowed them to play every devisive card (gender, race, orientation, religion, social class, economic class) to cater votes.  We allowed them to replace real debate with a collection of 10 second sound bytes that were rhetorical fluff.  We allowed to demagouge instead of expalin their positions.  We allowed them to throw mud at their opponents, to slander and lie about their opponenets.  Worst of all we rallied around the question "How can my life be made better by this election" (Are you better off now than you were 4 years ago) instead of asking "How can this country and all its citizens be made better?".  How did we think this would end well?

All of these things are in direct opposition to our Catholic faith.  Our faith is based in love of God; that is, a love that by its nature looks out for the good of others.  St. Paul tells us that this love rejoices in the truth, is not envious, and seeks the good of the other.  There is no segment of this life in which the love of Christ is supposed to be absent.  If we are true to our call as Catholics, then we bring that love into our political decisions and demand that those we elect do so as well.  Wouldn't it be great if our elected officials collectively looked at what was really in the best long term interest of this country, even if in doing so the are sacrificing their political careers?  Wouldn't it be awesome if both we and the Congress we elect realized that wisdom and not demagoguery should prevail in our social discourse?  These things are entirely possible, but first we must demand the life of Christian love to be each of our way of life and elect those who will do the same: those who look out for the good of the entire population, not just the part they hope votes for them.