This quote first struck me because it doesn’t make sense. I have a garden. And a lawn I’ve recently reseeded. If I see a weed, I grumble a LOT. In fact, I’ve been going outside lately and pulling crabgrass out of my lawn, in a nod to complete futility. I do not see the swath of green, I see the weed. I see the imperfection.
In this one area, at least, we’re consistent in how we handle the physical and the spiritual world. We are not willing to tolerate imperfections in expressions of faith, either. It’s got to be all or nothing, and the problem is that the more we cling to that, the more people choose “nothing.”
A few years ago, someone asked me for advice on convincing a reluctant spouse to embrace Natural Family Planning. I, in turn, asked advice from a friend, who said, “Tell them to practice NFP. It’s about practicing. You do the best you can. You’re going to screw up. Just keep practicing.“
This was a real brain-stretching thought for me. To me, NFP was an all or nothing prospect. You do it or you don’t. It had never before occurred to me that maybe something so challenging and outside the cultural norm is, by definition, going to be done badly (and here I don’t mean mistakes in applying the method, I mean spiritual choices) and with lots of spiritual mistakes on the way to doing it well. Like practicing the piano, or the violin. You’re bad before you’re good, but that doesn’t make the effort any less laudable or worth undertaking.
Why have we never thought about the spiritual life this way?
My brain is exploding with thoughts on this, but I’ll leave it there for today and take up the question again after the weekend.
Intentional Catholic 
That’s what Pope Francis is talking about in the much-criticized portion of Amoris Laetitia where he talks about sensitive, pastoral approaches to those living in “irregular unions”.
There is a balance: People need to be exhorted to work hard to be holy and not to get lazy, and yet at the same time trying to get holiness right is a painful struggle and people need sympathy, understanding, acceptance, and much help along the way. We need to avoid falling to the temptation to pick sides over an invented conflict of mercy vs. righteousness, instead focusing on stretching ourselves to be able to hold them both together.
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