Real Faith for a Real World
The whole “mission statement,” so to speak, of Intentional Catholic is the idea that everything we do is connected to faith. Even so, this quote seems almost funny–but also sobering. Because if even speed limits have a faith dimension, then faith really is supposed to form every aspect of life!
What this reminds me of, though it’s a separate issue, is tax shelters, offshore corporations, and tax loopholes. I’ve often heard, in relation to taxes, “As long as it’s legal I’m going to take advantage of it.” But we recognize that just because something is legal doesn’t mean it’s morally right (cough-cough-abortion). So using this argument as justification for doing whatever possible to hoard as much money as possible has never sat well with me.
Today, on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, we Catholics focus in very narrowly on abortion. In our discussions and arguments about connecting public policy to our faith, this issue is always presented as the issue–the only one that matters, the one that overwhelms absolutely every other tenet of our faith. Nothing else matters, because without life, none of the rest of it could happen.
But as this excerpt shows, that is not how the bishops of the Second Vatican Council viewed the world. That is not how we are called to view the world.
Our commitment to sanctity of life doesn’t–can’t–stop with abortion. To do so is to betray who we are as Catholic Christians.
Related posts:
How We Talk About Abortion, part 1
How many times have I read this Scripture passage and never noticed before? I always stopped with learning how to live in humble circumstances. Why on earth would there be anything to learn about living with abundance?
But there is. When you live with abundance, there’s more temptation: temptation to hoard; temptation to resent the imposition when the call of the Gospel means you have to let others have more of “your” wealth; temptation to get priorities out of whack and give too much importance to wealth and its trappings; temptation for preservation of wealth to become the deciding factor in every discernment.
It’s a huge temptation on a personal level that simply doesn’t exist if you have nothing. When you have nothing, there’s little moral dilemma surrounding money.
This also really resonates at the policy level. In America, there’s a lot of “temptation for preservation of wealth to become the deciding factor.” Virtually everything in American politics is a money-first discussion. It doesn’t matter if it’s right; it only matters if one side or the other sees an initiative as a an economic boon or difficulty. We renegotiate trade deals in our favor, even if the only way they can possibly be honored is for us to get more and someone else to get less. We decide environmental policy by cheapness and the perception of preserving status-quo jobs rather than by the damage to the earth and the ripple effect that will have on future generations. The foundation of discussions of health care is not the fact that it’s a basic need of human existence, but instead how much it’s going to cost, as if cost, rather than need, is the primary question.
We have abundance in America, but we haven’t figured out how to live with it. Not well, at least.
A few years ago, I’d never heard the term “scrupulousness.” My mother introduced me to it when I wrote a series on my personal blog about my struggles with anxiety. Now I think of it all the time–though simply recognizing it is a big step toward battling it.
I tend to view it as a sin, although a web search this morning seems to indicate that it’s more a cross to be borne. But I think Catholics in general are particularly susceptible. I would argue that scrupulousness is a big part of “Catholic guilt.”
Once I was sensitized to this tendency in myself, I saw it cropping up all over the place. It may not be a sin, but the inevitable fallout of scrupulousness is a rush to judge anyone who doesn’t share whatever I think is the right way to look at the world, and to place rigid expectations on others that constitute a heavy burden on people prone to scrupulousness–which, as I said, I think is many of us.
I would argue that scrupulousness plays a big part in a lot of the no-compromise fights we have within the Church–the political ones, yes, but also the liturgical ones (and many others). Most recently it’s struck me in the arguments about texts of liturgical songs–an assumption that because I read a particular text fragment in a certain way, a song is inarguably heretical, even though thousands of other people may find great spiritual benefit in it, and great potential for growth in holiness, because they don’t interpret that text fragment the same way I do.
For a long time, because I myself was very conservative and all my scrupulousness was about doing the right things (which were always conservative values), I thought scrupulousness was only a problem conservatives have. As I got better at combating my own scrupulousness, I began to move to the center, and that seemed to confirm my assumption.
But I was wrong. These days I am more likely to suffer from scrupulousness about environmental issues. It’s never enough. And I am VERY judgy about other people’s lack of environmental stewardship.
But the example that sparked this post was this: In the midst of my great world view shift, a quote kept cropping up over the course of months–I can’t find it anymore, but it was something like, “Your money doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to the poor.” It was attributed to a pope. No arguing with that!
The obvious conclusion to draw from this quote is: anything I do to save money is a sin. I have no right to enjoy the things of the world as long as poverty exists. I should never go out to a nice dinner, I should never take a trip to see the wonder of the world, I should never own jewelry–because as long as people are suffering, “my” money doesn’t belong to me. Also, I pointed it at conservatives who don’t like taxes.
It was a big struggle. I told myself that religious figures exaggerate to shock their listeners into doing something for the poor. But that didn’t help, because of who we hold up as the ideal of Christianity: Francis of Assisi and Katherine Drexel, rich people who did give away everything they had; Mother Teresa, who lived in abject poverty for decades; the fact that to this day, a lot of religious orders take a vow of poverty. A papal quote + the body of evidence of what the Church holds up for honor made it hard to draw any other conclusion than the Church intends us to be poor rather than rich.
Even Robert Barron used that quote once.
I tried for a long time to find the exact verbiage, but couldn’t find it anywhere. Then one day, someone attributed it to Rerum Novarum #22. Finally! I went to look it up.
Guess what? Rerum Novarum 22 does NOT say I am obligated to give every single penny I don’t absolutely need for my bare survival to the poor. Here’s what it actually says:
Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, 1891
(Note the date: eighteen ninety-one. This is not some uber-modern corruption of the Gospel. Note 2: the footnotes refer to the Summa theologiae and to Luke 11:14.)
It’s also worth noting that St. Basil the Great is a little more blunt on the topic of our responsibility to the poor:
(Note: I have not checked that quote, for what it’s worth.)
In the end, we all have to wrestle, to try to find a balance between enjoying with gratitude the good things of the earth (which are, after all, made by God), and hoarding the wealth that allows us to do so, thereby sinning by not helping those who suffer.
My freshman year in college, I landed (quite unintentionally) in an honors writing intensive class on Darwin which shook my faith right to the foundation. Sometime in college—not sure if it was that fall or later, when the fallout had time to settle—I remember sitting on the rough stoop outside the “back door,” so called even though it was on the front of the house because it was the work entrance with an iron bar to scrape manure off boots before coming inside, and saying to my mom, “Sometimes I wonder if I really believe any of this stuff at all.”
As a Catholic mother myself, that sounds like just about the worst thing a child can say to you, but my mom handled it with tremendous grace. She sighed. “Well, Thomas Aquinas said that you could prove the existence of God, but it would take so long to do it, it’s better to take it on faith. But everything in the universe is caused by something. And before that there’s another cause, and before that another one. And if you go back to the very beginning of all that, that’s God.”
It was a simple revelation but one that resonated deeply.
Twenty-some years later, I no longer doubt the existence of God. At all. Ever. I doubt many other things. I question many other things. I have a rocky relationship with the Gospel of John, for instance, because it seems to me that Jesus goes around picking fights and being deliberately obtuse. It’s hard for me to see through John’s advanced theology to who Jesus was and what he was like when he walked the earth.
So I pray often, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief.”
But I don’t doubt God, because in the past twenty years, I’ve encountered him so many times.
When I was battling crippling anxiety that I was too scared to talk to anyone about, let alone find help for, I discovered that I could sit on the edge of a creek for an hour or two, doing absolutely nothing, simply praying and being still. Eventually, a cool quiet would descend, quieting (though not eliminating) the voices of panic.
I didn’t realize that was the Holy Spirit until years later, when I was married and on the core team for Life Teen and I went to an adoration event where people were laughing and whispering in tongues and being slain in the spirit. I remember this rawness in my soul that night, a desire to experience the Spirit utterly at war with the certainty that such expressions were Not Within My Comfort Zone. When it was over, I thought with both disappointment and relief (but not surprise) that I’d been passed over.
Hours later, I processed the quiet, cool peace that had replaced the raw pulsing in my chest, and I thought, “Oh. Um. Something did happen to me in there.” It was the first time I connected that feeling I experienced by the creek in northern Iowa to the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit is my guy. We talk all the time. We talk about music, about kid problems, about the personal flaws I want to be rid of, even about my writing. (We talk a lot about my writing.) The Spirit never, ever fails. If I don’t get a solution to my problem in short order, I’ve learned to step around the problem and ask another question—like, for instance, “Am I barking up the wrong tree? Am I not supposed to be doing this at all? Is this why it’s so hard?” (Sometimes the answer is: Obviously! Other times, it is: No, it’s just hard.)
There’s been a meme going around Facebook lately, saying something like “I don’t believe in God because someone told me to, I believe in God because I’ve experienced him.” It’s no secret that I am deeply, deeply suspicious of memes. That one seems a little self-righteous to me. I don’t doubt the sincerity of the sentiment, but wouldn’t the witness be more effective to just, y’know, tell what your experience of God is, rather than send out some nonspecific meme crowing about your faith?
So that’s what I’m doing today—since I have little time and way too much to do, I decided to free write this little witness of why I believe in God. What is yours?
“Another self.” It’s hard enough to view others this way in family life. Half of Godly parenting–maybe three-quarters of it–is trying to get kids, who are supremely selfish beings, to recognize the other as not only equal to themselves, but “another self.”
But take this beyond the confines of those we already love, and it’s downright superhuman.
-the three people you most dislike in the world, you should view as “another self.”
–the people who are a continual thorn in our sides are “another self.”
–the people living in the woods and holding signs at intersections, whether they’re drug addicts or lazy or criminals or whatever assumptions we might be tempted to make about them, are “another self.”
–the refugee, asylum seeker, and yes, even the genuine “illegal alien” is “another self.”
And as a Christian it is my *job* to enable all these “other selves” to live with dignity. This is a conciliar document saying this, not one priest or one bishop. This is the Church speaking as clearly as the Church can speak.
Now, we can argue about what is the best way to enable human dignity. That’s a totally valid argument.
But those aren’t the discussions we’re having.
Instead, almost all our arguments are focused on whether we *should* help people–whether they *deserve* it and whether “there’s money” to do it. But let’s be honest: in America, there’s plenty of money to do what needs to be done. The argument is between those who think it can’t be done piecemeal, and should therefore be done at the level of society, i.e. through higher taxes and governmental administration, and those who think government is intrinsically evil and taxes are to be avoided at all costs–that charity should be entirely a private matter, even if that means many people will get missed.
This is the fundamental logjam in America today, and the trouble is that people on both sides view their own position on that question as universally-accepted truth–a settled reality. And so instead of figuring out how to strike a balance between personal rights and societal responsibility, we end up bickering about who does and who doesn’t deserve help. We start labeling asylum seekers as criminals, and conservatives as racists, and it all falls to pieces.
Our opponents, too, are “another self.”
The following quote is too long to put in a graphic, but it’s well worth putting at the center of our minds in an election year:
…there must be made available to all men everything necessary for leading a life truly human, such as food, clothing, and shelter; the right to choose a state of life freely and to found a family, the right to education, to employment, to a good reputation, to respect, to appropriate information, to activity in accord with the upright norm of one’s own conscience, to protection of privacy and rightful freedom even in matters religious.
This social order requires constant improvement. It must be founded on truth, built on justice and animated by love; in freedom it should grow every day toward a more humane balance. An improvement in attitudes and abundant changes in society will have to take place if these objectives are to be gained.
Gaudium et Spes, #26
The more time I spend with Gaudium et Spes, the more I love it. It’s just so beautiful!
You could look at this quote as a throwaway comment, but if you take the time to dig into it… wow! I can’t find myself until I don’t matter anymore. My opinions, my priorities, my philosophies, my vision of the way the world should work–all these are irrelevant, and I will be more spiritually free, more like God, the more independent of them I am. The less tightly I hold onto me, the more I will know who I actually am.
The thing is, what does it mean to make a “sincere gift of self”? The NFP community uses self-gift as a catch-phrase, to the point where for years, I only saw it in relation to questions surrounding sexuality.
But that’s only one tiny slice of self-gift. What does it mean in my family? In my marriage? What does it mean in a work or school community situation where I feel threatened or I passionately disagree with choices being made? Does emptying myself mean I should never stand up and protest injustices I’ve suffered? Never call out poor choices or un-Christlike behaviors or policies?
What about emptying myself of my own self-importance? We all know it’s God’s opinions, not ours, that matter. The trouble is, we are all 100% convinced that God agrees with us. We don’t recognize the possibility that we might have opinions we need to give up, because obviously, we’re already in the right. We never even stop to question what human priorities we have slapped with the “God’s on my side” label.
This quote from the Second Vatican Council offers a heck of a lot of food for thought in the year 2020, as we stare down the barrel of a presidential election guaranteed to be ugly–and more to the point, guaranteed to be full of the temptation to assume that my worldly philosophies, my desires, my opinions, are God’s opinions, rather than mine.
At 8:25 on January first, I walked into Jazzercise and was pleasantly surprised to see which instructor was waiting on the stage. This woman is an unfailingly positive human being. The kind who is down-to-earth but never says anything negative about anyone. In other words, she’s not saccharine and fake, but genuinely sees good everywhere and in everyone.
This may not come as a shock to anyone who’s read my angsty posts, but just in case it’s unclear:
I don’t identify with this personality trait.
I admire it. I can list two other people off the top of my head who routinely blow my mind by their unfailing ability to see and comment only upon the good. But it’s not me.
I went into class that morning with two things: 1) a certainty that I already knew the word to guide my spiritual growth this year, and 2) an incredibly bad attitude about my family life. This latter reality was based upon a) the fact that I haven’t been sleeping well and b) discovering at 7:55 a.m. on New Year’s Day that my chromosomally-gifted daughter’s last act of 2019 was to put the unrinsed pasta bowls in the (wrong) cabinet instead of the dishwasher.
Over the course of the hour I spent bathing in the positivity radiating from the Jazzercise stage, I realized I was on the wrong track with my word of the year. As important as “charity” might be in my life, there’s another fundamental skill I need to develop before I can be successful in pursuing it. Specifically, the predisposition to see the good instead of the bad.
After Jazzercise, I went up to the instructor and said, “I just want you to know that I so admire your positivity.”
“Oh, you are so sweet!” she said. “How can I not be positive? There’s just so much to be positive about!“
I spread my hands, because right there was the difference between positive people and, well, me.
In the past year I’ve come to recognize and accept that, in addition to people who see the good in everything, there also need to be people to call out evil and hypocrisy. This insight came, in fact, out of the mouth of another of those inspiringly positive women I mentioned earlier.
The trouble is, a person who is on fire to see God’s kingdom made manifest on earth tends to get really angsty about ev.er.y.thing. We tend to become unable to see anything other than calamity at every swipe of the screen.
I know that one year is not going to turn me into my New Years Jazzercise instructor. Let’s be frank. The rest of my life isn’t enough time to make me into that person.
And that’s not what I’m trying for. It’s not who God made me to be. God gave me the ability to put words together for a reason, and that means pricking consciences and asking myself and everyone around me to see where our attitudes and behaviors in the real world don’t live up to the faith we claim to believe. That’s my calling.
But I will be a happier and holier person if I can angle myself two or three or five degrees in the direction of focusing on the good. I will be better able to roll with the punches when the school district calls unnecessary snow days. When the parish changes the locks, causing me all kinds of headache and extra things to remember in planning choir practices, when I already can’t keep my life straight. When the strain of juggling kids’ concerns takes more emotional energy than I have to offer it.
And I’ll be a better example of Christian living if I can turn the energy I’ve spent focused inward, on negativity, instead into recognizing, and then affirming, the good around me.
So this is the shape of my spiritual goal for 2020: to see the good.
I doubt there’s a Christian out there who would argue with the sentiment expressed here, but in the context of globalization (a reality some embrace and others loathe, but inescapable reality either way), it does invite self-reflection.
Again and again in Scripture, from Cain saying, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” to the scribe asking “Who is my neighbor?” to the quotes referenced in the ellipses of this quote–Romans 13:9-10 and 1 John 4:20–it is clear that God’s definition of “love of neighbor” is bigger and much, much less comfortable than we’d like it to be. It requires self-emptying that we naturally resist. The supremacy of ego (my opinions, my right to judge) is hard to overcome, but it’s critical to living a Christian witness in an authentic and inviting way.
Intentional Catholic 