To care or not to care...

Monday July 9, 2007

There are times when I am overwhelmed with sadness. It comes like a wave and throws me off balance. I experience a sense of hopelessness in the core of my being and I want to cry out, “Is anyone out there?”

I know there are lots of folks ‘out there’ because I hear from so many of them every day. Former parishioners from ‘everywhere.’ I am probably one of the most ‘affirmed’ priests in the world! Really!

Then why am I sad?

I think I’m still grieving the loss of a vision I thought was shared by our shepherds. No, not all of them but I thought most of them had ‘caught the spirit’ of Vatican II or at least inherited it from others who did catch the spirit.

Yes, I realize fully that, to use Bishop Casey’s phrase, “we stripped a few gears” in our attempts to bring our Church up to date after the Council but weren’t they good days! It was exciting to be ‘Catholic’ There was no ‘shame in the name.’ Yes, I was one of the ‘young turks’ who thought I knew it all and I’m embarrassed to confess now that I didn’t know it all and never will, but I gave it my best shot!

Little did we know that some of our shepherds were not with their flocks and that others among them were up to no good with some of their flock.

I suppose the negative learning is that we can no longer depend on our shepherds to lead us but must turn to one another ‘in virtue of our baptism.’

Yes, indeed, there are many pastors among us—ordained and not ordained—who are committed to reform and renewal and I think of them in my low moments.

Here are a couple of reflections that I received from two priest friends who have been true spiritual guides for me. The first comes from Father Pat Collins, retired pastor living in Michigan. He directed the parish retreat at St. Virgil’s earlier this year.

The second article is from my faithful mentor and long time friend, George Wilson, SJ (“Jesuit but nice!”).

I hope they give you a little hope too!

Father Lasch

Offering Sanctuary For Sadness by Fr. Ronald Rolheiser
September 19, 2004

The church today, at least in the West, it is not a very happy place.

Gone are the wonder and the joy of being young, the innocent laughter that so characterizes us when we’re still pre-neurotic. There’s a middle- aged heaviness to the church today, a certain sadness.

We’re grieving a lot of things: What are we grieving?

In essence, four things: i) a lost innocence, ii) a lost unity, iii) a lost child, and iv) a lost wholeness among the people.

At a more obvious level, we are grieving a certain lost innocence. We feel this as we experience the recent scandals within the church, sexual misconduct by some clergy, financial impropriety and abuse of power by some church leaders, and other things that have helped shatter the image of the church as the unsullied bride of Christ that can do no wrong and has done no wrong. Recent studies in church history have also helped highlight this by showing that the church’s long history of grace is colored too by a long history of sin.

But, painful as this is, this is not what’s most dampening the soul of the church. Less visible, less expressed, but more wounding, is the sense of having lost a certain security, namely, the security of knowing that we were the moral high ground, that we were the cognitive and moral majority, that our virtues were real, and that our ethical beliefs and cherished ways of doing things really did separate right from wrong. Until recently we didn’t have to ask ourselves if we were racist, imperialist, sexist, narrow, bigoted. Today we’re a lot less sure of those things. Maybe it isn’t a bad thing to lose all of that certainty, but it’s hardly a joyful thing. We’ve lost our innocence, our moral virginity. That doesn’t come without sadness.

Beyond this, we are grieving a painful division within the church and society. I doubt there has ever been a time since the reformation that the Church has been so painfully polarized and emotionally divided. In many places, in fact, we have two emotional communities, so divided are we by ecclesiology, theology, ideology, and spirituality. We live in an emotional apartheid, separated by ideology and ecclesiology just as surely and rigidly as if this was mandated by law. Such is the church today and such too is society today. We are a deeply divided community.

Division of course is not new. Christ said that he would bring fire to the earth and that this would divide people from each other. His promise has held true, except that today that the division is not between the sincere and the insincere, the good and the bad, the committed and the non-committed. Today, too often, the sincere are divided from the sincere, the good from the good, the committed from the committed. When good people can no longer be in community with each other and can no longer even speak respectfully with each other, the result is always sadness and anger (and anger is just another form of sadness). Small wonder that our churches and communities are not always happy places.

Beyond our internal divisions, we are too grieving a lost child, our child, secularity. Perhaps this can best be explained in an image: Western culture is to us, the church, much like an adolescent child is to its parents. We gave it birth, helped raise it, and now, with a fierceness and anger that do not seem justifiable, it is asserting its independence from us, accusing us of being bad parents, and claiming it can find life only by moving away from us (all without acknowledging its debt to us). Like parents too we fear for its safety even as we envy its youth, confidence, power, and daring and resent its independence. Like parents too, we feel a certain sadness. The child has left home, rejecting many of our cherished values in that leave-taking. It is slipping away from us, daily becoming more post-ecclesial. To not feel a sadness about this is to lack insensitivity and love.

Finally, we are grieving as well the grief of our people, our world. Western society is, in large measure, despondent and suffering from every kind of brokenness. Wholeness, it seems, is no longer the rule.

More and more it’s the exception for someone to not come from a broken home, a broken marriage, a series of broken relationships, and an abusive background of some sort. We’re a society of the wounded, we bring this to our churches, and this colours church life. The tensions and sadness inside the church reflect the tensions and sadness inside society as a whole.

And so we are a grieving church, though that is not necessarily a bad thing. Tears can save us from bitterness and hardness of heart.

So perhaps one of the important forms of sanctuary that the church can offer the world today is that of being a safe place where you can come and be sad.

And from America magazine:

Rebuilding Christ’s Church

Even among the rocks, we must learn to care and not to care. By Martin Pable | JULY 16, 2007

As my spiritual directee described what she called “a meltdown” in talking with her husband, she sighed, “I just don’t care anymore.” Things were not going well at the parish where she is on staff. She was fatigued; her husband was not recovering well from an injury; she saw little that was positive in church leadership. But she then went on to tell how she recovered her usual zest during a weekend retreat led by a Capuchin friar and a secular Franciscan woman. She came to the realization that she truly does care—about the parish, about the wider church, about her call to minister to God’s people. I stressed how important it is that she keep her focus on “the deep-down things,” as Gerard Manley Hopkins put it: on the lordship of Jesus, on the gifts of the Holy Spirit, on the unfailing, unconditional love of God and on the simple beauties of nature, just as Francis of Assisi would have us do.

“Rebuild My Church”

The woman’s cry found an echo in my own heart. Sometimes I am tempted to say (though it is more of an under-the-breath whimper than a full-throated cry), “I don’t care any more, either.” On Easter Sunday the church where I offered Mass was filled to the rafters. The next Sunday the music was just as uplifting, and I preached with the same enthusiasm—but the church was back to its usual half-fullness. “Where is everybody?” Every survey I read paints the same dismal picture. Catholics are divided; they no longer believe many church teachings; they are angry and hurt by the sexual abuse scandals and by the closing of parishes; they have little confidence in their leaders.

Yet the words “I don’t care” stick in my throat. I cannot say them, because I do not really mean them. I am haunted by the words of Jesus to Francis of Assisi: “Go and rebuild my church, which you see is falling into ruins.” I hear those words not as a “should” but as a gentle, loving invitation. They make me want to give my best, even though I may never see much in the way of measurable “rebuilding.” For that matter, I wonder if Francis did. At first he took Christ’s words literally and began physically repairing the little, broken-down church of San Damiano. Only later did he understand what Jesus really meant: Go and rebuild my church spiritually. And, God knows, he tried. But he met opposition, not only from the faithful, who expressed indifference, not only from the institutional church, but also (and especially) from his own friars. This was discouraging.

What Really Matters?

I have often been touched by the ending of T. S. Eliot’s poem “Ash Wednesday”: “Teach us to care and not to care/ teach us to sit still/ Even among these rocks.” Yes, there are things we ought to care about, and others that we ought not. How are we to distinguish, to separate them? That is the function of discernment, of contemplation. Hence we need to “sit still,” to make time, to pray. Wasn’t that the impetus behind St. Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises and the contemporary retreat movement? Our consumer-driven, success-oriented culture dismisses the act of sitting still and the practice of prayer. Good heavens, we might miss something!

So, what should we care about? Briefly: what God cares about. I do not think God cares who wins the Academy Awards, or the N.B.A. championship or the next “American Idol” competition. God does care about the protection of human life, the safeguarding of human rights and dignity for all people, economic justice and adequate health care for everyone, the protection of children from violence and exploitation, equal opportunities for women and about the ending of war as a means of settling disputes and the commitment of all nations to live in peace.

“Teach us to care and not to care/.../ even among these rocks.” Yes, the rocks are there, and some of them are huge, like the stone rolled in front of Jesus’ tomb. What are my rocks? What are yours? Probably nearly the same things: the divisions in the church, the lack of dialogue, the clash of egos, the insistence on adherence to rules over sound pastoral judgment and the direction of resources to rebuild the physical rather than the spiritual church.

But even among these rocks, we must learn to care and not to care. So we must stop trying to please everybody, stop being paralyzed by fear of criticism, stop caring about who gets credit and focus only on getting the job done. And with genuine passion and even joy, we continue to give our best efforts, even when they appear fruitless. We detach ourselves from results, and ask only if we are being faithful to the Gospel vision that Jesus left us.

St. Paul had another way of putting this. “My prayer for you,” he wrote, “is that your love may more and more abound…so that…you may learn to value the things that really matter” (Phil 1:9-10). A good discernment question we should often ask ourselves is, “At the end of the day, in the long view of life, does this really matter?” If the answer is yes, then we stand firm and take whatever heat may come. But if the answer is no, we let it go. Sometimes it is wiser to lose the battle if it means winning the war. And then we trust that our humble yielding will be blessed by God. As Paul said in another place, “Your work is never in vain when it is done in the Lord” (1 Cor 15:58). That is really comforting. After all, it is not we who can rebuild the church; that is the work of Christ and of the Holy Spirit whom he sent to guide it till the end of time. Yet in a mysterious divine economy, our “work” is needed to bring about God’s purposes.

Persevere

“I don’t care any more.” We need not be afraid if those words well up in our minds at various times in our spiritual journey. They can represent a moment of truth, a warning light that there is a malfunction in our spiritual system. Rather than deny or repress it, let it come into the light—where it can be honored, examined and brought into dialogue with the part of us that still does care. We pray, “Teach us to sit still…even among these rocks.” Then, whether in a retreat, or in spiritual direction, or in prayer to the Holy Spirit, we reclaim our power to care deeply about “the things that really matter.”

Toward the end of his life, when Francis saw that many of his brothers were no longer following the way of poverty and humility that he had passed on to them, he was distressed in spirit and cried out in prayer, “Lord, I give you back the family you gave me!” (read: “I don’t care any more!”). But then he “sat still” and heard the Lord say to him: “Tell me, brother, why are you sad about this? Who converts men and calls them to enter the order? Who gives them the grace to persevere? Is it not I? Therefore, I say to you: don’t be saddened about this. Do what you have to do, and do it well. I have planted the order of brothers in an everlasting charity.”
“Do what you have to do, and do it well.” Each one of us is able to do that, even among our rocks. That is the only way to rebuild the church and to extend the reign of God in our world.

Martin Pable, O.F.M.Cap., is a retreat director at St. Anthony Retreat Center, Marathon, Wis., and author of Reclaim the Fire: A Parish Guide to Evangelization (Ave Maria Press, 2002).

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