“Let’s make Catholicism weird again,” is the cri du jour (cry of the day) of today’s “influencer” crowd. Again? When has it not been weird?
For starters, we have a Savior who speaks in parables, who commands us to eat his flesh and drink his blood, and who then hangs suffering and silent, nailed to the cross. Can anyone possibly imagine Jesus trying to “curate an image,” or taking a selfie, or impugning his integrity trying to be popular or “trending” or cool?
I do a certain amount of traveling for work, often combined with visits to friends. Wherever I go, I try to bring everything I have. I try to stretch myself to the limit: physically, emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, socially. I try to be 100% available and responsive to whoever and whatever might come my way. If I have a talk or presentation, I pour my heart, mind, and soul into it.
I often wonder whether I’m laying down my life for my friends or am simply a pathological people-pleaser. Why can’t I just do the minimum? Why does everything have to be life and death?
I keep thinking of an incident that occurred several summers ago. I was living in the LA neighborhood of Koreatown at the time. The mother of a friend of a friend had died and the friend couldn’t go to the memorial service in San Diego because she was out of town. Could I go in her place? Drive to San Diego, to a mobile home park clubhouse where the event was being held?
My friend lived off a trust fund and didn’t have to work; I, as usual, was trying to eke out a livelihood as a freelance creative writer. It was hot. I dislike driving the freeways under the best of circumstances. But there it was: “As you have done to the least of these, so you have done it to me.” The woman’s mother had died, for heaven’s sake.
So I arranged to double up on work for the next couple of days, gave up my own day, put on an outfit suitable for a funeral memorial, drove the three or so hours to San Diego and, after several wrong turns, found the clubhouse.
I knew no one but the friend of my friend, who of course was busy with other people, so I made small talk with strangers for an hour and a half or so while nibbling on dried-out celery sticks and cheese: a scenario that must have been all too familiar to Christ — the wedding at Cana, the countless healings at people’s homes — small talk, bad food, and extreme fatigue.
At the same time, I was glad I’d come, grateful I’d had the wherewithal to come. A tiny gesture of solidarity with a fellow human being, of respect for the deceased, of the fact that when someone dies, we need to mark the occasion; we want to know the person’s life mattered; we crave closure.
Afterward I helped clean up, and then my friend offered to take me to Starbucks for a coffee before I began the long drive home. “Thanks for coming,” she said. “That was kind. What I don’t get, though, what I’ve been meaning to ask you, is — how can you be Catholic?”
I stifled a guffaw and the urge to snap, “Trust me, if I weren’t Catholic, I would have spent the day in bed drinking Diet Coke, eating candy, and binge-watching Netflix. If I weren’t Catholic, I would not have lifted the smallest part of a finger to honor your mother who I never even met. If I weren’t Catholic, I would not have voluntarily agreed to undergo what all told will be six to seven hours of anxiety driving the Southern California freeways, been present to your late mother’s friends with whom I have zero in common, or sit here with you making an effort to be pleasant because I know you’ve just sustained a terrible loss.”
“Because left to my own devices I’m utterly selfish, utterly self-absorbed, and utterly judgmental,” I replied instead — and left it at that.
Then there are my spiritual but not religious friends. “God isn’t in a box,” they scoff, a reference to the useless, time-wasting loonies (like me) who pray before the tabernacle. “I can pray whenever I feel like it,” they crow. “Wherever I am.”
Well, yes and no; or better yet, yes and Yes. Of course we can pray anywhere, anytime. But to believe in the Transubstantiation is to believe that Christ himself is in the tabernacle, and if you love him, and want to be more like him, and hunger for his body and blood, to be able to sit in the same room with him, to kneel before him, to ceaselessly thank him, is a rare and precious gift, an unmerited honor, and a profound mystery.
How can you explain all that to someone who doesn’t believe, doesn’t want to believe, and thinks those who believe are stupid and cowardly and out of touch with the “real” world?
You can’t. So you drag your aging body — tired, thirsty, lonely — and sit before the “box” in silence, and pray for your spiritual-but-not-religious friend. Pray for all that is good and true in them — for there is so much, always. Pray because they have wounded you, because they do not understand who and what you live for, because they thoughtlessly insulted Our Lord — but forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do. Pray for them — and for yourself — because one day our souls will be called to account, and we will be required to name the master for whom we have labored.
“Whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this faithless and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels” (Mark 8:38), says Jesus, just six days before the Transubstantiation.
Whoever is scandalized, in other words, by the smallness, the last-placeness, the servanthood, the unlikeliness, the hiddenness, the utter lack of “triumph” in the Way, the Truth, and the Life will never be free from the bondage of self and of the world’s worship of power, property, and prestige; the world’s love for fads and taglines; the world’s craving to make a mark.
A God who is eternally silent, perpetually invisible, and offers himself up — out of love — to be publicly tortured to death.
Try making a trend out of that.
