The older I get, the more deeply I ponder the axiom that there’s a little bit of bad in the best of us, and a little bit of good in the worst of us.
That we can exercise incredible nobility of spirit in one area — and incredible sloth, or blindness, or pride, or ongoing compulsive behavior, in another — is an ongoing mystery.
I think of Bill W., the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, whose lifelong addiction to nicotine led to the emphysema that killed him. Married for 53 years to the faithful Lois, a union that by all accounts bore abundant fruit, Bill nevertheless had a complicated emotional life that included deep relationships, at the very least emotional, with at least two other women.
The late Msgr. Lorenzo Albacete, author and public intellectual who, faithful to a deathbed pledge to his mother, cared for his emotionally challenged brother for the rest of his life. Notoriously scattered and untidy, Albacete smoked, failed to return emails and phone calls, was habitually late, scandalously neglected his health — and by many accounts, was a kind of saint.
A photo recently circulated around the internet of St. Maximilian Kolbe — one of the greatest martyrs of the 20th-century Church — sitting at his own stupendously messy desk. Then there’s English author, philosopher, and Christian apologist G. K. Chesterton — who clearly enjoyed his food and drink, perhaps to excess.
At the risk of sounding heretical, could it be that we weaker folk need a certain crutch to get us through life? To go way out on a limb, could it even be that we couldn’t have raised the families, or produced the art, or helmed the nonprofit as well, as beautifully, as efficiently as we did without the crutch?
What we do know is that there is nothing of the stodgy, the pursed-lip do-gooder, the sanctimonious health fanatic in the follower of Christ. “There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse,” Chesterton quipped, “than in the man who eats Grape-Nuts on principle.”
What we do know is that Catholicism is the enemy of all that is bland, boring, homogenous, and overly smooth.
Of course we should strive, in a general way, for orderliness and good health. But when Jesus said, “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect,” he couldn’t possibly have meant that we’re expected to have no rough edges, no faults or failings, nothing less than an A+ in every area.
Could it be that our imperfections in some ways help, rather than hinder, love? Without them, how could we relate to one another? How could we work up compassion for the limitations of our brothers and sisters?
In 2 Corinthians 12:7–9, St. Paul describes the thorn in his own flesh:
“Therefore, a thorn in the flesh was given to me, an angel of Satan, to beat me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I begged the Lord about this, that it might leave me, but he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.’ ”
Consider, too, the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares (Matthew 13:24–30):
“The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field; but while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat and went his way. But when the grain had sprouted and produced a crop, then the tares also appeared.”
The servants want to uproot the tares but the owner of the field says no, lest the wheat come up with them. Let them both grow and at the harvest they’ll be separated: the wheat gathered, and the tares burned.
Note that in both cases — St. Paul’s thorn, the tares — are “planted” by Satan.
Maybe the idea of purgatory sprang from this cognizance of the gap between who we long to be and who we actually are. Maybe purgatory is a place not of punishment but of healing for all the compulsions and obsessions and blocks that caused us pain, that we wished with all our hearts we could be rid of but couldn’t — or didn’t dare to.
We may subconsciously realize that our nervous systems would short-circuit without a certain form of comfort or consolation or anesthesia.
That’s not to say we should indulge ourselves. But at the end of the age, God will separate the wheat from the tares. What’s no longer needed, what constituted the thorn in our side will at last burn away. What’s left we can only pray will “shine forth like the sun” in the kingdom of our Father (Matthew 13:43).
Mother Mary Francis of Our Lady, abbess of the Poor Clare Monastery of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Roswell, New Mexico, wrote: “Everyone has some sort of affliction — a weakness, a tendency that to some extent will always be there. A person may have an extreme sensitivity to pain, whether physical, psychological, or spiritual, that is always going to be there. A person may be by nature very irascible and although this can and must be reduced, the tendency will always be there. It is an affliction of the temperament. …”
Thus, she continues, it is most wonderful, “that we are encouraged to call the Mother of God the Consolatrix allfictorum”: the Consolor in our afflictions.
