| « | Wills-O'-The-Wisp |
»
|
|
Sunday, January 29, 2006
Fran’s Sunday Ruminations: Strivings And Givings
All my conscious life, including my years away from the Church, I've felt a high respect and admiration for Christian clerics, most especially for Catholic priests. A man who heads for the priesthood is undertaking the most extraordinary commitment of himself one can imagine that doesn't involve an actual free-fire battlefield. Of course, there are insincere candidates for the priesthood, and some of them do get through, a phenomenon with which we have all become unpleasantly familiar these past few years. But the overwhelming majority of Catholic men of the cloth -- 90% or more -- deserve the highest accolades for their dedication, their service, and their unflagging charity.
This morning after Mass, I chanced to encounter our parish pastor, Father Charles Papa. (No, we don't call him "Father Papa.") Father Charlie was his usual overflowingly cheerful and good-natured self, which given the record he's established would have been unremarkable, except for this: he's only about two weeks past an extensive series of heart surgeries. Until quite recently, only a few persons in the parish knew that he was under the weather at all.
Father Charlie referred to these multiple invasive procedures as "just a tune-up." From his appearance and his statements, you'd swear that nothing of consequence had happened to him at all.
It's a matter of common knowledge that Catholic clerics live far longer than the average American. Yet their lives are filled with toil and relatively bare of comforts. They are called to comfort the sick, the afflicted, and the troubled of spirit, without stint or thought of self. Their sustenance depends on the generosity of their parishioners. They can't retire until seventy-five years of age...and a great many, perhaps most, never retire at all.
Clearly, there's something to be said for a life put to the service of God.
Somehow I doubt that the above has caused a mass rush by Eternity Road readers to apply for openings at Catholic seminaries before they're all gone. Not that that would be a bad thing, mind you; it just strikes me as unlikely. It probably struck you as unlikely, too.
A man simply doesn't elect a career, especially a career as demanding as the priesthood, because he thinks it will prolong his life. Not only are the obstacles and surrenders required very challenging; a decent man who felt himself called to the cloth would not even stop to consider the benefits to him from ordination, if indeed the prospect of working deep into one's seventies or eighties could properly be called a benefit. In other words, we have a sense that this particular calling is a calling to give of oneself, rather than to amass for oneself.
It's not suitable for all men. Not one in a hundred of us is able to muster such selfless devotion to anything even for a day or two, much less for a whole life. Yet a priest of Christ lives and labors in the truest imitation of Christ possible to Man. If such is not one's own calling, at the very least it constitutes an ideal to be held up for admiration.
Let's not overlook the magnificent gifts of self made by Catholic nuns and religious sisters, which are equally to be admired. These, too, are ideals upon which we of the laity should reflect, and whose exemplars deserve our thanks and praise. Equally here as with vocations to the priesthood, one would not expect a young woman to enter a novitiate because the statistics suggest that it will add a decade to her life. Once again, what moves such a woman is a spirit of devotion and generosity that greatly exceeds the human norm, which we who cannot match it can nevertheless admire.
All the same, we can't help but wonder how this longevity thing works. I mean, if it could be bottled and sold...just kidding, folks. But really, now: they work longer and harder and with less recompense than laymen, yet they live longer, and seemingly in better health. What's going on here?
My conjecture is that it derives from their surrender of their anxieties. Laymen are enmeshed in the cares of the material world. We work, strive, and struggle to amass, for ourselves and our families. We agonize constantly over decisions, options, possibilities and contingencies. We live in unremitting uncertainty. We fear to fail, for we fear the possible consequences of failure.
Clerics are relieved of most of those anxieties and fears. Except at the higher levels of the episcopate, most of a priest's decisions are made for him rather than by him. He's assigned his duties by his bishop. Once in place, his response to the overwhelmingly greater percentage of possible events is prescribed by his collar. For himself, he trusts in God, the Church, and his parishioners to provide. His credo is "Thy will be done."
I've long been of the opinion that it's anxiety that ages and degrades a man. That a priest of Christ, who must give himself so completely to the service of others, should be freed of the ravages of anxiety strikes me as a most appropriate compensation. (No, God hasn't asked for my opinion, though He's certainly welcome to it.) We laymen, to whatever extent we can match our priests' humble acceptance of God's Will, can partake of the same serenity.
Some time ago, I wrote on good and bad reasons for adopting a religious faith. My verdict was that the only good reason is true belief; all else is teleology that subordinates truth to some lesser form of gain. It's entirely appropriate in our secular pursuits to choose to do this because it will allow us to get or achieve that, but in matters of the spirit, only sincerity counts. To follow the rituals and mouth the prayers without sincere belief is to subjugate the highest aspirations and institutions of Man to gains far cruder and more ephemeral. It harnesses God to the junk wagon of our mundane lives.
That doesn't mean no one ever does it, of course. But such a person shortchanges himself, no one else. Time spent on religious rituals not sincerely meant and joyously felt is utterly wasted. Effort spent trying to convey a religious creed to others when one has only adopted that creed to gain something else is worse than wasted; the hypocrisy of it is never successfully concealed. Insincerity being far easier to detect than the insincere are willing to admit, they're always baffled when the goal for which they donned the cloak of faith recedes from them. In short, there is no value in ersatz faith.
Yet skeptics of Christianity continue to demand to know "what's in it for me?" They stare at the most beautiful thing in the world through the wrong end of a telescope, reducing it to a cog in a machine whose maw they'll feed and whose crank they'll turn only if guaranteed a lollipop. The irony of how they dismiss the observable benefits in this world of Christian adherence, both for individuals and for the communities they form, could hardly be greater...yet to press the faith upon them with those things as inducements would only compound the felony.
There's a tension here. The believer is expected to be an adherent out of sincere, mature conviction rather than from some utilitarian cause. Yet it is undeniable that the faith is massively good for us here on Earth, both individually and collectively. Can we even speak of the latter without somehow destroying the conditions required by the former?
Perhaps it's just a tempest in a teapot. After all, we are what we are because God made us so, so why should He have a problem with our teleologically oriented, goal-seeking nature? After all, He wrote The Algorithm:
- Select a technique that you think will get you what you think you want.
- Will this technique require you to lose body parts, go to jail, or burn in Hell?
- If so, return to step 1.
- If not, proceed to step 3.
- Do a little of it.
- Are you at your goal, approaching it, or receding from it?
- If at your goal, stop.
- If approaching, return to step 3.
- If receding, return to step 1.
...didn't He?
Yes, He did...but He also gave us the innate value we place upon truth.
One could roam this entire planet and never find a single soul who would say, "If I were revealed to my neighbors as a deceiver, I would expect them to value and trust me anyway." We know innately that to be deemed insincere would destroy all regard others might have for oneself. Once he has discovered that Smith is insincere, Jones will never again regard him as better than a thing to be used on those rare occasions when using Smith might bring Jones some benefit -- and it doesn't matter whether Jones is himself sincere or not.
In this light, it would appear that it's not the Christian faith that conveys the benefits we associate with it, but sincere conviction of the faith, and plainly sincere at that, since it must be apparent to others. This is only part-way there. The insincere man, however loudly he might mouth the prayers, deprives himself of the serenity available from Christian belief -- because "thy will be done" offers no relief to him who doesn't really believe it.
The endless strivings and associated anxieties of a mundane life can't be entirely averted, even by a priest. But to whatever extent we can place our trust in God, we can armor ourselves in the same peace to which Christ invited His Apostles, on the very eve of his Crucifixion:
"I give you peace; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid." [The Gospel According To John, 14:27]
The busy tribes of flesh and blood,
With all their lives and cares,
Are carried downwards by the flood,
And lost in following years.Time, like an ever rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly, forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day.Like flowery fields the nations stand
Pleased with the morning light;
The flowers beneath the mower’s hand
Lie withering ere ‘tis night.O God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Our shelter from the stormy blast,
And our eternal home.[Isaac Watts]
May God bless and keep you all.
Comments
A real man of the cloth deserves your undending respect and support; pitiably those are few and far between. Keep him in your prayers.
Posted by og on 01/29/2006 at 06:53 PMGreat site. I will be back!
Posted by Krisco on 01/29/2006 at 08:33 PMStrong stuff, Francis - thanks.
Posted by Steve Burton on 01/29/2006 at 09:51 PMTwo points:
1) To pray and perform religious rituals insincerely can be a praiseworthy thing. In some moods, a settled conviction may seem unreal, so that the feeling of faith is not present: such circumstances are not a good reason to avoid prayer and religious acts.
And of course entering more deeply into religion to strengthen a weak faith may often be a very good thing. (I wouldn’t like to prescribe it for everyone.)
2) How does your theory about lack of anxiety square with the lifespan of the high ecclesiatics—say, the College of Cardinals?
Posted by on 01/30/2006 at 02:12 PM
