How to Persevere through the Quagmire

by Dan Masterton

Catholicism is utterly and totally cohesive and coherent. I think this is the thing that keeps me constantly coming back for more theology. As I live out my faith in prayer and worship, in relationship and community, my head and heart are nourished by the inexhaustible font that is Catholic theology – reading, reflecting, thinking, and writing in a regular rhythm as my faith seeks greater, deeper understanding of my God and the implications of His love for us.

Catholic teaching often frustrates because it can so readily and applicably speak to all things. And as it offers a response in truth and love, it often challenges our opinions and preferences in an uncomfortable way. It’s this countercultural, prophetic quality of Catholicism that is so prescient in its social teaching. And it’s this element of our faith that I find myself leaning on in the quagmire of bad news and backwards policies that it seems I’m wading through so many days.

The United States Council of Catholic Bishops has eloquently sorted our Church's social teachings into seven neat themes. And while each theme carries weight in addressing the social concerns we face, I find particular resonance these days with the Preferential Option for the Poor and Marginalized. This theme calls us to radically confront the reality that we as a society marginalize people, and that we must consciously and intentionally respond to this in order to reconcile ourselves to each other.

The way I explain this theme is that Christ calls us to consider people who are poor and/or marginalized in every decision we make individually, communally, and socially.

So as I read my daily morning theSkimm, as I scroll my Twitter feed, as I listen to NPR as I drive, I have to figure out how to respond to the myriad issues that are seemingly everywhere – the marginalization of immigrants, migrants, and refugees, discrimination against LGBT people, objectification and de-dignification of women, tensions between the value of the life of mothers and families and unborn people, and so much more.

I think it’s very tempting just to close the web page, exit the app, or turn off the radio. And while I’m not saying you should seek to “rub your nose in it” by any means, I think we need to find a constructive way to respond that doesn’t just sweep bad news under the rug. And I think it starts with asking yourself, “What decision can I make in response to this, either personally or in my community or society, to do something?” This is how we start to opt for those who are poor and/or marginalized.

A good start would be to pass along the story that drew your attention, angst, or frustration. Text the link to a friend. Share the link on social media. Bring up the story in conversation when your significant other or friends ask about your day or how you’re doing. Be honest in identifying when something has disturbed you. Get to a next level beyond simply reposting (some criticize “slacktivism” that does only this). Faith that does justice comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable – do it proudly.

Building on that, pray for those who are being marginalized. Include them in your personal prayers. Name them in your reflection during Mass. At home, my wife and I keep a prayer board in our bedroom: each day of the week, we erase the previous week’s intention and add the day’s date with a new intention that will stay up for the next seven days. It’s been a good way both to refresh our prayers and to hold people in prayer.

I think the next level of living out the Preferential Option is using one’s personal capital. Social capital starts with word of mouth and social sharing, and it goes further when you undertake advocacy. Emails, letters, and phone calls to elected officials help give voice to the voiceless so that public policy more intentionally considers those who are marginalized. Issue-focused groups as well as broader justice-oriented organizations help facilitate such advocacy. I personally appreciate the way Catholic Relief Services invites the faithful to get involved.

Additionally, organizations that work hands-on and directly with people who are marginalized need us to be generous stewards of our resources, in terms of time, talent, and treasure. Your time could be invested in advocacy, and could also extend to applying your talent with face-to-face volunteering, whether in back-end logistics or face-to-face encounters with those who are marginalized. Groups like Chicago’s Interfaith Committee for Detained Immigrants need volunteers to companion people going through the court and detention system or beginning to integrate into society after gaining their freedom.

Then, of course, monetary donations help to fuel these organizations and sustain their work with people who are marginalized. For my wife and I, we make a monthly donation to our parish as part of our desire to belong earnestly to our faith community, but I felt that our commitment needed to extend to directly support people who are marginalized. So, right below our utilities and just above our student loans, we have a line item in our budget for the preferential option; each month, we together choose an organization each month, like Aid for Women, Catholic Charities, Franciscan Outreach, or a local food pantry, to which we donate a modest amount.

The Preferential Option also must extend beyond these smaller actions into the larger decisions of our lives. When you buy your car, when you refresh your wardrobe, when you choose where to live, when you shop and go out to eat, how can you intentionally consider the poor and marginalized in each decision? This is much more radical and can really challenge your conceptions and sensibilities. What if I work hard for my money? What if I’m generally thrifty and spend cautiously? What if I want to treat myself? It takes a refined, faithful conscience and a careful, steady hand.

I’ll leave you with a story.

A couple I know was preparing for marriage and undertook the fateful task of preparing their wedding registry. They sought to register for many of the items that a new family and nascent household would need, but they also knew that such a registry could easily grow long and expensive. They finally asked, “Where is the option for the poor in all this?” And really, when you look at it, it’s just not there. Inherently, a wedding registry is a long list of stuff. So while they needed to keep a sturdy list intact, to prepare for their marriage and family life and give direction to those who wanted to get them gifts, they also wanted to intentionally opt for the poor in this important moment.

So, rather than scrap their registry, they built a second registry. But on this one, instead of things and stuff, they linked wedding guests to organizations that did things for the poor and marginalized: scholarship funds for at-risk young people to go to school, post-grad service organizations that help young people encounter and accompany those who are marginalized, and institutions that work directly with the poor. In this concrete way, they confronted the immense expenditures of a wedding and made intentional space for those who are often forgotten, inviting intentional giving and support and thus living out the Preferential Option in this milestone moment.

Christ calls us to consider those who are poor and marginalized in every decision we make, individually, communally, and socially.

The Restless Hearts on... The Easter Season

In "The Restless Hearts on...", we as a community of writers will tackle a topic or question communally, weighing in together in conversation. We'll offer a discussion like this every so often, and we invite your suggestions for topics/questions to discuss. Send them along to Dan via email or Twitter. In the first installment, we discuss the Easter season:

Catholics tend to invest great energy into Lent but don't do so well focusing on the season of Easter. Why do you think that is? Is something missing from our understanding or practice?

Dan:

We talked about this as a community of writers. There is so much blather out there about Lent, so many places are offering special reflection series and extra events and specific devotions. It's great to put a bright spotlight on a solemn season of repentance, but then after we do the Triduum and Easter, it's like we're back in Ordinary Time.

Easter has a decidedly different feel at Mass: the Gloria is back; the Sprinkling Rite gets your clothes damp at the beginning of Mass; parishes with robust music ministry are bringing the joyful noise. I, for one, LOVE IT. There’s nothing like singing Out of Darkness at the Basilica at Notre Dame with the special verses for Easter. But the Easter Season doesn't have the cultural/social milestones to hang your hat on like Lent does.

Nothing brings out the faithful like ashes—God forbid you be seen without them on that day (not even a Holy Day of Obligation)! And nothing gets the conversation going like "giving something up for Lent" (though it's supposed to be just one of three things we focus on). Easter, meant to be a time for feasting after all that fasting, doesn't have that cultural/social piece to highlight our celebration.

Rob:

I love Easter so much, but I’m definitely guilty of this—by about Tuesday of the First Week of Easter, I’ve moved on. I wonder if it has something to do with an overemphasis on productivity and a misguided sense of piety: paradoxically, Lent is easy because it is simple.

It’s like this: I am a sinner, and this is not a hard thing for me to acknowledge—as Niebuhr wrote, sin is the only empirically verifiable doctrine of Christianity. If I am a sinner, then I should do something to try to fix that problem, and so I fast so I can be less sinful. (This is, of course, a dangerous misunderstanding of the practice of liturgical fasting, but it seems to be the predominant way people think about it.) The practices that go with Lent feel like they’re making me more holy, because I have this sense that being holy should be hard work and require a lot of sacrifice and basically be not fun.

And then Easter rolls around, and it’s party time! But if I’m thinking about holiness (and ultimately salvation) as something that I have to work toward, then celebration seems wrong. There’s dissonance: I still feel like a sinner, and I am probably mostly the same as I was two weeks ago, and I certainly haven’t done anything to deserve a celebration, and feasting doesn’t seem like hard work so it probably won’t make me more holy, and so on.

Dave:

Broadly speaking, I blame the technocracy of materialistic individualism. It's hard to understand oneself as belonging (potentially) to a communion of saints, a collection of individuals throughout human history who have participated in the story of creation's salvation, if one is constantly glued to a tiny glowing computer, broadcasting a false reality of self into the abyss of social media. Culture lies to us as we grow older, predicating our personal value upon the way we appear, or what we are able to produce. I gradually come to accept these falsehoods, and attempt to assert my worthiness unto the world through both the conformity of appearance and my accumulated assets, or what I might potentially be able to sell.

This is why Lent is so valuable. Ascetic mortification, charity, and prayer restore our dignities in a quite marked way, speaking to us: "No, creature of dust, your value is not conditioned by how you look (for your body moves toward death with each moment) or what you make (for all that you produce will vanish in a momentary glimpse)." And so while the penitential season aids in our recollection of such truths, I think we have trouble holding onto them. The meaning of Lent, throughout which we have humbly moved toward the Cross and the Resurrection -- both of which reveal who God is in disturbingly different, though equally valid, ways -- dissipates rather quickly, within the first few days of Easter.

Heaven breaks into earth for the fifty days of the Easter Feast, leading up to Pentecost in a wacky way: there's a divine body leaving footprints on the ground. Flowers burst forth from the earth wherever the glorified sole trods (or so I think I heard from some Eastern theologian years ago). We re-enter the blaring idiocy of American individualism, which hammers all of our senses into a relative numbness. In a way, we return to a zombified state, our hearts once again calloused to the vivid life that the Resurrection makes known.

Sorry for being a downer. I teach 102 students whose identities lay firmly embedded in Snapchat, and this experience no doubt colors my perspective. I've decided that if God so wills that I ever have children, they won't have iWhatevers for the first 18 years of their lives.

Also, I like to think I'm the only Georgetown alumnus to have celebrated Easter by closing down the Backer after Vigil Mass at the Basilica.

Jenny:

I think it stems from a misunderstanding (and mistrust) of what feast is. In a culture that prizes productivity, self-improvement, and general busyness, the concept of feast feels foreign — like we're cheating or even being lazy. In some weird way, Lent, with its uncomfortability, can actually feel more comfortable and familiar to us.

This is perhaps because of a misconception about what the ascetic practices of Lent are really about. I think many people view them as a self-improvement project — kind of New Year's Resolutions 2.0, when in reality, prayer, fasting, and almsgiving should ultimately lead us to the realization of our powerlessness and need for a savior. As those practices break down our pride and reorder our love toward God, it should lead us to recognize our own smallness and God’s greatness.

When we play into the individualistic, pelagian tendencies of our culture, it's no wonder that we don't feel at home in feasting because we either (a) have been extremely successful in our fasting and it has become a source of spiritual pride which makes us ill-disposed to receive the feast as a gift, or (b) have failed in our Lenten observance and feel that we haven't "earned" the feast.

Alexander Schmemann writes really beautifully about the significance of feast in his work For the Life of the World: "Feast means joy. Yet, if there is something that we—the serious, adult and frustrated Christians of the twentieth century— look at with suspicion, it is certainly joy. [...] Christians have accepted the whole ethos of our joyless and business-minded culture. [...] The modern world has relegated joy to the category of 'fun' and 'relaxation.' It is justified and permissible on our 'time off'; that is a concession, a compromise. [...] For the man of the past a feast was not something accidental and 'additional': it was his way of putting meaning into his life, of liberating it from the animal rhythm of work and rest. A feast was not a simple 'break' in the otherwise meaningless and hard life of work, but a justification of that work, its fruit, its--so to speak--sacramental transformation into joy and, therefore, into freedom."

Dave:

On this note, I'm a huge fan of not abstaining on Sundays during Lent. There are, after all, more than forty days between Ash Wednesday and Easter, specifically because there are Sundays beyond the forty days of Lent. Sundays throughout the year are a miniature Easter, and in order to feast properly that we might enter into that joy (and anticipate it during Lent), abstention might not be the most spiritually healthy option. Likewise, the Catechism encourages able Catholics to abstain on all Fridays throughout the year, not just those that fall during Lent.

This is one of those ways I think Catholicism might renew its appreciation for the Jewish religious imagination. One of my friends, when I asked how his weekend went, remarked, "Well, I had a good day of rest. You know… for getting the rest of my work done for the week." It was funnier in person, I swear.

God built the Sabbath into the very act of creation; as Abraham Heschel reminds us, the Creator does not detach this final day from the entire process of speaking order into chaos. And thus, for Jews who take the Sabbath seriously, it becomes a ritual reminder of our Origin and Destination, a figurative -- though in some ways literal -- heartbeat embedded within the quotidien passage of time.

And so we find ourselves celebrating little feasts throughout Lent, because penance without feasting grows distorted. It's a lovely thing, moving toward the Feast of all feasts, with these little sacramental heartbeats punctuating a penitential season.

Dan:

So, then, is there a way to improve our spiritual practice of Lent, either individually, communally, or both? Are there things we can or should do with our Lent and/or Easter?

It sounds like maybe viewing Lenten Sundays as the little Easters they actually are could be a way of engaging differently with Lenten sacrifice and keeping an eye toward the cross and empty tomb?

I think there's also something to the impact that social media has on our activity. We become so thoroughly able to curate the content we receive and so able to control the image we create of ourselves. I think people could stand to include more faith-based voices in their feeds, and invite the voice of the Church, of theologians, and of people of overt faith into their social media scrolling. Maybe that would help reinforce a fuller sense of the Church’s richness in liturgy, feasts and seasons, and traditions. I also think that when people "fast" from social media for Lent, it should be less about avoiding it for 40 days and resuming right where you left off, and more about returning to it with an eye to revising the frequency and attitude you bring to social media and your consumption of it.

And beyond the cultural, secular version of Easter and its implications, we need a kick in the butt on the celebration and joy of Easter feasting at full length. I think as a largely immigrant church, we are far more comfortable with the austere restrictions of Lent than we are with an extended prolonged party. We need to remember the instructions of Jesus that we need to party while the bridegroom is in the house, because in forty days, he’s headed up, and it’s us, the Eucharist, and the Holy Spirit putting the noses of the Church’s faithful back to the spiritual grindstone.

Offering it Up

by Dan Masterton

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life. (John 3:16, NAB)

At the center of the Paschal Mystery is the Sacrifice of our Lord. God the Father sent His only Son to live as fully human and fully divine and to give Himself and His life for the forgiveness of our sins. This idea of sacrifice is so central to our faith and our understanding of God.

In one of the most popularly observed pieties of Catholicism,¹ many embrace the fasting element of Lenten observance by sacrificing something, or “giving something up,” for the duration of Lent, a time that parallels the forty days of temptation Jesus faced in the desert. Most of the time, our sacrifice is focused on taking something out of our lives — we focus on the subtraction of chocolate, dessert, coffee, soda, or something else we habitually use. The idea, when this sustains as something more than a sort of new New Year’s Resolution, is that our thoughts toward that thing we sacrificed will point us toward deeper contemplation of the Lord’s sacrifice in the Passion.

I think a frequently lost element of sacrifice is the simple idea of offering. In fact, the definition of sacrifice is “an act of slaughtering an animal or person or surrendering a possession as an offering to God or to a divine or supernatural figure.” So part and parcel in an act of sacrifice is an offering, beyond simply not doing something or not using something. Jesus doesn’t just give up His life; He offers His life to God and to all of us.

I was once in a relationship that started well but quickly turned rough, and I could not get a response from my girlfriend as I tried to figure out what was happening. I finally took a break, left my phone on my desk, and went to a chapel to pray. I started sitting up; I dropped my head in my hands; I knelt; I even laid prone on the floor as I tried to humble myself and embrace peace and surrender to God’s will to calm my heart.

I was seeking what I later learned is indifference or detachment — the spiritual practice of “making use of those things that help to bring us closer to God and leaving aside those things that don’t.”² After about an hour alone with God, I finally felt calm and comfortable with whatever would come. A friend tracked me down and told me to call her back, and she broke up with me because I had failed to understand and communicate with her on an important issue. Her decision was fair and the right call. However, as I processed it, I too quickly lost that prayerful peace from God and instead invited anxiety, nervousness, and self-doubt. That offering of myself too easily gave way. I moved to languishing despondently when I instead could and should have been honest to my emotions alongside that God-given peace.

As usual, the Mass offers us strong footing in understanding sacrifice more fully. In fact, as we enter our anamesis — our memorial — of Christ’s sacrifice through the Liturgy of the Eucharist, we begin with the preparation of the altar, which includes the Offertory. At that point in Mass, the choir and/or cantor offer a song of reflection; the faithful typically offer their monetary support for the Church and its ministries; and, the people of God offer their simple gifts of bread and wine for the celebrant to consecrate and transubstantiate through the power of the Holy Spirit.

I am a big proponent of those gifts always being brought forward from the congregation. Even at a daily Mass with a small crowd in a small chapel, the symbolism remains important and powerful. The bread and wine are set on a table outside the sanctuary and among the congregation, emphasizing that these items are a gift from the people of God that help demonstrate their participation in the liturgy as they hand them to the celebrant. The gift-bearers, then, are representatives of the faithful in offering the fruits of the community for the altar of the Lord. And what a neat-o responsibility those brothers and sisters have for the community as ministers in the Mass.

We are then called to offer ourselves, our sacrifices and all that we are, not just things we’ve lost or given up, but a surrender of our very selves as a gift to God. This is why I love the new translation of our prayer at this point in Mass, where the priest says, “Pray, brothers and sisters, that my sacrifice and yours may be acceptable to God, the almighty Father.” The new words make clear and specific that the priest is not alone in the sacrifice of the Mass; we as the gathered people of God are offering our very selves to God, alongside the gifts of bread and wine, through our celebration of the liturgy.

The Eucharist has myriad gifts readily available to the attentive believer. In this case, the reality of placing myself on the altar as a sacrifice, as an offering, to God invites me anew into Eucharistic living. This has been underscored to me the last three weeks as my wife, Katherine, and I brought our one-month old daughter, Lucy, to Mass for the first few times.

Each week, we find a place near the back on the end of a pew.³ I set Lucy down next to the edge of the pew, file past her, and leave space for Katherine to sit between us for Mass. Since Katherine isn’t yet cleared to carry anything heavier than Lucy, when it comes time for communion, I let Katherine file past me, reach over, and pick up Lucy’s carrier to bring her forward with me. I enjoy facing her carrier toward those kneeling in prayer as I walk forward; I enjoy seeing the look on the Eucharistic Minister’s face as the carrier shows him or her the pudgy face of this little gal; and I love the reception of communion on my one free hand as I balance Lucy and her carrier in the other.

The reality of carrying forward my daughter while walking on the heels of my wife and her mother makes excellently concrete the offering of my life. Whatever my failings and sins, whatever my career and professional vocation, each week, I come before God’s altar to meet Christ with the offering of my being a husband,⁴ my fatherhood, and my family. I already love going to Mass, but this familial procession of offering to God only deepens that. And in bringing forward my joys and struggles, what I have and what I sacrifice, who I am and who I am called to be, I get to really offer myself.

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1 I think it’s interesting to note those things that even more “casual” or less active Catholics observe. In addition to “giving something up for Lent,” most Catholics seem to go to Mass on Christmas and Easter and to receive ashes on Ash Wednesday, which is not actually a Holy Day of Obligation. I think the central reason for these sustained practices is the greatest motivator of all - social expectation. These three things are commonly talked about, and those who cannot say when/where they went to Christmas/Easter Mass, or what they’re giving up, or who walk around without ashes are missing something in social interaction. So those things more rarely fall by the wayside while regular Mass attendance and Reconciliation remain more rare.^↩

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2 Some good reading from IgnatianSpirituality.com here.^↩

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3 We strategically feed Lucy just before leaving for Mass. After burping her and strapping her into the carseat, the ride to church puts her to sleep, and she sleeps pretty soundly through Mass. The seat on the edge in the back is the failsafe to allow my wife the flexibility to make a quick exit should Lucy protest her current state. ^↩

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4 For parallelism in writing, I wanted so badly to use “husbandry” here, but “the care, cultivation, and breeding of crops and animals” just doesn’t quite fit.^↩

Lessons from Washing the Bodies of the Dead and Dying

by Dave Gregory

22 Year-Old Dave Gets His Hands Dirty

Once upon a time, my Jesuit novice confreres and I went to the Bronx to undertake our “hospital experiment”¹ at Calvary Hospital. While most Jesuit novitiates have -- given the complexity of finding a suitable arrangement -- foregone more traditional hospital experiments in favor of some sort of retirement facility ministry,² the Syracuse novitiate still sends its first-year novices to Calvary in order to wash the bodies of the dead and the dying for six weeks. Calvary is a unique institution among healthcare facilities; it is a palliative care hospital, a building where people go to die. While most of the patients had some form of terminal cancer, some were dying from other diseases such as AIDS and congestive heart failure. Calvary’s patients consumed such a ridiculous amount of morphine that the hospital had its own production lab in the basement in order to cut out the middleman.

We assisted the cancer care technicians and nurses in the most menial of palliative care necessities. Given our total lack of medical expertise, we did not perform or assist in any medical procedures, but were simply there to -- in the words of the hospital’s director during our orientation -- “glorify” the bodies of the dead and the dying, much like those who accompanied Jesus on his laborious path to Golgotha. Each morning, we threw on odd white polyester uniforms (vaguely reminiscent of old-timey ice cream truck sales people or mental asylum workers), arrived at the break of the day, and made our rounds, cleaning bodies and changing diapers. Apologies for the twisted comment, but it must be said: I had never expected that religious life would entail seeing so many penises and dealing with so much poop. Then again, Jesus was crucified naked, and the bowels of the crucified would release themselves upon the body’s expiration. Reality ain’t pretty, and I’ll admit that part of me wants more realistic portrayals of the crucifixion. Sterilization is bad for the Catholic imagination.

In short, our ministry at Calvary did not consist of providing emotional and spiritual consolation. We simply met the physical needs of men and women who awaited their final breath, or whose final breath had already been expelled. Never before had work so physically and emotionally exhausted me, and never before had I so intimately encountered Death. The Triduum brings to blazing focus all the meaning of human existence found in the Cross and Resurrection, and the appropriately-named Calvary Hospital did the same, making incarnate the Paschal Mystery for us baby Jesuits.

Two Stories

It was Holy Week of 2011. A woman in her forties on our floor was dying of cervical cancer, which had eaten away the tissue between her uterus and rectal cavity, causing her waste to mix together. Her body remained incapable of processing nutrition, and her shriveled body rapidly deteriorated toward death. Her husband sat in her room all day and night, in a wild and constant state of enmity. This process had exhausted him (as it does most people), and had driven him to such a state of irrationality that he would not let Calvary’s staff clean his wife, hoping that this might expedite her expiration; she lay dying in her own urine and feces, and stench emanated from her room. Despite this, he adamantly remained entrenched in the vile atmosphere, resolved to prevent hospital staff from performing anything beyond pain management. One morning we came in, only to discover that bruise marks in the shape of hands covered her mouth and neck. Having arrived at the point of despair, this agonized fellow had attempted to asphyxiate his wife in her pained sleep, and at that point³ Calvary could forcibly remove him from the premises. Finally, she could be cleaned. Her body could be glorified, restored to dignity. This woman died a few days later.

That Holy Week, I attended daily Mass in the tiny hospital chapel. I sat a few feet from a woman and her husband,⁴ both in their late 40s or so. She lay in one of those beastly hospital chairs, missing most of her hair, comatose from chemicals that dripped into her bloodstream from plastic pouches hanging on a chrome rack. And throughout the liturgy, I could not remove my eyes from this couple. The husband gazed at his wife adoringly, with a love I have not yet experienced and therefore cannot yet understand. He stroked his wife’s arm, contemplating her face. When the priest came around to distribute the Eucharist, he tapped her cheek, “Holly, Holly, wake up,” he called, “Communion is here.” Holly did not awake from her slumber. I began to get all emotional as a grace collided with my reality, incinerating that little chapel. This is strong language, I know, but I’m trying to be accurate here. It burned. Was this not a manifestation of God’s relationship to humanity, beckoning us as we approach death at every moment of our lives, trying to awaken us to that Presence? Is my life not some sort of zombified slumber, a largely unconscious stumbling through sleeping and eating and working?⁵ Am I not largely unconscious of Love, that Font of all that I hope and dread? Does God want anything other than for me to awake, to become cognizant of His presence? In that hospital chair, there reclined Christ, his body riddled with cancer, losing his hair, intravenous fluids slowly working through his bloodstream as he died. In my eyes, Holly’s husband became Mary and John beholding their beloved.

The next week, Holly’s husband wheeled her around our floor, to break the monotony of existence in a palliative care hospital. I approached him: “Hey man, I’m sorry to bother you, but I was at Mass with you and your wife last week. I just really wanted to thank you, because your love for her brought me to tears. It was a graced moment for me, so thanks for your witness.”

“Well,” he replied shyly, “She’s not my wife.” This, needless to say, took me aback. I’m sure my jaw gaped open in shock.

“Holly and I met back in the 80s when she was touring with one of the first all-women’s punk rock bands. I followed her to all these venues and clubs -- you know, CBGB and all that -- and we were romantically involved, but time drew us apart. We reconnected a few years ago, and fell in love after most of life had passed us by. I proposed this past December, and then she was diagnosed with stage IV cancer. And now we’re here.”

I had no idea what to say, and he saw this. He looked at me, with the sort of pitying (though very real) love that Jesus offered the rich young man. He smiled a bit, probably concerned for my emotional fragility in that moment.

“Listen, could you pray for us? Could you pray that she regain the lucidity to marry me before she dies?” My insides churned more than a bit. Tears welled up. I stood there in muteness, just in stuporific awe. My brain started ticking again.

“Yeah. Yes. Of course. You bet. Well, again, thanks, and enjoy your walk.” I retreated into the bathroom to regain my composure so I could get back to work.

Choosing the Cross

I dunno if there’s anything I can really say that isn’t lukewarm, blasé inanity. It’s just that these memories haunt me each Easter, percolating. As I’ve come to learn by now, my approach to Christianity cannot help but be heavily informed by an existential encounter with the abyss, with the forceful absoluteness that I move closer to death with each moment. My former Jesuit novice brother Tim used to make light of this, celebrating each birthday with the sarcastic -- albeit truthful -- remark, “One year closer to death.” As one novel (which one I cannot remember) I read a couple years ago observed: even the smell of a sweet child’s breath starts to sour because their insides are beginning to rot.

If there’s anything I’ve come to believe about belief, it’s this: belief is a choice. Faith in Christ cannot predicate itself exclusively upon logic, because we are not exclusively logical creatures. We do not operate strictly according to reason. As I progress through this life, glued to this rock, pacing toward my demise (be it cancer, old age, a heart attack, or a dismembering impact of metal and flesh), what will I stake my life on? What will I choose? Despair, as the husband of the victim of cervical cancer had? Or hope, as Holly’s would-be husband so beautifully lived?

Do I choose the easy way out when confronting the potential engrossing absurdity of the universe, do I choose to forsake the Cross or the manifold crosses, those seemingly endless crucifixions that fill our world with grotesque cries of pain? Then again, perhaps unbelief isn’t so easy. Perhaps there is no such thing as true unbelief. As David Foster Wallace once remarked, we all worship something.

In light of all this stuff, do I choose the Cross, this instrument of torture and execution that becomes the deepest revelation of God’s love? This thing of things is a paradoxical reality. After all, the crucifix of Good Friday is a symbol of lovely horror, full of mangled flesh and rattling exhalations, though it overflows with horrific loveliness on Easter, full of infinite potential to transform humanity and the world. It becomes emptied by a miraculous kenosis, though irreversibly marked by the bloodstains of a tortured man who claimed to be God. We cannot forget that the body of the resurrected Christ remains pierced through,⁶ even though it be glorified.⁷

How do I go about choosing this to be the fixed center around which my universe spins? In staking my life upon the Cross being the axis of the cosmos, is my existence fundamentally different than it would otherwise be?

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1 The Jesuit novitiate consists of a number of “experiments” in order to prepare novices for the Spiritual Exercises, and to test the long retreat’s graces upon its conclusion. One of these, the hospital experiment, directly stems from the experience of the first Jesuits caring for the infirm in Europe’s dilapidated hospitals.^↩

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2 I’m not knocking this at all, it’s just the way it is. I’m glad we did what we did, though.^↩

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3 Given that he had power of attorney or something like that (I’m no legal or medical expert), only when he evidenced that he posed a danger to his wife could action be taken.^↩

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4 For the life of me, I cannot remember what the name of the victim of cervical cancer was. However, I’ve changed the names of this story’s individuals; “Holly” is one of the main characters in the music of my all-time favorite band, The Hold Steady. It’s short for “Hallelujah”. Go listen to “Your Little Hoodrat Friend” and “How a Resurrection Really Feels” (both of which are about Holly), and thank me later. In the words of one YouTube commenter, “Closest thing to God you will see on stage swinging a few guitars around.”^↩

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5 I hyperbolize a bit here, but a Jesuit professor of mine once offered the insight that “faith is not so much about the constancy of the gaze, but rather the intensity of the glimpse.” Engraced moments certainly punctuate the life of a Catholic, and the ritual participation in the Church’s sacramental life forms the rhythmic heartbeat so that we might be roused to this Love.^↩

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6 There’s a lovely story from the early centuries of Christianity that I heard once, though I’ve never been able to track down its origins. It goes like this. On Good Friday, when Jesus descended into hell for its harrowing, Lucifer took advantage of this, assumed the appearance of the Christ, and approached the gates of Heaven. Awaiting the Son, the angels at the gates sung Psalm 24: “Lift up your heads, O gates, and lift them up, O ancient doors, that the King of glory may come in!” Lucifer drew nearer, and the angels asked: “Is it you, Jesus?” The devil threw his arms wide open, proclaiming “It is I!” as the gates to Paradise opened for the Son of God’s entry. With this gesticulation, suddenly the gates slammed shut. The angels saw that the hands of Lucifer in disguise were not wounded. The lesson is this: love must become wounded in order to be salvific, and so the angels knew that this figure could not have been Jesus. This brings me to wonder...when the resurrection occurs, what wounds will we bear?^↩

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7 I also wonder...at the Transfiguration, did shadows of these wounds mark Jesus’ hands and feet?^↩

Why Blog?

by Dan Masterton

I was catching up with a friend recently who is thinking about moving and finding a new job, which of course necessitates searching for job postings, updating and cleaning up the ol’ resume, and of course, composing the elusive perfect cover letter. For me, there’s definitely some ass-dragging when I come to these tasks, but when I can summon the right will power, I find that crafting a cover letter (and eventually interviewing) is a great method of self-examination.¹

Looking at a blank piece of paper, you have to reflect upon who you are, what you’re good at, and what you’re passionate about, and explain, in vivid, dynamic terms, why you are the best fit for the job posting you’ve found. Once I get the ball rolling, I find it’s a great way to take stock of my experience and apply my strengths and expertises to a new opportunity. It helps give me fresh insight into who I am and who I am becoming.

So about four months into The Restless Hearts venture (like us on Facebook), and 7½ years into the blog, I found myself wanting to scrutinize the reasons why I (and we) sustain this blog. In a social environment where everyone is a media personality through their social media output and the image they broadcast in so many ways, I think it’s worth examining the rationale for maintaining this blog and why this particular source is important.

Personally, at my core, this blog’s existence is an extension of my personality. As my wife and close friends can attest, I often have opinions on things; as my inner monologue and mind can attest, I have opinions on everything.² My spirituality is primarily intellectual, and it’s the faith-seeking-understanding element of theology that fuels my heart toward the spiritual, emotional, and mystical senses of faith and relationship.

Additionally, it comes down to my gifts. I think one of my core competencies is my ability to find words for thoughts and ideas that are difficult to express, and by extension, to help others express their own complex thoughts and ideas. This started to become clear to me as I gained experience in small-group leadership on retreats as a teenager, came into clearer focus when I served as a Mentor-in-Faith with Notre Dame Vision, and was crystallized and sustained as I took on full-time ministry, first with young people in Ireland and then with to teenagers stateside in California, Indiana, and now Illinois. In both serious programmatic discussions and in more laid back social chats, I’ve found that my strongest form of listening is one which helps others complete thoughts - with leading questions and suggested words and phrases, I find I can help draw complicated ideas from the abstract shadows of the mind out into the clarity of conversation.

As I started to apply this to myself and sought to articulate my own ideas in my own words, friends encouraged me to take the thoughts I shared aloud and write them down. It came to a head in my small faith-sharing group during junior year of college when my friend Michele led the charge in encouraging me to blog.³ There are definitely mixed results: sometimes, I get requests from different media to write for them or I connect with someone to author a post or speak for an engagement; sometimes, the things I write or share get very few interactions or views or the contacts I try to make are dead ends; some weeks, there’s hundreds of views on the blog and new likes showing up on Facebook; other weeks, it’s a bit of a tumbleweedy ghost town.⁴ Either way, to those who have encouraged, supported, and affirmed me, thank you for fueling this ministry and helping me use my gifts.

Ministerially, this blog is an extension of my pastoral desire to put rich, intriguing, challenging ideas “out there” in a way that will attract curious attention and invite further thought. I want my writing (and the writing of my colleagues) to come from a place of thoughtfulness and reflectiveness that is also theologically and catechetically sound. Then, I want the posts to engage others to think about what these ideas mean, how these ideas affect them, their life, and their faith, and talk about it within themselves, with others, and with God.

The challenge then is constantly toeing the line between vainglory and broadcasting. Fundamentally, in order to share my ideas and the ideas of my colleagues, I have to try to cultivate a buzz, a following, a presence of some magnitude. This requires monitoring pageviews, insights, and impressions to learn the best ways to share our work, which can get me too fixated on edifying my desire for likes, shares, comments, retweets, etc.

So I try to be thoughtful and careful about inviting friends to like/follow our Page, about how/when I share our links, and how I go about creating that presence. I want to create invitation and opportunity for others to engage with our online writing ministry, but I don’t want to make people feel like we’re overwhelming them or create fatigue in those that may consider reading our work. So, spiritually, it’s a constant struggle to check my yearning for quantity and to stay focused on trying to write well, clearly, and effectively in a way that sustains the ministry I desire.⁵

I gotta weather a murky mix of rejection and reception, of engagement and indifference; I gotta stay grounded in good, thoughtful ideas; I gotta be focused on invitation and not move toward compulsion or reader fatigue. So then, why sustain it? Why soldier on?

I think the climate of technology and social media simultaneously creates myriad avenues to communicate with others with great quantity and even quality at the same time as creating myriad new ways for us to ignore each other. I find that a lot of my activity and that of others is consumption - scrolling feeds, skimming articles, receiving texts and messages - without reciprocation; we’re often receiving content, but not following up with an interpersonal communication back to interact with another person.⁶

On this blog, my goal is to sustain a witness that is steadfast and committed to thorough, consistent engagement. So much of life, of relationships, of communication, is showing up. It’s having the pride and dedication to always be there, to offer your presence, to say what you need to say. It’s about slowing down to appreciate the person whose content you’ve consumed and consider how it might prompt you to interact with others.

So each Monday, Jenny, Rob, and Dave will show up.

Each Thursday, I will show up.

At points in between, links and quotes and notes I tweet will show up.

Then what you all choose to do with it is up to you. But as a faithful writer and editor, my reason for blogging is to show up in your social media and to show up good.

I want The Restless Hearts to be a consistent source in your media feeds. I want it to break up or complement or juxtapose or antithesize the stream of viral videos, funny memes, goofy GIFs, and friends’ status updates. I want to continue dedicating myself to providing thoughtful, intriguing, reflection-provoking, faith-based content so that your social media feeds cannot be compartmentalized totally away from your faith.

I want to help you fight the borders and boundaries that life tries to invite around your faith and instead suffuse the voice of the Church, of theology, of spirituality, of justice into your daily scroll.

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1 I also enjoy essay tests, college applications, organizing bills, budgeting… I could be considered a sort of masochist.^↩

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2 Let it be noted, I once sat at an IHOP table with my then-girlfriend, Katherine, as well as my dear friend, Stephanie DePrez, and fellow blogger, Dave Gregory. When I made an opinionated statement, Katherine sarcastically chided, “Oh, do you have opinions on things?” To which I responded, “I am the third-most opinionated person at this table.” This explains in part why Steph was our Maid of Honor and will be godmother to our daughter and why Dave and I get along quite well.^↩

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3 Shout out to the Emmaus program and to my fellow Folkheads for together building a rich place for group reflection.^↩

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4 Ever wondered about our traffic? I’m proud that we have a strong Facebook following, and I appreciate those who interact with us. Excepting Dave’s post on leaving the Jesuits (which was shared widely and garnered 4000 views to date), our posts have gotten as few as 30 views and as many as 800 views. On average, each post gets around 150 trackable views, and our site gets around 2,000 views each month.^↩

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5 Even as I write this post, I wonder about how it will be received, whether or not people will read it, and whether or not others will find the rationale compelling. Will it drive readership? Will it create engagement? Will it prompt comments and conversation? Gotta remember that good ministry is about sowing seeds and not needing to count God’s harvest.^↩

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6 So often, I find myself staying on my laptop or phone too long, searching for something to consume or read. I reach the end of my Twitter scroll and run out of links to click and read and have to be intentional about leaving the screen and moving on. The best solution I’ve found: BOOKS. Books aren’t dependent on a volume of live or recent posts; they’re just big chunks of already polished content that can be picked back up and consumed. This has proved a helpful remedy.^↩

Because of His Love

by Rob Goodale

In her post last month on The Imposing Silence of the Cross, Jenny described the task and promise of Christianity in this way: “[Christianity] radically separates sin from sinner and fiercely loves the latter, regarding each person as an ineffable mystery worthy of love.” Since first reading this beautiful affirmation of the goodness of humanity a month ago, I've been chewing in its roots in the creation story: “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.”¹ A question has been percolating in my mind: does this really apply to everyone, even the person I most know to be sinful—me?

It should go without saying that the dignity of each human person is intrinsic and unassailable. Our shared human nature is imbued with the Breath of God; each of us is a reflection of the perfect Love that spoke life into being. We are shaped in His image, and animated by His Spirit.

Moreover, the entirety of salvation history is a consistent claim that we are not only worthy of our fellow human beings’ love, but that we are worthy of the love of God. This is a seismic declaration: at the core, each man and woman is the product of an intentional choice by God, a result of God’s desire for union with him or her.

I have never had much trouble accepting or believing that others are worthy of my love, or even of such an outrageous, wondrous love as God’s. What does give me pause is the notion that I would be included as a recipient of this gift of Divine Love, because my life is largely an accumulation of evidence to the contrary. I am painfully aware of all the reasons I am woefully inadequate and unworthy of being the object of Divine Desire. I have a tendency to be prideful, arrogant, and narcissistic, and I am prone to self-indulgent actions. This is not who I am, but it is an inescapable part of me.

This doubt does not simply come from my obvious sinfulness, though that is a monstrous weight in and of itself. Even when I am at my best, I have an abiding sense of how utterly fleeting and feeble I am in the grand scheme of things. Hans urs von Balthasar captures this feeling well: “in my clearest moments, I would have liked to make of my existence something lasting, even though I knew that most of this existence would at last disintegrate into trash and decay.”²

I struggle to cope with the tension of knowing, in an intellectual sense, that I am made for communion with God, and at the same time being all too familiar with my own finitude. These truths do not seem to fit together; I fear death because, on some level, I do not believe it is possible that a thing like God could want a thing like me. How could a being that is perfect, whole, and eternal want to be with one who is so deeply flawed, broken, and fleeting?³ Could it be that Life itself loves that which dies? It seems impossible. In the words of my very favorite band, “you are far too beautiful to love me.”

And yet, as we make final preparations for Holy Week, we need not look far: the answer to our longing always begins and ends with Christ. When Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, he isn’t just trying to console Martha and Mary, nor is he simply aiming at shocking the Pharisees. He isn’t even simply making a claim about his divinity. The resuscitation of Lazarus, like all miracles, reveals to us a piece of the truth about who God is: this is someone who loves that which dies.

This claim is, of course, made even more forcefully on the Cross. As I wrestle with my own apparently ill-fated desire for participation in the transcendent, the transcendent participates in my feebleness. If, in the familiar formula of the early Church writers, God became human so that humans might become like God, then what could it mean for the Word Made Flesh to dive headlong into our most shameful secret?

In this is the glory of the Cross: not simply that Jesus loves humanity enough to die on its behalf, but that His death on the Cross is both revelatory and efficacious. Christ’s death reveals the Divine Desire for that which dies, and at the same time makes it possible for that which dies to fulfill that Desire. His death transforms our death, which now becomes the final ingredient in our sanctification, as we are made perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect.

Jenny is right: the cross is uncomfortable, and it neither seeks to explain away the mystery of human suffering, nor does it ascribe a goodness to suffering in itself. It is an incontrovertible statement on the part of God: I love that which you find unlovable. It is, in fact, this love that makes us capable of being loved, and of loving in return.

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1 Genesis 1:31^↩

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2 Balthasar, Life Out Of Death, trans. Martina Stöckl (Ignatius Press: San Francisco, 2012) 21.^↩

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3 Yeah, yeah, Thomists, I know: God isn’t a being, but the act of being itself. Bear with me as I try to write coherent sentences.^↩

Good Tired v. Bad Tired

by Dan Masterton

Growing up in a family of five, Sunday mornings were a ritual. Get everyone up, through the showers, dressed, and ready for church. Our go-to Mass at our parish was the 9am Mass - well, my dad’s go-to Mass was the 9am. My mom was agreeable enough, but as kids, it was hard for us to understand why we couldn’t sleep later and go to a later Mass and then brunch afterwards.

I don’t remember any horrible episodes, but I know I wasn’t an easy case to deal with on Sunday mornings. I think one time I even told my dad I was an “empty vessel” that early in the morning. However, on one Sunday of spring each year, my little friends and I would play in a middle school 3v3 basketball tournament. Sometimes, I had to be up as early as 6am¹ to get ready and get to the gym in time to play with my friends. You bet I had no trouble getting up for that, yet Sunday Mass could be a chore.

Now as an adult, I’ve realized that there are differences between what I’ll call good tired and bad tired. And it largely has to do not necessarily with what you’re getting up or getting out for, but with your mental and emotional disposition toward what is causing your tiredness.

Take Mass for example. Moving away for my first job, I was independent and just making new friends in a new place, so I chose what Mass to attend personally. I chose the 8am Mass at my parish(!). It was easy to just slide my alarm back an hour from the weekday work routine, get over to Mass, do my grocery shopping at the store just down the street from church, and get home for a short run before the 10am Pacific Time² kickoff of the NFL games.

What changed? Mass was still Mass, but I had matured and now valued Mass as a free, personal choice. I had taken ownership of the faith and tradition to which I had been exposed as a kid and decided it was important to me.³ So, it was “easy” to get up and out for Mass. I might come out of Mass still yawning and rubbing my eyes, but it’s good tired. I wanted to be there; it was important to me; I didn’t mind working through the lethargy and getting myself going to be at my preferred Mass and start off my Sunday that way.

Most days, I don’t struggle to get up and get ready for work. Even though I might be tired or feel tired, the opportunity to go and earn a living utilizing my greatest gifts and passions helps fuel me through the yawns and sluggishness because it’s good tired.

I think back to the freshmen retreat I revamped into an all-day Saturday event at my last job. I got to school at like 6am to get the setup going. My leaders rolled in around 8 to continue, and we had the whole thing going by 9:30. We had a packed-full day of large-group activities like Knockout, small-group discussions, prayer experiences, including a big gym family Mass, and finally a family potluck dinner with everyone. By time cleanup rolled around at 8pm, my legs were throbbing, head was spinning, voice was hoarse, mind was racing - and I loved it. The day was everything I desired for my students, leaders, and families, and the dynamic vitality of it was something to behold. I was exhausted, but it was good tired. With my leaders and colleagues, we poured ourselves into this beautiful day, so I was feeling affirmed, delighted, and grateful.

Anyone who has ever led or directed a Kairos can similarly attest. With Kairos, it’s four long days in a row, with just a short night’s sleep in a simple bed to keep you going through. And on top of the logistics to coordinate, the emotion of those four days is high. The social time at meals and breaks brings laughter, but the witness talks and sharing carry emotional weight, both in joy for others’ happiness and sadness for their struggles. The physical-emotional one-two punch of a good retreat wears you out real good. Yet, at the end of a Kairos, celebrating the closing ceremony with everyone and seeing the delight of families and leaders, it cinches up the good tired feelings of self-investment that come with facilitating a vulnerable, intimate experience of God’s love for others.

Then there are times at work where tiredness mounts for different reasons. I remember one week where three straight days of after-school meetings kept me at work past 6pm, stacking three twelve-hour days one after another. I remember one day where I was sick as a dog, gutted it out through the school day, and then had to attend an after-school meeting nonetheless. I remember at a previous job walking in the door with a clear picture of my day’s tasks and agenda in my mind, only to find I’d be subbing several periods of the day, constrained to babysitting in loud classrooms rather than freedom to tackle my job. Days like those that wear me out because of frustration or impositions or tedium - this is bad tired. This is the tired that comes on hard and weighs heavily, that is hard to mentally dismiss or overcome. This is the tired that tempts me to stay in bed or be short in the way I treat others. This is the tired that requires prayerful patience and needs plentiful grace.

I have been grappling with the good tired and the bad tired a lot as a new father. I love the poop⁴ out of my newborn daughter, Lucy, and my wife, Katherine. Having these twelve weeks of paid leave is an amazing blessing to just start learning how to be a great dad. Among the myriad unsolicited advice we received while awaiting Lucy, many people, almost bitingly, told us we’ll never sleep much again. Others, more insightfully, instructed, “Sleep when she sleeps,” which is something we’ve certainly utilized.

Overnight, my wife has to get up to feed her a few times, but Katherine also pumps a bottle of milk so that I can handle one of those feeds and give her a break. This means around 3-4am, I know that Lucy’s cry is my invitation to interrupt my sleep, throw on a hoodie and glasses, grab my iPad in case I want to stream a show, and set up shop with my Boppy pillow and burp rag while I warm the refrigerated bottle of milk to feed my daughter.

Now, I am a careful sleeper. I like to have a strict bedtime; I like to set an alarm and not snooze it; I like my predictable eight hours. So, this is a definite change of pace. Sometimes, Lucy is stubborn and screeches while she waits; sometimes, she won’t latch to the bottle and spits up or hiccups or struggles as she drinks; sometimes, she chugs it down easily like a champ. Either way, that hour of sleep I lose so that I can be up with her and feed her is fun. Spending an hour feeding, burping, changing, and holding her is pretty awesome. With no one else around, it’s like the world got quiet and empty to give the two of us space to just hang together.

It might mean I will not sleep straight through the night for a while, that I’ll lose sleep each night, that I’ll be a bit more tired. But this is definitely good tired. I can feel the fatigue in my body when I’ve only been asleep for a couple hours and Lucy summons me from bed, but I mentally and emotionally find it very doable to peel myself out of bed and get moving to do what Lucy needs. I want to do it, and I love to do it. And taking the time to care for her, even before she’s conscious of what she’s doing, gives her the chance to love me back, too, in her own funny little baby way.

There are definitely times in fatherhood that are bad tired. When we get Lucy down for sleep, and I decide I’m making a late-night McDonald’s run to get us milkshakes and french fries, and I find that our car has a flat tire that I have to change on the spot, that makes me bad tired.⁵ When I wonder excessively about my job and Katherine’s job and how many hours a week I should work when I go back and whether or not to stay home or work part-time or if we might have to put Lucy in daycare, that makes me bad tired. When life’s complications or frustrations that are beyond my control bubble up or compound or preoccupy me, it wears me out in a most undesirable way, and that is bad tired.

God’s gift to me is my steady, sturdy disposition; when I practice my faith and embrace the support of my community and close friendships, my keel stays even. When I’m bad tired, it’s just hard and not necessarily fixable. However, it doesn’t set in so often or so heavily. Most of the time, the blessings of my call to ministry and to marriage and family life engage me with labors of love that might be tiring, but are good tired.

When I try to engage faithfully with it all and relish the joys and challenges in tiredness, I think of my old friend, Scott, who when seeing a friend excel in friendship or love or ministry, would simply bequeath the loving blessing of God, “Well done, good and faithful servant!”

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1 Remember when getting up at 6am was unfathomably early? Now it’s just the time my alarm is set to go off. Those were the days.^↩

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2 With a frozen pizza in the oven to eat at halftime. The only thing I really liked about living on the west coast was the early starts and finishes of sporting events, especially those 8pm Eastern Time starts that would be done well advance of a comfortable bedtime.^↩

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3 Fr. John Westerhoff describes the growth of faith in four stages: experienced, affiliative, searching, and owned. To read a bit more about each, click here and/or check out his book.^↩

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4 Never one to shy away from talking about poop, I mean this figuratively and literally. I love her a lot. She also poops frequently, even when in my arms. She also likes to fart while I’m wiping her butt or applying topical cream.^↩

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5 Then, after taking the time to locate the accoutrements for the first tire change on our newish car, I then nonetheless still go to McDonald’s.^↩

Getting Off the Boat

by Jenny Klejeski

It can be easy to despair as a Christian. With the great evil and division both in the world and, more scandalously, within the Christian community itself, there is great temptation to hopelessness. I think, for myself, this despair stems from an attempt to control things, followed by a realization that my attempts for control are futile, and then feeling hopeless about the entire affair. Throwing my hands in the air, I concede this is just the way things are, and further isolate myself from the world and its problems. Ultimately, despair says there are certain things which cannot be redeemed and from these things, I should separate myself.

This attitude is not unlike those in the early Christian heresy, Donatism. The Donatists desired to separate themselves from the world and its evils. They sought to create a church of saints to the exclusion of the sinners. They believed that the validity of the Sacraments was dependent upon the personal sanctity of the minister. In the end, their heresy is one of trying to control, of saying God’s mercy only extends this far, of isolating oneself.

A favorite image of the Church for the Donatists was that of Noah’s Ark (which, it should be noted, is an image affirmed in Scripture and by the Church Fathers). They rightly saw the Church as the means of salvation given by God, a rescue from the sin and brokenness of the world. In the first of two New Testament letters attributed to St. Peter, he affirms that the waters of the deluge, which cleansed Noah’s world of sin, provide an archetype of the waters of Baptism, which cleanse our souls from original sin. Those who are aboard the ark remain safe from the destruction without.

It seems to me, however, that the problem with the Donatists (and often myself) is the desire to stay on the ark. While perhaps a bit cramped and uncomfortable (and smelly), at least there is a sense of security, a feeling of being separated from those unpleasant and even dangerous things outside.

But the thing is, God didn’t put Noah and his family on the ark so that they could stay there forever. In fact, God only makes a covenant with Noah once he and his family reached land. And God’s command in that covenant is to be fertile and multiply—to be the seed of renewal for all of creation. If they didn’t return to the world, there would be no point for them to have been saved in the first place.

So it is for us, too. Though the Church is the place wherein salvation subsists, it is not ultimately a place of escape or security from the world. Rather, it is a place from which we are sent. Hence at the end of each liturgy, ite, missa est—go, it is sent.

To live liturgically is to recognize all of creation as gift and to offer that gift back to God. In his book For the Life of the World, Alexander Schmemann writes, “The first, the basic definition of man is that he is the priest. He stands in the center of the world and unifies it in his act of blessing God, of both receiving the world from God and offering it to God [...]. The world was created as the ‘matter,’ the material of one all-embracing eucharist, and man was created as the priest of this cosmic sacrament.” Thus, it is part of our call as human beings to affirm the goodness of all of creation.

Of course, this does not mean a blanket acceptance of all things that go on in the world. Nor does it mean conformity to the world. The New Testament is pretty clear on that point. However, the problem comes in when we start to view things—whether consciously or unconsciously—as irredeemable and unworthy of our attention. If we believe anything in this world is beyond redemption it is likely that we have ceased to trust Christ as savior and instead have looked to ourselves and our own small-minded idea of what God’s mercy is.

In the midst of the raging storm, can we trust that Christ is steering the ship, even though He is asleep down below? And even more than that, are we willing to come off the boat at Christ’s bidding and walk on the water towards Him? Rather than throwing our hands up in despair, can we open our hands in prayer and trust? 

 
This is what we are called to: a radical hope that impels us to face the messiness and sin and brokenness of the world around us. In the waters of Baptism we have salvation, but this salvation is not something to be kept to ourselves. Rather, it is what enables us to go out into the world to be agents of the new creation.