On being a misfit

One of the things I hear my Bishop say with regularity is that Catholicism is counter-cultural. He has spoken of the counter-cultural choice young men and women make when they enter religious life. He emphasizes the counter-cultural lessons taught in Catholic schools. He makes a point that our faith, the core message of our evangelization, is counter-cultural.

Just between you and me, I haven’t meditated very deeply nor very often about being counter-cultural; but I guess the Bishop has said it often enough now that he has my attention. As I spend a few ergs on the subject, I don’t find the fruits of contemplation altogether pleasant. What I hear the Bishop saying is that who we are and what we do don’t mesh very well with society.

Catholics, it seems, spent the better part of the last 200 years trying to fit into the American mainstream. Now we’re affluent (statistically, anyway). We’re well educated. Studies indicate that people actually like having us for neighbors. We made it; we’re in.

Now that we’re in, however, good golly, Miss Molly, it looks like the thing to do is to get out – and particularly while the getting is good. More properly the expression is: be in the world, but not of it.

Now I don’t want to be putting words into the Bishop’s mouth, but what I hear him saying is that good practicing Catholics are a bunch of misfits. He would never say that, probably, but that expresses for me what “counter-cultural” means.

Perhaps the popular connotation of misfit evokes images of green whiskers and opium dens. Misfit is a harsh sounding word that makes people uncomfortable. Even so, is seems a verbal shock helps me to get the idea.

The idea is that nobody can follow both God and Mammon. To that assertion comes a round of qualifications and denials – not necessarily “O yes you can,” but “You can’t have too many clothes or too much money,” or the running assumption that acquisition of wealth is devoutly to be wished.

The gospel of the modern world is relativism: you do your thing and I do mine and moral standards are what I say they are. The Catholic Church rejects that idea, no matter what the degree of acceptance Catholics have found. And while the Church repudiates the simplistic yes/no codes of scriptural literalism, the Church also rejects that there’s no such thing as right and wrong. Right and wrong still do exist.

The key premise of the best-seller The Closing of the American Mind illustrates the position well:

Americans have becomes so relativistic that not to have a moral position has become a moral position. Somehow it’s become immoral to have convictions, because that means that I’m asserting that I’m right, which means that somebody else is wrong, and that’s not right. Don’t laugh. This hogwash is becoming a deeply ingrained American value system.

So, we Catholics have made it into the American mainstream, and look what we’ve found. We know that to authentically practice this faith of ours we now have to be misfits again.

Perhaps we can assert enough moral influence to change all that, but I suppose I’m skeptical. I appreciate the way the Bishop lets us in on the truth of the matter. “Counter-cultural”: that says it nicely. – T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on October 25th, 1987

On finding the Truth

Dishonesty is hard work. One of my more outlandish lies occurred one Saturday afternoon when I told my wife that I was on my way to confession. My real purpose was to idle about with the boys, but I knew my missus would have no part of that.

After my return from an absence of unseemly duration, the wife of course questioned me about the reason. I thought you said you were going to confession, she said. Indeed I had been to confession, I said. But my sins were of such a grievous nature that they could be forgiven only by the bishop. Owing to Father’s having to make arrangements and our having to wait upon his excellency, the hour grew very late, I said, against my best intentions.

So much for one of the redwoods in my forest of saplings.

By contrast, one of my favorite stories about honesty features Betsie ten Boom, Corrie’s sister. Betsie, it seems, so valued telling the truth that her very nature would not allow even slight equivocation. The ten Booms were hiding Jews during the Nazi occupation of Holland. The family received word just before the arrival of the SS and hid their precious charges under floorboards, atop which they placed a table. When the Nazis burst in, Corrie said she feared the worst because she knew Betsie would tell the truth if they asked her any questions. Sure enough, a soldier asked Betsie if they were hiding any Jews and she said yes, they were under the table, which was in plain sight. The Nazi mistook Betsie’s truth for sarcasm.

Somehow I have a hard time figuring Jesus for telling a white lie or a fib or mixing fact with fiction to avoid bruising somebody’s ego. I doubt that He harbored any false humility or pride when He came before His Father in prayer. I doubt He had a complex system of denial about the shortcomings of human weakness. I think He was honest with His Father, others and Himself. Would that I could be.

Dishonesty will work you to death covering bases, backtracking, stirring in enough true-seeming deception to get you through the day. Through the grace of God, I’ve found a lot of peace in making a clean breast of things with God, myself and others. Still, though, I know I’ve got arthritis of the tongue, a few spurs and outgrowths in my efforts toward rigorous honesty.

When I come to the Lord in prayer, I want Him to see me just as I want to be or as I’m trying to be, rather than as I actually just plain am. Surely I have a better shot at the Lord’s love and forgiveness with a few qualifiers on my is-ness. You know what I mean. I’m lazy, Lord, but… I have lust in my heart, Lord, but… It’s easy for me to say I’m the most wretched of all creatures; just as easy for me to thank the Lord that I’m not like the rest of men. Why is it I can’t just come before God acknowledging my deliberate choices and my gratitude for all that He has given me? Too much theology, perhaps, and not enough honesty.

My neighbor will call inquiring about my interest in some service to the Church. Surely my hems and haws must sound almost comic. Say that sounds pretty good, I’ll say, but I’m pretty busy. What night? The boss has been pushing me pretty hard lately. I really need to get more involved. ‘Course the wife has been after me to finish wallpapering the bedroom. I’ve been called away on a journey to a faraway land. I’ve bought a yoke of oxen and I have to try them. I’ve taken a bride and I will be unable to attend.

One of the last great victims of my deceptions and dishonesty is me. I lie to myself all the time. I can lie to God and say I’m willing to change, but He knows the score. I can lie to others and say I’m willing to change and some will believe and report back to me how touched they’ve been by my courageous resolve. They, too, however, ultimately bear witness to the fruits of my actions. They’ve got eyes. They can see the same old so and so. Come we now at lengths to the heart of the man, telling himself with confidence and satisfaction that he’ll get going on that self-improvement campaign first thing in the morning. Never was there a lie repeated more often to such a naïve and spellbound believer. I’ll believe anything I tell me with the faith of the fathers.

Jesus said He was the truth. It seems ironic that a poor, broken sinner, in a grace-filled moment of honesty, will acknowledge that he is in fact unwilling to change, that in that moment he will meet Christ. I guess it’s true that if we can find the Truth, then we can find the Way: and if we can find the Way, we can find Life. –T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on March 29th, 1987

Perceptions and truth

They say we remember things the way we perceived them to be the first time. I recall my oldest brother grabbing me from my bed one winter morning, taking me outside and setting me down in the new fallen snow. It was up to my waist! I had never seen so much snow!

Many snows have come and gone, but my memory shows the great snow of my childhood. The point is: It wasn’t that we had tall snow, but that I was a short boy.

I used to think that the home of my birth was very big, but it wasn’t so big. The overgrown hilly field behind our house was not a jungle but a thicket.

Many more perceptions come into play as we grow older, things a lot more complicated than big and small. Take marriage, for example. That can be a shocker.

I’m sure I went into marriage satisfied with the old ’60s adage: “You do your thing and I do mine; and if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful.” That seemed like a reasonable sentiment. Certainly I believed my wife and I had it together, each of us with something to keep and something to share.

Good golly Miss Molly how things change. Things just didn’t work out 50-50 in our wedlock. Come to find out that marriage can be ninety-nine to one or a hundred to nothing. Come to find out that marriage just won’t work any other way.

It seems that so much of maturity deals with coming to terms with disillusionment. It seems so unfair that big things are really small, that snow that once prompted awe now prompts dread, that love can be hard and thankless and painful.

I don’t mean to imply that I go around disillusioned all the time. Far from it. Actually, in a kind of ironic twist, disillusionment has been a great teacher, demonstrating to me that real beauty is found in truth itself rather than in a perception of it.

Who can know the peace, the deep satisfaction, of a couple married 50 years, a Sister celebrating her Silver Jubilee, a priest who has been a priest for 30 years or 40 years? You and I know that they didn’t make those milestones easily or alone. Indeed, they could not have made them without God.

My wife and I have discovered that Jesus Christ must be at the center of our marriage if we are to do the loving that’s called for. We have discovered that He was there all along, whether we chose to acknowledge Him or not. He has that kind of love.

One of the things I tell my kids is that Jesus loves them and that He never stops loving them. Even when they are doing wrong, even when it seems nobody loves them – when they are happy, when they are sad, Jesus loves them. I tell my children this over and over and over again. Sometimes they say, “I know, Dad.” Or they will say, “You always say that, Dad.” Sometimes, though, they don’t say anything – they just look off in one of those childlike stares, seeing what a child sees as he grapples with believing.

Having come through a few disillusionments in my time, I know that my children will face them, too. I cannot spare them that. Maybe, however, when the going gets rough, when life gets unfair and they are called upon to love someone who doesn’t love them back, they will recall with confidence that Someone does love them after all, and never stops.

The Hebrew scholar says that God did not tell us how to begin things. That is His secret. He did, however, reveal to us a precious secret: How to begin again.

That’s what I’ve had to do as I have recovered from my disillusionments. I’m surely thankful that God, Who is Truth, has pulled back the curtain, from which way to go.

As I have begun fitfully and timidly on these new journeys, I know that the snow may not be deep, but it can be serene and pure and awe-inspiring, and that I can appreciate it in a child-like way. I know that love out there will not be based on some preconceived idea, but will be beyond all understanding. –T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on November 23rd, 1986