In Praise of Shallow Praise

(I know I promised a post on the lovely and mysterious Mary of Bethany, but another reflection came to me on my walk to the Poor Clares this morning. I'll get to Mary. Along with Mary Magdalene and the woman with the hemorrhages, she's one of my great models of prayer from the gospels.)

Holy Week always gets me thinking of and grateful for the itinerancy of my Christian life. I think of all the places I've been for Easter Vigils over the years. On my walk to the nuns' this morning I was just reflecting back through all of these and praying for the various communities, places, and parishes. But my attention stopped on one Holy Saturday in particular. It was twenty years ago on April 18, 1992, toward the end of the second semester of my sophomore year of college, and the last Holy Saturday before I became a Catholic.

For his own purposes, God leaves me with a pretty vivid memory of that night. When I think of it, it reminds me how shallow my conversion really was, and how defective my intentions. Not that recalling this should be an occasion for self-pity, even when I notice how shallow and defective it all remains to this day--such is the devil's agenda!--but rather a moment to recall my own poverty and the God who calls us in his love for our souls and not on account of our being worthy or even interesting.

It had been a pretty drunken semester. My girlfriend, who was one of those well-behaved sort of girls, was away in Florence for the semester studying art, and I was thus liberated from her moderating influence. My friends and I were settling into the identity of philosophy majors, and were quite convinced that we were as smart as could be. It was all a lot of fun. Toward the end of the semester, and certainly by Easter, I had more or less decided that I wanted to become a Catholic. Soon I would tell the priest who was on campus two afternoons a week of my decision. He would give me a note of introduction to the local pastor. It was Ascension Thursday when I went. The pastor handed me over to the permanent deacon, who would give me my 'convert instructions' and then baptize me at the end of that summer. Yes, I came into the Church like converts did before the restoration of the catechumenate and the RCIA. Like St. Paul, I was born out of order. But all of that was 'not yet' just a few weeks before on Holy Saturday.

I remember that there were posters around campus listing the various Holy Week services. They were white with the lettering in purple. I studied the notice, but it didn't occur to me to make plans to attend anything. It was not something I 'had to do' yet. This idea I had of becoming a Catholic Christian; it was mostly in my head. It was concepts. It wasn't yet prayer and it certainly wasn't anything related to a praying community. But God was there, calling me. In his self-emptying he wills to make a throne out of even our inadequate ideas of him. That's the mystery of the Cross as it comes to live in our wills. God is willing to die in our defective and incomplete religion in order to deliver us to the pure faith of prayer.

On Holy Saturday night, the Elect were all around me, all over the world, receiving the sacramental initiation for which I also hoped. But I wasn't there praying with them. Even though I had vaingloriously begun to call myself a catechumen, it didn't even occur to me to attend an Easter Vigil. Instead, I was drinking with my friends. I was at a show of campus bands and having a great time. In the moshing I jammed one of my thumbs. I think I probably broke it a little bit. It hurt for a long time. It was well past midnight when the music was over and I found myself alone. I was hungry. So I walked off campus, crossed Route 32, and went to the glorious mess of alternativity that was Abbey House, the cooperative living dormitory. I cooked a hamburger in their kitchen, thinking that it was late enough at night not to be caught in the theft.

By the time I got back to campus and my own dormitory, Smith, it was going on four o'clock. Noticing one of the Holy Week posters on the walk back, I saw again that there was to be a Protestant service at sunrise. Since I was already up, I thought, I may as well go. After all, I was going to be a Christian, and so Easter ought to mean something. Arriving on the grass outside the chapel I met the Protestants. I got to talking with one student I knew because she had once tried to start a relationship by asking me to help her with her linear algebra homework. She was telling me about how she had been dreaming about the Resurrection when her alarm went off and she joked and said something like, 'Get out of the way Jesus, I have to turn off the alarm clock.' I remember thinking that she was corny. When I think of that, I am ashamed.

I sang and prayed with them. When a cup of wine was passed around, I had a hard time holding it because of my injured thumb. It's so funny to think of that twenty years later, when I daily gasp chalices of the Precious Blood without using my thumbs at all, como Dios manda. The back of the worship aid had a stylized image of the women at the tomb with a triple alleluia written below them. I cut it out and put it on my dorm room door.

After the service I didn't stay for the collation that followed. To be honest, I don't remember anything after that. I suppose I went back to my room and went to sleep for a little while, until my friends were ready for that great ritual of hungover grease and caffeine ingestion, the Sunday brunch at Harris refectory.

The Lord calls to us just where we are. He is willing to suffer in our shallow praise and defective intentions in order to save us from them. That's the sublime humility of the Cross, the humble sublimity of his Presence in the Eucharist. His power is revealed in our weakness. In that spirit, I boast of my shallow and defective conversion.

Cooler

Sometimes I think of things I once found amusing and realize that they aren't funny at all. Sometimes, on the contrary, I notice that they are troubling.

Beavis: "The only thing cooler than bands that get lots of chicks are bands that scare chicks."

And so it is illustrated that the sexuality taught by the world is not without its admixture of violence.

The College Voice

In these transitional and liminal spells, I often experience a sort of interior compression of the time of life-history, and people and events from the past start to come up in my prayer. There are graces for which I need to be grateful again, moments ready for new interpretation, old sins I need to confess, people before whom I need to repent.

This morning it was one of my college classmates, someone I don't think I ever met.

During our very first semester, he had written a letter to the editor of the school paper. It was published in one of the first issues of the year. Apparently he had been quite shocked and scandalized by what he had found in his first experiences of college life, and wrote strongly about how inappropriate and undignified was this life of binge drinking, recreational drug use, and casual sex.

When the letter was published, it was the hilarious entertainment of the day. Here was this stupid freshman who put his uptight annoyance and out-of-date views on display for everyone to have a good laugh.

I laughed at him too. I guess I didn't know any better.

My own critical turn against college life came a little later. For me it started as a worry about privilege and responsibility. What right did I have to this life of leisure and social and intellectual enjoyment when so much of humanity was suffering so badly? Concerns about the so-called sexual liberation came a little later. I had accepted without a thought that abortion was a matter of 'choice.' Nevertheless, it didn't seem to me like a very good thing or something to be taken lightly. To hear of the procuring of abortions talked about in a matter-of-fact or even joking way made me start to wonder if something wasn't wrong somewhere. How many of my tiny sisters and brothers died around me on that little island of privilege? Probably not that many, but to imagine even one gave me such compunction that I wanted to leave the world right then and there. Also, by the end of my time in college I had known a few women who had suffered date rape. Sure, there were vigils and awareness sessions about the problem, but I never heard anyone criticize the role that binge drinking and the expectation of sexual permissiveness may have played.

So today I just pray for the kid who wrote that letter. I have no idea where he is now. I ask his forgiveness for how I laughed at him and took him lightly. I don't know if his concerns were anything like the ones I came to in my own time, but no matter.

My Pears

The other day I got into a conversation that reminded me of one of my early experiences of religious people.

Folks like to make fun of St. Augustine and the big deal he makes about stealing the pears in the Confessions, but I get it. I get how childhood experiences become ways into an understanding of the depth of the problem of sin.

I was in the first or second grade. Some earnest religious kid asked me if I was 'saved.' Partly curious and partly making fun of him I answered his question with another: "Saved from what?" The kid didn't have a ready answer.

When I think of having said what I said, it fills me with awe before the mystery of sin. For that from which I needed to be saved was with me always: I was a sad and anxious kid, and already at that age I felt--felt, not knew--that there was something very out of sorts with my particular being-in-the-world.

Sin is not just the unreality that robs us and our societies of the good that ought to be there, but it also clouds our minds and perverts our thinking so that we lose our sense of the most fundamental thing of all, our need for salvation. If we were well aware of our need for God and the deliverance that God wills to give us, we would immediately become filled with such devotion and missionary zeal as to become like the saints. Indeed this is what sanctity is; not that we should conform ourselves to some religious standard by agonistic effort at 'personal holiness,' but that we should surrender to the need and desire for God which is our own deepest identity.

Even for us who are baptized and have been delivered from the burden of the guilt our first parents earned for us by their sin, the injury left by original sin remains in us. All of the actual sins of our life have kept the wound festering. The whole rotten business makes it hard even to think straight about things, which is something that should teach us theology students a lot of humility.

Even in my unhappiness I could ask from what I needed to be saved. That's the mystery of sin in its deepest and most sinister.

This is not to say that the purpose of salvation is to make us feel better or to help us arrive at a better mental health situation. The purpose of salvation, at least as long as we remain in the Church on earth, is to get us free from carrying our own selves around as a burden so that we can give ourselves to each other in love, open and responsive to how God wants to make use of us for the salvation of others.