Had a conversation with a friend over on FB who I have come to respect and admire and she was very encouraging (something we all need). I want to echo what she said to me to all of you guys: I’m grateful for you and I appreciate your kindness and friendship over the years. It’s easy to feel alone at times. You remind me I’m not and that we still have a lot of God-given grace to draw on in one another. At the same time, as my reply to her points out, I think we have to face from the outset that discipleship comes at a cost and that, as Jesus says, we have to count that cost from the outset lest we try to build a tower and not be able to finish it. Bonhoeffer says (and lived), “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”
My friend writes:
“I thank God I found people like you before Trump was re-elected. I feel like we have community to weather the storm ahead.”
It is a great gift. As God told Elijah, there are still 7000 in Israel who have not bent the knee to Baal. At the same time, we need to realize that peace, according to Scripture, is made “through the blood of his cross” (Colossian 1:20) and, as a host of martyrs down the age testify, the extension of that peace into the world often involves the martrydom of the peacemakers. It sucks, but we need to face it from the outset so we don’t feel betrayed by God should it come.
Martyrdom does not always involve blood (though it certainly can). It can involve betrayal, ostracism, and intense psychological suffering, often at the hands of those we loved and trusted. The betrayal of Judas and the denial and cowardice of Peter and the rest were part of the Passion. Paul was not universally loved in the early Church and had Christian enemies who gloated over his sufferings (Philippians 1:15–17). Athanasius was exiled from his see five times by fellow Christians. Beck was murdered by Catholic knights at the behest of a Catholic king. St. Joan was burnt by a bishop. And likewise, today, the #1 persecutors of Christians on our soil today are… other Christians and often Christians consumed with self-pity over coffee cups and imaginary Wars on Christmas and liturgies not to their finicky tastes and similar bullshit, all while they gloat over women miscarrying amid the Christofascist razor wire on the Rio Grande put there by Catholic governor Greg Abbott.
A friend complained the other day that he could not see how the Church is one or holy. I remarked to him that it seems to be one of the many paradoxes of the revelation that Jesus himself tells us it is so, but also constantly warns his disciples that the One Church is made of wheat and tares, bad fish and good, and that the Holy Church is constantly in danger of seduction and sin and that we live in peril of fire where “their worm does not die and their fire is not quenched.”
Both ends of this paradox–the Oneness and Holiness of the Church and the fractiousness and corruption of its members–must, like all the paradoxes proposed by Jesus, be embraced by us if we are to be his disciples, I think.
The Church’s soul is not us. We are and always have been a herd of cats, which is why, way back in the Golden Apostolic Age when everything was perfect, they fought like a herd of cats over who was the greatest. The Church’s soul is the Holy Spirit and he is the only thing making that herd of cats one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. That’s why Paul describes Jesus’ presence in the Church as a treasure in a jar of clay and why the Catechism says that the Church is nothing but a moon to Christ’s Sun. We have no light of our own. Whatever light we have is only reflected light and we spend our days reminding the whole world of that by our sins. Ecclesial arrogance, of all the forms of arrogance, is the stupidest in the world: like cancer patients bragging about who is the least terminal among them.
The good news is that, wholly undeserved, Christ does illumine us and gives us to one another so that the light one is gifted to reflect is given to others who need that light. The Chosen, in Scripture, are never Chosen as evidence that they are better than the Unchosen. They are Chosen for the sake of the Unchosen. Your ability to sing that I lack is a blessing for my ears. My ability to play the piano is a blessing to your song. The Body builds itself up in love and we discover that in Christ, all are chosen in different ways and called to supply grace especially when other members of the body sin. Sometimes, that grace is given by members willing to die for members of the body itching to murder them–something I think a lot about in this hour,
The nature of such love is that nobody can tell another person to make that offering without joining their murderers, but any of us may be called by the Spirit to do it in the sanctuary of our hearts and all of us should at least spend time pondering what we would do if we were so called.
I wish I knew the answer in my own case.
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4 Responses
Realistic words that are also comforting and helpful. Thank you, dear brother!
Mark, thank you for being such a decent guy. Thank you for the wake up calls.
I don’t miss the days when I was more naive and hoped for political heroes.
Right now I’m asking Jesus to help me with my sentiments of disgust, and asking him to help me to be like Him. I know–He felt disgust too–BUT! He was so cool in the face of humans that behave like hyenas.
Jesus did his share of insulting and making fun of the hypocritical power structure of his day. I do think challenging injustice in charity is difficult, but you do it better than most, really. If the heretics that are MAGA Catholics are offended by you, then they have really innocent ears. Or they’re just, you know, snowflakes.
The words about Martyrdom being more than physical rings in my soul.
For all of us who watched our friends and family subsume to this political cult, even as we desperately begged them to reconsider, we’re martyrs as we watch them assume that they’re the loyal church, that they try to push us out.
But we’re the church too.
And we’re not going anywhere.