I watched another film last night, on Patrick Coffin's recommendation, called Calvary. It is about a good priest ministering to his congregants in a small town in Ireland, all of whom who have lost faith in God and the Church in the aftermath of the sexual abuse scandal. It reminded me of the Irish countryside version of Diary of a City Priest (based in Philadelphia), which I read years ago. It was human and heavy, mixed with grit and the unpolished realities of living in a fallen world with nothing but scorn for the Church and among those who regard religion as little more than a naive fairy tale.
I made me think back to my days at the Catholic Worker in inner-city Harrisburg. I was helping manage a house of hospitality for men with drug addictions. The house was at 14th and Market Street in Allison Hill, a notorious neighborhood for drug dealing and shootings. I was 22 years old, a Catholic of four years, a kid from the suburbs, and a bit green. I would walk to the corner store for the newspaper and a pack of Benson & Hedges cigarettes every morning for my co-Worker, Bruce. We would go to to morning Mass across the street at St. Francis of Assisi parish, and eat in the soup kitchen for lunch. Most of my days were spent driving our guys to appointments and attending AA and NA meetings, helping the neighborhood kids with their homework after school, restocking our food pantry, writing and editing our community newspaper, organizing volunteers from the local colleges on the weekends to help paint and rehab our houses for women with children and refugees, and serving the needs of the inmates at the county prison. There was a seminarian who came by to help from time to time to volunteer, but he seemed out of place--kind of proper and concerned with churchy and clerical things; I couldn't relate. The summers were hot (no AC), the work was unpaid, but I was happy to be serving the Lord and getting a crash course in the Works of Mercy in the grit and grime of urban daily life.
I remember one of our guys in recovery who came to us in particular. We were about the same age, but from vastly different worlds. He was from Brooklyn originally but came to us by way of Pittsburgh. He had killed a man in retaliation for the murder of his father (who was in the mafia). We got him a job at a restaurant downtown. He lied about being clean, he was using heroin the whole time he was with us, went to NA meetings and faked it good. He stole my stuff and sold it for drugs, had no use for religion. He eventually left one night and didn't come back. He thought we were all a bunch of sissies anyway. It was a daily grind and a seemingly hopeless cycle of poverty and drugs and crime and violence. But the needs were still there, and who was going to do the work?
The temptation to the safety of spiritual escapism is strong when faced with entering into the fray of the daily despair of this seemingly futile and endless cycle. It's a scary world--a lot safer writing words on a screen, or discussing religious things in comfort. I don't think we realize what our parish priests endure--the daily battles of indifference and sometimes outright hostility towards them in places where faith has all but fallen by the wayside in places like Europe and Ireland. On top of it, they many times have to do it alone and maybe with inner battles and demons of their own (as in the film) and temptations to despair. They are like the teachers in the classroom, doing the hard work in the trenches in a culture gone mad. The priest in Calvary--he was a good priest, a good and ordinary man. He cared about people and their well being, trying to meet them where they were at, even when they scoffed at his belief and repaid him with derision.
If we are doing the work of the Lord, the daily grind, we have to sanctify it somehow. The pain of rejection and being made fun of for our naivety is nothing compared to the pain of a meaningless life. The Devil will always try to convince us that what we do doesn't matter, that our efforts are futile in order to drive us to despair. When we lose our raison d'etre as Christians--our faith in Christ--we have no faith left for humanity in its sin and brokenness. We can't live in a spiritual cocoon, a perpetual retreat or religious buffet--we have to come out of the womb at some point and enter in to the grimy fray of human existence. There is a lot of work to be done, and that work ain't always pleasant.
Some days it weighs on me--not doubt or despair, but that there are so few who believe, especially those in post-Christian cultures which hold their Christian heritage with contempt. Christ bore the sins of the world on his shoulders, felt the searing pain of the indifference of those whom he died for. We are not Christ. We are men, human and fallen, but we are still called to do the work--priest and lay person alike. We can't do that without faith, and we cannot maintain faith without prayer, and we cannot stay rooted in prayer without effort. And, let's face it, effort gets tiring. Just like life sometimes.
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