October 5, 2023 at 7:00 a.m.
Plaid-shirt theology
Some of my best friends happen also to be doctors, lawyers and college professors. Why the need for a disclaimer? Well, it seems that these days it has become common to dismiss the well-educated, people in the professions as generally “out of touch” with the lives of “everyday” people. Sometimes my friends even take themselves down a notch, like a physician pal of mine, who often refers to himself as a “cow town” doctor, even as he writes his second book while canning his crop of homegrown yellow wax beans. Not to mention being dziadziu (Polish for grandpa) to his umpteen grandchildren as they and his children often crash his “retirement” party. How he manages to keep it all together, as he has often phrased it, is a daily exercise in “plaid-shirt” theology.
I could also cite examples of active women and men — many on my staff — who regularly, constitutionally one might even say, perform the most impressive feats in management, finance and business while monitoring pets and progeny and, not infrequently, the progress of a sourdough bread starter and a home garden. Yes, I know not a few pastors to be about similar sundry matters on any day.
When it comes to practical wisdom, people who happen to be engaged in a variety of enterprises, not all of them profit-making or “successful” in an economic sense, are often rich in virtues, skills and insights not taught in schools or learned online. Their lessons, learned from experience, from trial and error and the “school of hard knocks,” are of immense value to anyone taking time to know them as friends.
Perhaps you have been fortunate enough to have had a grandparent or a favorite teacher, priest or nun, or neighbor who may never have won a Nobel Prize or an Academy Award but taught you volumes about life and how to deal with its blows, chances and challenges. People whose vision of life always seems to give us hope, leading us beyond the limits of our own personal experience or imaginations. Who never seem to settle with what is trendy, “popular” or fashionable. Not content just to keep up with the times or the Joneses, they seem to have a vision that leads us beyond and ahead of our times.
What is common to all of the persons I am thinking of as I write – with great gratitude to them and to God – is that they are, without exception, people who are reflective. They never get stuck in the past or phased by the future and are always looking deeply into the present, to see what is happening now that can easily be overlooked in the noise and speed of what promises “progress” but is quite often a distraction, a lie. I apologize for that loaded sentence. No doubt it contains assumptions I have made, and it needs some unpacking and explanation. Bear with me.
It was supposedly the Ancient Greek philosopher Socrates who famously said, “the unexamined life is not worth living.” In his “Apology,” Plato proposes to quote this dictum from his trial (4th century B.C.) for impiety and the corrupting of youth, apparently for encouraging them to ask questions and not to settle for pat answer from authorities who may not have really had their best interests in mind. For this he was sentenced to death. Could that ever happen again? He was “canceled” (terminated) because he believed that the best he could offer youth was to enable them to think. He was not a big fan of groupthink or censorship.
Not everyone is familiar with the writings of the esteemed spiritual thinkers like Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila and Ignatius Loyola, just to cite a few of the greats. But people who take the time to be reflective in their lives are following their example. We recently celebrated the feast of Thérèse de Lisieux, a young Carmelite nun who lived a simple life but who has been declared a Doctor of the Church because of her practical, lived, spiritual wisdom, though she died at the age of 24. But I left something out. I said they were all spiritual thinkers. They were more. They were not just people who reflected on their lives. They were people who prayed.
Those reflective people that I am so gifted and privileged to know all have this in common with the great spiritual thinkers: they pray. They trust that there is a God who is greater than themselves and to whom their lives all tend. They believe there is a reality larger than themselves for sure, but greater than the times in which they live. They know that the best and the worst are neither in the past nor in the future but are unfolding beautifully and abundantly in the eternal present of God, here and how.
What I am learning and continue to be amazed by from the wisdom of those who are teaching me — some of whom have gone before us “marked with the sign of faith” and some still breathing the air on earth — is that Heaven is not “up there” and Hell is not a place “down below.” They are both present realities that surround us and touch us deeply from within. Spiritual grace and spiritual warfare are in play, all around and within us. Without getting into the cosmology of angels and demons that our Hollywood friends enjoy dramatizing in spectacular ways, I am of the conviction that the spiritual, the supernatural, are fully accessible to us in the here and now if we only acknowledge the faith that these great spiritual ancestors — and the “plaid-shirt” theologians in our midst! — are imbued (I almost said inebriated) by. And, yes, maybe “drunk” is the right word.
It’s Caterina da Siena who exclaimed ecstatically that God is pazzo d’amore (“crazy in love”) with us. She felt herself bathed, almost intoxicated, with that love. I wish we would all believe the truth that she and our great spiritual sisters and brothers know with the certainty of faith that they lived and were ready to die for. It is the absolute truth that each and every human being, from the very moment of conception to their last breath on earth is a being of such moral worth that the Son of God, Jesus Christ, gave His very self for to the point of death. And not only to the point of death, but beyond, so that in his resurrection, he would lift everyone up who would accept the call to the eternal life he promises, that God wishes all of us to have — and not just at the end of a life well lived but beginning right here and now.
Yes, “we see through a glass, darkly,” as the Apostle Paul says (1 Cor 13:12), himself a man granted a special mystical vision even in the midst of the days in which he was persecuting the disciples of Christ. God showed him a tremendous mercy by stopping him in his errant tracks, as he will surely offer any of us who turn to Jesus in faith and the hope of deliverance. Remember mercy is not an entitlement. Justice is always due. Mercy cannot be presumed. Yet we can take hope that God’s healing love for us is infinitely greater than anything that happened to us in our past, whether self-inflicted or imposed by the sins of others. You are loved! You are chosen! You are a beloved child of God!
Accepting this in faith leads us beyond any consolation this world alone can offer, even as it gives us hints of what lies in store for us who believe in the Gospel of life, our eternal destiny. It means that we cannot any longer judge, let alone evaluate the dignity of other human beings based upon any of the superficial, limiting markers of status, with which human beings are often labeled. Health, wealth, age, race, sexuality, education and talent all leave their marks on this thing we call “identity,” but none of these — or any other branding — can change what we fundamentally are as beloved children of God, destined for eternal happiness. Does it take a world-acclaimed philosopher to teach us this — or is it enough actually to witness and feel in the arms of a plaid-shirt theologian grandpa or grandma, in apron or overalls, coming out of the barn or kitchen or some other common venue of the domestic church we dare to call home, that place where the heart is, ever ancient, even new. And if you or I may lament that so far in life our faith is small and our blessings seem few, there is nothing preventing us from opening our heart to another human being in search of the lover-God who embraces us all. Even faith the size of a mustard seed can move mountains (Lk 17:6)! We do not know what happened to the other thief crucified alongside Jesus, but the one who asked, received.
@AlbanyDiocese
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