Ask… Seek… Knock…
By Brother Brennan
Decades ago, just before my first “brush” with professed
religious life, my girlfriend at the time would sometimes attend Sunday Mass
with me at Our Lady of Prompt Succor Church in suburban New Orleans. Although
she lived in the neighboring parish, we had graduated from the same Catholic
grammar school, just one year apart, and thus were immersed in a very
traditional Roman Catholic/Southern Christian milieu (just imagine that—a very
long-established, traditional, provincial enclave of Old World Roman
Catholicism below the Bible Belt). While we would eventually separate,
our time together included being very much a part of the religious landscape of
such a place and time. It was still the 70s, when the sexual liberation
movement was kicking into high gear in the deep South, and many young people
were rebelling against traditional religiosity, dissatisfied with the perceived
rule-loving, devotion-addicted, spiritual stagnation of church authority. At
the same time, clergy and religious orders were often not very attuned to such
rapid social change, and just “dug in their heels” with more intensified calls
to church attendance, going to confession, and praying the rosary.
Recognizing my appreciation for religious life and practices
(however I perceived and practiced them at the time), my girlfriend wanted to
share in the journey more actively. And, I am sure, she really wanted to
embrace an opportunity for a deeper experience of church life and spiritual
life herself. One Saturday evening on the way to vigil Mass, she told me that
she really wanted to go to confession. We sat in the choir loft that evening
(our friend was singing). From there, I could see her making her way to the
confessional. She would confess to Fr. Timothy, and I felt so hopeful and happy
for her.
When she exited the confessional, however, her expression
and her actual walk reflected anything but the joy of forgiveness and
reconciliation. I hoped for the best, however, and quietly asked with a kind of
subdued cheerfulness, “So, how’d it go?”
“Oh, we’ll talk later,” she replied quickly, facing forward
with a sudden, wide-eyed, sideways glance toward me.
Well, the rest of Mass was quite a bummer after that. And
our conversation afterward was just so, so sad. She told me about how sorry she
felt for things she was confessing, and that she was hoping to return to
regular church-going and, with that, a sense of spiritual renewal. After
several scoldings from the priest, when she told him that she was hoping to
return and to really start fulfilling her “Sunday obligation,” he snapped at
her with “Going to Mass is NOT an obligation! It is a PRIVILEGE!” What was so
tragic, then and now, was that the teaching we had all received until then (and
since) was that going to Mass, for Roman Catholics, WAS an obligation. And
feast days were not called “feast days” but “holy days of obligation.” Her
choice of words was not at all her fault. Those words were taught to us by
clergy and religion teachers, and are still found in catechetical books and
lessons in print today.
Since then, I have heard so many stories of pastoral care
failures, of abominable experiences in confession; I have even witnessed and
experienced some of these myself, all at the hands of both Roman Catholic and
Orthodox clergy. And lately, our collective overreliance on social media and
religion-themed podcasts (thinking that “out there somewhere” we might find the
answers we need) has additionally led to what has become a crisis in real
pastoral/spiritual awareness in Church life. I have walked with so many over
the years who are genuinely seeking repentance, a return to the grace-filled
life promised by Christ, but are met—time and again—with platitudes,
exhortations to self-punishment and unreflective self-denial, and displays of
others’ seeming ascetical rigor.
So, what is really important here?
Well… Christ. Himself. Right?
Yes, our risen Christ, (still) so truly, abundantly present
in His Holy Church.
So, how do we find Him, again, after some of His “agents” have
been so stubbornly, flagrantly repulsive toward us? Along these walks with
others, in their pained search for the fulfillment of that promise of resurrected
life, I have often felt the greatest inspiration. They really have not given up
on God, nor (most surprisingly) the idea of a community of faith! They are well
on their way, it seems, to finding that answer they seek. It is a true joy to
share in their earnestness—their resolve to figure something out anyway.
While they have reached a point where many, quite understandably,
give up on a life in the Church, they just keep showing up, in person. And
maybe without even knowing it, they (we, really) are faithfully living
Christ’s words:
Ask and it will be given to you;
seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you… everyone who
asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and the one who knocks, the door will
be opened. (Luke 11:9-10)
Well, let us hope and pray that more people just keep
showing up—somehow—no matter what their past experiences were like. Sometimes,
as difficult as it may indeed be, we just need to let go of certain people and
places and move on. Of course, what that moving on entails is quite open-ended.
The answers do lie in that unknown we just keep trusting in, as we move deeper
into our calling to pass through and beyond that open doorway.
In our resurrected journeying, as we embrace the mysteries
of His rising, His walking among us with those wounds—the visible,
intact wounds touched and felt by Thomas—may our suffering, even that at the
hands of religious authority (as Christ Himself experienced), become a mere
doorway into His new, abundant life, His fullness of joy, manifested in our loving,
humble, resurrected presence to one another.
He is risen!
