Barefoot and Pregnant
Unlike my fellow Patheosi, I did not remain cool and collected in the wake of the latest papal interview. Actually, I was pissed off, and I spent two days writing and re-writing a post that — try as I did — never evolved into anything more than a petulant rant about Pope Stupidhead Francis.
Honestly, I was just gonna go with it, since it’s been a while since a I threw a good blog tantrum. Then last night, the Ogre and I were talking about his dissertation. His adviser had given him a quote to think about, and he played the song the quote was from for me:
Listening to the song made me realize how small and petty I’d allowed myself to become. I’d spent hours sifting through the interview to find all the negative threads and unravel them, only to patch them back together using criticism and snark.
Bloggers do that a lot. I’ve done it myself. It’s a real temptation, partly because it’s fun to be snarky and people like to read snark, but partly because it’s much easier to be destructive rather than constructive. It’s so much easier to point out what’s not good in someone else’s words than it is to write good words of my own. Sometimes — some rare times — that can actually be a good thing, when it leads to fruitful dialogue with necessary distinctions. All too often, though, what I end up doing is pointing out all the edges of a crack to prove to the world how cracked it really is.
But the world is cracked. We’re all cracked in some way, and some of us are downright broken. Christ, for example. He allowed Himself to be broken for us. In a splintered, fragmented world, grace works like that. Not through perfection and holiness, but through pain, suffering, blood, tears…in all imperfect things, grace will be there. Every crack lets in the light — even on the papal plane. Especially on the papal plane.
This song is incredible because it’s what our faith should look like on the street, in our homes, on the internet, and yet it’s so far from what it usually looks like. I know that I, at least, do not often — or ever — ring the bells that still can ring. I don’t know that I even see them. I’m usually far too busy lamenting the ones that are broken, because I’m not good enough to fix them, and there’s no point in even trying if I can’t do it right. Like confession. I need to go to confession. I thought twice this week about going to daily Mass or stopping in at the adoration chapel, but decided against it, because I need to go to confession — there’s no point in seeking God until I’m forgiven, right?
And love — love should be done only the right way, according to the Catechism and the Summa, because anything less than that is not actually love, right? It has to be properly ordered, or it’s not love. If, for example, a friend or relative is struggling with addiction, or in the throes of mortal sin, it’s better to tell them like it is and then keep my distance, right? Because if I don’t, it’ll be like I’m enabling them. Better to let them know I’ll always be here for them, and then be somewhere else until they figure it out and get back into a state of grace.
Sometimes I can’t believe myself. I, of all people, should know better than to think – even for an instant – that grace waits on perfection. I think grace has a hard time with perfection, actually, because perfection doesn’t exist outside of the Triune Source of grace. The rest of us sometimes think we’re perfect. or even just doing okay, and that’s when we tend to block out grace — precisely because if we’re doing okay, we don’t really need more light. We just need to fix that crack.
In my life, when things have been broken and I’ve been shattered, grace has been so thick that it’s practically tangible. Those are the moments when I’ve learned what love is, even though no one’s love for me was ever completely perfect or rightly ordered at every moment. The Ogre’s love for me was all kinds of disordered in the beginning, as was mine for him. But it was a refuge. It was cracked love, but it was love nevertheless. It still is. Even in a sacramental marriage, even when we’re both trying to love each other perfectly, our marriage still looks like a shattered plate our 4-year-old tried to glue back together. Full of cracks.
And light.
Everything is like that, and everyone is like that. Pope Francis is not perfect, and he’s definitely going to keep saying all kinds of cracked things. That’s good, though. The more cracks there are, the more light will come through.
I just have to learn to see the light instead.
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