Reform Through Quitting

One of the weird tendencies I’m seeing these days is the growing notion that, by leaving, one is making oneself a gutsy advocate for change. Whether it is the Catholic who announces that she is abandoning the Church but keeping her Catholic identity or the Tea Partier who loves the United States so much that he wants to leave it, or the governor who cares about her devotion to duty so much that she abandons her post to chase after more lucrative gigs, there’s something crazy about being a quitter and then bragging about it as an act of raw courage.

I don’t have a burning interest in the political quitters. But the Catholic quitters irk me since I have more than a vague “Catholic identity”. I actually believe Catholic teaching, and part of that teaching is that the Church is the sacrament through which God mediates salvation to the world. The notion that cutting yourself off from it is helping anything is, I think, just self-serving cowardice. More than that, it is irresponsible both to yourself and to the people you are called to bring into relationship with Christ. At this juncture, it is customary for the quitter to say it is arrogant to suppose that the Church has anything to offer the world in terms of salvation and that one can just as easily encounter God on a beautiful spring day in the park, etc. Duly noted. However, Jesus seems to have gone to rather a lot of trouble to offer us his body and blood and I suspect that’s because it’s pretty important. So to just blow all that off seems a tad ungrateful to me. Meanwhile, C.S Lewis has always seemed to me be pretty sensible in his approach to the whole, “I’m quitting *because* I care” rubbish:

Here is another thing that used to puzzle me. Is it not frightfully unfair that this new life should be confined to people who have heard of Christ and been able to believe in Him? But the truth is God has not told us what His arrangements about the other people are. We do know that no man can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved through Him. But in the meantime, if you are worried about the people outside, the most unreasonable thing you can do is to remain outside yourself. Christians are Christ’s body, the organism through which He works. Every addition to that body enables Him to do more. If you want to help those outside you must add your own little cell to the body of Christ who alone can help them. Cutting off a man’s fingers would be an odd way of getting him to do more work.