Sick Pilgrim: The Catholic Church is a Hot Mess…and I love Her

Two years ago, I was confirmed in the Catholic Church with a group of eighth graders. Having been in Canada on a book project, and unwilling to wait for Easter, I took my vows with a group of awkward kids who barely understood the words they recited. Me, a pastor of twelve years with a Masters of Divinity degree, no better than the kid in front of me who probably spent the morning playing Halo.

A few days later, a Protestant friend asked me if I thought I’d finally found the perfect church. I laughed and said, “On the contrary, the Catholic Church is probably more messed up than most. But, that’s part of the fun; we let our freak flag fly. When we try to be like everyone else, we fail.”

To me, that is what the church of God is supposed to do, let our freak flag fly so that all the weirdos like me can come in and be fed. Too often, we Christians get obsessed with image, power and glory. As a former Protestant minister (and I’m sure Catholics do this as well) I saw people hop from church to church because they had the “best kids ministry” or “this guy was a better preacher.” It got tiring living up to the image and I remember thinking to myself, “I wish I could be a part of a church that is so messed up that we can’t even pretend we’ve got everything together.”

And that, to me, is one of the reasons I’m a Catholic. We’re pretty screwed up and we can’t hide it. Oh, no doubt, we’ve tried, but God always seems to beat our ass for it. See the horrible priest abuse scandal and the terrible fall out. The church tried to hide the pedophiles in our walls and look at the resulting judgment. We deserve the movie Spotlight. Other churches advertise as a clean, respectable place to take your children to get good coffee and donuts. None of them have exposé movies made about them. The organizational structure of many of these churches astounds me. I can’t even imagine the amount of work it takes to maintain that image.

However, when you walk into a Catholic church, you are automatically confronted with the Crucified Lord. Eh, that’s uncomfortable, isn’t it? He’s in pain and half naked. What’s up with that, you wonder. Why have that in a church? Then, you look around and see the images of strange people doing grotesque things that most normal people wouldn’t do. All of it seems very bizarre and strange. That’s because it is. We Catholics are a hot mess. We have our bloody saints. We have our strange rituals that seem off-putting and weird. Our weddings are legendary, where people get drunk and make bad decisions they have to confess the next day.  Sometimes, we have loud, terrible fights that are the subject of intense media scrutiny.

Right-Wing Catholics are embarrassed of Papa Frank (Pope Francis) and his insistence on following church teaching in regards to the poor and the environment. It’s hard to watch Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio instruct the Holy Father on what he should or should not be doing. It’s sort of like watching a teenager telling his dad that he doesn’t know what he is talking about when it comes to the father’s own job. It’s painfully adolescent and embarrassing to everyone who watches it.

And, don’t get me started on those suffering from Pope Francis Paranoia Syndrome (PFPS). You can tell those who suffer from it by their constant social media claims that Pope Francis is the anti-Christ. On my social media feed, I get constant updates on what the Pope is doing that will destroy the church, introduce anarchy, and someone will use the baby Jesus from the Vatican crèche as a soccer ball.

On the other hand, we have the Left-Wing Catholics who think the church just serves to be a gigantic social justice machine and purveyor of the arts. Very rarely do they see the church as a mediator of the Sacred Mysteries, not realizing those very mysteries have fueled our greatest artists and social justice warriors. The Eucharist (and thus, the Incarnation), going to weekly mass, redemptive suffering, praying the rosary and asking the Saints to pray for us have become sources of minor embarrassment, something  you don’t talk about at polite parties with your cool friends.

See? We really are messed up and I love every minute of it. I love it because it’s home to me. I am a hot mess myself. As I look into my own heart, I see elements of messed-up weirdness from all branches and charisms (see, weird word again!) of the church. I became a Catholic so I could be honest and really wrestle with my conflicting self under one roof. I needed a safe space and the church has been that for me. I need a church that contains Mother Teresa (who had titanic struggles with her own doubt), Walker Percy, and Alfred Hitchcock. No, seriously. . . .

And really, that’s what we want Sick Pilgrim to be, a safe space for Catholics (and other Christians too!) to really wrestle with their own personal sickness. My fellow Weirdian, Jessica Mesman Griffith, said this place is like a hospital. I would take that one step further. We are a lunatic asylum for the insane who realize that only Our Lord and his lady, the Church, can make us sane again.

Does that seem contradictory? Maybe, but it’s crazy enough to be the truth. And, in our search for sanity, we want to push for the Church not to be perfect, but to share our weirdness with the world. We want to be honest that we eat Jesus, cross ourselves and do weird things during Lent. It all has a point, you see, a mysterious point that binds itself in our weekly celebration of the Eucharist, with the crazy idea that Jesus is physically present with us and takes us back in time to his sacrifice and resurrection. And in doing so, He elevates us from being a hot mess into something mysterious and powerful beyond imagining… So, join us, bring your own personal illness and come search for your healing with us…..