I've felt the need to reflect on a rather complicated issue recently and I need help from anyone who has a good idea.
And, before I go too far, I'm not really speaking about my relationships or trying to imply anything here. In other words, don't read anything into this.
The question is: how do you show love to someone that you don't necessarily respect. I ask this in the contemporary church situation in which younger "conservative" clergy are replacing older "liberal" priests. The younger priests are, generally, walking into parishes and restoring long-lost pius practices. The older priests hear about this and think we are taking our people back into a "pray, pay, and obey" situation prior to vatican II. We say we are just trying to put beauty, regularity, and sanity back into the church.
The hardest situation that I've had with several of my contemporaries is that we just want to do what's in the book. We walk into parishes that, for years, have done something different than the rest of catholicism and we can't understand what would prompt a pastor to need to be "different". It's hard not to lose respect for someone who seems to, rather easily, throw the book out the window and "do it my way."
I think the most uncharitable response we can have is to demonize these brothers and make them seem bafoonish. Yet, how should we respond? How can we show them love?
2 comments:
As a pasishioner, I feel the same frustration. I respect priest for being a priest but we don't have to always respect their behaviors, decisions or sermons. ..... One thing that you can always point out to your older liberal clergy brothers is that the experients of the last 40 years have not brought growth to the church. Our churches are emptying and the fundamentalist churches are filling. ..... I like to test things by the fruit they yield. The empty churches are the fruit of liberalism. Now is the time to bring back a balanced catechisis, devotions and reverence. The people are hunger for this. Please feed us.
How do you show love to someone that you don't necessarily respect?
Maybe the most loving thing you can do is invite them to help you enter into their situation. Ask their help in listening to and understanding them. In the end, you still don't have to agree with them, but when your zeal for restoring "long-lost pius practices" is tempered with empathy for those persons you don't respect, your efforts will be more readily received.
This is kind of dangerous though! You have to allow yourself to be a little bit vulnerable, and that may lead to your questioning something - maybe everything - that you thought was crystal-clear. And then you get to wrestle all over again!
I got thinking one time at NCSC conference: maybe God is colorblind. There might be something in the church that becomes an "issue", and then we get polarized over how God would see it.
Lots of people see this hypothetical issue as colored green - heck, maybe it's "on the books" as being green - but many people from a still Catholic perspective will swear that it's really colored red. Perhaps the red-seers are calling the Church to see an old teaching in a "new light". But if the green-seers insist that everybody call it green, because that's what the Church did for years and years and that's still what's "on the books" and everybody would just be a lot happier if the red-seers would just quit confusing the faithful and accept that it's green, then as a Church we're still sinning. We're still missing the mark. We don't recognize that our gift for separating colors and seeing beauty and trying to make sense of the world that way is still limited, and we still don't see as God sees.
Because perhaps what God sees is neither green nor red, nor a muddy combination of green and red, nor an instantaneous flip-flopping between red and green, but a much simpler, unnamed hue that we have yet to see with our own eyes.
Post a Comment