Lay People, messy families we need you! The Church needs you. We will die without you. Priests and Religious need you. We don’t just need you for our annual fund or to bring dinner to our homes. We need you so badly and are afraid to admit it. We need to remember what family is. We need to see children making mistakes and being forgiven, we need to see play, we need humor. We need you to invite us into the chaos of your homes, not to fix it or bless it but to be in it and see it as it is. We need to belong without being needed for service. We need you to see beyond the habit or collar to our own fragility. We need someone who will invite us not just to be on Instagram with them but weak with them. We need a brother or sister who will not be scandalized that we struggle. Priests need to be friends with husbands and fathers. Sisters need to be close with wives and mothers. When we forget what family is, we forget who God is. We may know Jesus in the Eucharist and be consecrated to Mary but we are flesh.
Please lay people allow us to step off our pedestals, we are dying up there. We are dying and the lie that is killing us is that we can’t be weak, we can’t scandalize the laity. Are you scandalized? Are you scandalized that just as you wake up with anxiety, so do we? Are you scandalized that we have human disagreements? Are you scandalized that there are days that we wonder just what we are doing and if we are strong enough? Are you scandalized that the holy hour we make might not be enough to take the unbelievable burden off our shoulders of listening to the suffering of the world? I don’t think you are. I don’t think we can scandalize you unless we have fooled you or ourselves that we are God and not just another broken human being called to spend our lives discovering and responding to Love. We are not called to take the place of God.
If we are looking for the hope of the world or the Church in this community or that priest we have created an idol. There is no religious community called by God to be the banner of hope. There isn’t. There is no priest however faithful, articulate, charming and funny (and perhaps good looking) who is called to carry your relationship with God. This is too much of a burden to carry and we have all fooled ourselves too long. They will fall under this pressure. And you will fall too. It is time. It is time to look around and recognize that Jesus is the only one allowed on a pedestal and let’s be honest, it is not a pedestal of marble but of wood and, in fact, we nailed him there. Either Jesus is enough for us all or he isn’t. Either Jesus died for the Pope, a sinner as much as the drunkard on the street corner or our faith is a sham.
Please beautifully messy families, don’t worry about cleaning up too much or knowing the right theological sayings, invite us to your dinner table so we can come back to earth and perhaps remember where Christ first broke bread.
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