Wisdom at the BBQ

The other night my husband and I went on a mini-date to our parish's men's ministry BBQ supper, which was being headlined by our parish's new pastor who will be coming from a teaching job at the seminary in a month or two. He has never been a pastor, but he has been in charge of human formation for fifteen years, so he has a sense of humor.

Our parish has had an interim pastor for a couple of years, who has had the hard job of bringing the parish accounts back into the black.  He followed in the footsteps of a very charismatic pastor, beloved by all, energetic, a missionary leader.  That priest was called to work in the vocations office at the Archdiocese Headquarters, probably based on his record of recruiting 8 deacons, a great youth minister, a marriage and men's ministry full time employee, and other parish employees. Apparently, he was generous and always said yes if parishioners came to him with a request. His generosity, though, left the church in the position of having to make some cutbacks.  Our current priest was brought in to be the belt tightener. He has not won many friends because he has let people go, he has not expanded ministries, he has eliminated positions at the parish, and he was done away with a perfectly awful Gloria arrangement.  We have liked this priest, but he hasn't made many friends.

So a huge crowd showed up to meet the new guy. He said it was like meeting the parents in an arranged marriage.  Since it was a men's ministry event, it was casual. Everyone was jovial. Beer was served, and lots of meat. 

Before we arrived at the BBQ, my husband and I were talking about some of the challenges of life lately. We have big decisions to make, we have some family issues, we have had some difficult email exchanges with teachers and student employers, we've had to negotiate some other unforeseen business issues, in particular a dispute over a parking lot fender bender in which the other party won't admit mutual fault. In sum, we have had the difficult experience of being let down by inflexibility, carelessness, thoughtlessness, selfishness; all those peccadilloes of human nature that we exhibit regularly ourselves.

Earlier in the day, just when I had been mulling over a wound inflicted by an unkind email, or a thoughtless word, I read a passage from Pope Francis's The Church of Mercy about how people always let us down.   We cannot put our trust in others, even those - or especially those - closest to us, who sometimes fail us in radical ways.  We can only trust God.  If we find our joy in God, we can forgive others more easily. Only if we recognize God's mercy to us, can we in turn have mercy.

The new priest seemed to speak directly to me when he announced he was going to talk about mercy.  In the context of his talk, he read off the corporal and then the spiritual works.  The corporal works of mercy are easy for me, as a mother, to remember - clothing, feeding, sheltering, incarcerating...  oh wait, visiting the incarcerated we don't do so often.  ... But I sometimes forget to think about the spiritual works. Plus they are hard.  Sure, I regularly admonish the sinner and instruct the ignorant in our house.  Not so often outside of the house.  More difficult to do is to bear wrongs patiently and forgive all injuries. 

One of my big weaknesses is a tendency to lick my wounds, to keep them fresh, to make them worse, especially those I think are caused by someone else.  But I only hurt myself when I dwell on my frustrations with others.  My fretting and stewing does nothing to heal the relationship.  Being angry is the opposite of being merciful. Being hurt and bitter is not being merciful.

The new priest mentioned that mercy is a translation of the Greek word "eleos."  He said it can also be translated as "to take delight in."  Now I am not finding this translation online, but the idea that mercy flows from delight is a fruitful one. It is easy to have mercy on our children. They fill us with delight, love, joy.  Poor Baby is likely to be spoiled because her siblings and parents only smile at her stubbornness.  But having mercy on the stranger, on the acquaintance, on the people who let us down, is harder.  How do we take delight in those we barely know?  We have to see the face of Christ in them, like Mother Teresa.

Only by loving God, attaching to Christ, is it possible to detach from the world's opinions, to forgive injuries, to bear wrongs patiently.  We are going to be bruised by the world, but, as Pope Francis writes, it is better to be bruised by going out and trying to love the sinner, than to be ill by staying shut up inside all the time.

One thing our interim pastor has done that the congregation does appreciate is add at the end of the prayers of the faithful "And for those we love and those we have difficulty loving."  Sometimes that person is the person closest to us.  Sometimes it is the person in the parking lot.  Sometimes its ourselves. 

In my English class, we just spent a class talking about good and evil.  I assigned, "Young Goodman Brown,"  "A Goodman is Hard to Find," "Batter My Heart" by John Donne - and then two other sonnets that allude to it, Benjamin Alire Saenz's "To the Desert" and Mark Jarman's "Unholy Sonnet," which goes like this:

Unholy Sonnet
by Mark JarmanAfter the praying, after the hymn-singing,
After the sermon's trenchant commentary
On the world's ills, which make ours secondary,
After communion, after the hand-wringing,
And after peace descends upon us, bringing
Our eyes up to regard the sanctuary
And how the light swords through it, and how, scary
In their sheer numbers, motes of dust ride, clinging—
There is, as doctors say about some pain,
Discomfort knowing that despite your prayers,
Your listening and rejoicing, your small part
In this communal stab at coming clean,
There is one stubborn remnant of your cares
Intact. There is still murder in your heart. 

Murder in the heart. The fruit of free will. But to forgive is another fruit.  To have mercy. To take delight in the land and the people. To love and bear wrongs patiently.  Hypocrisy haunts us. It makes us human. But to forgive, to have mercy, makes us like God. The new priest ended his talk with a reminder that God loves us because He sees Himself in us, just like as parents we see ourselves in our children. If God is in each of us, we all share a likeness.  I need the reminder to see myself, the part of me that is in the image of God, in others, and have and seek mercy. 

Mercy

Over the weekend, my husband's youngest brother came to visit. This is the third week in just over a month that out-of-town company has come to warm up on the sunny Southern California coast. This evening my mother arrives, and ten days later, my father will show up to admire his newest granddaughter.  Of course, they aren't coming for the sunshine, but to meet the baby. And since all these guests are family, I don't feel any pressure to make the house sparkle, more than the usual cleaning, or to cook to impress, other than the usual cooking, or to plan site-seeing outings, other than the usual haunts.

It's wonderful to live close enough to have family visit. My in-laws are talking about coming in May. Another cousin may show up for spring break. And we'll head back to the Midwest in the summer to see all the cousins.

Since my brother-in-law stayed at my other brother-in-law's house ten minutes away, we weren't really the hosts, although we hosted dinner one night and lunch another day at our house. Our kids love their uncle, who is young and fun-loving.  There was golf, surfing, music. It was a great, albeit short, visit.

It gives me a lot of joy that my kids know their extended family and love them, even though this is the first time we've lived in the same town with family since we were married.  We've always tried to make an effort to spend time with family or call or send birthday cards. My husband and I both feel like our best friends growing up were our siblings and cousins, and as I've mentioned before, we want our kids to feel that rooted connection to family that we had, even though we're transients.

In some ways, though, it's easier to live far away and only have idealistic thoughts about the relationships with siblings and parents. What living closer to family and having family visit reminds me is that when you are close to someone or spend much time together, you inevitably are going to rub each other wrongly every once in awhile. There were a couple moments during his brother's visit when my husband and I found ourselves bickering about "the plan" or lack thereof.  We were trying to coordinate the activities of our kids with the desires of my brothers-in-law. There were a couple times when their ideas about what to do next changed suddenly. And there was some uncertainty about the times our older boys were going to finish up what they were doing or where they were going.  In the end, everything worked out, but I fretted about trying to be three places at once, so needless to say, I got a little irritable.

I feel badly now that I griped to my husband needlessly.  I made him feel guilty. Perhaps I was more irritable than usual because I'm pregnant, but also because I had to sacrifice what I wanted to do. Once everything fell into place, I could see how I was being inflexible, and I apologized to my husband, but not before my edginess had rubbed off on him, making him grouse at the kids. Ruffled feathers have a way of reproducing.

The fact that irritability is contagious is one of the reasons why "I'm sorry" is one of those three important phrases mentioned by Pope Francis that I'm trying to use more often during Lent: "Please, thank you, I'm sorry."   "I'm sorry" is perhaps the most important of the three statements, and perhaps the most difficult to say.  How many times do we let anger or fear or passion cloud our judgement so that we make poor decisions, or say hurtful things, or seethe in silence that is intended to wound those around us?  Is there a day that passes that doesn't call for some kind of apology?

This minor little incident during a weekend that was supposed to be all sunshine and smiles reminded me yet again that family relationships - and friendships - aren't guaranteed to be free of conflict. In fact, they shouldn't be. We shouldn't hope to be in conflict-free relationships, but in relationships in which conflict is endured, discussed, forgiven.  We work out our salvation in marriages and families in order to cultivate the humility of apologizing, the generosity of forgiving, the peace of forgetting.

When we were kids, we fought with our siblings all the time, just like our own kids do. We hurt each other's feelings, we blamed each other, we hoarded stuff, we punched and pinched, to the point that I'm sure that our parents wondered, like we do, whether what is being cultivated in family life is selfishness and insensitivity. We used to play that game "Mercy" where you tried to bend each other's fingers back until the pain made you cry for mercy. "Winning" was both enduring or causing the pain.

But thankfully, at some point in life, with the help of grace, we realized that winning is about giving and receiving mercy, not inflicting pain.  I almost like the word "mercy" better than "forgiveness." How close is the linguistic relationship between the French "merci" - thanks - to mercy? (Wikipedia answer: both from the Latin for "wages paid" or the root of "merchandise." Something given, accepted. Benevolence, kindness, forgiveness. Mercy is a "work.")  As our siblings and we have aged, we have been able to move beyond that state of self-centeredness to more adult relationships of really enjoying each other's company, caring about what happens to each other and our families, and to loving in-laws and cousins because they belong to the clan. We learned to recognize that people have bad days, or weeks, that we all still have selfish sides that want our own way, that we are still learning how to be understanding adults. Those lapses happen and then pass.  The better self reemerges. We learn to forgive each other for giving in to the childish self and to give each other space to grow and change. Mercy is practiced.  Love is just as contagious as irritability. And it does mean having to say sorry, despite claims made in sentimental movies.

At one of his Angelus addresses, the Pope said:
The joy of God is the joy of forgiveness. It is the joy of the shepherd who finds his lost sheep; the joy of the woman who finds her lost coin; the joy of the father who welcomes home his lost son,” the Pope said.
“This is all the Gospel, here; this is Christianity! But this is not sentimentalism or bland 'do-goodism'; on the contrary, mercy is the true force that can save man and the world from the 'cancer' of sin, from moral and spiritual malaise. Only love can fill the gaps, the negative abysses that evil opens up in our hearts and in history. Only love can do this, and this is the joy of God.

Thankful for siblings, in-laws, aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents who bring so much joy and opportunities to practice forgiveness and to experience being forgiven.

The Pope is even celebrating a "Celebration of Forgiveness" around the world, from Dallas to Scotland to Mumbai this Friday.  Time to hit the confessional.



Benefit of the work of giving/receiving of mercy: beach life: