Thursday, August 16, 2007

5. FORGOTTEN AMONG THE LILIES: Learning to Serve Beyond Our Need for Affirmation and Recognition

I like the imagery conjured up by the title of Rolheiser’s latest book from which I borrow the title of this 5th reflection: “forgotten among the lilies.” Although this is by no means what he is discussing in the book, I was struck by the fact that people generally only notice the lilies in a pond. They marvel at the immaculate white flowers. Focused as they are on their beauty and brightness, they miss the murky and dirty pond that gives vibrant life and unparalleled beauty to the flowers that merit elevation to the glories and sanctity of altars all over the world.

My thoughts race back instinctively to John Milton’s famous poem on his blindness. My thoughts immediately are transported to the reality that many of us in our prime, would most likely never talk about, given the fact that we are still on the saddle, very much in the limelight, pretty much in control, or still sought after by people who admire us, who believe in us, who call us to minister to them in every imaginable way, or who pander to our every whim almost, who cater to our simple and not-so-simple desires.

I am talking about what generally most of us dread. I do. And this is an understatement. I am afraid of the time when I will just be in the sidelines, unable to be there in the center of it all, unable and incapable of making my presence felt in significant ways. Whilst I admire what Milton is saying in his Christian resignation, “they also serve who only stand and wait,” there is still something in me that protests, something that rises up in arms at being relegated to the unexciting task of warming up benches in the game called life.

I am talking about humility. I am talking about the legitimate need for affirmation and recognition that are part and parcel of our human personhood. In this ego-saturated world, in a world where about one-third of us are narcissists, focusing mostly on our own needs and concerns, humility is not a very popular word. At a time when Thomas A’Kempis’ classic “Imitation of Christ,” does not get too much of a following, with copies gathering dust on forlorn shelves of our community libraries all over, humility is not something religious and priests like us would go running for as top priority in our list of resolutions on a rainy recollection day.

And yet, as Timothy Dolan says, quoting Barnabas Ahern, humility is the Lord’s favorite virtue. All four gospels extol it. Greatness is equated with being lowly, with being at the bottom of the heap, being sick, being poor, with suffering, with children, with sinners. Everything small, everything insignificant … is what was extolled in the gospels. It is indeed, counter cultural. It goes against the grain. It goes against reason.

Dolan speaks of two types of humility: the humility before God, and the humility before others. I don’t really know which of the two is easier for you and me, but all I know is the former is absolutely necessary for us priests for the reasons I have mentioned above. For the most part, we priests and religious enjoy a status not given to our counterparts. Whether we are capable or not, whether we are brilliant or not, titled or mediocre academically, we occupy a special place in the hearts and minds of many of our people – thank God! They look up to us. They still, for the most part, think that we have many of the answers to their increasing questions. Why do you think fake priests and irregular priests rake it in while illicitly celebrating one Mass after another in funeral homes, and in private homes, and elsewhere? The simple faith of many still consider having a domesticated priest at home a privilege and a sign of status, a piece of news they can always pull out of their sleeves at parties and mahjong games: “Fr. So and So was at our place last evening!”

No matter our very modest upbringing and initial education, we priests are very often a celebrity in our own right. And this brings us a myriad of problems. First in the list is our spirituality. Without humility, spirituality takes a beating. It cannot take off. It cannot take flight. Pelagius and his ideas still rule the spiritual roost for us, as Dolan writes. We think we can do anything from our own human efforts alone. We can think we are Superman. With so many laurels and feathers pinned on our caps, with so much achievement for the record, we are anything but willing to surrender our turf to the average man on the street. That definitely includes those who are far below me in my estimation. But as Dolan tells us, “holiness, heaven, cannot be earned but only given to one who humbly admits that he needs God desperately and can never win divine favor on his own merits.”

I think that in the Philippine scene, like Dolan writes in the case of America, there is a more subtle form of lack of humility that we need to consider. Some of us, with most likely elevated scores in the Mania scale of any psych test, think, act, and move like all the world needs is a few more like us, with the right charisma, the right looks, the right attitudes, etc. They think that the salvation of the world depends solely on them and they have decided at some point they were divinely ordained to set aright everything that is wrong in the congregation and in the Church. Apropos this, Dolan quotes Cardinal Pio Laghi who remarked at a talk given in England thus: “Yes, I always worry about a young man who feels he is the Church’s savior. The Church happens already to have one!”

Being one who for long has been in the business of formation, I have realized that the cocky ones who were too sure of themselves, who looked down upon the lack of holiness of their fellow seminarians, who always behaved like they were the personification of the rule, who, in psychological terms, were too full of their “ideal self,” ended up falling flat on their faces at some later period in their growth. Sometime during their midlife transition years, the scaffolding of their false self, the projected persona collapses and the real self kicks in. This is not bad in itself except that all the unaddressed, denied, unaccepted and unrecognized issues like anger, resentment, unmet needs now all come surfacing and more often than not projected onto others, or they use others now to supply for what they missed earlier on. Believe me, if you happen to be the local superior of these people still struggling with adolescent individuation issues, you are in for a tough time. If you are the one in this predicament, you are in for an emotional roller-coaster ride. You will be dysfunctional to yourself and to others, and no amount of fervorini or talks on humility will be able to make you come down from your high horse of holier-than-thou, but poorly differentiated sense of self.

Formation is by and large a thankless job. When you are done leading them to the light, formandi will always think they did it their way. There is something funny about us humans, but I think the song “My Way” became popular not because it was eminently cantabile but because it really hit the nail right on the head. Everyone wants to do it his way. When it fails, it’s others’fault. When it succeeds, it’s due to my ingenuity. It is because I am brilliant. I am capable. I am great.

Donald Cozzens, in the first of a series of books he wrote immediately preceding, and following the clergy scandal in the US, referred to the Jesuit Michael Buckley who proposed paradoxically that “what the Church needed in her priests were a few weak men.” Cozzens writes:

He asks of the seminarian ready to be ordained, ‘Is this man weak enough to be a priest?’ His question takes us back to the humanity and manhood of Christ who was judged a weak and ineffective leader of a religious movement comprised of discouraged and confused Jewish peasants, to the weakness of a stammering Peter, to the ambition of James and John. Buckley continues: ‘Let me spell out what I mean. Is this man deficient enough so that he can’t ward off significant suffering from his life, so that he lives with a certain amount of failure, so that he feels what it is to be an average man? Because it is in this deficiency, in this interior lack, in this weakness, maintains Hebrews, that the efficacy of the ministry and priesthood of Christ lies.

If what I am trying to develop is not yet clear at this point, I would like to make it explicit. Humility for priests and religious has to do with this acceptance of this real, not romantic, weakness. Only those who accept they are weak are those who are humble enough to ask for help and support. As a teacher over the past 29 years, I have known and have grown convinced that the best teachers aren’t exactly those who breezed through their scholastic work with hardly any effort on their part. The best teachers are those who struggled a little, those who knew they could not make it without riding on the wings of hard work and a lot of prayer. The best mentors and counselors are those, who, themselves, have seen life and have stared at suffering in the face.

I would like, at this juncture, to quote Brian Doyle:

[Grace is found in] the bone of the character of a priest who walks to his breakfast with blood on his shoes, the blood of a student who died in his arms in the night after a drunken wreck, the priest is a wreck himself this bright awful dawn, minutes after he blessed the body, but he puts one foot in front of another and walks in a normal day because he is brave enough to keep living, and wise enough to know he has no choice, and he knows he received grace from the hand of the Lord when he needed it most, first when the boy terrified of dying grabbed him by the collar and begged to be told he would live forever and now, here, in the crack of the morning in a campus parking lot as he hesitates by his car, exhausted, rooted. But he walks.

There is a quiet dignity in the humble selfless service of a man who happens to be a priest who keeps on walking even while there is no one to goad him on and no one to cheer for him, even when there are no rah-rah boys and girls to egg him on. There is quiet heroism in the religious priest or brother who recedes into the background, far from the limelight, and does his work quietly and dutifully, even if no honorary doctorates or the like would most likely not be coming his way. But there is greatness in ordinariness. Robert Wicks writes that “ordinariness is palpable holiness.” All the great themes of the gospels were drawn from very humble and simple things like salt, coin, lamps, mustard seeds, and bushels.

I would like to end with a prayer, the Litany of Humility, which I first discovered tucked in a cramped confessional box in a parish in Arlington, Northern Virginia, a prayer quoted too by Dolan:

O Jesus meek and humble of heart, hear me.
From the desire of being esteemed, deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being loved, deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being extolled, deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being honored, deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being praised, deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being preferred to others, deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being consulted, deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being approved, deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being humiliated, deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being despised, deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of suffering rebukes, deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being calumniated, deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being forgotten, deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being ridiculed, deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being wronged, deliver me, Jesus.
From the fear of being suspected, deliver me, Jesus.
That others may be loved more than I,
Jesus grant me the grace to desire it.
That others may be esteemed more than I,
Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That in the opinion of the world, others may increase and that I may decrease,
Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That others may be chosen and I set aside,
Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That others may be praised, and I unnoticed,
Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That others may be preferred to me in everything,
Jesus grant me the grace to desire it.
That others may become holier than I, provided that I become as holy as I should,
Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
Our Lady of humility,
Pray for us.

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