Christ, the Teacher of Complexity

Homily for Christ the King

November 26, 2006

 “King” is hardly a word that engages us, so let’s call this feast, “Christ the Center.”  After all, its purpose is to remind us that no other person, cause, ideology, or commitment is to command from us the respect and obedience that Christ should.  So think of Christ as the hub of a spoked wheel – holding all the disparate parts of life and society in proper tension and alignment. What might this Christ the Center have to teach us today, especially in the midst of what so many of us are going through in our parish in the light of last week’s arrest of Fr. Tom and the reactions that has evoked?

A classmate from my seminary days who now teaches college theology likes to start a semester by asking his students what the most important word in Catholic theology is.  No one ever gets it right.  After listening to them fumble, he tells them that the course will be dedicated to teaching them the importance of the word “and.”  With regard to Christ, Jesus is God and Man; truly human and truly Divine.  dead and risen.  This year especially, we might learn from Christ the importance of “and”: We can study Him to learn how to become less one-sided, more complex, ourselves.

This is what I mean.  Over the last ten days I don’t know how many people have said to me about their feelings, “On the one hand…”; “but on the other…” about what they’re going through: they see great benefits, but great damage; feel great gratitude, but great anger; remember great talents, but great weakness.  They feel both, but can’t hold onto them at the same time.  Some have gone from an exclusive (emotionally, if not intellectually) emphasis on Fr. Tom’s achievements and benefit to them and to the parish (all true, but one-sided) to an equally true but equally one-sided preoccupation with what he has been accused of.  In extreme situations, some of Fr. Tom’s admirers have said they simply can’t believe the charges; a few others are now ready to focus only on his flaws and deny he ever did any good.

Many more seem to know that both are important, and need to be held on to, but find themselves oscillating back and forth, swinging from one to the other even within a few minutes’ time.   At some moments, they’re captured by the wrongdoing; other times, they’re incredulous because he did so many good things.  Back and forth, and uneasy all the time.

I’m certainly not exempt from this.  I’m speaking about something I need to learn as well, and that something is complexity, both mental and emotional.  The “and” of Christ’s two natures can be our teacher.  I’m not talking about mixing together good and evil and coming to some sort of average; the two natures of Christ aren’t mixed to form some divine-human hybrid.  The complexity we find in Christ is a paradox – two incompatible things held together.  In Christ of course it isn’t good and evil; but in our feelings it’s not, either.  Both are real.  And both need to be held onto to get a full picture.  We need to learn to be able to hold on, both mentally and emotionally, to his goodness and talent, and also to his weakness – not flopping back and forth, but as one complex view of a whole person.

The second place the “and” of Christ can teach us has to do with another question I heard a lot this weekend: How am I now supposed to look at priests?  For many, it used to be – at least emotionally, and perhaps notably with Fr. Tom – one-sided.  All priests – or at least he – could be trusted to be morally better than lay Christians, safely looked up to and trusted.  (It may be that some people have had an equal but opposite attitude of suspicion toward priests, especially since the revelations of clergy misconduct in early 2002, but I haven’t heard much of that from parishioners here.)  People may have known intellectually that “up on a pedestal” isn’t a good place to put priests, but not a few seem to have found now that, at least emotionally, they were doing that.  And now the pedestal has crumbled, and so the question comes: What kind of an attitude should I work toward having toward the priests in our parish, the priests I talk to and receive the sacraments from each week?

The answer, again, which we learn from Christ is – we should have a complex one.  One possibility which I’ve heard occasionally is to distinguish “the priest” from “the priesthood.”  (It’s sort of like “respecting the Office of the President,” but deploring that the occupant of the office is – take your political pick – Bill Clinton or George W. Bush.)  There’s a truth to that: We Catholics honor the priesthood as a great gift from Christ, and we know that fallible human beings are the only candidates around for the office.  But it’s too abstract to answer the question that our feelings urge on us: How am I to treat the human beings who are priests who are here each week?  Should I trust them, or suspect them? 

The answer, again, comes from the “and” of Christ.  Trust and suspect.  But don’t trust some, and respect others.  Trust and suspect each of us.  No human being is worthy of full, unalloyed trust.  No human being deserves only suspicion.  Again, complexity is the path, although it’s a hard one.  It would be easier to “respect the office and suspect the occupants,” or to trust some and suspect others.  But the path Christ wants to teach us is the path of complexity of feeling and attitude toward each individual person (and not just toward priests).  Trust and suspect.  If that sounds unimaginable, that only shows how much learning we need to do, how much Christ has to teach us.

While so many of us are naturally still so conflicted in our feelings it may be a bit early to say one last thing, but I’ll say it now because it’s important.  We need to have a focus for ourselves and for our parish as we go through this.  Each of us, and all of us together, will learn some sort of lesson from this.  It’s important that we learn the lesson Christ wants to teach.  We could learn to become discouraged, or learn to harden into a one-sided attitude of some sort.  That would be easy – and it would be tragic.  If God is going to bring new life out of this moment of shock and sadness, we need to let Christ be our teacher.  Our parish could, in a few years’ time, be better off from this if over these coming weeks and months many of us grow in our ability to deal more complexly with other people and with ourselves.  Our families, our relationships, and our spiritual life could benefit, as would our effectiveness in carrying out our mission.  So on this feast of Christ the King, Christ the Center, let’s let Him be our teacher.  And today let’s learn from his own complexity this one lesson.  To understand Him, we need never to lose the “and.”  To understand ourselves and our situation today, the lesson is the same