Father Steven Weller
Director of Vocations
The room smelled of pizza and disappointment. As I sat on the table in the lonely and messy room, I reflected upon the disasters of the day. It began with a series of distractions in the morning that led to the under-planned evening youth event in which nothing seemed to go right. There was not enough food, the spiritual lessons never occurred, and several youths had left early in disappointment. Now, left alone with my thoughts, I suddenly felt uncomfortable inside. It was like I did not belong in my own skin. I cannot describe it other than perhaps Adam hiding, the Adam who suddenly felt exposed and inadequate to be before God, and I did not want anyone to see me. “I wish I were a better priest,”
I thought, “I am not what I need to be.” I suppose most of us have days like these, the ones where we feel completely inadequate for our calling.
Then, as I reflected upon that table, something unexpected happened. A little shape poked through the doorway. Two twinkling eyes peered through the pizza smells and dark hallway. It was a little girl, perhaps 3 or 4 years old, likely a sibling of one of the students who had just attended the event. Upon her feet were two left pink boots, and her face held a highly determined look, serious and focused yet seemingly unaware of me. She stepped inside the room, and I sat up, unsure of what to expect. Looking around, her eyes landed on me. Her face remained focused and serious, and then suddenly, she smiled kindly at me. Then, like a well-trained soldier, she turned on her heel and marched out, no doubt to find her family down the hall.
Something suddenly occurred inside of me. As I suspected, it was God in disguise in little pink boots, and my heart melted. It was the all-knowing God seeking me out to know me in my lonely garden. My sadness had swiftly cured, and I burst out laughing.
As we Catholics know, we are the “Church Militant” here on Earth, in the battle so to speak, and the gates of hell will not prevail. Heaven is attacking hell and anything that belongs to the darkness, and so we think of ourselves as warriors in God’s army when we teach and minister. Yet, if we think deeper, there is some darkness in us; and so there are gates in us that heaven is attacking. God is on the attack on many fronts, and He longs to break down the fortress inside of us .
But how does that battle unfold ? How does God conquer us from the inside out? Well, as we know, God does not battle conventionally. In Revelation, He wields a sword in His mouth, after all, and He likes to win battles with fewer men like Gideon and his 300. The world conquers things with force and power, but Jesus conquers things backwards, so to speak. He conquered the world on a cross, and so He does the same in us. God conquers the heart through crosses, weaknesses, struggles and the unconventional.
In that room, sitting on the table by myself, the discomfort inside that I felt was my cross, which is God’s favorite tool of redemption. It is the thing always with us that we wish God would take away. Mine, as I suspect belongs to many, is that sense of inadequacy and imperfection, powerlessness, a sense that not everything is in control; and so, I often ask—like we are often tempted to ask—“Why can’t my events be perfect, and why am I not better, smarter or more motivated?” The tempting answer we think will solve our problem is the world’s answer, which is power: “If God just healed me or gave me this or fixed that, then I could be at peace.” But we know deep down that these are lies. We are all children of Adam, and we are all in our own gardens not wishing to be seen by God. God knows that we do not just need a “fix” or a more charismatic personality; it is just as it is with a parent with a crying child who has scraped a knee or stolen an apple from a forbidden tree.That scared child needs us much more than naproxen or a reprimand. We need communion more than Band-Aids .
The wounds of a scraped knee bring a child to a deeper relationship and trust with a parent, and so also do our wounds bring us closer to God. No parent completely takes the wound away, but they clean and kiss the owie . We tend to focus on the new Adam that we are meant to be, all Christ-like and perfect, which is great; but I think we forget that God sought out the old Adam first. God wants to see His children, and being seen by Him is what we need when we are busy hiding.
We Christians all know that we need to carry the cross to follow and stay close to Jesus. But usually, if we are honest, we do not pick it up all the time. The cross remains on the ground where we drop it, and it looks up at us. We somehow ceased our childlike tendency of finding communion through our scrapes and troubles. I think it comes back to that Garden, when Adam was so ashamed of himself that he could not bear God to see him. This shame holds us back from seeing the beauty and value in our cross-shaped struggles. Yet God sure seems to like to see that part of us in confession, and those familiar with the silence of prayer know that God loves to bring up and look at things we don’t like to think about.
God came upon the cross and all our crosses, and He made them beautiful; and God wants to see those beautiful parts of us just like parents want to be with their children when they are hurting. I find it no accident that the ancient Romans used the same Latin word for “wars” and “beautiful”: bella. Beautiful things do conquer us, and that is why God takes away the sins of the world but not our crosses. If He took them away, we would miss the point altogether, and we would remain unconquered. We would forget all the communion and compassion and beauty that those parts of us bring out when they are seen by Him. When we are weak, we either hide or are vulnerable, and vulnerability is how God will see us. Is not the withered hand cured only when it is shown to Christ? The vulnerable crosses of our lives bring us a healing that we could never otherwise have experienced.
But alas, God does not always show up in pink boots to look at us. He is not always so obvious. He usually comes in a little Host. As we go forth on eucharistic mission in our world, perhaps it is more the case that the mission is Jesus’ rather than ours. He is on his eucharistic mission in us. The spiritual battle is a backwards one, and as we go out on mission, a coup ensues inside us. It is God’s battle against our reluctance to open up, and there He calls us to carry crosses and still see beauty in them like He does.