I invite you to share and prayerfully reflect on Fr. Joe's beautiful foreword to my book.
- God bless, Doug +
The Catholic Hodge Podge, or Will the Real Gospel
Please Stand Up!
A
Foreword by Fr. Joe Towle, S.J.
“The
Catholic Hodge Podge, or Will the Real Gospel Please Stand Up?” is a book
written by a friend. As such, it is the object of both my understanding and
appreciation. What I appreciate most about the book and its author, Doug
Michaud, is the earnestness, the sincerity, and Doug’s intense love for the
church, as the fulfillment of the “Father’s Dream” for us on earth and the
enfleshment of God’s word through all time. Knowing Doug’s passion to see God’s
love revealed in its fullness, I understand the starkness of his plea that Catholic
Christians, especially teachers, recognize that all too many contemporary
presentations of the Faith and movements in the church do not promote
effectively an experience of that love nor the total transformation of the
person it promises.
In
the spirit of Von Hildebrand’s “Transformation in Christ”, Doug in part 2 draws
an inspiring picture of the reality of God’s presence to the heart of the human
person, using many analogies to illustrate the living power and transforming
intimacy with the Lord that Christian faith involves. Doug’s faith is
passionate. His teaching, I can attest from experience, has never
underestimated the depth and challenge of the Catholic tradition. The effects
of his teaching, especially on the young, have been profound and real. He
knows, then, the experience that many people are missing in the hearing of the
Christian message today. And it pains him.
With
that in mind, the reader will employ a certain indulgence toward the author in
accepting the starkness of some of his critiques of deficient proclamations of
the Christian message in part 1. While Doug makes no apologies for them, even
as his friend and brother I felt uncomfortable at times with some thrusts or
expressions critical of current trends, described in images of infection,
cancer, and tragedy. But it is the passionless person who can describe great
misfortune in antiseptic and casual terms. Doug sees that misfortune as
Christians being sold short, deprived of their true birthright: deep personal
intimacy with Jesus and a community life where God is working powerfully to
build a people of great faith. His point is well taken that we must diagnose
the problem clearly before it can be solved.
Unfortunately,
the print of a book does not allow for much dialogue with those who are in
“pain” over the conscious or unconscious loss of that birthright. While reading
the book we have to engage our compassion, too, for whole generations of church
people swept by a veritable tidal wave of secularism and sociological change
that has left them without moorings or bearings.
I
find myself thinking of some Christian movements or teachers (myself included)
as being in the same spiritually underdeveloped and uninstructed state as the
Athenians Paul met in Acts 17. There are people, the Apostle says – in a
touching phrase evoking the image of the blinded giant of Homer’s Odyssey – who
do “grope about,” feeling their way through the darkness. The deepest tragedy
would be if they ever stopped “groping” or if they were to say, with the Pharisees,
“We see.” The very search for the truth, however, when genuine, is – as Simone
Weil wrote – the search for Christ, for before he was the Christ, he was the
Truth. And one cannot long search for truth without falling into the arms of
Christ. The merit of Doug’s analysis is precisely in that it points unerringly
to those arms as the focal point and goal of all Christian education and
striving.
I
will confess my preference for the center section of part 2, perhaps because I
recognize so much of myself in the “reprimands” of part 1. In part 2, Doug
shares much of what he understands by the mystery of Christ and the intimacy all
Christians are called to share with the Father – that intimacy all too many
people know nothing of. Though recognizing that no earthly image can adequately
portray God’s love, Doug manages to touch deep chords and teach the unteachable
by means of human stories and parallels that are accessible to our
understanding: the leap into a father’s arms, the protective love of a parent,
the “real presence” of a loved one in the home, the transforming power that the
heart experiences in the intimacy of “Another” who is truly present to me.
The
images of family life are moving and helpful to me. They instruct me in the
essential difference between faith that is transforming and a faith that does
not lead to the experience of Jesus and the Father’s love. Doug speaks of the
Father’s “dream” that ultimately we be the ones who enflesh the Love of the
Father revealed in the Passion and released to the world in the Spirit of
Jesus. He shows how exciting the call to faith truly is and how far beyond our
own dreams are God’s intentions for us.
At
the same time, family images introduce a troubling factor. As one who of late
has been assigned to work largely among the poor and marginally poor people of
a large city, I do see that religious deprivation is often greatest precisely
where physical and familial deprivation are greatest. The very images that
touch many of us who have perhaps been graced with more stable upbringing are
seen by the poor only dimly in a mirror. The poor, at times, are two stages
removed from understanding the intimacy God longs to have with them. They too -
or they especially – need the presence of God to be mediated by still another
healing and abiding presence, that of a caring human being. Some time ago, I
asked a twelve-year-old boy off the street if he knew what a priest was. He
thought for a moment and offered this: “A priest is somebody who talks to you
on the street and makes you feel good.” It is not the whole message, but perhaps
it’s a start.
I
mention the anecdote because, finally, I believe Doug’s beautiful description
of “living in God’s presence” has its linkage and application to those more
unstructured teaching situations too. Knowing that the love of the Father and
the abiding presence of Jesus is the end of all our ministry, those
specifically called to implement the church’s preferential love for the poor
can find deep integration of their “social” and pastoral work precisely in
seeing the Father and Christ in the poor themselves: “He [the poor person]
becomes my own body and flesh… I plan nothing in life that violates a loving
consideration of his will and happiness – and these become realities that I
begin to feel and experience as only the heart can ‘feel’ and ‘see’ in the
intimacy of ‘Another’ who is truly present to me. His good becomes my good; his
joy, my own. His cross, his pain, his agony becomes my own as well.” “Christian
faith,” Doug writes, “in a real sense is man in the flesh deciding to spend
this whole life making love to God in this world.” Please, God, let us find You
in all the depth and reality Doug describes for us.
-
Fr. Joe Towle, S.J.
