Blog Versus: Harmful Slogans--Come As You Are

Just for fun, a little debate on our site. Today's topic is "Annoying Catch Phrases/Damaging Slogans." You can read the post by my co-blogger, the Faithful Skeptic, here.

I've said before that the faith cannot really be reduced to a single slogan, catchphrase, or motto. There are some which certainly come close--"Truth," "Love/God is love," "Discipleship," "The two greatest commandments...(fulfill the Law)"--but these are still rough approximations at best, and generally only capture one facet of our Faith, or of our God. They are true as far as they go, but none can go far enough.

There are others which are arguably true to some extent, though not as far as they go, and yet which some people would make into a slogan for the Church, or even for a ministry (such as evangelization or Catechesis). Some of these do more harm than good, especially in the current culture, with the current zeitgeist. I can think of few (if any) as damaging as the phrase "come as you are" and its flip sides, "Judge not...", "Who am I/are you/are we to judge," and (more to the point) "Don't judge me..."

The thing with these phrases--and I hope it is understood that they collectively work together to form a sort of attitude, even a counterfeit worldview--is not that they are all untrue or mischievous in and of themselves. The deeper problem is that they leave a man where he is: they too often mean "stay as you are," which people are all-too-happy to oblige. "Who am I to judge" often means "What does it matter?", a rhetorical question to which the answer is supposed to be, "Not a whit!"

This phrase and its underlying attitude is both pernicious and ubiquitous, and is used to excuse (though never to forgive) much. I'll give an example of this kind of thinking:

"Every liturgy I ever attended was unworthy of Christ the Lord. I know that every liturgy I ever attend will be unworthy of Him, as well. What I have never seen, not once, was a liturgy that was unworthy of me.... 

I feel sorry for these people who spend all their time gnashing their teeth and getting all lathered up over what they see as the terrible liturgy. They are not only missing their blessing, they are taking their blessing and throwing it back into Jesus’ face. 

I thank God that we have priests who bring us Jesus at every mass, who consent to be conduits of grace. I have no desire to pick at them over how high they lift the chalice, if they allow applause and whether or not they pray the liturgy with the “proper” amount of gravitas.... 

If the mass and the liturgy are good enough for Jesus to be there, if we, with all our imperfections, are good enough for Him to love us and share Himself with us, then what’s our complaint?

There is, of course, some truth to this statement, just as there is to the idea that we should "come as we are." It's true that we will always fall short of perfection, that we cannot even be actually worthy of God, that it is God's grace and not just our own merits which make us into His friends, disciples, brothers, or children. However, just because we cannot do it all, doesn't mean that we should throw up our hands and do none of it. Just because we cannot be perfected, does not mean that we can be better than we are.

The philosopher Peter Kreeft once remarked that as a Father, God is easy to please and hard to satisfy. The meaning of this is that God is pleased with any small token gesture of worship or service or indeed of affection and filial love. However, He is not satisfied until we are full-blown disciples, is not content to let us stop at anything short of agape. This should be reflected in our liturgies, in the literal sense of the Mass and in the trans-literal sense of the work in our everyday lives [1]. We ask for our daily bread in the Lord's Prayer, and by this we mean on the one hand our "Bread," that is, the Eucharist, Christ's Body and Blood and the graces we receive from consuming it [2], and in another sense for the simple graces, the "strength" to go about our daily lives while striving to become saints.

My co-blogger mentions "Fear not" as the slogan which does the most harm, and I must agree that such a phrase is very harmful when used to undermine holy fear. "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom," as the Bible tells us; but the end of wisdom, the thing towards which it is geared, is to love the things of heaven above those of earth, and above all to love the Lord our God [3]. One way which we show this love is in our reverent liturgy; another is in our daily lives.

Our Lord tells us that “If you love me, you will keep my commandments" (John 14:15). His beloved disciple further says that "If any one says, 'I love God,' and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen" (1 John 4:20). It is true, therefore, that one part of showing love is merely to be inviting, that is, to invite a stranger to come to Mass with us, to "Come as you are." But that is not the end of Mass, or of evangelization. It's not to score one more point for Team God, to get one more butt in the pew at Mass and one more body in line for Communion. Those things are also a start, but they are not what the finished product--person--should look like.

And one way we can show our love for our brother is to offer fraternal correction when its warranted. Being nice is ok, being kind is better and also more demanding--but loving is the hardest and best of all, and it goes being "being nice," "being tolerant/accepting," or even "being kind." There is no true dichotomy between mercy and morality, or between love and the Law. Jesus is love incarnate, and yet He also was to fulfill the Law; He is infinitely merciful, and yet does not at all loosen the moral restriction of the day, but rather tightens them. Do not murder becomes do not hate others, and do not fornicate or commit adultery becomes do not lust.

"Come as you are," yes, of course. We all need to take that first step. But after the first comes a second and a third, and then the thousands of steps which we walk during a lifetime. Let us not sacrifice all of these latter steps for the sake of constantly repeating the first step.



-----Footnotes-----
[1] Trans-literal: liturgy translates to "work of the people." When we refer to the liturgy, we are literally talking about the Mass and to a lesser extent to the Daily office; but in another sense, we literally mean our daily work, the work of becoming moral, virtuous, of becoming in a word disciples of Christ.

[2] A few different Greek-speaking sources tell me that the literal translation is "Super-substantiated bread."

[3] This is also what is meant by St John when he writes that "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and he who fears is not perfected in love" (1 John 4:18). Perfect love is attained in heaven, where even filial fear become unwarranted: there, we need not fear that we will sin and thus offend God, and we need not fear that we will be told to depart from Him. Here, love may be in the process of being perfected, but it never completes that process. To that end, love here may ultimately cast our servile fear (fear of God's punishments) which moving us to filial fear (fear of losing God).

Tolerance and Judgment

I've already linked Prof. J. Budziszewski once this week, but he also participated in the Intercollegiate Review's featured interview, IR Office Hours, the first question of which was about tolerance and diversity. Here is the Question and the answer, to get us started:

Tolerance and diversity are words usually used by the Left in academia to squash freedom of speech, especially among conservatives. How would you define the true role of tolerance?—Luciana E. Milano, Harvard University 

J. Budziszewski: The liberal rationale for toleration grounds it on an incoherency: supposedly we put up with some bad and false things because we suspend moral judgment about the good and true. But if we really suspended judgment, it would be hard to see why anything should be tolerated—or why anything shouldn’t be tolerated, or, if we are going to be tolerant, which things should be tolerated and which things shouldn’t be. Actually, the nonjudgmentalist wants only his opponents to suspend judgment. He rams through his own moral judgments by pretending that they aren’t moral judgments. 

By contrast, the classical rationale for toleration grounds it on a paradox: we put up with some bad and false things because the nature of the good and true demands it. For example, we don’t coerce faith, because as St. Hilary of Poitiers said, God does not desire unwilling obedience; we don’t repress the expression of false opinions, because debate helps us find our way to the truth. Notice, then, what true toleration requires: not suspending judgment but judging more adequately.

Meanwhile, Marcel LeJeune has a good post up for the Aggie Catholics blog about judging--that was the subject of the readings this last Sunday, after all.

TMM: Failure of the Pharisees

"Holiness is not just a collection of virtues. Indeed, such a conception of holiness causes great harm; it stifles our hearts, and after a while it fashions us into Pharisees. Holiness means 'walking in the presence of God and being perfect'; holiness means living in constant encounter with Jesus Christ."
Pope Francis, Open Mind, Faithful Heart

The Pharisees are today among the most frequently thought-over (and fought-over) groups in the Gospels. In an age which latches onto the statement "Judge not, lest you be judged" and then misapplies it (by applying it only to conservative Christians), there is no surprise that the liberals of all stripes would judge conservatives of all stripes to be the new Pharisees.

And, on this reading of how the Pharisees failed, it might be argued that the faithful Christian is nearer to the Pharisee than the liberal one is. It is almost universally considered a "bad thing" to be a sort of Pharisee, though in understanding how and where the Pharisee fails, we see that there are some worse things.

The Pharisee, after all, did get holiness half-right, even if they got the lesser half. The failed in the more important task of "walking in the presence of God," though they did at least try "being perfect." They missed that only God is perfect, and that only by turning to God can we even remotely approach being "perfect." There are, of course, virtuous pagans and virtuous atheists, just as there were virtuous pharisees.

On the other hand, the great majority don't strive for perfection, don't strive to be virtuous. It has become hip to claim that atheism offers us ethics and that pagans can live moral lives, a claim which is often made in the same breath as the statement that many Christians don't. Indeed. But we get an epicurean paganism and a hedonistic atheism (or "agnosticism" or "skepticism") more often than a virtuous one.

The failure of the Pharisee was not that he tried to be moral or that he had a complex morality; it was that he did this without necessarily trying to do it for God. He focused only on himself and how good he was--thereby indulging pride--while ignoring God and thus looking down on others. There is something worse than this, which is to utterly ignore others. Pride may be the worst of the seven deadly sins, but apathy does not belong only to sloth. To ignore--and, at times, actively block out--God is the worst thing we can do; to do the same to others is the next worst. But one compounds this by ignoring God, ignoring neighbor, and then ignoring one's own conscience and God's Laws (through which God does speak).

Ignoring God and man might be done passively, for the still small voice is hard to hear, and we must be vigilant against the pride and sloth which allows us to do this. This is where the Pharisees fail. But ignoring the moral law which God gave us, and indeed ignoring that somewhat louder voice of our own consciences: this is more active by far. It is a deadlier pride or a deeper sloth, because we must often work at it. Though we should not be satisfied to be like the Pharisees--trying to be moral, trying to be virtuous, but at the expense of being actually holy--there were worse men than these.

Quick Link: What Am I Not Supposed to Judge

"Judge not, lest you be judged; condemn not, lest you be condemned." Yes, but what am I not supposed to judge, since elsewhere I read: "By their fruits you shall know them"? The answers might be: a person's "heart"/intentions; the state of his soul; his circumstances and struggles; or his knowledge of the sinfulness of his actions. On the other hand, the action itself must absolutely by "judged," as in evaluated: this is a good action, this is a bad action, this was a good deed, this was a vile sin. A man's "works" are his visible fruits, and we are instructed to pay at least some attention to these.