A few years back I wrote a piece for The Michigan Catholic titled, “Christmas doesn’t have to be perfect to be a blessing.” In it, I pondered the inexhaustible mystery of blessing, what it means for us as humans, and how we view it in this undeniably troublesome life.
At the time, I had only been retired from my former job as a police officer for a few years, my daughters were a bit younger, and I was navigating a new education career, teaching young ladies at an all-girls institution. What I pondered then — and preach to myself today — is the inexorable truth that the blessings we enjoy from our “families” are often leavened with difficulty. At least they are on this side of heaven.
“I learned not to pray for certain things,” I wrote back then. “Why? Because God always answers. For instance, when I pray for patience, God usually gives me the opportunity to exercise it.” And just as often as not, when I ask God to fix someone else, He usually puts it back on me: “Fix yourself first.”
It took me years to recognize it, but I’ve come to the conclusion that all of our blessings in this life are riddled with imperfections. My job is a blessing, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a struggle at times. I thank God for my family, but that doesn’t mean they won’t get on my nerves (or me on theirs). My home is a blessing, but if I must fix one more thing, I think I’ll scream. If I may add something else from my former piece: “We have this inordinate ability as humans to expect our blessings to be stainless, our lives to be perfect, and our relationships to be eternally placid. And when they’re not, we have the temptation to forget that they are, in fact, blessings.”
This hasn’t changed. But as I’ve gotten older, it’s become more relatable. We’re all members of families. Blood families, work families … and yes, the family of God within our Church. Recently, in my sophomore ecclesiology class, we spoke about the Church’s indefectibility and the idea that the Church is holy. But "how can the Church be holy," one student asked, "when there have been so many bad people in it?” The question resounded and launched us into a discussion about blessings and how families play into them.
An inescapable trait we have as humans is that we tend to paint with broad brushstrokes. We align ourselves with certain ideologies and draw broad conclusions about those who don’t agree. We see a kink in the armor of people in our work families and assume all is lost. Or we see cracks in the hierarchies of our parishes and dioceses and forget that human nature is just as present within the Church as it is outside of it. It’s easy to overlook the fact that our Church is supposed to be a hospital for sinners rather than a museum for saints. If we’re being honest with ourselves, the same could be said about all families.
I need daily reminders that this world isn’t heaven. I didn’t get a lot of those in my former vocation. Thankfully, I get at least some now. But although we belong to this “Church militant” — those of us trying to work out our salvation on this earth — the journey can be challenging at times. At the heart of many of those challenges are the people around us — or even us. “Holiness would be easy,” quipped Mother Angelica once, “if it weren’t for other people.” It’s “other people” who cause us suffering, and we them. “God had one Son on earth without sin,” wrote St. Augustine once, “but never one without suffering.” I need reminders of that from time to time.
So, what does this have to do with our Catholic Church? Too easily, man falls into the Pelagianistic trap that we can find perfection absent God … in fact, absent the “ark” He intended us to use for our salvation. We see the purser acting up, or the first mate acting out and we immediately want to jump ship. We see rogue police officers crossing the line and we want to eliminate the entire department. We see priests act less than charitable — or worse — and we allow their actions to render “the ark” ineffective in her ability to do her job in bringing us to heaven. I’ve been there. I’ve felt like giving up. I’ve allowed cynicism to affect me, too. Even cynicism about our beloved Church.
But about two weeks ago, I was reminded about something while watching the papal conclave. I was confronted with the reality that we truly are a family. Even in the midst of our conflicts, disagreements and quarrels, we belong to one Church. In fact, so drawn were we in the proceedings that we watched them over the course of a few days in class. And when the white smoke poured forth from the stack of the Sistine Chapel, and our principal announced to the entire school, “we have a new pope,” I found myself a bit choked up.
That emotion caught me off-guard, to be honest. But as we watched live coverage of the central balcony and awaited the would-be pope’s appearance to the tens of thousands in St. Peter’s Square, something else occurred to me: “I love this family.” As I watched the multitudes waiting for the inalienable words, “Habemus papam,” I saw a family gathered together; black, white, Hispanic, old and young; ordained and lay. And something odd occurred to me: I don’t love this family because it’s perfect. I love it because we are bonded in our imperfections, connected in our desire to travel in this “ark” together in hopes it will take us to a place where our imperfections will be wiped clean.
This family, this Church, is a central part of who I’ve become. It’s helped shape me and my family into people today who are better than we were yesterday. Yes, I’ve known of some bad priests, but I’ve experienced an exponentially greater number of good ones. Yes, I have friends or cohorts who’ve been hurt by people in the Church, but these friends have also found solace in a Church that has assuaged their pain in ways that only a divine Bridegroom can.
Not long after we were all introduced to Pope Leo XIV, I read something he had written a few years before. It went something like this: “To those who are fed up with scandals, with misused power, with the silence of a Church that sometimes seems more like a palace than a home: I too, was angry with God. … There were days when I prayed and only felt an echo. But then I discovered something: God doesn’t shout. God whispers. And sometimes He whispers from the mud.”
That mud is where we all wallow from time to time. And it gets the rest of our “family” dirty. But maybe that’s what families are for — to wade together through the unconscionable valleys of this life with the hope that comes from being part of this Church family — even with some of her faulted members.
Paul Stuligross is a retired police officer. He currently teaches theology at Detroit Catholic Central High School in Novi.
