The insufficiency of a privatised faith

As a priest, I have opportunities to meet many people, in and outside of my capacity as a priest of God.  Sometimes, I have chance meetings with people who reveal that they are baptized Catholics.  There are generally two reactions when it is revealed that I am a priest – 1) surprise accompanied by a certain sense of ease, and 2) surprise which is accompanied by a sense of unease and discomfort, revealed often by facial expressions or mere body language.  The former would often reveal that the person is a practicing Catholic, church going and could be actively involved in the parish life.  The latter however, often reveals that the person has been struggling with regular Sunday worship, maybe not at all going to Eucharist, but takes comfort in the fact that s/he has been baptized.  These same people also often in the same breath reveal that they do pray privately at home, in front of their home altars, and may even say with some degree of confidence that “God and me, we’re ok!”. 

It is not at every one of these instances that I get these men and women to share with me their reasons for this privatized faith, but when I manage to remove their reservations which may prevent an honest sharing on their part, the reasons are quite similar, though not always the same.  They feel that praying at home is ‘better’, and that the Church is so full of hypocrites.  Sometimes they also say that it is much more convenient for them to do so.

I don’t think that many of my blog readers share the same feelings.  But I am very sure that each of my church-going readers would have friends and even family members who share similar sentiments, and who have a certain reticence in either going to Church, or being regular with their showing up at Mass each Sunday.  Someone even once said to me that we should do everything in moderation, and that includes going to Church.  It was later shared with me that this person goes to Mass about 4 times a year.

Is it hard to understand the preferences for a privatized faith?  Looking at the way that the social media seems to be touting ad nauseam the ‘I, me and my’ culture, coupled with a certain disdain for any authority outside of the self that is imposed by any moral code, I can understand why people may have such preferences.  Understanding is, however, not to be confused with approval or agreement.  I can understand how a drug addict can be so trapped and enslaved by the need for fix after fix, but I certainly do not approve nor would recommend that anybody become a junkie. 

What is the narrative that cuts across so many people of this generation, and which many baptized Catholics also seem to adopt and live by?  There are many differing reasons, to be sure, but I am inclined to see much truth in what Timothy Keller, a writer and thinker who is also a Presbyterian pastor, calls the narrative of the “sovereign self”. 

In his book “Preaching”, he deftly makes a convincing case that broaches what I would call the ‘elephant in the room’ when he goes for the jugular and hones in to the main problem that modernity has caused in the promotion not just of the self, but the self that sees itself as sovereign.  When the self and its passions are enthroned, it ends up with even animated characters like Elsa in Disney’s Frozen making that convincing case to just follow her feelings and ‘let it go’, singing almost with an aggression that is admired that because she is not holding anything back inside, there is no right or wrong, and no rules for her.

When the narrative of the inflated and sovereign self is blindly followed, it easily ends up making our needs and our feelings and our hungers far more important than the good of family, and people and society.  The hidden stilted philosophy behind this runs like this – I know what I want, and because society has told me to discover my deepest desire at all costs, I will.  It even applauds and affirms such actions and calls it ‘courageous’.  One only needs to see how much affirmation Caitlyn (or otherwise known as the former Bruce) Jenner has been called courageous to see evidence of this writ large.  Courage is no longer a term that is accorded to people who have listened to a higher voice of truth, and have a moral centre that is outside of themselves, but rather used to describe people who have identify fully with their inner feelings and preferences.  The modern poison is that unless you identify your dreams, and especially those most vivid ones, moreso if they are audacious and counter-culture, you should fulfill them or end up a loser and a failure.  It is no wonder then that categories like money, appearances, measureable and visible success, power and recognition, and of course romantic love become categories that are necessary for one to achieve perceived happiness. 

When this is the drive for a misguided self, it is no wonder then that even something like faith becomes driven by how the individual chooses to pray.  The community that one belongs to as a body of Christ is nary a concept that is on one’s horizon and the fact that one’s presence in a gathered community has a direct effect on one’s fellow Catholic at the Mass is at best missing, at worst absurd.  Much further off the radar of one’s awareness of community is how sin (no matter how personal) has an effect on wounding the community one belongs to.  An adulterous affair that I may be having on the side of my marriage is my business, and nothing at all to do with how this affects the state of holiness of the Sunday gathering in church!

Of course, no one would be willing to admit to this with a hurry, because admitting to this would be tantamount to admitting that I had been misled all the while, and that my sight had been off-target.  But when this is finally admitted to the self, and one truly becomes courageous, one can make that very challenging re-sighting in life to not make one’s preferences and one’s own standards the center of one’s life.  A re-alignment will be made albeit slowly.  There is a word for this in the Christian tradition.  It’s called metanoia.  It takes place when one is ‘born again’, as Jesus told Nicodemus.  It is to reconfigure oneself to be ‘in Christ’ and to finally truly be able to say that it is only in Christ that “God and me, we’re ok”. 

Short of that, we’re still pretty much our sovereign selves and we will continue with our privatized faith.  A privatized and insufficient faith.