The Games We Play At

When I was a kid I enjoyed playing at war. No, I don’t mean video games. I grew up in time when kids knew what real play was. Real play was movement, it was outdoors, it was imagination running on overdrive.

We didn’t need much in the way of props for hours of pleasure. Toy guns sufficed, and if they weren’t available, a stick would do. T-shirt and jeans, transformed by our imaginations, became dirtied, bloodied fatigues. We enjoyed playing at war, but as true veterans know, playing at war and really waging it are two very different things.

I wonder how many of us play at Christianity more than we live Christianity for real. I include myself in this in this inquiry, by the way.

We like to wear our crosses or crucifixes, cross ourselves (even in public!), and talk about religious things in the right company. We enjoy sitting on Church committees (Lord knows why), serving in the food pantry, and participating in Bible studies. It feels really good.

Now these things are well and good, but sometimes I wonder if our Christianity isn’t more a play-acting at discipleship than it is the real deal.

Let’s be honest with ourselves. How effective, as a whole, has our witness to the truth, goodness, and beauty of Christianity been the past few decades?

Read the news for five minutes and you may find an answer.

The savagery of the nanny state’s attempts to “redefine” marriage, its mockery of religious belief, and its threats to religious liberty, the obsession with sensuality in entertainment, and the state of the family are all signs that the Gospel we have proclaimed hasn’t convinced the culture. The culture is steeped in hedonism. And Relativism has successfully commanded the obedience of a people who have forgotten how to think.

I know, I know, what else is new? The Church has stood as a bulwark against the flailing winds of the culture since its foundation.

What concerns some of us today is that many of our own brothers and sisters in Christ have sold out unashamedly and thoroughly to the spirit of this age. Many of us Catholics have been intoxicated by the culture’s brew.

At any given pro “gay marriage” rally, or pro-abortion protest, how many of the participants are Catholic? How many Catholic couples pretend at marriage so they can have the “benefits” without the commitment? How many Catholics couples use contraceptives or resort to sterilization without weighing the damage it does, not only to them and their family, but to society as well? How many of us empower the architects of the Culture of Death by our votes, justifying our actions with platitudes about the more wide ranging social justice issues?  

How many of us really strive to live our faith in the day-in-day-out of our lives? How many of us extend the forgiveness we have received from our Savior to our family members, to those closest to us in the school of love? How many of us strive to die to self in the little ways, to put the needs of others first, and to not count the cost?

What will we say when we one day look the Blessed Lord in the eye and give an account for our lives, lives so often lived like that of any nonbeliever with his various idols of wealth, security, honor, praise, pleasure for pleasure’s sake, and worldly success?

When did we decide we didn't need the Church as a moral authority in our lives? 

It seems that somewhere down the line we decided we knew more than the Holy Spirit. When He inspired and guided Pope Paul VI to write the incredibly prophetic encyclical on human life, Humanae Vitae, many Catholics turned their noses. But by 1968 many Catholics had already been converted to the spirit of the age, to subjectivism and relativism and a host of other “isms,” so it was easy for them to rebel against the moral authority if the Church.  

That rebellion on the part of the “faithful” marked a turning point for the Church. The Church’s witness, in effect, got a body slam to the knees, and her evangelical credibility buckled. When the faithful rebelled, it was bad enough. When certain bishops and priests followed their lead, it was a recipe for moral anarchy within the Church.

This weakened the Church’s effective witness and paved the way for a bland and ineffectual Christianity. The Church, whether you were Catholic or not, had always been seen as a formidable proclaimer of truth. She stood solid. Look at the popularity of Archbishop Fulton Sheen on television, even among non-Catholics. The Church commanded a certain respect. Even atheistic world leaders who openly mocked her were secretly terrified of her. The Church was made to be authoritative; when a majority of her own treated her as just another therapeutic spiritual program she simply lost respect.

For many it seemed that even she began to believe that her truth was more therapeutic than salvific. She seemed to lose her confidence. (Of course this was just the perception; the Church was still the Church; but perception really does matter because people act on their perception.)

Once a majority of Catholics openly rebelled against their Church, the spiritual and intellectual life of the Church at the parish level simply had to diminish. With widespread rebellion and dissent, a gradual descent into subjectivity in the practice of the faith took hold. Subjective feelings trumped objective truth. Coloring rainbows and butterflies in order to “feel the love of Jesus” replaced intellectual formation in what we believe (which tells us who we are), and emphasis on emotion over authentic encounter became the order of the day.

When you dismiss essential truths as being superfluous, when you emphasize emotional response to the neglect of sacramental encounter, you cannot help but float around in clouds of a superficial faith that finds its fulfillment in fluff.

Sacramental encounter changes us, makes us more pliable in the hands of God. But when we seek emotional fulfillment as our primary goal, treating sacraments as a means to that fulfillment, we can’t help but lose the depth of faith. Using the sacraments for emotional pleasure and rejecting truths of the faith for one’s convenience is not only childish, it is hubris in the extreme. 

Once it became commonplace to call oneself Catholic while openly rejecting essential Catholic beliefs, the path was set for mediocrity and banality. You simply cannot take the call to holiness, to sanctity, seriously while simultaneously thumbing your nose at the Church’s moral authority, which comes from Christ the Maker of saints. Saints stoop under the authority of God and so fly in His freedom.

Many Catholics continue to reject the moral authority of the Church in favor of the shifting “magisterium” of the popular culture. And this to our culture’s peril.

How many of us have play-acted at Christianity by wearing Catholic "costumes" and “pretending” to be faithful?

One of my favorite quotes about following the Lord comes from one of my heroes of the faith, one who simultaneously inspires me and freaks me out. He was the real deal. The real deal folks both inspire and freak. They inspire because they show me what I could be, and they freak me out because they show me what I could be. They reflect back to me what I am called to be and what I am not.

His name was Charles de Foucauld, and he said of his conversion, “A soon as I believed there was a God, I understood that I could not do anything other than live for him. My religious vocation dates from the same moment of my faith.”

What would our Church look like that if we all shared that conviction and sense of mission?

Once when leaving a church parking lot I was joyfully surprised by the exit sign. It read: “You are now entering the mission field.”

Sometimes—just sometimes--- I wonder if we might be more honest to put up exit signs in the church parking lot that read, “You got what you came for. Now go home and be like everybody else.”

Ouch.

Where in my life am I just putting on the costume of Christianity instead of living Christianity for real?

God save me from the mediocrity of playing at Christianity.