AMERICA
Faithful Aspirations
Frank DeSiano
How can we make room for everybody in the church?
I
was stunned. I had asked a prominent leader in evangelization, a
priest, if he thought his parents were evangelized. He shook his head
“No” and explained that he did not think his parents were disciples in
the sense in which the church calls Catholics to be disciples today. I
wondered: If they were not disciples, if generations of Catholics over
centuries were not disciples, then have we developed too high a
definition of discipleship?
In his first apostolic exhortation, “The Joy
of the Gospel” (No. 3), Pope Francis sounds a very open note, one that
should get our full attention:
I invite all Christians,
everywhere, at this very moment, to a renewed personal encounter with
Jesus Christ, or at least an openness to letting him encounter them; I
ask all of you to do this unfailingly each day. No one should think that
this invitation is not meant for him or her, since “no one is excluded
from the joy brought by the Lord.”
Something like this more inclusive
approach might be a key ingredient to include in our thinking about and
practice of evangelization.
A few years ago, it was popular to cite some
words of Pope Benedict to the effect that the church had to become
smaller, to shrink in order for committed Catholics to show themselves
and support each other. This seemed to lead to an attitude in which some
priests were somewhat willing to see Catholics slip away because they
were not “true” Catholics in the first place.
I have often observed how that “smallness”
happens in parishes. A group of parishioners gets “more involved”
through one or another process—perhaps a prayer group or some parish
program. This group then starts looking at the rest of the parishioners
as somehow “doing less” than they should. As this smaller group starts
to talk, they imply that the rest of the parishioners—who come to Mass
and maybe even serve in one or another ministry—are not really committed
or are not really evangelized or are not really disciples. Once this
dynamic sets in, you can bet the process of evangelization ministry, or
renewing the parish, will come to a standstill.
Looking at Assumptions
Sherry A. Weddell, in her influential book Forming Intentional Disciples (2012),
says that “in calling Catholics to a deliberate discipleship and
intentional faith, our goal is not to create a community of spiritual
elites. Rather it is to create a spiritual culture that recognizes,
openly talks about, and honors both the inward and outward dimensions of
the sacraments and the liturgy.” This is related to her argument that
many Catholics receive sacraments externally without the inner
transformation and conversion that they imply. “The majority of
Catholics in the United States are sacramentalized but not evangelized,”
she writes.
Ms. Weddell believes conversion and
discipleship can be small: “If roughly 2 percent of your parishioners
are intentional disciples today, why not shoot for 4 percent five years
from now? If you think that roughly 5 percent are disciples right now,
what could you do to help raise that percentage to 10 percent?” At this
rate it would take a parish five years to double its number of
“intentional disciples”; obviously, intentional discipleship, while
offered to the many, is accepted only by the few. By that assumption, if
it takes five years to double the number of intentional disciples,
discipleship is not a mass movement. Just the opposite.
As we work our way through our vision of
evangelization and discipleship, we have to be attentive at every level
to debug the presumptions and unintended consequences of our approach to
church involvement. If we keep raising the bar, do we not automatically
at least marginalize, if not exclude, more and more ordinary Catholics?
Is it possible to use ideas of discipleship in a manner that can be in
effect exclusive rather than, as Jesus seems to have done, use those
ideas to a more inclusive effect? Jesus reached out to tax collectors,
prostitutes and those excluded by the interpretations of holiness of his
day. The approach of Jesus and his followers is helpful to reflect on.
No parable, I think, says more about life in
the early church than that of the sower and the seed. It is the opening
parable in the Gospels of Mark and Matthew. The seed that is not
productive seems to be a rather straightforward description of things
that led followers away from their commitments to Christ: wealth,
shallowness or fear of persecution. But of the seed that is productive,
there clearly seems to be a sense of gradation. Not all the seed
produces the same. As Mark puts it, “It came up and grew and yielded
thirty, sixty, and a hundredfold.” And Mark wryly adds, “Whoever has
ears to hear ought to hear” (Mk 4:8-9). Matthew varies the words
slightly, making the same point: “But some seed fell on rich soil and
produced fruit a hundred or sixty or thirty fold. Whoever has ears ought
to hear” (Mt: 13:8).
We note: It is the good seed that produces
in varying quantities. We hear 30, 60, 100, but are we not also
encouraged by the parable to hear 10, 20, 40 or 70? In other words, the
increased productivity of one range of seeds does not exclude the lesser
productivity of the other seeds. This indicates a wide acceptance, in
the early church, of different levels of discipleship without an
assumption that everyone had to fulfill the highest expectation—to
produce a hundredfold. Surely there is a huge difference between the
seed that falls on bad soil, yielding nothing, and the seed that is
productive. But that should not prevent us from noticing the different
yields of the seeds that fall on good ground.
Not Far From the Kingdom
In Mark 12, Jesus is approached by a
scribe who overhears how well Jesus is responding to those who were
disputing with him. The scribe asks Jesus about the greatest
commandment. When the scribe endorses the answer Jesus gave, Matthew
tells us: “Jesus saw that [he] answered with understanding, [and] he
said to him, ‘You are not far from the kingdom of God’” (12:34). This
phrase deserves to be tossed around in our apostolic minds for quite
some time. Obviously the scribe belongs to a group that is, as Matthew
says, “disputing” with Jesus. All the scribe does is recite back what
Jesus said to him. Yet this seems to be enough for Jesus to recognize
the scribe as somehow drawing close to the kingdom of God. In other
words, wherever insight comes, it should be recognized and celebrated.
Even more, Matthew’s great pa-rable of the
final judgment (25:31 ff.) should give all believers pause. In this
image, the king gathers all the nations of the world (the word nation
has special impact for Jewish listeners because it represents the
gentiles and, therefore, presumably those who are not chosen) and
divides them as a shepherd might, between sheep and goats. When Jesus
explains why the sheep are entering the kingdom (because they fed,
clothed and visited him), the hearers are shocked. “When did we see you
hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink?” In other words, the
righteous, the saved, are not even aware that they are doing the king’s
will. They are not even aware of their righteousness or even of all the
motives for righteousness. Of course, they fed, gave water, helped and
visited. The accursed, the goats, did not do these things for Christ’s
“least ones.” Can it be that people are involved in God’s grace without
even the dimmest recognition of it? Can it be that God’s grace is far
wider than those who are consciously followers and, even more, than
those who are “intentionally” followers of Christ?
The story of the good thief should make us
wonder what and whom in Luke’s community this unexpectedly attentive
criminal represents. What personal experience did he have with Jesus?
Were there early Christians who got only a glimmer of Christ, but for
whom that seems to have been enough? And look at Paul’s tolerance for
preachers who preached out of false motives—“as long in every way,
whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is being proclaimed” (Phil
1:18). How does that standard hold up when it comes to strict orthodoxy?
We Catholics in particular need to recall how often in our eucharistic
prayers we refer to those whose faith God alone knows.
A Discipleship of Inclusion
Of course we need to call all
Catholics to the fullness of discipleship, expressed through their
involvement with the word of God (conversion and relationship), prayer
(private and communal through liturgy), community (connectedness with
other disciples in faith and life) and service (reaching outward to
those who are not being served, helping all live a fullness of life). We
can never let up on this. Catholics need to be continually called to
more explicit commitment to Christ, which includes a more open sharing
with the world of the grace that comes from Jesus. Catholics need
ongoing conversion as part of their being followers of Jesus.
But instead of setting up criteria and then
judging one another according to those, can we just presume an ideal and
acknowledge that we all, even the most committed and active disciples,
inevitably fall short of that ideal and that as part of a continuum of
discipleship, all Catholics may be exercising more or less involvement
with their faith and faith community? Instead, for example, of thinking
of our children who do not attend church as frequently as some older
Catholics as if they were fallen-away cretins, maybe we could think of
them as people to be invited to fuller discipleship, given the
variations of their lives and experiences. Can we not think of these
people as being on a continuum with the more active?
In this more inclusive model of
evangelization and discipleship I am trying to sketch, we do not have
“true” disciples and “not disciples,” but a church in which, at
different times, we produce fruit that may range from 5 percent to 95
percent of the ideal yield, to use the Gospel metaphors. What we do as a
church is continually call ourselves to produce more, whoever we are,
as the fruit of our baptism. What we see in each other are the seeds of
discipleship, some of which have sprung into plants while others still
lie latent. What we acknowledge about all of us is our ongoing need for
greater conversion, for reconciliation and the expression of God’s grace
in more explicit ways in our lives.
Are there stages of discipleship? We can
certainly recognize phases of discipleship as we look back on our faith
lives. They may not necessarily follow those Sherry Weddell outlines
(trust, curiosity, openness, conversion, intentional discipleship) in
any strict order. At varying times in our lives as disciples we have
experienced deepening trust or been drawn along by curiosity about one
or another aspect of faith or powerfully experienced Jesus’ presence or,
perhaps, have powerfully experienced something like God’s absence (our
own “dark nights of the soul”) or have been clear in the direction of
our vocations or have been confused. Catholic mystics have taught us
well about phases of discipleship. The founder of the Paulist Fathers,
Servant of God Isaac Hecker, experienced years of what seemed like
internal confusion as part of his journey in faith but came to see this
as the work of the Spirit. The Spirit, Hecker would say, can work
through all—and many different—phases of our spiritual lives.
‘Open the Doors’
Might a more inclusive attitude end
up enabling lax discipleship? Perhaps. But giving the impression that
evangelization and discipleship are almost “elitist” might do something
worse than encourage lax discipleship; it might lead people to dismiss
church, discipleship and evangelization altogether. Everyone remarks
about the growing number of young people who respond “none” to the
question of their preferred faith. One feature of the growth of this
group is surely a pushing back at churches that seemed to be pushing
against them, as the 2010 book American Grace, by Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, shows.
Of course it is premature to generalize
about the ministry of Pope Francis. But one thing is clear: He is not
interested in exclusive or exclusivizing notions of faith. “Open up the
doors,” he says. Let’s get away from our small-minded approaches. He
mentions the unmarried pregnant woman who comes to get her baby
baptized—how, in place of some of our approaches, we should celebrate
this woman and warmly welcome her and her child. He washes the feet of
Muslim women. He prays with evangelical pastors. He places in the same
category as ordinary evangelizing ministry caring both for Catholics who
go to Mass every Sunday and for Catholics who have a strong attachment
to the church but do not go to Mass (“The Joy of the Gospel,” No. 14).
It is as if Francis is pointing out a vast ocean of divine love and
grace and inviting us all to swim in it, letting as many into that ocean
as possible.
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