"Being Good/Doing Good"

Friday, April 4, 2014

4-4-14

Despite the title, the reflection today was not about one of my favorite topics -- the difference between what makes you feeling like a good person versus doing concrete good in the world, even at a high personal cost.

The reflection was about why we respond negatively to good people.  And my first reaction was a complete rejection -- I don't do that!  I was trying to figure out what disconnect I have with the author of this reflection booklet (perhaps that I am young and so still believe that I am growing and thus aren't threatened by someone already there; I believe we share goodness; I am hard to make feel judged, in a lot of ways, etc.).

But then I remembered the post I wrote when I wrote the homily for Father Dempsey about Saint Katherine Drexel (Blessed Katherine Drexel?) at her home parish.  I talked on and on about how awkward it is to walk where a saint has trod -- not as a holy shrine far away but as your home parish.  To think of a saint as someone you knew in your real, down-to-earth life.

Or, for that matter, to think of my patron St. Catherine of Siena meddling in local politics and gossipy disputes between her neighbors.

We like true holiness to be some Other.  Something far away and distant, otherworldly.  Something only the truly exceptional are called to do.  Something we don't have to not even just aspire to but live up to.  Something we could do ourselves, right here in Beaumont, Texas.  If we had the strength of will.

It's easy to say it's self-righteousness that bothers us, but maybe it is simply true righteousness.  It's not hostility, it's just...awkwardness and inadequacy.  I don't think it provokes anger -- maybe in some, but if you didn't want to be good, it couldn't affect you.  If you didn't want to be just and true and faithful and loving, then you wouldn't be challenged by a saint's example.

It's just so much easier to look at a portrait of a long dead and faraway saint who lived a very different life than yours than to look one in the eye.

The reflection also reminded me of the friend I have who I call objectively the best person I have ever met.  I have seen her as a kind of challenge to myself, but she is so loving and wonderful to be around that I never resented or disliked or even felt uncomfortable around her about it.  But then there are all kinds of saints and good people, and she is the kind who would never try to change you explicitly.  She would just be wonderful and kind to you in a way that makes you more like her in turn.  In a way that makes you respond to her way of doing things, even if you can't see the world as she does.  It makes you want to see as she does and join her -- and she makes it seem very possible.

I don't know if that's more or less useful to our spiritual growth than saints who make us realize that we don't do enough or demand action from us.  Saints who give explicit instructions and show the possibilities. Who demand better from us.  The probable answer is that we need all of them.

But I do think that there may be a difference between what those two kinds of good people inspire in us.  Saints who show us our inadequacy inspire us to want to Be Good.  Saints who are quietly wonderful make us want to Do Good when we are around them.  I know who I prefer to follow, but then, it's also a wider path.

Or a lighter yoke.