Simple Things and Helping Hands
I once had a parishioner complain that our faith and practice were too complex. “I’m a simple man,” he said, “and I need the simple Gospel.” When I wanted to talk to him about it, he had no specifics. I expect that he was expressing a bias toward some kind of Protestant “Bible service” that he had known growing up and to which he was simply sentimentally attached. He just wasn’t used to the practice of the Catholic and Orthodox faith. It was weird to him.
It turns out that now, after spending many years back in the kinds of congregations in which he had grown up, that man is back at my former parish, and very happy. He has found that simple things don’t always look the way we expect them to look.
In fact, in speaking to lots of people who claim to want just a “simple Gospel”, I’ve come to understand that what most of them mean is that they want an unmediated experience - an experience of God with no go-betweens. They want just “me and Jesus”. The problem is that Jesus hasn’t set things up to work that way.
God made us as persons with bodies. We are embodied spiritual beings. Our bodies aren’t accidental, or a sort of hotel (or worse, a cage) for our souls to stay in until we move on to a spiritual future. We are only complete when we are embodied. That’s why we proclaim the Resurrection of the Dead - in which we proclaim that we will live in our bodies in eternity. And as creatures with bodies, we know things primarily through our senses.
It should come as no surprise that God has designed us so that our senses are very, very good at conveying information to us, and that our brains are very, very good at taking that constant barrage of sense impressions and turning them into knowledge. I may never see a poem as lovely as a tree, but I see either poem or tree only because my brain has disentangled a blob of line and color and discerned forms into which it has classified these things.
That’s mediation 101, and it happens before I’m even aware of it, which is good. When I was in elementary school I climbed through a barbed-wire fence into a field with a bull. The bull was not happy to have me sharing his field, and he almost immediately charged. If my brain had needed a nice, slow process of disentangling sense impressions and then deciding what to do, I wouldn’t be here today.
On another level, think about the Bible, taken as a set of writings. That’s a tangible thing (a book) that I need in order to learn certain things about God. God designed it that way. It was his plan to use the Apostles to go into all the world and spread the Gospel. And it was his plan that all that they had seen and heard should be transmitted to the world and to posterity by speaking and writing. St. Paul emphasizes that God wills to do his work through his Church:
“…[H]ow shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall the preach, except they be sent?” (Rom 10:14-15) God, for reasons of his own, wills to work through his people. God does not normally speak directly to people to reveal the path to salvation, but works through his Church. In other respects, God speaks to us through others and through the created order (see Rom. 1:20).
The liturgical life of the Church is varied: it provides us opportunities to worship God, to walk with Christ through the events of his earthly ministry, to enter into the wonders of his death, resurrection, and ascension, and to celebrate his work in the lives of the saints. That worship itself is very simple, whether prayers are said or sung, but it is not unadorned or antiseptic, because Christ comes to us and gives us his very Body and Blood. It is a symphony of beauty that ministers to our bodies and souls and is the result of a great deal of mediation, as God weaves the wonder of salvation in and through his Church.
My former parish met for a few years in the youth center of a large Baptist church. It had an amazing array of sound equipment (in which as a musician of sorts I took a great interest), including a mixing board, amplifiers, wired and wireless microphones, a speaker system, and a lot of spotlights of all colors. This youth center was not going to be the location of simple presentation of the Gospel, whatever else went on there. It required a lot of mediation - a performance, in fact (and a very complex one, at that). Once, while we were in the middle of Mass set up in that performance space, some of the colored spotlights came on and started moving their spotlights all over the place, like the beginning of a concert. They were very squeaky and noisy in addition to being very bright and distracting.
I thought at the time, “For us, an equipment failure is when a candle goes out.” If the power dies during Mass, we can continue. For all of our liturgical setting, the Mass is very simple. At the heart of our faith are very simple things: water, oil, bread, wine, human touch, human voice. And at the heart of our faith is a set of personal relationships: with God, with angels, saints, the departed loved ones, our fellow parishioners gathered at the altar rail, our families, and friends. God uses simple things and personal relationships to do his work. Why? Well, love is the motive for everything God does, so we find ourselves within a wonderful symphony of simple things and helping hands that gives expression to God’s great love. And I’m very thankful for these simple things and helping hands.
