What'll it be: Perfection of the Life, or of the Work?
The answer might surprise you. Plus, the cosmic heel turn
Notes Toward a “Just Some Guy” Ecclesiology
Once upon a time I became acquainted with a guy in my extended social circle who liked to clown on a certain style of preaching by shrugging in a half resigned, half aggressive way and saying “I’m…just a man.” This would punctuate the comic rehearsal of some kind of failure or shabbiness. Yes, I do wrong sometimes. But I’m…just a man. I couldn’t capture his delivery with my voice, let alone my words on a screen, but it killed me every time. We’d workshop this line together, confession and extenuation all rolled up in a neat little tautology. Look, the failure machine made a failure. What are we going to do here, cry about it?
I thought about this when I read the recent Grifts of the Holy Spirit, on the Archbishop of San Francisco. Like everyone else, this particular prelate is Just Some Guy:
If you get a fancy degree from a fancy school, you're still Just Some Guy. If you are elected to the United States Senate or if you make a billion dollars, you're still Just Some Guy. If you get married and raise a family and do well in your career, you're still Just Some Guy. We're all moving through life with fake-ish credentials, trying to win arguments and feel good and justify ourselves to ourselves, and most of us only occasionally get it right when it comes to demonstrating values like "mercy" or "solidarity" or "charity". And if you're ordained as a priest, if you graduate from divinity school, if the Pope himself names you a bishop or a cardinal in the church that preaches mercy and solidarity and charity, you're still Just Some Guy getting it wrong most of the time.
It’s Just Some Guys all the way down (stopping at Jesus, who was not Just Some Guy), in other words, and while Tony’s point is for understandable reasons explicitly gendered, let’s stipulate that the just-some-guyness applies, by whatever analogy works, to clergy and bishops without respect to gender. Whatever is indelibly etched upon us in the conferral of Orders or the habit of repeated action, it isn’t anything to do with pristine or even impressive moral character. But that just leaves us with the question: how good do you have to be?
I am not speaking about profound lapses or disqualifying abuses in this case. I have in mind something more like spiritual mediocrity, or the lack of any tangible aspiration to sanctity. Or maybe, because I tend to dwell on the negative here (see Vice, Don’t Do Bad Things, why Charisma is bad, Christian Wiman’s extremely metal poem about a preacher who murdered a goat), it would be better to frame it like this: to what extent must clergy struggle against their just-some-guyness and demonstrate a higher Christian ideal? And what if that ideal (whatever it may be) is at odds, practically if not in principle, with the requirements of the vocation? We’ll grant that Augustine was right and the Donatists were wrong, and the Sacraments are valid without respect to the sanctity of the minister. Still, do we expect some kind of approximation to an ideal? And should we?
I Don’t Have an Answer to These Questions
So I did what anyone would do, which is post polls for my similarly unrepresentative Twitter followers:
Here’s the clergy-specific version of the question:
Thinking this over and engaging with the very thoughtful responses, I realized that there are some problems of definition that you need to be clear on to give meaningful answers. Whether there is an “ideal” of clergy life that is distinct from the general obligations laid on all Christians, for example, or whether we are to be in some sense exemplary of what everyone ought to be doing. And our traditions have different ideals anyway. But just to give an example from real life: around the time I made this poll, I had a meeting at church dealing with some nuts-and-bolts governance stuff at a time when I could have been saying evening prayer, doing some corporeal work of mercy, advocating for something, communicating something edifying to someone, or pretty much any other Jesus Stuff. I didn’t feel guilty about this but it’s hard to feel that a business meeting is helping me approximate anything that anyone would recognize as an ideal, or helping me develop in holiness in any way. There are, it seems to me, some choices we have if we want to relate the Business Meetings side of our lives to the Jesus Stuff side.
We can hold a firm boundary around our vocation so that it overwhelmingly includes Jesus Stuff and not Business Meetings, leaving us free to organize and direct good works, pray for our people, proclaim the Gospel and so forth. This has some unfortunate implications for the Christian vocations of the people who have to do all the Business Meeting stuff on our behalf, however.
We can try to expand ourselves so that the Business Meetings get done without sacrificing any Jesus Stuff. This is not a bad exercise to a point, honestly (take every minute you can out of posting) but it can have some unfortunate implications for the other people who depend on us, to say nothing of our own longer-term welfare and health as leaders.
We can hold a firm boundary around our vocation so that it overwhelmingly includes Business Meetings and leaves Jesus Stuff to everyone else. The appointment of the deacons in Acts is sometimes cited as a precedent for this, though I don’t think the creation of diaconal ministry was meant to leave the Apostles free for capital campaigns.
We can incorporate Business Meetings into our understanding of sanctity, not excluding Jesus Stuff but accepting that a balance between them is a necessity, and perhaps not a happy one, laid upon us.
We can try not to care about being any kind of ideal of sanctity and all and fix our gaze solely on Jesus (this is the understanding on which the question above is a “Lutheran trick.”) Sitting around measuring your own progress in sanctity is bad and you shouldn’t do it, so just do your lawful and appointed work and lose yourself in God.
This last is probably the “correct” answer as far as my tradition is concerned, and it has a good and true side and a playing-too-much-golf side. Not caring about one’s own sanctity can be said in many ways.
Being Changed Into Fire
Where I ultimately come down on this is that we should put a fair amount of effort into praying more, being more generous, bridling our tongues and the rest of it. Not because visible sanctity adds anything to our work, but because you never know when spiritual mediocrity (and here I mean real lack of desire for holiness, not just being kind of dull and listless at pursuing it) will shine through and really deflate someone who needs not just the Word and Sacrament but a living witness that they are true and they matter (“Live the best way you can, because you may be the only Bible someone ever reads,” I hear my internship supervisor telling me). And because we should want to be good and faithful with every part of our lives, whether anyone is watching or not.
At a friend’s ordination, years and years ago, the bishop preached on the story of the desert abbot who asked a young monk, who had accomplished all other holiness and wanted to know to do next, why not be transformed completely into fire. This is perhaps a bad paraphrase of a paraphrase, but I’ve heard and seen this story enough now that I don’t even want to know the real thing. I didn’t believe that preacher especially wanted to be turned into fire, nor expected it to ever happen, nor had any idea of what would have to happen first. He was, I’m pretty sure, Just Some Guy, as we all are, and as we deep down want to be, world without end. I may be off the mark here because reading too much Desert Fathers gives me a psychosomatic case of cottonmouth, but I take part of the point to be that one must be trained to even want the kind of ecstatic experience Abba What’s-his-name was talking about. God can do anything, God can touch our hearts and ravish us anywhere at all, even on the golf course. But maybe you need to have extensive experience with boring, pointless fasts, vigils, and self-denial before you can put anything about being made into fire in your mouth.
I will live and die a full time zone away from whatever ideal the Desert Fathers represent, warm and well fed and uncombusted. But I’m not content to be Just Some Guy, shrugging at my own love of comfort, an untroubled conscience, and the ethical path of least resistance. None of us should. I have found it unnervingly easy, faced with Yeats’s “choice,” to prefer the perfection of the work over that of the life (“neither is possible,” Auden sniffed, perhaps irked that he didn’t come up with the line himself). It is always, in the moment, defensible. The community needs a certain kind of thing that only I can plausibly provide, so if it must be provided at some cost to my own soul, well, sucks to be me. Add in those areas where one can expect oneself to be competent, if not excellent—I am responsible for being a faithful and diligent pastor, a doting and attentive father, a loving and supportive spouse, a keeper of a house/investment vehicle, an engaged citizen, and the one man whose cheers will drag the Green Bay Packers to victory—and the grounds for continual compromise and bartering away of the soul’s true and highest Good will never be lacking. Next thing you know, you haven’t prayed in a year and you instinctively avoid church whenever you’re not preaching.
This is just to say that, for most of us, while the tradeoffs between the work and the life are real and painful, the work can’t flourish for long apart from the life. Our own souls are precious to God and if we don’t look to their health and welfare now and then, we will likely, someday, stop doing anyone else any good and may do them harm.
In other church Substack news, this on preaching for daily mass is very good. I’ve been preaching extemporaneously on Wednesday nights and I love it, though this advice will make me better at it.
Also if you’re not reading Jonathan Malesic in at least one format, I recommend changing that. His newsletter is really good and he was really nice to come to my church and talk to us about burnout.
Appreciation: Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth
Once in a great while, I see an image or poster for a movie and think: I will be seeing this movie. When I heard about the Joel Coen Macbeth I knew with a deep certainty that I would be seeing this movie.
For nearly a decade, Shakespeare was a pretty big part of my life. I didn’t read all the plays, or even all the really good ones, but I read and re-read a whole lot of them in class and on my own. I was brutally murdered on the steps of the Deep Springs main building by a conspiracy of envious senators and had to stifle giggles, under my shroud, as Marc Antony promised, in a game-show-host manner, “seventy-five drachmas!” to every several man and woman in Rome from my will. I wrote a bad but earnest honors thesis on the themes of exile and creative futility that crystalized in The Tempest. We named our daughter after a character in a decidedly minor play.
That all started with reading Macbeth in my eleventh-grade English class. And it ended for me long enough ago that I forgot what it really felt like to be immersed in Shakespeare’s language. It seems like a silly thing to say, but I found myself thinking “Damn, William Shakespeare could really write dialogue.” The immediacy of its awesomeness actually shocked me. This was a fantastic movie-watching experience from start to finish. The visuals are great, the acting is great, and Macbeth is just a perfect little play: short, violent, and direct, with a main character who accurately narrates the whole process of his downfall.
I haven’t read any reviews so I don’t know how people are evaluating Denzel Washington’s performance, but I found him totally captivating. His physicality is awesome, and while his line delivery sometimes had me thinking “That’s Denzel Washington, just Denzeling it up right there,” he really found something in the character. He’s great when he plays it quiet, as with the last scene with Macduff. “I bear a charmed life” as almost a throwaway (I also can’t remember the last time I saw an on-screen fight as good as his battle with Siward).
Anyway, I’m not going to try to play amateur film critic here. I was just hammered all over again by hearing Macbeth perceive the temptation to do evil, accustom himself to it, yield to it, and talk through all the consequences without any rationalization. He just walks straight into hell; “mine eternal jewel,” he rages, he has “Given to the common enemy of man.” The character believes this. I’m pretty sure the author, or at least the original audience, did too.
We get daily lessons in the banality of evil, and for good reason our arts and literature have tended to focus on it. But Macbeth’s very non-banal evil is frightening to me because it has its own plausibility. Sometimes you just do something wicked because you want to and you’ve overcome the inhibitions against it. By chance, I started watching the movie right after listening to the latest Revolutions episode on the murder of the Romanovs. Nicholas II was a stupid and violent ruler, and a bloody, undignified end is an occupational hazard of being an autocrat. But the craven and lawless way he was disposed of (to say nothing of the killings of his children and their servants) was a real heel turn by the Bolsheviks. It wasn’t a heat-of-battle summary execution or even political terror in the usual sense, just a sordid, vindictive killing without even the pretext of justice. T’were best it were done quickly, I suppose. And the guilty conscience of the regime, which prided itself on its own unsentimentality, showed through with the attempts to hide the crime or shift the blame to the local party.
One line my eleventh-grade teacher pointed out to us, when this was all new to me, was Macbeth saying “I am in blood / Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,
/ Returning were as tedious as go o'er.” He doesn’t say, Mrs. Vale told us, that returning would be more tedious than continuing. He just presses on because he wants to. Macbeth, too, was just some guy once. Then he changed himself utterly into blood. It’s not a good deal, but people still take it.