Throughout the years that I've been writing, I've have received lots of criticism. Sometimes it's bitter and mean-spirited and I tend then not to respond to it, believing that things are furthered by familial conversation, not by a fist-fight.
Sometimes, though, the criticism is sincere, thoughtful, and genuinely challenging. One such critique has to do with my approach in general:
"Why," people sometimes ask me, "do you write the way you do, invariably with some kind of secular-bent? Why don't you focus more on catechesis, on teaching church doctrine, on explaining the creeds, on defending moral issues like abortion, and on doing apologetics for the church?"
Fair enough. The Christian community needs these things, particularly today when many Christians, including regular church-goers, lack clarity about what they are supposed to believe and lack the tools they need to explain and defend their beliefs in the face of an ever-growing number of critics.
So why do I write the way I do? Why, as my critics put it, "the invariable bent towards the secular"?
My answer: Because I am trying to be a missionary and missionaries have been asked, by Jesus himself, to leave the 99 and go after the one.
Allow me an image:
Midway through his Pontificate, John Paul II instituted World Youth Days. When he first proposed this concept, his advisors were pretty skeptical: "Young people aren't going to come out to see an old man," they said. But his critics were wrong, wrong in a huge, huge way. His meetings with youth brought together some of the largest crowds ever assembled. Millions of youth gathered to pray with him.
I was living in Toronto when World Youth Days were held there in 2002 and I joined with the nearly one million young people from around the world who gathered to meet with John Paul II. And it was a wonderful, graced event.
But, while nearly a million young people came out for that event, 50 million young people didn't --- and not just because they didn't have the practical or financial means to come to Toronto. For every young person who was excited about that event, there were probably 50 who were indifferent to it or, worse still, turned off by it.
That's not a commentary on John Paul II, this event or the church, but a commentary on the lived reality and attitude of the majority of persons, including the majority of baptized Christians today, at least inside of our highly secularized culture. Those people who were indifferent to, or turned off by, World Youth Days are the "strays" the Jesus told us to search for lovingly in the desert, even if it means not being able to focus as much as we'd like on the 99 who are being faithful.
Please don't misunderstand this: Those who are faithful and practice regularly, the million who show up for World Youth Days, need to be nurtured and fed --- with doctrine, catechesis, clear moral teaching, and the apologetic tools they need to explain their faith to their over-zealous critics.
But Jesus' mandate is still there: Leave the 99 who haven't strayed and go after the one who has strayed; except today the default seems to have shifted and it's perhaps more a case of leaving the one and going after the 99.
And this requires that our teaching and preaching, and our reaching out to the world in general, must contain more than only catechesis, explanations of our creeds, clarity around dogma and morals, and even the repetition (however valid, needed, and timeless) of the language of Scripture and the creeds. Those things need to be done, but that is only part of the task.
The other part, equally needed and perhaps more difficult, is the task of relating these things (Scripture, the creeds, our dogmas, our moral teaching) to the energy, the color, the endeavors, the longings, the health, the sickness, the virtues, the sin, the beauty and the pathos of our world.
More and more people feel themselves thoroughly disconnected from our church circles and our church language --- and the fault isn't all on their side. We need missionaries to the world, people like Henri Nouwen, who can stand solidly within the church and invite the world, with all its desires and grandiosity, to join us, not as adversary but as family.
And the language we need to do this isn't simply out there, in our catechisms and dogmas, to be picked up and deployed. Much of the language we need has to be created anew by our own generation which, like every generation, needs itself to eat God's word, digest it and then enflesh it so that God's written word becomes a living word, inside our own flesh.
I don't claim to have accomplished this, nor to be anybody's expert, but I do know that Christ's mandate is to reach out to the world and not just to those who are coming to our churches. Oblate of Mary Immaculate Father Ronald Rolheiser is a specialist in the field of spirituality and systematic theology. His website is www.ronrolheiser.com.
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