Reading Francis

Why do I write?

So, the shortest of answers is that intermittent reinforcement is a helluva drug. I write stuff, and I post it on Facebook, and some people click the like button, a few people write something nice, and, every once in a while, I bump into someone at a conference or somewhere who says, Hey, I love what you post on Facebook. Keep it up. Truthfully, that’s enough fuel to make me want to do it again.

Why do I write?

Well, honestly, I write when nobody’s watching. (And usually I write like nobody’s watching, if you count the typos.) Since middle school, I found that writing is one of the most powerful forms of prayer I have, because sometimes, when I write, I can feel God in conversation with me. And when the writing goes in a direction that I would not have planned in a million years, it’s a wondrous thing. Maybe it’s just another form of my previous point that intermittent reinforcement is a helluva drug, but it’s definitely a reason that I write, whether anyone else sees it but God and me or not.

Why do I write?

I went back to the first post on my blog, and it said pretty much what I thought it would. When Pope Francis was elected, a lot of  people started paying a lot more attention to what the pope had to say than they had to his predecessor, Pope Benedict the XVI, or than they did to Pope Benedict’s predecessor, St. Pope John Paul II, in his later years of infirmity. And for the first time in about twenty years, I found myself engaging the part of my brain that I had powered down when I left my doctoral program in Christian political thought. After I spent my undergraduate religion major focused primarily on New Testament studies, my master’s of divinity had been steeped in study of Catholic social teaching, primarily through papal encyclicals, so even as a then-non-Catholic, I soaked in a lot of the details of papal process and Vatican politics. I had “planned” (always a loose term with me) to get a Ph.D. and teach Christian political thought somewhere, focused on what the popes had to say; when I walked away from that doctoral program after a very long year, I set aside any idea of using all that stuff I had learned, really, until March 13, 2013, when I heard in a DC taxicab that Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio had been selected to be the new pope and had taken the name of St. Francis of Assisi.

When people started paying attention to the pope for the first time in, maybe, ever, they asked a lot of questions or otherwise got confused. Since the Catholic Church takes a century to change the lightbulbs, the things I knew about the papacy from two decades prior still held, so I started writing to try to explain what the new pope was saying and help people sort out what was really going on versus what people with various perspectives only hoped was going on.

After several years of that, as more people got used to having Francis as the pope, I started going a little deeper into the catalog and pulling out what I remembered from my Biblical studies and applying it in writing. Again, this was with the intent of helping friends who might be interested take another look at those pieces of the Bible about which I had something worth saying.

But why SHOULD I write?

The truth is, when I put the books, encyclicals, and academic journals away to go join the circus of sports, I quit on school, but I didn’t quit on God. I kept praying, and I kept reading, and I kept worshiping in community. I think, in hindsight, I just needed some time for stuff to simmer. I have jokingly called myself a “sleeper cell theologian”, but it’s honestly not a bad term for what I was, spending twenty years in silence between school and writing. But my theology was actively being formed during that time underground.

When I started writing, maybe it was because I saw themes in what Pope Francis had to say that touched the themes that are so clear in the Gospels but so seldom highlighted by professional Christians that the connections sparked something for me. Connections about God’s inexhaustible love and mercy, about our inseparable connectedness to each other, especially to those on the margins, about the call to live joyfully in relationship instead of in fear of damnation.

Those are the core messages of the Christian faith, and they are the ones that people who know the Gospel need to hear. A lot of people, though, only hear those messages secondarily. They primarily hear Christians speaking judgment against the world or in-fighting against each other, and as a result, they may or may not have given up on the Christian God, but they definitely have either given up on Christians and their Church or believe that the Church has given up on them.

God’s love and mercy and our connectedness and the invitation to live joyfully in relationship are those folks’ Gospel too, though. Just because some Christians bury the punchline or lose the thread doesn’t make that Gospel any less true; it just means those who lead churches are as broken as everyone else. 

When you’re thinking about writing a book, one question that you apparently have to answer is, “Why should this book exist?” Which stumped me for a while, to be honest. I’m still not 100% sure of my answer there, which is kind of a problem.

But maybe I SHOULD write, whether it’s in a book or just here, because the people who have given up on the Church or have been given up on by the Church need to hear the Good News, and someone who isn’t a professional in the Church might be a better messenger than all the folks who write books from within the walls. Maybe someone who has given up on the Church will be more open to hearing good news from someone who doesn’t count on the Church for a paycheck.

And maybe I should write because the truth is, we are ALL sleeper-cell theologians who just need the right spark to wake up. In all honesty, it wasn’t the college courses in New Testament studies or the graduate courses in Catholic social teaching that formed me. It was living. Being married, having a child, losing parents and siblings and friends, winning victories and having my heart broken and just getting more repetitions in of waking up every day. God introduces Godself to us through joys and dreams and disappointments and sadnesses and just Wednesdays, a lot of times, and if we all reflect on our lives, we can see that. 

Maybe, maybe someday I’ll write something that helps you make a connection between your life and real Good News that sparks you out of your cell, too. That might be why it’s worth writing.