Rebellion

My characters, my fictional Catholics, understand the church's promise of eternal life but nevertheless find it lacking. For what they really want is life returned to them, the world returned to them, in all its magnificence and love and heartbreaking detail. Life uncompromised by death, death utterly defeated. Anything less is unacceptable.

It is a mad, unreasonable demand, of course, but it is also, it seems to me, the primitive impulse that makes faith necessary. It is the mad, unreasonable demand -- and promise -- made by Christ himself.

When Jesus tells Martha, "Your brother will rise," she replies as any one of us pretty-good-to-middling Catholics might, as one well trained in the language of faith should: "I know he will rise," she replies, "in the resurrection on the last day." If ever a false Messiah had an out, here it was. Jesus had only to tell her, Right you are; you get an A. What he does instead, mad prophet, is refuse such easy comfort. he becomes, John tells us, troubled, deeply perturbed. He weeps. "See how he loved him," the onlookers say. And then Jesus calls Lazarus from the grave. Jesus restores what has vanished, returns Lazarus to life, to his sisters, returns not the soul or the spirit, the memory or the ghost, but the man himself, the profile and the grace, the honest look, the laughter, the love -- and proves to us that death is not forever.

In his refusal to be reconciled, Jesus makes possible our impossible hopes, confirms our own primitive rebellion against that terrible thing that is the death of those we love. And reminds us -- or should remind us, if we can just shake ourselves from the numbing familiarity of the tenets of our church, the platitudes, the rote rituals, and the petty obsessions -- that ours is a mad, rebellious faith, one that flies in the face of all reason, all evidence, all sensible injunctions to be comforted, to be comfortable. A faith that rejects every timid impulse to accept the fact that life goes on pleasantly enough despite all that vanishes, despite death itself.

What I have to say about being Catholic, then, is simply this: Being Catholic is an act of rebellion. A mad, stubborn, outrageous, nonsensical refusal to be comforted by anything less than the glorious impossibility of the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.

But as we face the church of the twenty-first century, my hope is that we nonfictional Catholics regain the courage to be difficult, rebellious, mad, the courage to refuse to be comforted. That we refuse to be comforted by the familiar, by the way we've always done things (priests in charge, laity ushering, women running bake sales). That we refuse to be comforted by our own self-satisfied eloquence about the dignity of unborn life while political or practical imperatives silence our objections to the destruction of life in the ghetto or in the death chamber. That we refuse to be comforted by our good, prosperous lives, by the careful picking and choosing of what words of Christ we will take to heart.

My hope for the church, for us, is that we recall the adolescent rebellion that seems a part of most of our biographies as Catholics, recall our youthful dissatisfactions and objections
... and speak them again. Or, if that adolescent rebellion seems too distant to recall, then my hoope is that each of us becomes the garrulous drunk in the congregation, the loudmouthed, inappropriate, indiscreet psycho who cries foul over hypocrisy and deception and illogic and cliche, refusing to accept the easy comfort of assurances that the hierarchy will fix itself, that Jesus doesn't want women to be priests, that it is acceptable for Catholics to acquiesce to a politically defensible but morally unjust war.

At the heart of our beliefs, at the heart of our faith, lies the outrageous conviction that love redeems us, Christ redeems us, even from death. Following this wild proposition, this fulfillment of our most primitive yearnings, every other outrageous thing we expect or demand of ourselves and our church -- honesty, charity, goodness, forgiveness, peace -- surely must begin to seem reasonable, even easy. Every other challenge the twenty-first century brings should seem -- even to the likes of us not-so-great Catholics -- simple enough: a benefit, no doubt, of the simple grace of being Catholic.

--Alice McDermott, The Lunatic in the Pew