Jorge Bergoglio Changes Again

The first thing I learned from Jorge Bergoglio was that people can change.

He was, back when he took the reins of the Catholic church, someone that I'll admit to watching with a bit of wariness.  

Before he chose his nom de Papa, Jorge was something of a culture warrior.  He was active on the newly minted Twitter, and back in 2013 I observed that most of his pre-Francis tweets weren't the most gracious and welcoming things I'd ever seen.

On social media in his native Argentina, he learned in heavily against gay adoption, to the point where that seemed...if all you looked at was Twitter at the time...to be his primary schtick as an archbishop.  He was conservative, eh?  

But even at that point in the social media era, I'd realized that Twitter was a poisonous and unreliable thing.  "Microblogging" was already bringing out the worst in human beings, or so I'd observed in myself.  It made us prone to shallow, shortsighted, reactive thinking.  It critically sabotaged attention spans, obliterated subtlety, and caused pathological self-promotion.

And it caused us to blindly attack one another, as online mobs yearning for a daily dose of self-indulgent self-righteousness swarmed anyone for any perceived infraction.

So I committed myself to reserving judgment.  Let's see who he becomes, I reminded myself, not who he was.

In his role as Francis, Jorge was quite different.  His seeming commitment to ideological purity over grace evaporated in the light of his responsibility to minister to billions.  

At the time, Jorge/Francis described taking that mantle as a moment of real epiphany, an awareness that the conflicts that had animated him were below the role Providence had called him to play.  Like Saul of Tarsus, the man before the call wasn't the same as the man after the call.  In becoming Francis, Jorge Bergoglio was transformed.  Instead of invective, words of reconciliation and kindness.  He chose his ground, and that ground was solid rock.  Love for neighbor.  Care for the poor and the stranger.  A willingness to push back against power and falsehood.

This change infuriated those of a legalistic or Pharisaic temperament, in the same way that the actual teachings of Jesus infuriate such souls.  Not that Francis was "progressive."   He understood the task set before him by our mutual Master.

Francis did his job ably, and with integrity.  He presented the central teachings of Jesus effectively and personally.  As did Benedict before him, honestly, and John Paul II as well.

Euge, serve bone et fidelis.

  

Pope Twitter the First

Yesterday was satisfyingly busy.  Meeting followed conversation followed meeting, with working and thinking and sermon-cogitation woven in and around all of it.

And in the thick of it all, Twitter hummed away behind one tab of my browser.  My wanderings through the twitterness have continued over this month, and yesterday, I found myself experiencing yet another world event through this peculiar medium.

It really is like being in a scene from the Incredible Journey, sitting there in your tiny little nanosub and watching the neurons in the vast cortex around you light up and flash and blort out transmitters around you.

No, wait, Incredible Journey was the one with the dogs.  Um...what's that film again...um...you know, the futuristic one with Raquel Welch playing the Helpless-Eye-Candy-"Girl"-Who-Will-Eventually-Need-Rescuing?  Um.  Amazing...um...something.  No, not that one.  Oh, right.  The Fantastic Voyage.

As there are many, many co-religionists populating my corner of the global brain, yesterday was an endless blorting yarp of Papal tweets.  Some were earnest prayer-tweets from Catholics.  Many were goofy metacommentary, as the addled popcorn brain of our social macroorganism nattered on about smokestacks, cannabis, and some random seagull.

It trended and trended hard, to the point where even tweeting teens who use Twitter to let the world know about their every self-absorbed moment noticed.  "What the [Freak] is all this [flipping] Pope [poop]?  OMG I dunt care abt disss [excrement]!!! #whocares"

When the selection came, though, what my Twitter feed almost instantaneously let me know was the name of the Pope, the name he had chosen, and that as a Cardinal he had his very own Twitter account.  Surely, surely that's a first.

What is this human being like, I wondered.  Traditional media outlets were talking Jesuit, and waxing on about St. Francis of Assisi, and talking about "care for the poor," and "spartan lifestyle."  It sounded promising.

But Twitter means he'll be talking about himself and what was important to him, so of course, I clicked and went there.  I'll admit that Twitter's not the very best medium for really knowing someone, but you can get a hint.  That I'm a slightly goofy pastor who's into quantum physics and theology would become quickly apparent, for example.

What I found were two tweets about his becoming Pope, and then a lot of prior tweets with hashtags en Espanol.  They consistently read things that would translate like #nogayadoptionever and #whygaysshouldn'tbeallowedtoadopt.   Oh Lordy, thought I.  Is this what matters to him?  It certainly seemed to be, as the peculiarly warped mirror of that social media presented Bergoglio to the world.

Couldn't it have been #behumble, or #loveyourneighbor, or #jesuslovesyou or #careforthepoor?   As the old hymn goes, They will know we are Christians by our #hashtags, by our #hashtags....

Sigh.

But I didn't give in to the temptation to tweet about it, because I don't really know Francis yet.  Wisdom holds it's tongue, and watches until it is sure.  Best to think, to stand back, to observe, and not to give in to the 24 second news cycle.  Human beings are complex creatures, not easily reduced to #hashtags or their most extreme perspectives.

A social media platform's got to know its limitations.

The Bad News of Jesus Christ

Yesterday morning, my alarm woke me as it always does, at 5:40 AM.  Ah, the joy of having a high-schooler with a crazy early schedule.

My clock radio is an ancient Sony the color of milk and caramel.  It's a DreamSmasher, or something to that effect.  It dates back to the mid 1980s, so it chargeth not my iPhone nor hath it any connectors, but it still gets the job done, dadblangit.  It wakes me either with a totally uncustomizable alarm klaxon, which works but is horrible, or by turning on the radio, which is a bit better.  I keep it set to the FM news station that pitches us traffic and weather on the eights.

It's good to know what's going on.

So when I woke, I woke to a conversation between a guest and a host, talking about the departure of the Pope.  They were talking about a potential replacement for Benedict, and going through a list of Cardinals who might be tapped to be the Servus Servorum Dei.

The guest seemed excited about a particular Italian Cardinal, who he was reasonably sure had a shot at it.

"I see what you mean," said the host.  "That could totally work.  So, if he does get chosen, when do you think that Rome will be destroyed?"

And I said, Hwwaaaaat?

Although the non-digital dial did not show it, I must have bumped the knob that adjusts the radio overnight, nudging it slightly up the dial.  I was no longer on 103.5 FM.  This was a Christian station.

The conversation went on, with both the guest and the caller actively speculating on the likelihood that the city of Rome would be destroyed by a small asteroid in the next few months.  "It seems that's where we're headed," said the host.  "That's certainly what the prophecy suggests," said the guest, citing some bits of John of Patmos.

They seemed sort of bouncy about it, excited that this papal transition might be a harbinger of the end times.   They were particularly excited at the prospect that an ancient, historic city, one currently home to two point eight million human beings, might imminently be obliterated by a large hunk of space rock.

What this sort of apocalypse-porn fantasizing has to do with being a disciple of Jesus of Nazareth is utterly beyond me.  If you were unfamiliar with what Jesus taught, and this was your first encounter with Christianity, what would this say?

Sigh.

Papa Calls It Quits

So il Papa has resigned.  Pope Benedict the Somethingth, realizing that the limitations of his aging body and mind were making it impossible to fulfill his vocation, announced to the great sprawling fellowship of his ancient community that he's stepping down.

As a progressive, I'm aware that many leftists view him with snarky dislike.  I've nonetheless developed something of an appreciation for the current pontiff.  Yeah, he's completely wrong in a Jesus-would-be-pissed sort of way about women, and is a looooong way off on a number of other fronts.  But as he's talked about ecology, and nationalism, and militarism, and the radically imbalanced mess that our economic system has inflicted on humankind, I find myself in agreement with him at least as often as I am in disagreement.

Always best to live into that place of grace, eh?

And in showing the courage to stand down, I find my respect for him only increasing.   It's hard to step down.  Yeah, I know, there's precedent, and that it's been six hundred years in the Catholic Church is like two pastorates ago in most American Protestant churches.   But in an institution that has spent five centuries defining the Papacy as a vocation that only ends when you stop breathing, it takes particular boldness to stand against that expectation and to say: "This isn't working.  I'm not right for this any more.  I'm done here."

Having watched pastors cling to failed ministries, and watched churches cling to pastors who have long since passed their expiration date, I know how hard it is to let go.   Our individual egos and the collective sense of self-identity that can be woven up in a Beloved Leader often cripple the vibrancy of our fellowships.

A church can come to revolve around the story of that One Special Person, who steps in front of Jesus and becomes the embodiment of their identity.  It happens in countless fellowships, some small, and many large.  In the little church, and in the big, that individual becomes the defining feature of the community.  Their story becomes the story of the church.  Without them, the church is lost.  That's a dangerous thing.  Even if someone is blessed with particular gifts as a leader, a community cannot be a healthy fellowship if that is the case.

That way of being stifles the spirituality of everyone who participates in it.

Stepping down is doubly hard on the ego of the leader.  "I am the pastor of this church," we say to ourselves, and we say it enough that it weaves its way into our self-understanding.  We cannot imagine ourselves in the absence of that relationship.  We cannot envision what it might be like if another human being were to step into that role.

We can't bring ourselves to prepare a community for our leaving, even though we know that we are dust and ashes, and that the time for our departure will inevitably come.

Real leadership does that, but we often struggle with it.

So welcome back to being Joseph, Joseph.