As I write this, the pope’s new exhortation, “Amoris Laetitia” (“The Joy of Love”), has just been released. I haven’t yet read the document, but as I scroll through the newsfeed, I see a post with this lead: “Pope restores conscience to its proper place in the church and asks pastors to meet people where they are.”1 Yes! I like this post, and I like the Jesuit journalist-priest who wrote it. In fact, I love them both, but resist choosing the cute, two-toned heart on Facebook’s new reactions menu.
I keep scrolling—and the lovefest fizzles. I see another post about the exhortation. It claims that “while Pope Francis … ‘values feminism,’ he fails to include the modern sexism upheld by the Church’s hierarchy as one of the ‘patriarchal cultures that considered women inferior,’” a sexism which has “‘burdened history.’”2
Dislike. My cute, two-toned heart sinks, morphs into a teary-face emoticon. Even though I haven’t read the exhortation, I’m pretty sure this characterization is accurate. I’m pretty sure the document doesn’t shine a floodlight into the church’s misogynistic recesses. But I’m glad that some of my fellow Roman Catholics are bold enough to say that such work needs to be done.
Inner dissonance ensues. I respect both of these posts, both of these perspectives, both of these voices. I hold both to be true. Does this make me a hypocrite? Does it explain why I’m not much of an activist within the church? Does it explain why I dare to “like,” but not to “love”? Does it make me intellectually lazy?
The Franciscan priest and teacher Richard Rohr—who relentlessly recommends non-dualistic, “both/and” thinking—says that “when you don’t split everything up according to what you like and what you don’t like, you leave the moment open, you let it be what it is in itself, and you let it speak to you…. Stay with that necessary dilemma, and it can make you wise.”3
At this moment, though, I don’t feel wise or expansive. I feel torn. I feel confused. I feel like I need to take a stand—to defend the pope or go to a rally or click on an angry face or leave the church altogether. (That would show ’em!)
And then a passage from Colossians (1:16–18) slides into my mind like a love note under a door. “In him all things hold together,” it goes, “whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers”—governing entities, yes, but also the reigning discourses, opinions, positions, and spokespersons thereof. They all hold together in Christ. They all hold together in Christ’s body, the church.
(Even, I wager, the ones that make us wince—for we know as a Paschal people that Good Friday is always entangled with Easter Sunday.)
Which is precisely what allows me to stay, for now, with “the necessary dilemma” of the church—the Roman Catholic one, yes, but also the whole church, the Christian church, the small-c catholic one. This church is the very body that, by nature, allows me to take more than one view at a time. It’s the body in which the work of holding hard things is shared, where I can pass a heavy load to someone else—psychically, spiritually, emotionally—if my arms get tired. It’s the community itself, broken and passed, which makes the Christ paradox present. Community lets us be so much more than we are, so much more than we can bear to be. It lets us love with a two-toned—or infinitely toned—heart.
Why are your arms tired?
What truth might you let other members of your community hold?
What dilemma might you let rest in Christ?
