Wood over at his excellent blog has been on a roll recently and I wanted to expand on some ideas he has introduced.
Trials and Tribe-ulations
One of these ideas is the idea of “tribe”. He has suggested that one of the things that makes the Catholic Church both special and functional is it’s function as a tribe, united by Christian love. The word “tribe” is evocative to me of early human society, based on family units and where all the members work to the good of the whole. The uniting feature of these ancient tribes was blood relation. The undisputed leader of the tribe was usually a paternal or maternal figure and every member of the tribe had some role to play.
The Church is a tribe, united by the blood of the covenant which is thicker than the water of the womb. It is not uncommon to hear people referred to as “brothers and sisters in Christ”, which is both literal (by adoption) and figurative (by tribe). The Catholic Church today is riddled with many illnesses, and one of them is factionalism. But factionalism within the Church comes down to feuds between brothers over who serves Father best. The important thing is indeed serving Father, and if we were able to put aside our pride it would be a lot easier to do that. Remember–do unto others as you would have them do unto you. This is both prescriptive (“I want you to treat me better, so let me show you how to treat me better through my treatment of you”) and aspirational (“I need money so I will be more giving with my own money, so the favor will be returned to me eventually”). This idea is sometimes rendered as the cliché “be the change you want to see in the world”. If you want to heal the Church then begin by healing the church as it exists around you.
A lot of the wounds of the Church are multi generational, so no one alive can really take blame for the problems nor credit for the solutions. We are all just trying to do the best we can with a mixed-bag inheritance. This is my segue into the discussion of what I will call “founding myths”.
Founding Myth Busters
We as human beings are very short sighted to our own lifetimes. We can sometimes directly experience two or three generations of our ancestors and we can sometimes live long enough to directly experience two or three generations of predecessors. And that’s about it–it’s hard for us to fathom anything else. Anything that transcends that timespan is incomprehensible to us and holds a status as something transcendent and mystical. The United States of America, we like to think, has always been the way we experience it now, and the way we experience it now is a modest improvement by the way Grandpappy experienced it, which was already quite good.
I’ll take a digression to talk about major corporations, of all things. I work for a large organization, the employees of which, if gathered into one place, would populate a small town. I remember realizing, slowly, that so much of what makes large organizations persist from one day to the next is sheer willpower. Our recordkeeping systems are fragile, our leaders are flawed, our technology is dated, but everyone keeps showing up for work. My employer, as with every employer, as with every government, as with nearly every institution, only persists because people keep showing up for some reason, and is only one bad day away from complete and utter collapse.
All that to say, if we were to actually look closely at the mystical and transcendent entities that cross our generations–they are much more fragile than we realize. They are also never ever as good as we have been taught.
I remember when I was in 5th grade, on 9/11, I lived close enough to some of the events that kids at my school had parents who could have been at risk. One of my friends mothers came to pick him up from school, but it was lunch time so she came to sit with us at the lunch table. I don’t really know how else to describe her than as a redneck. She was loud, she was unpolished, and she told it like it was. She announced to a table full of 5th graders that “Terrorists blew up the pentagon”. I didn’t believe her–that doesn’t make sense, this is America. That kind of thing isn’t possible here. When I got home from school I got to watch how possible it was on TV, replayed with immodest doom voyeurism for young and impressionable minds like mine to absorb and not understand.
The genius comedian, Norm Macdonald, has a funny quote Hambone shared with me recently: “Hey, it says here in the history books that the good guys won every time! What are the odds of that!”
Our founding myth is the comfortable lie we tell ourselves so we don’t question our base assumptions and can just keep on showing up and keeping the institutions we are a part of moving along from one day to the next. When I recently suggested in an inflammatory thread of my own devising that the American Revolution was an unjust and immoral secession from a legitimate sovereign, it popped some brains who questioned if I was even an American. Hearing this gets some people so utterly flabbergasted–it questions the most fundamental principle of their lives. The sun shines, birds fly, and God Bless America Forever. They look on the world with the same impressionable eyes that I had in 5th grade, and I was immodestly slapping the horse-blinders from their face and expecting them to thank me. Founding Myths are always a lie, because they have to be.
Bastard’s Apple
This is also true in a way of family history. Family Lore is a kind of myth we tell ourselves, to help us feel connected to all the generations we can’t experience. My family happened to make no bones about it’s hubris. My namesake and great grandfather left his wife and started a new family in the Netherlands when my grandfather was very young. It makes our genealogical records somewhat complicated because after a certain point it’s hard to tell where the lineage actually connects. Families and relationships are messy things, and so we smooth over the bad parts and feed our kids the edible bits of the rotten fruit so they get an idealized version of the story, and don’t learn about all the skeletons in the closet. The skeletons aren’t really valuable, but when we go digging and learn about our skeletons, it is always shocking–we have tasted the rest of the rotten fruit, the wormy, moldy bits that don’t sit so well in our stomachs.
My priest told me about this in the context of generational healing. It is possible and important to pray over our family tree. We exist today as the fruit of that tree and any rotten fruit has not fallen far from the tree. Often if we look back far enough we can see repeated variations of the same themes in our family. By praying for healing, we can graft our branch onto the tree of life, and baptize the tree for a while. It takes effort to keep the tree attached, but starting out strong can surely help. In my case, my family was not Catholic when I converted, but I am the only name-bearing male of my generation. Many past Scoot’s have not been Catholic, but every future Scoot of my line will be–at least for a while, God willing. I don’t know how far back I would have to go to find a Catholic member of the Scoot family but I am sure it would take me back to Europe in the 19th century or earlier.
The important thing, then, is not that our past is muddy and rotten and dirty and tarnished. That matters a lot less than the fact that our future can be baptized, healed, and glorified. This is the source of Hope, not just for us, but perhaps for well meaning souls of our ancestors who are waiting in purgatory for someone in their lineage to figure out the right path and pray for them to get over the hump and into heaven.
AMDG
Times-Dispatch of Vichy Earth 
