As wheat once scattered on the hillsides
was in this bread made one,
so from the ends of the earth gather all your people home.
The Didache
When I was a kid, one of the clergy in my parish was a poster boy for what a priest should not be. He didn’t seem to believe in much except vacationing in Tuscany. He would sneak a transistor radio into the confessional on Saturday afternoons, and every penitent knew they were competing for his attention with Milton Cross and the Metropolitan Opera. Worst of all, he sucked up to the rich and openly ignored the poor. When he was reassigned to a poor parish he immediately started reading radical theologians and developing a crisis of faith. Spiritual peace returned only when the bishop relented and transferred him to a wealthy church, where he happily ministered to the country club that was literally next door to the church. Behind his back we kids called him Prince Mario, but the humor was just a cover for being scandalized. We wanted to change the world and reform the church, and Prince Mario represented everything we didn’t want to be.
Then, when I was seventeen, I fell in love with a girl from my hometown who was a social worker in Harlem. She had briefly been a novice in an order of nuns. Once in passing I made a crack to her about Prince Mario. Her reaction was fierce, and then she told me this story.
Her convent had been a rather dysfunctional place. When she had been thinking about leaving, everyone who counseled her said that she was just being tempted by weakness and discouragement, and that God undoubtedly wanted her to stick it out. Her world just kept getting more claustrophobic and depressed and frantic. And then one day the convent’s regular confessor was ill and Prince Mario filled in. All of her troubles and confusion just came pouring out, but then Prince Mario interrupted her. Ignoring the etiquette of the confessional, he turned and looked straight at her through the grille and he said, “Rosemarie, is that you? What the hell are you still doing in this madhouse?” She left the following morning and never looked back. She told me it was the best advice she had gotten in her whole life, that it had sprung her from the spiritual fantasy world she was trapped in. She had the take on Prince Mario, but she didn’t care, and she wasn’t going to listen to anyone badmouth him.
I’ve never quite recovered from being thrown so off balance that day. I was just old enough to be setting my moral compass bearings, and her words showed me I didn’t know the half of it. I expect my heroes to have clay toes — maybe a thirsty tongue or a roving eye — just to make them interesting. But I wasn’t expecting heaven’s messengers to have fundamental character flaws. I didn’t yet know, as Maureen said in her sermon two weeks ago, that human hearts are wayward and complex.
My moments of insight tend to have a shelf life of about two minutes. So every year when I read the Gospel stories of the Last Supper and see the friends that Jesus took up with, I’m still a bit shocked. I want all the Apostles to be Desmond Tutu, and instead they’re all Prince Mario. Jesus is being kind when he calls them “green wood.” They can’t stop bickering for precedence, they can’t stand up for him, they can’t even stay awake. We wouldn’t want any of them on the vestry.
And then I remember that this is the only New Creation there is. And I remember that the Lord washed their feet, just as we do tonight. That intimate and terrifying gesture has many levels of meaning, but perhaps most fundamentally Jesus says that these people are mine and I theirs, that they can be who they are and it’s okay. In fact, it’s the kingdom of God.
Aristotle thought that like seeks out like, to endorse each other. But Jesus taught us something different: that God is drawn to those who are unlike God. This is hard stuff when we see how wide that net is, nowhere harder than in Jesus’ teaching that love reaches its perfection in love of enemies. But even short of that, it means, as Mark Twain said, that heaven is going to be filled with people we couldn’t stand.
Many of us fondly remember Hugh Weaver, who always blessed us with the same words: “May we not be instruments of our own oppression.” At the time I took it as a good radical’s reminder not to let others control our identities. But more and more I think of it as a heartfelt prayer to be saved from ourselves, to rest in God’s upside-down kind of peace that certainly passes our understanding, and not to eat ourselves up in disappointment with others, not to let our weariness and our sad hearts sucker us into some dream world of a separate holy existence.
I think I’m finally coming to see that every attempt to have God without each other is just idolatry. We shop around for a god who doesn’t recruit in the late afternoon and pay full wages, who doesn’t drag in ragtag guests from the highways and byways, and a House of Bishops from the bozos on the bus. But instead we’re given a God who showers a surplus of forgiveness on this world, who cuts off the prodigal son’s apology, who puts out the best wine first for the riff-raff, who doesn’t notice any difference between the sheep and the goats. As Jim Weiss said last Sunday, God is at work whether or not we are faithful. Something deep in us very much wants to take a deep breath and join that spendthrift work and that holy indifference.
So I guess 40 years later I continue to carry Prince Mario in my pocket as a reminder of the God who is strangely at home in this shaggy-dog world, whose circle of concern is way bigger than Prince Mario’s, and whose arms are way wider than mine. And if that seems hopelessly pollyanna, well, as Archbishop Tutu says, “I’ve read the end of the book, and we win.”