by Fr. Tom
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CHARACTER COUNTS
The Season of Lent has arrived, and once again we are called to examine our lives from the inside out. I don't think that is as easy as it once was. Other generations were schooled in what was called the examination of conscience. That is now considered oppressive and retrograde. To stress character over free expression, and the examination of conscience over impulse, is essentially absent in either public or private discourse. We have become captive to the cult of self esteem, and any stress on culpability and responsibility that threatens self esteem is simply not tolerated. Today, what really counts is not character in the face of obstacles, but competence and charisma in the face of a TV camera. In the process, what we observe is not a celebration of character but the assassination of it. We attack our opponents on lack of it, but say nothing about building it. The result is not the erosion of the necessity for leadership, but the diminishment of the qualifications for it. It's not that we don't have leaders; it’s that they are so mediocre. We have succumbed to the cult of personality and celebrity and to confusion between the leader and the led. With the accent on polls, for example, leadership becomes codependent on followership and the leader of the people slumps into a popular panderer, dependent on what the latest polls say, (Os Guiness, Character Counts). President Eisenhower said that the essential qualities of a great leader are ‘vision, integrity, courage, understanding, the power of articulation and profundity of character.’ Although some might want to add other qualities, like decisiveness and a sense of providence, the Christian would assert that character is an essential and necessary virtue for good leadership in every area of life.
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The second thing that is revealed in any stress on the examination of conscience is the abhorrence of anything Christian that would make its appeal to a public consensus. The application and appreciation of Christian insights into anything that has to deal with the public sphere is discounted and resisted, especially in the area of character and value. Hospital chaplains, for example, are at liberty to speak of faith in Jesus only if a patient asks first. I have wrestled long with this, and the results have not always been happy. I am quite in agreement with the observation that a patient in a hospital bed constitutes a captive audience, and to insert something alien to that person when they have no other recourse but to listen is an abuse of authority and power. I accept that. My complaint is deeper...there is no consensus about what constitutes healing, the reality of the soul, confession and absolution, the forgiveness of sins and the reconciliation of relationships, and the need for God. The hospital may well not be the place to get to these things, but the problem is that our patients are not bringing with them any familiarity with these matters. The Christian consensus on what makes for the healthy life is just one option among many, and the Christian option is increasingly gagged (See The Gagging of God by Carlson). All of this, and much more convinces me that it is tremendously important to see that the scriptural revelation is as relevant today as it was 2000 years ago. The Temptations of Jesus were very real for him but they are also very real for us. But, culturally speaking, we lack familiarity with the means of grace that were appropriated by Jesus: the Spirit, the scriptures, and a strong sense of vocation. Nor are we conversant about Evil . Evil is real, but perhaps the greatest weakness in people’s thinking is that they have very little appreciation or aptitude for discussions about and insights into evil. There have been some important books, but, for a large part, they are unread and unknown. C. S. Lewis wrote the book, Screwtape Letters, about conversations with the devil; Scott Peck wrote The People of the Lie, about people who do really evil things, especially to their children and Carl Meninger wrote, Whatever Happened to Sin, but that was years ago. Instead, what we have is the celebration of vampires!!
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What is missing, and what the local church must insert again into community conversation, is the stress that Jesus put on character. We must see again that the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness included a test of character. Jesus is not alone when the evil one tempts that we turn our appetites into gods, rest our ambitions on compromise and our reputations on publicity stunts. Yet he is quite alone when he stresses that character is an essential element to love. To further this conversation, let me encourage you to take part in our Lenten study beginning this Wednesday. Life Shapes is a course on appropriating Christian disciplines into your daily life. If I told you it would be character building, you probably wouldn't come...but it will be, nonetheless.
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Fr. Tom
frtom@fcec.us
