Private, Public, and Pantry.

Reflections on St. Francis de Sales.

One of the most fundamental battles being waged behind the lines today concerns what is properly public and what is properly private.  It is a battle because there is a concerted and vicious effort to consign to the private region of life anything to do with matters of faith, and to prevent them from entering the public region of life.  The effort is vicious because there is punishment in store for those who do not get with the program and leave their faith at home.  Those who wage this battle (knowingly or unknowingly) against faith and the people who profess it seem to consider themselves somehow modern and advanced, leading society in a manner and to a place that no one has contemplated before.  I was reminded today that, in that aspect of the affair, the joke is on them.

Today at Sunday Mass, I arrived to find that the church had been prepared in the liturgical colour of white, rather than the green expected for Sundays in ordinary time.  I surmised that perhaps our parish was jumping the liturgical gun by one day, and I turned out to be right.  The next day, January 24^th, would be the feast of St. Francis de Sales.  Our parish was celebrating him on the Sunday the day before, which, given that it is the Parish of St. Francis de Sales, is hardly untoward.  St. Francis is the patron saint of writers and journalists, which is fitting because he was a man with a message.  His message puts the lie to the proposition that faith is a properly private matter, unlike what one hears from those who write and report in a manner consonant with the message of this age.

St. Francis was first and foremost a kind and gentle soul.  A Bishop himself, he rather exemplified in his life, works, and writings the admonition of an early Bishop, St. Ignatius of Antioch, to stand like a beaten anvil.  In the midst of Calvinist advances and successes in gaining temporal power, he was Bishop of Geneva where they had ensconced themselves.  He faced much worse than the unflattering editorial comment that seems to strike fear into the hearts of many prelates and religious leaders these days.  Yet he persisted with his message and his works.  A consequence is that today he is not exactly universally admired by Christians outside the Catholic Church.  That notwithstanding, his message is as valid and pertinent today as it was in his time.  It is, arguably, more pertinent, and to everyone, in today’s society.

Hard core secularists will permit, if not applaud, the keeping of matters of faith in private places, never to invade the public square.  St. Francis called believers to quite the opposite.  Not only did he call them, he pointed out to them that theirs was no less valid an expression of faith and faithfulness as they brought their faith into ordinary life than what might be envisaged as accompanying what is termed a “religious” life.  He spoke directly to those who lived in ordinary society, doing ordinary things, and in an idiom that embraced, rather than shunned, those things in the context of a life of faith.  For instance, he wrote:

“Let us willingly leave the lofty heights to the souls who have been raised so high: we merit not so exalted a rank in the service of God: we shall be only too happy to serve him in his kitchen and pantry: to be his lackeys, porters, and chamber-maids; it is for him afterwards, if it seems good to him, to advance us to his privy council.”

We can, he assured us, attain a devout and spiritual life no matter what our position is in society.  He thereby assures us that our spiritual life can be properly positioned in society, and certainly need not be separate and apart from it.  St. Francis speaks of kitchens and pantries, places of ordinary work.  And he does so in a manner that indicates they are not private places in our personal lives, but work places. They are not our own places, but places where we do the work of another.  This call to service is patently not a call to withdraw.  It is antithetical to the calls made in society to exclude matters of faith from our public affairs.

Here behind the lines, those calls are all around us.  They are disguised sometimes, but not well enough to mask their real content.  There is a mildly amusing series of ads being shown on TV by an advertising council.  In one scene, an adolescent girl is about to exit her bedroom window, and a music (well, lyrical) group intones that she is on her way to the library.  The tag line of the ad is that dressing it up doesn’t make it true.  Not to be outdone, aquaculture operators (aka fish farmers) have an ad that shows parents coming home to a trashed house, and their son indicating the cat was the culprit.  As the cat is put out, the tag line indicates we should not believe everything we hear from authoritative sources.  Let’s looks at a couple of messages, and examine them for content.

Saskatchewan Appeal Court judges have recently ruled that the province’s marriage commissioners must either marry same sex couples or quit, their religious views not withstanding.  The ostensible reason is because of charter guarantees in the constitution.  But is that all that this ruling constitutes, a balancing of legal points?  Would that it were!  It has two additional effects, at least.  It brutally tears religious faith from the living of one’s life in Canada, and by fiat seeks to thrust it into some vessel where it is hermetically sealed from any and all considerations pertaining to the living of that life.  And second, it is nothing less than vicious coercion to ensure that conformity ensues, in the form of a direct and malignant threat against the livelihood of those who seek to live their lives according to the convictions of their Christian faith.  It might be suggested in many quarters that these are not the intentions of the ruling – that these are merely side effects that are somehow unavoidable.  Given the context in which this ruling has been rendered, I would strongly suggest that anyone who professes a religious faith, and seeks to order their lives according to the tenets of that faith, think very, very hard before they swallow this sugarcoated pill.  The pill is no placebo.

The second message gives some insight into the context of the delivery of the decision.  It will perhaps be helpful in providing information on whether or not the whole concept of living ones life according to the convictions of ones faith (particularly if that faith be Christian) is under attack in some general way.  It was a message that arrived in my work email inbox about ten years ago, as an event known as the “pride parade” was about to take place.  It was sent on behalf or a third level executive of the public service (I confirmed that it had indeed ben authorized by the executive shortly after I received it), and it was a coercion I must admit I did not expect.  With respect to the parade, which is a rather gaudy, raunchy, and unseemly spectacle, quite part from what it promotes, it went well beyond informing me of its occurrence, or even the participation of the local branch of the government formation in it.  Using the not inconsiderable pressure and influence of position and level of the sponsoring sender, the email informed me:

… staff will be walking in the parade under their “Celebration Diversity in the Workplace” banner.  I encourage everyone to support this year’s Pride  events by participating in the parade or by being a spectator along the West End route.

So then, I was being “encouraged,” in the name of this high official, to ignore the teaching of the Church, and my conscience, and participate in, or support, this event that absolutely spat in the face of Christian teaching and of the Church.  And therefore, mine, too.  I didn’t, of course.  In fact, I lodged an official complaint against this official.  It was determined that no wrong was done (not unexpectedly), but I was offered an apology for the “obvious discomfort” I “felt.”  There was no point in going further.  A fatuous claim was made that there had been no choice made in choosing which “life style” to support on the part of the government formation (and JFK’s shooting in Dallas was not a political action, according to that logic), and I never again saw such a missive promulgated.  Still, I am hard put to conclude that the people responsible didn’t know precisely what they were doing.

So what are we facing, here behind the lines?  A simple and unintended dissonance between differing notes being sounded in all innocence? Or, perhaps one of the most malignant attempts possible to banish faith from the public square?   Courts have incredible power, and no citizen is exempt from being subjected to it.  You can’t get on with life and opt out of the courts.  And the formation that sent me the “encouragement”?  Well, if you make money, you are compelled to deal with them annually, too.  Try to opt out of that, and, you guessed it, the courts will have something to say.  So it’s not at all inappropriate to conclude that there is a deliberate and widespread (if not perhaps really well coordinated) effort in governmental formations to turf faith from the structuring of public life, and partaking therein. It has become so ubiquitous that if we don’t notice it, it’s for the same reason a fish doesn’t feel wet.

To read St. Francis’s “Introduction to the Devout Life” (and I recommend you do) is to encounter the reality that, for the vast majority of believers, those commonly called the laity, bringing one’s faith to bear immanently in the living of one’s ordinary life is nothing less than what is expected of the believing Christian.  Indeed, it is hard to picture anyone who professes any faith not bringing it so to bear.  And yet this is precisely what is under attack by governing formations these days.  We had better realize that we are facing an attack, and that it is a pernicious attack, one that strikes at the very heart of living one’s faith.  The last thing we can abide here behind the lines is assuming the classic pose of the ostrich in the face of this.  And it’s way, way too late to leave religion out of politics when governing formation behave the way they are behaving.  They have made that quite impossible, and if there are consequences, they are responsible for them.

Mind you, there is every reason to be hopeful.  Christians have, for millennia, lead devout lives, in the manner for which St. Francis provided such excellent guidance.  They have done this in the face of Imperial Romans, Nazi Germans, Soviets Communists, and Ottoman Turks, among others.  Met any of those folks lately?  Met any Christians lately?  I am quite certain that, years from now, todays tormenters will go the way of yesterday’s tormenters.  It is woeful that they will cause people of faith hardship.  It would be truly tragic if they succeeded in bullying them into trying to keep faith out of their public lives, and interactions with society, effectively stifling the faith.  And it would be best if the attempt to leave faith and God out of public life failed miserably and soon in these parts.  That scheme has been tried, most recently by the previously mentioned Nazis and Soviets, and it didn’t go all that well for anyone involved in or with it.  People of faith have a duty to see that their fellow citizens fare better than that by not giving in to these latest efforts to attach the faith.  And better yet, they have the prospect of sumptuous and generous rewards for even attempting to take the advice of St. Francis de Sales, even if they do not succeed in putting it into practice and well as did this, and other, saints.  May people of faith find these rewards, and this place become one where attempts aimed at making that impossible cease.  There’s much nourishment to be found when you work in the pantry.

 

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