On bitching about church

I had dinner last night with a new friend, a fellow from my parish who is leaving Catholicism for Orthodoxy. He is a very conservative Catholic, and was actively engaged in church activism. He is also far more cognizant of doctrine than I am. He told me that he'd come to disbelieve in a couple of key Catholic doctrines, but that he hadn't thought to investigate the Orthodox case for those doctrines until fairly recently.

Our conversation was wide-ranging, but one thing he said really stuck with me. He said that until he started going to St. Seraphim's, our parish, it had been years since he'd been happy in church. He said that he had been worn out by the constant bitching of orthodox Catholics (like himself) about everything that's wrong in the Catholic Church. Even good priests he knew fell into it. All his friends did. He did. It wore him down. He got tired of the greater part of his spiritual life being taken up by fighting. Boy, could I relate.

Here's the thing: he says, and I agree, that everything they'd bitch about is true. "The traditionalists," he said, "I never was one of them, but they sure did call a lot of things right a long time ago." So many of the things orthodox Catholics identify as serious problems in contemporary Catholicism are not mirages, or minor. This guy didn't just sit on the sidelines and complain; he got involved trying to change things. But ultimately, he burned out. He burned out in part because of the frustration resulting from throwing yourself wholeheartedly into trying to fix a problem, and getting nowhere with it because of institutional barriers, the indifference of the laity, and other things. But he also burned out because in the end, all that negativity can overwhelm one, and make it impossible to see anything other than the mess.

I suspect most Protestants don't have this problem, because if you don't like the way things are going in this church, you can go to the next one. (Though come to think of it, I know one example of a mainline Protestant who doesn't at all like what's happening in his church, but stays around because he feels a strong sense of loyalty to the church, to which his ancestors belonged). For we whose background is in liturgical churches, it's a lot harder to do -- especially if, like the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church, the ecclesial body makes exclusive claims of authority. So you hunker down and try to endure, and do some good. But you also run the risk of doing yourself in by overdosing on crisis.

I really don't know what the right answer is here. Back in my Catholic days, I'd get so fed up with the large number of Catholics who didn't want to think about the sex-abuse scandal because it presented them with questions they didn't want to confront. But for me, confronting scandal constantly drove me out of the Church. There's a big financial scandal in the Orthodox Church in America, and I have deliberately avoided getting to involved with learning about it because I know from hard experience that that sort of thing is a spiritual and emotional trap for me.

But have I now become the sort of cowardly person I used to despise? I think about this a lot. But not too much: my family needs me to be a spiritual leader, and that means I can't do what I used to do. Still, I don't know how any responsible churchman balances his (or her) duty to be a good steward of the church while maintaining enough detachment from whatever crisis is facing his church so as not to be destroyed by it. Quietism is cowardly, but its opposite is foolishly self-destructive.

I have a friend whose parents do not have a happy marriage. From what he tells me, his mother complains constantly about his father. Never cuts the dad a break. But the dad is no model husband either. What wearies my friend is that his mom has become so invested in her husband's very real flaws that she's magnified them all out of proportion. All she can see is that she's stuck in a marriage that makes her miserable. But she wouldn't dream of getting out of it, because she believes marriage is forever. What my friend says is that his mom wouldn't know what to do with herself if she left his dad: she's built an entire personality around resenting him. And she makes her husband's life miserable too, my friend says. I dunno, who can say what goes on inside any marriage? But the dynamic here, I recognize. Chances are the wife believes that if she were to put down her righteous anger at her husband, she would be acquiescing to him and his wrongdoing. So she's made herself, and her husband, totally miserable, and blinded herself to the many good things her husband has to offer (I've met the husband, and he struck me as a good and decent man).

Church life, no matter what church you belong to, is like marriage, I think. It's not like a contract, but like a love affair. If you never allow yourself to see that the dominant partner is abusing you, you become a passive accomplice to wrongdoing, and yield your moral responsibility for peace of mind and security. But once you give yourself over to constant bitching, no matter how just your complaints, you are well on your way to falling out of love.