Because Best By Weakness ...

I came across an interesting article by Michael J. Buckley, S.J., the Bea Professor of Theology at Santa Clara University - Because Best By Weakness ... - at the website of the New York Province Jesuits (the whole thing can be downloaded there as a pdf). The article deals with the question of what it takes to be a good priest ... Fr. Buckley puts forth the quality of weakness as a defining virtue. I think the points he makes are good ones, and valid not only for Catholic priests, but for all ministers/priests (male and female). Here below is some of the article .....

*********************************

There is a tendency among us Americans, common and obvious enough, recommended by common sense and successful practice, to estimate a person’s aptitude for a profession or for a career by listing his strengths ...

The tendency is to transfer this method of evaluation to the priesthood, to estimate aman by his gifts and talents, to line up his positive achievements and his capacity for more, to understand his promise for the future in terms of his accomplishments in the past, and to make the call within his life contingent on the attainments of personality or grace .....

I think that transfer is disastrous. There is a different question, one proper to the priesthood as of its very essence, if not uniquely proper to it: Is this man weak enough to be a priest? Is this man deficient enough so that he cannot ward off significant suffering from his life, so that he lives with a certain amount of failure, so that he feels what it is to be an average man? Is there any history of confusion, of self-doubt, of interior anguish? Has he had to deal with fear, come to terms with frustrations, or accept deflated expectations? These are critical questions and they probe for weakness .....

Weakness relates us profoundly with other people. It allows us to feel with them the human condition, the human struggle and darkness and anguish that call out for salvation. in the weakness that seems to threaten it ..... One of the most debilitating aspects of American society is that we do not authentically admit the cost in a struggle and almost never allow real fear to surface. Yet most of us must struggle to make a living, must wonder about our future and about our sense of personal value in a market
economy, must deal with the half-articulated and half-understood problems of our children, must fear what our death will be like -- what it will mean to die; we must deal with the temptation to believe that life is without meaning, that actions are inconsequential and selfish, and that other people are to be used. Being a priest does not mean, must not mean, that we are excised from all of that, as if called to deal with others as from a higher eminence; that the struggle for meaning and value and fidelity to the Gospel has been completed in our lives, and that we now deal out of our strengths ...

Secondly, weakness more profoundly relates us to God, because it provides the ambit or the arena in which his grace can be seen, in which his sustaining presence can reveal itself, in which even his power can become manifest ..... It is in this experience, the experience of personal weakness, and of having read even limitations as the presence of Christ, of having trusted in him in darkness and having found that one can trust him -- it is the experience that joins Christ to his disciples, as he comes to them walking on the waters.

There is a collective consequence that follows from all of this. We must make such a life possible for one another. We must support one another in weakness, forgiving one another our daily faults and carrying one another’s burdens ..... It is not our weakness that hinders the compassion and the goodness of God. It is that often what others count, our strengths, now become the criteria by which we distance ourselves from others not so gifted, interests through which we discover others as boring or unproductive, dedications and religious attainments by which we judge others as mediocre or obviously compromising ..... The greatest protection against this terrible pride -- masked as religious seriousness or apostolic commitment, as purity about the things of God, or as honesty about the qualities of men -- is an abiding sense of our own weakness, that searing reminder that as we are strengthened by one who has loved us, so we should support one another .....

******************************