From where the faithful sit

He wonders if priests can ever put themselves in the shoes of the faithful sitting at the pews through a regular Sunday sermon. He had been taught that if you want to communicate effectively it is imperative that you must be able to look at what you have to say with complete disinterest and judge it that way. In other words, to read your own message as if you had not written it. In other words, to imagine how your own readers and listeners might receive the words you try to impart.

This concept of “disinterest” is a “modernist” concept. More than a hundred years ago, thinkers had already looked keenly at how people perceive beauty and truth. They pointed out these are perceived “subjectively.” But this did not negate the possibility of their being universal. Subjective truth and beauty are all very well. But it is universal truth and beauty that would be loved and affect the greater majority of people. Only the universal is immutable and thus persist through time.

But for truth and beauty to be universal, they must pass the test of true disinterested judgement. In other words, the object or words to be judged must seem beautiful and truthful to someone who has absolutely little to do with the object or words.

The capacity to judge their own works this way is precisely what good communicators or artists try to develop in themselves in the course of learning their craft and art. It seems like a contradiction but it is nevertheless the contradiction every writer or artist must somehow resolve. It is not easy. Indeed, it requires a mastery of self-knowledge and a lot of hard work. One must learn to immerse one’s self in the discipline itself and to “live” the life it requires. If one seeks to be a painter, one must look at great paintings done over history and set one’s work against these.

Were it a question of homilies, then the priest must learn to put himself there, inside his church to listen to himself speak. There, where he is seated he might as well ask if he is enjoying himself by the words from the pulpit. And since beauty and truth are not entirely received through the mediation of reason, then he might as well also ask himself if the words make him feel good with their beauty. He is after all, before anything else, sharing with his flock the universal beauty and truth of God. And he might as well hark back to an old universal rule: It is better to say not enough than to say too much.

He would do well to wonder whether this truth and beauty may be contained inside another discussion of who are the best politicians to run our country for the coming years. He should ask himself if there is a place for that discussion here.

After all, any endorsement he makes of a candidate for, say, mayor will always be received inside a context of subjectivity. Cynical as people are, they would be inclined to link his endorsement to some hidden manner of association such as that they play mahjong together regularly or some contribution the candidate may have made towards the priest’s interests. This is inevitable since the candidacy of any candidate whether mayor or senator can hardly qualify as a universal topic of discussion.

This is not to say that there is nothing about politics that qualifies as a universal topic. In fact, there are many. The whole concept of liberating our people from poverty and exploitation is only one. And this is an issue which is political by its very nature. People look up to priests to guide them through this is because they expect priests to be better educated than most. This expectation is hardly of a divine root. The contributions they make every Sunday funds the operation of seminaries and religious schools everywhere. The quality of every homily from every Mass is for many their most immediate measure of how well these monies are spent.

But the discussion of politics fails entirely whenever this issue is brought down to the level of who to actually vote for in the coming elections. And the reason for this immediately has to do with the types of candidates actually out there. Is there anyone who qualifies as absolutely deserving of a “Catholic” vote? Do they qualify on sacred or even universal grounds?

The ultimate result of the church putting forward its list of candidates hurts the church more than helps it. The act of voting is truly a sacred act. That fact is at least universally true. But we come to the depths of irony and contradiction when we see how current church involvement in that act now dirties this sacredness rather than enhances it. It is easy to understand exactly how. We need only review the records of who they are asking the faithful to vote for.