Real Life Disciples: The radical call of discipleship

For the past several weeks, our Church has been overshadowed by a dark cloud of scandal. It has been a sad time, and one filled with questions and confusion. Unfortunately, I don’t think it will be ending anytime soon. I have had many people ask me, “How did this happen?”
 
To answer that question, it might help to have a cursory look at the ordinary course of sin and evil. Sin usually starts with a fleeting thought of temptation. Temptation becomes sin when the fleeting thought is fully considered, even dwelt upon. The temptation crystalizes into a sinful act. A sinful act done repeatedly can become a habit in our life. Habitual sin, if not stopped, will eventually become a pattern. A pattern of sin, gone unchecked, will become a lifestyle.
 
During a painful time in my life where this reality was most evident was in 1999. I was living in Colorado and was a youth minister at the Catholic church less than two miles from Columbine High School.
 
More than 200 teens from our parish were students at the high school the day of the Columbine shooting. Three of them were murdered and dozens more injured; some left with permanent disabilities. In the days, weeks and months that followed, the driving question was, “How did this happen?” I tried to comfort parents and teens. The more the story unfolded, the more confusing it got. How could two teenagers, so young themselves, be capable of doing something so horrible?
 
Understanding the basic course of evil sheds some light. The perpetrators didn’t just wake up one morning and start shooting their friends at school, and some priests and bishops didn’t just start one day to molest children and teenagers either. There were much deeper patterns, habits and lifestyles that developed over years of unchecked temptations and sinful acts, small at first, but eventually growing in significance and seriousness. In my last article, I talked about how the real mark of discipleship is gradual progress through good “habits.” Unfortunately, the opposite also is true. Incredible evil is fed by small, sinful acts repeated over time until the evil grows as a force in one’s life.
 
What’s going on in the Church today has everything to do with discipleship and is deeply connected with where we as a Church in this archdiocese are heading in the coming years. The call to discipleship is a radical one. It’s marked by small incremental steps toward virtue. If the measuring stick of discipleship is honesty and consistency, then the measure for the pursuit of evil would be consistency and self-deception.
 
To grow in evil, you first have to deceive yourself because you are acting in contradiction to who you were created to be. But, with a broken human nature and an inclination toward sin, that self-deception is an easy jump to make.
 
Discipleship calls us to honesty with ourselves. We are called to see all things through the light of Christ, and to allow that light to shine in every area of our life, especially the dark areas marred by sin. The heart of the current crisis in the Church is ultimately a failure of discipleship: leaders who somewhere along the line let go of that radical call, and allowed small, sinful acts to grow and grow to become a powerful force for evil. And, other leaders fell into a different sin of fear and self-protection by covering it up, but a sin rooted in a very similar thread of deception.
 
Authentic discipleship is founded on truth: “I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life” (John 14:6). And, because of that reality, discipleship is necessarily rooted in honesty and transparency. It fundamentally requires me to be the same person, wherever I am, whoever I am with, maybe even most importantly when I am with myself.
 
“How did this happen?” I don’t think that is a difficult question to answer. Much more difficult is, “Where do we go from here?” Our response to this dark time must be a return to the radical call of discipleship, for all of us.
 
We need to spend time in repentance and reparation for this terrible sin that has happened in our Church. We need to spend time in prayer and intercession for our Church and for the future, especially for those who have been harmed by this evil. We need to call our leaders to change, to greater transparency, and to an unyielding commitment to root out this evil from every corner of the Church.
 
But, more importantly, we all need to respond to the radical call to be disciples in this world ourselves. That fundamentally requires each and every one of us to a disciple’s “self-honesty.” We can’t give permission to any sin in our lives and allow it to gradually grow until it manifests itself as evil. We must have an uncompromising commitment to rooting out sin in our own lives, and pursuing the freedom offered to us by Christ.
 
The call of discipleship is ultimately a call of obedience, “the call to follow the proper leader … it is a summons to a willing obedience to the One who is the source of all life, who made us and who leads us to ourselves. ‘Lose your life and you will find it’ is a paradoxical principle running through all the teaching of Jesus.”
Real Life Disciples: The radical call of discipleship
 
For the past several weeks, our Church has been overshadowed by a dark cloud of scandal. It has been a sad time, and one filled with questions and confusion. Unfortunately, I don’t think it will be ending anytime soon. I have had many people ask me, “How did this happen?”
 
To answer that question, it might help to have a cursory look at the ordinary course of sin and evil. Sin usually starts with a fleeting thought of temptation. Temptation becomes sin when the fleeting thought is fully considered, even dwelt upon. The temptation crystalizes into a sinful act. A sinful act done repeatedly can become a habit in our life. Habitual sin, if not stopped, will eventually become a pattern. A pattern of sin, gone unchecked, will become a lifestyle.
 
During a painful time in my life where this reality was most evident was in 1999. I was living in Colorado and was a youth minister at the Catholic church less than two miles from Columbine High School.
 
More than 200 teens from our parish were students at the high school the day of the Columbine shooting. Three of them were murdered and dozens more injured; some left with permanent disabilities. In the days, weeks and months that followed, the driving question was, “How did this happen?” I tried to comfort parents and teens. The more the story unfolded, the more confusing it got. How could two teenagers, so young themselves, be capable of doing something so horrible?
 
Understanding the basic course of evil sheds some light. The perpetrators didn’t just wake up one morning and start shooting their friends at school, and some priests and bishops didn’t just start one day to molest children and teenagers either. There were much deeper patterns, habits and lifestyles that developed over years of unchecked temptations and sinful acts, small at first, but eventually growing in significance and seriousness. In my last article, I talked about how the real mark of discipleship is gradual progress through good “habits.” Unfortunately, the opposite also is true. Incredible evil is fed by small, sinful acts repeated over time until the evil grows as a force in one’s life.
 
What’s going on in the Church today has everything to do with discipleship and is deeply connected with where we as a Church in this archdiocese are heading in the coming years. The call to discipleship is a radical one. It’s marked by small incremental steps toward virtue. If the measuring stick of discipleship is honesty and consistency, then the measure for the pursuit of evil would be consistency and self-deception.
 
To grow in evil, you first have to deceive yourself because you are acting in contradiction to who you were created to be. But, with a broken human nature and an inclination toward sin, that self-deception is an easy jump to make.
 
Discipleship calls us to honesty with ourselves. We are called to see all things through the light of Christ, and to allow that light to shine in every area of our life, especially the dark areas marred by sin. The heart of the current crisis in the Church is ultimately a failure of discipleship: leaders who somewhere along the line let go of that radical call, and allowed small, sinful acts to grow and grow to become a powerful force for evil. And, other leaders fell into a different sin of fear and self-protection by covering it up, but a sin rooted in a very similar thread of deception.
 
Authentic discipleship is founded on truth: “I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life” (John 14:6). And, because of that reality, discipleship is necessarily rooted in honesty and transparency. It fundamentally requires me to be the same person, wherever I am, whoever I am with, maybe even most importantly when I am with myself.
 
“How did this happen?” I don’t think that is a difficult question to answer. Much more difficult is, “Where do we go from here?” Our response to this dark time must be a return to the radical call of discipleship, for all of us.
 
We need to spend time in repentance and reparation for this terrible sin that has happened in our Church. We need to spend time in prayer and intercession for our Church and for the future, especially for those who have been harmed by this evil. We need to call our leaders to change, to greater transparency, and to an unyielding commitment to root out this evil from every corner of the Church.
 
But, more importantly, we all need to respond to the radical call to be disciples in this world ourselves. That fundamentally requires each and every one of us to a disciple’s “self-honesty.” We can’t give permission to any sin in our lives and allow it to gradually grow until it manifests itself as evil. We must have an uncompromising commitment to rooting out sin in our own lives, and pursuing the freedom offered to us by Christ.
 
The call of discipleship is ultimately a call of obedience, “the call to follow the proper leader … it is a summons to a willing obedience to the One who is the source of all life, who made us and who leads us to ourselves. ‘Lose your life and you will find it’ is a paradoxical principle running through all the teaching of Jesus.”