Growing Calluses in a Soft Church

Lessons from the gunman

In spite of my general dislike of westerns, I periodically get caught up in one with my husband. I recently endured The Magnificent Seven with him. Then the sequel. Then the third iteration. I think there’s a 4th but I’ve had enough! Bad guys oppress people, someone hires guns (7 of them), and then there’s a shootout where so many people die that you wonder how the earth repopulated after the 1800s. It’s all very stressful. Anyway…

My painful enduring paid off in the third movie (Return of the Seven / 1966) in a brief scene between the main character, Chris (Yul Brynner), and a Catholic priest. The situation looks grim. The priest expresses discouragement about the circumstances of his flock and the gunman replies...

Chris : I'm not a religious man, Father, but I'll tell you this: they need you... more now than ever.

Priest : I've failed them.

Chris : You failed yourself. You got knocked down. Get up, Father! At least as far as your knees.

I can’t tell you much of what happened before or after that scene other than gunfire and whatnot, but I can tell you that my head snapped up from what I was reading when I heard…

Get up, Father!

I have many flaws but one of my strengths is that I’m pretty coachable and I respond well to encouragement. When Yul Brynner says GET UP! with some authority, well… I’m inclined to jump up from the couch and start looking for something to conquer.

For people of faith, the consolation of a comfortable piety isn’t generally what drives us to be more than we have been, but whatever God uses to shake us awake again. It is often the desolation and terrors of life which remind us that we cannot grow strong if we are coddling ourselves on the pretext of piety. Or maybe it’s the words of a fictional gunslinger who happened to speak into a rough patch of our weakness and failure.

Whatever it is, I surrender to it. Somebody wake me the heck up before I forget how to strive. And get it over with quickly before I lose my nerve.

The rallying words of the German priest, Fr. Delp so often come to mind since he spoke from the middle of the deeply shaken Nazi Germany:

Perhaps what we modern people need most is to be genuinely shaken, so that where life is grounded, we would feel its stability; and where life is unstable and uncertain, immoral and unprincipled, we would know that, also, and endure it.

The priest in the movie had an idea of what success looked like. He thought it would be better. Cleaner. Smoother. He wanted to write his own script but he failed. It took a secular gunfighter to remind him to simply man up and do his duty.

In the modern American Church, we are soft. Our shepherds are also often soft. We fancy that we might be capable of martyrdom but we cannot even manage to go without our goodies for a day. I’ve heard more than one priest excuse their excesses of drink, smoke, and food by explaining that their vices are justifiable replacements for the company of a woman. And many laity excuse vices in the same fashion…

Life is hard. I’ve earned this.

Faith becomes a talisman instead of a bedrock. And we grow soft.

Faith is not magical. It is not a fairy story. It is relationship and effort. It is rooted in reality and requires attentiveness to Natural and Divine Law. If you live a sedentary life, you will become weak and you won’t be able to run when called upon. You will fall short even in the easier tasks unless God suspends natural law for you.

When I most feel like I’m failing, it’s usually because I have stopped short of accepting the path I’ve been set upon. I keep trying to navigate another easier direction and end up in the weeds—utterly lost—or simply stopped on the road, content with the easy option of going nowhere. I have not reconciled with the truth that I am truly weak by my own fault. I want to sit in the air conditioned church in protected silence. Have nice children. Bake good cakes…

My sacrifices are not giving up comforts but rather which comforts shall I give up? And what do I get to keep instead? I am not in the middle of a gun fight or a nazi prison, and so I am content to be pious and soft because it feels holy.

I am like the priest caught in the sharp gaze of the hired gun who doesn’t have faith but can still see what I cannot. He sees that I have checked out of my duties under the cover of piety, that I’m out of excuses, and the battle is at my doorstep. There is no opt out for suffering. Even a healthy man without the advantage of faith knows that there is only one reasonable response…

Get up! At least to your knees. It is time.

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