All that matters is that one is being created anew. Galatians 6:15
When I was a kid growing up down in Meade County, Ky., I can remember going to a wrestling match once and a circus once. I can’t remember too much about the wrestling match, but I do remember something from the circus quite distinctly — a certain clown.
The clown had on red-striped baggy pants. From his baggy pants, I remember him pulling out a banana and peeling it ever so ceremoniously. When he had the peeling pulled back, he took the banana and threw it over his shoulder and began to eat the peeling. Well, we kids howled with laughter.
I am not sure why I would remember such a detail, but it has stuck with me all these years. I realized recently that it is not only something a clown would do to make kids laugh, but something we adults do all the time. We obsess about accidentals and overlook the essentials.
We do it, in particular, when it comes to religion. We obsess on its externals and overlook what is truly important — religion’s whole point — a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. We believe that if the institution would only be perfect, we would have no problem believing and following Jesus.
For the last 50 years, we have been obsessed with reforming the structures of the church. We have tended to operate out of a romantic notion that all the ills of the church reside with the institution — so that if only we could reform it, we ourselves would be better Christians.
The truth quite often is the other way around. The institution will get better when each one of us are reformed and transformed.
We have finally reached the point, after 50 years of obsessing on church structures — on the banana peeling if you will — that people are beginning to ask “where is the banana?”
Some of you might remember the old lady in the Wendy’s commercials, when she noticed just how small the meat patty was inside such a large hamburger bun, asked, “Where’s the beef?”
This, I believe, is what the ministry of Pope Francis is all about! He is focused on the essence of Christianity rather than the religious forms of the church. He has not done away with those forms, he is just not focusing on them as much.
Like a banana, transported from Central America, needs a good peeling to get to our breakfast tables, the essence of our religion needs a worthy container to transport it down through the ages. St. Paul talked so famously about that “earthenware jar that holds a great treasure.”
Those who obsess on preserving old religious forms, while neglecting its essence, engage in a form of idolatry, while those who think they can be spiritual without being religious are being naïve.
Religion needs personal conversion to give it heart, but the experience of personal conversion needs religion to keep it honest.
Father J. Ronald Knott
