Father Eric J. Banecker
Last month, I spent a few days visiting friends in the heartland. Kansas City, Mo. probably doesn’t register on most European people’s list of must-see American cities. Outside of bar-b-que, the city is surely best known right now as a perennial Super Bowl winner and the team on which Taylor Swift’s boyfriend plays.
Having spent several months diving in head-first to life as the pastor of a new (read: much larger) parish community, I took the opportunity to visit the city on my way home from an exciting Catholic conference.
The first thing you should know about Kansas City is that its airport is gorgeous. It is very, very new. So new that they haven’t even finished demolishing the old one, which one can see while driving out of the new one. Walking off the plane, deciding I wanted to freshen up before meeting my friend at his car, I looked confusedly at the “all-gender bathrooms” sign on the concourse. In Kansas City?
At this moment, I was grateful for Philadelphia’s decrepit old airport — who knows what a new East Coast airport would feature in terms of neuralgic cultural accommodations.
Like the drive from Albuquerque to Santa Fe, which I experienced as part of my first leg of the trip, the drive away from the airport reminded me of the vastness of our country. It’s not just that we have to take high-speed jets to get most places in a decent amount of time, it’s that once you get off the plane, everything is still so spread out.
It’s also entirely different. The beautiful red clay of New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo mountains looks nothing like the rolling green hills of the midwest. Yet they’re both part of our country. The residents there have at least one thing in common with me: we are Americans.
The next day, I did something I almost never do—I attended morning Mass. That is, I was not the celebrant or involved liturgically in any way. I simply snuck into the back of church in lay clothes for the morning Mass. At 7:30 promptly, the bell rang, and out came the priest. The crowd for Mass on Monday morning was impressively large — about 75 people or so.
Other than the fact that the Eucharistic Prayer was prayed ad orientem and holy Communion received at the altar rail, the cadence of the Mass was the same as it is where I am the pastor. It was beautiful and comforting to see Catholic life still happening amid the cultural ruins which have surely made their way even to such unassuming places as Kansas City.
I drove with my friends up to Auburn, Nebraska (population: 3,400) to have lunch with an old friend. On the way, we stopped at one of those small, orthodox Catholic colleges which the occasional article or play characterizes as fascist, hypocritical, or filled with weirdos. After a couple hours there, I can report that I personally did not meet any fascists. There were a few smiling nuns, though.
I also didn’t meet any weirdos — the students seemed genuinely happy and engaged, unlike some other college campuses I frequent where the students sometimes exhibit a bewildering combination of anxiety and intellectual self-assurance.
The professors I met left me with a twinge of jealousy that I couldn’t stay and bask in the glow of the life of the mind for a few more weeks, in the shadow of a beautiful monastery. I guess then the only hypocrite was me.
Auburn, Nebraska is not exactly what one might expect either. Sure, there’s the neighborhood diner that’s been taken over by the grandson of the founder, filled with photographs through the years that included, in one photo, the very friend I had come to see. But there was also the coffee shop clearly owned by (real or self-styled) Wiccans.
My friends have moved home so they can raise their son close to his numerous cousins on his mom’s side. They still bear the marks of the big city life they lived when I first met them, but there was also a sense of relief that while, yes, life in middle American suburbia could be a tad boring, there is something stable and permanent about the rhythm of extended family life, where the simple joys of church and home can be shared. Where they can be enough.
The deep, soul-crushing anxiety of our age probably results from the desire to have more than what we have. Wherever we are on the totem pole, no matter our level of stability, we crave more: more certainly, more control over our destiny. We manufacture products and propose solutions for problems we didn’t even know existed for most of human history.
The richest society that has ever lived has indeed discovered an almost awe-inspiring ability to find new ways to waste time and money. Yet, after the Prozac and the Ozembic, and the maxed out IRAs, we aren’t any healthier or happier than we were before.
One day, two sisters welcomed Jesus into their home. One, named Martha, had appointed herself the chief coordinator of the event. She took the initiative. She was the responsible one. To her credit, she wanted everything to go perfectly for such an honored guest (I still am so moved when families invite priests to their homes and make a big deal of it).
Yet, amid her good intentions to provide for every need, she inadvertently lost the plot. In seeking more and more, in running herself into the ground to make sure that every detail was tended to, she expressed in an exasperated tone her desire for her sister to get to work. Time for her to take on some of the responsibility and to make sure everything was perfect and risk-free.
At this point, Jesus switched from forbearance to correction. “Martha, Martha,” he began, using a double name which he reserved when giving a word of correction and warning to those he loved, “you are anxious and worried about many things.”
Is this perhaps the fundamental rebuke he gives to us too, for us who live now, particularly of my own generation? We’re so scared of everything: of going broke and having children (or not having them); we’re scared of our political leaders and of getting sick (and sometimes of the medical and technological apparatus which ostensibly resolve the sicknesses).
So much of the selfishness clearly evident in my generation might effectively be traced back to a deep, existential dread. We don’t know what’s going on, but we’re really nervous about it, might be the standard emotional state of the generation born at the end of the Cold War. We are anxious and worried about so many things.
Jesus’ counsel is not to quietism or navel-gazing. It is rather that we direct our attention to him: “Mary has chosen the better part.” Mary’s insatiable desire is directed precisely at the only object capable of fulfilling it, Christ himself. Isn’t that at the heart of all those sayings both comforting (“Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest.”) and terrifying (“Anyone who comes to me without hating mother and father … and even your own life, cannot be my disciple.”)?
In Jesus, we see either an interesting but ultimately irrelevant wisdom figure, or we see the lens through which all of reality comes into focus for the first time. In him we find the soothing balm from our anxieties because he is the only one to whom we can entrust ourselves completely.
Maybe that’s why people go home to be surrounded by familiar land and people and priests who celebrate Mass ad orientem. Perhaps that’s what is behind the wild popularity of Catholic Bible podcasts or the young women wearing traditional veils at Mass on a Wednesday evening at a major research university.
Maybe it’s because Christ unlocks those parts of our hearts that no pharmaceutical or financial instrument or pop icon can satisfy — and then he actually satisfies them. There’s nothing boring about that at all. In fact, if we are willing to put down the pots and pans and sit where Mary is, we can learn why Christ’s love is the single most exciting and fascinating reality, the only comfort in a world which promises control but delivers on none.
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Father Eric J. Banecker is pastor of St. Mary Magdalen Parish in Media.
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