By FR. KEVIN M. CUSICK
“Inside every overweight woman is a woman she knows she can be.” Weight loss commercials start up again in earnest every year as soon as the Christmas sales tail off. Oprah, the queen of weight loss as well as pretty much every other self-help program, features most recently in one of these ads wherein she appeals to the real woman inside of every woman fighting obesity or simply wanting to shed a few pounds. She assigns virtue to every time she tried and failed and tried again to lose weight and become once again that inner person she envisions and desires to be.
David Brooks recently published a book calling for a return to character with that word in the title, The Road to Character (Random House/2015). According to a story by Catholic News Agency, an “insanely happy” priest he encountered in the Archdiocese of Washington was one of the influences that led to his realization of the need for more than mere resume building in society. He met Msgr. Ray East who offered the benediction every year at a charity event in which he annually takes part.
As CNA describes it, Brooks’ experiences led to nagging questions about the heart of human fulfillment. “What followed was a meticulously researched and engaging book which poses a provocative thesis: we as a modern society are cultivating outwardly impressive but ultimately superficial ‘resume virtues’ — not character. And it’s costing us dearly, the author says, both personally and communally.”
Brooks insists on using the word “sin” in the book despite pressure not to because he says it gets to the heart of the matter that more is needed in our social interaction and discourse than merely being nice or avoiding offending anyone above every other consideration.
What do David Brooks and Oprah have in common? They are neither of them explicit advocates for religious observance as ministers or priests and both approach the need for and the reality of God from human experience and observation, one from a “macro,” or societal viewpoint and the other from the “micro,” or personal and interior experience.
The Church has long proposed the answers in Christ to both of these persons and the needs and longings they express and represent. Oprah’s need to try again and again to overcome a physical limitation or weakness and the realization that a subjective virtue is gained from the effort required to come back repeatedly from failure and David Brooks’ realization that more is needed than merely looking good on paper.
The Church offers both the individual need for “self improvement” and repeated conversion in the approach to God, and the Divine approach to man, in the sacramental life, in particular Confession. The spiritual “diet” of the Eucharist and the need for fasting and penance sometimes required to approach the Divine Presence offered in this most blessed Sacrament also proposes the goal of the human desire for spiritual perfection experienced within but frustrated by worldly limitations and sin.
Confession presents us with the same challenge for spiritual good which Oprah assigns to her own experience of trying over and over again to shed physical weight. Whether she realizes it or not, her own description of her experience of the interior life, of visualizing herself differently, and of gaining strength as she attempted over and over again to achieve that imagined goal, is also a “spiritual weight.” She acknowledges the importance of the spiritual life and the reality of virtue, which means “strength” as a good which she also possesses alongside her attempts, whether successful or not, to lose weight and become the woman she imagines herself capable of being.
Both Oprah and Brooks limn an approach to the spiritual life of Christ to which all of us in the Church commit ourselves through both regular Confession and the life of the Eucharist. The one builds character through its repeated necessity each time we fail most seriously through sin and the other calls us to envision ourselves as saints through the real help also of grace as truly present in Christ.
I am penning this column on the feast of Thomas Becket, holy patron to all those who find themselves in bitter and constant conflict with the unbelieving and increasingly pagan world around us. Thomas was attacked and brutally martyred in his own cathedral by men who took the part of the king against Becket’s religious leadership and authority in the name and person of Jesus Christ.
All of us in the Church who subscribe in a sincere and uncompromising way to all that she believes and teaches find ourselves opposed by implacable enemies who take no prisoners and give no quarter, increasingly emboldened by godless laws that confer illegitimate authority upon their errors. We are committed to a living martyrdom in imitation of Becket and all those who paid the ultimate price of witness with their life’s blood.
Whether we attempt to lose physical weight through Oprah’s diet program or read Brooks’ book about the need for morals in society, we already know well that it is the spiritual weight of sin and the virtue gained through repeated penance and conversion that wins us the greatest crown of sainthood.
The archbishop opposed by a king whose men threatened his authority and ultimately cut him down offered his life with the words, “For the name of Jesus and the protection of the Church, I am ready to embrace death.” May we all live such holy readiness each day. Thomas Becket, pray for us.
Thank you for reading. A blessed New Year to you and praised be Jesus Christ, now and forever.
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