Skip to main content
ArchiveOthers

A Strange Vocation

by Paulette Curran

By October 24, 2019November 23rd, 2023No Comments

This content has been archived. It may no longer be relevant

The concept of “fool for Christ” sounded very weird to me many years ago when Catherine Doherty taught us about it.

She told us that it was part of Russian spirituality, that in her childhood there were people who gave up all they possessed, took to the roads, and acted like fools—some, even as if they were insane—inviting ridicule and worse.

They were, she told us, identifying with the rejected Christ and atoning for the fact that when he was on earth, he was called a fool.

She told us of someone who had years before been a friend of her father, whom her father, who was a wealthy man, suddenly recognized in a beggar he saw on the street.

Her example helped my imagination. Though peasants also must have followed this vocation, I pictured someone who had everything—a super-holy, super-together aristocrat play-acting on the village square.

Anybody like that in the Western Church, I asked. St. Francis of Assisi, I was told. No one else? No one could think of anyone else. No one could think of more than one person in 2000 years!

It obviously was not much a part of our Western tradition. It was colorful, exotic information, but for sure, it had nothing to do with my life.

Well, I no longer think of fools for Christ as weird. And, over the years, between one thing and another, I have come to wonder if there are less dramatic, less obvious fools for Christ than the ones Catherine told us about, and if they are a lot more common than I imagined, even in our Western Church.

After Joe Hogan died, I thought about him a lot and I began to wonder if he was one of them.

Joe wasn’t obviously holy. And though he was likeable in some ways, many people found him difficult. He had an indirect way of communicating, which could be maddening, and his teasing and humour were often not appreciated, to put it mildly.

Worse, it often seemed like he was being deliberately provocative. It’s likely that he was.

Even in our loving community—we do try to love one another—Joe often experienced negative reactions of one kind or another.

There are, of course, a number of different ways this sort of thing can be dealt with by the person and by others. In this psychological age, we always want to fix things, and sometimes that is the right thing to try and do.

But not everything is fixable, and not everything even should be “fixed.” Should we try to change something that is an essential part of who we are just because someone doesn’t like it?

And God sees things very differently than we do.

I suspect that often, when God calls someone to be a fool for Christ, it isn’t someone who has everything going for him and is asked to give it all up and pretend to be a fool.

I think that sometimes God calls a person who already does not comfortably fit in, whose faults and/or eccentricities are obvious, who is already, to a lesser or greater degree, on the fringes.

To say that the person is in a painful situation is to say the obvious. He probably begs God to take him off this cross. And sometimes God does.

But not always. God’s ways are not our ways. When God calls such a person to become a fool for Christ, He, God, does something that, to our limited human eyes, is mind-boggling. He invites that person to accept, for love of Him, the situation he or she is already in and offer it to Him.

To our human eyes, this seems crazy and repulsive. It looks like a call to misery.

The amazing thing is that it is not. If the person says yes to it, yes to God, He takes the painful human situation and transforms it. God transforms it into a path to holiness—and, this is even harder to believe—a path to freedom.

If a person trusts God to give him what he needs, if he surrenders to whatever God sends from day to day, if he lets go of seeking for human respect and approval, he will find a freedom that our poor modern world with all its talk of freedom, cannot even imagine.

Did Joe receive this invitation? Did Joe become a fool for Christ? I don’t know, but there are some clues.

Joe did not hide his weaknesses; he seemed comfortable with them. And when someone was unkind to him, I’ve never seen him respond in kind. For sure he often seemed foolish. Yet there was a certain joy and freedom in him—even in his last years when he had dementia and lived in a nursing home.

Joe’s writings reveal a rich inner life deep in God, a life that was very hidden when he was alive. Whether he was a fool for Christ or not, I suspect he knew that the only thing that really matters is God and that he sought and found his life in Him.

As I’ve said, I’ve thought a lot about Joe since he died. What does his life say to me?

The reminder to be kind to everyone and to ask forgiveness when I wasn’t, is obvious, but there is more.

I think that, because it causes me suffering, I give too much importance to the pain that inevitably comes to me from other people, as it does to everyone, even in a loving family or community. Of course, some problems, some misunderstandings, can and should be “worked out,” but not everything can be. If, for love of God, I could let go of my “need” for human respect and approval, how free I would be!

No, the concept of “fools for Christ” is not weird or foreign. It has much to teach us.

[icons icon=”fa-arrow-circle-o-left” size=”fa-3x” type=”normal” link=”https://madonnahouse.org/restorationnews/” target=”_self” icon_color=”#a3a3a3″ icon_hover_color=”#175f8f”]