Feet Of Clay

From a funny-but-serious short memoir by George Saunders in the New Yorker:

On those Wednesday afternoons when I was Reader for all-school Mass, I would leave class early, confident yet stressed, like a little businessman, and hustle down to the sacristy, where I’d read the Epistle passage aloud so that Father X could check my pronunciation. He’d mark the reading with one of several silk ribbons bound into the pages, and I’d take the book out to the lectern and stand there a minute, thinking, Soon I’ll be up here, and the light will be on me, and the church will be full of my friends.

Normally on Wednesdays I found Father X working at something in the sacristy. This Wednesday, I came up the aisle quietly, so quietly that I discovered Father X and a nun I’ll call Sister Y in the middle of—well, I couldn’t figure out what they were doing. It appeared to be some particularly athletic form of kissing, involving tongues and a lot of snakelike extraneous limb and torso motion, as if this new kind of kissing were filling them with painful electricity.

Later, Saunders went back to the church to do his practice reading, careful to make a good deal of noise as he walked down the aisle.

Out came Sister Y, looking beautiful in the way someone will when she has just, against all sense, done exactly what she most wanted to.

Saunders awakened to the truth that nuns and priests are human beings, like the rest of us, with feet of clay, at an earlier age than I did. I was well into my late teen years before I was disabused of the notion that Roman Catholic priests and nuns were far above us lowly lay folks on the holiness scale. At my Jesuit university, one of my philosophy professors was an elderly priest who was an outspoken racist. He did not mince words in his racist remarks. However, he was very much the exception, in fact, the only exception amongst the Jesuits at that time, 50-plus years ago, for it was at the university that I began to unlearn the racist attitudes I had lived with my whole life. He had been a brilliant philosophy teacher in his prime, or so I heard, but when he taught me, he was way, way, way past his prime.

After graduating from the university, I taught second grade at a Roman Catholic school, one of a small group of lay teachers amongst the nuns who outnumbered us. After my first year there, the nuns treated me more like one of them and began to share news and harmless gossip about life in the convent. I was thunderstruck one day when one of the sisters made a not-so-harmless snide remark about one of the other nuns. The comment implied that the nuns did not always get along with one another! I have suggested before that I stayed an innocent naïf far longer than most young people - you could even say a case of arrested development, but there it is. As time went on, others shared with me the normal tensions involved in living in community. Of course, that's quite usual and natural, and I should have known better than to think all was sweetness and light in the relationships of the nuns one to the other in convent life, but I did not.

Lest you think that goodness went along with my innocence, I'll disabuse you of that notion, because my small circle of friends came close to what would be called "mean girls" today, for we used cutting irony and ridicule when we talked of certain of our peers. The good news is that it was mostly talk for we did not treat them rudely, plus we were not the top group in popularity, so we had little influence beyond our small circle.

UPDATE: From Fran in the comments:

By Thomas Merton

To love another as a person we must begin by granting him his own autonomy and identity as a person. We have to love him for what he is in himself, and not for what he is to us. We have to love him for his own good, not for the good we get out of him. And this is impossible unless we are capable of a love which ‘transforms’ us, so to speak, into the other person, making us able to see things as he sees them, love what he loves, experience the deeper realities of his own life as if they were our own. Without sacrifice, such a transformation is utterly impossible. But unless we are capable of this kind of transformation ‘into the other’ while remaining ourselves, we are not yet capable of a fully human existence.