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O'Malley's Best

Knowing Your Place

John the Baptist is a very good reminder to those of us who are brimful with eagerness to serve God but haven't the slightest notion how non-essential each of us is. John was blessed to know--and to accept-his place, what he was born to do. He wasn't created to be the headliner, just one of the many warm-up acts.

In the second year of my tenuous tenure at McQuaid Jesuit High School in Rochester, New York, I was made theology department chair--not because of my Olympian command of the subject nor my power to galvanize the religion faculty, but because nobody else would accept the dubious honor. (That alone should have put me in my place, but of course it didn't. Even the fact the Jesuit whose job I was taking had fled the Society, the school, and the challenge didn't deter me from my unquenchable zeal to inflame the youth of Monroe County with Christian fervor.)

I hadn't taught theology before. My seminary professors had deemed me scarcely worthy. I was destined by God, they opined, to teach a bit of grammar, fumble a few novels, and perhaps put on some harmless theatrical diversions. To my chagrin, I discovered that, after eleven years of utterly ineffective brainwashing, my seniors hadn't the slightest concern (nor even, alas, a whisper of respect) for the person or teachings of Jesus Christ--unless I approached him as a kind of pre-Hippie with no tolerance for rules, for limitations on their freedom, or for any authority older than oneself. (This was in the mid-60's, you understand). Even more disconcerting, as the classes ground forward I began to have inescapable suspicions the lads I was missioned unto also felt no need whatever in their lives for someone as intrusive and uncontrollable as God himself. God, I discovered, was utterly irrelevant to them and, for that reason, as good as non-existent.

I vented my frustration to my first meeting of department chairs, in screaming 70-point type: "If I can't get them to face the God questions here and now, they're going to go on to secular colleges and a bunch of atheist profs are gonna chew them out and spit out the pieces!" I went for a considerable stretch along that fearsome path, with all the dark and agonized spleen of Jeremiah or Ecclesiastes. At my first gasp for breath, the social studies chairman cocked a scowl and said, "Who the hell are you? God?"

Well! Just who the hell did he think he was, that arrogant, that unfeeling, that...that.... I steamed along in that righteous huff all the way back to my room. "How dare he be so cavalier, so indifferent, so....?" And then suddenly it hit me like a javelin through the sternum. "My God! He's right!"

That moment was perhaps the turning point in my professional life-and thank God it happened early on. I'd found my place. Like John the Baptist, I wasn't the one who had to succeed. Difficult as it was to yield to, God had been drawing souls to himself without me for endless eons and would doubtless do so for endless eons when my presence is quickly forgotten.

Since then, I've lowered my expectations-of myself, of my audience, and of the gauges of my success. If, like Sisyphus, I haven't quit, that's a major plus. If after nine months, four or five of the seniors don't think I'm a total idiot, I've been a roaring success.

The witnesses to the advent of Christ into human lives are uncountable. Every teacher who's ever suggested to learners that there just might be something better than treading water and treading water and then just dying has (even unwittingly) ignited the hope for a savior from meaninglessness. Even the sourest atheist, who groans that nothing has meaning or purpose and that we're all just piles of potential garbage, inadvertently tempts us to hope he's wrong. Every prophet and feather-headed idealist and Quixote makes us at least suspect we might not be merely temporary beasts implanted with uncomfortable computers.

How could I have let myself believe I was an irreplaceable voice in that nearly endless cavalcade emerging from the inescapable challenge of creation and evolution-all the testimonies crying out to us that we are worth immeasurably more than we'd even dared hope?

Oh, yes! Each of is wonderfully important. But none of us is essential--none except the one "the strap of whose sandal we are unworthy to unfasten" who has nonetheless made himself our brother and opened to us the floodgates of eternal life.

None of us is The Light, but each of us-like John-is nonetheless privileged to be a witness to the light. And as the old slave spiritual sings so truly: "I got a little light, and I'm gonna make it shine!"

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