You're shining that right in my eyes you jerk!

Last year, Pope Francis created a pretty huge buzz by telling the world that Catholics had become too obsessed with various issues, and that the Church needed to be a home for all.  Lots of the media ran with it in one direction, speculating on the Pope being a liberal reformer, lots of other folks ran the other direction with posts, articles, etc. outlining 'what the Pope really meant'.  This won't be either, because I don't think the Pope has any plans to change the foundation of the Church, nor do I think he said anything except what he actually meant, and I'm nowhere near qualified to speak for him.  This post is just a little idea that came to me today in a PD session about evangelization in the Church.

At the beginning of Fr. Baron's series on the New Evangelization, there is a little bit about Christ being the light unto the nations, and the Church being the carrier of that light... a torchbearer if you will.  We also explored a little bit of evangelization being about sharing our own light with the world as a way of inviting and building bridges, spreading joy through our faith. To paraphrase, we are called to share our light to guide others along the path to Christ. 

My little idea was this:  As Catholics, in a world that doesn't see eye to eye on a lot of issues, and where there are a lot of things we disagree with and fight against as evil, we want to shine our light directly onto that darkness.  I think the idea is to illuminate it and try to fix it.  I'm going to compare that to getting obsessed with issues.  In good conscience, with the compassionate goal of protecting the innocent, speaking for the voiceless, etc, we focus a beam into a dark corner.  The problem that Pope Francis is pointing out, is that anyone in that corner is gonna be kind of cranky because someone is shining a light in their eyes.  It's annoying, and probably not helpful most of the time.  You know the feeling, it's not a good one.  I worked in an underground mine on a contract, and knew a foreman who got so ticked at a worker constantly shining his lamp in people's eyes, that the foreman smashed it with a wrench while it was still on the guy's head.  It's that obnoxious.

What Pope Francis is asking Catholics to do is take the light out of the dark corner for a little bit, shine it on the road that leads to Christ.  In the real world this looks like building relationships with people and being contagiously joyful.   As a very wise nun told me once, if we are happy about being Catholic, we need to tell it to our faces and smile a lot more about it.  Without shining our lights on joy, love, and how awesome our faith is, then all we are doing is blinding the people looking at us from the other end of the beam, so they can't see the awesome stuff we have to share.

Pope Francis wasn't telling us to ignore the things we disagree with, he was telling us to turn our light around and point it at the love of God and the joy of faith, so everyone can actually see.