I love the overall message of this video:
Awesome stuff! Really great, great, great stuff!
But I must admit that I recoiled a bit at the choice of the word “weak”. I would have chosen the word “humble”. It is not weak to be an instrument of God’s grace. It is not weak to let God shine through you. In fact it takes great fortitude to say no to the pride that can get in the way of being a conduit to God for others. Humility, which seems to me is the ultimate point the bishop is getting at, actually takes a strength of character that is contrary to human nature.
But one of the things I’ve been learning to do in the last couple years is to be more humble in my assessments. And I’ve wondered in the couple days since I first watched it if perhaps I was being too judgmental. To compound that, when I re-watched it, I saw a theme in the Bishop’s homily that perhaps made weak the appropriate term.
The bishop says that “we are not looking for super-men”, and that sounds right to me. Because to be super-men is to attempt to deny our human weakness. We are not Gods. We are mankind. And for a priest to be effective, he must fully embrace his humanity. He can not let ‘En Persona Christi’ get too close to his heart so that he thinks he shares more with the divine than with the human. He must always be a man, with human weakness, not a super-man, who deludes himself into thinking he has risen above.
And so while I think humble is in many ways the right term and the term I would have used if giving a homily in this arena, I have to admit that there’s a value in thinking in terms of weakness.