This is a reflection on the pope's address to Congress and his address at St. Patrick's Cathedral mainly directed to nuns and priests.
In the life of faith, as in any realm of human endeavor, there are prodigies, journeymen, and hacks. A hack is somebody who lives his life imitatively or derivatively, someone who adapts uncritically to ethos around him and tries to make his way as best he or she can by doing what seems acceptable or unacceptable by others. Hacks never speak from what they know themselves; they only quote authorities or the law or use some other source extrinsic source of validation.
It's not that the authorities are wrong, but they only understand the letter not the spirit of the laws or rules. And they are therefore more likely to game them for their own advantage, rather that submit to the deeper truth that is often expressed in them. The Pharisees as depicted in the New Testament were hacks in this sense. They are the symbolic representatives of a spiritually empty judgmentalism I call whited-sepulcher syndrome and which is found always and everywhere among people who think of themselves as religiously superior in some way.
A journeyman in faith is most of us who struggle to live lives of genuine faith. We have experienced moments of transformative grace; we try to live as best we can oriented by what we have come to understand in the light of grace. We are the ordinary people you meet everyday who have a sense of common decency and common sense. We're the people who are often right but often wrong, but when we're wrong admit it and learn from it, and move on. We're the sinners who, like the Samaritan woman at Jacob's well, when they met Jesus were capable of recognizing in him something the hacks were not. The difference between a hack and a journeyman is that the hack goes through the motions coldly without the fire kindled in the heart of each man or woman who has encountered, in any of a million ways, the deep suffusing presence left in the world by the risen Christ, aka, the Holy Spirit.
For every encounter, whether it is while alone in prayer, while taking a walk on 4th and Walnut, whether in reading a book, the bible or some other, or being thrown in jail, participates archetypally in the encounter with the risen Christ the disciples, those two nameless journeymen, had on the road to Emmaus. Like their encounter, our encounter with the risen Christ in not obvious. But if you're a journeyman sinner, as most of us are, you recognize in the encounter a giving of a great gift. "How our hearts burned within us", they said after the encounter. Only later does it occur to you what in fact you encountered. I'm sure that was the experience of the woman at the well, and of so many sinners who encountered Jesus when he walked on the earth, in one way or another, experienced that burning in the heart without understanding what it meant, and whether it wasjust a flicker, or whether a raging fire, that fire in the heart is the core experience of the life of faith.
Prodigies may or may not be aware that they are prodigies. More often than not, they aren't aware. They are prodigies because the intensity of that fire is greater in them than it is in the rest of us, and it would be hard not to be aware of that, but at the same time we are told time and again by the saints that they see themselves as poor sinners, and I don't think that's false humility. The more you see yourself in the light cast by the fire of grace, the more aware you become of how much you lack, how far the distance between what you are now and that which you were created to be. The prodigies are prodigies by virtue of their awareness that they have more in common with poor sinners and all the wretched of the earth, than they do with the residents of Olympus.
So the prodigy knows something the rest of us don't, and because they radiate this fire, we recognize in them an authority that perhaps they don't feel themselves, and yet they speak because they must, and when they speak, there is a tone that draws you in, even if what's being said is an idea you've thought wrong or resisted. You hear even ideas you were familiar with in a way you never heard them before. There is fire in them. They take hold of you, and burn in you, and transform you. In his speech before congress he pointed to prodigies of the faith whom we should learn from, Martin Luther King, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day. (Lincoln, I think, is more for obstreperous politicians to learn from than for the rest of us.) Each of them were kindled by the fire of heaven, and each of them were prodigies because of the way so many people who encountered them were transformed by them.
Unfortunately prodigies are rare, especially among the professional clergy. Most are journeymen, and alas too many are hacks, and too often the hacks rise to positions of authority and power in the Church. One of the signs of a hack is that he or she is stridently judgmental. Hacks think they have the truth in ways that others don't, but they don't know The Truth, none of us does. The best we can do is speak the truth as best we know it, and if there is grace in it, then it will be heard and will take hold in the heart of him or her who hears it. That's what is so wonderful about the way this pope speaks. He speaks the truth, very often an uncomfortable truth, in such a way that and in such a tone that it will take hold of more hearts than from listening to a thousand sanctimonious rants of clerical hacks.
He'd be the last to admit it, but the pope is for these reasons a prodigy of faith. He asks for our prayers because he understands the importance of his task and the obstacles that lie before him. He knows that he can accomplish nothing by himself, that it is not he, but Christ in him who accomplishes anything that is good. While we are all of us vicars of Christ insofar as our actions are inspired by grace, the pope is the Vicar of Christ in a uniquely symbolic way as the the representative of all us in whose hearts Christ has taken up residence, no matter how cramped the accommodations he finds there. He is the Vicar of Christ in all of us.
So Pope Francis asks for our prayers so that he might represent that which is best in us as he confronts the enormity of those forces that seek to dehumanize us. He knows that he cannot do it by himself, but only with the support and the good will of a quorum of earth's humans, we journeymen in the world who in their encounter with this good man encounter not just him but the confluence of the world's good will. We empower him by our prayers to be in a special way someone who when people encounter him can say in truth, "Oh, how our hearts burned within us."