Will the Real Life Please Stand Up: The Illusions of the “real” life

Rural South Carolina is not known for having an abundance of Catholic Churches, and for good reason: the region is solidly nestled in the Bible Belt of the Southern Baptists.  Growing up there as I did, our family’s parish was about a 50 minute drive away - and was incredibly small.  Seating probably no more than 75 comfortably, Saint Catherine Parish has been the church out of which my siblings and I received most of our Sacraments, and is the community where we learned the ins and outs of Catholic worship.  For years, my brothers and I were the only Altar servers (and I doubled as Sacristan towards the end), and were present for most Sundays and Holy Days.  As is appropriate to our faith, the climax of our Liturgical year at Triduum found my family bringing every piece of brass the Church had back to our house for a deep polish and cleaning, accompanied by hours long altar server training spread throughout the preceding weeks and prior to the Liturgies.  With Saint Catherine being the only parish I ever really knew for a long time, I could never fully understand some of the frustration our parish priest would vocalize concerning the restricted space in the sanctuary, or the relatively simple design of the brass and golden Mass essentials.  Fr. David’s laments over the constrictions of space in our “humble country parish” (as he used to call it) would not make sense to me until I became Sacristan and Altar Server trainer for the Chaplain at my college.  It was only when I was exposed to a much larger and well equipped sanctuary, followed by a train of adult life experiences, that what Fr. David would say while I was growing up would make sense to me.  I say that what he said made sense, but a better description would be that my college and adult experiences would actually highlight something my parish priest would not say: though Saint Catherine’s size constrictions gave cause for frustration or lament at the necessity for a more simpler celebration of the Holy Mass, Fr. David would never look at the simplicity of his parish and argue that it was not a real parish, compared to larger ones.  The difference is huge, but the motivation is similar, and is one I would encounter again and again as I observed my fellow man encounter life not at all how we imagined it.

I first heard the term “if we were a real xyz” articulated during my freshman year of college.  I attended a very small Catholic liberal arts school, which prided itself on affordability for its students.  There were many typical complaints from the students about how the college operated, as one could imagine.  Most complaints were variations of the phrase “if we were a real college, we would…”.  The sentiments attached to this phrase were usually comparisons to state colleges as some standard model of objective reality: real colleges do not have campus service, or are not dry campuses.  Real colleges allow for inter-sex dorm visitations from time to time, or do not have curfews.  I could continue for a while on this train, but the trend was widely applicable to almost all of the discomforts that were not so much a result of being a fake college as much as they were consequences of being a small college.  And in one sense, I could understand the lament, even if I did not agree with the phrasing: bigger colleges have more options and more money to throw around.  I did not see how not having money was a reflection on legitimacy.

Eventually, I would graduate and move on to work for a family owned packaging company in Cleveland, OH.  The company is now in its second generation of management, and employs the third generation regularly.  This as much to say, the company is well established and has enjoyed a level of stability to warrant multi-generational operations.  The small size of the company allowed for a level of understanding and flexibility between management and the employees concerning attendance to deal with family and life issues, to the relative benefit or frustration of employees who picked up the slack.  The nature of a factory leads to a high turnover rate among the temporary and seasonal employees - a phenomenon similar to the watermelon fields I used to work as a boy.  With this as the context of my first real-world job, I was surprised again to hear complaints about the job as variations of “if we were a real company”.  These complaints varied from classic to specific: real companies offer higher pay (a universal complaint), real companies don’t work through temp agencies (a seemingly specific complaint).  Real companies hire expensive contractors and shut down production to perform building maintenance.  Again, I could go on, but the sentiment remains the same: a reaction to the proximate exposure to the inner workings of a small company resulted in a comparison with multi-billion dollar companies as somehow objectively more real than the job we were currently working.  

The crisis of complaints and comparison to real continued as I entered Basic Training, attended Advanced Individual Training, and shipped for my first deployment.  All around me throughout all three of these different units I heard complaints “if this was a real boot camp”, “if we were a real Army”, “if this were a real deployment”.  The continuation of these complaints astounded me as persisting even into the biggest branch of our military.  I would not really laugh and piece this continuing phenomenon together until, upon returning home, I began working for one of the biggest armored courier services in the world - and employed at one of the top performing branches, at that.  Here, in the garage of clearly one of the most successful companies globally, I was surprised to hear the same refrain: “if we were a real branch we would fix the garage”, “if we were a real company we would get better salaries”.  Again, the list continues at length.  At this moment, the words of Fr. David would finally echo in my ears as a contrast: we do what we can in our humble country parish.  I reflected upon how easy it is to dismiss the physical world around us as somehow being not real as compared to the objective, resistance free life we play out in our minds.  

Life is full of constrictions, impositions, and encounters with the harsh realities that make life possible.  We forget that we are not so far removed from a life exposed to the elements, and bury ourselves in the edited phantasies of the iPhone.  Compared to Hollywood, our lives are drab and poor - or so we think.  We forget that the most real and unrepeatable thing in the world is the human person, an encounter with ourselves, and with others, through encounter with God.  This encounter of personhood is only truly possible when our distractions are stripped away and we see real life for what it is: rooted in the physical world, fragile, and mortal.  In an ironic sense, every complaint of legitimacy - all variations of comparing the humble country parish to the cathedral - is in fact simply a discomfort with a forced confrontation of some reality within your own life.  Seek out ways to be small, and be real.  Pray with wonder in the humble country parish.