The Tappan Zee Bridge Pledge

I needed to get out of the friary today. My soul is somewhere between restless and content, anxious and calm, and having been cooped up with the senior friars for the past week had been just about enough, so I took a drive up to Nyack to take a walk around the very large mall they have there. As I was crossing over the Tappan Zee Bridge, catching quick glimpses of the NYC skyline to the south down the Hudson while trying my best to keep from swerving into the other lane, I was reminded of something.

When I was a candidate, I had crossed this same bridge with my current classmate. We were on our way up the Palisades toward Perkins Memorial Drive. We were both getting ready to enter in a few months and I was a little bit anxious and upset about some things that I had seen in the community. My candidate's world was shattered when I realized that the friars weren't the perfect men I thought that they were. In fact, they were rather imperfect. There were some interpersonal difficulties playing out in one of the friaries that I frequented and I became distressed at the way some of the brothers were treating each other, most specifically I was distressed about the gossip and the backbiting I saw going on.

I didn't really know the context of the argument, so for all I knew either side could have been justified in their feelings (although probably not their behavior). I expressed this to my classmate and he agreed with me and the two of us, as we crossed the Tappan Zee Bridge, pledged that we wouldn't be like that - we wouldn't give into the lure of gossip or slander. We were going to be different... or so we thought.

The truth is, I didn't keep that pledge. As a matter of fact, this year I broke it many times. I got very caught up in needless drama, slander, gossip, and the whole lot of bad community behavior. Somehow the struggles of living with these other men made my heart bitter and made me forget the pledge that I had made two years before, that I was going to be different.

The truth is, it is very hard to live the religious life and be human, at least for someone as scrupulous and self-depricating as me. You see the ideal, you try to work toward it, but when you fail, you fall into a spiral of dislike for yourself, which turns into dislike of other for putting you in that situation, which makes negative behavior easier and easier. The feast of Saint James makes this all the more clear as the scripture readings from today's Mass underscore the deep humanity of the Apostles.

I've yet to discover the key that turns off my inclination toward self-deprication and scruplocity, but I think the best way to "be different" is experience. What I mean by that is, as someone who both gossiped and was gossiped about over the past year, I've learned the pain that gossip can inflict in another individual, pain that I myself experienced and wouldn't want another to have to experience. This makes it easier not to gossip. As someone who slandered and who was slandered, I can say that it is a painful experience to be talked down to, to be broken down by another, so why should I want to do the same thing to another? I guess in many ways my life history has made this realization bear more fruit, but I need to continue to be open to experiencing pain and thereby allowing those tendencies in me that would place that pain into the heart of another to drown in a tide of grace and love flowing from the Heart of Jesus.


Pax.