Comparing God's Grace to a Kidney Transplant

This picture actually has to do with the story and it not merely gratuitous.  Read on!

This is a true story told to my actress and me by one of our friends on the road last week.  I have changed the names to protect the innocent, and also because I don't remember the actual names, anyway.

Larry was married to Ruth, and one day Larry found out that he needed a new kidney or he'd die.  Ruth prevailed upon her brother Steve, who agreed to donate one of his good kidneys to Larry.

Larry received his brother-in-law's good kidney, and it saved his life. 

But Larry started having an affair with the recovery room nurse from the hospital where he received his transplant.  Within two weeks, Larry moved out and dumped his wife, whose brother had just saved his life.

The brother-in-law and the wife sued Larry, claiming that there was an implied contract involved, and that the implication at a minimum was that Larry would be faithful to his wife and stay with her - since, after all, without the wife's efforts and the brother-in-law's kidney, Larry would simply be dead.

Larry argued that it's not legal in this country to sell body parts, and that Steve's kidney was donated as a gift, and that therefore there was no contract, implied or express - for it would have been a violation of law had there been.

Larry won.

And I thought, there's a deep lesson in theology behind this.

Love is always a grace.  All God's gifts to as are gratuitous, unearned, unmerited.  We are saved by grace thorough faith, which works through love.  The heart of our existence and of our salvation is grace - a free gift.  That's the origin of it and that's the core of it.

Technically, then, there is no implied contract - for the nature of a gift requires no payment and exacts no reciprocation; and grace is always given freely; otherwise it's not grace, but a barter, a contract, a transaction.  And grace (like love) transcends all of that.

And yet any normal human being is revolted by Larry and by what he did.  We know that, while he's right technically and from a legal standpoint, he is utterly wrong morally.  He's right, but he ain't good.

For there is a reciprocation to grace that is fitting.  It's called gratitude, saying "thank you" to God and to our neighbors.  This is done through wonder, prayer, upright moral living, even suffering and sacrifice.  It's not done by running off with the nurse you met in the recovery room (even if she looks like the gal in the picture above).  It's not done by sticking with your own narrow sins and constricted agendas, despite what God has given you.  It's not done by shutting yourself off from God's grace and from the response it doesn't demand from you, but that it ought to elicit from you all the same.

And if any of you are like me or my actors, who tend to love unwisely, and who tend to give and give and give without getting anything back, realize that reciprocity is at the heart of our response to God and to our response to others and their response to us.  Love is not a business transaction, but it only bears fruit if it involves a give and take - given and taken out of sheer grateful delight.


In brief, the response to a good kidney is to be a good liver.

The Church's Style of Management

If atheists are right, and there is no God, then let's burn down all the churches, for they're all monuments to lies.  If Catholics are right, and there is a God and He is who He says He is, then when He says, "Know the truth, and the truth shall set you free" (John 8:32) we'd better realize He means it.  That much, at least, Catholics should have in common with atheists: a devotion to the Truth.

But if we are too scared to be loyal to what is True, then we will also fail in being faithful to what is Beautiful and what is Good.  The prince of Lies and the God of Truth don't really mix that well.

I write a lot about Unreality on this blog, by which I mean a religious attitude that is divorced from the reality of life.  Unreality is a form of idolatry, of using the things of God for your own small-minded purposes, of leaning on the Church to support your tottering house of cards, of being contrived and artificial, of adopting airs and affectations, of making the worship of God not about understanding and serving the Truth (troubling though the Truth may be), but about shoring up your own deliberately narrowed and circumscribed agenda.  It is the main temptation facing devout Christians of all stripes.

And here's how Unreality works in practice.  

Fr. LaVann

Now, I'm not about to tell this story to shock you with the truly disturbing parts of it - the fact that a man who by all appearances was a seriously dangerous priest (Fr. LaVan) was allowed access to victims by the archdiocese of St. Paul for many years, even up until last December.

In all, LaVan was accused of sexually abusing at least three girls and several women, including one who suffered from a brain injury and was under psychiatric care at the time of the abuse. 

Fr. LaVan also reportedly threatened to murder the husband of a woman he'd been having an affair with, and burn her house down, after she ended the relationship.  As far back as 1988, a psychologist insisted that putting LaVan back in ministry (after he was accused of raping two underage girls and had been temporarily removed from duty) would be "very risky" - and yet, the archdiocese put him back to work and he served in parishes for another 25 years.

It's not all of that that I'm calling your attention to, horrible as it is.

What I'm focusing on is the reaction of Robert Carlson to one of the many complaints against this priest over the years.  Carlson, who is now my archbishop in St. Louis, and who was at the time an auxiliary bishop in St. Paul, wrote a memo to the archbishop (his boss), saying ...

"If we don't want this to build into a real problem it is my recommendation that we accept Father LaVan's resignation from the parish, find a suitable cover story and get him into an in-patient treatment program ... so that this thing does not blow up."

This is Unreal.

And it's the typical way the Church operates.  Lie to the people on the ground.  The Truth will set you free, and all that, but don't ever get real with the Catholics in the pews.

It's a form of weird administration-think.  It's the attitude of an insulated middle-manager type who can't see that there's a disconnect between the marketing and the quality control.  It's the security of clericalism protecting the inanity of mediocre mismanagement.  And Jesus Christ has nothing to do with any of it.

I have no doubt that Carlson will somehow deny this, or "spin it", as he did with his apparent dishonesty in a recent deposition, and that Bill Donohue and other ideologues will "find a suitable cover story" to protect him, and the last thing we will see is a heartfelt apology or even an acknowledgement that when a priest has harmed parishioners and is removed because of that, that other parishioners have a right to know the Truth.  Parishioners should not be lied to, even out of general human decency, much less Christian charity.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.  He is working the gears and dials furiously to keep up appearances.