Complacency and the Magis

Contentment and change:  I typed the words into my Chrome search window for ideas and came to this elegantly enjoyable posting by Andy Wood, and this photo.  I’m grateful for Andy’s gift as I recall Joe Barrett’s calling me out.  And I thank him for his word – it’s what Joe Barrett convicted me of thirty years ago: complacency.

Joe was a character in my life, a real character.  His wife Lynn had been an “early adopter” of the Charismatic Renewal meetings that had come to the social hall of our progressive, Jesuit-administered Catholic parish.  Like many husbands, Joe had been kind of dragged in, encouraged to meet the other men, to find out why the heck we came.  He joined us in a way that was pretty risky – by accompanying seven or eight of us men on the second of our annual camping weekends, times we used to get to know each other more intimately, preoccupied as we were by our jobs, while our wives were free to meet on weekdays and share lunch, albeit with hordes our kids in tow.  Joe was a super bright person coming through hard times.  He was a film maker, training and educational films, and was full of entertaining stories.  He ran us through his latest film, “Dust-Free Rides Again”, a parody of an old Western (Destry Rides Again) that was intended to motivate soldiers to change the air filters on Abrams Tanks.  Every comedic device in the film came alive in Joe at that campfire.  He told us about his Army buddy Jeff Bruney, so often in trouble that he was on perpetual latrine detail, who on the day of the General’s inspection put a suspicious looking dollop of peanut butter on the seat of a meticulously cleaned toilet for the General to discover, and then tested it by tasting it when asked by his red-faced Sergeant what it was.  “Why, it’s SH**, Sergeant!” Joe blurted out, saluting.  We laughed so hard that tears came.  But every once in awhile, Joe would realize that he was in the woods (he was no camper) and look around at us one by one, grubby and red-eyed from smoke, and say “This is ridiculous!”

Joe survived the campfire and the frying pan campfire food, and became one of us.  The intensity that he had shown on that camping weekend never left him.  Everything he did was at double speed, and his mind was always coming up with the next two ideas even as he was finishing one.  The house he and Lynn welcomed us to for rotating home Masses was filed with books, framed art, a kind of yin/yang of Lynn’s calm water and Joe’s fire.  By now our “Prayer Group” had been together for five or six years, and it seemed to me that the women were always coming up with things for us to do, projects to be involved in together.  This bugged me.  Always busy with my own projects, I wanted to stay clear of their wacky ideas (or so I branded them in my mind.) 

One such evening in Joe and Lynn’s house most of the group was huddled around the food table discussing one of these ideas to get us moving.  I sat on the couch and page d through one of their coffee table art books.  Joe came over and asked me why I was not participating in the conversation that was growing in its enthusiasm.  I smiled, and quietly said “That’s ridiculous.”  Joe asked me what I meant, returning a half-smile.  I told him my gripe, that the group was always thinking up schemes to get us deeper, more involved.  I told him that I found myself busy and happy.  I told him I was satisfied.

Joe’s face erupted.  “SATisfied!  Be anything, but for God’s sake, don’t be satisfied!”  He turned and left me.  I assume he went and rejoined the rest of the group.  I was too startled to notice. 

The Jesuits have a term: Magis.  It means more.  It is a term that can be troubling, even addictive.  It does not call us to be workaholics, but to know that the God who calls to us is always more that we can imagine, and is capable of more that we think.  Change happens.  Things are not as they ought to be.  Hunger and homelessness and violence persist in eating away at love and kindness and joy.  Andy Wood put it elegantly in his Blog: “There’s also something that looks like contentment but isn’t.  Complacency is ugly; it’s spiritual cholesterol.  It’s not resting in the Lord, it’s snoring.  While contentment is desire under surrender, complacency is desire under siege.”  I think that the word I’d used when I told Joe that I was satisfied was closer to complacency than contentment.  I think Joe was right.  If we claimed to be followers of this Magis God, our work should never be finished.  But how do we do it?

Tomorrow – the place of faith in a life of engagement in justice.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.