In the big picture, sometimes we lose focus
There is nothing like travel to broaden the mind. Away from home and set free from routine, trips often provide an opportunity to learn about things of both large and small consequence.
To be filed under the trivial category, I discovered while touring Sicily that not only are the natives obsessed with eating and cooking with ricotta, they are also enthusiastic about making it at home. Who knew there was such a thing as ricotta molds and that they came in different sizes? A visit to a hardware store in Sicily cleared up that misconception.
But sometimes the knowledge gathered on trips is much more profound, yielding a chance to reassess priorities and think about what’s really important. And if you’re really lucky you don’t even have to leave the house to benefit. Occasionally, someone else’s lessons can teach us as well.
On Sunday, the New York Times has taken to running a photo essay in the back of the travel section. Every week they show an unusual scene. A paragraph below offers the subject’s take on what they were thinking about when the photograph was taken.
Recently, there was a shot of a young Canadian theology student admiring a baby elephant at a wildlife shelter in Kenya. The young man beamed with delight and stood near enough to stroke the pachyderm. His camera was at the ready.
The picture was certainly engaging — two cute kids from different species relating to each other. But it was the caption that really hit home.
The young man was abroad for the first time observing missionary groups at work in Africa. He was struck by the difference in approach between the church in North America and the church in Africa. The church in Kenya was focused on doing good works, he said, but the church at home was focused on itself. This was his travel lesson.
Bureaucracy happens it seems and sometimes it becomes almost an end in itself, more than just a necessary byproduct or the way to organize complex undertakings. Enacting our faith begins when two or more are gathered in his name but the apparatus surrounding these gatherings has grown larger and more complicated over the years.
I recently had a brief visit with an Amish family. I had long wanted to poke around an Amish house and they were happy to oblige by showing me the first floor of their home. They even pointed out the pocket doors separating the rooms. These could be pushed out of the way making an unbroken space large enough to seat numerous families for their worship services that rotate from house to house.
The Amish have no church buildings and the clergy are selected from among highly regarded male members. As Catholics, co-owners of soaring cathedrals and priceless art treasures too numerous to mention, we know such austerity is not the only way to go.
But we need to periodically check that our faith is more than a self-perpetuating hierarchy that also happens to have some mighty fancy real estate holdings. Maintaining organizational simplicity as a priority, stripping things down to focus on service, is an ideal that should be repeated.
Our reason for being is the message. The message is love. Any other focus yields a muddled lesson, a blurry photograph.
