by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
A Comfort to the People
It probably took the editors of Time about two minutes to choose Pope Francis as the magazine’s Person of the Year. And that’s one more reason why he was the right choice.
No, I don’t mean that he was the right choice because he saved the editors a lot of work. I mean that Francis made the choice easy for them through all he said and did this year, and that his way of making this easy goes to the heart of his pontificate and his reform of the church (because that’s what it is).
Last night I went with family to hear Handel’s Messiah – the Christmas portion – at the Church of the Transfiguration on Lower Fifth Avenue, better known as the Little Church Around the Corner. A friend of the family is a boy treble in the church’s choir of Men and Boys, the oldest such choir in the country.
It was all the Messiah one could ask for: chilly evening, lovely country church, crack historic choir, evergreen threaded through the eaves – and the music itself, restored to its nature as sacred oratorio through the setting and the care taken with the presentation, so that the sequence of biblical promises really sounded like promises, not remnants of the world-picture of a vanished prior age.
Near the end – right before the “Hallelujah” chorus, appended as it generally is – came the aria that goes “My yoke is easy, my burden light.”
That is what Francis has done this year. He has lightened the burden by a few pounds, loosened the yoke a notch or two; he has reminded us that the yoke can easy and the burden can be light.
This is not to say that religious belief of this kind doesn’t have its complications – beginning with the most complicated question of all, which is, as Newman had it, is the question of the “being of a God” – or that it isn’t worthy of the complicated society we live in.
It’s to say that the gospel suggests, as often as not, that there is something natural about the beliefs set out there: that they follow on aspects of human character that we consider natural to us when we invoke the divine, call him by name, recognize the stranger, feel for the person less fortunate, yearn to live better and more fully than we are doing, or acknowledge how far short we fall. Those great men Wojtyla and Ratzinger made it easy for us – for me, at least – to lose sight of this in their stress on the strenuous character of the gospel and the myriad obligations of insistence and resistance that (in their account) followed on it.
The yoke can be easy; the burden can be light. I don’t think it’s too much to say, in Advent, that this is a simple truth we’ve been waiting for – waiting for, some of us, for a third of our lives.
