He’s Right With God Where It Counts

It is not easy being nearer, my God, to thee. Never has been, apparently.

One of the great preachers of this century, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., wrestled with doubt and fear and allegedly had sexual liaisons outside his marriage. Jimmy Swaggart once tearfully confessed to trolling for prostitutes. Then there’s Jim Bakker and his swindling, Marvin Gorman and his adultery. And who can keep count of all the priests accused of child molestation? Evidently, then, a cleric’s collar is no magic shield against the infirmities and vulnerabilities that beset all women and men.

So why is everybody picking on Father Ray?

Well, actually, that’s not quite right. Most of us have been ignoring Father Ray, the central character on “Nothing Sacred,” ABC’s Thursday night drama about an irreverent young priest and his inner-city parish. The show has been drawing ratings you wouldn’t wish on a bloopers special.

But religious conservatives and some Catholics have been riding the good father like a mule for months now. As the American Family Association puts it in a typical screed, “‘Nothing Sacred’ ridicules Christianity like no other prime-time drama has ever done.”

Granted, Ray is not your father’s … um, father. He has a temper and uses words like “crap” and even “damn.” His staff includes a feminist nun and an atheist business manager. He loves the blues. Challenged to prove God’s existence, Father Ray can’t. In counseling a pregnant young woman who is considering abortion, he flounders between the prohibitions of his church and the pro-choice leanings of his heart.

Needless to say, this is one conflicted priest. But I still like the guy.

I like him because he is a work in progress - imperfect, fallible and full of unresolved wondering. I like him because he reminds me of people I know. One of them being me.

And I like him because he resists easy answers in a medium given to cop-out. On those rare occasions when television even acknowledges the existence of a spiritual life, it generally prefers saccharine over substance and sugar over struggle. We get Hallmark cards like “Touched by an Angel” or “Highway to Heaven,” where the next miracle is never too far away and all complications are neatly and sweetly resolved in time for the last tampon commercial.

It’s a world that bears no resemblance to the one where most of us live.

There, bad things happen to good people and scoundrels live lives of health and wealth. There, things don’t wrap up neatly or sweetly and you labor sometimes to know the right thing and to do it. There, miracles are rarities and believers sometimes find it hard to believe. Small wonder, that. There are few things more difficult than belief.

Which is, I think, the reason “Nothing Sacred” is failing, the reason it has drawn fire from religious conservatives and the reason it is, some weeks anyway, the most arresting hour on television: because it acknowledges the difficulty. Because it admits that homilies cannot always ease pain. Because it understands that human is a hard and ofttimes lonely thing to be.

No, it’s not easy being nearer, my God, to thee, but it gets harder, I suspect, when your tendency is to paint morality in primary colors, to ignore the toughest questions and propound the easiest answers. Life itself has shown us repeatedly that all are vulnerable and none immune, that perfection is not in us. If you accept that as a given, then you must also accept that the measure of a man or woman isn’t how they avoid mortal frailty - they can’t - but how they live through it. Who they are and what they believe in the face of their own failings.

Which is the other thing I like about Father Ray. After a day spent struggling to make out the hand of heaven, he goes to his knees in a quiet place and prays. Every morning he rises to try again in a new day. He can’t prove, but he believes anyway. I think they call that faith.

xxxx