From The Everyday Apostle by Fr. Edward F. Gareshé
The first apostleship that Fr. Gareshé discusses is the Apostleship of the Common Man. I appreciate his starting here, because he aptly diagnoses a human tendency: a desire to be "uncommon, unusual or exceptional". Now, I suppose for some I must explain why this can be a problem. After all, don't we encourage our kids to dream big? Why is wanting to do great things for the glory of God a weakness? What concerns Fr. Gareshé is how we react if we learn that our vision of what would be extraordinary differs from God's. How then do we view the "common, ordinary and usual" work that God places before us? Do we denigrate it? Do we fall into despair?
So Fr. Gareshé sets to task to convince us of the virtues of the common man:
"'God must love the common people,' said shrewd Abraham Lincoln. 'He makes so many of them.' And in its way, the saying holds a deal of truth. For what God loves in us is not our petty talents or riches or distinctions, unspeakably small and trivial in His eyes; what He loves in us is our humanity, made to His image and raised by grace to be in a wonderful way His very image indeed!"
How often we mistake our gifts as a sign of our greatness and value. Instead, shouldn't our emphasis be placed on our faithfulness to using the gifts in accordance with God's will?
What I love is that Fr. Gareshé decided to expand on this point by examining the example of the 12 Apostles! Now most of us would shout at this point, "Wait a minute -- those were extraordinary men!" I share that reaction. And, admittedly, they are saints because there was something heroic about them: their virtue. Ah, but there is Fr. Gareshé's point. When you object that these are no ordinary men, is the basis of your objection that they demonstrated heroic virtue? Or is it instead that these men "touched and heard the Savior", received "their mission from His very lips", had the Holy Spirit descend on them in tongues of flame and worked miracles and prophesied?
Fr. Gareshé reminds us that we too have experienced the same things, if we take the nature of the Church seriously:
"But so have you heard Christ, from the lips of His priests, His chosen envoys; so have you touched Him (most sweetly and efficaciously!) in Holy Communion; so has God given you a mission to spread His word, if you will only heed. Your faith is your mission, which must be made known among all men, among the pagans of this day, as among the pagans of that earlier time. Your hope is your mission, which gives you such earnest of a vast reward for your brotherly toil for other men. Above all, your charity is your mission, which stirs your to love God and your neighbor with a sincere heart, diligent to labor and suffer in bringing your neighbor to the love of God. And the Holy Spirit? He has been with you from your Baptism, unless you drove Him from you. He came to you in greater intimacy in Confirmation. He chose you then with a solemn choice to be a soldier and apostle of Christ. As for the miracles and prophesies: these were needful to the Apostles, because they were to preach a new and hard doctrine to an incredulous world. But we, Christ's lesser apostles, are to use instead of these extraordinary arguments, the simple persuasion of good lives, of simple charity, of the light of holiness and virtue that our deeds are to make to shine in the eyes of men."
If we take all of that seriously, we will see that what is extraordinary is that we get to tell people -- through whatever means set out before us -- about Christ, that He is the answer. And it is the common man who gets to do this in varied ways.
"Where the priest may not enter unsuspected, the common Catholic is already there, a familiar and a friend. His common talk is listened to with interest and without suspicion; his testimony is accepted; his teaching will pass current as the word of a friend."
For more on The Everyday Apostle, see these previous posts (#1, #2) on Integrity.
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