Beware! The spiritual paradox of not being “everybody”

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Apr 11, 2025

One of the most annoying things about the Catholic Church since the 1960s is the frequency with which various bishops, priests, religious and lay people have considered themselves to be “prophetic” by aligning Catholic teaching and Catholic practice with the habits of the culture in which they live—for which they wish to be admired as both visionary and “loving”. Of course, such realignment is hardly unique to our time. If we lived for centuries, I suspect we would notice this in every age, even if some periods are worse than others.

After all, the Church always draws her members, and ultimately her clergy and religious, from the world. Therefore, whenever discipline from the next higher level has been lax, a great many Catholic leaders have made their livings preaching a reconditioned gospel with which the world can resoundingly agree. An even greater number of lay people have commended this practice, though it has never been a source of numerical growth—indeed, quite the opposite. Unfortunately, to have our thoughts and aspirations conditioned by the world’s culture is a constant danger since we humans strive for a favorable response and possess an almost instinctive sense of what is “acceptable” or “unacceptable” in the world around us.

Now on to the theme suggested by my title: At any given moment, these acceptable values and opinions fall into that nebulous category of what “everybody knows” to be right and good.

But we are not everybody

Perhaps the first point to be made is that, as Christians, we must realize that we may not consider ourselves to be everybody, which is to say just anybody. I can remember that as a child, when I wanted permission to do something or when I desired some new possession, I would entreat my parents with the argument that everybody gets to do this or everybody has one. But I was lucky: My parents invariably replied, “You are not everybody.” And truly, this is one of the greatest lessons that parents can impart to their children, the healthy sense that they are not just members of a crowd (or of a dominant culture). We are not everybody; rather, we deny ourselves often, and we base our decisions on what is reasonable, good, important and Christian.

Many parents still take this approach, but some only with their children and not with themselves. An adverse comparison to “everybody” is not very helpful when applied only to children’s desires and not to an adult’s overall example of life. Indeed, the best way to not be “everybody” is to set deliberate Christian priorities for the family as a whole, to fast and feast and pray and worship in accordance with the rhythms of the Catholic liturgical year, to use material resources in accordance with God’s will, and to have or not have (and do or not do) in accordance with what is required for an ever-closer relationship with Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

In stark contrast, huge numbers of people spend their lives ensuring that they are tuned in to the world. They want to be “everybody who is anybody”, and this reminds me of a song recorded by Dobie Gray in 1964 (and “Mama” Cass Elliot in 1966):

I’m in with the in crowd.
I go where the in crowd goes.
I’m in with the in crowd,
And I know what the in crowd knows.

Unacceptable

Deliberately or instinctively worrying about the “in crowd” makes for a pathetic sort of life, and it is especially pathetic within the Church, where people cannot live this way without being more or less deliberately spiritually obtuse—subject to God’s judgment, of course, not mine. Still, the Apostle James managed to be forthright about it:

Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you men of double mind. Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to dejection. Humble yourselves before the Lord and he will exalt you. [Jas. 4:7-10]

But sometimes it is difficult to escape the worldly hype. A problem we face even within the Church today is the problem of false prophets. This ought to remind us of the time of the true prophet Ezekiel, who proclaimed the Word of the Lord against the false prophets of Israel: “Because you have uttered delusions and seen lies, therefore behold, I am against you, says the Lord GOD” (Ez 13:8). Everywhere we look, we find certain Catholics in the forefront of the movement to justify the latest perversities of our wayward culture, and to show more sympathy for those who devote themselves to temptation than for those who struggle to resist it.

To take a very prominent example today, a significant number of Catholics afflicted by both homosexual and transgender inclinations have had to struggle through a series of confessors before they were told the truth about these temptations and the need to combat them spiritually. This seems to be a common experience among those who have struggled back from the abyss and become whole enough to write their stories. Too often they have received bad advice, even from the Church’s own ministers, and even in the confessional.

Habitual closeness to Christ

After the sacraments and personal prayer, the first rule of a successful Christian life is to practice small acts of self-denial so that we learn detachment. We cannot completely distinguish prayer from self-denial, of course, since for most of us an ongoing attendance at Mass and time spent in personal prayer are contrary to our purely natural inclinations, and so these are the first habits we should cultivate as a discipline of detachment from our own desires. In any case, this is how Christians establish a frame of mind in which God’s promptings and their own grasp of the Truth can overcome their unreflective sinful inclinations.

For those who delight in the devotional life, some restraint might be necessary to escape the trap of simply enjoying their feelings of piety. But for the vast majority of us, this is not going to be the problem. Few people (or so I suppose) find time spent in prayer “fun” or attendance at Mass “entertaining”, or either one particularly consoling. For a great many of us, I suspect, such spiritual consolations are few and far between. That is why discipline is so important to the development of a life of prayer, a life of practicing the presence of God—why, in other words, it is important not to be just like everybody else.

But one thing is certain: The only way to detach ourselves from worldly ways of thinking is to attach ourselves to God. And we can only attach ourselves to God by taking advantage of the opportunities He provides for us to “catch on”. If we have some connection with the Catholic Church, we should strengthen it as the fastest way to grow spiritually. If we do not, we must seek frequently to raise our minds and hearts to God and ask for His help and guidance—a habit called practicing the presence of God which should also be applied continuously by those who are already members of the Church.

So what’s the catch?

This practice of spiritual mindfulness is essential. When our minds and hearts are essentially empty, they are filled constantly with useless things, which almost invariably become sinful things. And then we say and do stupid things. Instead of growing as God’s beloved children, that is a quick way of becoming “everybody”. And yet this aversion to being “everybody” does have a spiritual catch. Our Lord describes that “catch” in His lesson about the two men who went up to the Temple to pray (Luke 18:10-14), the sinful tax collector who begged for mercy and the righteous Pharisee who thanked God that he was not like other men.

The point of this Biblical passage was captured brilliantly by the Catholic poet Richard Crashaw (1613-1649):

Two went to pray? O rather say
One went to brag, th’ other to pray:

One stands up close and treads on high,
Where th’ other dares not send his eye.

One nearer to God’s altar trod,
The other to the altar’s God.

The catch in all this is that we must, in our spiritual growth, always remember the law of the gift. As St. Paul says: “ What have you that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?” (1 Cor 4:7). So we must not be everybody or even just anybody. But we must learn to exchange pride for gratitude—I mean gratitude for gifts and graces all unmerited—at every moment of our lives.