Stagnation, Tilting at Windmills…and Easter

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Apr 01, 2026

It is manifestly difficult to deal with widespread social problems, and it seems often to become more difficult in highly bureaucratized societies, in which procedures substitute more or less completely for both human judgment and human growth. Worse still, procedures substitute even for spirituality, and this has even become true for standards of universal behavior: Whatever the law requires. There are worse things than the rule of law; but there are also far better things.

Of course, “proper procedures” play an important role in any society, but they are fundamentally limited. The whole purpose of the procedures is to create the desired outcome as often as possible by standardizing the mechanism by which people pass through their various stages of life in the larger civil community. But the established procedures in any given society serve more to maintain a lowest common denominator of functionality than to produce any sort of excellence. What is sought is a minimum standard of compatibility for a harmonious social order.

Excellence is not generally a factor. Spiritual development is not even recognized. In fact, the maintenance of a broad status quo means that spiritual excellence is generally discouraged. After all, spiritually excellent people have one thing in common with criminals: They are notoriously difficult to govern. Welcome, my friends, to the all-encompassing modern bureaucratic state.

Bureaucracy

A number of factors can lead to the breakdown of the standard systems of civil government. Such systems are managed by bureaucracies—that is, governmental departments staffed with large numbers of employees who are tasked with making each system run smoothly. Their motto is excellence through proper procedure, whereas procedure is often the death of excellence. Various departments can be under-staffed and under-funded. People can and do find ways to circumvent the systems in place. Those in charge may be slow to detect and correct significant inefficiencies. Both common problems and the rise of new problems tend to be addressed with another layer of bureaucratic procedures.

Moreover, government bureaucracies—which typically do not depend on human efficiency for their funding—are notorious for increasing the number of steps necessary to complete each task (the better to ensure that each process is correctly followed) in an effort to make human judgment unnecessary, thereby reducing the interest of the employees and increasing the frustration of those who strive to excel. Moreover, all bureaucratic states gradually bog themselves down in mere procedure, making it difficult even for political leaders to find effective solutions to endemic problems.

In a bureaucratic state where political leaders are periodically elected, it becomes increasingly difficult for sustained changes to be made. The interaction among political managers, the bureaucracies themselves, the election cycles, and the citizens themselves (a smaller and smaller percentage of whom are not employed by or directly dependent on government) makes it even more difficult for “progress” to be made. Each new governmental administration emphasizes some new direction, typically creating additional bureaucratic offices to implement new policies; and each new governmental administration generally leaves new messes for the next “administration” to clean up…or simply rearrange.

This is now true almost everywhere in the world. Moreover, in a society overwhelmed by procedures, even churches can bog down. Everything must be done “just so”, but this is no guarantee that everything will be done well. Even the Catholic Church and her members will inevitably absorb some of their characteristics from the bureaucratic standards of the larger society in which they find themselves. The emphasis on personal responsibility has steadily decreased while the emphasis on jumping through all the required procedural hoops has steadily increased. In the larger society, and sometimes even within the Church herself, personal morality has been largely reduced to following all the accepted procedures. The first thing this usually means is not thinking outside the bureaucratic box. Instead, one increasingly fulfills responsibilities by checking the appropriate boxes on a form.

From Lent to Easter

Some worldly cycles and developments are exciting when we are young. They tend to grow exceptionally boring after a lifetime of seeing them come to nothing—that is, nothing good. Others will deplore my negativity, but one wonders in the United States, for example, whether life would have been very different now if the losing political party had been the winner in each American election at every level throughout the country’s history. Indeed, politics is a lot like a perpetual game of Whac-A-Mole, and it seems that the more things change the more they remain the same. One keeps whacking, of course; but one learns not to expect ever to stop.

Even the Catholic Liturgical Year goes round and round without much significant change. But at least it goes round and round the better to remind us that the long Lent of our lives is merely a time of preparation. Indeed, we need to learn to appreciate the various seasons—however little they change from year to year—as a constant reminder that our lives here on this earth, with all their frustrating repetitions which produce so little definitive progress, are a preparation for the magnificence of permanent change that comes only in Heaven. Each year we prepare for Christmas and celebrate our Lord’s Nativity; we take a break for ordinary spiritual development; we plunge into the sacrifices of Lent; we celebrate Christ’s triumph over meaninglessness and death at Easter; and, while we experience spiritual growth, we nonetheless slip away from some of those severe and glorious beauties throughout the rest of the Liturgical Year.

Indeed, even as we grow spiritually, we recognize our spiritual deficiencies more painfully. And if someone asks us why we do it, or what we get out of it, it is often hard for us to say much more of Christ than Sancho Panza did of Don Quixote in the musical Man of La Mancha: “What do I get? Why, already I’ve gotten…. I’ve gotten… I like him; I really like him.”

But though we often tilt ineffectually at nothing more than windmills, at least we need not despair. Never has so much been granted for so little, as Christ grants to those who hang on through a dull and seemingly endless bureaucratic stagnation…by remembering, even at the last moment, to prepare for and celebrate Easter.