Christ the King?
I was surprised to discover that today is the feast of Christ the King, and a little dismayed that I was surprised. There was a time when I paid more attention to the Church’s feast days. My wife and I, coming from non-Catholic families in a non-Catholic culture, have never really gotten these things entirely into our habits of mind and practice, but we made more of an effort when the children were small, especially when we were part of a Catholic home-schooling group.
These days we aren’t doing much more than the bare minimum of external observance. For a number of reasons, some worthy and others less so, we’ve stepped back from our local parish, and float between two. We go to the diocesan cathedral twenty miles away on most Sundays because the liturgy is far more conducive to worship than that of our local parish. Tonight, though, we went to the local parish for the first time in some weeks—to the evening Mass, because we had spent most of the day traveling—and the switch from the magnificent cathedral choir to the pop style at our parish was jarring. It took a few minutes for me to begin to take seriously the fact that I was in fact at Mass. But I got pretty focused at the homily, delivered by a deacon who is a very fine and solid preacher.
He had the nerve to talk about the Second Coming as a fact, to be taken as it was taken by the apostles. Spoken by a Baptist minister of the old school his evocation of the Judgment and of what’s at stake in it would have been pretty mild, but for a Catholic it was very strong stuff: the Second Coming will happen, and even if it doesn’t happen while we are in this world, we are all going to die, and we are all going to be judged. Christ is in fact the king; some will receive him willingly, some not, but all will be ruled and judged by him. He will be everyone’s king by force of cosmic law, but will he be owned as such, with grateful obeisance of the heart, or will he be resented and resisted?
I fancy that the King’s judgment will be of a piece with something that happens within us, and that we will know, immediately upon facing him, not only what he thinks of us, but what we think of him: either that this was what we have always wanted, or what we have always dreaded. In that sense the judgment may not be a surprise, but a recognition of something we’ve always known in the most secret places of our hearts.
Surprises there will, no doubt, nevertheless be. If we are not surprised by our own fates, we will probably be surprised by those of others, as Mrs. Turpin, in Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Revelation,” is surprised by her vision of “whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs”—all entering heaven ahead of herself, whom she sees somewhat glumly bringing up the rear of the procession, resentful at her place in it. There’s some reason to suppose at the end of the story that this vision of herself may, in fact, be a cure for the pride that is the cause of her resentment. And so the vision may be a prophecy that, because it was given, will not come true.
Like Mrs. Turpin, I’ll be happy to be anywhere in that procession. But I’m a pretty stiff and undemonstrative person, and I must say I kind of like the idea that I might be clapping and shouting and leaping like a frog.
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