Detachment is an ugly word.  It carries the connotation of stoicism and cold-heartedness – perhaps even ruthlessness.  But what the saints mean by “detachment” is “renouncing possessiveness”.  Thus it is not wrong to be “attached” to people and things that we love (in other words to care for them and long for them), but if we become possessive of them, then we enter into something that might lead to idolatry at worst, selfishness at best.  The mother who loves her son and misses him when he moves away is “attached” to him; the mother who sabotages her son’s psyche and makes him a perpetual adolescent, still living at home at age thirty is “possessive” of him.

When you start an “apostolate”, you do so out of a mixture of motives.  Everything we do is done out of mixed motives.  I’m in the acting business and believe me it’s impossible for any actor simply to say, “I’m doing this for the love of God.”  Pride, career concerns, vainglory – all of that is thrown into the mix, and there seems no way to avoid it.  We can work to become “detached” or to see ourselves as “stewards” rather than “owners” or “possessors”, but these selfish motives creep in all the same, in an apostolate like my Theater of the Word Incorporated or anywhere.

Last week a friend told me of something he had set up that was a kind of mini-apostolate or lay ministry – let’s call it a Bible study group for the sake of discussion.  As with almost everything in the Church, not only when “two or three are gathered together in My name, I am among them,” as Christ tells us (Mt. 18:20); but also when two or three are gathered together for any cause politics is among them.  Non-profit organizations and church functions in particular are hotbeds for politics and mind games – probably because success can not be quantified in sales or profits, and so the struggles for power become more personal and less tied to reality.

And so in this good man’s Bible study group, after a few years all hell broke lose.  An internal power struggle led to one of those ugly episodes that everyone who’s close to the church can describe – Christians behaving abominably.  In this case, the founder of the group was ousted in a kind of Salem witch trial (this sounds ridiculous, but these kinds of things happen all the time in non-profit endeavors and leave very nasty scars on the victims involved).  In utter frustration, my friend said, “I wish I’d never started this group!”

And I said, “Wait a minute.  You did this for the Lord, didn’t you?  It’s not your group; it’s His.”  And I told him that perhaps the greatest thread running through the lives of the saints is persecution for the sake of allowing the saints to practice “detachment”.  Blessed Jeanne Jugan, the foundress of the Little Sisters of the Poor, who will be canonized this fall, is probably the best example.  After giving her all to found this wonderful order, she was dispossessed of it and forced into a kind of exile by an unscrupulous priest who put himself in the limelight, claiming to be the true founder of the order.  He did such a good job, even altering historical documents that extolled Jeanne Jugan so that they would instead extol him, that for a generation after her death, this robber-baron priest was thought to be the true founder of the Little Sisters.  Imagine what you would feel if the great work of love you gave your life for was stolen from you and you were ignored and forgotten.  You’d be miserable – unless you had the grace to say “I did this for the Lord”.

A secular example is Maria Von Trapp, who, because of an odd copyright quirk, was “dispossessed” of her own life story.  She received almost no money whatsoever from the bonanza that was both the stage and film version of her biography, “The Sound of Music”.  She was even discouraged from being on the film set – the very woman the movie was all about!  One wonders if any of us could handle this.  When Joseph Pearce, in a moment of need, barters away his life story to the mega corporation that turns it into a film (“The Sound of Shakespeare”), and teenage girls go ga-ga over Pierce Brosnan as the film’s Hollywood version of Pearce – with the movie earning hundreds of millions of dollars, while Joseph and his family are relegated to living in obscurity and eating ramen noodles in a trailer park somewhere in the South, we’ll have to see how well he handles this.

Personally, I’d be ticked – indeed, bitter and angry even to the day I died.  But Maria Von Trapp was not.  She showed true humility and supernatural “detachment”, dying a happy woman, as did Jeanne Jugan.

I’m not saying this is easy to do.  Indeed, I don’t think it’s at all possible on the natural level.  Only supernatural grace can give us the virtues to offer everything we do to Our Lord, in a spirit of love – attached to Him, but not possessive of what He has allowed us to do for Him.  May we all thus pray for a spirit of true “detachment”.