In preparation for St. George's new Church building I bought an old statue of the Blessed Virgin with a grotto (about 4' high) to put out by the front entrance. It took a lot of cleaning and preparation to get to the point of repainting it, but it is coming together quite well. There is a certain excitement to it, since before purchasing this it was apparently sitting in a garage, merely forgotten. There is also something quite emotive about it. I am driven to ponder this work as a work of love that is seeking to help others better see the Virgin Mary and thereby see her Son the Redeemer.
As I have mentioned before, as a protestant I thought very little about Mother Mary. Now I think about her frequently, and (I have to admit) I often get emotional just thinking about her motherly love and care for me. In my work to restore this statue, I have been struck by the fact that I am now "caring" for her (in a sense). I am doing a work to make sure that she is noticed and remembered by everyone who comes to St. George. I cleaned the statue, and am now in the process of painting it in order to beautify it.
This is exactly what I am doing in my work for the Church as well. I am cleaning up the dirt, adding some beauty, and trying my best to show it to the world so that they can come to love the Lord better. A couple of my sons have been helping at various points and they too put in quite a bit of "elbow grease" so that we can bring this statue back to its proper glory. I can think of times when I have approached a statue of the Virgin and with a brief prayer have reached up to touch her feet. For me it is a sign of "childlike" love reaching out to our spiritual mother.
Just touching the statue in that way is a sign of affection, but handling a statue in the work of restoration can almost seem somewhat disrespectful. Push, pull, bump, scrape and sand; it all seems like rough handed grunt work. Yet, like I said above, that is exactly what Church work is like. It is the effort to help people to fix their problems and overcome their sins, and get pointed in the right direction. Sometimes we have to push hard (like when there is an actual sin that they are working to overcome). At other times we need to be more gentle because not everyone is ready (cf. John 16:12) for all the truth (like with a behavior that is a problem, but has not yet become sinful). Distinguishing between actual sin, and "apparent sin" is always a challenge.
With restoring a statue, things can seem fairly straightforward. Patch the cracks, remove the loose paint, prepare the surface for the new paint; all very simple. That is not the case when we are working with real people though. Many times a problem may seem black and white on the surface, but down deep it is not always the case. I remember once having someone complain after Mass to me about a family whose children were extremely unruly. He thought it was as simple as "tell them not to let their children play while at Mass". Yes, on the surface it looked like the family was doing nothing to properly discipline their children, but I knew what was going on behind the scenes; I knew their situation and had been working to help them for quite a while.
In the work of restoration of people, there are many factors that have to be considered. There are many things that come into play that are not always obvious to the casual observer. The one good thing about that situation that I described in the previous paragraph was that the person who was concerned came to me to talk about it (he did not merely sit back, hold a grudge and spread gossip). I was able to speak to him and tell him "you don't have all the facts, please understand I am working with it". Yes it may have appeared to an uninformed person that those parents were not doing their job, but there was more to the situation than merely "sanding and repainting".
People are not statues. And while I believe that the Blessed Virgin appreciates the work that I am doing on restoring her statue, I also believe that she is praying for me as I seek to restore her spiritual children. She, as their mother, knows how to be gentle with them in order to help them along the path to holiness, and I am thankful to have her prayers for me as God's priest. Let us all recognize that those people sitting in the pew next to you are not "statues that need polishing" but people who need grace (which does not always look the way you expect). They are all God's people who are multi-faceted and are not as simple as it might appear from a limited amount of knowledge.
