Gifts

In case any human on earth has not seen the Susan Boyle video, here it is. I urge you to watch it from start to finish.

When you look at Susan you do not think the woman could have a single gift, other than perhaps as a cook, or a mother. You might be tempted to think of her as some lower class clown looking for her ten minutes of glory by making a fool of herself on Britain's Got Talent. As the video shows, that was not the case. Susan Boyle not only has talent, she has it in abundance.

Watching her silence a crowd that was prepared to laugh at her, then turn them into adoring fans the moment she opened her mouth, taught me something about gifts and how they show up in people. We all have a gift of some kind. Granted, not everyone is going to sing like Susan, or paint like Caravaggio, yet we all have something. Unfortunately, we dismiss people as worthless by appearance only, much too often. Not only that, we judge them, to boot.

If Susan can be a lesson, she must be a lesson to us against spiritual snobbery. St. Benedict warns us against it, as do all the Church Fathers and Mothers. The Church itself is the single most guilty party of all! Yet, some plain Jane like Susan Boyle shows up and blows all our preconceived notions out of the water. Just because we are Catholic does not mean we are always right. The church itself isn't even always right. If it were, then we would not be in the mess we are currently in right now.

I pray that a spiritual equivalent of Susan Boyle will soon emerge in our world.