“You weren’t a decent man and you didn’t do your best. We none of us were and we none of us did. Lord bless you, it doesn’t matter.”
–C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
When I used to teach CCD, somehow I always ended up on Sunday morning with nothing much prepared, having once again tricked myself into thinking that I could improvise a whole lesson from an outline that I cooked up on the way over. Never worked. I wouldn’t say that I let the kids down, but only because their expectations were so low to start with. They were used to being bored and confused. 
I’m sure I signed up with the idea of giving those poor children at least one shiningly wonderful teacher, but it wasn’t panning out very well.
Anyway, since class let out just before the 11:00 Mass, and since I sure wasn’t getting up for the 8:30, I’d usually come to Mass right after CCD, feeling pretty crummy. Part of the crumminess was knowing that I had been given an important task and wasn’t doing my best at it. Not even close to my best. Not even pretending. The other part was the damage to my self-image: it’s not nice realizing that your native holiness, charm, and brilliance, which you’d always thought so highly of, aren’t enough to keep a few teenagers entertained, much less edified, for a measly forty-five minutes.
So I’d usually spend the first few minutes in the pew in a kind of grumbling self-examination. “Self-examination” is the wrong word, actually. Self-justification is more like it. In my mind I was some kind of leper, filth and rags, and I’d spend those few minutes bathing the leper, or at least pulling on some clean clothes over the rags, or at least maybe smearing some deodorant on him. You know, to make him presentable. So Jesus wouldn’t think he was yucky.
It took me a long time to realize how mind-bogglingly stupid this was, and not only stupid, but nowhere close to Christian. Had I not read the Gospels, like, ever? Had I not noticed the part where the town whore busts in and starts sobbing on Jesus’ feet—and apparently this is just the kind of thing He’s looking for? Or the part where the shrimpy little tax-collector shimmies up a tree, looking like a complete idiot—and gets to have Jesus over for dinner? Where did I get the idea that I had to smell nice before Jesus would be interested?
Wherever it was that I got that idea, I remember when it first started to die. I had just finished another disappointing class. I knelt in the pew, all prepared to start up with the self-flagellation. But before it really got underway, Somebody said silently—these aren’t the right words, but words are never quite right—Let me look at you.
So I did, and that was really much better than the other way.
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