Let the Great World Spin

“Corrigan liked those places where the light was drained. The docklands. The flophouses. The corners where the cobbles were broken. He often sat with the drunks in Frenchman’s Lane and Spencer Row. . . . He got laughed at by the more vicious drunks but he didn’t care. They were using him of course. He was just another snotnose trying on the poor man’s shoes.”

Corrigan starts “serving” the poor at an early age, foreshadowing his future missionary work with prostitutes and the elderly in New York. He is attracted to the dark side of human behavior and believes he can make a difference for the less fortunate. Later, he intensifies his relationship with the poor and the troubled through religious training and vows. He believes he is following the example of Jesus and doing God’s will by loving his neighbors, no matter how dysfunctional or unattractive they may be.  

“Corrigan told me once that Christ was quite easy to understand. He went where He was supposed to go. He stayed where He was needed. . . . He never rejected the world.  If He had rejected it, He would have been rejecting mystery. And if He rejected mystery, He would have been rejecting faith.”  

Corrigan is an avid follower of Christ. His description of Jesus’ life applies equally well to his own. “Mystery” is not clearly defined in this passage. One possibility is that human beings have very limited understanding of reality and even less knowledge of God’s plan for us. So, life is always a mystery, impossible to figure out completely. Corrigan is suggesting that Jesus understood that as long as he was in human form he could experience life, but not fully comprehend it.  

"What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday. . . . He wasn’t interested in the glorious tales of the afterlife or the notions of a honey-soaked heaven. . . .He wanted, quite simply, for the world to be a better place, and he was in the habit of hoping for it. Out of that came some sort of triumph that went beyond theological proof, a cause for optimism against all the evidence.”  

Ciaran interprets Corrigan’s faith that God will somehow make everything better. Corrigan aligns himself with this hope, as he does with the other primary virtues of charity and faith. It is Corrigan’s mission to do what he can to make God’s plan for a better world a reality.