Self Portrait: Duane W.H. Arnold, PhD

Self Portrait

People often assume they know who I am.

Some see the priest. Others see the scholar. A few know the writer, the music producer, or the collector of forgotten histories. Over the years I have accumulated titles, degrees, publications, projects, and accomplishments that make for a respectable biography. Yet biographies have a way of smoothing rough edges. They create coherence where life is often messy.

The truth is that I have spent much of my life trying to reconcile competing parts of myself.

I am drawn to tradition, yet I resist becoming captive to it. I value scholarship, yet I distrust intellectual vanity. I believe deeply in the Church, yet I have spent much of my life criticizing it. I have sought beauty in liturgy, music, architecture, and language, while knowing that beauty alone cannot save anyone.

Looking back, I sometimes wonder whether I have been more successful at understanding things than changing them.

I have written thousands of pages about theology, history, and the life of the Church. I have spent decades studying the great figures of Christian tradition. I have taught, preached, and argued. Yet there are moments when I ask myself a simple question: have I become as wise as the people I have spent my life studying?

The answer is not always reassuring.

One of my recurring faults is impatience. I have little tolerance for superficiality and even less for fashionable ideas that mistake novelty for insight. This has occasionally made me perceptive. It has also occasionally made me arrogant. There have been times when I have been so certain that I understood the weaknesses of an institution, a movement, or a theological trend that I failed to appreciate the sincerity of the people involved.

Criticism comes naturally to me. Construction is harder.

I am, by temperament, a builder of projects. New ideas excite me. New ventures attract me. Books, articles, parish initiatives, musical collaborations, historical investigations, and creative endeavors have filled my life. Yet every strength casts a shadow. My enthusiasm for beginning things has not always been matched by equal enthusiasm for maintaining them. Some projects flourished. Others remain unfinished monuments to good intentions.

Age has forced me to confront realities that ambition once allowed me to ignore.

A tremor, possibly presaging a worse malady, has been one of those realities.

There is a peculiar cruelty in losing confidence in the very tools through which one has exercised a vocation. A priest speaks. A scholar writes. A teacher communicates. When those abilities become uncertain, one is compelled to ask uncomfortable questions about identity. Am I what I do? Am I what I have accomplished? Or am I something deeper that remains when accomplishment becomes difficult?

I wish I could say I answered those questions long ago. I did not.

The struggle continues.

What surprises me is that I remain hopeful.

Not optimistic. Optimism depends on circumstances. Hope depends on conviction.

Despite disappointments, failures, and limitations, I still believe the Christian story is true. I still believe beauty matters. I still believe the Church, for all its flaws, remains the Body of Christ. I still believe that grace is greater than our successes and failures alike.

At this stage of life, certainty interests me less than faithfulness.

There are books I will never write, projects I will never finish, and questions I will never answer. However, perhaps wisdom is not found in completing the journey but in remaining attentive to it.

This is my self-portrait: someone shaped by history, sustained by faith, distracted by too many interests, occasionally hindered by pride, frequently frustrated by institutions, still captivated by beauty, and increasingly aware that grace is the only reason any of us finally endure.