Reflections for the Monastic Community

These are reflections on this coming Sunday's prayers that I offered for the monastic community earlier this week.

Brothers, we have arrived in the dog days of Lent. Things started out well enough. We certainly felt something of the penitential fervor of Ash Wednesday. In the first Sunday, we went with Jesus into the desert and were properly chastised by its omnipresent sparseness. Perhaps we felt the need to renew that same spirit of sparseness in our lives as monks. Last week, inspired by the conference of Br. Silas, we prepared our hearts for the shocking reminder of the goal, the experience of Jesus, transfigured in his glory. We have seen the impact of our Lenten observances on our lives. We have incorporated new ideals of monastic living. And now? And now perhaps the spirit is waning, the resolves are diminishing? Where is that bona opera form? I think I had better start that book. What was it again? The Third Sunday of Lent takes us into the cold heart of the matter. The Third Sunday of Lent separates the spiritual men from the boys. The Third Sunday of Lent gives us a proverbial kick in the scapular and sends us down the road that stretched out so menacingly for Peter, James and John in last week’s Gospel.
In the call that this Sunday affords us to renew our fervor, we are not without aid. Certainly the Holy Scriptures, but perhaps for US Catholics, the new translations of the prayers of the Roman Missal give us new fuel for the spiritual fire, igniting the cold embers of our Lenten imaginations with the vivid blue of its fervor. I cannot say how individuals may think or feel about the new translations. Perhaps we run the gamut. One thing is certain however, none of us can sense that the new translations are not an opportunity to rethink, re-imagine these essential prayers of the Church.
The new translations of the prayers in the Roman Missal offer us a lucid picture of this challenge. This week, as has been prescribed, I would like to offer some rather random reflections of these prayers for the dog days of Lent. Let’s begin with the collect. First of all let us ask ourselves what the collect does. The prayer of the collect in the Mass begins with an implied question: From where do you come? In our Catholic parishes, this undoubtedly has many and varied answers. One need only spend a bit of time in a parish reconciliation room to realize the complexity of the lives of those who gather weekly in communities around the world. People’s lives are knotty, triumphal, disappointing, heroic, holy, and sinful. Indeed our lives as monks are not so different. Each week when we gather for the Sunday celebration we bring the most important thing with us, really the only thing we can bring, ourselves. Our selves, that have gathered in the course of a living week all of the flotsam and jetsam of worldly living. We bear the burdens of the week like water drenched clothing. We come to Church with a faint hope of relief, for the experience of reconciliation. The collect aspires to gather us in, to give us direction and purpose in response to the randomness of our living. The collect hopes to unveil the connectedness of our disparate conditions. It seeks to find unity in diversity, creating through its words a united voice, a gathered people, a newly hope-filled community. And who does not realize the need for that unity, even in monastic communities where things can become, shall we say, a bit self-centered as we move through the routines of weekly life. Which one of us does not need the reminder that we are not in this alone, as lonely as the road may sometimes feel? Which one of us does not need to recognize in his own struggles, the needs of his brothers, the common understanding of our alienation and the common understanding of the resolution of our alienation. What does the prayer exhort us to do? Perhaps more significantly what does the prayer ask us to be? Let’s listen to the new text.
Collect:
O God, author of every mercy and all goodness
who in fasting, prayer and almsgiving have shown us the remedy for sin,
Look graciously on this confession of our lowliness,
that we , who are bowed down by our conscience,
may always be lifted up by your mercy.
The collect of the Mass for the Third Sunday of Lent is a study in conversion, of turning over, turning around. First it invokes God as author (in Latin, auctor). For us the word implies not one who writes as though God were somehow the writer of the mysterious pulp fiction of our existence. The Latin word, auctor, while engaging the creative act, is tied more closely to authority and a more profound creativity. It is the right to write the law of life. God not only conveys every mercy and all goodness (the latter being one of the four elements of transcendence along with beauty, unity and truth). He is the true source of all goodness. There is no goodness without God. Even the goodness that is displayed by others who deny the existence of God is a kind of anonymous theism. The naming of the deity in this instance gives us insight into his more profound authority. If God is the auctor of goodness, he has the right to tell us how it is to be pursued. God alone is our guide. Of course this is difficult for us because we like to think that we are the author of whatever is good in us. Yet Our Holy Father St. Benedict reminds us that if anything is good in us, give God credit. So, if God is the true source of goodness then he will tell us how to live. And what has he prescribed: Ah, there’s the rub for now we are back to fasting, prayer and almsgiving. These three keep coming up in the Lenten prescription. They present themselves repeatedly throughout this season as the mute sentinels of our spiritual programs. And what is our first instinct? How can we get around them? We may understand the authority of God. Unless we are complete knuckleheads (a characteristic I never discount in myself), we must know how God intends for this Lent to be lived and yet we make compromises. Our fasting is symbolic. Our penance is perfunctory, our almsgiving is, well, after all we are monks. Perhaps such a sentiment is not new. St. Augustine, writing on the Sermon on the Mount, says: “Vainglory can find a place not only in the splendor and pomp of worldly wealth, but even in the sordid garment of sackcloth.” If we may at times have a tendency to overly stylize the tried and true disciplines of Lent (and certainly Saint Benedict understood this as well), we may also, in these days of zeal have a tendency, at times, to overdo them so that these disciplines become ends in themselves rather than means to an end. They are indicators of our spiritual heroism. Perhaps this is especially true among the young. The disciplines of Lent are not semi-Pelagian magic tricks. They are the means to an end and the end is a greater openness to God. An anonymous author of the early Church says this: “All acts which a person does, that person does according to his capabilities. He brings them forth from the store of his capacity to afford him greater access to the divine.”
Now we go back to the collect. “Look graciously on this confession of our lowliness.” The question of course is are we making a confession of our lowliness. Are we willing to make a confession of our lowliness, to humble our pride and accept not only what is about to transpire in the Mass, but also, in a greater sense in Lent itself. Graciousness meets lowliness. They are mutually beneficial. God gives as much as we are humble enough to receive. Graciousness and lowliness should offer us, at least a faint echo of the characteristics exhibited by Our Lady, whose feast we celebrate in the coming weeks. An image of Mary in the collect offers us two pointers. One is toward the end of Lent, that is to say the telos of Lent, to gain access in renewed grace to the throne of the resurrected Christ. Mary is our guide in this as she is our precursor. The other Marian image however, comes in the contrast between the life of Our Lady, airbrushed in the collect, to the subject of the scrutiny Gospel, celebrated on this weekend but not everywhere in this Gospel cycle, the story of the Samaritan woman at the well. She is, in many ways the anti-Mary by origin and background and yet, like our Lady when she acknowledges her lowliness to the omniscient Jesus she becomes a powerful witness to the presence of Christ, just as his mother was in the aftershock of the annunciation.
The last two lines of the collect also impress upon us the image of the Samaritan woman into their folds.
that we , who are bowed down by our conscience, may always be lifted up by your mercy.
What is the purpose of our Lenten resolved but to find a way of acknowledging what is true? Our being bowed down by our conscience is not a false act of piety. It is acknowledging what is true. It is the key to humility and thereby the key to unlocking God’s graciousness. The scriptures for Lent, the injunction of St. Benedict all gear us toward this end. What is true about my monastic life, my Christian life? No one who honestly asks these questions can ever come away unscathed by the blackboard-clawing answer. Lent convicts us. But here is the end. We will be lifted up, not by our efforts at faulty fasting, prayer and almsgiving, but by his mercy. Misericordia, however, is not cheap. It is purchased at a price that in a few weeks will become all too apparent to us. It is purchased at the price of suffering from the only one whose blameless life makes him free from the need to suffer. It is pure giving and mercy is God’s to give. Therefore, our Lenten practices, impoverished by human weakness are made perfect when they are viewed, not as an instrument to salvation, but as a thanksgiving for God’s mercy. The collect, collects the misery of failed lives and places them squarely where they belong, in the light of God’s endless misericordia, open-heartedness. In the background of all of this is the image of the Samaritan Woman, but as is the case in St. John’s Gospel, she is also us, in all of her foreignness, sin, pride, she is us. Thus the collect truly collects the desire of the people to find solace and comfort in God, but as God wills, through conversion, through turning around, by means of metanoia. Those who do not celebrate the scrutinies in this year have the passage, also from John’s Gospel of the cleansing of the temple. Here again, the readings amplify the need for the disparate elements of the assembly to gather themselves into one person of conversion, moving away from our money changing ways to the worship of God, in spirit, in truth and in purity.
Now we turn to the prayer over the gifts.
PRAYER OVER THE GIFTS
Be pleased, O Lord, with these sacrificial offerings,
and grant that we who beseech pardon for our own sins,
may take care to forgive our neighbor.
When we consider the prayer over the gifts, we should begin with a small consideration of where it comes in the liturgical celebration. The prayer over the gifts is the culmination of an action. In the rite, the people bring forth gifts. What are these gifts? What do they represent? What will they become? The prayers for the preparation of the gifts give us some insight here. They are the gifts of the earth, the fruit of the vine and the work of human hands. Our Lord chose these very gifts to be the accidental forms by which his holy body and blood would be communicated to the world in a perpetual sacrifice of praise. Obviously they had ritual implications in the chabura/seder meal he celebrated with his disciples in the upper room at the institution of the Holy Eucharist, an event we are anticipating at the end of our Lenten observance. Even in that context, however, they represented something deeper than aspects of a cultural pattern; they represented and represent the basic elements of our livelihood. The bread and wine of the Passover represented the Jewish people’s liberation because they represented the Jewish people. Bread and wine are basic to human sustenance in what amounts to an almost universal anthropological signification. Bread and wine are what keep human persons alive. They are also the creative engagement of earthly elements and human labor. In the anthropology of food, culture is required for bread and wine as opposed to wheat and grapes. Bread and wine require our participation and our intentionality. We have to make them. In the theology of human labor then, they are a part of us. Bread and wine not only keep us alive, they keep us living through our positive intervention in our creative longevity. When the gifts are presented then, the holy people are giving not only what they need to survive, they are giving the best and most basic elements of themselves. Now the transformation. Lent is calling us, again, to realize who we are, people caught in the whirlwind between the temporal and the eschaton, the space between receiving forgiveness and being agents of reconciliation. Like the collect of the Mass it is a place of hopefulness. What could be more descriptive of monastic life? We are caught here between the temporal and the eschaton. We know all too well the temporal, where is the eschaton? I believe that like the prayer over the gifts, monastic life catches us looking for something in the future that is already present to us here. God. One thing that Lent has to remind us of each year is God’s burglaristic character. God breaks in. He breaks in to our carefully constructed ideas as to how things are supposed to be and with the determination of a four-year old tramples down the little temples of our expectations, reducing to dust what we think he can do. Is the message of Lent to be open? Perhaps we have had no better opportunity for that than in these liturgical changes we are highlighting tonight. Is the new missal a call to conversion, a call that we monks should not only welcome but see as our essence? That connects us to the prayer after communion
PRAYER AFTER COMMUNION
As we receive the pledge of things yet hidden in heaven
and are nourished while still on earth
with the bread that comes from on high,
we humbly entreat you, O Lord,
that what is being brought about in us in mystery may come to true completion
The collect for this Sunday points to the nature of transformation, of conversion, that is of the basic themes presented in the Samaritan Woman readings. Strangely enough, here in the midst of Lent, the prayer after communion calls us back to Christmas, as indeed it must do. The hidden in heaven, the bread from heaven, will nourish the earth. The mystery begun in heaven and continued on earth is brought to its completion in us in the most corporeal way. The prayer demonstrates that far from a semi-Pelagian (again) denial of bodiliness in Lent, we are united with God in our bodies, in the act of eating the bread that comes from on High. The prayer after communion is always a prayer highlighting exchange. Exchange here is mightily represented. The Samaritan woman’s exchange of guilt and hiddeness for open proclamation of the presence of the Word, the exchange highlighted by this coming Sunday’s second reading from St. Paul:
Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom,
but we proclaim Christ crucified,
a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles,
but to those who are called, Jews and Greeks alike,
Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.
The exchange is particular, but it is also generic.At the close of the Mass we are led to understand a significant truth about our lives of faith, perhaps especially about our monastic lives. It is this: the tension is never relieved. What do we receive in the Holy Eucharist? How is it an image of our lives of discipleship? It is the tension of things yet hidden in heaven, and nourished while on earth. Once again, the closing prayer draws us back to the central theological idea of our faith, the incarnation. We see the same tensile strength again in our acknowledgement of the bread that comes from on high. What we encounter in the Holy Eucharist is essentially what we experience in the unfolding of Lent, Christ, suffering, Christ risen, Christ, glorified, Christ in his fullness yet still accessible to us, still available to us, still as close to us as the bread we eat, the cup from which we drink. The prayer also mentions completion. This is the completion of the Mass, it is also, a representation of the fullness we have received. If we are open to the mystery, if we complete in our lives the saving action of Christ in the Incarnation, if we have received this Holy Eucharist with joy although we are unworthy that he should enter under our roofs, then we shall know true completion. We also know that our pilgrim path through this life is still one of moving, unfolding, unveiling. We do not see it yet and our continuation of this saving mystery of Christ will bring us once more to the existential place of loss and confusion where we found ourselves at the inception of the mystery of this Mass. Thus we come to the final blessing, words of comfort to an unfolding people but also words of challenge.
BLESSING
Direct, O Lord, we pray, the hearts of your faithful, and in your kindness grant your servants this grace: that, abiding in the love of you and their neighbor, they may fulfill the whole of your commands.
The oratio super populum offered at the end of Mass is not new. The older version of the sacramentary offered the translated prayers over the people proper to each Sunday of Lent. What is new with the recent translation is the proper prayers over the people for each day of Lent. In the prayer we are asking for something significant from God, direction. Perhaps this is the most difficult gift for modern man to conceive. In a culture of self-direction and self-determination, it is difficult as we leave the Eucharistic assembly to ask God to continue to direct us even outside of Church. What do we ask? To abide in the love of God and neighbor implies something profound. the Latin word here is manentes, to maintain which implies in Latin a state of permanence. We want to remain always in the love of God and neighbor and fulfill the command given us by Christ in the Gospel of St. John, from which this image stems. It is our parting gift in this Third Sunday of Lent, in this celebration of the Eucharist. For monks, it may well imply a greater desire to renew our vow of stability.
I recently saw a very powerful film titled, The Mill and the Cross. The film dealt with the life and work of the painter Peter Brughel. The narrative surrounded the painting of Christ carrying the cross, which Brughel completed in a tiny Dutch village using local people as models. Like most of Brughel’s religious paintings, you need to look for the subject matter carefully in the midst of a great deal of activity. In this case the cross is at the center of the action and Jesus in his journey is surrounded by villagers, soldiers and passersby in his way of the cross. The impact of the painting comes not from the poetic depiction of the event of the crucifixion. It comes rather from seeing the passion of Jesus in the context of what was every day. What was usual. What was their world? The soldiers wear Spanish uniforms. The execution wheel, all too familiar in local villages is seen on the right of the image. Children play in the background as if nothing is happening. Mary weeps in the foreground. People are fishing. A city sleeps to the right. The tree of life blossoms to the left. A fire circle burns in the background. A crow or vulture flies overhead and through it all the cross shaped mill continues to operate. The film demonstrates the presence of the passion in the daily lives of the folks, now long forgotten who are depicted in the painting. It is a passion that cannot be far from our lives, if we are honest with ourselves, if we are true to our calling as Christians.
The Gospel chosen for this coming Sunday is the account of the cleansing of the temple. The passage forms a pivotal part in all of the Gospels. In the Gospel of John, from which the account is taken in this coming Sunday’s readings it includes the important quotation from Psalm 69. “His disciples recalled the words of Scripture, Zeal for your house will consume me.”
The quotation offers a foreshadowing of Christ’s passion. It forms a connecting bridge between his ministry and his ultimate suffering, death and resurrection. Lent is that same kind of bridge for us. It is meant to draw us more intimately into the reality of Christ.
Zeal for the House of the Lord, that is this house, that is the house of the Church, that is the living Body of Christ, zeal for God’s house is the renewing work of this Lenten season. It is a housekeeping season, a housecleaning season. One of the opportunities this Lent affords us is that of cleaning our spiritual lives with the new Mass texts. With these new texts we are invited to experience in fresh ways the message of Lent offered to us through the saving mysteries of Christ. Surely it is a test for the monk, indeed for the Christian, to encounter zeal in our lives, even in these dog days of Lent.

Homily for Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday

Brothers and sisters, I have to admit that I am a little tired of Lent already. I am a little tired of Lent because I am a little tired overall of looking at the question of faith, of finding an apologetic for faith, of being asked by the world to continually question our faith, of not finding any support for anything but a milky, watered-down faith, of looking at the question of faith as something to be tiptoed around in parishes, and even here of continually being bombarded with fears about whether or not we can preach a true faith, a consuming faith, a powerful faith without having to face the consequences of being too “radical”.

Brothers and sisters, I think it’s time to get radical. We need it. We need it if the pains of living and working through the difficulties of this seminary are going to mean anything at all.
We need to get radical because we have become, all of us have become too complacent
We need to get radical because we have been lulled into the false reality that this faith experience doesn’t really reflect our wholeness as human beings.
We need to get radical because the world is going to continually tell us that our faith is only something quaint and accessorizing.

Listen again to the words of the prophet:

Even now, says the LORD,
return to me with your whole heart,
with fasting, and weeping, and mourning;
Rend your hearts, not your garments,
and return to the LORD, your God.

Can our lent be a mealy mouthed event if we take seriously the words of the prophet?
Must it not be a life changing event?

We get the lecture from Jesus in St. Matthew's Gospel:
Pray, give alms, fast.
Do not let you left hand know what your right is doing.

We have heard all of this before. We have been here before. We have experienced this before and like a spiritual déjà vu we shake it off, deciding instead to pursue the disingenouness of a culture of comfort and consumerism.
What is Lent in the popular imagination? I propose that it is an unheeded season.
What you are giving up for Lent?
How can I get out of that?
What are the laws that govern these practices?
Useless laws
Relented practices
Tokenism, blatant tokenism in the face of a call to radical conversion.
We do not take the call of God seriously even in this environment and we are bewildered that lukewarmness and a real lack of concern exist, out there.


Trumpets are blown, faces are besmirched with the dirt of resentment, room doors are flung open to display the flagrant acts of asceticism taking place within.
We commit ourselves to our good works and fail
We submit our robust flesh to the relentlessness of exercise programs and fail
We strive to be the most abstemious and we fail

And in all of this unheard of sacrifice and heroic neglect of self, what happens?
Nothing of course
And all of this is accompanied by the rhetoric and cadences of a spiritual tokenism.
We moan
We wail
We weep

Here is the question I ask this community of faith every year …

Where is Lent leading us?
What do we want to BE on the other side of Lent?
What destination are we aiming for in this annual pilgrimage of discipleship?
How might this Lent be truly a time of difference

What if we could give alms and feel the pinch a little rather than scraping the bottom of the barrel of life for loose change to fling in the general direction of the unspecified poor.

What if we gave the alms of concern and time to help a brother in need, or attend to his pain?
Then we might gain alms for ourselves, the alms of a life lived in sacrificial service, the alms of charity, the alms of fulfilled love.

What if we could pray without constantly worrying about getting things done? What if we could learn to adore Christ in the Blessed Sacrament without continual recourse to our schedules? What if we gave God the time he really deserves? What if the chambers of our hearts could be opened and the doors of our mouths could be closed? What if we talked more to our neighbors about the joy of prayer and less about the misery of seminary life?

Then we might find ourselves gaining softness in those open hearts. Then we might find ourselves able to nakedly reveal our struggles and pains. Then we might learn to love with an unfeigned love.

What if we could fast without flash, deny ourselves a little, purify ourselves a little, learn to control our desires a little more? What if we fasted from something meaningful and by our fasting created new habits and eradicated that which is useless from our lives? What if we gave up for Lent and for life?

Then we might find the purity of mind to discover what Lent truly is: a season of opportunity, a season of promise, a season of pure joy for the grace that God has given us to really look at ourselves.

Brothers and sisters, I propose that Lent is a radical season. A season in which everything must change, everything must grow, everything must be rethought. It is a season of expectation in which the promise of resurrection really exists.

Do we expect to rise on Easter as transformed, radically transformed people or do we expect to just go back to the damnable malaise of a conventional faith?

Let us begin this Lent with radical hearts, radical for grace, radical for conversion, radically ready to be fed first in this Eucharistic banquet, and then by the banquet of a life, fully lived.

Anticipating the Year of Faith

The Year of Faith – Part One
Brothers and Sisters, once more we have entered the holy season of Lent. Once more we have gained the opportunity to see in this season a clearer vision of how our lives in the Spirit will fare as we move forward from Ash Wednesday, to the glorious celebration of the Lord’s Passion, Death and Resurrection that waits at the end of this pilgrimage of faith. Once again we are offered something unique, the time to spend contemplating our future, not the mundane future that awaits us in this semester, but the eschatological future that is afforded us by our privileged status as sons and daughters of a benevolent God. If the world thinks about Lent, it thinks of it often as a silly season of trivial rejection of superfluous goods and the donning of false pieties like so many painted and embroidered cloaks, sometimes interesting to look at but hardly affording the wearer even the semblance of functional haberdashery. Brothers and sisters we stand today on a precipice, the fortuitous opportunity to change and transform our lives in light of God’s divine plan. As a new Lent dawns for us, we see in its golden rays the opportunity to be transmogrified into something new, even those of us here who already seek in focused and finite ways to conform our lives to his auspicious plan.
In these conferences, I would like to spend some time meditating on various themes presented in our Holy Father’s motu proprio, Porta Fidei. The Year of Faith is an auspicious opportunity to think about and perhaps more significantly to do something about our life with God. When we examine the world around us, what is the conclusion we must draw? I believe that it is simply this: Faith in our world today is hidden. It is not absent, it is simply hidden. Here I do not mean to imply that faith is something covert, something hidden for a reason, although in many areas of our world we know that this is the case, we understand that there are men and women in our world for whom an active life of Christian faith is forbidden. As brothers and sisters in Christ we have a responsibility not only to understand the crisis of culture that motivates persecution of the true faith, but to stand with our co-religionists, to stand up for them in a political environment charged with a subversive spirit. Noting this situation, I am more interested in how we stand in our own time and place, in our own cultural milieu in which faith, while certainly not persecuted is, I would say, little understood, even by sophisticated practitioners such as ourselves.
What is faith? Perhaps in Thomistic fashion it would be appropriate for a moment to mediate on what faith is not. Perhaps this seems like an unusual way to proceed and yet I think it is a necessary way for we have become immured in what I would perceive as false understandings of this central principle of our Christian lives. What do we hear: Have faith even when reason fails. You only need to have a little faith in situations in which all rationality has been compromised. We have learned to view faith as something opposed to reason. Historically this is a development that comes from a new supposedly “evangelical” temperament in modern Christianity. The evangelical mindset teaches us that the tenants of faith, the principles of our religious situation are necessarily opposed to reason. No one expresses this position more concretely than the Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard. In many ways, Kierkegaard represents the end of a trajectory of thought that begins in the late Eighteenth Century. It is a split between reason and emotion as modes of intellection. The impetus for this train of thought is the work of the German theologian Friederich Schleiermacher, who has been called the “bête noire” of contemporary Christianity by more sober minds. Schleiermacher proposed a decided split in the ways people think between rational and emotional. In this train of thought, rationalism is the key to engaging the world; it is the means by which practical decisions must be made in one’s life whether that life is understood on the personal or corporate level. The exercise of the emotion is where religion lives. It is an intensely personal and private world making religion, no matter how we choose to exercise it, as something quite individual. Indeed Schleiermacher decries the very possibility of a congregational religious body in the sense of “church” because religion is so private that it does not admit to corporate expression. Kierkegaard takes this vision to its logical extreme. If religion is personal and private then it can contain nothing public or objective in its constitution. If there are public or rational aspects of thought, then these aspects are not religious and must be excised. Religious people must behave irrationally at least in the expression of their religion while they must maintain a rational demeanor in their public functioning which is far removed from religious practice. The thought of Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard has found a great deal of support in contemporary Protestant fundamentalism. Fundamentalism sees the exercise of religion as a private affair, between the individual and God. Fundamentalism posits a simple epistemic approach. Fundamentalism finds an ultimate breaking point with the world in which we live. Fundamentalism is, likewise, not limited to Protestant circles. We experience it as well in the Catholic Church, a Catholic Church saturated with contemporary epistemological veneers which are, in point of fact, inimical with the practice of Christian faith, a faith that views the incarnational aspects of our creed as central to the lived experience of Christianity.
At this point in my talk you are undoubtedly asking yourself what all of this highly theoretical speculation can possibly have to do with the very practical aspects of priestly formation. My point is basically this question: What do you expect? While we may decry the substance of Schleiermacher’s thought and the outcome of that thought in the work of Kierkegaard and modern fundamentalism and see these modes of thinking as something far removed from our experience, I would say they are not. The real outcome of this dichotomous configuration is the experience of thinking about the world as real (that is empirical and rational) and personal (that is emotional and fideistic). In this reality the world of faith is decidedly separate from the “real world”. We become schizophrenic in our approach. We try to live two simultaneous realities. We try to believe that the life of faith is separate from the secular world. The modern schizophrenic mind, however, cannot maintain this split and thus, ultimately, is called to make a choice between the world of faith and the “real world”. We are told that we must take the real world and the world of faith must pass away like so many childhood fairy tales. And where has man’s sojourn in the “real world” taken him? Is the human person better off in a secular environment? Is the “real world” conducive to the development of the higher aspects of the human condition, the moral, the aesthetic? What has our tentative traversal of the “real world” offered us? Has it made us better suited to relationships, more devoted to one another, or better focused? And yet we have been told that the life of faith has no bearing on the “real world”. Keep your faith we are told but also be a good citizen in a completely secular culture. Practice your faith privately without reference to the marketplace. Be as prayerful and as faithful as you like at home or in church but take nothing of that private world into the “real world”. In the real world men and women are doing “real” things and are not traipsing through the vain imaginings of a world of faith. Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, modern fideism do not save faith in the “real world” they destroy the possibility of faith by making it the vain imaginings of individual minds and hearts.
Our Catholic faith however, when rightly understood, teaches us something far different. Perhaps no theologian has expressed this authentic Catholic position on faith better than Blessed John Henry Newman. When we read our Holy Father’s words about faith in this upcoming year we hear the faint strains of Newman’s thought as well. For Newman, personal development necessarily had to be a complete movement of the person for it to make any sense whatsoever. In his estimation, reason and faith were naturally intertwined in that faith “requires [not] a cold and ineffective acceptance, though it be held ever so unconditionally”. For Newman, the separation between theory and life, that kind of epistemic schizophrenia, was the affliction of many. “Such in its character is the assent of thousands, whose imaginations are not at all kindled, nor their hearts inflamed, nor their conduct affected, by the most august of all conceivable truths”. Newman must have known countless examples of such characters in his life of ministry; but something else is at stake here, for Newman not only critiqued the ivory-towerism of academia, he also criticized those who move unquestioning through life as though motivated only by fixed theories and perceptions of the world that never change. Such people, in Newman’s estimation, were less than whole. The experience of complete living, that is, the fusion of the intellectual and the moral and emotional, brought about a different kind of experience. This, in short is the real life of faith.
Is it the elaborate, subtle, triumphant exhibition of a truth, completely developed, and happily adjusted, and accurately balanced on its centre, and impregnable on every side, as a scientific view, “totus, teres, atque rotundus,” challenging all assailants, or, on the other hand, does it come to the unlearned, the young, the busy, and the afflicted, as a fact which is to arrest them, penetrate them, and to support and animate them in their passage through life?
In other words, Newman is arguing here for what we might term a pastoral approach, or more concretely a sacramental approach realized in the human person , or even more concretely a real life approach. The chief insight of this sacramental approach to the life of faith is that in every instance of life, there is more than meets the eye, there is a behind and before, there is a wholeness and roundness that only presents itself in truthful engagement. For Newman there could be no authentic living that did not uncover such wholeness and such roundness. He understood, however, that such an endeavor was fraught with tension by its very nature and that the natural inclinations of the person were toward peace and serenity. In other words, when we truly pursue the life of faith, we will have no peace unless we mean by peace that challenge of endless pursuit. Newman used this comparison to show the difference between theology and religion. Theology, as it was traditionally conceived, while an essential component of a religious worldview, was constructed principally on ideas. Formulae, axioms, and corollaries are the fodder of theological reflection. “Theology, properly and directly, deals with notional apprehension; religion with imaginative”. Theology is an intellectual exercise and as such forms a necessary component toward the expression of religious life, but it remains an expression of an intellectual idea, which is constructed of “proof, analysis, comparison, and the like intellectual exercises”. “For the purposes of devotion, it is the image of a reality”. Religion is different for Newman in that: “Religion has to do with the real, and the real is the particular; theology has to do with what is [theoretical], and the [theoretical] is the general and systematic”. Theology and religion are not opposed, but there is a danger on the part of academics of mistaking theology for religion. Likewise, there are those within a religious tradition that would view a devotional life as something divorced from theology. While Newman makes the distinction, he is clear that theology and intellectual processes are a part of religion but that religion excites a level of commitment from the individual precisely as it touches on the reality of life. Theology generates teachings, but religion “lives and thrives in the contemplation of them”. Theology considers systems of truth, and rightly so, but religion considers systems of living. The priest in Newman could never have accepted a delineated view of religion as cold analysis. In fact, he disdains the discussion of religious matters, notions of God, by those for whom the lived experience of religion is not evident. In other words, questions of God should only be discussed within a life of faith and devotion, in the lived experience of the community of faith, with all its complexity and indeed messiness. It is a theology done on the knees. It is what we strive after in this seminary environment. Only then will the religious seeker find motives for devotion and faithful obedience. Such an insight necessitates a re-appropriation of the very concept of theological method and may, in the long run, entail a conflation between theology per se and what Newman refers to as religion.
Perhaps I have gone on too long about Newman. It is something of my nature. I would now like to briefly return to the document of our Holy Father in relation to these reflections. The year of faith proposed by Pope Benedict is nothing less than a attempt to reclaim the epistemological center, indeed the complexity of Christian faith. The contemporary secular censors (or perhaps enemies) of our faith desire nothing more than to make Christianity into something easy and simple. It is neither. The practice of Christianity is not a small matter. Faith is complex. If there is a single theme that pervades the work of Josef Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, this is it. Faith is complex. It is a counter-cultural theme. Far from a matter of private concern, faith is something that, “implies public testimony and commitment.” As in Newman, the pope sees faith and its profession as “an act both personal and communitarian”. In the profession of faith as a public act, an action the pope believes all Christians must have committed to memory, we are aligning ourselves with a public epistemological stance. We are professing not an esoteric, Gnostic belief system, but a viable way of life with very viable consequences in the marketplace. “Knowledge of faith opens a door into the fullness of the saving mystery revealed by God.” Faith and its public expression are the outcome of the sincere, but often misguided secular search for knowledge and understanding. For the Holy Father, this search is the preamble of faith because it invariably “guides people onto the path that leads to the mystery of God”. In faith we discover then our true humanity and our authentic selves in that we discover the Truth for which we are searching, a search that in cold secular terms we experience but cannot name. “Human reason, bears within itself a demand for what is perennially valid and lasting”. Faith invites us and opens us to the fullness of reason. It also connects us in a complete way with the public sphere. Again, in our culture we have become attuned to the misguided ideal of the separation of Church and State. How can there be a separation of Church and State if the profession of faith defines the person and if the person is both a person of faith and a public person simultaneously. In our country today we are facing a mighty challenge in this area. We have been led to believe that there can be within each of us a good Catholic and a good citizen and that these two may never meet. Brothers and sisters they have met in the crude and unredeemable ideal presented in the current health care legislation of the Obama administration. As the secretary for the United States Catholic Bishops notes : "It's the unstoppable force meets the immovable object." That is where we stand. Our hospitals, our schools, our offices of Catholic charities are under attack in a way that promotes the separation of Church and State as a reality. It is not a reality. It is a false comfort. Until we realize that our position as citizens must meet our position as Catholics we are lost. It seems in the current legislative environment that our hospitals, our schools and our institutions of public charity may also be lost. This is a test case and a mighty test case that will ask Catholics, and really people of all faiths if we are ready to move to another level, indeed a new paradigm. The year of faith is not asking us to think about the niceties of a Sunday School world, but to critically look at the real world and ask ourselves whether our faith as Roman Catholics ultimately means anything or not.
The year of faith then is not proposing something expressly opposed to human nature. It is rather proposing a return to our authentic nature. In a return to a true understanding of faith we are not asked to be contrary to the human condition and situation, we are asked to be true to it. No one understands this question better that our Holy Father. Like his predecessor, the present pope understands the authentic challenge of the Catholic Church to call men and women back to true humanity, a humanity corrupted by false understandings of the human inherent in modern culture. I believe that there is a contemporary trend found within our Church, yes, even within our local community to seek a Truth in faith apart from the authentic exercise of human nature. It cannot be without a systematic denial of the true center of our Catholic faith, the sacred marriage of the human and divine in Christ. As we prepare to embark on this year of faith, I will devote more conferences to this topic. I also encourage your reading of the document Porta Fidei which you have each received. Brothers and sisters, in this season of Lent we are called to revive ourselves and our commitment to Christ. We are called to renew the message of the Gospel already received in our hearts. We are invited to a new reality, a second spring of faith in our lives. Can we accomplish it? Let us try with the aid of the saints and in particular our Blessed Lady to whom we cry: “Hail Holy Queen…”

Rector's Conference

In my conferences during this formation term, I have focused on the business model of “best practices” as applied to what we do here in the seminary. For the final conference of this series, I would like to turn to a very specific issue, the issue of social networking and our relationship in general to the internet and the world wide web.
Last year I was invited by the National Conference of Diocesan Vocation Directors (NCDVD) to make a presentation at their annual convention on social networking and its impact on seminaries. At first I thought the organizers were joking. As anyone knows, I am basically a techno-idiot. I have no space of my own. My face is not on a book. I believe that only birds should twitter and tweet. My initial response to the invitation was to say no, but then I realized, perhaps I needed more insight. Naturally, the first thing I was interested in as a scholar was what others were saying. So, I googled, because I do know how to do that. Needless to say there were hundreds of thousands of links to sites concerning the use of social networking. Google was not helpful. I then turned to members of the staff to find out what their thoughts were on the question. An elderly professor slammed the door in my face indicating that he thought the internet was possessed by the devil. Fair enough. Another indicated that he was frustrated by all of the email he receives. Our IT man was frustrated by his having to constantly monitor internet use for inappropriate sites. Another has a warning on his web signature: No inutile forwards. Clever and literate, I thought. Another is frustrated by the amount of useless information that is conveyed. TMI, TMI he kept repeating and I only later found out what that meant. Overall my cursory survey of the staff was about as helpless as Google. Now I was even more frustrated and so, as I always say, when in doubt, ask the pope. What did our Holy Father have to say about social networking and communication? In a statement for the 44th World Communications Day in 2010, Pope Benedict said the following:
The world of digital communication, with its almost limitless expressive capacity, makes us appreciate all the more Saint Paul’s exclamation: “Woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel”. (Benedict XVI, Statement for the 44th World Communications Day, 2010).
Rather than presenting the phenomenon of social networking and techo-communication as a problem, the pope views it as an opportunity. Indeed it is.
The bottom line is this: Social networking and its attendant technologies are here to stay. They are a definitive part of our social landscapes and our horizons. As a seminary, our choice in the work of promoting and sustaining priestly vocations is not whether we will engage social networking and technology to connect with today’s (and tomorrow’s) generation, but how we will use it and form those with whom we are charged to use it responsibly in such a way that effective interpersonal communication that is necessary for quality pastoral encounters is not jeopardized. Moving past the theological discussion of the aftermath of a cyber centered universe, I would now like to engage a more practical approach to the challenges of social networking. I will do this in several sections. First I will look briefly at the phenomenon of social networking. Next I will examine how social networking interfaces with contemporary values, particularly in terms of the values (often countercultural values) that we seek to express in our lives as priests.
First: How do we define social networking? In general social networking is the use of some technology to communicate with others who are not proximate. More particularly, it is the process of building and/or maintaining community from a distance. In that sense it is as old as cupped hands or the use of tin cans to generate conversational ability. Social networking in its modern sense is preceded by older technologies of written communication, telegraphs and telephones. The advent of the internet provided new means and a new impetus to the possibilities for social networking. The internet, more than previous technological instruments, placed the world immediately at the disposal of everyone with a computer and did so inexpensively and efficiently.
One of the hazards of discussing social networking and trends is the lightening pace at which these trends change. The same can be said of statistics. At the risk of almost immediate archaism, I will try to land the statistical ball somewhere in the field of the contemporary situation. Almost 1.5 billion people employ email. Together they generate 247 billion emails per day. Every second the textual quantity of emails equals approximately 16,000 copies of the complete works of Shakespeare. In the world of texting. 2.3 million texts are sent each day. The average “texter” sends 357 texts per month, although this figure is skewed. Younger people tend to text a great deal more than their older counterparts. I recently spoke with an older lay student who was lamenting the family phone bill; her college-freshman daughter had sent 2,000 texts in a single month. Relating this story to a class of lay students, another woman raised her hand a said that her son had sent 20,000 texts in the previous month. Looking at social networking proper, MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and new sites which appear almost daily have gained tremendous momentum in the past 5 years. Likewise the use of the internet to gather information has become a decided trend among younger people. The use of sites like Wikipedia and a dependence upon information gathered from various Catholic blogs has become one of the challenges of teaching in a technologically charged academic environment. A common cry I hear among some of my teaching colleagues is: “Where in the heck are they getting these ideas?”
Reflecting on the various aspects of social networking and realizing that the moment any reflection is made in the area of technology it becomes obsolete, I have arrived at eight challenges to seminary formation posed by the preponderance of social networking among younger people today.
First is the danger of constructed realities. Social networking communities are not real communities. They are constructed. This constructed reality has two essential components, one the fact that what is there is only the result of what is put there. Essentially there are no accidents in cyber communities. The participants have the ability to “edit” their lives, putting forward only what is considered meaningful and perhaps, attractive. While this may not seem to differ significantly from what we might experience in real communities, I think it does in that in real engagement there are other clues to read that might reveal stories behind the masks. In a meaningful way, all cyber communities are what we might term “second life” communities. In cyber communities we have the ability to conceal what we do not want others to see. There is no “warts and all” in cyber communities. This might be as innocent as not sharing significant challenges with our cyber neighbors or as deceptive as lying about one’s age, personality or even appearance. The second constructed aspect of cyber communities is the lack of alterity. My friends are by nature those like myself. I do not have to include others in my cyber world if I do not like their politics, religion, skin color or other aspects of their lives. The other, an essential component of real life, is able to be excluded from constructed communities. Segregation is real and its effects in the long term may be as severe as those of the real world. In the seminary world, constructed communities most often take the form of like-thinking individuals. The cyber community becomes a crucible of single-mindedness. It is difficult to see the possibilities for priestly formation in such communities. Parishes are messy affairs. They include people who do not think like I do, look like I do, or act like I do. Hyper-socialization in cyber communities can condition seminarians and priests to a false set of expectations about what real communities should be like. There is no perfect community. Likewise, I am never a perfect member of a community. Seminarians will say they are seeking affirmation for their beliefs, which are often counter cultural in cyber communities. Those beliefs in order to be truly counter cultural however, have to encounter the culture, real people who will challenge and at times thwart them. An example of this outside of the question of social networking is the resistance experienced from some seminarians for engaging a program of Clinical Pastoral Experience (CPE). Some seminarians say they do not want to do CPE because CPE groups have a reputation for being hostile to Catholic beliefs. My common response to this complaint is: So is at least some of the culture you are going to engage in your parish community and the broader neighborhood. If you cannot defend your beliefs to a controlled group of CPE participants, how can you defend it in the “real world”? Seminarians must be formed to realize that they cannot control the world around them in every detail. They cannot cushion themselves from people who do not think as they do on particular issues. They cannot avoid encountering alterity in its many forms. Nor should they. Authentic priestly ministry means encountering the real community and bearing witness to your beliefs. If these beliefs are from God, they need no defending. If they are not, then they must necessarily fall.
A second challenge of social networking in seminary life is what I term the prevalence of an “alternative magisterium”. I am not proposing a new theological category here. I am merely trying to describe how the legitimate exercise of Church authority is sometimes compromised in the pundit-like atmosphere of contemporary cyber communities. Catholic blogs, internet sites, etc. pose a problem in that they present opinions about various aspects of Church life as though they are facts. Many of our seminarians diligently follow various blogs and other sites. A few years ago I was appalled to read in a popular Catholic newspaper, the following headline: “Orthodox Catholics say ‘no’ to their bishops”. As a theologian, I do not know what that means. Our perception of orthodoxy, particularly as priests, is inextricably tied up with our relationship with our ordinary. The exercise of the Church’s authentic magisterium is compromised by commentators, whether in print or online, who question the validity of that authority. Dealing with the question of who speaks authoritatively to those in formation for priestly ministry is crucial to the outcome of that ministry. Orthodoxy is not adjudicated in the blogosphere, it is uncovered and experienced in the living reality of the Church. It is experienced in real relationships by people who have real responsibility for its authentic expression. Seminarians who garner theological opinion from cyber space endanger the authentic relationships they should be building with their ordinaries, those responsible for expressing to them in a significant way the Truth found in the Catholic Church. For us the ancient adage remains true: Where the bishop is, there is the Catholic Church. Theological opinions in cyberspace that are inimical to the authentic teaching of the Church’s magisterium have to be disregarded. The antidote for this challenge is two-fold. One is careful listening to what seminarians are expressing in the classroom and challenging these positions when they are contradictory to the Church’s authentic magisterium. Seminary professors should always ask for the source of problematic opinions. Second, relationships between seminarians and their ordinaries should be cultivated from the beginning of seminary formation. This is important for a number of reasons. It allows both the ordinary and the seminarian to develop the authentic human relationship that is necessary for a quality obedience to be expressed between the two and it allows for the healthy development of an understanding of the relational quality of orthodoxy in the life of the Church. While the relationship between a seminarian and his ordinary cannot be based merely on personality, authentic personality is a place to start when in search of the teachings of the Church. Cyber relationships are not.
A third challenge of social networking is a perceived but false sense of anonymity in posting. There is a seductive aspect of seeming privacy in internet conversation. I sit in the privacy of my office or room. I post to a wall on Facebook that is only viewed by my “friends”. I do not have the ability to see the reactions of those to whom I am speaking (unless I am using a webcam). I may never get particular feedback on my postings. Yet, they are “out there”. I express sentiments or opinions about various things that I would never proclaim over a microphone in a crowded room. After all, I am only taking to my friends. The internet presents a perception of intimacy that does not exist. Thus, conversation becomes public that was never meant to be public. A great deal of time is devoted in seminary formation today to instilling in seminarians a perception of appropriate speech. How should ideas be expressed? What is the appropriate audience for different forms of speech? I would not say to an entire congregation in a parish they same things I would say to my brothers priests in the rectory. I would not say it in the same way. Different modalities of speech are necessary in human discourse. These distinctions get lost in internet communication. Anyone with the technological savvy of the average fourteen year old can see practically anything on the internet. The fine distinction of friends and walls is lost in the determination of a junior league hacker. Anything and everything can be seen. What is available, however, is less of a formation question than the perception of anonymity the seminarian has. The priest is a public person. What he says and does, even his most private thoughts and actions always have the potential of becoming known. We have too much evidence in the press to presume otherwise. Should we be preparing new priests to be paranoid? By no means, we must prepare them to be responsible for what they say. With the deacons here in the seminary, I use a simple tool to illustrate this point. All of them, with the permission of their bishops are asked to post to a blog on priestly spirituality. They have to sign their names to every posting. Such blatant exposure of their ideas and thoughts has the effect of making them think more carefully of what they are doing in other areas of cyber communication.
A fourth challenge in this area is related to this. It is the possibility in cyber communications of a boldness of expression without the nuances of interpersonal communication. Even in direct personal communication the possibility of misinterpretation is always present. As the form of communication becomes more removed, that possibility becomes greater. In Christopher Marlowe’s play Edward II, there is a famous scene in which Mortimer sends a letter to the executioner who is to visit the imprisoned King Edward that is so ambiguously worded that it could be interoperated either as a mandate to kill the king, or a mandate not to kill the king. This ambiguity is meant to protect the scheming Mortimer from the consequences of regicide after the fact. Letters, messages, telegrams (remember those?) even telephone calls bear the potential for problematic interpretations. Likewise, email, postings and tweets. Because of their truncated nature, these cyber communications also have the potential to be bolder in expression than might be desirable in older forms of communications. When I am restrained by few words, when I am texting or typing on a phone, I am more likely to engage in hyperbole and boldness of tone. At times this may be problematic. I communicate something that may seem confrontational by the receiving party or parties. I am also encouraged to boldness of speech because I do not have to see the consequences of what I am saying reflected in the reaction of the receiver. The receiver does not have the facile ability to question me or my intentions. Cyber communications are rife with the possibility of being misconstrued. They also reinforce a growing comfortability and perhaps a bias in favor of confrontational speech that is perceived to be at a safe distance. The continual use of cyber communication can also effect the person’s ability to learn and read nuances of personal communication. This is a serious debilitation for priests who must depend upon these nuances to fully appreciate and interpret pastoral situations. The fullness of pastoral situations cannot take place by Twitter. Speech that is too bold and un-nuanced can have a deleterious effect on pastoral credibility.
A fifth challenge is the inability to retrieve cyber communications. Emily Dickinson once wrote in a letter to a gossipy friend: “We must be careful what we say, no bird resumes its egg.” Once it is out there, it is out there. I am always somewhat amused when I receive emails from colleagues or seminarians and then, a few seconds later, receive a recall notice. There seems to be the perception that the recall notice somehow cancels the existence of the original email. Yet, there it remains in my inbox. In was recently reading an account in the news of a murder trial in which the suspect had done a Google search for terms such as “chloroform” and “suffocation”. She was fully convinced she had erased this information from the memory of her computer, yet forensic technologists were able to retrieve this information from the depths of her hard-drive.
A sixth challenge regarding social networking is the question of opinion versus fact. This is a fine distinction and one that bears a number of theological nuances. In the priesthood, there is always the need to consider the carefulness with which ideas are expressed, in particular their relative weight. We spend ample time in seminary formation instilling into you the ideal that priests always speak on behalf of the whole Church and never engage in a public discussion of any private opinions they may hold. The religious submission of will and intellect promised by the priest at his ordination ensures that the private opinions of the priest are irrelevant to the public discourse of the Church, a discourse that he leads and guides in his role as shepherd. If the priest has private opinions contradictory to the teaching of the Church (a situation difficult to imagine), he keeps those opinions to himself. He is bound to do so. This distinction is not in question. He is an agent of the magisterium. Of course, there are areas of Church life where the priest may authentically exercise his preferences and opinions. A simple example might be the way in which he ties his cincture. It is of little consequence for the life of the Church whether the priest prefers to wear the cincture with the ends both hanging to one side, or whether he prefers the ends to hang down to either side. It does not matter. It is equally important that the priest not attempt to make important matters those things that are not. For example, if he presents the question of the cincture as a matter of importance, when it is not. As seminary formators, and as priests and seminarians, we are familiar with these distinctions and how they get exercised in the daily life of the Church. With parishioners, it is not necessarily so. The priest is perceived as having an authoritative voice. He needs to be perceived in this way in order for him to assist the ordinary with the exercise of his authentic prophetic office in connection to the bishop. For many average Catholics, information and opinions placed on a priest’s blog may be given a degree of weight which the priest did not intend. Nevertheless, the opinion is there and because the priest exercises a legitimate authority among the faithful, it is sometimes taken that all of his communication bears this authority. Whether the confusion is formal or not, it is there. Several years ago, I had the opportunity to correct a seminarian who placed on his blog some rather forceful opinions about some contemporary church music. Now, of course, he is not a priest, but he should be conditioning his public speech to the degree of responsibility that the priest needs to constantly exercise. He told me that he had a right to his opinion. I told him that by the exercise of conscience he certainly did. However, he did not have a right to express that opinion in such a way that his legitimate authority would give credence to the opinion that was not necessary for the reader to accept. The faithful are always prone to say: “If the priest said it, it must be true”. Too many of our Catholic faithful have been confused by priests presenting their conflicting opinions about non-essential or essential matters in Church life as authoritative. Do the faithful need to be more discerning in the way in which they read communications by the priest? Certainly, but priests need to be more discerning in the way in which they present their opinions. The casual and indeed, seemingly friendly and personal nature of internet posting, whether on blogs or walls can lure even well-meaning priests to express something that can be misinterpreted by the faithful as bearing an authoritative weight it does not have.
Another challenge in this area for seminary formation is so common I have given it a name, the e-bomb. The e-bomb consists of challenging or confrontational communication expressed in electronic form. In the news we constantly read of people (mostly men) who break up with their romantic interests by sending them texts. No one could deny the callous inappropriateness of such an action. Confrontation is made easier by the anonymity of electronic forms of delivery. What is callous in a fiancé is sinful for the priest. Using electronic communication to correct or confront others is always problematic because it denies the essential dignity of the person who deserves personal engagement. Seminarians have a tendency to send out emails to their peers correcting their behaviors. Occasionally this will be extended from the individuals who might need to be corrected to all of those in the community. The community-wide correction is a product of new technology. The irony of it is that it seldom hits its target and ends up making innocent parties angry at the sender. Correction in a seminary has to be done personally and directly. This can also be problematic for the formation staff. As formation personnel we cannot send the message that it is alright to confront people electronically. Likewise, we have to be careful not to respond to emails we receive that are problematic with an equally problematic response. The formation staff has the responsibility of demonstrating appropriate confrontation of difficulties, even when the temptation is to fire off an equally explosive e-bomb of our own. The use of the e-bomb is something that must be addressed in seminary formation because its deployment in the world of parish life is not only problematic but deplorable. One of the greatest formation challenges we encounter today is how to re-teach pastoral communication in which the basics of communication have never really been mastered.
The final area of challenge is related to this concern. It is the corruption, or perhaps more pointedly the failure to develop appropriate interpersonal skills. At a very basic level this applies to the area of grammar and forms of expression. The continual use of truncated words and expressions has robbed at least a generation of the ability to construct a sentence. Numerous authors have addressed this question asking the pointed question: Is Google making us stupid? Are we more able to communicate effectively with one another in this era of highly sophisticated means of communication? Are our vocabularies, our abilities to spell correctly and our forms of speech gaining or loosing in an era of heightened computer literacy? It is in many ways an ironic question and still more ironic in the sense that we might not even be able to answer it because we have been robbed of the ability to ask it.
Often I wonder in a world of greater communications if we have not suffered a corruption of critical ability for doing authentic theological reflection. This is a complex concern. One that undoubtedly requires a further conference to consider and I have gone on long enough here. Contemporary scholars of mental functioning report that the age of the computer has had the undesired effect of limiting the attention span of the modern person. In today’s world three minutes is about the sustainable limit. If you are interested you can read the last seven points of this talk on my blog, completing the sense of common concern expressed at the beginning of these too long remarks.

Opening Homily for Second Semester

Homily for Opening Mass – Spring 2012
How ironic as we begin this new semester, this new opportunity for growth in the Spirit and in the community, in our identity as ministers of the Gospel …
How ironic that we should find Jesus, the mighty God, at a loss. We are told: He was not able to perform any might deed there. In many ways, Jesus finds himself in his own hometown in the Davidic bind that haunts our first reading. Which option should David take when none seems appealing, certainly none seems popular.
Yet, in spite of the negative situations presented in both readings, there is also the necessity of moving on. Brothers and sisters, that is where we are. Moving on.
In our lives so often we find ourselves saddled with difficulties that we never asked for, never expected. Sometimes these have to do with our families, or our past relationships, or even the very core of our being. There is no doubt that often these situations present us with something important, even critical to address.
And yet the voice of the Lord encourages us to be moving on.
In our lives we know what pain and heartache are, we know what loss is, we know what it is to experience brothers in this community that move away from us.
And still the admonishment of the Lord is to be moving on
In our lives we understand the sting of ending, even in these days of beginning. Within the husk of this new year there is already the seed of decay and death.
And there is no doubt that the voice of God is lifted to us, impelling us to be moving on.
In our lives we can get caught sometimes rather decisively in the web of our own insecurities, our fears, our doubts, our misgivings, our failures. Move on the Lord says, Move on
How can it not be so? How can it not be necessary?
We must move on because that is what Jesus did. That is what our Lord did. Confronted by enemies he moved on. Stifled by the expectations of his family. He moved on. Held back by hometown fears or a lack of acceptance of the message. Shake the dust from your feet. Move on.
We know what that means if we have ever had to confront rejection, despondency, an inability to resign oneself to the call of Christ. We know what it is to receive this summons from the Lord. How can we not know it if there is an ounce of evangelical spirit in us?
And what do we receive in this seminary?
Can there be any doubt that we receive the necessity to pray, the necessity to form lasting relationships, the necessity of study to improve our minds in light of God’s great gift, the necessity of drawing closer to our Church, closer to its teachings, closer and closer to its great truths that it still preach for a world immured in the false luxury of relativism.
Can we not hear in the daily announcement of our Church, of our lives, of our formation here the great necessity to keep going, to keep moving, to move on?
What do we receive in the life of ministry that God has so graciously given us? We witness new birth, the joy inherent in the cries of infants at the font. We witness new life gained in the quiet corners of confessionals and reconciliation rooms, we witness renewal in the daily reception of the body and blood of the Lord in the sacrament of renewal, we witness regeneration in the sacrament of the sick, relationship in the sacrament of matrimony, reconfiguration in the sacrament of Holy Orders. In all of these cycles of life, of birth and death, sickness and revival we bear witness to the desire, the need to move on and to be alive.
What do we have in this celebration of the Eucharist?
We have Christ himself, the Christ that calls out to us in the form of bread and wine, the Christ that keeps calling out through the din of our lack of faith, the Christ that pushes, guides, inflames our hearts with the desperation to move on.
And so we move upward and upward in a never ending hopefulness, gratefulness, fullness, blessing and we discover in our lives that the truth of discipleship, the Truth predicted by David and the prophets of old, the Truth professed by the Truth himself is simply this: We must keep moving, we must keep progressing, we must keep stepping forward and finding in our paths the encouragement of the one so rich in grace and mercy that he moved on
He moved on past the inglorious birth we have so recently remembered, the birth of the Prince of Peace as a poor child of poor parents in a poor stable, moved on to the dusty roads of his ministry to an often uncaring, unfeeling hometown crowd that is us
He moved on past resentment, the resentment of those so close to him and yet so far in understanding, so near to him in fellow feeling and yet so distant in the escathon
Past the hurts that fill all lives, the misplaced ideals and motives, the slights, the rejection
Past the misunderstanding
Past the cross and its infamy an infamy that we will never feel, although our lives as disciples may be filled to the brim with desperation and loneliness and social upheaval
He moved on to the cross, on to the passion, on to the infamy to what? to the glory of the resurrection and so shall we.
Brothers and sisters we stand today on the threshold of another semester of formation. We stand today in the path of illumination, in the hemisphere of possibility. Do we need to know what all of this means? Or do we need to know that the One who is true has called us. He has called us and instilled in our hearts, our minds, our limbs the endless desire to move toward glory.
He calls us in the drama and mendacity of our daily lives
He calls us in the person of men and women, children, all of those whom we serve and who serve us more profoundly
He calls us in our triumphs and in our disappointments
He calls us, not gross characters of seminarians, priests, religious, lay faithful
He calls us to this altar, to this celebration ,to this Holy Sacrifice of the Mass where we are renewed, where we are made whole, where we are brought back to life from the very precipice of death and fortunate are we, fortunate indeed are we to be called to the supper of the Lamb.

Rector's Conference

In my conferences for this formation term, I am focusing on the “best practices” for priestly formation. In today’s conference, I would like to spend some time offering a rather extended reflection on the “best practices” of human formation. Human formation is certainly a basic of what we do here. At Saint Meinrad, I would say that we have given this dimension of priestly formation particular emphasis and not without just cause.
Often we have heard the injunction of our late Holy Father, Blessed John Paul II, that the personality of the priest forms an effective bridge to the possibility of ministry. The pope’s words in Pastores Dabo Vobis give us insight into how we must initially proceed in seminary formation. “The priest, who is called to be a ‘living image’ of Jesus Christ, head and shepherd of the Church, should seek to reflect in himself, as far as possible, the human perfection which shines forth in the incarnate Son of God.” (Pastores Dabo Vobis, 43)
As a bridge, the priest must understand the dynamics of his own life and personality as well as any man can. He must know what motivates him and what he finds life-giving. These insights are not always at the surface of the human personality and are not always evident in a pronounced way in the daily engagements of seminary and priestly life.
In my reflections today, reflections that I hope will take us back to the basics of priestly formation and give us some new insights in doing so, I would like to focus on the qualities of the human personality that I see as essential for quality formation to take place. All authentic human persons display these qualities, even if they may need to be engaged more explicitly in the work of seminary formation.
St. Ireneaus famously commented that the glory of God was the human person fully alive. This certainly seems to be an insight in keeping with the message of Blessed John Paul II. We might paraphrase by saying that the work of evangelization is accomplished readily, even passively, through the expression of authentic human living. Is the new evangelization, that is the re-evangelization of the Holy Church, dependent in our age on reclaiming authentic humanity? I would say that undoubtedly it is.
What are the essential qualities of authentic human being? First, I would say a kind of groundedness; second, an authentic generativity; and finally, a sense of gratitude.
First, I would say that the well-formed human personality is grounded. This groundedness is related to the spiritual practice of humility. Humility is a virtue often misread in the life of the Church, and even more so in the world. Our social climate promotes pride, even a false pride, in one’s accomplishments. The social order tells us to do what it takes, even to the point of lying about ourselves, in order to achieve the ends which that same social order has established as the authentic markers of success: wealth, power and popularity.
The great teachers of our spiritual tradition, however, speak of a need to cultivate the virtue of humility as the antidote to the ills of the age. In the words of St. Therese of Avila, “We shall never learn to know ourselves except by endeavoring to know God; for, beholding His greatness, we realize our own littleness; His purity shows us our foulness; and by meditating upon His humility we find how very far we are from being humble.”
Our Holy Father Pope Benedict has remarked:
Do not follow the path of pride, rather, follow the path of humility. Go against the current trend: do not listen to the persuasive and biased chorus of voices that today form much of the propaganda of life, drenched in arrogance and violence, in dominance and success at all costs, where appearance and possession to the detriment of others is openly promoted.
What is this humility to which our Tradition testifies? It is simply telling the Truth about oneself. Humility is being grounded in the Truth. When we speak of the new evangelization as a re-evangelization, we must speak the Truth about the Church, about its condition in our local communities, about its condition in my heart and soul. Humility requires that I tell the Truth about myself to myself, that I stop presenting false images about my piety, my holiness, my worth to myself, whether those images are inflated or whether they are detracting.
Spiritual pride is expressed in hypocrisy, that is, trying to convince myself and others that I am better than I am. Spiritual pride is also expressed in lies about my self-worth, my failures and my lack of virtue. Humility is telling the Truth for good or ill. And when we know the Truth, it will set us free. When we acknowledge the Truth, we are already expressing a new evangelization in our lives. Ultimately, this Truth reveals to us that we cannot effectively preach to the nations what we ourselves are unwilling to admit and ultimately believe.
Knowledge of self is therefore essential to fulfilling the evangelical commission. We can hardly expect the nations to listen when we ourselves have become confounded internally by the cacophony of false messages presented by culture, social conditioning and the persistent voice of false ego.
When we learn to tell the Truth about ourselves, one thing is revealed. We are not alone. We are not only in the presence of others, we need others. Blessed John Paul II said:
Of special importance is the capacity to relate to others. This is truly fundamental for a person who is called to be responsible for a community and to be a “man of communion.” This demands that the priest not be arrogant, or quarrelsome, but affable, hospitable, sincere in his words and heart, prudent and discreet, generous and ready to serve, capable of opening himself to clear and brotherly relationships and of encouraging the same in others, and quick to understand, forgive and console.” (Pastores Dabo Vobis, 43)
An essential aspect of the new evangelization, both internal and external, is the reawakening of the need for reference to the other. The human person is a social being. We have lost this insight by too close attention to the ranting of the false philosophers of individualism and atomism. To quote the poet John Donne: “No man is an island, entire of himself.” We know this when we are humble enough to be honest. We desire to reach out to others when we realize that those embracing arms are also embracing our truest selves.
When Blessed John Paul II speaks about the nuptial meaning of the body and affective maturity, he is proposing, to an age inebriated with false messages of isolation, the essential truth that lies in the heart of each one, the truth of our need for one another. The maturity we seek to authentically exercise the holy priesthood is affective maturity and that affect cannot be directed toward the contemplation of self. Affect that only loves the self as an object is narcissism. True love always considers the other. We only penetrate the truth of the human mystery in the presence of others. Our brothers and sisters are an essential part of our mystery. This is the new evangelization and an insight as ancient as the seventh day of creation.
Grounded means knowing who I am and how I am; that is, I am always in the presence of others. Going back now to the business model proposed at the onset of these reflections: What are the best practices for human formation? Practically speaking, how can we achieve our goals in making the priest an authentic bridge through his human personality?
We might begin with the acknowledgement and cultivation of true friendships. Many of us have experienced a new awakening of friendship in the life of the seminary. I have made lifelong friends among my former classmates and now fellow priests. Many of us learn in a very different way the true meaning of friendship here that is grounded not only in common interests and fellow feelings, but in an authentic spiritual bond that we often gain only in the context of formation.
Friendships often become deeper and more profound in seminary and priestly life. We depend upon our friends as authentic markers of our ability to reach out to others and as true barometers of authenticity in ourselves. Friends confide in each other. They challenge each other. They support each other, often through common activities and pursuits and often by being authentic mirrors to the reality of the pursuit of vocation. Friends help me in discernment. They do this because they know me deeply. They know me deeply because I have shared deeply with them. Friends pray together and are not embarrassed about the spiritual aspects of their relationship. Friends put up with one another, as St. Benedict says, by bearing their weaknesses of body and spirit and personality.
Authentic friendship is a true act of humility and therefore a truly divine act. The ability to make and maintain authentic friendships is a sign of the seminarian’s ability to be true to the vocation of being configured in Christ, who said to His disciples, “I know longer call you servants for a servant does not know the mind of his master. I call you friends.” (John 15:15). Friends learn from one another. They lean on one another. Friends love one another in affective maturity. In the context of a celibate house of formation, friendship is a true and authentic expression of sexual integration. As Pope John Paul has mentioned:
We are speaking of a love that involves the entire person, in all his or her aspects - physical, psychic and spiritual - and which is expressed in the “nuptial meaning” of the human body, thanks to which a person gives oneself to another and takes the other to oneself. (Pastores Dabo Vobis, 44)
Because the friendships that we develop here are true and deep, we feel their loss more keenly when a friend decides that formation as a priest is no longer his calling. There is great sadness in this loss of daily society and the support we feel in our meaningful friendships. The sense of loss is real, however. It is a sign, indeed a sacrament, of the gap formed in the life of every celibate person. Our keen experience of that loss is also a blessing. It demonstrates to us that we have gained the ability to cultivate loving friendships and thus we can do it again and again. In the old days, we often spoke in religious communities of particular friendships, that is, intimate relationships that were exclusive. Obviously, this can be detrimental not only to the individuals, but also to the life of the community. However, the ability to make deeply committed friends is positive so I say: have particular friends, only have many of them.
Another best practice in human formation in a seminary is counseling. I am a firm believer in the power of counseling to make a profound difference in the life of the seminarian and the future priest. In my seminary formation, I frequently had recourse to our counseling center. It is a productive way of carrying out one’s formation. Even today, I occasionally see the need to visit with one of the sisters. Even the rector cannot always be right. Even the rector needs another head, another opinion, another voice. Counseling is a relationship that assists us in asking the right questions and seeking the right answers in areas such as relationships, sexual identity, public personality, addictive and compulsive behaviors, etc.
Often, new seminarians are referred to see one of our counselors. This does not mean that something is wrong; it means that something could be better. That holds true for everyone in this room today. Every seminarian, indeed every faculty member and administrator, can benefit from the periodic use of our counseling center. We are truly blessed at Saint Meinrad by our dedicated and professional sisters. They have devoted their lives to our service here. They have taught us the central place that counseling has in the world of modern seminary formation, as was evidenced by the John Jay Report that appeared this past summer.
Seeking counseling is not weak; it is responsible. It is responsible to do everything in our power to make ourselves the best men and the best priests we can be. I know that there is also some cultural bias against mental health care. While understandable within particular cultural contexts, it is necessary for priests working in this country to be comfortable with the process of counseling, not only for themselves, but for those whom they will serve.
Another best practice in being a grounded person is acquiring appropriate manners and etiquette skills. My grandmother was a great lady of manners and she had a saying which, in the innocence of my youth, I never quite understood. She said, “Anyone who would put a fork into a piece of bread would kill a man.” At first, I considered her observations about correct behavior to be a bit over the top. I have come to realize, however, that, first and foremost, the priest is a gentleman and there are two tried-and-true rules for a gentleman’s behavior. One is that he behaves like a gentleman at all times, even when no one is around to see him. Two is that he presumes that everyone he meets is a lady or a gentleman as well and he treats them as such.
G.K. Chesterton once said of Charles Dickens that he was a great man because the mark of a great man is that he makes other men feel great. Truer words were never spoken. Being a gentleman requires consideration, consideration of my own behavior and words and their impact upon those around me and consideration of others. This also requires a good bit of forethought. Being a gentleman is not an act; it is a habit and as such comes second nature to us. For priests, we might say that being a gentleman is pastoral. Correct manners involve who we are as priests. Far from being unmanly, the rules of etiquette teach us how to be real men.
Another best practice for groundedness is what I might call a functional extroversion. All of us have different personalities. Statistics show that many who are attracted to various forms of religious life are introverts by nature. Natural introspection is a gift that helps nourish our lives of prayer. Being a public minister in the Church, however, requires an extension of my social skills. I cannot be an effective priest if I cannot talk to people. I cannot be a good priest if I have to run to my room every five minutes because I am too shy to meet the public. I cannot be a priest if I cannot mingle in a crowd. Do I always like to do it? Perhaps not, but you must learn to do it, often at the expense of great energy and personal cost. This is essential. When we meet one another in the corridor, there must be an acknowledgement of the other person even if it is only a simple, “Good morning” or a nod of the head.
If I routinely meet others without greeting them, I cannot function as a priest who is called to be an agent of unity. Simple social interactions such as carrying on a meaningful table conversation, anticipating the needs of one another at table, looking attentive in class or in presentations are basic human skills. If it costs you something to practice these basic human skills, then offer it up. They must be mastered. Nonchalance in simple social engagements leads to others thinking that you simply do not care. Here, we may know how odd you are and give you a pass. In the parish, your lack of proper social engagement will be read as callousness or worse. You never have a second chance to make a first impression. Make the most of it by practicing here. I will conclude this section with the words of Pope John Paul II:
Human maturity, and in particular affective maturity, requires a clear and strong training in freedom, which expresses itself in convinced and heartfelt obedience to the “truth of one’s own being,” to the “meaning” of one’s own existence, that is to the “sincere gift of self” as the way and fundamental content of the authentic realization of self.

A second quality of the human person that the seminary calls us to perfect is that of generativity. A fully alive human being is not only grounded; he or she is also generative. A great deal of ink has been spilled in recent years concerning the generative aspect of priestly ministry. There can be little doubt that there is a quality of generativity that must be a part of who we are as priests. In the words of Archbishop Sheen, “‘Increase and multiply’ is a law of sacerdotal life no less than biological life.” (The Priest is not his Own, 57)
That generativity does not begin in some distant time; rather, it must begin now. You aspire to be called “father.” What kind of life are you going to offer the community now? Archbishop Sheen goes on to enumerate several ways in which the priest demonstrates generativity in his life and ministry. One is convert making. Another is fostering vocations. Obviously, convert making touches directly on the quest of the new evangelization. Perhaps it would be a fruitful discussion for a later conference, because I believe we shortchange the task of convert making in the Church today.
In this conference, I would like to focus on fostering vocations. Certainly, we have heard enough of this in our dioceses and religious communities. We know how to speak about vocations. All of us here, I am sure, could offer eloquent testimony to the action of God in our vocational lives, unique as they are. We know how to attract young people to the priesthood and religious life. We know, to some extent, what motivates them. I would like to take a bit of a different angle on this question, however, and talk about the way in which we foster vocations here in the seminary, among ourselves. How does each of you foster the vocations of his brothers here? How do we all purposefully help sustain the call that has been given to each and that has brought us to this crucial juncture in discerning God’s will in our lives? How do we act as spiritual fathers and nurturers of one another’s vocational journey?
I would say we must first begin by fostering a life in community that is life-giving and not desiccating. What is this community of formation about? It is about prayer. It is about study. It is about cultural challenge. It is about service. Vocations can only be fostered here when we are authentic about the nature of the community. I cannot be generative in fostering vocations if I never challenge the cultural expectations of the larger society. I cannot foster vocations if I denigrate the importance of prayer through my idle talk and bad example. I cannot be generative about vocational life if I never offer any example of service or even meaningful conversation to those who live with me in this community. Let us all ask ourselves these important questions concerning the generativity of our lives together.
1. Do I frequently ask my brothers to pray with me outside the established times of prayer in the community?
2. Is my table conversation at each meal edifying or do I engage in silly banter for the purpose of amusing others?
3. Is my recreational activity life-giving or do I often succumb to the popular culture?
4. How much time do I spend isolated in my room using the internet or watching television?
5. Am I quick to volunteer my services for house or class projects?
6. Do I do the least I need to do to get by?
7. Do I murmur and criticize the faculty, administration and my fellow students behind their backs?
These are a few questions. There might be many more. Are we asking these kinds of questions? Are we bringing concerns we have about the generative quality of the seminary to the rector or the vice rector? If we aspire to be called “father,” which we do, what kind of father do you want to be? Do you desire to be a father who is honest and open, who gives himself freely to prayer, who is willing to listen? Or do you desire to be a father who is backbiting, deceptive, critical and engages in unmanly gossip and idle talk? If we focus on the quality of generativity in our priestly formation, which we must, let us resolve to continually be fine-tuning our means of attaining this essential quality. Then we are fostering vocations here. Nothing can kill the tender vocation faster than a barbed word or a misplaced criticism.
When looking for some best practices for generativity, I will consider three: Cultural enrichment, an open door policy and listening. First, cultural enrichment. In your time at Saint Meinrad, you will undoubtedly hear two things from the rector. Every rector, after all, has his little catchphrases. The first is the need for a spirit of arête to penetrate the life of the community. Arête, in Greek, means habitual excellence. As seminarians and as priests, we should be striving to express this excellence in everything we do. Excellence means never settling for the mediocre in ourselves or in our communities. It means constantly challenging what is here. It means practically implementing a strategic vision for how things can be better. It means communal conversion in the most concrete sense.
The other expression you will hear from me is “raise your gaze.” The poet T.S. Eliot wrote these words describing the condition of modern culture in The Wasteland:
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Eliot’s point is this. The cultural point of reference of modern humanity is decidedly in the dust, focused on what Blessed John Henry Newman called the fanciful or the popular. Our cultural icons today are earthbound. The music, the literature, the art we engage in drag our consciousness into the dust, where fear reigns. We are caught in a quagmire of sexualized, materialized images of what is supposed to be important in life. We have lost sight of the transcendent in an eternal contemplation of ourselves.
We cannot think ourselves immune to this contagion here. We are all products of our commercialized culture. Where do you spend your time? How do you enrich yourself culturally? Are your cultural imaginations buried in the stony rubbish of our modern prejudices? An example of this is Facebook, Twitter and other social networking tools. Who cares what people are having for lunch? How much time do we spend following the inane daily activities and incidental musings of our hundreds of friends, when our minds and imaginations might be better engaged?
Raising our gaze means looking up from the immediacy of a navel-gazing popular culture and seeing our true citizenship in heaven. As priests, our lives are supposed to point toward the transcendent and the meaningful in the material, not to the material as an end in itself. Raising our gaze means trying to find cultural expressions that are generative: music, literature, theater, and art that are engaging for the long run and not merely satisfying for the length of a reign in the top 40 or until the final bell is sounded in the wrestling match. Engaging a more generative culture is not snobbish or elitist. It is human. Just because you do not understand something does not mean that it is worthless. It merely means that there is an invitation.
A second generative best practice is the open door policy. The open door is an invitation for others to come in. While it is true that we must, at times, have some privacy in order to pray, in order to focus on study and complete projects, we also need to invite others in. This is perhaps related to the functional extroversion I spoke of earlier. A good practice is to have your door open for about one hour a couple of nights per week. An open door policy encourages all of us to be more open to hospitality. Needless to say, the hospitality offered need only be our company, but we need to be willing to offer our company without reserve on occasion. It is good practice for becoming the public person that the priest must necessarily be.
An open door policy also encourages another good priestly (and human) value: cleanliness. Brothers, there is little to no excuse for living in a room that is not ready for visits almost at a moment’s notice. Dirty or extremely cluttered living spaces indicate two things: one, a lack of personal care and perhaps even good hygiene. Second, a lack of stewardship and care for the property of others. For the most part, all of us will spend the rest of our lives in borrowed living spaces. Keeping those spaces habitable for the next occupant is an essential formation question.
Connected to the open door policy is the final generative best practice: listening. In a culture inundated with aural clutter, listening is often the most important aspect of what we do as priests. As all of you are aware, one of the first charges I give to our new seminarians is “being here.” Attention is a key aspect of seminary formation. It is also the first step of obedience. Obedience begins with quality listening and that must be practiced early in our lives of formation. The practice of good listening begins with a willingness to listen, an open ear and an equally open heart. After ordination, many of you will realize that good confessions, good counseling and often good teaching depend upon the ability that people have to tell their stories and the willingness of the priest to listen to those stories. Sometimes that is all they need.
Listening is a sign of respect and active listening indicates a real interest in the lives of others. Listening is also the first stage of empathy and compassion. St. Benedict, in the prologue to the holy Rule, encourages his disciples not only to listen but to incline the ear of their hearts. Listening opens our hearts to the needs of our brothers here. It makes us worthy to be called brothers to one another. If we aspire to that spiritual fatherhood of which we hear so much, then the first quality of a good father is to pay attention, to carefully listen to those for whom he has spiritual care.
The final quality for human formation that I would like to focus on today is gratitude. Our sense of gratitude for our lives, our vocations, our education, our formation, our friends, indeed for everything, draws its energy and power from one source, Jesus Christ. When I was growing up as a Baptist child in the South, in Sunday School we had a song, “O How I Love Jesus.” The words are not difficult to remember.
O how I love Jesus! O how I love Jesus! O how I love Jesus! Because he first loved me!
Our sense of gratitude comes from our acknowledgement of who we are, the enlightenment we have received in a true spirit of humility. We are sons and daughters of God. We are a people picked up by the Good Samaritan, the Lord. We are those who have received, completely without merit and without cost to ourselves, the love of God who cared so much for the world that He gave His only Son to be our savior. As St. Paul reminds us in the Letter to the Romans:
While we were still helpless, yet died at the appointed time for the ungodly. Indeed, only with difficulty does one die for a just person, though perhaps for a good person one might even find courage to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us. How much more then, since we are now justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath. (Romans 5:6-9)
Gratitude for so great a love spills over for us in the perpetual sacrifice that makes present this divine gift in a never-ending way, the Holy Eucharist. Eucharistia, thanksgiving, is the source and summit of our lives as Christians. Our appreciation and celebration of the Eucharist tells us how to live. Just as Christ Jesus mandated that we love God and love our neighbors, so our appreciation of the gift of redemption and the gift of the Holy Mass must inform our daily lives. Brothers and sisters, this is not rocket science. Saying “thank you” is easy if our hearts are truly attuned to what we have received.
What are the best practices for gratitude? Simply saying the words, for a start. Writing thank you notes is another important best practice. I do not mean thank you e-mails. I mean notes sent through the mail or placed in our community mailboxes. Every year, I receive dozens of notes from thoughtful seminarians who want to express their gratitude for what they have received in formation or in a class. This is so important. How could we go through four to six years of formation without ever acknowledging with sincere gratitude what we have received here? I keep every thank you note I receive, because each one is a testament to what we are doing here: instilling a sense of purposeful thankfulness for the gifts God has given us.
Another best practice is a purposeful meal prayer. When we pray the meal blessing privately, let it not be perfunctory or trite. Let it be heartfelt and meaningful, even if it’s only for grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup. Even the base animals offer signs of gratitude for what they have received at the hand of others. Our failure to do so places us on a lower level. Only lives steeped in sin could be as base as that.
Brothers and sisters, today I have presented some values and attitudes for our common life that touch on the qualities of a well-developed human person. I began this conference with a brief discussion of the new evangelization as a re-evangelization. When we dare to become better people, we proclaim the Good News to a world often drowning in mediocrity. As we gather insight on the issue, we can do no better than to turn to the insight from St. Paul in his Letter to the Ephesians:
He gave some as apostles, others as prophets, others as evangelists, others as pastors and teachers, to equip the holy ones for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of faith and knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the extent of the full stature of Christ, so that we may no longer be infants, tossed by waves and swept along by every wind of teaching arising from human trickery, from their cunning in the interests of deceitful scheming. Rather, living the truth in love, we should grow in every way into him who is the head, Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, with the proper functioning of each part, brings about the body’s growth and builds itself up in love. (Ephesians 4:11-16)
In our pursuit of these lofty goals, we must turn to the aid of the saints, and in particular Our Lady.