Priesthood and Deacon Promises

Blessed are they who hope in the Lord.

In her devastating little short story, “Good Country People” Flannery O’Connor tells the tale of a young twenty-something woman named Joy. Joy has had many advantages in life, a good home, a Christian mother, an extensive education, but Joy is anything but joyful. In fact she is sullen, depressed, antagonistic and well, frankly, just a nasty person. She has taken her education and turned it against her pious but simple-minded mother. She has taken her upbringing and turned it into an object of derision and ridicule. She has even taken her name and changed it to Hulga, the ugliest name she can come up with which describes completely her nihilistic, nasty disposition and her truly belligerent frame of mind. In addition to all of that she also has a wooden leg. Joy/Hulga lives at home with her mother, basically just to torture the old lady and indeed, nothing might ever have happened in her life if a young, rube Bible salesman had not happened to ring their doorbell one day. The young Bible salesmen belongs to a class of folks that Joy’s mother refers to as “good country people” Hulga, who believes that no one can be truly good decides to play a little game of cat and mouse with the naïve young man. She teases him, berates him, argues with him and finally tries to seduce him as she lures him and his Bible samples into the loft of a barn. Now, this, of course, is a story by Flannery O’Connor and so, as we might expect, the tables are turned. Once in the loft the soft demeanor of the young Bible salesman is transformed. The mouse becomes the cat and, long story short, he makes off with Hulga’s honor, her pride and, in a nasty turn of fate, her wooden leg, leaving the cynical, nasty Joy literally without a leg to stand on. In O’Connor’s great economy of grace, this is, of course the best thing that could have happened to her. She has been visited by divine justice and what might appear as impoverishment, becomes the source of her, we hope, conversion.

Blessed are they who hope in the Lord.

Tonight our brothers come here to make promises in preparation for receiving the Sacrament of Holy Orders. For many not in this chapel tonight, these promises might be seen as an impoverishment. Tonight they are asked to consider the surrender of what our culture terms freedom, freedom to stand on their own two feet, freedom of the pursuit of the will to a greater freedom, the freedom to live completely as sons of God. Tonight they are asked to make a profession of faith, faith in something other than themselves and ephemeral notions of joy. Tonight they are asked to make an oath of fidelity, faithfulness to a greater and higher pursuit than the damning contemplation of the passing glories of a temporal triumphalism. From the standpoint of a culture of narcissism, the promises made tonight by these men might be viewed as an impoverishment. Certainly for men of faith, they are not.

What are these men doing? Tonight they are taking a definitive step in making themselves richer by joining their lives to a greater purpose. For years, they have pursued the often blithe spirit of vocation. They have studied, prayed, been formed, talked to spiritual directors and counselors, ministered, they have cried and laughed and relaxed and labored and, well frankly, also complained, fought, grumbled, gossiped, fallen back in sin, procrastinated, given in to vices, doubted and shirked responsibilities. They have, in other words, been utterly human and utterly themselves and yet, there has been something else at work, God’s grace. In grace they have heard the call of God, experienced in the very depth of their beings, and in the very public arena of Church life. They have heard the call through God’s grace, to unite their speech, conduct, love, faith, and purity to a higher purpose of service. To a culture of self, this might be viewed as an impoverishment, but not here, not tonight. Tonight this call is to riches.

And what are these riches?

The richness of the profession of faith. Our brothers promise tonight in their profession of faith to love the Church, to love our holy Church, to see in our Church the richness of a history populated by saints, a history inhabited by run of the mill men and women striving to serve God in little ways in every place.

They are being called to love the Church by knowing and professing the wealth of its great theological tradition, a tradition forged on the hot anvil of the experience of God who has insinuated himself into the very marrow of the human condition.

They are called to love the Church, to love the Church in the richness of the words of the Creed, a creed inscribed in the blood of the holy martyrs, a creed formed on the lips of men and women in countless languages as they are plunged headlong into the rejuvenating waters of baptism.

They are called to love the Church, in its teaching and in its teachers, accommodating their wills to the will of our Church, suspending their judgment in order to completely listen to the judgment of wiser hearts and clearer heads.

They are called to love the Church and in loving the Church they do not experience an impoverishment but enrichment because they find in the words of these promises God’s promise, God’s fidelity, and God’s pledge of eternal presence. They find in these promises, in the very heart of the Holy Catholic Church, the joy of Christ instead of the bitterness and animosity of the world, the peace of God rather than the interminable strife of the so-called free spirits. Our brothers find love in the Church and thus wealth in the Church. They want to be emissaries of love in a loss littered landscape. United in God’s love they become richer than what they might have been as they fulfill in their bodies the wonder of Christ’s love for his Church and they are blessed.

Blessed are they who hope in the Lord

The promises our brothers make tonight are also promises to love the people of the God, the Body of Christ. This is an oath of fidelity, a bonding of the poverty of their bodies to the wealth of the greater Body.

They promise tonight to love that Body faithfully, those huddled masses of men and women who yearn for dignity and respect. They promise to see only the opulence of Christ in their brothers and sisters who hunger for work, for hope, who labor under the yoke of tyranny, who are beset by violence, who are besieged by terrorism, who are controlled by addictions, who are torn by every kind of sin, to see all of these as intimately bound to themselves and not as distant figures crying out. They promise to make alive for us the lavish possibility of the uncertain, unwed mother, the starving child, the unborn babe, the mistreated migrant worker in the lavishness of their convictions that theirs is a life poured out for the good of all.

They promise to love the Body of Christ through the richness of a life lived in chaste commitment to the one who calls them by name. They promise to be the nuptial expression of Christ’s love for his Church. They promise to have the pure hearts cleansed in the fire of celibacy freely chosen. They promise to show us examples of free hearts and minds and souls and the will to say in the very heat of sacrifice: Blessed are they who hope in the Lord.

They promise to be examples of God’s love, his love poured out in the sacrificial offering of Christ. Let us see in their frail and sometimes broken personalities the torn body of our Lord. Look at their embattled spirits and see his life sweated in the blood of Gethsemane, the wealth of passion, a passion lived in love for the Body of Christ.

Blessed are they who hope in the Lord.

Finally they promise to love the God in themselves. They promise to know themselves, their strengths and their crosses. Tonight they are making a declaration of freedom. The rich man in tonight’s Gospel, thought he had everything, but the one luxury he did not possess was freedom over his own temptations, his own opinions, his own prejudices, his own predilections. Tonight our brothers consider in themselves the very penury of spirit, soul, body that inflicted the poor man in the Gospel. They know their faults and they also know that their poverty is the greatest gift they have for service. The declaration of freedom expressed by these frail men tonight is a declaration of desire to embrace the cross, to find in the cross their connection to the Church and its Body, to see in the cross the light of hope, to explore in their own crosses the hidden via dolorosa to holiness.

Blessed are they who hope in the Lord.

The poverty of pride, the poverty of culture, the poverty of the self is the richness of the Kingdom. So we express in our moment of reflection here tonight. As our brothers stand before us tonight we are caught up in the awesome character of their commitment, a commitment that does not leave them helpless in the hay lofts of cultural expectations, or floundering in the hopelessness of hell, but rich in the bosom of Abraham, our home, the Church.

Soon we will hear these words: So help me God and these holy Gospels on which I place my hand. The Gospel empowers them, and it empowers us to promise to them our freedom to love, our fidelity in service, our profession of faith, our desire to be like them, men of joy.

Blessed indeed are those who hope in the Lord.