Deacon and Priesthood Promises

Last evening, 29 of our brothers professed their ordination promises. Here is the homily:


Deacon and Priesthood Promises – 2011
St. Thomas Aquinas Chapel

Tonight we celebrate with our brothers their public acknowledgement of the promises they will make in their ordination. For our Third Year men, this is a new beginning. For our deacons, it is a continuation toward that goal to which the Lord has been leading time for years.

There are so many things that could be said tonight, that might be explained.

This evening, we could meditate on the declaration of freedom, waxing philosophically about the meaning of freedom, the quidity of freedom, the very possibility of freedom in a world enthralled by a bastardized notion of liberty. We know all too well how personal freedom is compromised by cultural bias, individual flaws, and original sin.

We could speak lofty words tonight about the oath of fidelity. Keeping a promise for life is a rare commodity in our world today. Every day we witness, many of us first-hand, the ephemeral nature of families, marriages, communities and religious vocations. We see the struggles our brothers and sisters around us make in keeping commitments. We all know something of both the statistics and the real human toll those statistics take. Trusting an authority is equally precarious. We have a great suspicion of institutions, a suspicion that sometimes confounds our ability to be faithful.

We could offer high sounding phrases about the profession of faith, but we know the value of our creed, we know the blood that stains each word of this holy testament, we know how its syllables connect us to all of those men and women, those saints of God who have professed it while endless ages have rolled. We know how these prophetic words have struck and stung the scorpions of human pride. We know how their utterance has confounded heresy and the tyranny of human ambitions. We know how they draw us back to the waters of our baptism, where we rejected one world and promised to live for another, a kingdom of this world, and a kingdom of the world to come.

We could go on about all of that, but let’s not. Neither these men nor we need to be reminded of the serious nature of the obligations that are voicing tonight or the kind of promises they are soon to profess. Instead, I would like to do something quite novel this evening, that is, stand back and look at the Gospel.

Ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find, knock and the door will be open to you.

Let’s begin by going back a bit, back to the beginning, back to the days when these men first experienced the call that has brought them here tonight?

How did it all begin?

Perhaps in childhood, playing mass with Ritz crackers and Kool-aid. In the dulcet tones of childhood, the utterance of God insinuated itself into the mind of the boy: “Be mine. Live for me and my Church. Ask and receive.”

Perhaps in adolescence, in a sensitivity which often alludes that season of life, in an unusual caring for others, a kindness in the face of ridicule, and the voice of God speaks: “Follow me rather than the crowd. Take your chances with me rather than the dangerous path of self-fulfillment. Listen to me and not the clamor of commerce. Seek and you will find.”

Perhaps that call came in the fervor of conversion, in sickness over a life lived apart from God, apart from his Church. Perhaps it came in the light of an early morning, in a searing revelation that there is more to life than pleasure, more than the grind of personal pursuit. There is suffering in the world that is more than my suffering, heartache in the world more than my natural disasters.

Perhaps it came in influences, a parent, a grandparent whose aching knees and gnarled beaded hands implored the Master of the Harvest. Send my son. Or perhaps a priest whose life was not showy or remarkable but who prayed his office, visited the sick, said Mass, buried the dead, and said to a lost young man, “Have you ever thought of …?” knock and the door will be opened.

Ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find, knock and the door will be open to you.

God asked, He sought, He knocked upon the door of our hearts and we answered, tentatively at first, seeking outlandish signs, sweating mightily in the heat of discernment that was nothing more than self-deception, doubting, affirming, doubting again, then gaining confidence as the symphony of formation tuned, rehearsed and then performed its mounting song.

All of us hear have heard something of that call, something of that symphonic music echoing against the walls of cynicism and fear and doubt. The words of the Lord have been clear to us all: “Follow me and I will make you fishers of men”, and here we are, standing here, not only these brothers but all of us, gathered here tonight, standing on the promises of God.

Ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find, knock and the door will be open to you.

Brothers and sisters as we gather here tonight, we are able to gather here tonight because God is true to His word.

My brothers you gather tonight to make your promises to God, and that is truly wonderful. More wonderful however is the promise that God intends to make to you tonight.

Ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find, knock and the door will be open to you.

Ask God for the grace to help you persevere in your vocation.

Ask and you will receive the endless of support of as yet faceless men and women and children, the ragged Church who will desire to support your vocation in a thousand as yet un-named, unimagined ways. You will experience this support in the pressing of calloused hands, the tremor of feeble lips, the whisper of encouraging words, the card, the cash, the hotdish, the wave, the bow of the head. Father you are loved. We need you. We will overlook your little quirks and flaws, even though we probably should not. We will give you everything because you have given us one thing: the overwhelming love of God.

Ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find, knock and the door will be open to you.


Seek the grace to live a celibate life because that is what many of you fear.
Seek and you will find the love of all because you want to love. Love in the name of Christ, love in the name of His holy Church. Love in the eyes of the old and the dying seized with mortal anguish at the threshold of the awesomeness of eternity, love in the sparkle of the newlyweds, love in the embrace of little ones, in the handholding of the housebound, the trembling grasp of the grieving. Love without compromise and without cost. Love the unlovable, the outcast, the beggar, the difficult parishioner. Love with all your hearts and you will never be lonely, never lacking in friends. His love, as you give it away, will be sufficient for you. Love with the conviction that God alone will turn our mourning into gladness and our sorrows into wholeness.
Ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find, knock and the door will be open to you.

Knock upon the door of faith in your dark hours, with your back to the wall.

Knock and the door of faith will be opened to you by a myriad of faith-filled men and women running the marathon of life, running with blinders on toward the heavenly Jerusalem. Ask for faith and the Lord will give you examples of simple faith in old ladies and young fathers that will put your sophisticated faith to shame. They gather quietly each day, opening the Church, putting out the vessels, praying the rosary too fast and too loud, catching a moment of prayer between soccer games and ballet lessons, confessing simple sins over and over, asking hard questions for which there are not catachismic, canonical answers, seeking the Truth in a swirling whirlwind of lies, knocking upon the door of the Church, assured of a ready answer or a ready harbor.

Brothers and sisters the miracle of the promises made here tonight is not only that our brothers are making them, but that God is making them. And that is true for us all.

We ask and God answers. We seek and God provides. We knock and the opportunity for service, for vocation, for living truly authentic lives is opened to us. I hope that is what we represent in this community of faith.

For some of you, your time spent at Saint Meinrad is coming to a close. In a few months you deacons will leave this Hill for the last time. You will no longer have the daily support of seminary life to keep you faithful to the promises you make. You will have to be sustained by humility, the humility to ask, to seek, to knock. God will be true to His word. He will give you the strength to be true to yours. Yes brothers in a little while you will be going away, but we will remain, this community of faith, striving to do what we have always done. If you need Saint Meinrad in the coming months or years you need only ask, seek, knock upon our door and you will find us ready to answer and open the door to invite you in, just as the Lord Jesus opens the door of his Body and Blood to us in this Eucharist. We sustain ourselves by that promise.

Ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find, knock and the door will be open to you.

Now do not be afraid. The promise is guaranteed.