Fall Conference IV

In my rector’s conferences this semester, I have been focusing on the promises made by priests at their ordination with a special eye to obedience. What I think I have discovered is that while there is a particular promise of obedience in the Rite of Ordination, that really the charism of listening and responding is found throughout the rite; indeed the reality of obedience becomes the hallmark and the daily work of the priest. Today, I would like to examine yet another of the particular promises. On the one hand, it seems quite general; on the other, it might touch at the very core of the reality of the priest.

Do you resolve to be united more closely every day to Christ the High Priest, who offered himself for us to the Father as a pure sacrifice, and with him to consecrate yourself to God for the salvation of all?

This is obedience as well. The resolution is not to follow the example of Jesus, but to unite ourselves to Jesus more closely every day, and, as we are told, this means offering myself to the Father as a pure sacrifice for the salvation of the world. What do we mean when we think of the sacrifice of Jesus?

It is a sacrifice of love. To be united with Christ is to love as Christ loved, without prejudice, without pre-disposal. I cannot accept my faith on the terms that I will admire and fulfill that with which I agree.  The content of faith comes to me as a given, something to which I must conform my will, not because I like it but because I accept that it is true. It has an internal logic, which I must prepare my heart and mind to understand.

It is a sacrifice of loss. There is no authentic life of faith without loss. My uniting myself to Christ the High Priest means I acknowledge and accept that part of me must decrease while He must increase. Part of me needs purging. That is why we have the sacrament of reconciliation. That is why we have spiritual direction and need both our entire lives.

It is a sacrifice of beauty. By that, I mean the appropriation of true beauty. In our taking on Christ, we see something new; we see the beauty of the world, often a beauty hidden except through the eyes of faith. I see the good in others. I see the value in what the world puts aside. I see the wonder in the simple and the beauty of the complex. Christ gives me, if I ask Him, his sight – the sight by which I can see what He sees when He says: Behold I am making all things new. Brothers and sisters, if we can only see for a moment the wonder that God intends to show us and bestow on us, not only in physical creation but in the works of human hands, in our neighbors and in ourselves.
It is a sacrifice of desire. I am going to be quite honest with you for a moment, not that I am not always honest (I hope), but here I want to say something rather brutal. I am sick and tired of the continual assault on the charism of celibacy, not from outside the Church – how can we think otherwise in a material culture devoted to instant and superficial gratification? I am sick and tired of the assault on celibacy that comes from within the Church. I want to repeat here what I say in almost every retreat I give to priests: no one, absolutely no one, is forcing you to accept celibacy as a way of life. I agree increasingly with Cardinal George’s assertion that a vocation to the priesthood is a vocation to celibacy primarily. That is not to say that celibacy is primary in the vocation, but we are called to celibacy before we can be called to the priesthood.

The matter is simple: If you don’t want to live a celibate life, then don’t become a priest. But if you accept the celibate commitment in your priesthood, learn to embrace it and love it and, for the sake of religion, do not spend the rest of your life grousing and complaining about celibacy as if someone twisted your metaphorical arm or as if the Church is still stupid enough to retain an outdated charism. Embrace the sacrifice of desire that celibacy entails and embrace it lovingly for its benefits, mourning its losses but continuing to live in its blessings. Then, and only then, can we judge ourselves successful.

Moreover, I think an important question for us all to ask ourselves is this: How do you, how do I, judge success? It is easy in the seminary world to get caught up in the numbers game. Some dioceses have this playing in the background as well. We have this number of seminarians … we must be successful. But, of course, we know that numbers aren’t everything. Some of us get caught up in in the political game played out in many dioceses. Some of us get caught up in a kind of secularity. These words came from the Office of Readings recently:

You ask: How have we despised your name? By offering polluted food at my altar. Then you ask: How have we polluted it? By saying that the table of the Lord may be slighted. When you offer a blind animal for sacrifice is that not evil? When you offer the lame or the sick, is that not evil? Present to the governor, see if he will accept it says the Lord of Hosts.

How many of us remain caught up in the world? Is that success? Is that how we measure success? How many of our less well-formed brothers are ordained to the transitional priesthood? They are on their way. And yet, is that success? Are we to judge our priesthood merely using the rule of secular measures of achievement? I hope not.

I think here of the words of Saint Polycarp in his letter to the Philippians: Abandon empty vanity and the waywardness of the crowd.

We are told to find our excellence in false senses of achievement. What do we say of priests who have had vastly successful priestly lives in the hinterlands? They have been abandoned by their bishops? I think not.

And yet, how do we measure success? I am thinking about the poet Emily Dickinson.
If I can stop one heart from breaking, 
I shall not live in vain;      
If I can ease one life the aching,     
Or cool one pain,      
Or help one fainting robin             
Unto his nest again,   
I shall not live in vain. 
   
We might go even further than that. If I have no success at all, in the very trying of the thing, I shall not live in vain. A while back, as I am sure you remember, I was giving a retreat for priests on a cruise ship sailing through the Caribbean. It was very interesting. The priests were very good men from about eight different dioceses around the country and from Canada. They were good fellows who had done their duty and were given a little furlough on this cruise ship.

None of us knew when we signed up for this gig that we would be sharing this cruise ship with literally hundreds of young people, some might call them special young people. These young folks had Down’s syndrome. Some were mentally challenged, others physically so, and they and their parents were on this cruise. You have never in your life seen such exuberance. Any cynicism I had was thrown overboard. On the first day, I met a young man named Michael in the elevator. I have no idea how old he was, but he wasn’t a child. When he got on the elevator, he shook my hand and introduced himself; then he did the same for my fellow passengers. Then he got off. Every time I saw Michael over the next few days, he yelled out: Fr. Denis! I don’t know, maybe young Michael was fulfilling a vow:

Do you resolve to be united more closely every day to Christ the High Priest, who offered himself for us to the Father as a pure sacrifice, and with him to consecrate yourself to God for the salvation of all?

You know, in our lives we experience all kinds of ills and we try all kinds of remedies. Nothing can assuage the long loneliness, however, except the genuine joy of knowing another. How do we unite ourselves more closely to Christ the High Priest, by pouring out our lives as a pure sacrifice? What is a pure sacrifice? The sacrifice we give without ever expecting anything in return. Can we do it? I know we can. I was thinking the other day about prayer. It is my job, after all. How many of us pray with intentions? This rosary is for this. This Mass is for this. That is well and good. I do it all the time. I wonder, though, what if we could pray without intentions?

We believe that God hears our prayers. We know He does. That is an act of faith. What if we could allow God to allocate our prayers where they are most needed? I pray and I let God direct those prayers. I don’t claim any particular proprietariness over my prayers. I certainly don’t pat myself on the back for praying when I owe everything to the Divine Maker. 

I have found that when I fail to control my prayers, I pray better. When I pray for others, I pray better. When I pray for faceless folks, I pray better. It can’t be all the time because we do have genuine needs for which to pray. If we consecrate ourselves with Christ to God for the salvation of all, it is truly for the salvation of all, not just me and those I know. Brothers and sisters, there are millions of people in the world who have no one to pray for them. There are many in our midst who have no one to pray for them. Can that be us? Can we pray for them to God and let our prayers be distributed by him?

Sometimes our recited Credos get instantly transmogrified into personal theologies. We begin to believe in a God who does our bidding. We only accept the will of God when that will is our will.
But I am reminded of the words of G. K. Chesterton: God is not your scapegoat.

And so we resolve to unite ourselves more closely every day to God through Christ. Saint Ambrose said: If we would please God, we must have love, we must be of one mind, we must follow humility, each one thinking the other higher than himself. Can we live that here?
Brothers, in our ordination, we are called to one thing, the representation of Christ. That call, heard in this promise, requires an obedience from us, a listening to a voice other than my own. We must listen to the voice of the Church calling out its pain to us:

It cries to us in the cry of the lonely and the outcast, those folks that our modernity has promised to preserve with long life and yet are rejected and exiled precisely in their longevity.
It cries to us in the various real crises we meet daily in our ministry: unemployment, illness, loss, debt, disability.

It cries to us in the need for dignity that has to learn to attract our attention in a world that does not value the human person, but only the false qualities of that person that contribute to the false qualities preached by the world.

It cries to us in our brothers and sisters who are wounded in some way and lash out in anger, or frustrations that are ideological.

It cries to us in those who suffer the effects of false understandings of sexuality, of those caught in the web of lies that their natural selves understand as lies but that are not available in understanding to them as lies.

In the midst of these trials however, we hear the words of Saint Paul to the Romans:
The sufferings of the present are as nothing compared to the glory to be revealed in us … the world itself will be freed from its slavery to corruption and share in the glorious freedom of the children of God.

Brothers and sisters, this is our pastoral plan. For those of us who have been graciously ordained in the office of priest, it’s the reality for which we strive by uniting ourselves more closely every day to Christ the High Priest, who offered himself for us to the Father as a pure sacrifice.

Do you resolve to follow the example of Christ and offer yourself for the lost ones, including ourselves? We cannot do it without God’s grace palpably active in our daily existence. We cannot live without the Truth in our daily existence. I am reminded of the words of Saint Augustine:
What does the soul desire more than truth? Why then does the soul have hungry jaws, a spiritual palate as it were, sensitive enough to judge the truth, if not in order to eat and drink wisdom, justice, truth, eternal life? (Commentary on John).

How can we discover the Truth that God wishes to hold out for us? We cannot do it without a willingness to sacrifice our own wills. Our good as priests or future priests has nothing whatsoever to do with the world’s notions of success, nothing whatsoever. Happiness, material gain, monetary renewal, numbers, damnable numbers. These things have nothing to do with the success of a priest. The success of a priest is gained by one thing, his obedience and his fidelity to the call, and his willingness to let God sort out the rewards, which may accrue to me and my friends and may redound to the need of some lone soul far away who has no one to pray for her.

You probably know here I am thinking of The Diary of a Country Priest. Why do I keep returning to this novel of Georges Bernanos? I don’t think it is because I find in it the truth of how the priesthood ought to be, must be. I think it is because it draws so readily the bottom line for our lives as priests. The priest in the novel has no talents, he has no luck, he has no health, he has no one to care for him, and he has no real gifts except the gift of endurance. He even has no name.

What if this is all there is? We search for the grandiose and the dramatic and we are confronted instead with the daily bread of priesthood. This one needs anointing. This one requires a rather mundane confession. This one is hurting over a divorce. No one needs an exorcism today. There are no tragic car accidents to respond to today. Now I am thinking about Chesterton’s Fr. Brown. Fr. Brown was a great amateur sleuth, much to the chagrin of the local police. Yet, Chesterton is quite clear that Fr. Brown’s real heroism comes from his ability to race on his bicycle to a jam judging, the parish picnic or the bedside of an old hypochondriacal lady. It came from Fr.   Brown’s willingness to embrace Christ among us, to realize that in the daily drama, the wisdom distilled from the daily, that this is all there is.

Brothers and sisters, this is all there is. And it is beautiful. We are all we have and we are wonderful. As we mature in the faith, as we truly mature, we realize that when we pray, there is only one way to do it. Give the outcome to God. Offer your prayers every day in that spirit of the perfect prayer of Jesus: your will be done. Not my will, Father, but your will be done. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.

Do you resolve to be united more closely every day to Christ the High Priest, who offered himself for us to the Father as a pure sacrifice, and with him to consecrate yourself to God for the salvation of all?