The
Lord has given me a well-trained tongue that I may learn how to speak a word to
the weary that will rouse them.
The words of the prophet Isaiah this evening
are prescient, certainly for us, but also for the prophet. They are bold words,
bold words indeed for a man who would soon be facing death. Yet, is that not
the condition of us all?
There is an intimacy in these words, a
familiarity.
Tonight we gather in this familiar place, with
many familiar faces and a few unfamiliar ones as well to begin our new
formation year. For many of us that is old news, for some of us, it is the very
essence of Good News, this coming together, this amalgamation of community life
a life we will forge in the coming year through prayer and study together,
through formal initiation into the life of the priesthood, a life that many of
our brothers are very close to indeed.
What will we witness this year? We will witness
transition. Some are arriving, some soon departing. Some will enter new
ministries, others will see in their ordinations to the diaconate the
culmination of those ministries received.
Classes will be taken and from an academic
point of view, there will be change and development and then, moving on.
Books will be read, or not read. Various
ministries and projects will be offered. Many folks will be met, some in
positions of strength and others in weakness.
Lives will be unraveled and reassembled in
spiritual formation and counseling. Insights will be gained, or avoided.
Tonight we begin this new adventure in so many
formal ways but we also will be the respondents in the coming year to informal
invitations as well.
Friendships will be forged in unlikely places.
Other relationships will fall by the wayside.
Our tastes will be challenged. We will be
called upon to seek a little more in the way of authenticity and a little less
in the way of cyber-reality.
We will fall. All of us will fall and fail in
the coming year.
And in this extended journey of informal
formation we will make some important discoveries. One of these will inevitably
be an uncovering of the difference between what we like and what is true.
We will find the need, and hopefully also the
courage to face realities within ourselves that, when authenticated, might be a
catalyst of change for the world. This is true for our seminarians. It is also
true, at least I hope it is true for our faculty and staff as well.
A faculty and staff not immersed in the
language of personal conversion can hardly be seen as useful for the
stimulation of these same movements in others.
As a faculty and staff, we are called to
conversion as well, to be different today than we were yesterday, to find where
the Lord God lurks, perhaps surreptitiously in our hearts as well.
The seminary is as we know a seed bed. It is a
place where folks are broken open and reconfigured. For a faculty and staff,
these dynamics are the same, as they are indeed for all people of character.
A seminary faculty and staff devoted to
conversion with their seminarians is a wonder indeed and I pray we are
exemplars of that wonder here at Saint Meinrad. We are all in this together. We
are all in this voyage of discovery as one.
Another discovery we will make is that the
Catholic Church is a lively mess. That is not bad news, although it might sound
a bit ominous. It is good news because it allows for us to be something quite
essential, it allows us to be ourselves. All of us are messes.
All of us have parts of our past and present
that are not open for inspection, those things we like to keep hidden, though
if we are honest with ourselves they are mostly known.
All of us have sin in our lives, sin which
sounds the ominous note of intransience, sin that tells us, most cripplingly
that we can never be anything other than this sin or that sin, that we can
never become saints, only awful people bound for perdition.
All of us feel stunted or stifled caught in a
web somewhat of our own fashioning and somewhat fashioned for us by a world
that does not want us to change. All of
us are sinners.
And yet all of us, in some way, in some unique
way are also called.
We are called to be witnesses of God, not only
in our privileged times but at all times.
We are called to find more in the world, more
joy than video games, television and entertainment.
We are called to breath the fresh air of Lethe’s
banks and to aspire to some new horizon, some new paradise. Can we find a
paradise in the billowing smoke of the Stygian shore on which we stand.
We are called to announce the Gospel to a world
that has desperate need to hear good news.
This past summer I was traveling through the
Atlanta airport on my way to Belgium. As
I made my way through the various twists and turns of the terminal, a building
aptly named, I came across a large crowd that was gathering around a display
that had been set up in the corridor. It was a display of robotic people. There
were two robots, fashioned so realistically that they looked exactly like two
young people. They walked, they talked, they served your every need. The crowds
were fascinated by them. They looked so real. Of course, the reason they looked
so real is because they were real. They were not robots at all, but actors
advertising a new television show about robotic servants who will, I am sure in
the course of the season, go wrong. And yet people looking at them were
absolutely convinced that this was the next step in a technological advancement
that would bring robotics into our homes, or at least into the homes of the
very wealthy. The world likes to fool us, but brothers and sisters, we also
like to be fooled. Increasingly in our world we are offered the invitation to
not have to deal with what is real. And we accept it willingly, lovingly.
This certainly applies in our encounters in a
world full of challenges. Follow the news. This summer we had the situation of
the supreme court of the United States pronouncing on the issue of same-sex
marriage. What those men and women said was not real, and yet we are told that
we must accept it as real. We live in a culture of relativism, a culture that
says if I put on a robe and sit in an imposing chamber and speak language that
many will fail to comprehend then I am speaking the truth. The Truth is not
contained in trappings or formalities. The Truth is told in the very marrow of our
being and yet we are told again and again not to trust these instincts which
bubble at the core of our existence. And so those so-called truth tellers
become nothing more than illusions, like the robots in the Atlanta airport.
This summer we also witnessed the shame of the
Church in the resignation of the archbishop of Minneapolis and one of his
auxiliary bishops. We know our bishops are not perfect and they will tell us
that. However, we cannot accept a minister of the Church that seeks to hide the
sins of others to protect the reputation of an institution that is already
compromising itself in the original sin. Power does not come from subterfuge
and the ability to hide the ugly stain of failure. Power comes from honesty, the honesty that looks reality in the eye and says that this
is this and not this. This is that and not that. Your formation is
circumscribed by your ability to tell the truth in love, to one another
certainly for fraternal correction, but also to ourselves.
Power comes from humility from the earthy
residue of lives fully lived, not lies half-told.
Power, true power, comes from an embrace of
myself, myself precisely as who I am, a broken, truly wretched individual who
has never merited a thing but is nevertheless infinitely loved by the God of
all ages.
How does this apply to our work here? Brothers
and sisters, that is our work here. Here we must learn the one essential truth
of our ministry. We do not build castles on the foundations of a false purity.
We do not stand aloof from the mystery of sin and death to serve those whose
sanctity is proven and whose passport to eternal life is already assured. We do
not need to serve the saints, the saints have already been served by God
through grace.
We have need for the half-hearted. We have need
for those whose lives are underway. We have need for those who struggle with
the same sins over and over, but struggle and do not succumb to them. We have
need to those who cannot articulate their faith well, who do not know the
commandments, whose theology is not rusty, it is non-existent.
We have need for those who lie awake at night
questioning, but struggling in their questioning, because so often, in our
quarter or half catechized world they do not know the questions to ask.
Brothers and sisters, our task is to help one
another in our questioning, to seek the path that will save us by knowing
full-well the landmarks of that path, landmarks like courage, and devotion, and
fidelity, and beauty, and love, especially love.
The half –hearted reminds us all of who we are,
pilgrims on the journey, perpetual pilgrims, always in the throes of starting
over. And that, of course, brings us to the portal of a new formation year.
The Lord has
given me a well-trained tongue. The words of the prophet are words that we,
likewise must aspire to as we continue trying to evangelize that part of
ourselves that still refuses God’s invitation.
They are
also words that offer us some insight into what this vocation costs us, because
they were words spoken by a man who was about to die.
