About 35 years ago, I came into
contract with a book that has literally haunted me ever since. I have read it
at least a dozen times and most recently, I have been listening to the book on
CD. In the early nineties, I wrote a play about it. The book is called Silence, by the Japanese Catholic author
Shusaku Endo. I understand that next year it will appear as a film directed by
Martin Scorsese. The book is a harrowing account of the seventeenth-century
Jesuit missions to Japan. In particular, it is the brutal story of one young,
naïve priest, Fr. Sebastian Rodriguez whose life in Japan, literally from the
moment he hits soil, is defined by torture and chase. I would like to say that
the book inspired me to become a priest, but it probably did not. In fact, the
reason I seem to have been haunted by the book is that I have never adequately
been able to evaluate the story of Fr. Sebastian. Is he a hero, a villain, or a
naïve fool? Perhaps he is all three simultaneously. My most recent listening of
the book has brought to mind several themes, however, themes I would like to
spend a bit of time reflecting on this evening. All of these themes have to do
with what I might term, pastoral imagination.
When I consider the meaning of the priesthood, the first
thing that comes to mind for me is that we are called to an integrative
vocation, that is, we are called to building up. Building community is never
easy. Community requires first and foremost a personal sacrifice on the part of
those who create it. Creating community requires that we move away from our
personal likes and dislikes and what we perceive as our personal needs, and
view the other as primary, or rather view the others as primary, and finally to
see myself as part of the others, the we. As I have noted before this is
difficult to realize when the central cultural message we receive is one of self-reliance
and self-preservation. In the Catholic ethos, I can only realize my truest self
by giving my truest self away. The question we have to continually ask ourselves,
perhaps especially in this moment of counter-cultural behavior we call Saint
Meinrad, perhaps the question we need to ask is: “Am I becoming more of a
member of the group?” This is an essential skill and one that all of us must
learn. The legacy of the fall is a legacy of shame and isolation. We must find
a way to overcome it and that is undoubtedly our first priority. We are God’s
children now, all of us and realizing that vocation means that I place myself
first only when I place the other first, because only in placing the other
first can I truly become who I am. Lumen Gentium 10 deals with the important
theme of the integration of the hierarchical priesthood and the priesthood of
believers. We who are called to the hierarchical priesthood exercise that
priesthood authentically only when we build up the priesthood of believers. The
purpose of the hierarchical priesthood is not to realize a separate caste, much
less a privileged few or even a band of brothers. The authentic exercise of my
hierarchical priesthood is only realized when I have given myself away in
service to you, to my brothers and sisters, to my flock. Yet how many priests
do we know that devote a vast amount of time and energy protecting themselves
from the people. The priesthood is not lived in a gilded cage. It is lived on
the streets, in the community, in homes, in schools, in dangerous places. The
rectory is only a rejuvenation spot and must never be seen as a refuge. As a
priest I have no refuge and no respite. I am called to serve to exhaustion and
death. We do not really care for that language and in a culture of
self-preservation, it is anathema. When I think of Fr. Sebastian in Silence, here was a man who threw
himself onto the shores of a hostile country and did not stop until he found a
people to serve. Brothers in formation, we too have thrown ourselves onto the
shores of a hostile country. We must learn to love that country, to love its
people, to speak its language, not to be drawn into its silent tranquilization,
but to challenge and preserve it, to strengthen it in its weakness because it
deserves to be strengthened. I think of another book that has had a great deal
of influence for me, The Diary of a
Country Priest. In Bernano’s novel, the young, naïve priest works himself
to death, not because he is being successful, in fact he is not. He works
himself to death because, like his Divine Master, he is called to work himself
to death.
This leads me to a second observation about the pastoral
imagination. The only thing that recreates the world is a solid life of prayer.
We must work. We must work creatively. We must serve but our greatest service
to the world comes primarily in our life of prayer. If our vocation is built
solidly upon a relationship with God that relationship begins and ends with an
intimacy with God in prayer. Prayer is the means of my maintenance not only of
my relationship with God but also with myself and myself through others. A life
of prayer that is fruitful and meaningful begins with a realization of the
responsibility I have to pray and fulfilling that responsibility. That is
piety. A life of prayer that is fruitful is also a sincere being in touch with
tradition. Brothers and sisters, we must know the tradition. We must invest
hours of study. We must understand the devotional tradition of the Church. We
must honestly ask ourselves what our relationship is with the past. The past is
a necessary part of our present but it does not refer to our present as a
slavish recreation of the past. Tradition is an essential element but it is
only as meaningful as it stands also on the cusp of newness. Always old, always
new. This is the hallmark of any real relationship and especially our
relationship with God. This is the world of prayer that we are responsible for creating
and maintaining. Perhaps we might consider this tension as a question: Is
prayer a thing I do or am I defined by prayer? Just as we must know the
tradition, we must be defined by prayer. One of the interesting aspects of Silence is that as much as Fr. Sebastian
suffers he knows he cannot lose sight of his need for prayer. The need for
speaking and listening to God is necessary, yet how many people, how many of us
make prayer their daily priority?
A third observation is that certainty or the pursuit of
certainty may be degrading to the vocation. What do I mean by certainty? I mean
that if we are looking for answers to questions, and the answers are very
specific that we are looking for, we may be on the wrong track. Deep systemic
change is a fact of life. It is a biological fact. To live is to change. If
there is certainty in life it is the certainty of change. Our lives as priest
cannot be built upon the principle that we are going to create an ideal and
force others into it. They must be built upon realizing a guiding change. One
of the unfortunate traits we see in parishes today is among those priests who
desire to create a pristine world, usually predicated on a kind of liturgical
ideal of purity. Usually this ideal of purity is my ideal which we attempt to disguise as the Church’s ideal. My
tastes are not magisterial teaching. I must never use my authentic power in the
Church to lord my opinions and tastes over others. Neither must I merely
acquiesce to the tastes of the people. As a priest, I am called to lead, to
listen, to be sympathetic but I am also called to recognize an ideal and to
help people to realize that ideal, not my ideal but the Church’s ideal. In the
novel Silence, the title refers to
God’s occasional silence, but is also refers to the need for the priest and the
people to be silent in order to hear God’s word. Fr. Sebastian knows in the novel that he
needs to keep his own agenda in check to serve the people in terms of what they
need. And of course, ultimately what do we need? We need God.
A fourth quality of the pastoral imagination is to view the
other as oneself and ourselves as the other. Much of our work as priests is
spent in navigating tensions. We are called to continually adopt new
circumstances and adapt ourselves to new and changing realities. Navigating the
tensions around us is a skill that is necessary. Our love for the others
requires us not merely to plow through the other in order to find the virtue,
it is loving through the vice, loving in the sin. The deep learning of the
priest, his grammar is not sorting out, but loving the other in spite of her or
his flaws. If consists in caressing the flaws, of finally finding the flaws
somewhat beautiful. How do we accomplish this? Let me reiterate what I have
often said before. Your strength as a priest comes certainly in recognizing and
accentuating your strengths. However, it comes primarily in knowing your flaws
because those flaws become conduits of mercy. In the coming year, the Holy
Father has called us to a year of mercy and he has already offered several
concrete means of expressing this mercy. Are we men of mercy? Are we merciful
toward others? Will our confessionals be oases of mercy or will they be harsh
places of punishment? Do we feel mercy for our brothers here who are struggling
and in need or do we judge them because they cannot or will not live up to our
expectations or what we perceive to be the expectations of the Church. Perhaps
a more significant question is can we receive God’s mercy ourselves? An interesting
aspect of Silence is that a great
deal of Fr. Sebastian’s response to the various people he serves is
superficial. He notices this one’s teeth and this one’s eyes. He notices their
clothing. Later he learns a new pattern, that is, he learns to appraise others
in mercy. Why, because he realizes that he needs mercy as well. If we are acutely
aware of our need for God’s mercy, our sinfulness, then we can only judge
others accordingly. The best confessor is the one most sensitively aware of his
own sin and his own reception of God’s mercy precisely through the sacrament.
A fifth principle is that we experience our needs and the
needs of others in our bodies. One of
the ideals of formation is encapsulated in the Greek word, paideia or wisdom. We think of wisdom as a purely intellectual
activity yet for the Greeks it was not. The Greeks understood wisdom as a
property of the body as much as of the mind and soul. What is corporeal wisdom?
Primarily it is taking care of ourselves, of caring for our health and our
bodies. What is our diet like? Do we exercise moderately? Are we engaging in
behaviors that threaten our health unnecessarily? There is something insidious
about taking advantage of our relative wealth to provide opportunities for us
to harm ourselves. The humanity of the priest is a bridge and it must be
authentic. We come to know the people through our social skills. Are you an
introvert? Good, now learn functional extroversion. Are you an extrovert,
wonderful, now learn to shut up and listen to others. One of the most important
ideals of wisdom is the tolerance for turbulence. We must find in the frantic
nature of human life those moments of grace that speak to us in ways we need to
hear desperately, and that moment is the insight that God is present. Fr.
Sebastian in Silence, learns through the experience the depravation of the body
how to create a space for God. All of us are half-empty, but our half emptiness
is the opportunity to receive God in a substantive way.
Finally, I think the principle of pastoral imagination
requires us to understand that when God calls us, he calls us totally and he
calls us immediately. Here, that requires us to hit the formation ground
running. You know that I favor an approach to “discernment” that may be
described as cautious. Certainly we have to be open here to listen to God’s
call to us in our lives, but, are our expectations always realistic? Rather
than being bogged down in the question we must move forward purposefully toward
the answer. If God is calling you, it will be apparent, if not, it will also be
apparent. In the meantime, move forward toward ordination. God can sort it out.
So your question is not whether you are going to be a priest. Your question is
how will I become the best priest possible.
Pastoral imagination implies something quite explicitly; it
implies that our major way of approaching the world is through inductivity,
through thinking that is integrative and organic. Yet, for the most part, our
previous education does not necessarily prepare us for this reality. We are an
answer oriented people. We have been taught to the test. And yet, the pastoral
imagination means our lives as priests are fraught with ambiguity. Can
inductivity be taught? It must be taught. We also know this: As a staff, as a
faculty we must be more explicit with you. We cannot take for granted the
values that we hold and that we believe are necessary for you to hold.
Likewise, our task as a faculty and staff is to form you, but in a Christian
community it is also to be formed by you. We are formed by you. Holy Orders orders us to an end, but it is not the
only end. Discipleship orders us to an end, a psychological end, a metaphysical
telos, temporal ends. Let me turn for
a moment back to my rather conflicted relationship with Silence. In the end. Fr. Sebastian apostotizes, he abandons his
priesthood in the swamp of Japan. Why does he do it? He does it to save
Christians who are being murdered by the Japanese because he will not
apostatize. His captures tell him that he is responsible for the death of these
people. It is a horrible ending, a brutal ending and it has haunted me for over
thirty years. In the Holy Father’s address to the members of Congress last week
a paragraph stood out for me and so I hope you will bear with me while I repeat
it:
All of us are quite aware of, and deeply worried by, the
disturbing social and political situation of the world today. Our world is
increasingly a place of violent conflict, hatred and brutal atrocities,
committed even in the name of God and of religion. We know that no religion is
immune from forms of individual delusion or ideological extremism. This means
that we must be especially attentive to every type of fundamentalism, whether
religious or of any other kind. A delicate balance is required to combat
violence perpetrated in the name of a religion, an ideology or an economic
system, while also safeguarding religious freedom, intellectual freedom and
individual freedoms. But there is another temptation which we must especially
guard against: the simplistic reductionism which sees only good or evil; or, if
you will, the righteous and sinners. The contemporary world, with its open
wounds which affect so many of our brothers and sisters, demands that we
confront every form of polarization which would divide it into these two camps.
We know that in the attempt to be freed of the enemy without, we can be tempted
to feed the enemy within. To imitate the hatred and violence of tyrants and
murderers is the best way to take their place.
