Opening of 2016 Fall Semester Spirituality Week
Very Rev. Denis Robinson, OSB
August 22, 2016

I have been invited by Fr. Bede to spend a few minutes this morning reflecting on the spiritual lives of priests as we begin this spiritual formation week. There is a great deal I could say, after all that is my job and I love it. This morning however, I know we want to get started and so I will offer a few reflections on what I consider the core of priestly spirituality, the life of prayer and service.

I am proposing that the first challenge of priestly formation today is the cultivation of a dangerous life of prayer. Saint Paul tells us in the first letter to the Thessalonians to:

Pray without ceasing for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.

There are three things that the Church requires of its priests. Celebration of the Eucharist, celebration of the sacraments and prayer. While we know that there is more to priesthood than these things, these are the core and, in some sense, all of the other activities of the priest should have reference to these three. There is nothing else that priests in our dioceses and religious communities are preparing for, so we should plan to give to these things our all. We should plan to give sacrificially. That must be part of our formation for we can hardly expect men to suddenly embrace a sacrificial life of prayer if that same thing has not been modeled and encouraged in the seminary.

Here in this place, we must prepare ourselves for a life lived on our knees before God on behalf of the people we serve and will serve. Your seminary formation and your ordination prepares you for this and demands this of you, that you pray regularly, constantly before the mercy seat of God.

As we move through the years of formation the time swiftly passes for you to be considering your commitment to a life of prayer. The time passes quickly for you to be lamenting your inability to pray, to get up in the morning. The time passes quickly for preparations. Time spent in the seminary is a time for action. You must be instructed: Pray until it hurts, not for yourself or your needs, pour out your love, your life in prayer on behalf of the Church you have promised, will promise to pray for without ceasing. Here our responsibility is hold out for you the Church’s vision. Bishops need to articulate clearly for seminarians their expectations about the Liturgy of the Hours, about devotions, about adoration. In seminaries we must be careful to stress the essentials, offering other alternatives but holding fast to the preferred forms of prayer, the Eucharist, the Liturgy of the Hours, etc. We must encourage men to have a strong devotional life, but not to see that devotional life as something inherently separate from, or, God forbid, more important than the Eucharist, the sacraments and the Liturgy of the Hours. We as seminary formators must be examples of prayer for you. We must model what we hope you will become by our commitment to prayer. In all things we must learn to be generous and to give our time to God.

In many ways, prayer is the marker of your formation success. And it is dangerous, for us too. It requires something of us, not only our time but our souls, our lives. As a priest, primarily, I have nothing to do all day except celebrate the sacraments and serve God and I do that best on my knees. Here is what I say to you today: Wear out your knees, have knee replacements not because of too much running or running around but because of too much kneeling before the throne of the almighty, a throne mightily insinuated for us in our parish churches, in our chapels, before the tabernacle. There is the Holy of Holies our ancestors in faith worshiped before and died to preserve. There is the temple of the new covenant spoken of in the Book of Maccabees. There is the temple not made by human hands, that sanctuary of God. Give your life to God in its mighty shadow. Live a dangerous life of prayer and never look back. Never count the cost. Die in your vestments and you will have lived a most successful life.

The other thing I think a seminary must assist new priests in cultivating is a vital vision of service in the Church.

For the priest, this means one thing, service until death. There is nothing more beautiful in this life than to serve one another. We live to serve. It is a cheerful service. If we compete with one another, it is in service. We live it in hospitality, the desire to open my life and my home to all who come. We live it in volunteering, in doing small things with great love, in setting up the dining room, in cleaning the chapel, in preparing food, in the formal ministries we exercise and the informal ministries that are as close to us as our beating hearts.

From a human standpoint, service until death is built on one thing, giving, giving, giving. I think about these words of St. Paul:

For I am already being poured out like a libation,
and the time of my departure is at hand.
I have competed well;
I have finished the race; I have kept the faith.

The service we are called to is not divisive. It does not know strangers. It does not evaluate need according to creed. We do not make radical decisions about personal orthodoxy and then persecute those we find unworthy. We do not carry on heated conversations in pectore that we would be embarrassed to offer in the chapel. The life of discipleship and priestly service is the action of the Good Samaritan who sees the problem and promises to fix it, paying back all those who have helped him on his return. Service fixes us in the inn of life and it places us there with everyone, literally everyone, even those who deride, who hate our faith.

Our lives as priests, as ministers of the Gospel present us in the inn with the poor, with the unloved and unlovely. It is, the ignorant, the pitiable, the leprous, the unacceptable, the barbed, the uncultivated. Any of us who have spent five minutes in parish life know that we are most needed by those who are in trouble, on the brink. Can you learn to love them as much as you love those with whom you share firmly fixed ideologies? One of the qualities of a delineating generation is that you make lists.

You make lists of those who are acceptable and those who are not. This professor is acceptable, this one is not. This seminarian is orthodox and therefore okay, this one is not. Ideology that is soundly Catholic, solidly Christian is an ideology built on service.  I can preserve the purity of the faith all day, but if that rarified quality is maintained in a palace surrounded by the ditches of neglect, suspicion and even abuse, then that palace must be destroyed.

What we must do is build a community of love. Building a community of love means going out of our way for the one whose attention warrants not one second of our time, in our mottled opinion. That must begin in the seminary, and then extend to presbyterates and parishes. Building a community of love means primarily not tearing down. It also means seeking the lost sheep.

Seek the lost sheep. Seek the atheist. Seek the liberal or conservative. Seek the dumb bunnies. Seek the complainer. Seek the noisy. Seek the nosey. Seek the poor. I think our seminarians need to be challenged in this way: Do we even know the poor? Do we care about them at all? Are they the stray sheep, the one who got away? I can assure you we need not look far. Look to your families, your old friends, your fellow seminarians, perhaps even the rector.

Seek the stray. Please God we need to seek the stray because that ultimately that stray sheep, brothers, is us. We are the one who got away and the Good Shepherd went looking for us and found us in our particular places. He found us in the cervices of the origami of our spitefulness.

Perhaps that is enough for the first day. Needless to say, I will have more to offer as the year progresses. You can count on it. I will hold myself accountable and I will hold you accountable. I believe that is what charity looks like. I believe that charity expressed in prayer and service is the heart of this spirituality week.

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