Rector’s Conference
April 24, 2022
Very Rev. Denis Robinson, OSB
Last week, I was particularly taken with the homily of Deacon Thayer in which he quoted Pope Francis:
Pope Francis says that the most beautiful experience we can have is: "to belong to a people walking, journeying through history together with their Lord who walks among us. We do not walk alone. We are part of the one flock who walks together."
For me, it was one of those “AHA” moments, an opportunity to hear the Word of God speaking very directly and very hopefully to us, as a People of God, as the Church. We have now arrived once more in the season of Easter, for the next 43 days we will be given the singular opportunity to meditate on the mystery of the resurrection. Easter, which in the secular mind, will come and go with the rapidity of a bouncing bunny, remains for us Catholics a mystery upon which we are not only invited but required to deepen in our hearts and in our lives. Easter is a call for self-knowledge, a knowledge that we have explored already in the discipline of Lent. It is a call for self-knowledge about that more central and important corporate self of which we are most vitally a part.
Likewise, our formation is a kind of continuous Easter, a time of growth, development and moving toward the ever-expanding horizon that is Christ, that is God. It is a time to discern ourselves in many dimensions.
For example …
It is a time to look at our temperament, about the way in which our particularities of personality either attract or repel others. There is a holiness in quiet, but if quiet is read as indifference, there is a problem. We are called to be able to meet others, sometimes covertly, but often head on. Our temperament, our resting face can call others or keep them at a distance. So often a central part of the personality of seminarians is a kind of acute introversion. Solidly relating to the internal self is essential to our lives as priests, but we must also cultivate that public personality that attracts others, draws them in and out. We must become functional extroverts without losing the calm and depth of our interior lives.
Likewise, our intellect. The Church has no real need of ignorant priests, as we know, but sometimes our intellect can become an obstacle. Think for a moment about conversations at table. Sometimes people at breakfast wish to engage in a scintillating conversation about the theological controversies of the Fourth Century, but sometimes they just want to talk about nonsense. Small talk, while not of a particularly intellectual nature, may be just the vehicle to attract others to a more serious mode of conversation. Sometimes we can put others off by our over-intellectualized conversations. Can we instead learn to converse about the various types of games played with different kinds of balls in the course of seasons? I am not saying that all conversations should be inane, I am saying that we must learn to “pitch” ourselves to the audience and need and thereby raise the level of conversation through familiarity, even friendship.
Another dimension of ourselves is perfectionism. We all know that an unrealistic sense of perfection can damage a person. Sometimes these ideals (if that is what we want to call them) are imbedded in us in childhood. We want to please parents. We want the perfect report card. We want to always do the right thing. Therapists will tell us that this kind of thinking can sometimes lead to dire consequences in adults, perhaps, for example, in our context. of having too many unrealistic expectations of people in our parishes or in the confessional. The obverse is also true, that is, the failure to challenge ourselves to be better and the failure to inspire the best in other people. Perfection is our goal, but it is a goal in heaven which stretches only to “nearness” here on earth. Can we become humble enough to garner our own perfectionism to serve others, to not intimidate them? It is a challenge.
Easter is also a time to continue to look at our sinfulness, our biases, our prejudices. It is a time to allow all the ties we have to crude corporeality and harmful or useless things fall away in the glory of his new person.
When we examine the various goals of Easter, or look, even in a cursory way at the trials of the human condition, I would say the major problem that Christians face as individuals is the refusal to enter what Pope Francis calls, the flock of those who walk together.
We need to be a part of the whole and not individuals tilting our little boats toward an elusive salvation.
We live in a Church in which we have the strongest expression of cultural involvement in the history of the world and yet our parishes, our schools and our lives are culturally dead. We live in a Church which has consistently been involved in the betterment of humanity through education and yet our school children and adults remain ignorant of the basic principles of faith. We live in a Church which has consistently been an advocate of the marginalized and a champion of the politically oppressed and in places, we are turning into an un-welcoming Church for millions of new immigrants and wayfarers. We live in a Church that has assisted the poor in every turn and we are becoming a place of closed communities which push the needy into the background. So often I fear, we have become brothers and sisters, a Church which has, in the past, held fast to its teachings in the face of incredible social pressures and yet today the stance of Catholics today on abortion, on birth control, on capital punishment and dozens of other issues is unrecognizably different from our secular neighbors.
As Pope Francis might say, we think of ourselves and not of others and we become less than human by that turn.
All these issues are problems of imagination.
We cannot imagine a world in which the poor and the needy are brought into communion with the ever-present others.
And so we continue to fall into the cultural and political biases of our own place and time which contradict the values of the Gospel we are supposed to uphold.
We cannot imagine a world in which this group and that group find a common mechanism, like communion, for gaining access to the other’s insulated vision of life.
And so we take some smug comfort in out isolation from the rest of preening humanity in ivory towers of academia, or wealth, or a misguided orthodoxy.
We cannot imagine a world in which truth is triumphant
And so we continue to perpetuate lies about our social environment, our neighbors and ourselves. We lie to ourselves about ourselves because we cannot imagine something different, something alive rather than dead, something open rather than closed, something meaningful rather than mundane.
Somehow we need to become more Easter and now we have this season of the year to help us with that goal, a horizon toward which we continue to move. But we cannot accomplish that alone, in the world of rugged individualism. We must face the world together and strive together to make this place, as much as it is possible, the Kingdom of God on earth. We reach that nearness of perfection only when we surrender our isolation for the bounty of the common journey.
I would like to go back to the saint that I proposed at the beginning of Lent for our reflection, St. Therese of Liseux. I wonder if there is a saint in the whole of the martyrology who had as much right, by nature, to claim sanctity on the force of her personality. I believe that St. Therese struggled with personality her whole life, short though it was. I believe she struggled mightily to be less of Therese Martin and more of a Carmelite, and so she is a saint for our modern world, a saint calling us to move away from the siren call of individualism and toward Pope Francis’ ideal of a flock that journeys together.
I close tonight with the words of the Little Flower:
For a long time now I have not belonged to myself; I have given myself entirely to Jesus. He is free to do with me whatever He likes.
