50th Ordination Anniversary Celebration

On October 14 I celebrated 50 years as a priest. I preached a homily/sermon on that occasion. A couple of people asked for copies, so I reconstructed it from my outline. I want it to appear first on this blog, so I am re-copying it from the earlier posting I made a few days ago.

50^th Ordination Anniversary Celebration

October 14, 2012

Homily

Readings from 28^th Ordinary Sunday of the Year

1. Wisdom 7:7-11

 2. Hebrews 4:12-13

 3. Mark 10:17-30

 

Fifty years ago this past week the Second Vatican Council opened. I was ordained just four months before that, in June of 1962. I am a “Vatican II priest.” The council was very important for me. It shaped my priesthood.

I am an “aging sixties’ radical.”

I want to share what Vatican II did for me, what it gave me. It gave me four things.

1) First of all it gave me a love of the bible, sacred scripture.

I had a theology professor who told us “Read the bible through at least once during your lifetime.” We Catholics did not read the actual bible very much. We had a set of readings from the bible for each Sunday of the church year. There was an “epistle” and a “gospel” for each Sunday, and we read the same epistle and gospel on a given Sunday every year.

Let me describe how it worked before Vatican II.

The priest would go to the right side of the altar and read the epistle, with his back to the people, silently, and in Latin. Then the priest would go to the center of the altar and the server would pick up the book and its stand (sometimes the book and stand were almost as big as the server). He would go down the three steps to the sanctuary floor, genuflect (holding the book and stand), go up the three steps to the left side of the altar. The priest would go to the book and read the gospel, again with his back to the people, silently, and in Latin. Then on Sundays he would go to the pulpit and read the epistle and gospel again, in English.

That system did not cover very much of the bible, but it provided just about all the bible that most Catholics would hear. For example, there were no readings from the Old Testament, so people would never hear the first reading for today, from the book of Wisdom. Almost all of the epistles were from actual epistles. The gospel passages were limited. For example, people would never have heard the story in today’s gospel, about the rich man.

The Vatican Council said that the riches of the bible should be opened up for the people. Here is what it said:

. . . the holy synod [the council] forcefully and specifically exhorts all the Christian faithful . . . to learn “ the surpassing knowledge of Jesus Christ” (Phil 3:8) by frequent reading of the divine scriptures.” “Ignorance of the scriptures is ignorance of Christ.” Therefore let them go gladly to the sacred text itself, whether in the sacred liturgy, which is full of the divine words, or in devout reading.

[Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation (Dei Verbum), par 25]

The quotation about ignorance of Christ is from St. Jerome.

I still get emotional when I read some of the stories in scripture. (I get tears in my eyes very easily, but I don’t want anyone else to see it.) I get tears in my eyes when I read the story in Genesis of how Joseph reveals himself to his brothers, or the story of Tobit, whose father was blind and who was guided by an angel as he went to a foreign land to collect a debt owed his father. The angel tells Tobit that he should marry the daughter of the man who owed the money. Tobit objected. “I have heard that this woman has had seven husbands, and a demon has killed every one of them on the wedding night.” The angel said “ Don’t worry.”

Tobit takes Sarah as his wife. On the night of the wedding Sarah’s father goes out and digs a grave in the garden, just in case. He doesn’t want anyone to know if this husband gets killed. But Tobit and Sarah, helped by the angel, are just fine. Then they return home and the angel cures Tobit’s father’s blindness.

Then there is the story of Ruth, who had married a man from a foreign tribe but whose husband had died. Her mother-in-law decided to return to her own land of Judah. Ruth decided to be faithful to her mother-in-law, even though that meant leaving her own land and family. In the new land she meets a rich man. Her mother-in-law coaches her on how to snare him as a husband, and the snare is successful.

2. The second thing that Vatican II gave me was an appreciation of the value of marriage.

Before the council Catholics were taught that priesthood and religious life were superior to married life. They appealed to passages like today’s gospel, where Jesus says “If you would be perfect, sell what you have and come, follow me.” Priests and religious were the perfect ones, and the rest of the church was like the rich man.

The council said that that approach was wrong. Here is what it said:

Christ our Lord has abundantly blessed this love [married love], which is rich in its various features, coming as it does from the spring of divine love and modeled on Christ’s own union with the church. Just as of old God encountered his people in a covenant of love and fidelity, so our Saviour, the spouse of the church, now encounters Christian spouses through the sacrament of marriage. He abides with them in order that by their mutual self-giving spouses will love each other with enduring fidelity, as he loved the church and delivered himself up for it. Authentic married love is caught up into divine love and is directed and enriched by the redemptive power of Christ . . .

[Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes), par. 48]

This is very inspiring. It is so inspiring that many of my fellow priests decided to leave the priesthood and get married. I am pleased that most of them are still to this day faithful to the spouses they married.

There were fourteen of us in my ordination class in 1962. Since then three have died. Nine of the remaining eleven gathered here in Quincy to commemorate our ordination. Three of the nine are married. We had a joyful and prayerful time together.

In 1977 I made a Marriage Encounter. That experience changed my life. It brought home to me something that Fr. John Joe Lakers like to say: “We come to God through one another.”

These days there is a trend in the church away from a stress on the community and more on an individual’s relationship with Christ, the way it was before the council. For example, before the council people used to say the rosary or read a prayer book or go to confession during Mass. The council said that people should be actively involved in what goes on at Mass.

Now I know that a personal relationship with Jesus can be a powerful force in one’s life. Many Protestant groups put a great stress on that. I don’t want to put that down. But I meet Christ more in other people. I no longer find the individual experience as compelling as I once did.

God works in our lives in many ways. Both approaches are ways to come to God.

3) The third thing that the council gave me was a respect for freedom of conscience.

When I was ordained I was taught that I was called to convert the whole world to Catholicism. Then in 1960 John Kennedy was running for president, and some Protestant critics pointed out, correctly, that the church taught that if he became president he would have to enforce Catholic policies on the country. For example, he would have to outlaw remarriage after divorce. Kennedy had an advisor, a Jesuit theologian named John Courtney Murray, who argued that a person’s conscience must take precedence over everything else, and that a political leader has no business trying to enforce religious beliefs. That is the position of the First Amendment in the U.S. Constitution.

Murray was an advisor to bishops at the council, and he got them to accept the principle of the primacy of conscience. This is a case where the church learned from the experience of the United States: things go better when the government stays out of religious issues.

Here is what the council said:

The Vatican Council declares that the human person has a right to religious freedom. Freedom of this kind means that everyone should be immune from coercion by individuals, social groups and every human power so that, within due limits, no men or women are forced to act against their convictions nor are any persons to be restrained from acting in accordance with their convictions in religious matters in private or in public, alone or in association with others.

[Declaration on Religious Liberty, (Dignitatis humanae), par. 2]

I think this was the most revolutionary thing that the council did.

Of course, the council added the condition that your conscience must be correctly formed. This means that if you are Catholic your conscience has to agree with what the church says. Catholics don’t enjoy this freedom.

I say, why not? Catholics should be as free as anyone else. If a Catholic decides in conscience to become a Lutheran, fine. Even if he or she decides in conscience to become an atheist, that is what religious liberty implies.

I respect what people do in conscience. I know that sometimes people will claim to be acting in conscience when they are really acting just out of self-interest, but who am I to judge that? I must respect what people say.

Freedom is precious. Love has to be given freely. When someone loves me, that’s a gift. I don’t deserve love and I can’t buy it. The person giving it must act freely.

 

4) The last thing that the council gave me was the principle that I have to respect people of other religions. There are two council decrees on this, one on ecumenism, which deals with fellow Christians, and one on non-Christian religions, which deals with Muslims, Buddhists, and similar groups.

We used to be forbidden to pray with Protestants. We could not go into a Protestant church to pray. So for example if I had a son or daughter who was getting married in a Protestant church, I couldn’t even go to the wedding. The council said that God works in other religions. There is some truth in every one. For example, Muslims stress the uniqueness of God, and the need for us to let God guide our lives. the word “Islam” means “submission.”

There is a story about St. Francis of Assisi. It is one of the best documented stories in Francis’s history. The crusaders were in Egypt, trying to battle their way to the Holy Places in Palestine. They were stuck at a siege of the city of Damietta. Francis and one of his companions went to Damietta, crossed the lines into Muslim territory, and got to speak in person to the Sultan Malik al Kamil. The two men spent several days in conversation about God. The Sultan ended up saying “I can’t be a Christian, but I give you and your followers safe passage to the Holy Places.” Franciscans have been in the Holy Land most of the time since then.

Francis came home and wrote a section of his rule that went something like this: “When the friars go among Saracens or other infidels, here are two ways that they can do it. One way is to live among them peacefully. The second way is to speak about their beliefs, if they believe God calls them to do that.”

There is a saying that people attribute to St. Francis: “Preach the Gospel at all times. If necessary, use words.” I don’t think Francis ever stated the principle in those exact terms, but this passage in his rule comes pretty close to it. 

So, to sum up, the Second Vatican Council gave me four things:

It gave me a love for Sacred Scripture.

It taught me the beauty of marriage and of all human  love.

It gave me respect for freedom of conscience.

It taught me to respect people of other religions.

These were great gifts in my life.

That is why I am a Vatican II priest. And maybe even why I am an aging sixties’ radical.

An Unfinished Universe

 (based on a homily preached on the fifth Sunday of Easter, 2010)

            The word “new” comes up five times in the readings for this Sunday, especially Revelation 21:1-5a. New heavens, new earth, new Jerusalem, I make all things new, new commandment. 

            The new is generally better than the old, but we sometimes get hurt trying out the new. Example: the motor vehicle. It is good for a lot of people, but 33,000 people were killed last year in motor vehicle accidents. That is a lot fewer than thirty years ago, which suggests that we may someday reduce the number to zero. We’re doing better, but we haven’t learned enough yet. 

            The same thing is true of capitalism. It is a wonderful invention, but it kills people just like the motor vehicle does. We haven’t learned to do it well.

            The story of Adam and Eve is not about obedience, it is about the human tendency to push the limits, to try new things. God could have inserted a gene into Adam and Eve that would have made the tree unattractive to them. God knew they were likely to eat of the fruit of that tree. Their being driven from paradise was not a punishment, but a description of how you can get hurt when you try something new. Did God say “Go for it”? The story does not put those words into God’s mouth, but it could have.

            Instead of inserting the gene, God inserted himself into the human story, in Jesus Christ. God became vulnerable. Love is vulnerable, faithful involvement. When you are vulnerable, you get hurt. Love is more important than not getting hurt. God got hurt.

            The new commandment will lead to the new heavens, the new earth, and the new Jerusalem. The new commandment is “love one another as I have loved you." 

            The old commandments are the famous ten: thou shalt not (kill, commit adultery, steal, bear false witness). They are part of the old heavens and the old earth. The One on the throne says “Behold, I make all things new.” He makes all things new by showing us what happens when we live vulnerably and faithfully with one another. 

            We may be facing the greatest environmental disaster in history—not the Gulf oil spill, but that and a whole list of related things: global warming, poisoning of our waters by the thousands of chemicals we invent, nuclear war. The disaster, if it comes, will have been caused by our pushing the limits. We invented all these new things and they can kill us. We need a theology that can cope with even the ultimate disaster. A theology based on obedience will not do the job. 

            Of course, each of us as individuals face disasters as terrible to us as the end of the world would be to all of us. Marital failure, cancer, Alzheimer's.

            The theology that can do the job is a theology that sees creation as unfinished. God is constantly creating, and letting humans play with creation. God creates thousands of species and eliminates thousands of species. Not all environmental disasters are “man-made.” God created a creature that could share in this process of creation and destruction, because that creature could also love, and love is the most important thing ever created. Love will survive any disaster. That is the lesson of Jesus’ death and resurrection. 

            The deniers of global warming are not evil people. They may, like all of us, be partly motivated by self-interest—they may be making money off the present system and don’t want to see it changed. But fundamentally they are part of a human race that has not yet learned how to do technology without killing itself. Maybe we’ll learn in time, maybe not. Regardless of whether we do or don’t learn, we can love. 

            We thought that smoking was cool, but it gave us lung cancer. We thought we knew how to make a marriage work, but it didn't. Those things don't stop us from loving.

            Love will offer us a more promising path toward dealing with, or even preventing, the disasters than will politics and brute force. 

            Traditional theology says that humans cannot find salvation without grace. The special kind of grace that we call “sanctifying” (holy-making) is really the Spirit of God, God's breath blowing on the coals of our hearts to make them white hot with love. Without that wind, we cool off. 

            We believe that the wind is there, that God is present in our midst in Christ Jesus, and that we can love, regardless of how wounded we are, as individuals or as nations. 

            The Book of Revelation was written to give hope to people who were faced with obstacles and dangers. The image of a new heavens and a new earth is meant to give hope in the midst of very unfinished old heavens and old earth. Only when we have hope can we open ourselves to love.

           

Soul-friendly capitalism

Steve Strieker urged me to put this on my blog. It was first published as a letter in the Quincy Herald-Whig on February 10, 2004.

     Capitalism as we now practice it is soul-less.

      

     Soul is story. My soul is my story, with its sorrows and its joys. Soul-less capitalism has no concern for the stories of individual human beings.

     

     The problem of soul-less capitalism is not only greed. Its greatest problem is idolatry. Soul-less capitalism says that an abstraction, a number on a bottom line, is more important than beauty, more important then love, more important than health, more important than worship. If the bottom line drives beauty and love and health and worship from the lives of billions of people, that is okay. In the long run and in some places things are better. The problem is that billions of people do not live in the long run or in the right places. “The long run” story is an abstraction. It is idolatry.

     We need soul-friendly capitalism.

    

     Soul-friendly capitalism takes account of the stories of each man and woman and child on the face of the earth. It says that competition is good, so long as competition does not kill. It says that incentives for effort are good, but that earning twenty or thirty times what the lowest paid worker in your company earns is good enough to motivate effort. Earning hundreds of times what that worker earns is feeding a beast with limitless hunger. The beast is an idol.

    

     Soul-less capitalism creates a train rushing to environmental destruction, whose engineers are powerless to slow it down. Soul-friendly capitalism slows down the train so the riders can enjoy the scenery, and so there will be scenery to enjoy. Soul-friendly capitalism says that moments of contemplation are good, and that every human being should be able to enjoy such moments, not just those who worship the beast.

     Soul-less capitalism creates fundamentalists, who correctly perceive that such capitalism is idolatrous. The violence needed to sustain soul-less capitalism breeds violence in reaction to it. Soul-less capitalism rests on a foundation of violence. It requires the biggest weapons in the world to sustain itself. Billions of people face those weapons and curse us for them.

     

     We need soul-friendly capitalism, that will put down the weapons and be content with the minimum force needed to keep order in a world community whose members can live lives of beauty and love and health and worship.

     Soul-friendly capitalism is the better model that we need.

Psalms

          The death of my very close friend, John Joe Lakers, last month, has made me reflect on my style of prayer.

          JJ told me, not long before his death, "You and I are very different." One way we were different was in our prayer preferences. I love the psalms. He could not endure them. He never attended our community prayer when it involved praying the psalms. He welcomed spontaneous prayer with others. He was partly responsible for an attempt by our community to introduce a period of spontaneous prayer in common before dinner. He even asked that we pray the Angelus then, because it recalls Jesus' becoming incarnate, which was his favorite theological theme.

          Months ago I was reflecting on the Muslim practice of praying by bowing to the floor five times a day in the direction of Mecca. That very physical action (which I could not possibly do with my knees being the way they are), led me to my own physical way of praying. I began singing the psalms out loud, privately, in my room. This became so important for me that I developed the practice of singing all the psalms in the course of a month, which means using the psalms for the Office of Readings and for Midday Prayer.

          Why do I find this prayerful?

          I think of my childhood, when everybody used "prayer books." Maybe using "prefabricated" prayers was something that uneducated people liked. But educated people can benefit too. I first began praying the psalms in earnest in the 1960s, when the post-Vatican II turmoil had caused us to abandon the old Latin breviary and we had not yet developed something to take its place. I was struggling with my own relationship to God, and said to myself, "I need to piggy-back on these prayers that people have used for over two thousand years."

          I am a child of two parents who never attended high school. I had the benefit of a fine graduate school education. I have often thought that my experience is probably shared by every person who has jumped from a "pre-modern" culture into U.S. university culture. At heart I am a 1950 parochial grade school kid. I think of Jacques Maritain's autobiography, The Peasant of the Garonne. I never read it, but its title suggests that maybe Maritain, one of the most famous Catholic intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century, was having similar reflections in his old age.

          As I sing the psalms, using the antiphons provided by the breviary—I love the Advent season and its antiphons—I stop to think of all the people around the world who are praying the same psalms this very day, maybe at this very moment. The majority of Catholics, and of new entrants into religious life, are today in the southern hemisphere. I think of the friars in Vietnam, where my confrere Ken Capalbo is now living and teaching. Surely, like everyone else, these men (and possibly women—do women find the psalms as prayerful as men do?) have their distractions and times of mechanical recitation. I find that I need to pray slowly, stopping to look out the window and reflect on the trees and the sky, a sky that every person in the world also sees. I think of all the monks and friars in the middle ages who prayed the psalms in Latin, using a Latin translation that often makes no sense. (Carroll Stuhlmiller, in his introduction to the ICEL version of the psalms, says that some verses are like objects you find in an attic. Nobody knows what they mean, and the elders could tell us, if only they could speak to us. Yet the mysterious objects and verses are part of what has been handed down to us.) The psalms have their rough, raw edges, reflecting periods when people's understanding of God was more primitive than the understanding preached by Jesus. The ICEL translation of Psalm 3 prays "Break their evil jaws! Smash their teeth!" This is not Jesus. But it reminds me that my ancestors in the faith had a ways to go in their understanding of what God is like. So do I.

          The negative tone of so many of the psalms (the "lament" psalms) used to turn me off. I judged them as out of touch with the great advances humanity has made in solving our problems. Now, as I pray them I reflect on how my vision of the world has been too optimistic, too pollyannish. There is evil in the world. People are suffering greatly because of it. Maybe the future will hold more suffering than I have seen in my day, especially as people around the world continue to struggle for increasingly scarce resources of energy and water. I pray soberly, trying to place myself in the shoes of those who are suffering even now from the injustice of the way we do things.

          I don't bow down to Mecca five times a day. I sing aloud these ancient prayers. I feel close to those Muslims who bow down, and thank God for their example.

Fr. John Joe Lakers has died.

Fr. JJ, whose writings I have linked to this blog, died on Friday, November 4, 2011 here in Holy Cross Friary.

We plan to continue to maintain a website of his writings, www.qufriary.org/Lakers. In addition, some of his former students hope to edit his work. Before he died he entrusted copies of that work to them.