This past week was the annual Statewide Convocation of all the priests serving in Alaska. It concluded with the Chrism Mass for the Archdiocese of Anchorage – Juneau. The Archbishop asked me to give a reflection to the priests before the Chrism Mass. Here is the audio. The text is below. NB, as always, the text is not as expansive as the audio. I hope you find it helpful. Feel free to share.
It was some weeks ago that the Archbishop asked me to share a few reflections with you at the end of the convocation.
I am more than happy to do so, but I am painfully aware that doing so is always a daunting task in the midst of one’s colleagues. As we heard in the gospel Monday evening when Our Lord preached in the synagogue in Jerusalem, “No prophet is without honor except in his native place.”
Never did that become more painfully clear to me than shortly after I was ordained in 1994. I spent the first four months serving here at my home parish of Our Lady of Guadalupe, now the Cathedral, before I headed back to Rome to finish up a degree. It was right here in this very building, which my own father built, that I was confronted my Mary Monahan out in the vestibule before Mass. She stopped and looked at me up and down in my spiffy vestments and said, “I’m supposed to go to confession to him? Hell, I used to change his diapers.”
You are just not going to get a lot of respect from someone who knows you that well.
Still, here I am and happy to be here.
Tonight the Archdiocese will be celebrating the Chrism Mass. As you know two important things will happen.
The oils will be blessed,
And we priests will renew the promises we made at our ordination.
Some of you have done this four times, some fifty-four times. I have done this 31 times. The words and the promises are very familiar to us, but I wonder how much attention to we really pay to these promises that define our lives.
Have we prayed and reflected over them as often as we should?
Perhaps we should do so now.
Because I believe in my hearts of hearts that by doing so we not only prepare ourselves to renew just our vows, but also our priesthood and our ministry exercised within its embrace.
You may recall that on Monday, the Archbishop reminded us that we are in a Jubilee year and the Holy Father has called the Faithful to be Pilgrims of Hope
Many of you have been on pilgrimage at various times with your parish or order or whoever.
And what is one of the first things you do when you arrive in the place where the pilgrimage will take place?
You meet your guide.
So I submit to you that if the people of God have been called to be pilgrims of hope, and they have,
Then they need guides who can show them where hope can be found.
And that, my brothers, is you and I.
But to be a good guide you have to have an intimate knowledge of the holy space to which you bring
We cannot guide others to hope, if we have not been there ourselves.
Furthermore, a good guide must also know his proper role, so that others may come to experience the power of the destination to which he brings them. He must know who he is, so that he may help others become who God has created them to be.
Our vows define us.
They define how we shall live, how we shall love and whom.
So, in understanding them, we understand ourselves better and are of greater service to the People of God whom we are called to serve.
Let’s go back to the beginning.
Why were we first ordained deacons before being ordained priests?
One must be configured to Christ the servant before he can be configured to Christ the Head
Then the mother of the sons of Zebedee approached him with her sons and did him homage, wishing to ask him for something. He said to her, “What do you wish?” She answered him, “Command that these two sons of mine sit, one at your right and the other at your left, in your kingdom.”
Jesus said in reply, “You do not know what you are asking. Can you drink the cup that I am going to drink?” They said to him, “We can.”
He replied, “My cup you will indeed drink, but to sit at my right and at my left [, this] is not mine to give but is for those for whom it has been prepared by my Father.”
When the ten heard this, they became indignant at the two brothers. But Jesus summoned them and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and the great ones make their authority over them felt.
But it shall not be so among you. Rather, whoever wishes to be great among you shall be your servant; whoever wishes to be first among you shall be your slave. Just so, the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Mt. 20:20-28)
We can forgive Mrs. Zebedee. She is simply looking out for her two boys. She wants them to have nice cabinet posts when Jesus sets up the government in what she expects will be the new theocracy in the reestablishment of the Kingdom of Israel. Like all the people at that time, she has yet to understand the immensity and transcendent nature of the Kingdom God preached by Jesus.
But Our Lord is very clear, the exercise of authority in the Kingdom can only be understood within the context of service.
Abbot Jeremy pointed out very eloquently yesterday this same thing when he explained the meaning of the Ritual of the Washing of the Feet during the Mass of the Lord’s Supper.
Like Christ, the priest does not come to be served, but to serve. Thus, we are ordained deacons, configured to Christ the servant, if you will, before we can be configured to Christ the head.
Authority in the Church, or anywhere else for that matter, can only be exercised in the context of service. Any attempt to do otherwise is doomed to failure and as we have seen so painfully since 2002, will have devastating consequences for the people of God..
At our diaconate ordination, we made three promises:
For celibacy,
For prayer
For obedience.
These are lifetime commitments to God and to his People. They are the foundational promises on which is built the framework of our priesthood.
The ordaining prelate asked us:
“In the presence of God and his Church, are you resolved, as a sign of your interior dedication to Christ, to remain celibate for the sake of the kingdom and in lifelong service to God and mankind?”
Now you and I both know that this entails more than simply foregoing marriage and promising to live a single life.
It is the total a commitment of oneself, body and soul, to the People of God.
In a way, it is a type of covenant.
Covenants, as you are aware bind persons, or groups of persons – families, clans, tribes, nations. In the Old Testament, covenants were serious business. They still are. They were always established in blood. On the second Sunday of Lent we heard these words:
The Lord God took Abram outside and said,
“Look up at the sky and count the stars, if you can.
Just so,” he added, “shall your descendants be.”
Abram put his faith in the LORD,
who credited it to him as an act of righteousness.
He then said to him,
“I am the LORD who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans
to give you this land as a possession.”
“O Lord GOD,” he asked,
“how am I to know that I shall possess it?”
He answered him,
“Bring me a three-year-old heifer, a three-year-old she-goat,
a three-year-old ram, a turtledove, and a young pigeon.”
Abram brought him all these, split them in two,
and placed each half opposite the other;
but the birds he did not cut up.
Birds of prey swooped down on the carcasses,
but Abram stayed with them.
As the sun was about to set, a trance fell upon Abram,
and a deep, terrifying darkness enveloped him.
When the sun had set and it was dark,
there appeared a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch,
which passed between those pieces.
It was on that occasion that the LORD made a covenant with Abram,
saying: “To your descendants I give this land,
from the Wadi of Egypt to the Great River, the Euphrates.”
Genesis 15:5-12, 17-18
What we have here in the Covenant with Abram is a very good description of the Covenant ritual. After the contract was pounded out between the parties, you took the best from your herd and flock and coop and split them in two. Making a path between the animal halves.
Then you walked down this path of gore as you said, “If I break this covenant, may what has happened to these animals happen to me!”
The amazing thing here in this passage is that when the smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passes through the pieces, God completes the ritual with Abram and binds himself to a people.
Covenants were always established in blood. They are still serious business. When we made our promise of celibacy, in a very real way, we bound ourselves to the People of God, saying in effect: “All that I am, I give to you, body and soul, without reservation, without condition.”
This finds its deepest, most profound, most intimate covenantal expression when we say the words of institution in the greatest moment of union in the life of the Church,
With Christ we say, “This is my body…this is my blood…which is given up for you.”
Configured to Christ, we too give all that we are to the People of God,
so that we may be available to them without incumbrance, in a fidelity that is infinite in its scope and eternal in its consequences.
We hold nothing back.
We do not make compromises
We cannot make excuses
To do otherwise does violence to our relationship with our people
And if we do this well, we become so identified with Christ as to become unrecognizable in another context.
It was my day off, and I was getting ready to fly the little airplane out to the cabin. On the way to Lake Hood Seaplane Base, I stopped into the grocery store to pick up a few provisions.
Since I was going to be cutting wood and other manly Alaskan things, I was in a flannel shirt and some Carharts. As I went down the aisle this woman starts to stare at me very quizzically. She knows she knows me, but she can’t figure it out. I let her stare at me for a moment and then I said, “Mary, I’m Fr. Leo. I’m your pastor. You sit in the third aisle on the left at the 10:30 Mass.”
Her face lit up and then she exclaims loudly a phrase I will never forget, “Oh Fathah! I didn’t recognize you with clothes on!”
Realizing what she had just said, she tried to back it up, “No, I mean with real clothes on! I mean you don’t have your collar!
“Please…please,” I said. “Just stop talking.”
Our promise of celibacy is not an external discipline that Church imposes upon us
It is a total gift of self that we give to Christ and to his People for the building up of the Church and the world.
Let’s move on to the second promise, the promise of prayer. As we stood there, the bishop asked:
“Are you resolved to maintain and deepen a spirit of prayer appropriate to your way of life and, in keeping with what is required of you, to celebrate faithfully the Liturgy of the Hours for the Church and for the whole world?”
We set aside three things in the Church, that is, we set them apart as sacred to God:
We sanctify people – through Baptism, confirmation, consecrated life, Holy Matrimony, Holy Orders.
We sanctify places – churches, shrines, religious houses, Cemeteries …homes.
(A quick aside:) I bless a lot of homes. I hope you do as well. I have to tell this story of one home that I blessed. Now, as you know, many times when you go to bless a home, the family will invite you over for dinner following the blessing. It makes for an enjoyable evening and people are delighted to take part in the “Feed-a-priest” program. So, I’m speaking with the mother of the family before heading over and she asked, “Is there anything special we need to get ready?” and I said, “Not really, just your favorite dish.” “Great!” she replied.
So I go to the home. As always, we started at the door of the house and then worked our way through the various rooms. Finally, I came to the dining room, and there, in the center of the table, on hand made lace doily, was the most beautiful porcelain soup tureen I had ever seen. It was in the shape of a swan and the ladle (not a silver one) resting in a way that it blended in perfectly with the tail feathers.
Here in all its glory was her favorite dish.
It was completely empty, and I ate at home that night, but by golly, I shall never ever forget that woman’s favorite dish!
So, we sanctify people, we sanctify places, but perhaps most important of all, we sanctify time.
For the priest this is perhaps one of the most important promises of all. Why? Because you and I know that the Kingdom of God is made of relationships, the deepest and most intimate of which we call being in “full communion” with Christ and the Body of Christ, the Church.
It is our particular relationship with Christ which defines us, his priest. And we know that relationships are not rocket science.
If you want a relationship to grow, you give it two things: time and attention.
I have said this thousands times to my parishioners and I say it again to you today,
If you cannot find at least ten minutes a day for private prayer with Our Lord, then your life is out of control and you need to make adjustments. NO EXCUSES.
I SAY IT AGAIN:
If you cannot find at least ten minutes a day for private prayer with Our Lord, then your life is out of control and you need to make adjustments. NO EXCUSES.
You need to fight for this time. It is the second of the great gifts you give to Christ and his people.
To be honest with you, it goes far beyond just setting good boundaries as Deacon Bernie shared with us.
You have to plan for this time. You have to fight for this time.
What do I mean? If I was the Evil One, I would fill your life with so many good things…not evil things…good things like:
Sacraments and confessions and marriage preps and bible studies and liturgy planning and catechetical sessions and pastoral counseling and marriage preps and school events and so much more
I would fill your life with all these good things so that soon you literally do not have time to pray at any time, let along be faithful to the Liturgy of the Hours.
My brothers, the reality is that relationships do not die because of conflict
Ironically, healthy relationships get deeper and more intimate as a result of the resolution of conflict.
No, relationships die because we fail to give them the two things that make them deepen and grow.
Time and attention.
Do you want your relationship with your family to grow?
Give it time and attention
You want your relationship with your friends to grow?
Give it time and attention.
You want your relationship with your brother priests to grow?
Give it time and attention.
Do you want your relationship with Christ to grow?
Give it time and attention.
And that means prayer.
One of the great experiences I had was to work with the Missionaries of Charity in their various houses in Rome. My favorite was their house of formation. It was also the house where they served many who had chronic diseases and conditions.
Part of their rule of life in the Order is to spend one hour a day in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament. They take this very seriously.
I found out how seriously one day when I went there to celebrate Mass. Now Mass for them happens at 6:00 AM. Every day. On purpose. (Now as you may be aware there are two kinds of people in the world. Those who wake up with a smile on their face and say, “Good morning, God!” and those who wake up and say, “Good God! Morning.”
Anyhoo, I arrived at 5:45 and the Superior said to me, “Now, Father, if some of the younger sisters fall asleep during Mass do not take it personally. They were up until 3:00 AM ministering to one of our residents.”
“Oh,” I said sympathetically, “So they have only had two and have hours of sleep.”
“Oh no, Father!” she exclaimed, “After that, they still had to do their holy hour.”
In their service to Christ in the poorest of the poor, the Missionaries of Charity live a very intense and austere life. But they know that they cannot do what they do for any length of time, if their ministry is not animated by a deeply intimate relationship with Our Lord.
So they give it time and attention.
They make no excuses.
And neither should we.
Let’s move on to the third promise, that of obedience.
Finally, each of us went up individually and knelt before the bishop. We put our hands inside of his, and the bishop asked, “Do you promise respect and obedience to me and my successors?”
There is a reason why this one is separated from the other two, and repeated.
This is where the rubber hits the road.
The first two lay the foundation on which our ministry stands.
Obedience gives the framework, the form, and the details of our ministry.
What obedience gives us and the Church is unity of heart, mind and action.
It is not a repression of our own will, desires and opinions, but as one writer puts it, “the fruitful redirection of them to a common goal.”
In paragraph 1567, the Catechism puts it this way:
First, quoting Lumen Gentium 28 § 2, it says:
“The priests, prudent cooperators of the episcopal college and its support and instrument, called to the service of the People of God, constitute, together with their bishop, a unique sacerdotal college (presbyterium) dedicated, it is, true to a variety of distinct duties. In each local assembly of the faithful they represent, in a certain sense, the bishop, with whom they are associated in all trust and generosity; in part they take upon themselves his duties and solicitude and in their daily toils discharge them.”
Then it makes a commentary: priests can exercise their ministry only in dependence on the bishop and in communion with him. The promise of obedience they make to the bishop at the moment of ordination and the kiss of peace from him at the end of the ordination liturgy mean that the bishop considers them his co-workers, his sons, his brothers and his friends, and that they in return owe him love and obedience.
This is when we are at our best. This is the image of a true Christian community—united and all working together in their respective roles for the glory of God and the proclamation of the Kingdom.
In one sense, obedience is saying yes at the very beginning of our priesthood to anything that will be asked of us from that point onwards. Sometimes it is easy to say yes, sometimes it is very difficult.
However, my brothers, we must never let difficulty devolve into disobedience.
On Tuesday, we heard these words in the Gospel:
Then the angel said to her,
“Do not be afraid, Mary,
for you have found favor with God.
Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son,
and you shall name him Jesus.
He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High,
and the Lord God will give him the throne of David his father,
and he will rule over the house of Jacob forever,
and of his Kingdom there will be no end.”
But Mary said to the angel,
“How can this be,
since I have no relations with a man?”
And the angel said to her in reply,
“The Holy Spirit will come upon you,
and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.
Therefore the child to be born
will be called holy, the Son of God.
And behold, Elizabeth, your relative,
has also conceived a son in her old age,
and this is the sixth month for her who was called barren;
for nothing will be impossible for God.”
Mary said, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord.
May it be done to me according to your word.”
Then the angel departed from her. Luke 1:26-38
The Blessed Virgin Mary gives us a beautiful example of the distinction between difficulty and disbelief.
In his depiction of the Annunciation in 1921, the American artist Henry Osawa Tanner has the Virgin sitting on the side of her bed, barefoot. The blankets are in disarray. The angel is portrayed as a pillar of light, which illuminates the whole room, but especially her face. It is the face of one pondering how everything has changed, can change, and her future will never be the same. Tanner captures beautifully the most pregnant pause in human history, that moment when heaven and earth await the decision of a 16 year old girl who has been asked to bear the Incarnate Word of God. It will mean the death of all that she was expecting up to that point entry into a new life and an uncertain future.
Will she say yes to God?
Will we?
As we knelt before the bishop, our future was no less uncertain. Yet in that moment when the bishop asked, “Do you promise respect and obedience to me and my successors?” we joined our “yes” to hers, trusting in the God who called us then and calls us still.
Now, you and I know that obedience is easy when things are going great.
But there is nothing virtuous about that.
The true test of obedience is when it is unexpected and difficult.
It was February, 2016, at this very convocation. We were walking out of morning conference when Archbishop Schwietz pulled me aside and said, “Hey, Leo, can I talk to you for a minute?” It was not unusual for him to do so. He was always asking me to help him with this or that from time to time.
So I said. “Sure, Archbishop! What can I do for you?”
He said, “Well, you know that Tom Brundage is no longer here in the Archdiocese and we need another priest to be a canon lawyer in the chancery. Would you mind going back to school and studying Canon Law for the Archdiocese.”
I stood there and just looked at him for a few moments. I wonder what the expression on my face was.
What I wanted to say was, “Archbishop, you know I already have my doctorate in Theology. What part of ‘terminal degree’ do you not understand?!”
But what came out was, “You know, Archbishop, I can honestly say that the idea has never crossed my mind. You are going to have to give me the day to get my head around this one.”
So I went down to the chapel that we had set up in the hotel at that time and sat there for some time. While unexpected, the idea was not abhorrent. However, I was loving life at St. Benedict’s. We had reached a great place in the life of the parish and we were hitting on all cylinders. So I just said to Our Lord, “Okay, Lord, you know what’s best. Let’s see how the rest of the day plays out.”
I didn’t have to wait long. Mass was right before lunch in those days. And what was the Gospel? The call of the first disciples in Luke: “And they left everything and followed him.”
“Thanks, Lord. Thanks a lot.”
And then Bishop Burns got up to speak, oblivious to what was going on and in the course of his homily said, “And you gotta be ready for God’s little surprises because you never know what he is going to throw your way.”
“Okay, Lord. I get it. I get it.”
And again, later in the day, the speaker picked up the theme about how certain saints redirected their lives to follow God’s call.
“Alright, Lord! Enough already! I get it.”
So that evening when we had recreation and cocktails, I pulled Archbishop aside from the group and we sat down at a table in the corner.
“Okay,” I said to him, “The answer is yes.”
His response? “Your mother is going to kill me.”
And so at the tender age of 50, I headed back to school to study a very expansive subject in a foreign language I had not spoken in 20 years.
And you know, Our Lord seems to know what he is doing.
I really liked Abbot Jeremy’s resurrection questions and his comments on about the multivalent aspects of the Paschal Mystery, namely, the Passion, Death, Resurrection, Ascension, and Pentecost.
And by and large, we priests are very comfortable preaching about the Passion death and resurrection.
But are we willing to apply that to ourselves and our ministry?
A priest will die and be raised several times in his lifetime. Each new assignment means a conclusion a death to what he knew and a new life in a new place.
Sometimes it is easy. Sometimes it is unexpected and difficult.
But Our Lord knows what he is doing.
And our ‘yes’ given in the promise of obedience at the beginning of our priesthood allows us to follow him in a way like no other and to be of service to the people of God in a way like no other.
To live a life fraught with possibilities
of endless opportunities and grace-filled surprises.
The promises we make define who we are, how we shall love, and whom. The first three vows we made at our ordination to the diaconate laid the foundation and the framework for the vows we made at our ordination to the priesthood.
For your personal reflection for the rest of this afternoon, I have provided a sheet with those vows along with a few questions that may help you in your contemplation.
For now, I leave you with a short poem by the great 20th century Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner whose work on priestly identity continues to inform our understanding of the holy priesthood in the modern world.
‘A Prayer for Priests’ by Fr Karl Rahner SJ
The priest is not an angel sent from heaven
He is a man chosen from among men,
A member of the Church, a Christian.
Remaining man and Christian, he begins to speak of you the Word of God.
The word is not his own.
No, he comes to you because God has told him to proclaim God’s Word.
Perhaps he has not entirely understood it himself.
Perhaps he adulterates it.
But he believes, and despite his fear he knows he must communicate God’s Word to you.
For must not some of us say something about God,
About eternal life; about the majesty of grace in our sanctified being?
Must not some one of us speak of sin, the judgement and mercy of God?
So, my dear friends, pray for him, carry him,
So that he might be able to sustain others by bringing to them
The mystery of God’s love revealed in Jesus Christ.
May God who has begun this good work in us bring it to fulfillment.
Questions for Reflection from the Rite of Ordination to the Presbyterate:
Do you resolve, with the help of the Holy Spirit, to discharge without fail the office of Priesthood in the presbyteral rank, as a worthy fellow worker with the Order of Bishops in caring for the Lord’s flock?
What does it mean to be a worthy fellow worker with my bishop? Do I respect him and his office at all times or just in his presence? Am I charitable in my words, thoughts and deeds?
Do you resolve to exercise the ministry of the word worthily and wisely, preaching the Gospel and teaching the Catholic faith?
How much time do I spend preparing my homilies, my presentations? Is it enough? What am I reading to keep my preaching fresh and engaging? Do I really believe what I am preaching? Does my preaching delight, inform, convince, and inspire?
Do you resolve to celebrate faithfully and reverently, in accord with the Church’s tradition, the mysteries of Christ, especially the Sacrifice of the Eucharist and the Sacrament of Reconciliation, for the glory of God and the sanctification of the Christian people?
Do I celebrate the Holy Mass, Reconciliation and the other sacraments with joy or with resignation? Do I work with others to plan faithful liturgies that engage the People of God so that they may fully, actively and consciously celebrate the great mysteries of the Faith? Have I ever resented someone asking for sacraments? If so, what was the cause?
Do you resolve to implore with us God’s mercy upon the people entrusted to your care by observing the command to pray without ceasing?
What is my prayer life like? Do I get my Holy Hour in every day? Am I faithful to the Divine Office? Do I need to make adjustments?
Do you resolve to be united more closely every day to Christ the High Priest, who offered himself for us to the Father as a pure Sacrifice, and with him to consecrate yourself to God for the salvation of all?
Do I make that total gift of myself, body and soul, to Christ and his People every day, or am I holding something back? Do all of my thoughts, words, and deeds reflect the dignity of my vocation and the gift of self that I have made to the People of God.
Then the elect goes to the Bishop and, kneeling before him, places his joined hands between those of the Bishop. Bishop: Do you promise respect and obedience to me and my successors?
What is the best assignment you have every had? What has been the most challenging? What has been your greatest joy? Your greatest difficulty? Where has Christ and the Holy Spirit been at work in all of this?
The priest is not an angel sent from heaven
He is a man chosen from among men,
A member of the Church, a Christian.
Remaining man and Christian, he begins to speak of you the Word of God.
The word is not his own.
No, he comes to you because God has told him to proclaim God’s Word.
Perhaps he has not entirely understood it himself.
Perhaps he adulterates it.
But he believes, and despite his fear he knows he must communicate God’s Word to you.
For must not some of us say something about God,
About eternal life; about the majesty of grace in our sanctified being?
Must not some one of us speak of sin, the judgement and mercy of God?
So, my dear friends, pray for him, carry him,
So that he might be able to sustain others by bringing to them
The mystery of God’s love revealed in Jesus Christ.
– Fr Karl Rahner SJ