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LETTERS TO MY BROTHERS AND SISTERS Donald J. Goergen, OP Dominican Publications |
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Foreword
To write a letter, even to a group one knows well, is a risk. One is conscious that one's truth is partial, that what is said arises from particular concerns and experiences, that words "slip, slide, perish, decay with imprecision" (T.S Eliot, Burnt Norton). Unlike a conversation, there is no immediate feedback, no ready opportunity to hear and consider disagreement, to identify and clarify misunderstandings, to reach deeper mutual understanding. Words disembodied of voice and gesture reach the readers silently. Writing is particularly challenging when one has a sense of the whole group, the spectrum of ideologies, contexts, temperaments, concerns, histories. In a single act, one reaches out to the afflicted and the comfortable, sensates and intuitives, innovators and traditionalists.
Yet letters are a vital way in which religious leaders fulfill their unique function of reflecting back to the group a sense of the whole. They are a way of serving the community by naming critical issues, offering a context for their consideration, and raising questions for personal reflection and communal dialogue. Because letters can be read and re-read, they may be friendly companions on the adventure which Donald Goergen, OP, calls "continuous formation." If they are done well, they are a means whereby a religious leader can perform what Herbert McCabe, OP, terms the job of the superior: "to play the central role in an educational process by which the good for the house becomes clear to everyone" (New Blackfriars, June, 1984).
The effectiveness of these letters is determined by the degree to which they foster conversion in the writer and readers, elicit dangerous memories, awaken recognition, unsettle routines, soothe the heart, strengthen the lonely, seed questions, provoke debate, move to prayer, evoke a chuckle. Such letters have served their function if they have promoted the vitality of the tradition which gives the community its distinctive identity and purpose, opened a common ground, helped to achieve a common sense and effectively oriented the community to the common good. In Catholic theological tradition, this process is known as reception. It is the recognition of the truth in a way that forms a community of greater freedom and solidarity. The decision of the Dominican Friars of St. Albert the Great Province, to whom these letters were addressed, to have them published is one measure of their reception.
To make these letters available to a group beyond their original audience is no less a risk. What word of insight and liberation might they speak to other readers? Are they so bound to their context that they have only a limited appeal?
This volume will find a natural audience in other Dominicans, both women and men, because its letters and addresses are a sustained reflection on elements of the Dominican charism: preaching, common life, contemplation, study. In exploring these topics, Goergen makes fresh connections between contemporary issues and Dominican tradition. His 1987 address to the Provincial Assembly, "Preaching in Solidarity with the God of Jesus Christ" is a particularly moving example of his ability to bring insights from the Order's intellectual tradition to bear on the relationship between holiness and justice. In doing so, he furthers that tradition.
Beyond the Dominican Family, this volume may be useful to women and men religious in a variety of contexts. Goergen's reflections on the vows and the common life, on the option for the poor and on conversion are food for personal thought and springboards for communal dialogue. His final letter, "Religious Life and the Gospel," is a stimulating and highly original contribution to the theology of religious life.
With compassion, honesty and delicate balance, Goergen takes on some of the critical, even divisive, issues in contemporary religious life in the United States: preaching justice; community and intimacy; activism and contemplation; the lure of individualism and materialism; pluralism and diversity within a faith community; how to identify ministerial priorities without succumbing to uniformity. Had these letters been written by the head of a community of women, the contents would probably have included a treatment of the issues raised by feminism, rather than the challenge to clericalism found in Goergen's letter on the laity.
This volume is, at its heart, an example of fine preaching. Its contents flow from reflection on Scripture and tradition, engagement in contemporary issues and deep love for the church and for a particular community. They demonstrate a knowledge of history and current magisterial teaching. It is preaching which has passed through the crucible of experience and contemplation and which invites a response of dialogue and conversion. Such preaching has power to move many other women and men hungering for insight and thirsting for holiness.
Patricia Walter, OP Prioress, Adrian Dominican Sisters June 20, 1995
Preface
The letters in this volume were originally written to my Dominican brothers in the Province of St. Albert the Great, USA. Our Provincial Chapter of 1994, judging them to have value beyond the province and also beyond the Dominican Family, asked that they be published in order to make them more widely available. I am deeply appreciative. We have entitled this collection, Letters to My Brothers and Sisters, yet one must always keep in mind the original context as that of a provincial writing his brothers. I was provincial from 1985-1994. The letters (and two addresses) included here cover a range of issues pertinent to the future of religious life.
The years of leadership were not easy. I have no regrets about having accepted the responsibility. They were both demanding and rewarding years. During them I came to formulate my own definition of leadership as a process of being drawn more deeply into the mystery of discipleship.
Leadership is living the paschal mystery. It is a privilege. It is a cross. I am glad I picked it up. I was glad to lay it down.
I love my brothers and sisters in the Dominican family. I am proud of them. I came to know how fragile we really are.
Every person's spiritual journey is distinctive -- the path by which we are drawn into being servants of humanity and servants of God. Mine may have gotten a jump starts from an asthmatic attack as a child. My parents were Iowa farmers. I had asthma, so I wasn't destined to be a farmer. But I liked school. I wanted to spend the rest of my life in school. It was a Catholic school. Franciscan sisters taught me. So already at an early age I hoped that God was calling me to priesthood. Thus I could stay in school by being a teacher. Intimations of a call trying to break through!
I didn't always make it easy for God, nor did God always make it easy for me. I tried the diocesan priesthood, but my vocation was to Dominican life. I remain grateful to the Province for receiving me. The two and a half years between my departure from the diocesan seminary and entering the Order were important and maturing years. They took me to Kentucky, back to Iowa, then Berkeley, California and Topeka, Kansas before I became a novice with the friars preachers.
Religious life at this period of history is not easy. A few years ago I summarized mine as: God, 4; Goergen, O. Almost always what I had chosen for a ministry was not what God had chosen for me. In retrospect, however, God had the better plan.
A difficult thing about being provincial is that one has to care for a personal life as well as a public one. It is not always easy to be attentive to the former. In 1992 my Mom died. In 1994 Dad died shortly after my second term was over. I now miss them -- especially now that I might have had more time to spend with them.
Another difficult thing about being provincial is the misconception that you set the agenda. People think of leadership as power. There is a power in it, but not the one we ordinarily think of. My own goals and plans frequently had to be altered. What I wanted to do or was elected to do or simply had to do were seldom the same. Leadership itself requires a profound obediential listening.
It is still too soon for me to say what I have learned. I know that I was changed by this ministry as by my previous ones. One feels called to be obedient to truth. It is difficult to speak the truth, to do the truth, to seek truth with love. It was truth that changed me and set me free. I felt compelled to live for the sake of the gospel, and not just an ideology. I often felt put to the test. Was my deepest commitment to the agenda of the left, or the agenda of the right? In the struggles one has to learn that there is a reality beyond both. I call that gospel. My understanding of the gospel, and of religious life in relationship to the gospel, was there in the beginning, but one can also see that it developed over these nine years.
At some point I hope to articulate more clearly what I have learned. At this point I am simply grateful to you, my brothers and sisters with whom I share gospel life, and to whom I dedicate these reflections. I especially thank Marygrace Peters, OP, for her assistance in editing, Lucy Sanchez for her typing, and Patricia Walter, OP, for her willingness to write a foreword.
Donald J. Goergen, OP
June 24, 1995, Feast of the Birth of St. John the Baptist
1, Preaching
August 8, 1985, Feast of St. Dominic
Dear Brothers,
The feast of our founder and brother Dominic is here. This occasion calls for celebration, but the summer date does not always find us at home. Wherever you are, may the strength and peace and joy of Dominic be with each of you.
The feast of Dominic calls for more than celebration. It is also an occasion for reflecting on our mission. We honor our founder by focusing on the gift Dominic gave to the Church: preaching. To follow Dominic means to be for our period of history what Dominic was for his. The Dominican family is missionary; our lives are apostolic. This is always the starting point for our self-understanding and for renewing our lives.
Dominic was always a lover of God, of Jesus Christ, and of the Church. And he became in time a lover of preaching. From Caleruega in Old Castile to the University of Bologna, from the episcopal town of Osma to the papal see in Rome, through the towns of the diocese of Toulouse, Dominic gradually found his voice as a preacher. He was convinced of the power and importance of preaching for the Church, and his love of preaching prompted him to gather together a community of preachers, his gift to the Church.
Dominic's life was shaped as much by the Pope's agenda and by the yearnings of his times as by his own. Innocent III had called for preachers. He had looked first to Cistercian monks, but something new was demanded at that moment in history. It had not yet been conceived, but it came about through Dominic Guzman and his companions. New wine could not be contained in old wineskins. Between his encounter with the Cistercian preachers at Montpellier in the summer of 1206 and his death in the summer of 1221, Dominic gave birth -- gradual, uncertain, but deliberate -- to the Preachers. From 1206 on, Dominic himself was formed by that project. After Bishop Diego died at the end of 1207, the urgent preaching mission fell to Dominic. He was not yet forty years old. It was only then, after so many years in the shadow of Diego, that his own vocation flowered with the formation of a new missionary, preaching, religious family in the Church.
The early sources of our history show how earnestly Dominic desired the confirmation of an order which would be called an Order of Preachers (see Jordan of Saxony, Beginnings of the Order of Preachers, 40). In asking for such a title, Dominic was asking for a lot. There already was an ordo praedicatorum in the Church. It was the episcopal order! Yet Dominic sought both the name and the mission: he wanted his religious family to be and to be known as Preachers. His goal was realized and officially confirmed, the order on December 22, 1216, and the name shortly thereafter (see Vicaire, St. Dominic and His Times, pp. 217-25).
In fidelity to our founder and our tradition, our own identity and spirituality must derive from the preaching mission. It is our charism and our gift. It is arguable that decline and renewal in the Dominican Family mirror quite accurately the weakening and strengthening of our responsiveness to that gratia praedicationis. The question returns: what does it mean for us to be preachers, not at the beginning of the thirteenth century, but at the end of the twentieth?
Granted the diversity of our personalities and particular works, preaching remains the gift that unites us in a brotherhood and a family. It gives a distinctive character or shape to our differing ministries and calls them (and us) into cooperation within the Church. What does it mean to be a Preacher who is a teacher or a theologian, or a pastoral minister in a parish or hospital or on a campus, someone working for peace and justice, an administrator, or a fulltime itinerant preacher? We are all Preachers, but not everything we do is preaching, yet preaching ought to help form everything we do.
Asking and attempting to answer the question of what being a Preacher means today activates the spiritual and theological life of the preacher. It reaches into our deepest motives and touches upon our faith. Preaching makes a theological life necessary. Thomas Aquinas wrote the Summa Contra Gentiles as a collaborative preaching, we might say, with and for his brother Dominicans. Theology gives content to our preaching, and preaching gives shape to our theology.
Any theology of preaching must clearly be a theology of the Word, intimately related to theologies of the Trinity, Christ, the Spirit and the Church. For various reasons, not all of them unfortunate, our theological understandings of these central mysteries differ in varying ways, but they come together in our common desire to proclaim the Word and in the traditions that comprise our Catholicism. Our varying theologies give Dominican preaching many facets, many voices. They make our common mission intelligible in a society that is of many different, conflicting minds.
As the Dominican Family, given the charism of preaching, we must be a community that is characterized by prayer, thought and articulate expression. A deepening theological and spiritual life brings together the reality of God and the lives of God's people. Profound fidelity to this vocation is far more important to our own unity in the Order than any conformity in theological stances or forms of ministry. And it is absolutely essential to the effectiveness of our ministries in the Church.
Our reflection on our vocation should include self-examination. What are we doing and how well are we doing it?
How is my particular ministry related to our corporate mission? How do I preach the gospel? Is the gospel central to my prayer, thought, and life?
How do I try to improve my own effectiveness as a preacher? Assuming that my preaching can always be better than it is, how have I taken responsibility for my continuing formation as a preacher? Where does my preaching need improvement?
Is my preaching substantively, doctrinally weak? Could it (1) benefit from more study? Am I saying the same things today that I did five years ago? Repeating ideas that have not deepened or developed?
Or, is my preaching substantive and doctrinal, but spiritually lifeless? Does the power of the Holy Spirit manifest itself in my words? Is my preaching grounded in prayer? Am I preaching my own ideas (myself), or Jesus Christ?
Or, do I rely solely on the power of the Holy Spirit without enough attention to some basic human skills? Have I shifted all the responsibility to God and neglected what I might learn from others' feedback, or from a preaching workshop?
Do I evaluate what I do? Allow others to give me straight feedback? Is my preaching grounded in humility, poverty of spirit and accurate self-knowledge?
What are the human experiences which form me and my words? Have I any experience of material poverty, dependence, solidarity with the poor of this world? How have I allowed the cry of the poor, those without social status, education or power, to influence my understanding of the gospel and my expression of it?
For Dominic, preaching was founded in a life of poverty, prayer and study. Is that true of me and my preaching?
Considering our corporate mission of preaching, I see three particular tasks confronting us in the next few years:
1. Our continuing formation as preachers: the ways in which we accept responsibility for personal and corporate development as effective, grace-filled preachers.
2. The development of our communities as centers of preaching. How can our particular manner of living together directly promote the prayer, study and expression that comprise our preaching and publicly identify us as "Preachers"?
3. Collaboration with our Dominican sisters in the preaching mission and the promotion of lay preaching in the Church. That our sisters have recognized and accepted their share in the charism of Dominic is an impressive fact of our times.
Given the centrality of preaching in the mission of the earthly Jesus (Mark 1:38), given its centrality in the life and mission of Dominic, and given the needs of our world and Church today, let us approach the feast of Dominic as a time for celebration, reflection, and self-evaluation. Let us approach the feast with our lives focused on our mission. Let us celebrate the feast as Preachers.
Fraternally in our brother Dominic,
Don
2, Faith, Politics and Justice
November 15, 1985, Feast of St. Albert the Great
Dear Brothers,
Every saint discloses some aspect of the mystery of grace, and every Dominican saint some aspect of the mystery of Dominican life, lived in its fullness only by all of us together. We are approaching the feast of Friar Albert of Cologne, our Dominican brother and Province patron. Albert's life reflects several facets of the Dominican spirit. We have Albert the teacher, the doctor universalis, the patron of scientists, and the exponent of Aristotelianism. Albert was indeed a man of learning, intellectual inquisitiveness, a life-long student. But the Albert I ponder today is the Albert captured in the nickname by which many Bavarians knew him: Bishop Boots.
During his three years as provincial, Albert made formal visitations of all the houses in the province on foot (as was the custom for the friars preachers). "It was Albert's custom while travelling -- always by foot -- first to visit the chapel of the religious house where he intended to stay the night, to thank God for the safe journey, then immediately to visit the library to see whether there were any books there that he had not yet seen" (James A. Weisheipl, "The Life and Works of St. Albert the Great," in Albertus Magnus and the Sciences, Commemorative Essays 1980, ed. James A. Weisheipl, Toronto, 1980, p. 34).
Albert never desired to be provincial, nor bishop. He was allowed to resign from both. As bishop he continued to live the life of Dominican simplicity: his preferential option for Dominican poverty. Although permitted as bishop to ride horseback, Bishop Boots visited the whole of his diocese on foot. Albert was a man of both learning and poverty. The one did not exclude the other. Thus, as we celebrate the feast of Albert, I would like to reflect on our call to preach justice -- a call rooted in both learning and true poverty.
FAITH AND POLITICS
In my previous letter, I spoke about our preaching mission. Preaching, theological education, and justice have been clearly set as Province priorities for some years now (See Acts of the Provincial Chapter, 1977, n. 85). Neither the ministry of preaching nor the challenge of theological education can be severed from one of the clearest signs of our time: the cry of the poor.
Justice is not only a human, social concern. It is a concern of faith as well. Indeed, it is a moral imperative, not an option. Justice talk disturbs us because it has political implications, and many of us prefer to think of ourselves as non-political, at least in so far as we speak as representatives of the Church. Justice talk also raises economic questions, about which we must humbly acknowledge a lack of expertise. Yet we cannot escape the thirst for justice in our world without rendering the gospel and the teachings of the Church vacuous.
Rather, we must assert strongly to one another and to the people whom we serve the inseparable connections among faith, justice, politics, and economics.
As United States citizens, we have grown up with the idea of the separation of church and state, and we see the wisdom in such a separation, and we rightly attempt to protect it. Yet, at the same time that we say "Separation of the church and state, yes," we must also say, "Separation of faith and politics, no." Separating the practice of the faith from the socio-political issues which confront our world is not only undesirable but impossible. One cannot desire to be non-political as a man or woman of faith unless one desires the faith to be socially irrelevant.
Justice thus remains a constituent element of our preaching. And we must educate people who accept the separation of church and state about the inseparability of faith and political life. We must insist that faith does not predetermine or dictate concrete, prudential, political and economic decisions. The gospel does not tell us what we must do in all the concrete circumstances of life. But the gospel does teach us that political and economic issues are moral issues as well. Politics and economics are not value-free, devoid of moral concerns. The strong reaction among some against the United States Bishops' pastoral letter on peace and the upcoming pastoral on the United States economy, [This was published in 1986, its title Economic Justice for All.] arguing that bishops have no expertise or right to speak on political and economic topics, indicates that United States Catholics have been improperly taught or at least unconsciously allowed to assume that political and economic decisions can be non-moral. Perhaps this will be one of the major contributions of the bishops' recent pastorals: making us aware that social, political, and economic decisions are moral decisions as well.
Faith seeks after justice; the social, political, and economic responsibility of the Christian cannot be denied. This responsibility is not the whole of the gospel, but it is essential to the gospel. We too often err by going in one of two directions, by reducing the gospel to social justice alone, or by denying the intrinsic link between the gospel and justice. There is no gospel without the challenge to act justly, and yet there is more to the gospel than justice by itself alone.
In its wisdom, the Church advocates no particular economic system. As church we realize our compatibility with a variety of economic systems and the historical expressions thereof. Systems are criticized when they violate basic human rights. Such violations the Church as God's people cannot tolerate -- not because it is making concrete prudential moral decisions for its members but because the Church sees itself as an advocate for human dignity. This value runs through the bishops' pastoral, the writings of John Paul II, the modern social teaching of the Church, back to medieval and patristic times. The Church sees itself as an advocate for the common good.
The Church in France in the nineteenth century had to come to grips with modem political systems and political democracy. The Church had to come to the awareness that to be a Catholic did not necessitate being a monarchist. The Church struggled with these issues, now considered dated, and in so doing lost many of the people, much of the working class. Our own Henri Lacordaire contributed to the acceptance of the democratic form of government. So, in the twentieth century, the Church faces the challenge of coming to grips with new economic systems as well. Where are our Lacordaires?
A PROVINCE SEEKING JUSTICE
We affirm the separation of church and state as well as the inseparability of faith and politics. Economic issues are moral issues, yet we respect the prudential area and peoples' moral decision-making. We speak out against the violations of human rights. We seek to learn what it means to be compatible with non-capitalist economic systems. All this is fraught with danger, but the virtue of justice cannot be separated from the virtues of "courage" and "good sense." (See Herbert McCabe, The Teaching of the Catholic Church.)
Perhaps our failures with respect to justice pertain as readily to these other two moral virtues. How many of us seek justice deeply in our hearts, but lack the courage it takes to speak out, preach, or act on behalf of justice? We are people of good will, but also cowards. Or our particular failure may be a lack of good sense. How often do we not see the words or deeds of others as providing no role models because they are rooted in self-righteousness, single issues, or a simple lack of wisdom? As Preachers we seek justice, but a justice undergirded by courage and good sense. Certainly as preachers, as educators, as people who have committed ourselves to the practice and the preaching of Christian life in its fullness, we are at a point in our own history where we can and must take the pursuit of justice even more seriously. I grant that we will all have our own opinions on political and economic questions. I also grant that recognizing the social implications of the gospel opens the door to politicizing our life together; it can be a source of tension and disunity.
I do not grant, however, that differences of opinion are bad for us, that differences need necessarily negate the deeper bonds of brotherhood that we share, that adult religious are incapable of genuine human respect for those who disagree with them. We do not need to avoid discussions about the socio-political implications of the gospel. What we need to avoid are: (1) an arrogant attitude that one is always right, and (2) quick, unreflective solutions to extremely complex issues. We do not need to disagree with one another less; we need to understand one another more. We need to avoid the ready-at-hand ways of categorizing people and defining ourselves over against each other, intellectuals over against activists, contemplatives over against prophets, men over against women, liberals over against conservatives, and we could go on. We all have something to contribute and we all must contribute to the search for a more just society.
A Dominican pursuit of justice is inseparable from our pursuit of truth, our obligation to study, our capacity to reflect in common. We cannot justify being ignorant in the areas of greatest concern to our contemporary world. We must do the truth as we seek the truth. Justice and truth are never opposed.
When we speak of peace and justice as a ministry, we do so in at least three ways, and all three are valid and necessary. In the first, most restricted sense, we think of our brothers who have committed themselves on a full-time basis to direct action on behalf of peace and economic justice. In a second sense, we think of those who have given themselves full-time to more traditional, institutional apostolates, but apostolates that are clearly on behalf of the poor. Among others, I think of the majority of our parishes. In a third, even less restricted, but equally important sense, we think of all of us for whom peace and justice must be an essential part of our apostolic life: at the level of provincial leadership, in parish ministry or at campus centers, in our preaching, teaching, scholarship, music, art, counselling, and administration. These, too, must be ministries for justice.
We are not all involved in the peace and justice ministry in the same way, but we must all be committed to peace and justice as a constitutive element in our ministries. How does the cry of the poor inform our preaching? Being able to preach justice and peace is both difficult and necessary, avoiding the two extremes of platitudes and partisanship. The same is true of us as educators. The concern for justice must be a part of our teaching, research, or administrative activities. Does the parish have its peace and justice committee and is it given a central role in pastoral planning? Have we all read the first drafts of the bishops' pastoral on the United States economy so that we can implement the final draft in our communities and ministries? In the worship life of a community, baptism, reconciliation, and Eucharist are all occasions for raising our social consciousness and deepening our faith.
These three senses in which we are committed to peace and justice pertain primarily to our individual ministries. But there are also ways in which we are called to act corporately. The Provincial Chapter recommended that the Province take corporate stances on important issues related to peace and justice (1985 Acts of the Provincial Chapter, n.30) in accord with approved guidelines. This makes us aware of corporate as well as individual social responsibilities.
THE BISHOPS' PASTORAL
Individually and corporately, it is not a question of whether but of how to involve ourselves in the political, economic, and social issues of our day, not because we are more knowledgeable than laity but because we share responsibility with the laity for our world, God's world. The practice of the faith cannot be limited to nor separated from societal issues.
As Dominican preachers, educators, and pastors we must be prepared to promote the pastoral, "Catholic Social Teaching and the US Economy." The final draft is scheduled to be approved in the Fall of 1986. The second draft is already a shorter, more concise statement. If we do not read it carefully and follow its development, we will not be prepared when the final draft is approved.
In the first drafts, several points in particular are worth highlighting.
1. The bishops have made an option for solidarity with the poor and are challenging us to follow their lead. Concern for the needs of the poor and the vulnerable is to be a primary guiding economic principle.
2. The approach taken in the pastoral reflects the more recent pastoral and theological methodology developing in the Church which begins with a reading of "the signs of the times," social analysis, dialogue and consultation "from below".
3. One of the major contributions of the pastoral will be to alert us to the reality that economic issues and decisions are moral issues and decisions as well. "Therefore we want to call all persons, no matter what their income or status, to a new commitment to economic justice. Such a commitment is an inescapable implication of belief in Jesus Christ".
4. The pastoral does not deal explicitly with the capitalism vs. socialism debate. Yet it recognizes that contemporary forms of capitalism can make a virtue out of fallen human nature and take advantage of our sinful selves by structurally building upon them: consumerism.
5. The Church recognizes that it has, as an institution, moral obligations in the economic sphere. "All the moral principles that govern the just operation of any economic endeavor apply to the church and its many agencies and institutions; indeed the church should be exemplary."
6. Lying underneath the pastoral is a new definition or understanding of holiness. It is this that may be the most difficult for traditionally educated Christians to grasp or accept, but what may be most important for us to see, namely, that holiness involves a commitment to justice, even if it cannot be reduced to that alone.
These points, solidarity with the poor, a consultative methodology, the moral dimension of economic life, the limitations of capitalism, principles of justice as applicable to the church, and a new understanding of holiness must help to shape our consciousness and our preaching.
We celebrate the feast of Albert the Great with great respect for our Dominican intellectual heritage as well as for our Dominican contribution to Catholic social thought and social action. We especially call to mind Bishop Boots' love of poverty as we are called in our own period of history to make that option for solidarity with the poor. May the feast of Albert be an occasion for celebration, self-reflection, and just preaching. May it bring us closer into solidarity with the poor.
Fraternally in Dominic and Albert,
Don
3, Mission, Ministry, and Continuing Formation
January 28, 1986, Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas
Dear Brothers,
Thomas Aquinas has continuing value not only for the synthesis he once effected but also as a model thinker. Thomas must be understood as a truly biblical theologian. This does not mean that he was not also a speculative theologian. But we can easily forget his career of lecturing on the Scriptures and his commentaries on Job, the Psalms, the Song of Songs, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Matthew, John, and the letters of Paul. Thomas was a master of the Scriptures. In his Summa, he sides with opinions that the Scriptures seem to more readily endorse. The major question for Thomas as a theologian was simply what opinion is most in accord with the Scriptures.
Thomas must also be understood as a continually developing and open theologian. Thomas never stopped thinking! His theology is not simply a finished product but also a creative inquiry still going on toward the end of his life when he decided to discontinue writing. On the question of whether God would have become incarnate if humankind had not sinned, Thomas grew in his understanding and changed his mind between his writing of the Sentences (1252-1256) and the later tertia pars of the Summa (begun around Spring of 1272). On the significant question in Thomas' Christology of whether there was only one esse in Christ, or whether Christ as a human being has an esse as well, Thomas shows himself as continually thinking. He changes his mind within one year, age forty-seven or forty-eight, between the disputation De unione verbi incarnati written earlier in 1272 and the famous question 17 of the tertia pars later in that year. There are many such examples. Thomas was capable of continual thinking and rethinking and changing his mind.
Thomas' theology, while scholastic, was also pastoral -- intended to be a guide for the preachers of the Order. The history of the preaching friars, as far back as Dominic, was wrapped up with the struggle against the Albigensians. Thomas sought out and then thought out a theology that might more effectively aid "The Preaching." He chose Aristotle to assist him in developing a theology of creation and nature in response to Manicheism.
Thomas sets the example for us, along with other values, of what it means to be a biblical, pastoral, and continually developing thinker.
OUR MISSION AND MINISTRY
Among the concerns that our Province frequently raises are those of ministerial planning and provincial identity. Who are we, and what are we about? A fairly straightforward answer can be given to the question. We are preachers, educators, and promoters of peace and justice. This does not mean a lessened commitment to campus, parochial, or other provincial commitments. It does mean that ministry in these settings ought to emphasize quality preaching, educational programming, and the promotion of justice and peace.
Our conscientious commitment to preaching, education, and justice reflect not only a long Dominican heritage but also our more recent provincial decisions. The acts of our 1977 Chapter stated:
We recommend that there be no priority ranking of individual ministries, but that three areas of ministry are especially suited to the Dominican mission. These areas might function as guidelines for the brethren, the provincial and the Council, and for Formation personnel. They are:
1. the preaching ministries in their variety of forms;
2. the intellectual and artistic ministries;
3. the social ministries in which the Gospel is brought to the less advantaged and oppressed. (1977 ACTS, n. 85)
We confuse ourselves if we talk about provincial "priorities" in terms of numbers -- as if we can really determine how many brothers are committed to quality preaching, learning, and social change by counting numbers. The Province really has two priorities: ministry and continuing formation. These are two interdependent efforts. Like inhaling and exhaling, one is not more important than the other.
Preaching, theological education, and the promotion of justice are not the priorities of the Province as much as they are the means by which we understand, articulate, and implement our mission. They are what I prefer to call apostolic norms. "Norms" refer not so much to common practice, as to those actions or aspirations in terms of which we choose to understand who we are and what we are about.
Aidan Kavanagh explains:
A norm in this sense has nothing to do with the number of times a thing is done, but it has everything to do with the standard according to which a thing is done. So long as the norm is in place both in practice and in the awareness of those who are engaged in it, the situation is capable of being judged "normal" even though the norm must be departed from to some extent, even frequently, due to exigencies of time, place, pastoral considerations, physical inabilities, or whatever. Yet to the extent possible, the norm must always be achieved to some extent lest it slip imperceptibly into the status of a mere ideal all wish for but are under no obligation to realize. (Aidan Kavanagh, The Shape of Baptism, Pueblo, 108.)
Ministry is one of the two priorities of the province. And there are three primary apostolic norms in terms of which we understand our ministry: preaching, education, and justice. These three do not confine the apostolic life or ministries in the Province but rather define how we understand and interpret ourselves.
Ministry articulated in terms of these norms is clearly to be encouraged; ministries less clearly related to this apostolic self-understanding are less encouraged. But these are norms in terms of which all of us can and ought to evaluate our apostolic lives. A particular teacher who is unconcerned about the quality of his preaching, who sees little connection between teaching and the proclamation of the Word, whose style or message do not contribute to more just social relationships does not honor the Dominican vocation simply by teaching. A pastor or chaplain is a better Dominican to the extent that he exercises his ministry in effective preaching, and takes every opportunity for evangelization, adult catechesis, and the active pursuit of peace and justice.
CONTINUING FORMATION
In contrast to the priority of ministry which I have spoken about in terms of three apostolic norms, I prefer to speak about continuing formation in terms of questions which we must continue to discuss.
What does it mean for us to be brothers to each other?
How do we relate our brotherhood to the wider context of the Dominican family and collaboration with our Dominican sisters?
How are questions of brotherhood, collaboration, and priesthood rooted in the ongoing challenge of conversion, deepening, and renewal in our common life?
Brotherhood, collaboration, priesthood, and renewal are all rooted in continuing formation.
Renewal cannot be discussed in the abstract, but must be related to the concrete, existential areas of our common life: prayer, study, obedience, poverty, chastity. These are all areas for continuing renewal that we must take up one by one, re-examine, and re-own. Our apostolic life is rooted in our common life; the renewal of one requires the renewal of the other. Ultimately, both the priority of ministry and the priority of continuing formation are rooted in one goal: charity, as St. Thomas so clearly affirms, a growth in charity that manifests itself in friendship, brotherhood, collaboration, and ministry.
OUR INTELLECTUAL TRADITION
As Dominicans, we take pride in our intellectual history. Our history, however, carries with it a responsibility. What we have received we hand on to the future as a living tradition. There are two tendencies that we must always check lest they distort our tradition rather than enhance it: the tendency toward elitism and the tendency toward rationalism. The correctives lie in seeing that our intellectual tradition is both pastoral and contemplative.
Dominican reflection is related to the realities of this world. Its concerns are human, social, and pastoral. Dominic addressed his preaching to the needs of his world and church, his period of history. The crisis of Albigensianism was not an abstract theological problem but a pressing social and pastoral issue. The same was true for Thomas. His Summa Contra Gentiles was to serve as an aid to his preaching brothers challenged by an increased awareness of the world of Islam. And we can say the same for Catherine: a woman for all times because she was first of all a woman of her times. Our intellectual heritage is not an intellectualism that separates us from others and makes us aloof, but rather an appreciation of critical thought that flows out of our deep pastoral sensitivities and makes us genuinely humble. As Dominicans, we see the distinction between "academic" and "pastoral" as a false dichotomy. "Pastoral studies" can be pursued in a critical, reflective, and scholarly fashion. And scholarship -- whether biblical, historical, philosophical, or theological -- is pastorally aware, guided, and sensitive. The intellectual life does not separate us from other people but is a way of serving people. The scholar too can be both pastor and prophet.
This relates to a second characteristic of Dominican intellectual life, its connectedness to other aspects of our heritage, its ability to see relationships, and its roots in contemplation. We can readily identify our apostolic, missionary, intellectual, artistic, mystical, liturgical, and social traditions. But these traditions, while distinguishable, are not separable. They are interdependent. Is Thomas to be seen as a preacher, a thinker, or a mystic? To separate our intellectual life from its connections and roots is to produce a sterile rationalism. Our intellectual lives cannot be separated from our contemplative lives. Dominican reflection is both pastoral and contemplative, rooted in the world and rooted in prayer, at the service of the people and at the service of God. Both God and the people lie at the heart of the truth that we seek. Our search for truth is prayerful (contemplative), intelligent (using our reason), and practical (pastoral). The caritas that we seek to become in our continuing formation is not at odds with the veritas that we seek to grasp, or be grasped by, in our being continuing students, life-long learners. Rather, they go hand in hand.
On this feast of St. Thomas, then, we call to mind our search for Truth; our personal and corporate quest to be people of charity; and our priorities of ministry and continuing formation, or proclaiming the truth and living it. We do justice to Thomas not when we repeat his thoughts but when we follow his example. He remains a model for us today.
Your brother, in Truth and with Love,
Don
4, Pluralism
April 29, 1986, Feast of St. Catherine of Siena
Dear Brothers,
We come once again to a significant Dominican feast, that of Saint Catherine of Siena, one of the great women in the history of the Church, a doctor of the Church, an ecclesially conscious, politically courageous, and deeply contemplative woman. As we celebrate this feast, I would like to turn our thoughts in a theological direction and reflect on three issues that affect our lives.
Catherine herself was an apostle to a divided Church; so too in many ways are we. Her capacity to love the Church was equalled only by her capacity to challenge the Church. And she always sought a deepened theological understanding as a source of insight and strength.
The three issues that I have chosen also require theological clarification and reflection. Two of them lie at the source of strong differences among us (the theology of pluralism and the theology of the Church) and the other pertains more to the effect of such differences (the theology of the human person). Our feelings and attitudes toward pluralism, our understanding of the nature of the Church, and our ways of relating to each other are not issues that we can reflect upon once and for all and then they go away. They require continuous dialog and reflection. So I welcome your own theological contributions as well to what must be a continuing dialog.
PLURALISM
What we seek is a theology of pluralism, an understanding of pluralism that is rooted in faith, an appreciation of what it means to believe that God acts and is present in our midst in diverse and even conflicting ways. We need to affirm the value of pluralism in the life of the Church and also be critical of pluralism. Pluralism comes from God, but that does not imply that anything and everything is "of God." Some realities that fall under the umbrella of pluralism may also be an effect of sin.
Let us first acknowledge the value of plurality. The Catholic tradition is and always has been woven together out of diverse cultures, structures, and theologies. Our belief is simply that the transcendent God cannot be revealed adequately in the created order except in diverse and manifold ways. Each human perspective is human and limited but God is unlimited. God has spoken and continues to speak through diversity.
Any cursory historical study alerts us to the diversity out of which the history of the Church, doctrine, and theology have been woven. This fact is as true of the first century and New Testament Christianity as of every century since. We ought not too quickly attempt a superficial harmonization of the Christianity(ies) that lies underneath our New Testament. The theology of James is quite distinct from that of Paul, and not obviously reconcilable (contrast Galatians 2:15-16 and James 2:1417). Likewise the organization of the community in Jerusalem under the leadership of James was a contrast to the organization of those communities evangelized by Paul. And the problems they faced differed as well -- the problems facing the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem and those facing the Christian communities in Galatia, Thessalonica, Corinth, or Rome.
The theology of the Gospel of Matthew is distinct from that of Paul and from that of James, in some ways not as extreme as either of them. Likewise the organization and life of Matthew's church is distinct, whether it be situated in Antioch or Caesarea or somewhere else. And the Petrine style of leadership was distinct -- perhaps sociologically the only style that was able to hold together the diverse Christian experiences and worlds. And none of these (Peter, Paul, James, Matthew, Luke, Mark) reflect the unique theology, problems, and leadership style manifest in that of the Johannine community. Pluralism seems to have been a part of God's intention for the Christian Church from the beginning.
Pluralism also seems to have been a part of our Dominican tradition from quite early on. There is no need to retrace our history and struggles, but a text from Humbert of the Romans' commentary on the prologue to the Constitutions is illuminating.
We who are under obedience to a single Master are said to live by a single profession. And it is right that we who are united in this way should be found uniform in the observances of our canonical, that is, regular, religious life. It is the general practice among approved religious orders which live by a common profession that they should display the highest degree of uniformity in external things, not only in their observances, but also in their habit, their buildings, and in various other things too. It is with a certain sadness that we must realize how far we differ from the rest on this point. They have their churches and monastic buildings all conforming to the same pattern and arranged in the same way, but we have almost as many different patterns and arrangements of our churches and buildings as we have houses. They are uniform in the colour, shape, size and cost of their clothes; but we are not like that. One man has a black cappa, another a red one, and yet another a grey one. Some people's cappas have a wide opening, some have a very narrow one; some appear very expensive, some are cheap and some are in between. One man has a narrow scapular, another a broad one; some of them have pointed hoods at the back, others do not. Some of them have a long neck opening, some have a short one, and some have folds at the cheeks and some do not. Some people have cappas which cover their whole tunic, while others have cappas improperly shorter than their tunics; some of them are so short that they attract attention, while others are so long that they attract attention. Similarly with scapulars: some are very long, some are very short. And it is the same with the lay brothers: one has one kind of scapular, while another has one totally different in colour and in all the other ways mentioned above.Other orders also observe uniformity in their shoes. But with us one man has black shoes and another has red shoes; some wear coarse, religious shoes, while others wear worldly, open shoes. Some are fastened one way, some are fastened in quite another way. Some of us have got into the way of wearing shoes so large that they almost come up to the knee, whereas others are very short, and some are in between.
Not only in our buildings and in our habit, but also in some of the customs we follow in the Divine Office and in many other things, there is tremendous diversity between our different provinces and even between different houses in a single province.
The reason for this diversity is the difference between different countries, the equal status of all the provinces and houses, and the excellent minds some people have. Different countries all have had different customs, and out of this diversity different people have brought different things to the Order, even though it is only one Order. And since the houses and provinces are all equal, one province or house is not obliged to follow the customs of any other or to conform itself to any other. And since intelligent brethren are of the opinion that their own customs are as good as anyone else's they are reluctant to abandon them unless an ordination of a General Chapter defines what practice is to be preferred. (From Early Dominicans, Selected Writings, edited by Simon Tugwell [New York, NY: Paulist Press, 1982], pp. 141-142.)
Again, conflict, diversity, and pluralism are not "modern" or post-Vatican II facts and experiences.
Diversity is sometimes easy to affirm; the conflict and hostility it almost inevitably creates is not as easy to accept. We prefer harmony, even when that may not be God's immediate intention. I recall a theological insight of Karl Rahner's, that someone may be given the gift to be an accelerator and someone else the gift to be a brake. Is that possible? That the Spirit could be acting in our midst not only in diverse but even conflicting ways? Underneath our theology of pluralism is our theology of the Holy Spirit.
At the same time that we affirm the value and providential character of pluralism, however, we must be ready to be critical. There are dangers inherent in a naive optimism. There are two false approaches to pluralism -- neither well grounded theologically. The weakness in a simplistic "conservative" approach is to try to confine plurality too quickly within clearly defined, authoritative, secure limits. Does this do justice to what we know about the Holy Spirit? The weakness in a simplistic "liberal" approach is an excessive tolerance, as if all tolerance is always good. Pure tolerance makes convictions a matter of personal taste. It is an attitude that makes religion purely a personal or private matter. The Dominican commitment to veritas can accept neither of these simplistic approaches to pluralism. Neither of them goes deeply enough into the heart of the matter --pneumatology. What does it mean to believe in the Holy Spirit -- the principle of both the unity and the diversity in the Catholic experience!
Do I believe that the Holy Spirit is truly at work in our world today? Can the new wine be contained in the old wineskins? Does newness imply no need whatever for the old wineskins? How do I discern what the Holy Spirit is doing at this period of history? Is it possible for the Holy Spirit to be at the source of some of our conflicts? Is the Holy Spirit trying to stretch us in some way? Is it at all possible that the Holy Spirit is at work within someone or some movement that is quite distinct, even in conflict with how I sense the Holy Spirit to be present in my life? What does it mean in the concrete to believe in God as Spirit?
The challenge of pluralism forces us to think through very carefully the theology of the Holy Spirit and the theology of the Church.
THE CHURCH
Pneumatology and ecclesiology are both significant areas of theology that confront us today. What I say here is not new. We have known for some time that ecclesiology lies at the heart of our conflicting perspectives. Ecclesiology was at the center of the work of Vatican II, and the documents of Vatican II themselves contain conflicting ecclesiologies.
We have become accustomed to thinking in terms of models of church, realizing that varied models are not necessarily exclusive. Yet different models imply different ecclesiologies, and different ecclesiologies imply different churches -- if we translate theory and theology into practice and life. Thus we ought not be completely surprised to wake up and realize that at least for the past twenty years we have been working for different churches, even for conflicting and competing churches.
There are several ways of describing these conflicting ecclesiologies. One is to contrast an ecclesiology from above and an ecclesiology from below, or the hierarchical church and the popular church, or a clerically dominated church and a laity-oriented church. This way of speaking contains insight and yet is too great a simplification. An either/or way of presenting the contrast does not do justice to the ecclesiologies of the majority of us. Only small numbers in the Province would gravitate more exclusively toward one extreme or the other. Most of us see the Holy Spirit as active in the world and Church both "from above" and "from below." We do not want to exaggerate a polarization that most of us do not accept. Nor do we want to deny naively deep differences among us.
A deep-seated conflict in the Province -- as in the Church -- is the interpretation of Vatican II. It is not at all a question of some being pre-Vatican II and others post-Vatican II. The conflict is over two (or more) competing interpretations of Vatican II -- a question of the hermeneutics of Vatican II. Whose understanding or interpretation will prevail? I would describe these two interpretations as follows, and both have bases in the conciliar documents: those for whom the hierarchical and institutional side of the Church is primary, although not to the exclusion of other aspects of the Church; and those for whom the hierarchical and institutional side of the Church is significant but secondary. How one interprets Vatican II is closely related to what type of Church we are working for.
Two things seem almost self-evident. (1) What interpretation of Vatican II eventually becomes authoritative rests with history and is probably not something most of us will live long enough to know. This has been true of most Councils. They created as many questions as they solved. What would eventually become the authoritative interpretation of Nicea or Chalcedon took the following centuries to work out. Thus most of us will live our lives in the midst of these conflicting ecclesiologies. (2) The conflicts during the next twenty years will not be less painful than during the previous twenty. If anything, they will be more. Given the issues of the theology of priesthood, the relationship of the church to world and religion to politics, the laity and the Scriptures, liberation theology, the role of women, the tension between a Eurocentric and world church, not to mention many other issues, conflict within the Church is not likely to decrease.
Our contribution can be to live through and work through these potentially divisive questions as brothers. None of us knows the ultimate outcome. Each of us has been given the gift of the Spirit. Each of us has some contribution to make. We need not evasively cover over our differences. We need only affirm our brotherhood as a bond that frees us to struggle together. We have the freedom to discuss together -- knowing that agreement is not our expectation, and that respect for each brother is his right.
THE DIGNITY OF THE HUMAN PERSON
Pluralism does not imply that anything goes, that every opinion has equal claim to validity. And a critique of pluralism does not imply that my perspective is the normative one, and that the limits be set by how far the diversity deviates from my norm. Pluralism, in the concrete circumstances of our lives, raises another theological issue besides that of the Holy Spirit, this time an anthropological one, our theology of the human person. Perhaps nothing challenges the practice of our faith more than the attitude we sustain toward those who deeply disagree with us. Yet, practically speaking, what does it mean to say we believe that every human person is created to be an image or likeness of God? Whether woman or man, right or left, gay or straight, old or young, learned or less educated, and on and on.
It is always a great personal challenge to see our brothers and sisters as "icons of God." Such dignity deserves great respect. We must appreciate both the dignity and the imperfection that comes from being human and realize that what is most important about each of us we all have in common -- that we are "in Christ."
I think of an older man in the Province for whom fraternal love and human dignity implies that we not treat him as if he were finished, having nothing more to offer. What does it mean to realize that someone has given forty years of his life to the service of the Church? I think of a middle-aged man in the Province whose political views are strongly to the left, and how that deeply held political conviction prevents many from seeing in him a man of great faith, hope, with a deep capacity for love. What does it mean to embrace as brother someone who threatens us because of the clarity of his option for solidarity with the poor? I am thinking of a man who told me the other day that he was gay, a man in religious life long before I joined the Order. I feel that his human dignity and self-worth have been eroded through the years and wonder when we will talk more comfortably about questions of sexuality such as these. I look around the Province at my brothers and I see fragile, talented, vulnerable, hard-working, flawed, dedicated, hurting, self-sacrificing men. We come in many shapes and sizes, protecting ourselves and yet yearning to be connected with each other -- each an image of our wonderful God.
Pluralism cannot get in the way of our recognizing the beauty and dignity of each individual among us. To become brothers does not mean superficially glossing over deeply felt differences either.
I have not written about these questions to provide answers but to provoke discussion and promote dialog. Do you believe in the Holy Spirit? What is your understanding of Church to which you are giving your life? Do you see in your brothers the image of Jesus Christ? These are the questions that both divide and unite us.
As we celebrate this feast of our sister Catherine, I ask that we continue to discuss and reflect together on our theological understanding of the Holy Spirit, the Church, and the human person, and on the implications of those reflections for our common life.
Your brother in Dominic and Catherine,
Don
5, Obedience
August 8, 1986, Feast of St. Dominic
Dear Brothers,
One year ago, for the feast of St. Dominic, my first letter to the Province was on the subject of preaching -- preaching as an apostolic priority in the Province, as a norm for evaluating all our apostolic activities within the Province, as the mission in the context of which our Dominican vocation takes on its coherence. This year I would like to address another topic close to the heart and vision of Dominic: obedience.
One of the most powerful biblical images is that of "the servant of the Lord" -- the one who does the will of the Lord. True obedience and servanthood are practically synonymous.
A biblical theology of obedience and servanthood makes two points quite clear. (1) The foundation of the servant's life is God. A servant is first of all a servant of God. Radical obedience is always to God. (2) Servanthood not only implies obedience, but also frequently implies suffering, often the pain of rejection. The suffering is not because God wants it, but because there is no way to do what God is asking without embracing the specific pain it may involve. God did not love Jeremiah less because what he asked Jeremiah to endure was more. There was no way in which Jeremiah could have done God's will, spoken God's word, to those people in that period of history without opening himself to the pain his particular vocation or mission would entail. Whatever else may be said about obedience, this biblical image of the servant must be the cornerstone of our understanding.
OBEDIENCE AS LISTENING
Obedience is primarily concerned with our relationship to God, and it calls us into a posture of listening to God, of becoming "hearers of the Word" before we become "proclaimers of the Word," and thus establishes an integral relationship between obedience, contemplation, and the apostolic life of the Preacher.
Obedience, etymologically, comes from the Latin oboedire, or ob, a preposition implying something relational, andaudire, a verb meaning to hear or to listen. We must listen before we can truly hear, and we must hear before we can genuinely respond. The obediential posture is that of a listener. We should as brothers bound together by the vow of obedience certainly examine ourselves and ask: What is the quality of my listening?
the extent of my capacity to listen?
We first of all, of course, listen to God. But God's will or word is most often mediated. And therefore we also ask to what else or to whom else do we listen.
We listen to the Church, in its teaching and its liturgy. We listen to the world, as we attempt to read or hear "the signs of the times," the cry of the poor. We listen to ourselves -- our best selves, true selves, not our sinful or selfish selves. And we listen to others -- to friends, to those to whom we minister, to those most in need in our society, and to our brothers and sisters in the faith, especially our brothers and sisters in Dominic. It is this latter listening which draws us close to a particular Dominican form of obedience. Listening is a contemplative act: we listen to the Word. It is also a fraternal or communal act: we listen to each other.
OBEDIENCE AND COMMUNITY
Although obedience implies a profound relationship with the Living God, and the contemplative's capacity to listen to both God and world, the most concrete effect of a freely chosen, vowed obedience for us as Dominicans is the community, life together. This is where the vow of obedience is most often experienced and where it is found the most challenging. For over and above the virtue of obedience which affects all Christians, the vow binds us together as brothers, no longer seemingly autonomous centers of activity but rather interdependent lives lived together. Through the vow of obedience we have chosen to allow brothers or sisters a place, a space, a role in our lives. We have a special obligation to hear and listen to them, when they speak individually, and even more so when they speak corporately.
Pierre Raffin makes the point that it is the fraternal dimension of obedience which is the hallmark of the mendicants in contrast to an earlier monastic understanding of obedience, or even the later Ignatian understanding. Obedience among Dominicans implies community life and vice versa. First of all, we owe obedience to one another. We have obliged ourselves to listen to each other. Religious profession binds us to one another: this is the first concrete realization of what Dominican obedience implies. As Raffin writes, "Dominican obedience is based on a radical trust in people. The dependence upon one another, which we accept by making profession in the Order, presupposes that we trust one another, that we trust in the personal uprightness and prudence of our brothers." ("L'obéissance dominicaine", La Vie Spirituelle [Jan-Feb, 1985], 39-50.)
Another quality of Dominican obedience, highlighted by Herbert McCabe ("Obedience", New Blackfriars [June, 1984], 280-288), is that obedience is more a question of intelligence than of will, of a mutuality of learning than a simple doing, and thus again that it is something which takes place in common or in a community of brothers and sisters. For Thomas Aquinas, the act of commanding is not primarily an act of the will but of the intelligence, the act of one who understands what is to be done.
McCabe draws out the implications of this:
In our tradition on the other hand, which sees obedience as a kind of learning process, a matter of practical intelligence, obedience is something that brings people to share a common mind. For our tradition it matters that the superior should be right. S/he too has to learn, to be obedient. For the modern style an obedient house is one in which the will of the superior prevails over that of the subject. For our tradition an obedient house is one which has got as near as possible to the truth, in which there is general agreement about what is to be done, so that the will of the superior hardly enters into it. The job of the superior is not to make her or his will prevail, it is to play the central role in an educational process by which the good for the house becomes clear to everyone... Obedience, then, for us is not simply a matter of efficiency in getting something done but of fraternal unity, and it would perhaps be better if instead of speaking of a vow of obedience we spoke of a vow of solidarity.
This vow of solidarity with the community helps us understand the role of the community meeting and a house chapter in our lives, as well as a provincial or general chapter. It is in these corporate gatherings that the challenge of Dominican obedience will make itself felt. But this takes us to another level at which the fraternal character of Dominican obedience is experienced -- the role of leadership in a Dominican community.
OBEDIENCE AND LEADERSHIP
Obedience involves our fidelity to God, to ourselves, to others, and Dominican obedience involves in particular a fidelity to our Dominican brothers and sisters and our Dominican vocation. But this relationship to our fellow Dominicans, whether in a local community or in the Province, also involves the relationship between leadership and membership. This relationship, to which unfortunately we can jump too quickly when discussing obedience, is not the starting point for understanding either the virtue or the vow. Inevitably, however, it is a relationship which must also be addressed. And in doing so we must remember, following upon what has already been said, that obedience calls both membership and leadership to responsibility within community life.
Dominican obedience is communal fraternal in character. It is inseparable from our Dominican form of government in which authority is derived from the community which expresses itself through general, provincial, or house chapters. Authority itself is both limited and obligated by constitutions and capitular, corporate decisions. The chapter at all levels plays a central role in Dominican life.
Yet I frankly admit that the effort to correlate the needs and desires of the individual members and the corporate decisions and needs of the Province as a whole is a most difficult and delicate task. The question is: what content does the Dominican vow of obedience have for us? Is the vow effective? Does it strengthen our vocation and mission? It is one of the hinges that holds us together. If it is missing, or not working, we fall off in all directions. Thus we fail to exercise a corporate ministry; nor do we have a corporate impact on the life of the Church.
Part of our difficulty, I believe, is that we have been oscillating back and forth for the past twenty years between two models of obedience, neither properly Dominican! The first, seemingly more traditional model, overly simplified, runs something like this. Provincial leadership takes the initiative; the individual is consulted in the process; the provincial makes the decision. The second model, explicitly operative since the early 1970s at least, placed more responsibility on the individual. The individual member took his own initiative; provincial leadership was often consulted in the process; but the individual was the final, determinative factor.
Each model had advantages and disadvantages. But neither took into sufficient account the fraternal character of Dominican obedience, the first by placing the responsibility primarily on leadership, and the second by placing it primarily on membership, whereas Dominican obedience is always collaboration between the two,a reciprocal and mutual process of learning. The first, seemingly more traditional model lent itself to authoritarianism and a lack of concern for how the Holy Spirit was acting within an individual. It collapsed in our contemporary, rapidly changing, cultural situation. There have been sufficient critiques of "blind obedience" and the abuses of civil and ecclesiastical power to which it is open.
But the second, more recent model had disadvantages as well. It did not form and support corporate commitments, decisions, or responsibilities. Leadership lost any capacity to lead or implement corporate goals and policies. Thus corporate and capitular decisions or goals remained ineffective. The corporate good and corporate life were undermined. Any corporate or provincial or communal planning became a precarious and futile venture, resting on nothing more than the hoped-for good will of those who were so inclined.
There is, however, a model between these two which I propose. Dominican obedience implies that both leadership and membership profess and practice obedience. There must be a mutuality of fraternal listening. The initiative can be taken by either membership or leadership. What is initiated is a process of discernment and decision-making in which both the individual brother and leadership (or a particular community) are integrally involved. Our obedience is never a question of "the provincial gets his way," or "the individual brother gets his way." Obedience does not set us over against each other like that, but rather implies that we as brothers are committed to a common process. If there is no process, no discernment, or if the individual is not fully respected, or if the provincial leadership is not integrally involved, then there is no obedience to speak of no matter what else may be going on.
Someone may suggest that the word discernment is not a Dominican word. Yet it is, and we need to retrieve it in its fully Dominican sense. Both Eckhart and Tauler speak of discernment and it occupies a central place in the theology of Catherine, for whom it is one of the three fundamental virtues (humility, charity, and discernment). Or perhaps we would prefer to use a way of speaking more akin to Thomas. Then we can talk about the virtue of prudence, and discernment or obedience as a process of coming to a corporate prudential judgment.
But, in Dominican obedience, there is a final step, after the mutual listening, after the fraternal dialogue, after communal discernment. All that is trust in people. Then comes the trust in the brotherhood and its corporate processes, the chapters. This allows the closure of the process. It is the function of leadership to see that things move: the decisions of the provincial chapter, responses to requests and needs, calls from the larger Church, intervention when proper responsibility and initiative are not in fact forthcoming at the local or individual level. In the process both leadership and membership will have learned, grown, perhaps been stretched, and in decision-making, leadership can effectively serve the common good.
The difficult but important challenge of Dominican leadership is how to bring together the needs of the individual and the needs of the community or province, and also how to bring these together with the needs of our world. I have several times been impressed by Frederick Buechner's definition of vocation which relates closely to my understanding of obedience. He writes:
Vocation comes from the Latin vocare, to call, and means the work a man is called to by God.There are all different kinds of voices calling you to all different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of Society, say, or the Superego, or Self-Interest.
By and large a good rule for finding out is this. The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you've presumably met requirement (a), but if your work is writing TV deodorant commercials, the chances are you've missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony, you have probably met requirement (b), but if most of the time you're bored and depressed by it, the chances are you have not only bypassed (a) but probably aren't helping your patients much either.
Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet. (The Alphabet of Grace [New York: Harper and Row, 1985], 95.)
This is the challenge of obedience for Dominican leadership, how to facilitate a coming together of the individual member's deep gladness and the Province's mission and the world's deep hunger. The process ultimately depends upon a freely chosen gift of the self to the brotherhood -- the spirit of collaboration and sense of fraternity.
Dominican obedience implies the trust that Pierre Raffin spoke of. Michael Downey writes of Jean Vanier, "A true leader is one who has the extraordinary ability to call forth from others the very best they have to give" and "The proper use of authority aims at bringing about balance between the importance of ideals and the importance of the people who pursue them" (A Blessed Weakness, The Spirit of Jean Vanier and l'Arche [San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986], 37 and 69). Leadership and membership, the individual good and the corporate good, are not to be defined over against each other but in relationship to each other.
OBEDIENCE AND POWER
One of the constructive aspects of the vow of obedience is that it makes us confront our use of power, just as the vow of chastity challenges us to face the use of our human sexuality, and as the vow of poverty confronts our relationship to materiality, material goods and comforts. Sexuality, material goods, and power are very human elements in our lives, and how the vows enable us to live with them as people of the gospel is not something to take lightly.
Christian chastity teaches us that human sexuality is good, but that it is distorted when it becomes too dominant a source or motive in our lives. The truly chaste person is one who is truly sexual but who freely puts that sexuality at the service of the Lord. Christian poverty (the virtue, of course, and the vow, not the economic condition) teaches us that material goods are indeed good, and yet we can distort them when we view them as possessions or are dominated by our desire for them, unable to share and distribute them equitably. A truly poor person in the religious sense is one who enjoys and can delight in material goods as God's gifts but freely puts them at the service of the gospel. Likewise, Christian obedience teaches us that power is good; yet power is distorted when it defines us over against others or above others, when it dominates our ambitions or desires. The truly obedient person is one who sees that power too is good but has learned to use power for the sake of the reign of God.
We deal here with significant human realities and yet we are fragile creatures. How much all of us want to be in control -- of our lives, our relationships, our apostolates, and even our relationship with God. Our socialization has geared us to seek independence rather than interdependence. We live under the fallacy of self-sufficiency. This is why obedience lies at the heart of our spiritual lives and struggles. To hold power as a force for good and yet to be able to let go is the sign of a truly free and spiritual person.
The vows teach us to be discriminating. Not all power is the same. So often we think of power as coercion: I can get whatever I want if I have the power. But this is not the kind of power which God longs for us to have, the power of which the Scriptures speak, the power of the Spirit and the power of love. The kind of power that the person of obedience seeks is the kind of power only God can give. True power does not imply the ability to have my way but rather the freedom not to have my way. Power is not something that I posses by myself, but something that we share in common. This is what Christian obedience and our vow is all about. Rollo May distinguished five kinds of power: exploitative, manipulative, competitive, nutrient, and integrative. (Power and Innocence, [New York: W W Norton and Co., 1972].) We could each well ask -- whether as leadership or membership -- which kind of power most characterizes my style of life and approach to others.
So much more could be said, but I have only wanted to invite us into a reflection on Dominican obedience as we prepare to celebrate the feast of our brother Dominic.
From the beginning of the Order, St. Dominic required the brethren to promise him community and obedience. He himself humbly submitted to the decisions, especially the laws, which, after full deliberation, the general chapter of the brethren established. But outside the general chapter, he required -- kindly but firmly indeed -- voluntary obedience from all to the commands which, after due deliberation, he gave while governing the Order. A community, indeed, to remain faithful to its spirit and its mission, needs a principle of unity, which it obtains through obedience (The Book of the Constitutions of the Dominican Order 17, I).
Your brother in Dominic,
Don
6, The Option for Solidarity with the Poor
November 15, 1986, Feast of St. Albert the Great
Dear Brothers,
In the third draft of their pastoral letter on economic justice, the United States bishops continue to place the fundamental option for the poor at the center of their teaching (see paragraphs 8494).
"The obligation to provide justice for all means that the poor have the single most urgent claim on the conscience of the nation" (85). "As individuals and as a nation, therefore, we are called to make a fundamental 'option for the poor "'(86). "The fulfillment of the basic needs of the poor is of the highest priority" (89). The bishops continue to challenge us toward "a new American experiment" within the economic life of the nation (paragraphs 291-321).
The United States bishops in their roles as preachers and teachers have set for us a profound and challenging example. May we as Preachers prove to be ready to take up the challenge and follow their lead.
Taking up the challenge flows readily from our Dominican tradition and the priority it has given to the cry of the poor. Names like Dominic, Albert, Catherine, Francisco de Vitoria, Bartolomé de las Casas, Martin de Porres, Rose of Lima, Henri Dominic Lacordaire, and Louis-Joseph Lebret come immediately to mind.
As we celebrate once again the feast of our brother Albert, and as we have just recently celebrated the feast of our brother Martin de Porres, I would like to call our attention to the option for solidarity with the poor.
What does this way of speaking imply? What are its implications for our apostolates? For our common life?
THE OPTION FOR SOLIDARITY WITH THE POOR
The conscious option for solidarity with the poor does not imply a rejection of ministry to the middle class or even the wealthy. It does place definite requirements upon such ministry, however. Such a ministry must be globally conscious and socially responsible. Although the option for the poor does not mean ministry exclusively to the economically poor and socially marginal or vulnerable, it still implies a preference given to ministry to the poor.
The expression, "preferential option for the poor," or variations of it, is not univocal. Such an expression will not have the same implications for each and every one of us. What it requires of one brother may vary from what it requires of another. What it requires of all of us, however, is that our preaching and ministry be socio-ethically responsible, that we ourselves become more socially and politically educated, and that we become aware that our faith and discipleship do have political and public implications.
"Solidarity with the poor" is rather an enticement, an invitation, a conscience prodder, consciousness-raising language, a highly tensive language rich with implications, hence a means of conscientization or conversion, or personal conversion to a social consciousness, a social conversion. It draws us into unrest with our present way of living orprevious content in preaching. It makes us more conscious, more restless, more challenged.
"Solidarity with the poor" also requires that we approach every question, every issue from the perspective of a social consciousness. Our common life and our ministries cannot be divorced from the social questions of our day. This does not mean that we approach every issue exclusively and only from a social perspective, but that the social, political, and economic aspects of an issue be a constant factor in our awareness. Such an awareness makes social justice a mission to which we are all called within our varying apostolates.
"Solidarity with the poor" is a process. It takes time. It is not something accomplished within us overnight. It involves personal transformation as well as a commitment to social transformation. Solidarity is always pulling us and pushing us one step further.
We may be led where we would rather not go (Jn 21:18). Albert Nolan made this point well in a talk he gave in London in 1984, in which he elucidated solidarity with the poor by reference to our traditional approach to spiritual growth.
In their third draft of the pastoral, the bishops speak about the option for the poor in the language of "fundamental option" (86). A fundamental option is not optional, however. It is not something we take or leave. It is, morally speaking, the only choice we have. And it is a choice that is then foundational, at the basis of everything else we do. The option for solidarity is a decision we make about how to live our lives.
The option for the poor is ultimately not for the poor alone, but choosing to be for humankind. It is an option for the gospel, the whole gospel, and nothing but the gospel. "Action on behalf of justice and participation in the transformation of the world fully appear to us as a constitutive dimension of the preaching of the gospel" ("Justice in the World," 1971 Synod of Bishops, in Vatican Collection, vol 2, More Postconciliar Documents, ed. Austin Flannery, OP, p. 696.).
How this option for solidarity will work itself out in the concrete in my life I can never know in advance. As I said, the expression is not univocal, but an enticement. I must give myself to it and see where God leads me. We all ought to accept humbly the fact that we do not know precisely what the implications of this option may be for us as individuals or as a Province. But we ought not be afraid or hesitant. Together we can move both wisely and courageously in this direction to which the gospel calls us, the "signs of the times" impel us, and with which the bishops challenge all Catholics and United States citizens.
We ought humbly accept the fact that none of us is perfect or "has arrived" with respect to this solidarity. None of us can say, "You want to know what the option for the poor means? Look at me." Rather this is something with which each of us must wrestle. But there can be no backing away from the decision. So let us begin to explore together what this means for us. Let us begin to talk to our friends about it. Let us talk to our brothers and sisters in the Dominican family. Let us begin to talk about it as communities.
I must raise these questions myself in terms of my own spiritual life, my own preaching and teaching, my work as Provincial. Last year in Bolivia, I paid 1,500,000 pesos for three candy bars. Bolivia is considered one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere. How can I help our country to move in an economic direction that does not promote and perpetuate such global poverty? Last year in San Salvador I could see and feel the effects of that government's tactics of terror. What is my response to the growing number of refugees from Central America? Where do I stand? Last year a Czechoslovakian woman, a member of the Dominican laity there, sought out the opportunity to talk to me about the lack of religious freedom in her country. How can we avoid being naive about repression in Eastern Europe? Our option for solidarity will raise these questions and many more, but we cannot stand back from pursuing them with cowardly excuses that we are not economists or not knowledgeable in these matters. When have Dominicans ever used ignorance as their excuse? When have we ever taken refuge in a lack of education? Our tradition of learning demands that we learn about these matters and discuss them in the light of the gospel.
SOME IMPLICATIONS
Although the implications of this option for the poor remain to be worked out by us in the coming years, some suggestions or questions can be posed.
A fundamental option for solidarity with the poor has particular implications or obligations for those of us who have chosen to live the common life. Which is more apparent in my life, the influence of evangelical simplicity or United States consumerism? Solidarity with the poor implies a freely chosen self-limitation with respect to goods and comforts in the face of our society's consumerism.
We must continually call to mind the integral relationship between what we practice and what we preach, between our living the gospel and how we proclaim the gospel. Paul VI, in his apostolic exhortation on evangelization, Evangelic Nuntiandi, puts it well. "These 'signs of the times' should find us vigilant. Either tacitly or aloud -- but always forcefully -- we are being asked: Do you really believe what you are proclaiming? Do you live what you believe? Do you really preach what you live? The witness of life has become more than ever an essential condition for real effectiveness in preaching" (76).
When the final draft of the bishops' pastoral has been approved, how will I preach solidarity with the poor?
What one decision will I make about my life personally and what one decision can we make as a community that will reflect our decision to be in solidarity with the poor?
How can I place myself in some situations that will give me a more concrete feel for the effects of poverty?
With whom am I going to discuss this further so as to come to a wise and resolute decision about this step to which we as United States Catholics are being called?
The principle of solidarity with the poor has apostolic and pastoral implications as well. Whatever I do, wherever I minister, how will this solidarity affect my ministry?
As we plan new ministries or expand ministry within the Province, how can our ministry be increasingly with the poor and among the poor? I am not suggesting that the above are the most important questions for us to ask, but only that the option of solidarity must have some concrete implications for us. Together we must raise those questions and together we must respond to them.
In our human and spiritual adult lives, there are three significant and difficult struggles. We may want to relate them to the classic struggles with the devil, the flesh, and the world, or to the norms of obedience, chastity, and poverty, but whether we do so or not all of us has to face the struggle with our own ego and the self, the struggle for intimacy and relationship, and the struggle for justice and peace on earth. Our relationship with God and our desire for holiness requires that we not back away from any of them. In our continuing renewal, I hope we can enter into these struggles together as brothers and with our sisters. The "preferential option for the poor" invites us to undertake a search that we as people of the gospel cannot ignore.
Solidarity with the poor will not be easy. We are just beginning to explore something of what it means. As a closing reflection, we can take the closing lines of the poem, "Return" (1980) by Carolyn Forche. [From The Country Between Us, New York, Harper and Row, 1981.]
Her subject is El Salvador. She writes upon her return to the United States.
And so, you say, you've learned a little
about starvation: a child like a supper scrap
filling with worms, many children strung
together, as if they were cut from paper
and all in a delicate chain. And that people
who rescue physicists, lawyers and poets
lie in their beds at night with reports
of mice introduced into women, of men
whose testicles are crushed like eggs.
That they cup their own parts
with their bedsheets and move themselves
slowly, imagining bracelets affixing
their wrists to a wall where the naked
are pinned, where the naked are tied open
and left to the hands of those who erase
what they touch. We are all erased
by them, and no longer resemble decent
men. We no longer have the hearts,
the strength, the lives of women.
Your problem is not your life as it is
in America, not that your hands, as you
tell me, are tied to do something. It is
that you were born to an island of greed
and grace where you have this sense
of yourself as apart from others. It is
not your right to feel powerless. Better
people than you were powerless.
You have not returned to your country,
but to a life you never left.
In solidarity with the poor, and in solidarity with Jesus Christ,
Don
7, Contemplation and Prayer
April 29, 1987, Feast of St. Catherine of Siena
Dear Brothers,
As we celebrate the feast of Catherine of Siena, I am very aware that the challenge issued to us by Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council has not yet been accomplished, namely, the ongoing renewal of religious life. This task is of utmost importance, for on it everything else depends. It is imperative that we continue to renew ourselves, deepen our love for Jesus Christ and the gospel, and not back off from the continuous giving of ourselves to the spiritual life. In our continuing and constructive efforts toward renewal, the contemplative side of our lives has suffered from lack of attention. We must accept, as Preachers, that we are also contemplatives. We are both contemplatives and apostles, and neither of these takes precedence over the other. What better topic is there upon which to reflect as we celebrate the feast of Catherine?
What is your own understanding of contemplation? What are those things which foster or nourish your contemplative life? Why does our spirituality of the Word and spirituality of preaching require contemplation?
Perhaps I ought not say "contemplation" but rather "contemplative experience." For it is the experience of the Living God that contemplation both seeks and nourishes. Thatexperience of God makes our faith a living faith. And only a living faith can truly give life to those to whom we are sent.
WHAT IS CONTEMPLATION?
Contemplation is an experiential love of God, the experience both of loving God and of being loved intimately by God. Contemplation helps to distinguish the one who knows a lot about God from the one who has met God. And the people of God are looking for religious who have met God.
Contemplative prayer is a relationship with God that is beyond reflection, and beyond affection, although both reflective prayer or meditation and affective prayer or the prayer of the heart prepare the way for contemplation. Although contemplation and the spiritual life are multi-faceted realities about which much has been written, there are four supports for the contemplative life that I would like to emphasize: discipline, silence, devotion, and Scripture.
PRAYER AND DISCIPLINE.
The foundational experience in the life of a religious is one's experience of God, and the foundation of one's apostolic life is one's image of God. One's image and experience of God are shaped by prayer, ministry, community, friendships, and one's self-concept. But of these, nothing is more important than prayer.
As individuals and as communities, we need to stand back from time to time and take a look at our commitment to prayer and the Eucharist -- at least if we intend to take renewal and attentiveness to spiritual life seriously.
Can I say that there is nothing more important in my life than prayer? As communities can we say that there is nothing more important to us than our common prayer? There may be other things of equal value, but nothing is of greater value than consciously attending to my friendship with God.
This is why I place emphasis on the annual retreat (The Book of the Constitutions of the Order n. 68). There is simply no substitute for it. This is why we place emphasis on a common celebration of the Eucharist. We do not expect a friendship with someone to grow if we do not take time to be with that person. The same is true of friendship with God. We would mistrust any friend who said, "I love you, but I don't have the need to spend any time with you." Growth in prayer requires times of heightened consciousness and attentiveness.
Attentiveness to personal prayer and common prayer require a disciplined life. One of the most difficult things in any commitment is perseverance in the ongoing daily self-giving to the tasks at hand. At this level the consolation, excitement, and romance are put to the test. Only a continual giving of ourselves to prayer will allow our relationship with God to bear fruit. So much spiritual life ceases because we stop nourishing it, somewhere after novitiate, or final profession, or the first years of ministry. Other things become more exciting. But we are the ones who suffer the consequences -- as well as those with whom we live, those to whom we minister, and the Church as a whole.
There are legitimate individual differences when it comes to discipline, prayer, Eucharist, and the spiritual life. All of us have our own rhythms of prayer and our own ways of praying. But such differences do not negate the necessity of discipline, prayer, and attentiveness to spiritual growth. Tennyson's King Arthur came to realize the power of prayer.
And slowly answer'd Arthur from the barge;
"The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
Comfort thyself; what comfort is in me?
I have lived my life, and that which I have done
May He within himself make pure! but thou,
If thou shouldst never see my face again,
Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer
this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy voice
Rise like a fountain for me night and day.
For what are men better than sheep or goats
That nourish a blind life within the brain,
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer
Both for themselves and those who call them friend?"
(from Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Passing of Arthur, Idylls of the King)
SILENCE
If we speak about practices which undergird prayer and contemplation, there is none more important than the practice of silence. Yet, if there is a practice which we have almost lost since Vatican II, it has been that of formal silence. Silence is conducive to the spiritual life and contemplative spirit of both the individual and the community.
Contemplation is silence in the presence of God, a consciousness of the divine presence in which my only desire is to be there in God's presence. Neither thoughts, words, or affections convey the reality of the presence. Only silence can express the longing for solidarity with God. To have practiced silence is to be better prepared for encounter with God.
This is not only true in our times of solitude and personal prayer, but also for a community and in common prayer. The times of silence in our common liturgical prayer are precious moments of grace integral to the prayer itself. It reminds us that prayer is not words but presence -- to each other and to God. We may well be most one with God when in silence with each other.
This emphasis on silence in no way diminishes the importance of direct communication with each other in our lives together. But there is a rhythm, a time for speech and a time for silence (Eccl. 3:7). Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it: "Let him who cannot be alone beware of community. Let him who is not in community beware of being alone" (from Life Together).
Community silence ought not be something a community experiences only during prayer. There ought to be times and places of silence within the community. The chapel is certainly a place for quiet, as is one's own room. But there should also be set times. These are not artificial or ascetic or romantic, but create a climate, a consciousness, a sense of ourselves as contemplative. This will be something difficult to re-integrate into our common life in a wholesome way, but we should give some thought to it -- silence after a certain hour in the evening, or in the morning until a certain hour, or at one meal a week.
There is a long, reliable, theological tradition behind the value of silence, going back as far as the origins of monasticism and to Jesus himself. It will benefit us not to lose it.
MARY AND DEVOTION
One of the modern dangers for religious, since the Reformation and the Enlightenment, and especially in the United States with our separation of church and state, has been the privatizing of religion and our faith. Society prefers to make religion a matter of opinion rather than a question of truth. Only recently are we beginning to rediscover and recognize the public character and social responsibility and political implications of our Catholic faith. We still search out how to express this wisely and courageously. This is one of the great moral challenges for us as Catholic citizens.
At the same time that we begin to assert the public, social, political, and economic implications of our faith as well as its corporate or communal character, we ought not dismiss the importance of the personal, individual, or devotional aspects as well. Corporate or public responsibility and personal or interior growth need not be exclusive of each other nor harmful to each other. The person with a public and socially conscious faith can also be a person of great personal devotion. Indeed, we all ought be both. It is not a question of a choice.
I call our attention to the life of personal devotion since it can be an embarrassment for us, something we don't let on as having or needing, something that we still keep private in an age of public witness, yet something that needs to be acknowledged and supported. I realize that this aspect of our Christian lives is quite personal, often intimate, and not something for publicity, any more than other personal aspects of our lives may be. Yet we ought not be ashamed to say we do have personal devotion in our lives as well as public expressions of our faith, both liturgical and political. We ought not be ashamed because personal devotion is again one of the major supports for the contemplative life, and we are contemplative people. Contemplatives in the world and in ministry and in the public forum, but contemplatives nevertheless.
We ought acknowledge the particular value of devotion to Mary -- not an exaggerated devotion, not a devotion unaware of the contemporary theology of Mary, not a devotion that is ecumenically offensive or a devotion that promotes a false image of woman for the modern world, but nevertheless prayer to Mary: a woman of courage, faith, fidelity, and true obedience, a woman full of grace. We do not want to lose our sense of the contemplative, our love of silence, and our capacity to turn to Mary in prayer. We can well bring to her our petition for the conversion of the United States to economic justice at the same time that we are working out the implications of our own option for solidarity with the poor. Mary's Magnificat expresses beautifully the prayer of the anawim.
THE WORD OF GOD, JUSTICE AND CONTEMPLATION
The heart of Dominican spirituality is the Word of God. It is in the reciprocity between proclaiming the Word and contemplating the Word that Dominican speech takes shape. Our contemplation is affected by our being proclaimers of the Word and our proclamation is affected by our being contemplatives before the Word.
And thus the Scriptures play a foundational role in our lives. The Scriptures are one of Dominic's loves. It would be difficult to know which to emphasize more as a preparation for contemplation, silence or the Scriptures. Both are necessary. We are called upon not only to study the Scriptures, exegete the Scriptures, reflect on the texts of Scripture, but also pray with the Scriptures. Study and prayer are not opposed in the rhythm of Dominican life. They mutually nourish each other, a time for study, a time for prayer. Praying with the Scriptures, studying the Scriptures, and opening the meaning of the Scriptures for others are all part of Dominican contemplation.
We are all preachers, in varied ways. But more important we are Preachers. This latter says something about us whether we are preachers with a small "p" or not. Our spirituality and identity are formed by the Word. We love the Word. We have given our lives to the Word. We are nourished by the Word. We share the Word. We live the Word.
There are many who are not Dominicans who are preachers. The bishops are preachers. But none of them are necessarily Preachers.
Preaching is the basis of our identity in the Dominican Family, preaching is our mission, and preaching is one of the major sources of our spiritual direction and prayer. Contemplation then does not take us away from the world, but draws us even more deeply into the heart of the world, into the anguish and despair and pain of the world as well as the hopes and joys of the world. This is true because our contemplation is so integrally related to our being Preachers and vice versa. It is the Word that achieves this integration. The Word makes us contemplative preachers and preaching contemplatives. The Word brings us to the foot of the cross which we both contemplate and proclaim.
The cross, which so concisely and symbolically speaks of the mission of Jesus, which is a summary of the whole history of human suffering and victimization, which is a sign of God's unqualified love for humankind, which draws us into the meaning of the resurrection, which remains always something of an enigma before us and challenges us like a parable, this selfsame cross shouts from within us the need to be proclaimed, as a sign of contradiction, as the sign of Jonah, as God's "No" to the history of injustice, as God's judgment on our evil, as the prophetic martyrdom of the Just One. The history of prophecy comes back to haunt us. The cross refuses to let us set it aside. We find ourselves both judged and loved. We humbly proclaim the Word that God called us to contemplate. The words of Micah wring forth, "What I ask of you now is simply this, to act justly, to love tenderly, and to walk humbly with your God" (Micah 6:8).
We work for justice. We return to prayer. We proclaim what we hear. We are never the same. We are contemplatives on a journey into the heart of our world strengthened by a God who is always One-Who-Is-With-Us.
Your brother,
Don
8, Preaching in Solidarity with the God of Jesus Christ
Excerpt from an address on the occasion of the Provincial Assembly, Province of St. Albert the Great, May 26, 1987.
I would like to begin with a sense of mission and our self-identity as Preachers -- men and women whose spirituality is formed by the mission of the Word, the Word as the self-communication of God, the Word as enfleshed in history, the Word as proclaimed by preachers, educators, and pastoral ministers. We begin as Preachers not only with the sense of a mission but also with an ecclesial sense and a social sense, and at the same time we perceive the brokenness of both the church and the world in which we presently find ourselves.
As Preachers we know that our mission is the proclamation of the gospel, the good news of the power and compassion of God, the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ whose death and resurrection give testimony to complex, victimizing, socio-economic, political, and religious forces within which God remains the final judge.
As Preachers, we proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ not only in a divided world, but in a divided church as well. Indeed, since the Second Vatican Council, and most probably for the next twenty years at least, two conflicting ecclesiologies compete, at times unhealthily, for our absolute allegiance. The eventual authoritative interpretation of Vatican II remains a task for history to determine. But among us our allegiances divide over a vision of church in which hierarchical language is primary and a vision of church for which our institutional structures are essential but secondary, a church more clerically focused for which a theology of ordained ministry becomes paramount and a church perceived as a people grounded in the birthright of their baptism, a church which teaches the world out of the legacy of an authoritative tradition and a church which is a co-learner with the world as well as with non-Christians and non-Catholics as together we read the signs of our history. Many see areas of complementarity between these two contrasting ecclesiologies. Others feel a moral imperative to take sides. The Spirit can indeed work both from above and from below, but each of us gets caught up in the Spirit in our own ways with our own fears, hopes, vulnerabilities, intellectual habits, temperaments, selfishness, and often one-dimensional perspectives.
Yet, in the midst of it all, we must begin by calling to mind who we are and why we have been called, that we are all on a mission in this world, all missionaries of the Word, Preachers of the gospel of God.
PREACHING TRUTH
And more than ever we must also call to mind that our deepest commitment as Preachers is to the truth. We can talk about truth in many ways, such as objective truth, personal truth, and symbolic truth. We can seek the truth, speak the truth, and do the truth. But what is most obvious is that we live in a world that has lost its love of truth. For it we conveniently substitute personal opinions, misinformation, national security needs, upward socio-economic mobility, and clichés, whether they be contemporary or traditional.
Dominic founded an order of men and women as dedicated to truth as it is to preaching. For his preaching mission to take hold and have importance at his period of history, learning was required, a learning that comes from the Scriptures, from the church, from experience, from prayer, from wisdom, and from an understanding of the times. Indeed Dominic and Francis understood their period of history, read the signs of their times, and saw the need for a new emphasis and movement in religious life. Dominic's grace-filled response to the cues of his world was a family of preachers wholeheartedly dedicated to truth. Thomas' love of truth led him to reading, understanding, and interpreting the secular philosophy of Aristotle and putting it at the service of the gospel. He neither accepted Aristotle uncritically nor rejected him out of hand. As Thomas was formed by Scripture, the fathers of the church, and conciliar teaching, so he could put Aristotle at the service of the tradition he loved and inherited. An act of courage and a miracle when one stops to think of it. Catherine's love of truth led her both to the contemplative experience of the divine mystery, and also to a course of action which had social and political implications as well. Again, when one thinks of this fourteenth-century woman, one cannot help but marvel at her courage in doing the truth. Orthopraxis as well as orthodoxy made her both saint and doctor.
Henri Lacordaire, to whom we owe so much in terms of the benefits we continue to reap from the French Dominicans in our own day, read the signs of the times of his century and pursued a path dedicated to truth, accepting post-revolution France and its liberal ideals, which did not make him popular in the church. But he was also critical of post-revolution France's enlightened intolerance of religion which did not make him popular in the newborn social order. His constant theme was always both présence au Dieu and présence au monde. His spirit inspired men like Lagrange, Lebret, Chenu, Congar -- whose love of truth put all of them on the frontiers of biblical, economic, historical, and ecumenical research. Our mission has always been a mission on the frontiers. Truth took our brother, Bartolomé de las Casas, to the frontiers of a new world in the sixteenth century where his love of justice manifested his radical understanding of the implications of a life turned over to truth.
It is our love of truth that sets us free, gives us courage, and points us in a direction from which we cannot turn. We are Preachers for whom Pilate's question, "What is truth?" is not just a job but a vocation.
IN SOLIDARITY WITH GOD
Our pursuit of truth is equalled by our pursuit of holiness. "Holiness language" and the striving after Christian perfection are no longer popular topics among us. Yet if we return to our roots in Jesus Christ, or to the origins of religious life, or to the life of our father Dominic, or to the inspiration that brought us to a novitiate that would socialize us into a new way of life, we cannot avoid asking the question: does the world perceive us today as holy? And even more so, what does holiness mean in our world today?
Jesus Christ's foundational religious experience was that of an intimacy and solidarity with God which led him to address God almost blasphemously as Abba. Antony's, Pachomius', or Benedict's search were simply expressions of their desire to know God. Likewise, to understand Dominic, one must understand his love of the God of Jesus Christ. And so it is for ourselves. Our love of God and thirst for holiness is not something that can take second place. We are here because we seek or at some time sought to know God and to know God more personally.
It would be worthwhile to contrast the heroic and inspirational figure that lies behind the great Greek epic, Ulysses, with the figure that is foundational and patriarchal for the Hebrew Bible, Abraham. [See John W. Padberg, S.J., "The Past as Prologue", in Religious Life at the Crossroads, ed. David Fleming, SM (New York: Paulist Press, 1985), 19.] The story of Ulysses is the drama of one who longs to return home. The story of Abraham and Sarah is of a couple who leave home and face the unknown. The kind of security that home implies will never be theirs. They live only by faith in themselves and a trust in God's promises. It is the figure of Abraham more than of Ulysses who typifies our own journey.
The question we face then is not whether to be holy, but how to be holy -- how to be holy in this latter part of the twentieth-century world. There is no one everlasting definition of what holiness requires.
For Dominic, holiness did not imply being another Benedict. And Dominic's brand of holiness was a scandal for many who had become accustomed to the traditional forms of religious life. Yet Dominic's love and experience of God as well as his capacity to read the signs of his period of history led to a new definition of holiness which affected the history of the world. The same was true of Jesus. The new movement for renewal which he inaugurated within Judaism was based on a new understanding of holiness that was distinctive from the quest for holiness as outlined by Sadducees, Pharisees, or Essenes. Jesus' definition of holiness was that of an inclusive compassion rooted in his own experience of the Father's unlimited love for all.
The form or shape that the striving afterholiness will take in our period of history will not be the same as that of first-century Christians or thirteenth-century Christians. Yet we are all defined by that desire to know God more intimately and proclaim God more adequately.
One thing is certain, however. Just as the search for truth cannot be separated from the search for God, no matter what our period of history, so our search for God cannot be separated from our thirst for justice on earth. Because we desire to be holy, we also desire to be just. As the psalmist says, "Holiness and justice support your throne, O God." Indeed, holiness is orthopraxis, not an orthodoxy by itself alone.
PREACHING TRUTH AND JUSTICE
The effort to articulate a renewed understanding of holiness and spirituality lies underneath Edward Schillebeeckx's hermeneutical project. [See in particular his Christ, (New York: Seabury Press, 1980 ),670-743, 762-82 1, and the collection entitled God Among Us, The Gospel Proclaimed, (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 33-44, 85-90, 103-15, 122-27, 164-74, 180-87, 232-48.] In Schillebeeckx's spirituality, one's experience of God for Christians leads them into a following after Jesus and "the praxis of the reign of God." Indeed, holiness is orthopraxis, not an orthodoxy by itself alone.
Orthopraxis implies an essential relationship between theory and practice. We cannot have one without the other. A major issue facing the church as we enter the twenty-first century is not the relationship between the past (Scripture and tradition) and the present, but is rather that of the relationship between theory and practice, doctrine and life. How the theory manifests itself in the praxis is a critical test of the theory. Jesus' refusal to sanction an orthodoxy separated from orthopraxis lay underneath his critique of sabbath observance, the Law, and the Temple. Jesus' practice of the reign of God, his praxis of God, the praxis to which God calls us cannot be contained by the Law. Hence the Law, while valid, is also relativized by God.
When it comes then to a question of what it means to follow after Jesus, we are confronted by two contrasting experiences, our experience of God and our experience of the history of human suffering, what Schillebeeckx calls the contrast experience. What are we to make of this contrast between the barbarous excess of human misery and a God who wills good? This painful but hope-filled experience of the contrast is the basis of the prophetic awareness that injustice does not have the right to exist.
Christianity does not attempt to explain this history of suffering. Rather followers of Jesus tell a story, the story of the life, suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Given the awareness of the history of human suffering, those who follow after Jesus necessarily involve themselves in that story and in the struggle for justice on earth. Thus Christian love and holiness are necessarily but not exclusively political. "Political love," to use Schillebeeckx's expression, is an urgent form of contemporary holiness.
In Christian holiness there is both a political or social dimension and a mystical or contemplative dimension. Neither the mystical life nor the political life can be discounted. Both Christian mysticism and Christian politics have the same source: the experience of contrast between a God who loves all humanity and the history of human suffering. For the follower of Jesus, the spiritual life cannot be reduced to "personal holiness" alone, nor can social and political life be reduced to their social and political components alone. For Schillebeeckx, "mysticism" is an intense form of the experience of God. "Politics" is an intense form of social engagement, not restricted to professional politicians. Politics without prayer or mysticism becomes barbaric; mysticism without political love becomes sentimental interiority. A Christian involvement in the world is a religious praxis, rooted in a particular interpretation of the world, drawing upon the experience of the holy.
Moses, a political leader who brought his people liberation, was a mystic "who spoke to God face to face." For Jesus, the mystical experience of God as Abba was the heart and soul of his mission on behalf of the poor. True mysticism has its own intrinsic value, and not just in reference to its social or political consequences, although true mysticism always does have such consequences. "Bourgeois" religion attempts to separate religion and politics, salvation and liberation, whereas authentic Christian salvation implies both.
Christian life and spirituality are intimately tied up with one's concept of salvation, and the meaning of salvation has been one of Schillebeeckx's enduring concerns. "Salvation means being whole" [Christ, 717] and salvation becomes less than whole if one emphasizes only one dimension of the human -- whether this be the socio-political, the personal, or the eschatological. Social liberation is an integral ingredient of the eschatological salvation offered by God. "Personal salvation" is only partial. And likewise for socio-political liberation. If it claims to be total it becomes a new form of servitude, totalitarianism. Human liberation and Christian redemption are not alternatives but are both constitutive elements of Christian hope.
Schillebeeckx has acknowledged his indebtedness to modern Dominicans, particularly Marie-Dominic Chenu, who probably more than anyone else was Schillebeeckx's inspiration. Chenu guided Schillebeeckx's early doctoral dissertation on the sacraments, and it was Chenu who gave substance to the phrase, "signs of the times," in modern Catholic theology.["Les signes des temps," La Nouvelle Revue Théologique (Jan., 1965), 29-39.] If one wanted to trace the development of modern Catholic thought and spirituality from Chenu through the present writings of Schillebeeckx, one might entitle it, "From the 'Signs of the Times' to 'Political Holiness."'
Underlying this development, and a key to understanding Schillebeeckx, is the foundational idea of présence au monde. The term originated with Lacordaire, was developed by Chenu, had its influence at the Second Vatican Council, and has been consciously acknowledged by Schillebeeckx as influential on his own hermeneutical project. Présence au monde is the grace of understanding deeply one's own time and the capacity to respond accordingly.
The two-fold présence au Dieu and présence au monde,