..
 |
“Silver Jubilee Mass for Fr. Gregory and Fr. Peter Dear Friends in Christ, families and friends of Frs. Gregory and Peter: No better Sunday can be chosen for a priest jubilee mass than the Sunday of the Good Shepherd. The liturgy of today guarantees that our celebration does not deviate either into the vanities of human accomplishments or the secular topics of some professional career in which long-lasting and successful service is routinely recognized. Instead we celebrate the Risen Lord as the one and only Good shepherd, the one and only High priest who continues to exercise his ministry of teaching, leading and sanctifying through human lives he chooses to expropriate and appropriate for such a purpose. We celebrate the ongoing presence of Jesus in the world in many ways and forms as he selects, promotes, brings to fruition priestly vocations and uses his ordained priests to sound his voice, express his thoughts, represent his sanctifying and vivifying presence in various times and places for his Church. At a 25th priestly jubilee the emphasis is not just on the grace of God, source of all ministerial priesthood, but on a special grace that keeps the world going not only in family life, but also in the inner dynamics of the church: I speak of the gift of perseverance, the gift of following the Lamb wherever he leads, the gift of following the original call not only to the altar on the day of ordination, but also the gift of growth in that grace, in which one discovers true meaning in sacrifice, pain, and even conflict and the experience of inadequacy. The most fundamental experience of a priestly existence is the least known. If not before at least on the day of his ordination, a priest must realize that his life and performance are being held up to unrealistic standards, he must identify with objectives and goals clearly beyond the scope of his talents and possibilities. Why? On the first day he pronounces the words of the consecration, he must know that in his life he has no more important task than to let God’s creative word, his holy will, his power and grace prevail over and beyond his own human wisdom, clever perception, professional know-how or psychological insights. Nothing that is essential in a priest’s ministry can be achieved by mere human resources: only in virtue of divine grace and presence do your words make proper sense to those who believe, only by God’s salvific will do the sacraments effect what they signify, only God’s ongoing call can guarantee the possibility of continuing to persevere in a ministry which ultimately God alone can validate at the time and in the way he wants to: “Without me you cannot do anything.” Vocations grow out of a mysterious soil of a young man’s primary experiences. Nobody, parent or friend, teacher or spiritual director – none of these knows where a vocation comes from how it grows and blossoms. The Spirit blows where it wills, you do not see its origin, and you do not perceive its direction. It may take you several years until a point of clarity is reached so that the vocation becomes something you can address, a topic that can be discerned and accepted. Many people have a hidden role in this development of a vocation – parents, teachers and friends – but as a rule no one knows to what extent he or she has really helped and promoted that vocation. About this often extraordinary and mysterious and certainly always sacred and holy development of a vocation no one can claim credit, no one is entitled to a leading role. And yet all who have been involved must be grateful for the fact that God has involved them in one way or another. Yet usually a priestly vocation owes much to the parents’ response -- a mother’s perception and generous response and a father’s stable and persevering fidelity for the cause of the family and of the children. We are particularly happy that today we are able to celebrate, in a true and deep sense, also the parents of both Fr. Gregory and Fr. Peter. They have probably been the first to sense or perceive God’s call in their sons to the priesthood, and their generosity was probably the most important adult response to that call. As important and moving as the remembrance of a vocation’s beginnings is, what we celebrate today is perseverance. In retrospect 25 years may or may not appear very long. In older times, however, when the average age was around 50 years, one regarded 25 years as the span of one generation, a unit of history in which the new becomes old, people grow up and age, events obtain their perspective, become important or get forgotten. The last 25 years of the abbey’s life into which these two priests have invested themselves – their time, their talent, their energy – were especially important. Since the ordination of Fr. Gregory and Fr. Peter generations of students – altogether some 700 young men have gone through our school and carried with themselves the impact of these two priests’ lives, words and work, thought and influence. Our Abbey began to attract and gather around its ministry an increasing number of Catholics, young and old, our daily and weekly ministry has become a steady influence in the metroplex, and these two priests’ life and ministry has become a most important bridge leading from the initial founding years of the monastery into a presence that is well-known as an important part of the church’s life in Dallas. But all that I have spoken about is mostly superficial, only appearance, facts that are quantifiable data, pastoral and educational achievement, struggling with the challenge of survival, a matter of facing the power of time, something that is ultimately temporal, perishable, due to become history, and vanish into dust. What we celebrate is cumulative and thus lasting. “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not ever pass away.” Or, “my words are spirit and life” – Christ’s life, which a priest’s self-giving is called to extend, expand and transmit, is of a permanent and spiritual nature. 25 years invested in the Lord’s ongoing sacramental presence in the world must be valued for its inner and lasting substance. Speaking the gospel, administering the sacraments, pronouncing the words of reconciliation, making the body and blood of Christ become true food and drink – all these actions nourish the life of God in our midst, increase faith, make hope remain, proclaim the risen life of Jesus in our midst to overcome sin, despair, hatred and alienation. According to our faith perseverance in grace is a free gift of God, something to be grateful for not something to brag about. But the perseverance of a religious priest has some special aspect that needs to be mentioned. The mystery of the Eucharist is itself completely focused on permanence and perseverance. It is the Eucharist – the Eucharistic sacrifice and the Eucharistic presence – that expresses best God’s permanent love, his own perseverance in loving us, his salvific will overcoming the obstacles of our sins, his faithfulness not just unto death but beyond death. As God said through the words of the prophet Jeremiah, “I have loved you with an everlasting love and kept on turning to you with acts of mercy.” What has happened once at the last Supper and on Calvary has become permanently accessible, omnipresent in human history, part of the pilgrimage of the Church. The Eucharist transmitting the body and blood of Christ comes about through the ministry of the priests and so the priesthood is constituted exactly for the purpose of mirroring, signifying, expressing God’s faithful perseverance in offering a path to salvation for the human being. There is hardly anything more important in the priestly lifestyle, priestly existence or the priestly way of life than perseverance in order to express and signify God’s fidelity to his salvation plan, God’s commitment to his intention to offer a way to salvation in all human contexts, in all phases of human history in all the various human situations. So maybe after all that number on the program for this celebration, these 25 years, the fact that the priests whom we celebrate have persevered for the whole quarter of a century does have today a special significance. Not as an achievement, or even less as an entitlement, but as a sign or a gift of God’s own abiding love, something that is capable of overcoming the fickleness of the human being, the instability of our hearts. In hard times like our own, an era of wild, uncontrolled and unpredictable changes, we need to celebrate with special thankfulness this sign of God’s faithfulness in his priests. We need to appreciate priesthood in a monastic setting, the many signs of perseverance expressed in these huge blocks of stones, each one of them singing in its own individual way the line from the book of Psalms: his love is everlasting and so, we might hope and anticipate, will our life , our ministry, our hymn of praise also be: “I want to praise the mercy of the Lord, for he has done wondrous deeds” so that the praise on my lips may also be endless. Amen
|
