EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is taken from a series of Lenten homilies given by Bishop Edward K. Braxton to seminarians at St. Joseph Seminary in the Archdiocese of New York in 1987. They were later compiled into a book entitled “Saint Augustine of Hippo: A Man for All Seminarians.” Although prepared for men studying for the priesthood in mind they offer to all of us points to consider in our own vocations.
Scripture Readings: 2 Kgs. 5:1-15
Lk 4:24-30
“No prophet gains acceptance in his native place.”
The young man is trembling with fear. He has come to see you, his parish priest, directly from the doctor’s office. He is desperate. The doctor has told him he has Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. He wants your help. Can you help him? You sigh deeply. You ask him to pray with you. You celebrate the sacrament of Reconciliation. You bless a basin of water. You look him in the eyes and tell him to go home, tell no one of his illness and drink a cup of this consecrated water every morning for seven days; on the seventh day, he will be healed. The man, tortured to his soul, looks at you in utter amazement and disbelief. As he hastens to the door, leaving the basin behind, he mumbles that he has plenty of water at home and drinking it will not combat his fatal illness.
I suspect that it is a rare priest indeed who would put his faith to the test this way. And it would be an even rarer parishioner who would see any merit in obeying the simple instructions given by the priest in this story.
Yet, Naaman’s leprosy was the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome of its day, and Elisha was God’s servant. His instructions surely seemed as unbelievable as those that I have just suggested.
This is why we can all understand why Naaman’s faith was hesitant. The command to wash seven times in the Jordan River simply did not make much sense to him. There were plenty of rivers in Syria and no doubt he had bathed his leprous body in them often. Elsiha’s request seemed unreasonable. It was unbelievable that the mere act of a ritual purification could cure his deadly disease.
While most of you may not try your hands at faith healing, you may find that your ministry of teaching the Christian faith in the contemporary world will be met with suspicion, skepticism, and unbelief. In our materialistic, technological and scientific culture, the Jewish and Christian faith traditions are seen by many as simply two more products out there in the market place, competing with all the others. For many, especially among the well educated, traditional religious faith is out of the question. Indeed, Bernard Cardinal Law, the Archbishop of Boston, the American member of the Holy Father’s commission to prepare the international catechism, has noted that one of the main concerns of the commission is to develop a document that is written with a keen appreciation of the wide-spread reality of unbelief. The bishops have found that religious belief is very difficult in our day for many people, whether they are first, second, third world inhabitants.
This is the case, at a time when expressions of secular faith seem to abound. Every day, even the most agnostic people live their lives in an environment that presumes a certain faith in humanity, faith in science, faith in technology, faith in progress, faith in capitalism, faith in America, even a vague faith in the generalized mythology of television commercials. The reason many people were so shocked by the Shuttle disaster, so amazed by the Iran Arms Affair, and so annoyed by the Wall Street financial scandal is that these events go against their basic unquestioned faith in the political, commercial and scientific systems that surround them.
In the Mediterranean world of the 4th century in which Augustine lived out his own faith, the questions of belief and unbelief were often formulated in terms of the relationship between faith and reason. As Pope John Paul II explains in his Apostolic Letter on Augustine, this is perennial and vexing problem. “One must pass safely between two extremes, between the fideism that despises reason and the rationalism that excludes faith. Augustine’s intellectual and pastoral endeavor aimed to show, beyond any shadow of doubt, that “since we are impelled by a twin pull of gravity to learn, “both forces, reason and faith must work together.” (cf. Pope John Paul II, Apostolic Letter on Augustine of Hippo, Origins, p. 285)
Augustine was always attentive to the Christian faith, but he also placed a great importance on reason. Each had its own particular primacy. He felt that it was necessary to believe in order to understand. But it was necessary to believe in order to understand. But it was necessary to understand in order to believe. When he wrote of his love of the Church, he gave some of the reasons for his faith. “The consensus of peoples and races keeps me in the Church, as does the authority based on miracles, nourished by hope, increased by charity, strengthened by its ancient character; likewise the succession of the priests, from the very see of the apostle Peter, to whom the Lord entrusted the care of his sheep after the resurrection, down to the episcopate of today; finally the very name of the Catholic Church keeps me in her, because it is not without reason that this Church alone has obtained such a name amid so many heresies.” (cf. Pope John Paul II, Apostolic Letter on Augustine of Hippo, Origins, p. 285)
It is important to note that when Augustine gives the reasons for his Christian faith they are always dynamic, organic and, in a sense, personal. No one of them, nor all of them together are sufficient to convince another person to become a Catholic, in the manner of a rational and purely logical argument. For most people reasons alone are not definitively persuasive in matters of religion. Faith is not the result of a steel-trap exercise in logic. If it were, there would be no need for faith. Indeed, those who actually met Augustine and experienced his living faith might well have been more inspired to join the Church than those who simply examined his argument, rigorous as they are, apart from the person.
This is because of the complex and interdependent relationship between faith and reason. Christians do not come to believe in the Church because rational arguments and evidence are so conclusive that they could not do otherwise and remain persons of reason. Theologically speaking, faith is certain because of the authority of God revealing. But from the point of view of unaided reason, faith involves the risk that one’s beliefs might be incorrect.
This is not unlike the experience of intimate friendship and love. When two people become very close friends, or when a man and a woman decide to marry, their relationship is not the automatic result of a logical process. Indeed many people outside of the relationship might not be able to see what two people find to be so appealing in each other. Potential friends do not compile a list of the ten irrefutable reasons for loving someone and only then decide to love them, based upon the certitude of reason.
What seems to happen is that little by little we grow in a profound relationship. Perhaps without even realizing it we gradually realize that we love and are loved in return. Sometimes the graphic image “fall in love” is used to describe this process. Now, when we actually love someone, we can reflect upon the relationship and see that it is reasonable that we should have grown to care for this person. But the reasons do not produce the reality of love. Indeed we may also be able to think of “objective” reasons why we should not have grown so fond of them. The reasons of faith, like the reasons of love are, at least in part, the reasons of the heart.
This means that you as future priests will be called upon to be like St. Augustine and witness to your faith with your minds and your hearts. Glean all you can from the treasury of the Catholic intellectual tradition. Study well the thoughts of Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr, Augustine, Ambrose, Anslem, Gregory the Great, Aquinas, and Francis de Sales; the teachings of Trent, Vatican I and Vatican II, Leo XIII, Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI, and John Paul II. Study the writings of Cardinal Newman, Cardinal Danielou, Cardinal de Lubac, Gerard Manley Hopkins, G. K. Chesterton, Etienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, Dorothy Day, Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Thomas Merton, John Courtney Murray, Bernard Lonegran, Karl Rahner, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy. The recovery of a distinctively Catholic intellectual tradition in America could make a distinctive contribution to the combating of what University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom has called the impoverishment of the souls of American students, in his recent book, The Closing of the American Mind.
However, for many of your future parishioners, the reasons of the heart may have a special importance. They may be more interested in how prayer has been important in your life than in theories about the effectiveness of prayer. The importance of the sacrament of Reconciliation for you personally may matter far more to them than any theories that you can recall about the metaphysical nature of sin or the ontological implications of the redemption. As Catholics we have no reason to be uncomfortable with personal testimony. This is not somehow the exclusive prerogative of the Protestant traditions. But if the priest is to be effective in giving personal testimony that is truly his own, yet authentically Catholic, he must know himself and the Catholic tradition. And he must know both well.
To speak from the heart about your relationship with Christ and the power of the Spirit in your life is not always easy. You must not only know what you know about faith and know what you think about faith, you must also know what you feel about faith. Few people can express such feelings without a certain degree of personal vulnerability.
You are bound to startle some of your people. The reasons of the heart are profoundly disclosive. They are not constituted by coherent, abstract, logical schemata that allow one the security of distance and non-involvement. Faith is not the place for the spectator, it is the domain of the participant. The reasons of the heart flow from the stuff of our interiority. They are the result of a dynamic orthodoxy that is sustained by a genuine orthopraxis.
You may never be an Elisha who is called to cure Naaman’s leprosy. But you will be called every day to do wondrous deeds. You will call your people together to hear God’s Holy Word. You will offer gifts with and for them at the altar. You will bless the cup of salvation and break the bread of life. You and your people with you must use light-filled eyes of faith and reason if you are to behold wine that bleeds and bread that breathes.
No priest can shrink from this prophetic responsibility. Like Jesus you may find that some of the people from the old neighborhoods of your life will find you unacceptable. They may be filled with indignation, rise up to expel you from the town. For no prophet gains acceptance in his native place.
You will be called upon to proclaim God’s word in season and out of season. You may have your dry seasons when you will pray with Augustine “Lord I do believe. Help thou my unbelief.” But always remember that if the Catholic Church is to reach the people of our day, the Church must proclaim Elisha’s faith while understanding Naaman’s doubts. If I may paraphrase Cardinal Newman, it will not satisfy to have two independent systems, one for the life of the mind and the other for the life of the spirit. The priest in the year 2000 must be profoundly religious. But this same devout priest must be the friend of intelligence.
To apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint.
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love.
Ardour and selflessness and self surrender.
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unsee, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is
Incarnation.
T. S. Eliot
Four Quarters
18 November 2001
