Father Gerald Brown, SS

April 24, 2006

I can think of no better timing for the theme of this convention: That You May Be One, the Community of Priests. Just a few days ago, at Chrism Masses and during the Holy Triduum, we priests celebrated with the People of God the awesome mystery that in and through Christ all are called to be one and that priests need to witness by their lives and ministry what it means to be one. These celebrations, in God’s grace, coincided with a growing recognition among priests in the United States that, more urgently than ever, we need to build accessible bridges among us and to foster greater friendship, harmony, and collaboration if we are to fulfill our identity as agents of Communion. Yes, the time is right for pondering the theme of this convention.

I say this for yet another reason. This particular moment in the history of NFPC makes our theme both timely and highly appropriate. Soon, Father Bob Silva, the current President of the NFPC, will be transitioning into yet another ministry of servant-leadership. We all know Bob as a unifier after the mind and heart of Jesus. No one could have done a better job these past years of supporting priests, of explaining to the wider world the challenges of priestly ministry today, and of speaking as a representative of this organization that has made such outstanding contributions to the Church in the United States and beyond. Bob knows from the inside-out and outside-in the challenges of diversity on every level, both personal and institutional, local and global, ecclesial and societal, and has worked hard to create a sense of priestly community, never forgetting what we share in common with all human beings, with all Christians, and with all fellow ministers for the sake of God’s Kingdom in our midst. Bob, congratulations for your years of service and congratulations to all of you gathered here for outstanding leadership at a time of such great need. And thanks for reading so well the signs of the times!

Now I come to the topic of my talk: “Priests for Today and Tomorrow: a Spirituality of Living and Building Community.” First, what do we mean by “community” among priests and by “living and building” community? Secondly, what is meant by “spirituality” and the phrase, “spirituality of”? Thirdly and lastly, I will present what I mean by “priests for today and tomorrow.” At least now you know that there will be an end to what I have to say.


Living and Building Community

On the level of charism, the Religious among us can speak eloquently about the joys and perils of community, the challenge of living and building authentic community, the sacrifice required of each member if the community is to mirror to the rest of our Church the depth of our calling as agents of communion in imitation of Jesus and His Father.

Interestingly, in different ways, diocesan priests are talking more and more consciously about their own particular charism in the Church which also embodies, by definition, a sense of common mission, shared identity and ministry in the Church, an apostolic spirit, and a commitment to each other that transcends personality, cultural, ideological and ministerial differences. For all of us, diocesan and religious, the term “community” implies that we commit ourselves, on the level of mission and calling, to building each other up in the spirit of Jesus Christ, supporting each other in our various tasks, learning from each other, putting each other first, not primarily for my sake or your sake, but for all of our brothers and sisters for whom we have been ordained, especially in particular churches where we form together single Presbyterates. On this level, we are all one as brother priests though we have our own unique characteristics.

Now, what does it mean for us to live this community? First, negatively speaking, we seek conversion from any tendency, whether personal or communal, towards exclusivity, divisiveness, egoism, and narcissism. More positively, at our best, we trust each other with respect, even reverence. We deal with each other justly. We demonstrate a genuine interest in learning from each other and sharing our own experience, journeys, and hopes. We maintain intimate and healthy friendships with brother priests, without neglecting members of family and other men and women who can help to keep us honest and faithful to our promises, including friends of other denominations and faiths and diverse racial and ethnic groups. These are all ways of living community together. Even more, we pray for each other, support each other, build each other up. Then, beyond personal commitments to live community, regularly as Presbyterates we assess the current status of community among us with a view to improving our lives together.

What does it mean to build community? Building community means taking personal and communal action in creative ways to forge relationships among us and to make them happen, to build bridges across the chasms of experience and ideologies that can so easily divide us. Building community means setting aside time to develop strategies as a total Presbyterate on how best to put together structures of dialogue, mutual understanding, and collaborative planning that would provide a voice for each priest and that would empower all of us to use our gifts for the sake of the whole. Building community as a Presbyterate means assessing together the needs of our local church and of wider society as well as realistic solutions that are possible only when we pull together in unison. This does not mean that there will be no differences of opinion. Strange as it may seem, some priests will be more argumentative and stubborn than others. Others will be too timid and shy. Nevertheless, we are obligated for the sake of the mission of Jesus and His Kingdom to live and work together in harmony, though we may never be in total agreement with each other.

To make all this happen, local churches need to have structures and personnel in place for facilitating the work of living and building community. All this means:

• planned times to gather regularly as a total Presbyterate;
• the development of a unified vision and a strategic plan for the future of the local church and its leadership and for the good of the whole Church and society;
• common understandings of viable models of priesthood for our particular local churches;
• strong relationships on the part of the priests with the Local Ordinary;
• the fostering of spiritual direction, support groups, and time apart for relaxation and prayer and for the cultivation of healthy relationships;
• the development of well-prepared mentors for the recently ordained, for first-time pastors, and for new arrivals from other countries to the United States;
• putting in place well conceived and well planned programs of continuing formation with:
  • special emphasis on spiritual renewal and the cultivation of contemplation in the midst of extremely busy and complex lives;
  • periodic opportunities for “time-away” for Sabbath and renewal;
  • opportunities for priests and other ministers to learn together best practices of collaborative leadership; 
  • and structured opportunities to learn about one’s own culture and the cultures of others and the implications for effective cooperation.
    

Spirituality For/Of

Now, what kind of spirituality do we need to pull all this off? I often tell folks that we priests share 95% of our spirituality in common with others. First, we are all part of the universe, an act of God’s creation begun over fifteen billion years ago with the “Big Bang” in which was planted by God a predisposition for life and communion. We are also all part of the human race which has struggled with spiritual identity for at least 120,000 years. In fact, we have come to realize that our brains are wired with a hunger for transcendent experience and that, through the centuries, liminal figures have emerged in each society to mirror back to others how best to discover and fulfill their destiny. Jesus Christ is the culmination of this spiritual quest that is planted in the human heart, and, in God’s grace, we priests are in a long line of liminal figures called to help others discover the reason for living.

At the same time, despite all that we share in common with all human persons and in a special way with our brother and sister Christians and Catholics, we priests are called to live elements of spirituality that are unique. Each state of life in the Church represents a distinct role in the Church with distinct charisms and responsibilities. We priests are ordained to proclaim God’s Word, to gather people around the Sacred Table inviting them into the fullness of a rich sacramental life, and to provide a type of leadership that catalyzes full collaboration for promoting and building the Kingdom of God in our midst. But we are more than what we do. As ordained priests, we are called to be sacraments of Jesus Christ at the very core of our being. In Christ, we are called to be living signs of mercy, forgiveness, reconciliation, and communion.

We do all this in union with our bishops in whose priesthood we share and with our brother priests with whom we are intimately connected as members of a distinct Presbyterate. And we do all this with a new depth of understanding made possible by Vatican II and subsequent Church teaching over the past forty years.  For example, through the documents of Vatican II, we have come to a deeper understanding of the mystery of Trinity calling forth Consecration, Communion, and Mission, the divine summons to participate actively in the ongoing work of creation, redemption, and sanctification, and the necessity of integrating essential being and purposeful acting. We have also adopted more healthy approaches to evangelization and enculturation. Above all else, we are relational—even when performing essential functions. Recently, through documents like Ecclesia in America, Nuevo Millennio Ineunte and the recent Deus Caritas Est, our eyes have been more widely opened to the universal call for holiness, the sacredness and dignity of every culture, and the love of God that touches all of creation and all peoples in all of their diversity. Through the new document of our own Bishops Conference, “Co-Workers in the Vineyard of the Lord,” we have come to an enlightened recognition and deep appreciation of new official lay ecclesial ministries in the Church.

Now, getting to the “heart” of my talk, I want to distinguish between spirituality for living and building community from a spirituality of living and building community. It occurs to me that the distinction between “being” and “doing” is still relevant. On the one hand, what we do flows from who we are. On the other hand, we become what we most effectively do. We all know that personal holiness leads to a holy way of behaving, but we also know that holy behavior helps to reinforce and even to create new inner holiness.

There is no doubt that being personally and internally prepared for living and building community is crucial if we are ever to live what we are called to be and to do as brother priests in union with our bishops and the entire people of God, in a special way those men and women with whom we share leadership daily on the local level. This means having in place those attitudes, understandings, life-styles, choices, decisions, and practices that are necessary if indeed we are to live authentically and build responsibly the community to which we have been called as priests For example, we all recognize the importance of a spirit of hospitality, of collegiality, of humility and concern for the other, of lifting up the other in prayer, of an internalized vision of Jesus.

But we must go even deeper. We need to probe and develop for ourselves a spirituality “of” living and building community. A colleague of mine recently shared a powerful image that helps to capture what I want to get across: “You build the road as you go.” We become holy by doing, by stretching ourselves, by risking new ventures of personal involvement, rejection, and failure, by making leaps of faith, by making new alliances, by engaging fully in lives of action. This means taking prophetic stances, stimulating planning, working hard, engaging in personal and communal prayer, and not giving up, what I and others call living key “P’s” of action: participation, partnership, mutual planning, and prayer. I would add a few other “P’s”, such as a call for passion, a spirit of penance, a courageous profession of faith, and trust in divine providence. Some other colleagues of mine reminded me of yet another “P”––perspiration. Living and building community is 10% inspiration, what we bring to our ministry, our own preparation in the power of the Holy Spirit, and 90% perspiration, the other “P,” or blood, sweat, and tears.

By all this, I am not reverting back to a frequent expression used in years past, “my work is my prayer,” a statement explaining why often time was not set aside for prayer on the mountain, in the garden, before the Blessed Sacrament, or in a comfortable prayer-corner. I don’t need to set aside time; my work is my prayer! These days, we know without much doubt both that our work needs to be fed by prayer and lead to prayer and often reveals the presence of a prayerful spirit, but what I want to say is that prayer-inspired doing that is focused, faithful, and central to what God is calling us to do leads us to holiness. Jesus both prayed and died on the Cross.

The main point I want to make is this. Most often we realize our destiny and become holy by taking up our mat and walking, frequently without knowing exactly where we are going, by taking risks, by trusting the invitation of others without knowing fully why. And we need to avoid doing this alone. As the Basic Plan [for the Ongoing Formation of Priests] states forcefully, we need to take such initiatives not simply one by one by one by one, but mainly by working together that we all may be one.  Moreover, individually and as a total group, we need to be bold and trusting. Bishops need to invest fully in the program for the ongoing formation of their priests. We priests need to invest ourselves in helping to build and support what Father [Ron] Knott calls “Intentional Presbyterates.” In all this, if we are to be successful, we need to cross-generational, cultural, and, most difficult of all for many, ideological boundaries.

Part of building the road as we go and taking up the mat, in my judgment, requires that we priests come together much more often as Presbyterates if we are ever truly to live and build the community which is so much needed today. Isolationism and delegating the project to a few already over-burdened brother priests can no longer work. We need time together. In no way, do I mean any kind of unhealthy clericalism that divides or implies superiority. Moreover, how presbyteral gatherings are arranged will differ from diocese to diocese, depending on geography, demographics, finances, and other weighty factors. That they occur, however, is necessary “for our good and that of God’s holy Church.”

Much of what I am saying will seem overwhelming even to those of us gathered here, let alone to the thousands of others working in the trenches. “Jerry Brown, you are asking us to do even more than we are already doing.” I say to this: “not really.” If we are to create new opportunities to come together as priests, we definitely need to address the #1 struggle for priests today: overwork. This means finding ways together of cutting back on overly busy schedules. We need to look carefully at how we spend our time, how we might delegate what can and should be done by others, and what can be eliminated as activities not essential to the mission. My friend [Father]Gene Konkel keeps reminding us in the west to keep the main thing the main thing, a mantra worth repeating often.

We need to listen to communications experts who would tell us that we are not the only ones in our society who fail to communicate well, to plan together, and to come up with solutions that all can support. In their view, we all need, these days, to engage in what they call “stopping behavior,” sadly a lost art that needs to be recovered. That is, in our case as priests, we need to get stopped together at the same time in the same place to talk about the same things in the same way. We need common understandings of what we want and actually need to be and to do as a community of priests and then find ways of accomplishing these wants and needs. We see an outstanding example of this in Acts 6: 1-7. The Apostles, after listening to the legitimate complaints of Greek-speaking widows, came together with other leaders in the community and found whole new ways of ministering to the needs of these women and others in similar circumstances while, at the same time, doing what they felt most called to do, i.e., prayer and preaching the Word of God. All of this required personal and communal discernment and planning that was truly “intentional” and productive of needed change. We need to do the same, always remembering that we do not build the road alone. We are more than co-inhabitants of a Local Church, more than fellow tenants of church rectories. We are brothers called to unity as a family for the sake of God’s wider family. This takes vision, desire, courage, a heart that loves, a soul on fire, a sprit convinced, a spirituality that puts first things first, above all else lives centered on Jesus.

It is important, in all this, to emphasize that everything I am talking about must be done in union with our bishops and with a strong commitment to the leadership of the universal church. Moreover, we need to know that we do not stand alone in other profound ways. Indeed, we are blessed to be represented by several national organizations that focus on our well-being as priests. I think of groups like the NFPC, NOCERCC, NACPA, CMSM, NALM, and the many relevant offices of the USCCB and the Vatican. On yet another level, we are blessed to work together with dedicated and competent fellow-ministers who are called to assist us and to help us be effective in all we do just as they have a right to expect the same from us. In dealing with all these levels, national, local, and of course international, we need to be supportive and collaborative, frank and honest when we see need for improvement, and willing to contribute our own ideas and energies to make things better. Criticism without personal investment is destructive. Challenge with open hands leads to positive change and to the holiness of all of us as we come to recognize the gifts that God has given to each of us.

A few other qualities and stances that need to mark each and all of us are:

• the willingness and capacity to forgive. I admire tremendously the apostolic vision of John Paul II that led him to acknowledge, in many venues, the sins of the Catholic Church over the centuries and to seek forgiveness. He sought forgiveness from women, scientists, religious and world leaders while, at the same time offering forgiveness to those who put Catholics to death for their faith. If John Paul could do all this with and for the unexpected, in light of our past experience, we can do the same with and for our bishops and our brother priests.
• the need for fostering within us and among us the virtue of self-sacrifice, always giving others the benefit of the doubt and being willing to cross barriers to make human contact even with those whom we do not know well or whom we know just well enough to avoid.
• a good sense of humor. Can we laugh at ourselves and chuckle at the foibles of each other, not in a malicious way, but in a way that affirms our common efforts to live authentically and well the life of Christ?
• in a special way, a willingness and a commitment to stand at the foot of the Cross in union with the mother of Jesus and the Beloved Disciple, with each other and those we are called to serve, especially those who most keenly walk the way of the Cross with Jesus who gave up his life for all men and women of all times and all places. In a profound way, we priests are daily at the foot of the Cross, even if we fail to realize or acknowledge it. If this is true, then we need to look around and see all the others among us who stand there with us.

Priests for Today and Tomorrow

We are “Priests for Today and Tomorrow.” These days, we have a much-improved understanding of the theology and identity of the priest. Much of this can be attributed to the hard work and leadership of the NFPC. In my judgment, our sense of identity and mission and identity as priests of today will deepen to the degree that we actually work at the living and the building of this mysterious reality. As a result, in a wonderful way, for as long as we live, we priests of today will also be priests of tomorrow, continuing to listen, always open and willing to discern, decide, act, and stay with it. Even more wondrously, we will create a climate where future priests, God-willing, will walk in our footsteps fostering and deepening a spirituality of living and building community. I will end with a quote from St. Francis of Assisi, the Patron of my home diocese in California: “Brothers, while we have time, let us do good.”