2023
The Two Keys:
Vulnerability
and
Love
Introduction
I begin by saying thank you. Thank you for inviting me, but even more, thank you for the work you do every day, going, as Holy Father Francis would describe it, to the margins...to the land of the forgotten...the nursing home, the sick room or the intensive care unit.
You go there because you have read the answers to the final exam in the Gospels and you have had the good sense to seek out the face of the Lord not just in tabernacles or beautiful Churches, though he is assuredly there, but in the imprisoned, the sick and the dying, where you gaze on his face, take his hand and let him heal you.
So what do I have to offer you, good Catholic Chaplains who care for the sick from morning till night, and sometimes in the middle of the night? What do I have to say?
Just a little but about the two keys to ministering to others, set within the framework of your good work.
And the two keys are vulnerability and love.
Vulnerability
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Is there anything more vulnerable than a baby?
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Or a baby in a manger? He can’t feed himself, like the little lambs who eat the straw. He can’t run away, like sheep dogs barking in the night. He can’t even make himself heard, like the bellowing calf. He is dumb as an ox an weak as a baby rabbit. He can do nothing but be.
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But was there ever a more beautiful being, a more wondrous birth, a more glorious incarnation than Christ, the incarnate, the only-begotten Son of God. For he chose to empty himself, taking the form of a weak, puking babe in a feed box, son of a Virgin, wrapped in baby cloths and reigning from a throne of stinky straw.
Catherine of Siena understood it when she wrote that Christ came:
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“...so that I, then, with my littleness, would be able to see your greatness, God, you made yourself a little one, wrapping up the greatness of your Godhead in the littleness of our humanity.”
For the message of the Christmas season is that the littlest shall be the greatest, the last shall be first and the way to know God is not big and important, but small, very small.
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And so, I would like to speak with you for a bit about vulnerability, the choice to empty myself like Christ in the Manger and Christ on the cross, to collapse into God’s arms in total surrender to his will for me. And there are few things harder, for me and for you.
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For when I look in the mirror, I know what I want to see. I want to see youthful perfection. I want to see the me I want my bosses to see, perfect in every way. I want to see the me I want my friends to see, warm, loving and ever so patient and giving. I want to see the me I want God to see. I want him to say,
“What a good job I did with that one. He is truly the Son in whom I am well pleased.”
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But while you can fool some of the people most of the time, and many of your friends some of the time. There is no fooling God. For “nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account.” (Hebrews 4:13) We are naked before God, whether we want to be or not.
Which makes it strange that we spend our entire lives, and sometimes our entire careers, running away from who we are, for fear that its not enough.
Vulnerability, openness to God, is the most indispensable ingredient to effective ministry. It’s called by all kinds of names..... But its all the same. Am I willing to imitate the kenotic self-emptying of Christ in order to die to myself and be born to what he wants me to be. Am I willing to let go of my yesterdays, so that God can show me tomorrow.
Don’t worry, it’s not only chaplains who resist vulnerability. I do it all the time. Vulnerability is hard work and requires nightly examinations of conscience and constant vigilance and good and honest friends, and really smart and strong spiritual directors and shrinks to stay honest. Because we run from vulnerability like its the plague.
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But what is more vulnerable than the baby in a manger or the man on a cross.
Though he was in the form of God he did not deem equality with God something to be grasped at, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born into the likeness of man and accepting even death, death on a cross.
And as he did it, he opened his arms and looked us right in the eye, and said, love one another as I have loved you. Take up your vulnerability and follow me. Vulnerability. It is the key to unlock what God wants of us... But it is never easy.
Three short stories from my illustrious seminary career.
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Liver Cancer
It is 1978 and I had been dying to do hospital ministry, because I knew I would be so good at it. Because I knew so much, and I was dying to tell these other people what they needed to know. They would be so grateful, because I would make them so happy, because I was so smart. I was dying to tell them all what they needed to know.
It was my second summer as a seminarian, and I was working as a chaplain’s assistant at Hahnemann Hospital in Worcester. I’m not sure what day it was, but I know the Priest, any priest, was nowhere to be seen. And so they called the seminarian to go to the bed of a man dying of liver cancer and see what he could do to help.
How lucky these people are, I told myself, for they were about to benefit from all of the pastoral skills I had been honing for the past two years. I knew just what I was going to do, until I got there.
Now, in the bed was a man dying of liver failure. He was as yellow as a banana and his eyes were rolled back into the back of his head. But he wasn’t just lying there. His body was spasming as he would practically throw himself into the air as he emitted a deep groan and then fall back on the bed, only to repeat the spasm fifteen seconds later.
Standing at the bedside was his wife, hysterical, and trying to clasp her husband’s hand as he bounced up and down groaning in pain. Beside her was her daughter, holding on to the bed rail
with both hands and weeping. And over to our right, was her son, just about my age, slowly banging his head into the metal locker...thump...thump...thump....
So, at that moment, I seriously contemplated whether I should run out of the room and go into politics instead of the priesthood. I was so scared, literally, that I could not move for a whole minute. My eyes filled with tears and my hands got sweaty and I wanted to throw up...no answers at all. I wasn’t even sure of what the questions were any more!
Eventually, I just let go and I went with my gut. Since the son was the most in danger of actually hurting himself, I went to him first, and I put my arms around his shoulder and slowly moved him to the bed. With my right arm, I reached over for the mother, placing my right hand on her shoulder. She jumped, and then looked at my tear stained face and put her hand over mine.
Then the daughter, feeling as if she was in the middle of a macabre version of Twister, moved over toward me and put her hand around my waist.
OK, I thought to myself, what do do you do now. And like the little kid I had suddenly turned into, I said the Lord’s prayer. We all wept our way through it. Then I took my hand from the wife, who quickly grabbed the daughter, and I placed it on the dying and groaning man’s head and we just all prayed...every prayer I could remember. And after about ten minute he died.
It was my first death and possibly the one in which I ministered the most, admitting my vulnerability and speaking faith not from above, but from within the pain of those whom I sought to lead to Christ.
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My First Homily
I’m not sure if I’ve told you the story about my first homily, but if I did, just smile knowingly and listen to it again. It was a practice homily, my third year as a seminarian.
I worked for weeks on it and was convinced it was the theological treatise of the twentieth century, replete with everything I had been dying to tell people since I was four years old.
I was convinced that as soon as I opened my mouth a fire would ignite faith upon this earth...that people in far-off lands would fall to their knees and not even know why.
So I began preaching, and after about five minutes, I noticed people pinching their babies to make them cry and setting off the alarms on their wrist watches. They were looking longingly out the windows at their cars and crinkling their bulletins loudly.
And I got angrier and angrier. I was so angry that I read the last six pages slowly.
And when I got back to the Seminary I went to see my spiritual director, and he asked me how the homily went. “It was terrible,” I told him! “one of the worst experiences of my life."
My spiritual director looked quizzically at me and said, “Didn’t you love those people over at Santa Susanna’s?
“Love them,” I said. “Those are the stupidest people I ever met. It was like casting pearls before swine!”
“You didn’t love them?” he asked. "No, I didn't love them!”
Then he looked me right in the eyes and said: "If you don't love them, you don't have a right to open your mouth.”
He blew me out of the water. Because he taught me that preaching is not about me having all the answers and brilliantly tossing them down from my royal throne, but lovingly sharing the truth from my own brokenness and vulnerability. I have to be little and loving to preach the Gospel of the Child in the manger and the Christ on the cross.
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Evening Prayer
I was, I suppose, a typical late seventies seminarian. Each night of my senior year at Holy Cross, everyone would gather in my room and we would sit in a circle, burn incense before an icon and sing Compline. Each morning, I would pray Morning Prayer and there was always a Gelineau Psalter jostling around in my book bag. I came to the Seminary entirely devoted to the Psalms and the essential role of the Liturgy of the Hours as a sanctifier of time and a participation in the very prayer of Christ.
And so the preservation of the LOH, to exclusion of almost all other versions of Christian Prayer, became something of a crusade for me. Novenas and devotions were nice, but they were so yesterday. I belonged to the enlightened ones who did not pray to get something but to join our hearts and souls to the cosmic praise which transcended more primitive forms. I would graciously tolerate the imperfect usages of others, but I knew God liked my prayers best of all.
So when Father Garzilli, my spiritual director, suggested I might benefit from an introduction to the Jesus Prayer, I smiled at him indulgently, but never really took it seriously.
For this prayer he was all excited about lacked rubrics. There was no prescribed posture or incense or bells or intellectually challenging prayers. You just sit there, he said, and say over and over again: Jesus, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me a sinner. “Jesus, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me a sinner”? Yes, he said. But more slowly and with your eyes cast on the cross or closed.
So, skeptically, I tried it. Over and over and over again. And by the fourteenth time, I was getting bored...longing do go do something truly useful, like go match my socks. But I stubbornly kept right on. And at the twenty eighth time I was angry: “this is not doing any good. I could have gotten through mid-day by now. I’m not accomplishing a darn thing. I didn’t say darn.
But I at least had enough sense to keep pushing on...until I pushed through, and started to listen to what I was saying, with more than my head. Slowly, very slowly, my heart came out to play. And I began to pray: to see the face of Jesus, and to see it as something more than a reflection of me. And then my voice began to blend with the voice of the Leper by the side of the road: Jesus! Son of the Living God! Have mercy on me, a sinner!
And by the sixtieth time, I didn’t want to stop, for I felt embraced by the mercy of God, overwhelmed, washed over and transformed. Only when I had unmasked my vulnerability, was I able to begin to learn how to pray...
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So, you wanna be a better minister than I was? You wanna be a better chaplain than ever could be? You wanna be what God wants you to be?
Be vulnerable. With your spiritual director next week when it comes to everything and anything. With your counselor with your deepest and darkest secrets.
For conformity to the vulnerability of Christ as we open our arms on the crosses God gives us and accept his will is the only thing that will make us into the kind of priests he has called us to be.
I conclude with a poem by Christopher Wallace.
The vulnerability of baring myself fully
clenches the belly
panics the heart
stands my hairs on end.
It is truly the most terrifying thing to stand in ones authenticity.
And yet. And yet.
The courage it takes.
The great tender strength.
The spine tingling elation.
The heart swells, and magic.
The naked beauty borne, in feeling you have nothing to hide. The spirit touched ardor of a bare approach to life.
The openings and the mystery.
The expressions: tripping, falling, incomplete, misguided.
The wonderful mistakes, elucidating lessons.
The perfect imperfections.
The easing of honesty.
The engendered humility.
The profundity.
The sense of being touched, touching, and in touch with life. The unmasked revelations, of full spectral undulation.
The this. The that. The I can accept it all.
The dropping of shame.
The incredible liberation, in shedding that shame.
The finding forgiveness for self, for other.
The quiver of unknowing.
The sweet caress of potential.
The dread. The sorrows. The uncertainties.
All making room for, in their acknowledgement:
Room for what else is there.
Room for laughter, and joy, and luminescence.
Breaking open.
Melting into Love.
Soaring on the wings of Truth.
The hush, of anxious worry.
The Goodness bestowed.
The empathy.
The compassion.
The connection.
The holy restoration of creative flow.
The fires of real passion.
And everything.
And everything.
And Beauty.
The Second Key: Love
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I begin with one of the most beautiful passages of the entire Bible, sometimes described as Saint Paul’s “way of perfection.”
And it’s curious, because I suspect that if you or I were to write a treatise on "how to be perfect," we would describe the acquisition of exceptional qualities: getting an advanced degree, learning how to speak exotic languages, curing cancer, understanding the mysteries of science…in other words being perfect: never making a mistake and accomplishing great and impressive things.
But that’s not what "being perfect" is to Saint Paul, or to God. Being perfect, he tells us, is not being rich or famous or infallible. Being perfect is being like God. And God is love.
And nothing matters if it is not done out of love. Indeed, Saint Paul tells us: “If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but do not have love, I gain nothing.”
What does he mean by that? Well, he gets really specific. Here is what love is:
Love is patient, love is kind.
It is not jealous, it is not pompous,
it is not inflated, it is not rude,
it does not seek its own interests,
it is not quick-tempered, it does not brood over injury,
it does not rejoice over wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth.
It bears all things, believes all things,
hopes all things, endures all things.
Let’s unpack that just the first two lines.
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First: Love is patient
Patience is hard. Patience is a choice. Pope Saint Gregory the Great called patience “the root and guardian of all the virtues.” And he should know. He was elected Pope at the end of a pandemic which wiped out close to a third of the population. Poverty, hunger and disease were rampant in the city of Rome. Most people died in their mid-twenties and less than 20% of them had a job.
But despite the chaos all around him, Gregory responded with patient love. He set up food and medical care for the poor in seven Churches across the city, counseling the Deacons in these churches to remember that they were not to think of themselves as "giving the poor something," but they were to remember they were just returning to the poor what was theirs in the first place…for all of creation was made as a gift to those who need it.
Gregory's patient love in the face of chaos did two things: it fed the hungry and it calmed down all the other folks who were running around like it was the end of the world.
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Second: Love is kind. Love is not jealous
When Saint Therese of Lisieux entered a Carmelite convent at the age of sixteen it was, in the words of one of her biographers “a community of very old nuns, some odd and cranky, some sick and troubled, some lukewarm and complacent.” Yet from the first, Therese made the best of what God had given her, writing early on “"I applied myself especially to practice little virtues, not having the facility to perform great ones …”
In a letter to one of her sisters Therese expressed a bit of her frustration with convent life and described what she thought heaven might be like: a place where “we shall meet with no indifferent looks...No envious glances will be seen; the happiness of every one of the elect will be the happiness of all…and just as the members of a family are proud of one another, so shall we be of our brethren, without the least jealousy….”
“Oh! how I long to dwell in that Kingdom of Love,” she concluded.”
And how we should long to live in that Kingdom, where “love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” And by the way we love this week, may that Kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven.
Love Frees
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And finally, Love makes us free.
Frees me from time…from Suffering, and from Getting my Own Way.
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Freedom from time
How many patients have you seen struggle with the question of how to “pass the time” while waiting for the next gaggle of technicians and doctors to poke and prod them.
For the patient time takes on new meaning...it becomes more tangible, more capable of description. My condition might (by the grace of the insurance company) require three days in the hospital and then two weeks in rehab. When I was out in the real world, time was measured by the calendar and an appointment book. But here in this other world, outside forces have imposed their timetables on me and others determine when things end and begin.
Even my daily pattern of existence, once determined by work, by whim or by social obligations, is now regulated by forces I do not fully comprehend. When I can get out of bed, or go for a walk or have visitors is fully regulated and I can be constantly tempted to think that me, my life and even how I pass time all belong to the hospital, the doctor, and the nurses.
I recently turned seventy, and have, in recent years, accompanied my parents through sickness and death. Such events have a way of fixing the mind on the passage of time. I recently lamented to a friend how I was old enough to be their Father. “No, James,” he gently chided me, “you are old enough to be their grandfather! This is the same friend who, a couple weeks ago on vacation, observed that at our age we no longer had the time to make any more “old friends.”
Sickness and lack of liberty focus the mind in a wonderful way as well. The great seventeenth century Poet John Donne was thrown in prison due to a political dispute. By the way, his estrangement from his wife brought forth that exquisite expression of despair: “John Donne/ Anne Donne/ Undone.”
Donne later wrote a series of reflections on suffering, including the brilliant insight that sickness focuses the mind on the use of our time, our priorities and our spiritual condition like almost nothing else.
Time was created by God and some day will end. Like all of creation, it is given to us as a gift, to be used for God’s glory and to be filled with never-ending moments of seeking his face, loving in his name and growing closer to his Cross. Time is our rehearsal space for an eternity of timeless praise of God in union with all the angels and saints. And whether that time is given to us in a nursing home chapel, an ICU or a cubicle at work, in a home or a deserted space is almost irrelevant. Time is still God’s gift and when we embrace it as gift, we are set free to be the children of God that we are called to be.
Thus are we freed from the bonds of time and drawn closer to God.
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Freedom from Suffering
And then there is the cross. The Cross of learning that its malignant, that you are guilty, that your old life is over, at least for a time, and that now you must enter this monastic enclosure called Cardiac Care or my room in rehab.
Like all Crosses, it demands detachment: a letting go of what has been. Like all Crosses, it is mounted on a Good Friday as the sky goes black and all seem to have turned against you. Like all Crosses, it faces a vast darkly empty tomb, across which they plan to roll a great big stone to seal you in.
And like all Crosses, there are two ways it can be approached: as a captive or a free man. As a captive, I go to the gallows bound and gagged, never gently into that good night, but fighting for my life. Alternatively, I choose to received the cross with open arms in imitation of the one who taught me how to mount the tree and accept every cross as a participation in his. The first is coerced. The second is the act of a free man and life with meaning.
But its hard to be a free man and to accept the suffering as they drive the nails into your wrist. Our every instinct is to struggle to get away. Only faith opens our arms. Only faith makes us free.
Blessed Theresa of Calcutta, Doctor of fruitful suffering, once reflected:
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“Today the passion of Christ is being relived in all the lives of those who suffer. To accept that suffering is a gift of God. Suffering is not a punishment. God does not punish. Suffering is a gift. Though like all gifts, It depends on how we receive it. And that is why we need a pure heart- to see the hand of God, to feel the hand of God, to recognize the gift of God in our suffering. Suffering is not a punishment.
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Jesus does not punish. Suffering is a sign-a sign that we have come so close to Jesus on the cross, that He can kiss us, show that He is in love with us by giving us an opportunity to share in His passion. In our home for the dying it is so beautiful to see people who are joyful, people who are lovable, people who are at peace, in spite of terrible suffering. Suffering is not a punishment, not a fruit of sin, it is a gift of God. He allows us to share in His suffering and to make up for the sins of the world.”
Or, as Saint Josemaria Escriva once wrote:
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“If we join our own little things, those insignificant or big difficulties of ours, to the great sufferings of Our Lord, the Victim (He is the only Victim!), their value will increase. They will become a treasure, and then we will take up the Cross of Christ gladly and with style. And then every suffering will soon be overcome: nobody, nothing at all, will be able to take away our peace and our cheerfulness.”
Thus are we freed from the bonds of suffering and drawn closer to God.
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Freedom from Getting My Own Way
No one plans to get sick. So there is a certain element of surprise in the life of each of your clients.
And I suppose a bit part of the sorrow experienced by the man in the corner room or the woman in intensive care is that this is not what I had planned! And what makes it even worse if that if this is not what I had planned...what’s next?! I have lost all control, all ability to steer my life. My life is no longer my own.
Which is why I suspect that if the Lord had a bit more time to write his sermon on the mount, he would have included the sick. For like the poor, the broken hearted and those despised for the sake of his Holy Name, the sick have just been rather rudely awakened to the new that they are no longer in control of their life.
And that is why they are blessed...for unlike you and me, who go about incessantly trying to prove to ourselves that we are in control, they have been given the great good news that we’re not!
And that, believe it or not, is good news! For God’s plan is the whole reason we were made, and the sooner we let go of our way and embrace his, the happier we will be! Now, of course, for those He really loves, God’s way leads to the cross. When he holds us close to his heart, we are given a full portion of sacrificial suffering to go along with it. But once we recognize His embrace, even that suffering turns to pure joy.
But we gotta let go first.
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I always loved the story told by Somerset Maugham about the janitor at St. Peter's Church in London. It seems that once the vicar found out the old man was illiterate he threw him out on the street. However, the resourceful fellow took the little bit of money he had saved and bought a tobacco stand, which was so successful that he opened a shop, and then another one and another one, until he had amassed a fortune of several thousand pounds. One day the man’s banker asked him, "You've done well for an old illiterate, but where would you be if you could read and write?" "Well," he thoughtfully replied, "I'd be janitor of St. Peter's Church in Neville Square."
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Think back on your own life. How many times did you face failure or ignominy or run right smack into a brick wall, convinced that God had made one first class mess of your life...and then it happens...once you’ve let go of all your presuppositions and glorious plans, God shows you the way he had planned...more glorious than anything you could have dreamt up in your wildest dreams.
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And so it is with the person lying on a bed of pain, convinced that God is just toying with them or perversely punishing them for some long forgotten sin. But then if they accept the cross, open their arms upon it, they suddenly discover there is always meaning in suffering, and hope in pain. Good Friday never passes without the Easter morn.
Thus are we freed from the bonds of our brilliant plans and drawn closer to God.
Conclusion
We need the sick.
Despite what all those folks say about how good you are to be a chaplain, about how the beatitudes were written about you, going to the hospital, the jail and heaven....despite your training, your expertise and all the background checks...it's really not you who are there for the sick person: it is the person in that bed who is there for you.
Those of you who have been doing this for a long time know how true that is. Your salvation is worked out not because you are dispensing an act of charity, but because you have a job which lets you gaze on the face of Christ every day. Like the cloistered nun before the blessed Sacrament, you see him...and he sees you.
Not a bad job. Because such work with the sick and the suffering changes you, it transforms you. It makes you look like him.
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It’s not unlike looking into the face of Blessed Pope John Paul II in those last years of his life. Remember how stooped and broken he was, his hands shaking, his words slurred. But more powerfully than any sermon he ever preached, more eloquently than any Encyclical he ever promulgated, he reflected in those days the face of Christ in his suffering, his imprisonment and his dying.
He reminded me that this voice you have been listening to will grow weak in not so many years and this mind will grow dim. These hands will begin to shake and sometime this heart will cease to beat. In the end, this body will stop working entirely. And I, who spend most of my waking moments in denial, need to be with sick people who remind me “of the essential or higher things. By their witness, by the liminality of their condition, they show that our mortal life must be redeemed through the mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection.
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They teach me how to join my sufferings to the cross of Christ.
They teach me what it is like to stand at the foot of the cross, like the great Mother of God.
They teach me that sickness and lack of freedom, a natural part of human life, is just around the corner.
But that with the grace of the children of God, even from time, from suffering, and from my own brilliant plans, I can be free.
And so can they.
