Homily for Fourth Sunday of Easter
This is Vocations Sunday, a special day set aside every year offer prayers for vocations to the priesthood and the religious life. 30 years ago this would have been a straight-forward enough homily to deliver. Even if there were sufficient priests in Ireland to serve Ireland's spiritual needs, yet vast tracts of the universe still remained ignorant of Christ and the gospel. And if they had not heard of Christ, they could not possibly be saved. Today, thirty years later, the world is a far more complex place. The world has changed utterly - consider Universal education. That change (and the nature of that change) is well encapsulated in a poem named Annus Mirabilis by the English poet Philip Larkin:
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me)
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.Up till then there'd only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for a ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.Then all at once the quarrel sank:
Everyone felt the same,
And every life became
A brilliant breaking of the bank,
A quite unlosable game.So life was never better than
In nineteen sixty-three
(Though just too late for me)
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.
Circumstances have conspired to force us to question a lot of our received assumptions about the church, about the world, about the priesthood and religious life, about lifestyle, and indeed about salvation itself. So life is not as simple and straightforward as it was 30 years ago.
Today we are asked to reflect on, and pray for, vocations. Honest reflection refines our prayer. It winnows away the chaff of self-deception. Prayer that evades, or wishes away reality, is mere escapism. In our prayers for vocations we have refined escapism down to a fine art. This must not surprise us. As humans, we are beset with ambiguity.
The current 'vocations crisis' has been exhaustively analysed. Its cultural and social roots have been exposed. Only a fool would ignore such important factors. But as Christians we are not just dealing with a cultural crisis. Something more specific, something deeper, confronts us. And we are obliged to address this issue as passionate believers, not as disinterested social scientists. We are faced with a change in religious sensibility, a marked alteration in the way we feel about our God, our religion and our world. It is not that God has been banished. Far from it. But our aesthetic sense of his place and role in our world has altered. Our knowledge of God is filtered through a religious language, through religious imagery. Many of our more powerful religious images are based in the scriptures. Shepherd is one such image. But I would suggest that in our own lived experience today, we regard our God as a 'Chairman' rather than a shepherd. Like all good chairmen, he is not intrusive. He affords each the space to develop, or to die. And there is a certain logic in our tasteful evolution. God is good, we are assured. So we invest him with democratic respectability, and all the civilising traits of our culture. Like all enlightened father-figures, he is concerned for our welfare, he will listen to our troubles, but above all, he will mind his own business. I suppose we have fashioned God in our own image, which is not how God intended it. We need to pay more attention to the God who challenges, the God who stretches us, the God who disturbs us and ours.
The truth is beginning to dawn on us that this whole area of vocations needs to be revisited and thought out again. As the world changes, the particular form in which vocations emerge will change. But yet the official Church continues on with its head down. When we are asked on this day to pray for vocations, are we being urged to implore God to turn back the clock to the 1950s? When seminaries were full, emigration was enormous and marriage was relatively rare and always late? Clerical vocations were so numerous that, unwittingly, lay people were nudged out of their rightful place in the Church. It will take us generations to recover from that clericalisation. As this clericalisation unravels, much confusion and ambiguity will manifest itself. For example, many parents will still want their children educated by religious. However, they would never wish a child of theirs to join them. Prayers for vocations from such confused quarters would confuse the Almighty himself or herself! You know in your own hearts that willing for others what we would not wish upon our own is a dubious type of praying indeed.
In the interests of clarifying our own vocations, we must confront some of our ambiguities and comforting idols. The first idol to be confronted is the belief that there will be a swing around, a turning back of the clock. Clocks move in only one direction. The second idol to be confronted: the responsibility for the gospel cannot and should not be passed on to a professional group. No one can live out the gospel for another person. We must all take on our responsibilities. When we have cleared away this misleading clutter, we may be in a position to confront the problem of vocations in a realistic and honest way. Because, as along as human beings inhabit this planet, there will be a need for vocations to the priesthood and the religious life. The form they will take is of course another matter.
It is a relatively difficult time for serving priests, I suppose. There is a fair amount of disillusionment to be found in their ranks. The priest poet Padraig Daly has expressed well that disillusionment which breaks through into dogged commitment:
THE LAST DREAMERS
We began in bright certainty:
Your will was a master plan
Lying open before us.
Sunlight blessed us,
Fields of birds sang for us,
Rainfall was your kindness tangible.But our dream was flawed;
And we hold it now,
Not in ecstasy but in dogged loyalty,Waving our tattered flags after the war,
Helping the wounded across the desert.