25th Sunday, 1997

Introduction to the Academic Year

This is the third of the introductory masses for the school year. The intention today, according to the propaganda we put out, is for "social justice within and beyond our community, and that those who teach will be inspired to make a difference". The challenge for me is how to get from there to these readings. But I think it is possible. And I do not think it is a leap that is made too dangerously, so let me try.

We are supposed to be celebrating the reality of a Catholic school. Why would anybody be a Catholic? I think that this is a reasonable question. The only persuasive answer I can come up with is that I believe that being a Catholic puts me more fully in touch with what is real. Now that is a complicated thing because Catholicism both illuminates what is real and tells me "that is where you belong, you belong connected to that". Any other reason is stupid, brainless, and destructive. To be a Catholic means that somehow, in Catholicism, I find the fullest possibility of perceiving the world and participating in the world. So, let us start from there and look at the Isaiah and Markan readings which contain the figure of a deaf person.

A deaf person is a person who is out of contact with much of the real. The early preachers would use that kind of physical condition as a metaphor for the human condition, the point being, therefore, that when you run into this religious reality - - the God of the Jews, or the God of Jesus, or Jesus himself - - you become aware for the first time that you do not hear, you really do not hear, what is out there. So that is the context for this famous passage from "The Letter of James". Take, for example, this situation: we are in a room and somebody walks in dressed in an Armani suit, or a Givenchy gown, or Calvin Klein cuff links and Pierre Cardin belt-buckle. Shortly after, another individual walks in looking like a refugee from the Goodwill throwaway bin. All James is saying, with regard to this type of situation, is "what are your responses?" For example, somebody shows up at my door dressed like a bum. Or, somebody shows up at my door driving a Mercedes. I respond differently. Why? What is wrong with that? It is normal; it is human.

There are all kinds of plausible reasons for this response. For instance, this reaction could be based on the idea that people who are dressed well and have good jewelry are more aesthetically pleasing to the eye. Thus, just on aesthetic grounds they are preferable. They probably smell much better too. If you have ever spent any time in slums or with really poor people it is the smell of poverty that is probably most difficult to put up with. Yet look at what is going on in that process. We are simply staying on the surface. We do not see people - - we see surfaces. This is exactly why James, or whoever wrote the text, could say this to his congregation, because, presumably, Jesus was the person who enabled people to see beyond surfaces. To see people, not surfaces, not status, not reputations, not bank accounts, not appearances. Then, you look at our world; our world, not the world of Jesus where probably ninety percent of the people lived in poverty, but our world, where we, twenty percent of the population of the world, use eighty percent of the world's resources. That is real. Thus we, as a would-be Catholic institution, somehow ought to mediate the whole educational process in such a way that the people who leave this place and the people who operate in this place are more in touch with what is real, and therefore, participate more fully in what is real. It is not a question of a slogan like "social justice". That all sounds very safe. Or, even a slogan like "service". Some of you know I am becoming increasingly uneasy with the notion of "service" whereby our politicians are public "servants", in which the police "serve" and protect, and even in the church we have a surplus of "servants" who do not act like servants at all - - they act more like bosses.

So, how do we come to the point of being in touch with the real? Let me suggest a few possible ways of doing it. I prayed at the beginning, last Tuesday of the first year assembly, that those of us who are here, and I certainly include myself, become aware that we are a privileged cast. How many people in Canada, as we University faculty members do, get four months vacation per year? If you are a student, how many of your contemporaries are in university today? But then, if you think about it, we live in a world where everybody says, "you deserve this, you do not have enough, you need more". Thus, what I am saying is that an appeal to privilege is probably whistling in the dark and that it does not get us anywhere. It does not bring us closer to the real or contacting the real. Well, then we could say it is a matter of justice. However, justice is a fairly cold notion. For example, anybody who has ever been in an intimate relationship where the issue of justice comes up knows how difficult it is to define justice. What is fair? What is just? It is impossible. Nations cannot do it. Individuals cannot do it. So, the appeal to justice does not help either, not very much at least.

We, with our Anglo-Saxon heritage can appeal to yet another possibility: "noblesse oblige". An idea as old as the Romans, the ancient Romans that is, that we who are in higher status have, by dint, of that an obligation to at least provide bread and circuses once or twice a year for the underlings, to keep them pacified and entertained, and thus in the process, prove our own worth. And it is very interesting with this recent pair of funerals, I must say I am somewhat startled at commentary assuming the moral equivalence of Mother Theresa and Princess Diana. I do not think there is any moral equivalence. But "noblesse oblige" works. People are helped by "noblesse oblige", but that does not get to what the gospel is about. It still deals with surfaces. "Noblesse oblige", basically, is still self-aggrandizing. So what are we left with? What can move us?

I think this is a very simple thing and I have said this before in this place, and this is hardly a novel thought with me. I think the only thing that will enable us to move out, to see a world and participate in that world, is a sense of gratitude. Not just a gratitude because somebody sent me roses on my birthday, but a sense of gratitude for my life, for myself, for the world.

Lately, it is interesting that everybody is quoting Mother Theresa. If you try to analyze the things that she is saying: "Here is God suffering in the guise of the poor", you think to yourself: that that sounds stupid, that sounds ridiculous - - asinine. Unless you ask what is it that moved her to say that with a straight face, and then operate in the way she did, you will not find the answer. I believe fully that the answer behind this is that it was a sense of gratitude for herself, for her world.

But here too we run into enormous problems. Who of us is unbruised by life? Who of us is resentment-free? Who of us is not damaged goods and aware of ourself as damaged goods? How many of us in the various moments in our lives are not paralyzed by the pain of that realization? I think that it, more than a sense of gratitude, probably underlies everything that I do. So where are we? We are face to face with the mystery of grace, to put it in theological language. Grace is simply the translation of the Greek word for "gift". Jesus somehow operated believing in the God of the Jews. Being a pious jew himself, Jesus believed that his life was a gift, that everybody was a gift, and thus he was able to see beyond surfaces. There is nothing magical involved in this. Somehow Jesus' head worked in such a way that he could see all kinds of things. He could see the real in a way that I cannot, and was grateful. This is not unusual. For instance, I do not know whether anybody has read Dag Hammarskjöld's autobiography. He was the great first secretary-general of the U.N. After he was killed they found, this world famous banker, had a diary which was later published under the title Markings. In that diary there is a stunning passage: "One day, I do not know how it happened, I was able to say yes to the world, and thank you". Thus, what we are talking about is not some kind of great mystical flight but it certainly is something that transcends my own history. I am too wrapped up in too many grudges that constitute who I am. Too many sadnesses. Too many disappointments. Until I somehow manage to move beyond that, then the reality of my own life and everybody's life as a gift, is inaccessible.

Is that so far removed from English 230, or Geography 147, or Math, or even Religious Studies? I do not think so. And if all those things do not work in some way to move us to gratitude, we are not doing what we, as a Catholic school, say we are doing. But how does one teach gratitude? Every parent in this room knows that is absolutely an impossibility because those of us who are parents know how seriously flawed we are and how mediocre our performance as parents is. We also know how many times our kids provide us with evidence of that. But that is the job, at bottom, that is the job - - how to learn to be grateful in a way that arises not because somebody said "you ought to be grateful", as I have told my kids any number of times. "You owe me! You owe me!" Rubbish. Anybody knows that that may be a great cry of pain but it is utterly pointless as far as changing anybody's minds or hearts is concerned.

I would like to propose to you in this third mass, therefore, that that is the agenda. That does not incapacitate us from reading and writing footnotes, from being academically respectable. No. But only that justifies our calling ourselves a Catholic institution. Even if we have to do it by saying "we are not doing it", because even in acknowledging we are not doing it we are at least acknowledging this is what we ought to be doing.

So, finally, I have talked too long. I apologize. I probably will not see many of you until you graduate. So I would like to make one final point. What we are doing here has the title of a Greek word "Eucharist". We are supposedly celebrating the Eucharist. Do you know what the translation of the Eucharist is? Thanksgiving. Every mass ought to be a celebration of thanksgiving or another opportunity to learn to be grateful, to open ourselves to the transforming power of God to enable us to be grateful. Grateful for what? For this man who was able to say "this is my life for you". Diana's brother said that "the world is going to be poorer for her accident". I do not doubt that that is true, but the world would be infinitely poorer without the example of Jesus. This dark place, which is our world, would be darker by far, and so no matter how bad the music is, no matter how boring the preacher, the mass still gives us a chance to get in contact with this man who was able to say, "this is my life poured out for you". That is why this is an essential part of our operation here.

To other sermons

RT 13/10/97