[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 107 (Thursday, July 10, 2014)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4392-S4393]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             EASTER HOMILY

  Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, Father O'Donovan is one of the dearest 
friends I have from my association with Georgetown past or present. 
Marcelle and I were privileged to help him celebrate his 80th birthday 
and join him for church the next day. His homily is truly reflective of 
the wonderful human he is and I wanted to share it with my fellow 
Senators. I ask unanimous consent that Father O'Donovan's April 27, 
2014 homily be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                           A Jesuit's Journey


                       Homily in Dahlgren Chapel

                     On the Second Sunday of Easter

                             27 April 2014

       Dear Friends: I beg your indulgence this morning to speak 
     more personally than the Second Sunday of Easter would 
     ordinarily suggest. You may permit me to do so, however, 
     since you have come to the Hilltop not

[[Page S4393]]

     only to help me celebrate a very ``round'' birthday but also 
     to give your support to the education of young Jesuits. And 
     so the story of this one Jesuit's journey will be linked to 
     that of my fellow Jesuits as well as to you, my very dear 
     friends.
       When yesterday, it seems--I entered the Society of Jesus, I 
     was setting forth on a journey for which there were indeed 
     words--the love of God, the service of our fellow human 
     beings, a vowed life in the Church--but only a fairly shallow 
     grasp of what they might mean. Yesterday, with other newly 
     entered Jesuits, we were young, vigorous, some had great 
     dreams, others cherished a blessed sense of duty, all sensed 
     that somehow the life they gave to the esteemed Society of 
     Jesus would also be found, truly, in that least Society.
       And now, suddenly, I find myself . . . 80 years old. When I 
     entered the Novitiate during the presidency of Dwight D. 
     Eisenhower, under the papacy of Pius XII, and with John 
     Baptist Janssens as General Superior of the Society of Jesus, 
     order was a relative constant in our experience. Soon the 
     constant became change. In our formative years our nation was 
     shaken, for good and ill, by the civil rights movement, the 
     Vietnam War, Watergate. The Second Vatican Council, with 
     roots, we learned, in the liturgical, patristic, theological 
     and ethical scholarship of many Jesuits among others, 
     convened in a miraculous rush of time between 1962 and 1965. 
     New hope dawned for the Church in the world, most of us 
     thought, just when the world seemed most to need such a 
     beacon. Within a decade, the journey on which we had embarked 
     seemed to have mysteriously changed--to have become, in fact, 
     far more an adventure. We were invited to change, too, if we 
     were really to live in the time we were being given. Many 
     other friends had experiences somewhat similar, not least 
     because children change everything.


                            The God of Time

       The time we were being given: through it all there was this 
     constant: the patience and fidelity of God. In the Society of 
     Jesus we wanted liturgical participation, social renewal, a 
     newly intimate community life. Indeed, as the Society began 
     remarkably to appropriate the aggiornamento of the Council in 
     its General Congregations from the 31st onward, under the new 
     and (I deeply believe) sainted leadership of Pedro Arrupe, we 
     were called officially and authoritatively to recognize that 
     a community of loved sinners can only be faithful if it seeks 
     the unloved, stands with those who have been shunned, lives 
     but also learns in solidarity with the poor.
       How clumsily, how unrealistically, with what a rush we 
     often sought our new goals and discovered that God, the Holy 
     Mystery who is our Absolute future, was patient with our 
     straining time, was even taking it into God's own life. (Some 
     of us became aware of what can only be called God's sense of 
     humor before the human spectacle.) The love of neighbor which 
     had seemed like the love of God, a moral imperative and 
     recommended pattern of behavior, proved to be far more: the 
     discovery of and entry into God's own life. God was not just 
     pleased if we could be healing, or encouraging, or messengers 
     of justice. God was there, in the care and hope and justice, 
     taking our time into God's own.
       For if God is eternal but also offers divine life and grace 
     to a freely created world, then that world's time and 
     history, our time and history, becomes God's time and history 
     truly, too.
       We had set off on a journey to a goal--and discovered that 
     we were already, however and even desperately unworthily, 
     already living in it. Through the patience of the Great Tutor 
     we were learning that incarnation was specific to a certain 
     time and place--but also calls all time and space to union 
     with it.


                          The God of Suffering

       Incarnation, however, means becoming fully human, and 
     sooner or later, one learns the cost of the endeavor. There 
     were ghastly events in political society such as the Balkans 
     war or the Rwanda genocide. There were what many of us 
     considered retreats from the ``aggressive fidelity'' of the 
     Council. Our own nation's struggles with racism, sexism, and 
     the serious poverty of many Americans seemed to fail as often 
     as they succeeded.
       But there were more personal losses as well. We lost 
     parents and friends. We struggled with alcoholism and other 
     addictions. Cherished projects all too often failed. The 
     social legislation we favored did not pass. The promotion we 
     hoped for went to someone else. Anxiety became a nearer 
     neighbor. Many fellow Jesuits, a Provincial and not a few 
     best friends among them, left our company. The symphony's 
     scherzo proved to be a threnody.
       But God was patient, was indeed perhaps most patient with 
     our suffering. The cross of Christ before which we had been 
     encouraged to ask: ``What have I done for Christ? What am I 
     doing for Christ? What shall I do for Christ?'' became 
     something not imagined but rather our immediate experience. 
     His suffering was ours, and ours his, because he had given 
     himself for and to us, and had claimed us to and for him.
       And so, even more miraculous than life itself, there Christ 
     is--in the illiterate village, the anguished schizophrenic, 
     the solitary death row, all the battlegrounds of the world--
     the whole Christ to whom all belong and they to him, the 
     crucified and risen one who is never a stranger but the 
     patient one who waits for us always--and from whose love 
     nothing, nothing, nothing can separate us.


                           The God of Beauty

       If the cross of Christ seals our time and shares our 
     suffering, revealing the patience of God, it awakens us also, 
     in ways I scarcely could have imagined all those years ago on 
     this Hilltop--yesterday--to the beauty of God. Darwin wrote 
     toward the end of his life and without apparent regret that 
     his scientific studies had led him no longer to be able to 
     enjoy Shakespeare. Dostoevsky, on the other hand, let Prince 
     Myshkin speak his hope: Beauty will save the world.
       For many young people, ``the beautiful'' is a preoccupation 
     for an elite few. But with fellow Jesuits and so many of you 
     here today, I have learned how wonderfully various and 
     compelling God's world is. My Jesuit classmates included a 
     poet, historians, literary critics, high school and college 
     administrators, journalists and prolific authors, theologians 
     and philosophers, spiritual directors and retreat masters, 
     ethicists. We have served in North America, South America, 
     Europe, Africa and Asia. And if beauty is what arrests and 
     compels human attention, whether in the splendor of a sunset 
     or the sorrow of a scar, a Frederick Edwin Church landscape 
     or a character such as August Wilson's King Hedley II, we 
     have seen too much marvelous variety not to have become more 
     alert to the beauty of the artisan of it all.
       It was easy enough to appreciate the harmonious, the 
     splendid, the musical moments of our experience. Harder to 
     recognize what distortion, darkness, dissonance reveal. But 
     the same Spirit that establishes order can comfort tears; the 
     Spirit that illumines can guide through the night; the Spirit 
     that teaches song can interpret discord. The beauty of God 
     can come in the mode of fulfillment, in achieved form and 
     luminous color and delicate balance, but also in the mode of 
     hope, in protest against violence, in fury at injustice, in 
     conscientious objection.
       To say that the Spirit of God teaches us to see again and 
     to hope to see wholly is not to claim completion. I find 
     myself at 80 each year happier and more blessed to be a 
     Jesuit priest--but journeying still. This too: beauty is 
     always fresh, new, surprising. And if a patient God has made 
     our time God's own, and our suffering God's own, then how can 
     we not hope that in today's liturgy indeed but one day 
     finally and forever, God's Spirit will teach each of us the 
     most beautiful words of all:
           Take me. I am yours.
     Leo J. O'Donovan, S.J.

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