[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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