Word to the Wise
Sunday, May 29, 2011 - 6th Sunday of Easter - A
[Acts 8:5-8, 14-17; 1 Pet 3:15-18; John 14:15-21,49]Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope, but do it with gentleness and reverence, keeping your conscience clear, so that, when you are maligned, those who defame your good conduct in Christ may themselves be put to shame.
In the Fall of 1960, I left the little Catholic "cocoon" in which I was raised in Natchitoches, LA, and went to the big city of New Orleans to attend a private secular university known as Tulane. It was in the dormitory life there that I found myself being challenged fairly often to "give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope." I'm not sure I always did this with "gentleness and reverence," given the nature of dormitory arguments, but I found that the process required me to "do my homework" and not just quote selected lines from the Bible or the Baltimore Catechism. In the end, what impressed my peers was not all the cogent and impassioned arguments, but the fact that I started getting up early to go to Mass over at the Jesuit church at Loyola next door. And when I left law school at the end of the first year to enter the Dominican Order, I had a number of good wishes from non-Catholic classmates as well as Catholic. In short, the most effective explanation is not always a well-crafted argument!
A life of faith lived with "gentleness and reverence," "keeping one's conscience clear," is a powerful evangelical force! I belong to a religious order with a glorious intellectual heritage. That heritage, especially manifested in such heroes as St. Thomas Aquinas and Frs. Yves Congar, O.P. and Marie-Joseph LaGrange, O.P., inspires me to study constantly and rejoice in what I learn. Ultimately, however, it will be the way in which I "put skin on" the gospel in the way I live it that will give credence to any preaching that I do from the pulpit. By the time I get to the pulpit, the "explanation" will have already been underway!
The more we know of our Catholic Christian tradition, the more we can bring to our daily living. Our tradition is not a vague and fuzzy altruism. There is a truth about Christ that centuries of reflection have handed down to us. We should strive to know it as best we can. But it is the way that we live it that will be the best explanation of it! AMEN