Going to Lay in the Grass

Once a month, my three housemates and I travel up from our post in Clonard, Co. Wexford and the Diocese of Ferns to invade Dublin. Sometimes we hop on the Wexford Bus; sometimes we catch a lift from a friend of ours. That friend is a priest who supervises primary school education in the diocese, and he is part of the community in Dublin that we join each month.

The University of Notre Dame's Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE) has become an incredibly robust and constantly growing outreach across America, pulling in tons of incredibly talented post-grads from Notre Dame and all across the country. Those who accept their invitations to join ACE spend two years in Catholic education; they dedicate their summers to coursework toward a Masters in Education while spending two academic years as Catholic school teachers in under-resourced Catholic schools all across the country, from Oakland, CA, to Richmond, VA, to Mission, TX.

ACE also includes advocacy and fellowship networks in many different places, and the O'Connell House/Keough-Naughton Centre in Dublin hosts a unique version of this group. People who work in Catholic education in Ireland, mostly as teachers and administrators, gather together at O'Connell House on one Friday every month, under the leadership of an American Notre Dame/ACE alumnus and his Irish wife, to share a mass, dinner, and some conversation. Since the House of Brigid is a group of Notre Dame alumni that benefited from Catholic education and continues to serve it - in the primary schools of our home parish of Clonard - we join the community as well, invited to serve primarily as the music ministers for these humble, homey masses.

At the end of each academic year, the ACE Community in Dublin commissions two young Irish people who have been selected to travel to America to study at Notre Dame and serve a Catholic school as teachers in ACE. This commissioning mass is the finale for each year, and a few weeks ago, we traveled up to Dublin to join the community for this final mass to send forth two Irish girls to Our Lady's University.

Our celebrant for the mass was a man named Fr. Michael Drumm. He sensed the mood of the mass - an intimate group of less than 50, including the families and friends of these two girls, in the parlor of a very old Irish house, stationed in plastic chairs around a makeshift altar and the hearth of a seldom-used fireplace. Fr. Drumm ministered to us accordingly, and his homily was a bit like hearing your dad tell a story by the fireside on a cozy night at home.

The centerpiece of his homily, at least in the way I heard it, was a simple reflection on grass. You ready for this? Here's three simple facts.

1. Grass grows.
2. No one has ever seen grass grow.
3. If you laid down in a field for a long time, the growth would envelop you.

Ok, father, we've all heard the cliches about grass growing, water boiling, etc., and we just heard the Sower and the Seed parable for the Gospel - what else ya got? But this wasn't just the standard use of a tired metaphor. He was trying to convey a sense of what a teacher should strive for in his or her work, their ministry. This really struck me as a tremendous way to preach patience alongside presence.

You see, we usually start each month's gathering with a round of introductions before the opening song of the mass, and this month we bypassed the usual convention in favor of focusing on our two honored guests. The introductions for the four of us youngens from Wexford are usually laugh-inducing, four of giving the same short schticks, though I sometimes slip in a joke, like "I'm the product of 17 years of Catholic education." But this time, I had a different introduction that would have put me squarely alongside these two gals - "I'm Dan, and I'm going to be a Catholic high school teacher and campus minister, starting in August." So secretly, I was being phantomly commissioned all the while.

Fr. Drumm's words cut straight through to me. I had never prepared myself explicitly to accept a teaching job, figuring it may come as an extra responsibility to my main pursuit of being a campus minister but wouldn't be my main occupation. But here I was, a few weeks in to knowing that I'll begin teaching theology to 14-to-16-year-olds imminently and beginning to regularly muse and hypothesize over how I'll undertake the ministry.

I already am committed to a vocabulary of ministry, presence, service. I've assumed a mindset of spirited commitment to ministry, no matter what the medium or "job" for it is. I remain imperfect - crotchety, critical, particular, opinionated, moderately moderate - but the vocabulary I persist in using during prayer/reflection, conversation, and job interviews indicates the ideal I am pursuing and the reality I try to enflesh. And Fr. Drumm provided us a metaphor that encapsulated so much of what my friend, the one who referred me to her school and now my employer, had previously told me: "Just love them."

As I've spent more and more time in ministry, the sower/seed metaphors have been consoling. You must be willing to sow the seed and not insist on seeing it grow. You have to be willing to pass the garden on to others to water and harvest. You also have to know that you're seeing the fruits of seeds sown by other ministers. We are truly a Church when we work together in such a way, trusting in the mystical bond we share as Christ's Body, knowing that the guiding hand of our Church can make such a difference.

Here, in Fr. Drumm's observation, I find new depth. This metaphor preaches patience: go and be there, knowing that a difference may not come instantly or quickly or even measurably. It preaches presence: commit to laying down, to being in the thick of it, going on to the front lines. Most of all, it preaches certitude: grass can, does, and will grow, even though no one has ever seen it. Grace is often invisible to our eyes, especially in the very live moments in which it unfolds right before our eyes. But we know the grass grows, and we must remember that a commitment to tend to it and spend significant time with it yields results, results that are reliant on something - Some One - greater than any one of us "gardeners."

My friend's exhortations about my new school warned against orthodox catechism-thumping, indoctrination, and strict lectures on tradition. Instead, her insights centered on committing to a thorough presence, a desire to provide a sturdy and substantial counter-culture of faith, on that will give teenagers an alternative to what one scholar calls "moral therapeutic deism" and give them an attractive invitation to thoughtful Christian life and a lived faith.

Here, Fr. Drumm showed me just what I must do. I need to go lay in the grass, accept that I may not see it grow, and remember that if I lay there long enough, the growth will overwhelm me.

Faith Seeking Understanding

I remember sitting in the side office of the reception room of the Office of the Undergraduate Admissions at Notre Dame late during sophomore year. I worked there, sharing the auxiliary office with a dear, sweet lady named Judy. Between handling epic amounts of paperwork and answering dozens of phone calls, often from worried parents and frazzled teenagers, Judy was basically the gatekeeper of the Our Lady's Administration, shepherding people to their help while defusing nervous hearts and angry tempers.

Amid the shuffling papers, tour guides' coming to get their name tags and business cards, and my own organizing our student hospitality program, we had new piles of paper on our desks. Judy was organizing the new influx of materials on Notre Dame's different departments and majors. The newest stuff was newly designed cards from the majors of the College of Arts & Letters. Having completed almost two years at Notre Dame and feeling very satisfied with my major, I wasn't a free agent looking for a home. However, I was (and always will be) an impassioned theology major who was curious what his department was touting to prospective students.

I picked up a Theology card off the stack and began to read. I can't remember exactly the points that the card made, but I remembering progressing through it and smiling - as a current theology major, almost halfway through his coursework, I felt like I was experiencing exactly what the card was promising to potential theology students. The card wasn't making the major into something more glamorous or pristine than it was; it didn't use fluffy quotes or fancy graphics. It led its reader to the main point of theology, of the study and discussion of God: faith seeking understanding.

This great quote from St. Anselm is probably the greatest explanation of what theology is and should be. Yes, the little theology major card did use this quote, but it used it well. And it used the quote justifiably because, not only did some of my professors use the quote to describe their personal and their classes' approach, that's what studying theology at Notre Dame is.

I'm not just writing to uphold Notre Dame Theology - excellent as it is and as excellently as it prepared me as a person of faith and as someone who aspires to minister and catechize to others in the Church. I'm writing to uphold this as the definition of theology that people should embrace and know. Theology isn't just MTS and PhD students striving after the academic and intellectual pursuits; it isn't just deeply orthodox people digging into tradition to pile up some trivia. Theology is the quest of any and all believers to nourish their faith with a greater understanding.

Faith is that commitment we make in our hearts to believe in that which we cannot prove, that which our reason cannot deduce conclusively. Taking things on faith does not mean that we stop thinking, reflecting, or praying about them. It means that we have to consider them in a broader light than solely reason, and our Catholic tradition embraces the cooperation of faith and reason, which can and will nourish our spirits.

We need a broader narrative of intelligibility. We can't bracket our thoughts to solely what we can explain with scientific precision and clarity. We have to incorporate in the breadth of God, the One who isn't limited by space or time, the One who is omnipotent.

We need to embrace transcendence. We believe in a God who is in time and who entered time, a historical God who has directly acted in human history, most profoundly by becoming man as Jesus Christ. Yet, He is also a God who is above and beyond time, greater than any of our explanations of nature can articulate.

We need to extend beyond reason, fact, and science. We can study the bible historically-critically, and we can learn greatly by contextualizing the writings in their authors, their cultures, their historical settings, and their formation. However, those things cannot fully penetrate our spirits without what Pope Benedict XVI calls the "hermeneutic of faith". Our reading of the Bible must be encompassed by the belief in the greater truth of God and our faith in Him as Love.

Theology - by a barely educated layman or a lifelong priest and theologian - is one's faith in pursuit of greater understanding. It isn't the pursuit of complete and total understanding, of finding every answer. It isn't the pursuit of dead ends that force one to take on some kind of blind faith.

It's a faithful effort toward asking the questions and seeking to gesture at mystery. It's embracing one's imagination as a means of using the gift of thought to reach out to something that reason cannot fully articulate. It's the struggle to discover the depth and riches of Scripture and Tradition that are so full of potential nourishment for our minds and hearts.

When we say, "I believe," from the Latin credo, we aren't claiming a conclusive belief in something that we either understand fully or believe blindly; we are saying that we have faith in the truth of what we are asserting, in the tenets of our creed. We are promising that we will strive toward better understanding of the mysteries of our faith, mysteries not because they are unsolvable but rather because they invite wonder, curiosity, and awe. Theology is our chance to undertake that pursuit. Theology is faith seeking understanding.

On Earth as it is in Heaven

"Thy kingdom come; thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven."

We pray the words of the Lord's Prayer with a degree of rote recitation from the sheer quantity of times we've spoken it. It becomes almost mechanistic, robotic, empty-headed, nonchalant.

To an extent, the more positive aspect of these mostly negatively-connoted words is not only ok; it's encouraged.

Prayers like the Lord's Prayer, Hail Mary, Glory Be, etc. are "familiar prayers," prayers that are meant to be so well ingrained that you can recall them without difficulty. They're meant to provide our prayer lives with a foundation, a basis, a default. That's not all they are - each prayer carries incredible meaning if we choose to pray over the words with intentional scrutiny and reflection - but they're intended to be the prayers that come forth from our being naturally.

We can look to these prayers especially when we are unable to come up with anything else, when we don't want to come up with anything else, when we don't want anything else but those prayers that we've known all our lives, in our church, in our school, in our families. These familiar prayers are meant to give us the words that will remind us of God's love and presence before we struggle seriously or move anywhere near the brink of hopelessness. We can turn to the Hail Mary or the Our Father to get our wheels turning and move into the embrace of God through prayer; these prayers catalyze our movement toward Him during those times when familiarity breeds comfort and peace, bringing solidity to our faith in a moment when we are seeking God.

Within these beautiful prayers lie profound formulas. These well-known phrases are simple enough to flow on naturally but rich enough to nourish us with great meaning. One phrase I come back to time and time again is in the Our Father:

Having obsessed in the form of an Honors Senior Thesis over the Kingdom of God, I enjoy that I've gained a layered understanding to what the Kingdom of God means for us. As a result, I really latch on to mentions of it in the readings for mass, and I usually perk up each time we pray over the Kingdom in the familiar prayer we say each mass.

We pray that God's kingdom will come, that His will be done. We pray that it happens on earth just as it happens in heaven. How can we know heaven on earth? How can we recognize and make present and real the Kingdom of God? Rather than dance around this any further, I'm gonna pass you on to one of my favorite theologians, who is all over this. Read it twice or three times or more because it makes those familiar words take on a beautiful depth for you when it sinks in...

"Two things are immediately clear from the words of this petition: God has a will with and for us and it must become the measure of our willing and being; and the essence of 'heaven' is that it is where God's will is unswervingly done. Or, to put it in in somewhat different terms, where God's will is done is heaven. The essence of heaven is oneness with God's will, the oneness of will and truth. Earth becomes 'heaven' when and insofar as God's will is done there; and it is merely 'earth,' the opposite of heaven, when and insofar as it withdraws from the will of God. This is why we pray that is may be on earth as it is in 'heaven' – that earth may become 'heaven.'" -Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth (Pt. 1)