Nurturing a hope rooted in Jesus

Paul Bednarczyk, CSC

Those who know me know that I am a sucker for a good story. I admit that I will stay up until 2 a.m. turning the pages of the latest John Grisham novel, or on a rainy Saturday afternoon, I will be in the community room watching an old Humphrey Bogart film on the Turner Classics station. I am certain that for all of us stories easily work their magic by providing us with the necessary mindless distraction and escape we need at times. But then there are other times when stories penetrate our inner realities and touch our hearts, enabling us to discover eternal truths which rise above time and differences and which unite us as a human family.

All good storytellers know that what makes an effective story is its ending. Because the storyteller knows where it is going to end up, he or she carefully and strategically arranges the sequence of happenings by identifying a beginning which leads to an end. Think of the many times you told your own vocation story. “It all began with…” or, “It all began when….” We tell our vocation stories in retrospect, knowing that it will end with our commitment to religious life, marriage or priesthood. In other words, it is the end that determines and reveals the meaning of our story, and ultimately our life.

In the reading that we just heard from the Philippians, St. Paul illustrates the universal story of all people— the journey of the soul, and in particular for Christians, our journey to God through Jesus Christ. Like any master storyteller, St. Paul knows that this sacred journey can only make sense and have meaning if we look at it within the context of its end, which as he says is “the prize of God’s upward calling, in Christ Jesus.”

While enticing us with the goal that is ahead in the distance, Paul reminds us that our journey is far from complete, and that we, like he, must continue to run our race on a complicated course riddled with twists, turns and dangerous pitfalls. What is unusual though about this story, this journey, is that it ends where it all began—in Jesus Christ.

Maintaining hope

Earlier in the year, I went for my annual check-up to a new doctor near where I live. Through the course of our initial conversation, he asked me what I did, and after I explained it, he simply said, “I can’t imagine doing what you are doing. It must be so difficult, and so discouraging. How do you maintain your hope?”

It is true. As we all know, vocation work is hard and is no simple task. We promote a way of life based on Gospel values contrary to our cultural values in a hostile climate. Some people look at us and our church with suspicion, if not outright derision. Where religious and clergy once held a privileged and revered status in society, our present situation in the church has challenged our former credibility and influence.

Combine this with a painful polarization resulting from conflicting ideologies, ecclesiologies, and christologies, and we are left with, for all appearance’s sake, a hopeless situation.

We can easily say with St. Paul, whatever gains we had, we have come to regard them as loss. But as we know, the story of our faith does not end in loss. Paul reminds us that by suffering the loss of all things, we gain Christ and can be found in him. In other words, it is exactly in these moments of suffering that we need to look beyond the present reality so that we can see the exciting possibilities that lie before us.

Dr. Robert Wicks, in his book, Riding the Dragons, tells a marvelously poignant story of one of his former students who returns to Ireland during a personally difficult time. This woman writes:

I visited with my aunt on her small farm. We walked together and came to a particular field. It was winter and frost covered the land. The ground beneath our feet was winter dark and hard. She looked over at me, smiled and asked me to kneel down, close my eyes, and place my hands on the earth. I did so and she said almost in a deep whisper, “Feel the life.” I couldn’t feel anything and told her so. She then told me to put my ear close to the earth and whispered hoarsely again, “Listen to the life.” In response I put my head close to the earth and listened intently. But I heard nothing. When I got up and told her that I could neither feel nor hear “the life,” she took my face between her hands and said, “alanna mo chroi (child of my heart), it is often when the land is most barren, cold, and dark that life is quietly growing!” When she said that, I knew she was speaking to my inner pain and the need for hope during the winter I was experiencing at such a young age.¹

As vocation ministers in the church, we know too well the barrenness of this ministry, yet we gather at this Convocation, hoping to feel and hear the future life of our church and of our religious communities that is buried within the cold darkness of our present winter reality. We come here to Chicago knowing the potential of this life, because we have experienced hope and joy even when our own journeys presented us with the occasional twists, turns and pitfalls. While we have been hurt and have sometimes imposed hurts on our brothers and sisters in community, we have also been the grateful recipients of their loving companionship and consolation in times of loneliness and grief. While we have all known the frustration and exhaustion which results from ministry, our faith has also been rejuvenated by the transformation and conversion in others we have witnessed in our ministry.

While we struggle to be faithful to a God who can appear to be elusive and absent, we remember those times when our hearts were burning inside of us as we experienced our own Emmaus meetings with the Risen Christ. We know that this life is good, but we also know what this life in Christ entails, and the suffering and joy that it brings. And yet like my doctor, there are times when we pause and wonder, how can I be hopeful when the situation seems so hopeless?

Jesus: source and sustenance of hope

Paul faced the same reality. He faced terrible dissension in the church of Corinth. He was literally run out of Ephesus, was almost stoned, only to be chained, then imprisoned and finally martyred. And we thought we had problems! How did St. Paul maintain his hope? How did he feel and hear the life within?

Paul makes it perfectly clear in this reading from the Philippians. First, his hope originates in his desire for Jesus Christ. Secondly, he sustains his hope by his faithfulness to that desire and by his gratitude for the journey on which his desire has led him.

We cannot dispute the clarity of Paul’s heart’s desire. He wants, to know Christ “and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming conformed to his death….” Paul knows who he is and he knows where he wants to go. He is a Christian, and he knows that the way to the goal ahead of him is the way of Calvary. His desire to fulfill his personal needs of success and fulfillment are secondary to his desire for Christ. Because of this, he is free to forsake everything for Christ, including his suffering. As Thomas Merton says, “holiness in Christ is…to completely abandon ourselves with confident joy to the apparent madness of the cross.”

I do believe that at some point, as vocation directors, we need to ask ourselves, what is our own heart’s desire in this ministry? Is it to fill up our formation houses with people to continue our community charisms and missions? Is it to bring about deeper conversion in the hearts and souls of our community members? What sufferings and obstacles in our ministry impede our own desire for a deeper life in Jesus Christ? Where is the journey of our desire leading, and do we exercise this ministry with the same confident joy of St. Paul?

As difficult as these questions are, nevertheless, their answers are necessary for us to live this life and to do this ministry faithfully and with integrity. St. Paul emptied himself for the sake of Christ and found the strength to endure and the freedom to pursue his ministry of preaching with joy and conviction. He began his race in Christ, keeping his eyes on the finish line, not looking back, but straining and pressing ahead to the ultimate goal. His secret was in the beginning and in the end of the story. It was Jesus Christ who gave him life, and it was Christ who saw it through to its completion. It was Jesus Christ who gave him hope, and it was Jesus Christ who sustained his hope.

Recalling our heroes

But for us, the difficulty is not in the beginning or in the end, as much as it is in the in-between. It is precisely in these “in-between times” that we encounter our struggles and doubts which weigh us down and prevent us from moving forward. This is when our hope for the future dims and our fidelity wavers.

These are the moments when we need the power and the magic of the story—not to distract us, but to inspire us. Our hope needs to be nurtured through the inspiration of the stories of those who have lived the faith yesterday and of those who continue to live the faith today, the great women and men, the heroines and heroes of our church and congregations, those who endured hardships, rejection, betrayal, and desolation and yet remained faithful to the course, never losing sight of the goal that awaited them.

How can you resist applauding Mother Theodore Guerin, who after several bizarre encounters with the dictatorial Bishop of Vincennes, was literally locked in a room and not allowed to leave until she resigned as superior. She not only walked out of that room with her head held high, but she had the opportunity to see the bishop resign as she continued her champion leadership of the Sisters of Providence in America. On the other side of the world, I am sure Mary Mackillop, foundress of the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph in Australia, could easily have empathized with her. She was excommunicated by her bishop after she refused in conscience to leave her sisters, knowing that he was trying to push her out so he could overtake the community. All of this was in direct violation of the very constitutions that he himself had approved! Ironically, the holiness of these two women was officially recognized by the church in their beatification by Pope John Paul II.

St. Peter Claver, whose feast we celebrate today, also knew rejection. Because of his ministry to the newly arrived slaves in Spain, he was continually ostracized and accused by his contemporaries of defaming the sacraments because he gave them to a people who “barely had a soul.”

Then there are the heartrending stories of the sufferings of those who battled their own demons. Even though he is esteemed as one of our great contemporary spiritual writers, Henri Nouwen wrestled repeatedly with his own sexuality and frequent bouts of loneliness and insecurity. Likewise, all of us were surprised to learn recently that despite her reputation for being a living saint, for decades Mother Teresa’s prayer life suffered from darkness and barrenness. It reminds me of my own founder, the Venerable Basil Moreau, who being faced with painful conflict and abandonment in the early stages of our Congregation of Holy Cross, literally knocked on the tabernacle door to see if anybody was home!

In a similar fashion, we can tell equally inspiring, dramatic stories of men and women today with like conviction, who show us that it is possible to run this race with fidelity, confidence and joy. Like them, as religious, we need to be beacons of hope so that we can inspire one another in this life, and possibly inspire others to take up the course and run with us.

Attitude of gratitude

St. Paul knows, though, that it is not only fidelity that sustains him; it is gratitude. Despite his many difficulties, St. Paul tells the Philippians to be glad and rejoice with him. He asks his followers to share in his gratitude for the journey on which his faith has led him.

Giving thanks is fundamental to being a Christian. Without a grateful heart, we simply cannot be the people of hope whom we aspire to be. Gratitude is concomitant with hope. But before we can experience pure gratitude, like Mother Guerrin, Mary Mackillop, Peter Claver, Henri Nouwen, Mother Teresa, Basil Moreau and countless other faith-filled people, we need to penetrate the depths of our own darkness first, be it within ourselves, within our church or within our own religious communities. By opening up our hearts to our vulnerabilities, we open up ourselves to grace, and our stories then take on their real magic. Our suffering and joy suddenly become united in gratitude, and then we begin in a most profound way to feel and to hear the life and hope that awaits us. As shameful as her excommunication was, Mary Mackillop was able to thank God for it, for as she later wrote of the experience, “I was intensely happy and felt nearer to God than I had ever felt before…I cannot describe the calm, beautiful something that was near.” Again, the telling of the story can only make sense in light of its ending.²

I would like to conclude this reflection with a quote from Vaclav Havel, former president of the Czech Republic and human rights activist during his country’s communist regime. Because his own integrity and convictions led him to proclaim the truth, Mr. Havel confronted many things about himself and his beliefs while he was imprisoned for his public speaking and writing. In the book, Disturbing the Peace, he reflects on the transcendental mystery of hope.

Hope…is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart.…It transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons…. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather, it is an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper the hope is…. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. In short, I think that the deepest and most important form of hope, the only one that can keep us above water and urge us to do good works…is something we get, as it were, from “elsewhere.” It is also this hope, above all, which gives us the strength to live and continually to try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now.³

These words could have been written for St. Paul as much as they could have been written for us.

If we are to parallel our experience with Havel’s words, I would assume that all of us know that the vocation we have chosen makes sense and the work that we do is good, even though at times we may not feel so successful. Our own stories prove it, for we have not given up on the race. But the story and the race are far from over. As religious, whether we are newly professed, major superiors or vocation directors, now more than ever, we must remain faithful to the beginning of the story just as much as we must never lose sight of its end. I believe that if we do this, then we will be grateful for these unsettling “in-between” times and we will be empowered to look forward with hope to the future and to the new stories still waiting to be told by those who have yet chosen to run with us. So as we with St. Paul “press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus,” let us prayerfully pause on this holy ground and feel and listen to the life and hope that lies within. And let us always be thankful, for “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8). :

1. Wicks, Robert J. Riding the Dragon. Notre Dame, Ind.: Sorin Books, 2003, p. 62-63.

2. As quoted by Robert McClory in Faithful Dissenters, Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2000, p. 152.

3. Havel, Vaclav. Disturbing the Peace. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1990, pp. 181-182.

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Paul Bednarczyk, CSC is Executive Director of National Religious Vocation Conference. A member of the Congregation of Holy Cross, Eastern Province of Brothers, he has been involved in vocation ministry since 1993.