David O'Brien, Ph.D.
Loyola University Chapel Series
January 12, 2004

I am grateful for the invitation to be with you tonight, and I am especially grateful for the opportunity to visit so many friends in Chicago. I hope you will recognize that my remarks tonight are informed by themes long associated with Chicago Catholicism. I hope too that you will hear some echoes of my mentor and friend Monsignor John Egan: how we have missed his friendship, his pastoral care for us, and, during this time of crisis in the church, his wisdom about priesthood and ministry and shared responsibility.

Tonight's program calls for a short, somewhat personal address speaking to great themes of faith and vocation and church. I have chosen to approach these topics through the lens of this amazing reading about love from the First Letter of John. I would ask you to attach to that powerful statement of Christian faith these words of John Paul II, speaking about "Teaching Peace" on World Day of Peace, just a few days ago:

Christians know that love is the reason for God's entering into relationship with man (humanity). And it is love which God awaits as man's (humanity's) response?.At the beginning of a new year I wish to repeat to women and men of every language, religion and culture the ancient maxim: Omnia vincit amo (Love conquers all). Yes, dear brothers and sisters throughout the world, in the end love will be victorious! Let everyone be committed to hastening this victory. For it is the deepest hope of the human heart.

(Origins, January 1, 2004)

Like others of my generation I took much about faith and church for granted. I accepted Catholicism as a gift passed to me through my remarkable family. Faith was experienced in family rituals and the rhythms of practice in parish and parochial school. Catholic faith was given enormous significance by our family connections to Maryknoll, by the religiously loaded narrative of the Cold War, and by the integrated American Catholic civil religion that informed my experience at the University of Notre Dame. Only later, through some combination of Catholic renewal, social conflict over race and war, and providential encounters first with the Catholic Worker, then with Jack Egan's Catholic Committee on Urban Ministry, only then did I begin to probe Catholic meanings with personal as distinct from academic seriousness. For me as for so many others the faith once integrated with family and group identity, and with national and global conflicts, became, in Karl Rahner's famous phrase, "a matter of personal decision constantly renewed amid perilous surroundings."

Along the way I learned, in part from Isaac Hecker, that in our America, eventually, the bonds of ethnic and regional subcultures fade and we Christians all become evangelicals. That is to say we turn to the scriptures, we focus on the person of Jesus, we invite each other to conversion, and we seek communities where our newly affirmed personal faith can be shared. Successful pastoral strategies in the middle class almost always involve scripture, conversation, small groups. When prayer groups meet in your parish or mine, when our students turn to shared prayer after a service project, I suspect parishioners and students sound pretty much alike, at Blessed Sacrament or at Willow Brook, at Loyola or at Wheaton.

For me that turn to a more personal faith was formed as well by moments when I heard people speak of love. Bill Miller, writing of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker, introduced me to the idea that for Christians love might indeed be at the center of human history. If so, our writing and teaching about history should reflect that idea. I was stunned one day by an eloquent Michael Himes reminder that love is the word we Christians use to express our hesitant, partial understanding of the mystery that lies beyond the inner and outer horizons of our experience. The first word we use, or should use, about such matters is mystery-----we really don't know. To that modesty before the mysterious we Christians bring the revealed word of God as light in the darkness. As we heard a few minutes ago: "God is love and anyone who lives in love lives in God and God lives in him [or her]." At about the same time Joanne and I heard a Marriage Encounter priest bring that message home: with all our human limitations, when we make our daily decision to love one another, we participate in the very life of our God. Wow!

And then there was Thomas Merton's moment of grace on a Louisville street corner when the author of the counter-cultural Seven Storey Mountain realized that he loved all those people. From then on, Merton thought differently. In 1967 Pope Paul VI asked Merton to draft a letter from contemplatives to people living "in the world." At first Merton hesitated, telling his superiors that "we [contemplatives] do not speak the language of modern man" and there is danger of "driving him deeper into despair, simply by convincing him that we belong to an entirely different world." The monk, Merton argued, would have to speak to those outside the monastery "as brothers, as people who are in very much the same difficulties as he is, as people who suffer much of what he suffers, though we are immensely privileged to be exempt from so many, so very many of his responsibilities and sufferings."

With that kind of populist, pastoral love for people, faith comes to new life: We celebrate Christmas--the God who is love comes among us----and Epiphany---our God loves everyone, not just us----the Sermon on the Mount, guidance in living the life of love----Crucifixion---love is not sentimental but, in Dostoevsky's phrase long repeated by Dorothy Day, love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing. And Easter: there is a future, for all of us, promises of what the Pope calls "a civilization of love" that is not pablum and platitudes but a genuine historic goal that, in God's time, and with our free response, will be fulfilled. Hope is possible.

So, at the heart of all our hungers and yearnings is love, its occasional presence, its too frequent absence. The good news of Christian life is that love is real, and available in the incarnate Jesus, who remains present to us is God's spirit, a spirit of love found in surprising places, even among us, who claim to be the very body of Christ, making Christ present to others. Sometimes. Easter means that love will win out in the end. The bad news is that the win will be very close. Real love is not about winning, results, success. It's about participating in the life of a God whose overwhelming love could not stop the slaughter of his own son or, to underline the point, of his beloved and still chosen people, our Jewish brothers and sisters. And slaughters continue.

This points us to the second big Christian idea: solidarity. God loves everybody. Think how we will feel at the pearly gates if we get in and others don't. That anxiety is solidarity, the opposite of so many fundamentalisms which are about boundaries and leaving some out so the rest of us can get in. Solidarity, like love, has its soft and sentimental side----it takes a village, so why can't we all be nice. It can sound easy: interdependent globalization will cause some short run pain but in the end we will all benefit. We can do the right thing for our people after 9/11, but it won't require any great sacrifice, at least not for us. But solidarity is not that easy. If we are connected, really connected, then we are responsible for one another. The Quakers have a phrase: don't just do something, sit there. The great reporter Jonathan Kozol speaks and writes eloquently of individual children and families in America's poorest neighborhoods, then asks us to simply abide for a moment with the truth that they are there and we are here---from that meditation, for many, come personal commitments to justice seeking and peacemaking---solidarity----but translating those commitments into life choices, vocational choices: what shall I do, how should I do it, with whom shall I do it, is not easy-then old harsh and dreadful stuff again, the product of our freedom, and our limitations, evidence of our need for grace, and for one another, which might be the same thing. God loves everybody-and as those called to be God's presence in history we must try as best we can to do the same.

Finally a third big truth is that Bill Miller was right: history looks different. For the Christian history is not something that happens to somebody else, at some other time and in some other place---its about us, now, and our decisions, especially about love ---for in the end the price of freedom is that love is a decision-----we are responsible. Nor is the center of history where we thought it was. The writer Norman Mailer in his great book of the 1960s about a march on the Pentagon felt the center move that day from that building to a jail cell holding a dozen obscure Quaker peacemakers. Think again of September 11----------mass murderers turned history, but so, perhaps, did selfless fireman and innumerable heroes and heroines who, when their moment of truth came, spoke in acts of selfless love. A big claim then about love and solidarity: we are talking not about personal matters alone but about the meaning of human history----love matters.

For me that faith in love is embedded in another story, the story of American Catholicism. I tell that story as an unreconstructed Americanist, regarding it as a story not just of Americanization, that ambiguous process of adaptation to our society which disturbs so many of our deep thinkers. No, our forebears did not experience passive adaptation but positive self- making. Ours is a story of genuine, which is to say human and ambiguous, liberation. In a few generations poor, marginalized and despised peasants became----you and me. The becoming was intentional, and it was often fueled by love. Families gave meaning to suffering and sacrifice through hope for their children. In their churches folk memories were brought to bear on new aspirations. And, for many, aspirations for freedom, security and respect were indeed fulfilled. Liberation, of its very nature, brings with it new freedom, and freedom's partner, responsibility. We can, if we choose, take our responsible place with others at the center of our society, and renew and reform our church in ways appropriate to that new location. If the journey ends instead in a new captivity, as many fear, captivity to materialism or individualism, the so-called "culture of death," if we fail to fulfill the promise of American Catholic life but choose instead to reconstruct separate Catholic subcultures, that will be our choice, and our responsibility.

As we struggle in the church with the choices consequent on our freedom, what difference might love make?

Here at Loyola we might ask what would happen if we considered the possibility that love, because it is so important, might deserve more academic attention. To frame it in Jesuit terms, perhaps we could actually think about that much admired slogan "men and women for others" as an intellectual challenge. When we don't think about love, Reinhold Neibuhr once suggested, love often ends up as sentimentality or fanaticism: the lover retreats to private life and creates a haven in a heartless world, or the lover commits to a life of love without thought and burns out, a phenomenon familiar to many of us who work with young activists. Is it possible to think harder about the concrete historical possibilities of love? Stephen Post of Case-Western Reserve University in Cleveland, one of the nation's leading bioethicists, thinks so. He persuaded the Templeton Foundation to invest several million dollars in an Institute for Research on Unlimited Love. So far my Jesuit colleagues have not responded to my suggestion that they seek a men and women for others grant.

What if we learned to speak of love as we consider vocation. At Lappionao, the international formation center of the Catholic renewal movement Focalare, highly educated young adults from across the globe speak of vocations informed by love. One young woman, painting some of the high quality children's furniture manufactured in a Focalare cooperative, spoke of her prayer as she worked for the parents and child who would use the crib. In prayer and work and study these impressive young Catholics dare to think that love can inform their work and their politics as it informs their personal and religious lives, even in settings where the Catholic hegemony that still haunts our imaginations is literally unthinkable. One veteran Focalare member told us that while integrating love into law or medicine or business might be hard, sustaining confidence that love is possible is by far the greater challenge. It surely is!

What if we found ways to speak of love as we struggle with the question of gay marriage, as we are in Massachusetts on the eve of a constitutional convention? Official proclamations seem far removed from pastoral realities as couples of all sorts struggle to make love work. Some good pastors and some loving moms and dads tell us that some gay women and men seem to experience new dignity, confidence and hope when they find a loving and committed partner. Love in such cases seems life-giving: it makes a difference. Where is God, or, better, how do we make God present, as our people, Catholics and all Americans, struggle with such matters?

And what if we thought again about whether we should love this country of ours, and its people? We are told to think many things about what we call the sixties. Most such well intentioned advice is misguided or self-serving. For me the events of those years were filtered through my Notre Dame civil religion and the memories are central, not marginal, to my religious journey. John Kennedy's inauguration, and his funeral. Dr. King's dream, the courage of Black people, in the south and down the street, Bobby Kennedy's moment of grace-filled solidarity with hundred of African Americans in an Indianapolis street amid the shock of Dr. King's murder. How we loved our country and our people at such moments. And how we wondered about God's absence when we stared at images of police dogs in Birmingham, frightened children fleeing bombs in Vietnam, a Black man assaulted with an American flag in Boston. What was gained in the sixties was personal responsibility---so many decided they had to something, for their own integrity. What was lost was innocence about power and about social sins, including our own. What was endangered was our trust in one another, without which no Republic can flourish.

Cheapened use of beloved symbols then and now built cynicism, but recovery is possible. We know that because moments of Americanist civil faith and love punctuated our experience of 9/11. Ordinary people, our people, rushed to the aid of other ordinary people. A priest chaplain in death becomes a shared sacrament of American solidarity. Chicago's Eugene Kennedy recalls the last cell phone calls of men and women facing death as a litany of love----again and again the message was simple: I love you. The short biographies of victims published daily for months in the New York Times, story after story of people, like us, much loved themselves, remembered now for their care for others. Jim Dwyer's remarkable reporting of families and neighborhoods drawing on reservoirs of faith and hope in rituals of grief and farewell, rituals at once theirs and ours. Yes, we wanted to say, these are my people and I could ask no more of God than to be allowed to share their life and fate.

For us Catholics can we not ask for a rebirth of Americanism. Ours should not be a counter-cultural righteous Catholicism obsessed with its difference and distance from others but a Catholicism that makes present the Christ of Epiphany, wanting to be at one with everybody. At Vatican II we said no to countercultural Catholicism: "The joys and the hopes, the griefs and anxieties, of the men and women of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these too are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ." What if we made such love and solidarity the starting point for our prayer-and our politics?

And what of love amid the crisis of the church? One is reminded of a story told by Herbert Hoover as the country sank into the depths of the Great Depression. He said that it reminded him of a little boy who asked his mother if she remembered their family's beautiful vase that she once said had been handed down from generation to generation. Mother answered that she did remember the vase. Well, said the little boy, this generation dropped it.

We are the Body of Christ, the people of God, called to be, together, sacraments of God's love here in the United States. Now we face a crisis of integrity: can we care for victims in such a way as to express our sense of truthfulness, justice and compassion, whose absence has set at risk the integrity of our community of faith? As the Body of Christ we are also supposed to be a sacrament of solidarity. Can we restore our trust in and care for one another by reforming our governance in order to insure greater justice and accountability? Are we ready to talk together about the hard questions of pastoral ministry now facing us? Can we escape our misplaced deference and learn to speak honestly and act responsibly so that our common life as Catholics will express the intimacy of our communion with one another? Finally, as Body of Christ, each of us is responsible for the life and mission of the church. Can we find loving ways to call each other to account and to share responsibility for responding to the most important challenge our American church has ever faced? In the context of the crisis our call to think about love and its requirements becomes urgent and inescapable. That is what some Catholics are trying to do in Voice of the Faithful and comparable groups. Expressing anguish, hoping the bishops will listen and waiting for them to give permission for others to act, such detachment simply will not do. It too easily slips into excuses for avoiding responsibility, widespread, I fear, among Catholic academic and cultural leaders. Especially those of us working in and responsible for Catholic institutions must do what we can to insure that our church's actions are marked by truthfulness, justice, generosity and compassion.

So let us conclude with three suggestions about the consequences of love:

1. Solidarity, not subcultures. Let us be sure that as we speak of the needed Catholic resourcement, recovery of a sense of our distinctive faith and mission, that we do so in a spirit of social and intellectual solidarity with others who struggle for meaning and love.
2. Responsibility, not passed bucks. Let us admit that we failed to build the structures of shared faith and responsibility that we needed if we were to truly live out our commitment to be the Body of Christ, the people of God. When the anticipated bad news comes from the National Review Board at the end of next month, let us no longer ask if the bishops are listening but begin as best we can to develop procedures and structures through which all of us can share in deliberations and response. .
3. A preferential but not exclusive option for the laity. In the nineteen century our church deliberately set itself off against the larger society. That choice bred incredible heroism and sacrifice for the sake of the church, but it also led to tragic isolation and irresponsibility amid the crimes of the last century. In our time Pope John XXIII helped our church make a different choice, for solidarity and shared responsibility for the fate of the human family. The first choice, of its very nature, bred distrust of the laity, of necessity living every day in societies that had rejected the church. The choice of Pacem in Terris and Gaudium et Spes calls for dialogue between faith and culture, commitment to the common good with all persons of good will, and shared responsibility for the church's mission among clergy, religious and laity, who in this age become the major agents of the church's mission precisely because of their engagement with the world. As we try to be a sacrament of love, the body and presence of Christ, all the time and not just when we gather at church, let us recall the vision of an earlier generation: Father Dan Cantwell, Ed Marciniak, Patty and Pat Crowley, Matt Ahmann, Peggy Roach and Monsignor Egan. I end with a prayer of St Therese of Avila which reflects that spirit of taking on responsibility for the life and work of our church: