Rev. Bob Silva
President, National Federation of Priests Councils
Monday, November 15, 2004

Introduction

God is the Environment in Whom I have lived my life from my earliest days. Never a question of whether God really is, always a realization that God is "in the mix", I grew up secure in the knowledge that "?no one lives for himself, no one dies for himself; whether we live or die, we are the Lord's."

I was born sixty five years ago in Carmel, California. A California Native American woman and a Spanish Military man named Manuel Butron, members of Father Juniperro Serra's community at Mission San Carlos Borromeo, provide the foundational roots of my California heritage. My Portugese history traces back to the Azorean migration to the Hawaiian Islands and from there to the California mainland. My father was born in Honokaa on the island of Hawaii. He migrated to the mainland at the age of nineteen as a stable-boy who cared for a shipload of polo ponies destined for the playing fields of the Monterey Peninsula.

The Carmel Valley, Monterey and the coastal mountain region of California were peopled by the indigenous Native American coastal tribes. They were peace-loving, gentle, welcoming. The tranquility of their lives and the future of the entire region was dramatically altered by the coming of the Spaniards. The Spanish explorer, Vizcaino, landed on the shores of Monterey Bay in the 1500's. The Carmelite priests who were with him celebrated Mass under a large Oak tree that still stands as a witness to their arrival. It is said that when they saw the mountain cliffs rising up from the mouth of the Carmel River, they likened the territory to Majorca and claimed it as their own.

I tell you this little background so that you will know that I tell the truth when I say that God is truly a "Given" in my life. From the earliest roots of my personal history, God and the Church have provided the context and the environment of my personal life and history.

The Early Years

Imagine the early California Ranch where horses, donkeys, mules, cattle, sheep, goats and hogs; rabbits, chickens and ducks and turkeys were the stock. Imagine the ranch located in the dusty hill country between the coast and the central valley without electricity, running water, telephone or indoor bathrooms. It was an eighty mile drive to town on an unpaved road with thirteen creek crossings to mark the progress. This meant that everything was grown or made on the ranch - wheat, barley, corn for the animals; tomatoes, carrots, beets, squash, lettuce, onions and garlic for the people.

As a small child, I loved to kick off my shoes and run barefoot in the dust and the dirt of the yard, taking in through my feet the creative power of God who made of the dust and the dirt the stuff of my life. It was God that we prayed to when we woke up in the morning, and it was God who cared for us throughout the day, and it was God we asked to bless us when we were ready to go to sleep.

When the terrible coastal storms hit, we put a candle in the window to make sure God could see us and protect us, our animals and our crops. Over the bed hung a picture of little children being watched over by their Guardian Angel - to this day, I am convinced that the angel protected my life when I was struggling to breathe in the middle of the night, my lungs filled with congestion. He came in the form of my grandmother who had in her hands a healing power that, to this day, I find hard to explain.

God and Jesus, for me as a child, were simply of fact of life, the substance of my life. To pray was to live.

The School Years

My formal education in the faith began at the hands of two Maryknoll nuns who were assigned to Mission San Juan Bautista and whose mission was to catechize the children and prepare them for the sacraments. For two weeks of a summer, the Sisters stayed in a borrowed home "up the canyon" and drilled into us the catechism answers which supposedly prepared us for First Holy Communion.

On the day of the First Communion Mass which was held at the parish church in Tres Pinos, we crawled into the car in our pajamas at three thirty in the morning and drove the eighty miles to town. In a gas station rest-room, my mother got us dressed for Church. Next I was whisked into a confessional where I told the priest my sins. Then Mass began. A lady sang "O Lord I Am Not Worthy", I received my First Holy Communion, and then got to drink hot chocolate and eat a store bought donut in a room next door to the Church. I had a hard time understanding that this was really where God and Jesus came to me. The closest I can come to describing the experience is to compare it with going to town to see a relative I had never met before. I knew he was a relative and that I should love him - but, he was a stranger to me. It would take time for me to realize him as one of the family.

When my family moved to San Francisco from the countryside, they were able to send me to a Catholic school where my formal Catholic education began. There the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the "BVM's" as they were known, helped to shape my catechetical and textbook knowledge of the Church and its teachings. It was Sister Mary Canice, a BVM nun who taught me in the eighth grade who was responsible for my aspiration to the priesthood.

Tortillas the size of platters, beans and rice, salsa, queso y semitas, enchiladas and tamales - not "de Mexico" - but that blend of Spanish and Native California Indian which made up an early California cuisine - did not prepare me for the boiled potatoes, bland meats and "mystery" dessert that I was fed in the seminary.

Nor did the warmth of a household rich in affection and nurturing of a treasury of relationships in extended family prepare me for the Irish American brand of French Sulpician spirituality I was asked to live throughout my years of priestly formation. If I wanted to be a priest, I had to become one of "them". And, I did. I started to wear shoes.

For many years, I lived in a kind of denial of my black eyes and brown skin. I was terribly confused by the isolation and aloneness imposed by the seminary formation system that was teaching me to be a priest. I who had come to know God through the dusty souls of my feet, now was called to discover him in the theology and philosophy books, in the spoken and formulated prayers, in the formality of a perfected and scripted liturgical action of the "church". My brain learned. But, in my mouth and my heart it was so much straw.

With my shoes on, I looked for God in ideas, in books and in the disciplined behaviors of a cleric. I became a sophisticated Churchman. Following my ordination to the priesthood, I moved into the world of "the Church". As an associate pastor in my first parish, I became a social justice activist. When I had disturbed the establishment enough that I was becoming a gadfly, I was sent to teach high school. From there, another activist priest drafted me into the college and university world. As a university chaplain and professor, I not only wore shoes; I wore tweed - all the while living a disciplined clerical life - with a few reprieves along the way.

It was a wise bishop who sent me from the University to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains where one of my first duties was to ride a horse carrying the ashes of an "old-timer" who was to be buried on a ranch that overlooked the Stanislaus River Canyon. No pavement of a highway, only the dust of the trail provided a way for our journey. It was the beginning of my way home.

I served as the pastor of three parishes. In each parish I was charged with building, organizing and restructuring pastoral and business plans. I even served as a seminary formator for a short while. But, my conversion has been effected through the interaction with my people - those who needed me, not for my sophisticated theology; not for my teaching, building or organizing skills; but, for the God who has never left me, hidden though He has been; the God who is the Environment in Whom I have lived all these years, Who began to show Himself once again on a dusty country trail as the Sustainer and Substance of my life.

In being with people who were yearning for God, whose hearts were "like dry weary land without water" thirsting for God, I have learned the real meaning of my life and of my priesthood. Standing with my brothers and sisters, barefoot in the dust once again, I realize as I did when I was a child, how wonderful it is that God still is making us all from the dust of the earth into a life which He alone knows fully.