Illuminations Our homilies are all around
us
By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Woody Guthrie scuffed up and down
America during the dust bowl, playing songs of social protest with the words
this machine kills fascists scrawled on his guitar. His point was
that, in the right hands, even a beat-up acoustic guitar can strike blows for
justice.
Jesuit Fr. Walter Burghardt, widely acknowledged as one of
Americas best preachers, believes the same thing can be said for
pulpits.
Burghardt, 85, has crisscrossed the world since 1991, trying to
help ministers be better preachers of social justice. So far hes offered
86 workshops as part of his Preaching the Just Word project, based
in Washington, where Burghardt is a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological
Center. This summer, Burghardt will ride the circuit again from Maryland to
Ohio to North Dakota (where hell finish up with a session at the aptly
named Rough Rider Hotel in Medora).
When Walter Burghardt talks preaching, people listen.
In the mid-1990s, Baylor University in Waco, Texas, set out to
identify the 12 most effective preachers in America. After a search that
unfolded over two years, Baylor, a Baptist institution, named Burghardt to the
list, where he joined luminaries such as Billy Graham and Charles Swindell. He
was the only Catholic so honored.
The plaudit came on top of Burghardts long and distinguished
career as a theologian and patristics scholar, solidifying his reputation as
one of the more remarkable personalities in the American church. He sat down
with NCR during a mid-February visit to Kansas City.
Burghardt said hes been a weaver of words since his days in
St. Francis Xavier High School in New York City in the late 1920s (hes
not kidding; he manages to use both mewl and eructation
on the first page of his just-published memoirs). Yet his panache in the pulpit
is not merely the result of natural talent or a rigorous Jesuit education. He
said -- and seems for all the world to mean it -- that he spends four hours of
prep time for every minute he preaches.
Burghardt once described what hes trying to capture by
quoting a passage from Richard Bach in Illusions: Once in a while
theres a great dynamite burst of flying glass and bricks and splinters
through the front wall, and somebody stalks over the rubble, seizes me by the
throat and gently says, I will not let you go until you set me, in words,
on paper.
Probably few Catholics can remember the last time they heard a
sermon that felt like it arose from such a shattering epiphany. Yet Burghardt
believes every experience in a preachers life, in its own way, aspires to
trigger such a breakthrough.
Your homily is being prepared whether you know it or not by
everything you do and experience, Burghardt told NCR. Your
meditation in the morning, the people you meet during the day, the books you
read, the articles you read, the movies you see, the hospitals and jails you
visit -- all the contacts you make in the course of a day. Relatively few
priests think of this as preparation for their homily, and yet it is.
Our homilies are all around us all day long. Our failure is
in not putting our experience in contact with the homilies we write and with
the people we serve.
This belief in experience as the fons perennis of preaching
means that for Burghardt everything that happens to him is a resource.
Preaching to the elderly, I need no longer pretend, he wrote
recently. I can feel in my flesh what aging is like. Arthritic joints
jab, oxygen reaches for the heart more painfully, bones turn brittle and
sauerkraut makes for diarrhea.
Only a man of faith could find a silver lining in the
gastrointestinal fallout of sauerkraut.
Burghardt is aware, however, that some kinds of experiences lend
themselves to preaching on justice better than others. A passion for justice,
he said, wells up out of solidarity with the poor.
I have suggested that it would be very good for my preaching
if I were to take an HIV-positive baby in my arms, the way Mother Teresa
did, Burghardt said. Underneath all this there has to be a
spirituality that turns the preacher inside out, makes a new person of him and
puts fire in the belly.
Burghardt the scholar is a master of the church fathers. (A
favorite line from Clement of Alexandria: There is only one river of
truth, but many streams fall into it on this side and on that.) For 44
years he edited or co-edited Theological Studies, and in that capacity
exerted an enormous influence over the direction of theological discourse in
this country. He has served as president of the Catholic Theological Society of
America.
Burghardts parents were immigrants from a corner of the old
Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father died at 53 and his mother at 80 (his only
brother died three weeks after his father, both of cancer). He has been a
Jesuit for 69 years and a priest for 59 years.
One of the charming things about Burghardt is that his gentle
spirit has never suffocated his ability to tell it like it is. For example, in
a 1970s convocation address at The Catholic University of America, Burghardt
wondered out loud why the law school library had to kick students out at
midnight, while the theology stacks were lonelier than a Maytag repairman. One
reason, he concluded, is that lawyers rise only as far as their mastery of the
law takes them, while a priest can be theologically illiterate and become
a bishop.
Burghardt is a prolific author, with 21 books and 287 articles to
his credit. Two new books are out now: Long Have I Loved You, a set of
memoirs published by Orbis Books; and Christ in Ten Thousand Places, a
collection of sermons from Paulist Press.
Though it doesnt show up on his curriculum vitae, Burghardt
is also a repository of living Catholic memory. He wasnt at Vatican II --
somehow the Holy Spirit managed it without me, he joked -- but he
feels in his bones what those who led the councils reforms hoped to
achieve.
Hes old enough, for example, to remember that Pius XI once
forbade Catholics to take part in ecumenical endeavors because they were
pan Christian. He knows, too, what the crackdown on modernism
launched by Pius X had done to seminary education by the time he came up
through the system (among other things, Jesuit seminarians had to obtain
permission if they wanted to read an adversary of the faith such as
Immanuel Kant). He can recall those days fondly without wanting them back.
Burghardt was among the first members of the International
Theological Commission formed by Paul VI to advise the Holy Office, joining
such legends as Karl Rahner, Joseph Ratzinger and Hans Urs von Balthasar.
(Long Have I Loved You is full of anecdotes drawn from these
experiences. He relates how at the first meeting, someone kidded Rahner about
writing sentences that went on for 60 lines; in all seriousness Rahner replied,
I have never written a German sentence longer than 33 lines.)
Burghardt doesnt flinch when asked what aspect of Vatican II
strikes him as most underdeveloped in todays church.
Collegiality in practice, he said. The pope
should not appear or seem to be the ordinary of every diocese, and bishops
should be allowed much more freedom to express themselves without getting into
trouble.
For all his erudition, Burghardt feels most alive in the pulpit.
He said the Sunday homily is where popular support for justice issues must be
built.
Going across the country as we have with our project, we
have found a fair number of good preachers and a small number of very good
preachers, Burghardt said. But by and large, our preaching is just
not what it should be.
The Preaching the Just Word project offers a five-day
retreat/workshop, based on themes from the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius
Loyola, integrating personal prayer with reflection upon scripture, the social
teaching of the church, contemporary culture, homiletics and liturgy.
Though he focuses intensely on justice, Burghardt transcends any
separation between horizontal spirituality (such as, building a better world)
and vertical (a me and Jesus prayer life). His definition of
contemplation is a long, loving look at the real.
The real is everything that is. Its a child with a
chocolate ice cream cone, its the sun setting in the West, its a
striding woman with windblown hair, its a sparkling glass of burgundy,
its Christ Jesus, Burghardt said. If you know and love the real, he
suggests, youll defend it if it is deformed. That is where concern for
justice is born.
His best advice for struggling preachers? Lead people to immerse
themselves in life, to know and love the real themselves.
If I want to sell you on spaghetti bolognese, I dont
give you a menu or a recipe. I let you smell it and taste it. If I really want
you to appreciate Mozarts sonata, I dont give you the score, I play
it for you, he said. Thats what preaching should do, put
people in contact with experience.
John L. Allen Jr. is NCR opinion editor. His e-mail
address is jallen@natcath.org
National Catholic Reporter, March 24,
2000
|