Homily given during the Regional Assembly – Day 2

Although the word of warning of Jesus to the scribes and pharisees in today’s Gospel should not be too easily cast aside as not applicable to us, to me, that from the outside we look beautiful “but inside, we are full of the bones of the dead”, today it is not the time to make this reflection. Today we will reflect on what has been given to the world – to the Church, to the Congregation – by the work of our confreres – particularly by Richard who celebrating 60 years of religious life, and Dieudonné and Yuliwan who are celebrating 40 years of religious life.

That is why I have chosen to reflect on a saying Paul in the first reading, from his Letter to the Thessalonians. In the brief passage we read how Paul praised  the Thessalonians for “when they received the word of God, they accepted it not as a human word”, but, as the text says “as what it really is, God’s word, which is also at work in you believers.” Paul praises the Thessalonians for what they had accepted, as deeply personal, the Word of God, that this Word of God had become alive among them.

When we began our religious life, we were taught something extremely important about life. We were taught to meditate. Meditation, we were told, is of the essence of religious life. For most of us that teaching was something new. We were told that Father Dehon constantly regretted that his active life was preventing him from a life that he considered much more important: the contemplative life. For him the contemplative life – the attention to the Word of God within us – is the real life, the essence of life. I have learned again over the past few years, how intense that contemplative life became for Dehon. I became astounded,  in my study of Dehon’s meditations in Couronnes d’amour. by the depth of his attention, his contemplation, of disinterested, unconditional love and the desire that love be pure, that it not be contaminated by self-love/ amour propre. When he realized this, when it penetrated his soul, he wrote: “It is a grace for me. I place myself in a situation of ardent love for the Sacred Heart. It is for me the only way where I can walk more assuredly. The other directions may convince my spirit, but they do not grasp me as strongly. It is my way; it is the vocation. … It is my salvation and it is my sanctification.” (NQT 19/67) Dehon meditated on the gospel and its account of the love of God that came among us in Jesus. His contemplation of this love became for him a way of transforming his life. This contemplation became for him the greatest gift that he could receive from living. In the end, he acknowledged that it  allowed him to enter into the heart of Christ – the Sacred Heart. This is the ultimate gift of contemplation.

Many of us have half forgotten this truth that we were taught at the beginning of our religious life: the importance of contemplation. We have valued “action”, “work”, our ministry. We tell one another as we did on Monday night, what we have accomplished. We do not talk about what we accomplished by not doing, by just being, of our times of inaction, about the time that we had nothing to do, what we received without our doing, by our contemplative life. Shakespeare said it beautifully “We are made out of the stuff of dreams; what is measured out to us lies in a sea of sleep.” It is not what we do, but what we do not do – our inactivity – that is the measure of life. It is our interior life, as Dehon said repeatedly, that is the grace of life.

The South Korean philosopher Byung Chul Han tells us: “Our inactivity has its own logic, its own language, its own time, its our architecture, its own beauty, its own magic. It is not a weakness, a lack, but an intensity which (today) is hardly recognized and accepted.” (p. 9) Paul insists that only by the contemplation of the “Word” are we called into God’s glory and kingdom. Our silence deepens our speaking. Without the silence of contemplation, there can be no music, Han says. There can be no play, no religious living. The Jewish Shema tells us that the first word addressed to us by God’s word is “Listen!” Listen, you who struggle with God.  Listening is your life.

Today we give thanks again for the gift of life that we have received – not through our doing but through our receiving. Today we thank one another for keeping that word and that listening alive. That is the gift, I feel, that I have received particularly in the latter part of my life, to have time to reflect on the legacy of Dehon, to appreciate his contemplative life, something that a few years ago I hardly knew, hardly appreciated. It is a gift of inactivity. Some suggested that the Spirit received at Pentecost was not so much a Spirit of activity, but of fatigue: that it inspired the disciples not so much about what needed to be done, but what can be left behind. When Jesus left the gathered disciples in the cloud at the ascension, he left them an experience, a revelation. He told them to give to others what they had received. It was more a reign of inactivity as the Jewish people imagined the Sabbath, the day of rest, to be. A time of completion, fulfillment, but as a rest. This time of my life is the time of Sabbath, a time that will allow me to see life differently. That is what I hope with you.

Fr. John van den Hengel, scj