Pastor
St. Agnes Parish
Louisville, KY

"My fulfillment is in the challenge people bring to me in ministry. After so many years of preparation, formation, theology, study—suddenly, people come with the profound human experience of falling in love, feeling betrayal in marriage, losing a child in death, or watching their career crumble before their eyes and they preach to me of what the passion is." 

 

How long have you been a member of the Passionist Family?

I have been a Passionist 37 years. I was professed on October 15, 1972 and Ordained on June 4, 1976. Since then I have ministered as an itinerant preacher, vocations director, retreat house associate director and campus minister.  I was appointed Pastor of St. Agnes Parish on August 1, 2003.  

What drew you to the Passionist community?

I think the biggest thing was growing up as a child in Chicago. Our home parish in Chicago was staffed by Passionists. They were just happy men. When people like Fr. Benet Kieran, C.P., would come to our house he would bring holy cards and a big smile and I knew that was for me. Anyone who is that happy and had it that put together, I knew that is what I wanted to do.

What kinds of ministries have you been involved in?

I have done a lot of itinerant preaching. But it really has been a mixture. I’ve been in campus ministry for two years, vocations work for five years, parish ministry, and a little bit of retreat house ministry, I like variety in life.

How has what you do influenced other areas of your life?

Recently, here at St. Agnes, our Parish Pastoral Council, Pastoral Staff, and some organization heads spent a Saturday developing a vision statement; "Embracing Jesus’ suffering love for all, and making it visible in worship, service, formation and education." I see a strong correlation between our Passionist charism and the nature of pastoral ministry. As a pastor I am different because of the formation/education I’ve been privileged to receive.

What you find rewarding about Passionists ministry?

For me the reward or fulfillment is in the challenge people bring to me in ministry. After so many years of preparation, formation, theology, study—suddenly, people come with profound human experience of falling in love, feeling betrayal in marriage, losing a child in death, or watching their career crumble before their eyes and they preach to me of what the passion is. I mean I suddenly realize I am on holy ground when I listen to them telling their story. As good as my formation was, and I tremendously reverence it, I’m grateful for the formation we were given, my education came later I think. It came after I was ordained. It is just the holiness of people’s lives that I find so rewarding. It is a real privilege to be there and have people break open their experience with me.

I think in some ways that is why the metaphors we have from the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures are of people taking off their shoes as reverence of God! There was a young family at Immaculate Conception parish, Chicago, I remember—a young son had a brain tumor. When I got to the hospital, I’ll always remember this, watching the parents sobbing with not only relief and gratitude now, but something far more profound. And just watching that happen I suddenly realized where charity and love is ….this is God! Watching their love for their children, that is when you take off your shoes and you shut up.

What do you find rewarding about preaching?

I find preaching is an arena for my own spirituality. That sounds kind of narcissistic but it offers me a forum for me to process my own God relationship. Although sometimes on a retreat team we will give the same "conference" week after week after week, it’s never the same. And it is because the people are coming with so much different experience, and it is not just their body language, but the stories they tell that afternoon.  They bring their God experience into my life and suddenly I find myself using the pulpit to kind of work my salvation. Preaching is exciting; it’s dynamic; it’s not a static thing. It is an arena for developing and growing into our own salvation. The people make us saints. That for me is why it is so alive. Friday night you can be dead tired, and the people come and suddenly you are zapped! You are just being charged because people bring their God experience.

You speak of something very holy. It is holy. Yet the way you speak of it is different than people’s understanding of "church," bringing your God experience in terms of the actual lived experiences of your life i.e. betrayal, falling in love, and things like that. Many people could be very challenged because it does not fit their model of what church is about.

We have said this before, but the metaphor I always use for a preacher is one of a mirror. Where people can come and bounce their experience off for a weekend or a week and a go back and reflect because mirrors do that. I think most people, regardless of the paradigm they use for their own faith, know that God works in their lives. And they know they rely on grace. And I think our task is simply to hold it before them once in a while and to reverence it (Re-vere) to look at it again with them and give them that space. I used to get a lot more criticism and resistance from people in the pews, maybe it is because I am getting older, but I don’t get that anymore. I used to get fiery responses, and I know I’ve mellowed too, I think a lot of it is that beginning to respect people’s lives more than I did when I was younger. I don’t have to be messiah or change them I just have to let God’s grace work.

Talk to me about community life. What is community life like for you?

I am convinced that, and I am growing in my conviction, but when I listen to married couples for example, I am more and more comfortable experiencing the grace of matrimony with them where it is not just some profound experience they get walking down the aisle in tuxedos and pretty white dresses. God keeps lavishing their lives with his grace, and 20 or 25 years later God continues to change them through the mystery of one another’s presence. I think in many ways our sacrament as religious is the giftedness and limitation of the mystery we bring to one another. I know I don’t want to live in isolation. I want someone to hold my feet to the fire and keep challenging me, getting angry with me, and loving me. Christianity is not a mystical religion, it is a psychological religion. I believe it is a relational thing where Jesus keeps relating with his disciples. And I think to be followers, to be living that intense religious life you have to be highly relational. Whether introvert or extrovert it means we keep relying on one another for grace. And we have to keep naming that grace. So I just keep growing in gratitude for this thing called community. It’s hard work. It makes me angry sometimes, and it makes me runaway. And I know that is why God dwells in it. Because it is always engaging.

What are the rewards for you of community?

Because we live in such an individualist culture, an isolationist culture, community life for me is very countercultural. Sometimes I think I get bloated with the comfort and convenience of doing my own thing. And it gets very unbalanced and very unhealthy living in our culture. Living in community moves against that and forces me to go deeper. I don’t know, perhaps if I lived in India it might be different, which is not an individualized culture. So I think our charism will be enfleshed in a different way. I would be curious talking to you a year or two from now. But for me it is just too easy to get home from a parish mission and just go to my room. And lock myself into my own world of study or entertainment. And then I get very narcissistic, self-absorbed and self-indulgent. And it is very un-freeing it’s very unhealthy. So the reward of community is bumping up against relationships when I do not choose it. And that to me is life-giving. It is like we said about assignments. I did not choose vocation work, I didn’t choose parish ministry. I didn’t choose itinerant life. Yet they were always life-giving, challenging and fun. And I get to meet new people. And I am just so grateful for things that I don’t plan all the time.

What words of advice would you give for a young man coming in to the community who has come in from an individualist culture who does not understand community?

Hmmm, two things. Number one, be yourself. It takes a tremendous amount of discipline I think, in our culture, to cut through all the expectations and to be your most true genuine authentic self…. To be the most grace full person God intended you to be. The greatest gift you can give to humanity, I think, is yourself. But you have to be your authentic self so that takes a lot of discipline. Secondly, I think you have to keep breaking boundaries and keep stretching and living on the edge. So as soon as you have a concept of what "church" should be, or what "family" should be, or what "religious life" should be, I think what happens is God kind of tears the veil, like at the moment of the crucifixion. When we go through that Paschal mystery we have to keep breaking boundaries and tearing down curtains, and allowing God to be God, not limiting God to my own perception or my own myopic vision. I always say in preaching, one of the joys of having terrible eyesight is that I can’t limit reality to what I see because I can’t see too much. And it is kind of a spiritual image for me too.

How did you learn about the charism of the Passionists?

I remember as a little boy; maybe five or six, growing up in the Passionist Parish, one of our neighbors down street was a very ill man. I mean he was a terrible alcoholic. And I used to watch the way some of our Passionist priests would minister in this very broken situation. And I learned something about the Cross just doing that. Or I had cousin die at 28 from cancer, leaving two little kids. I watched Passionists respond to the death. I learned about the charism primarily by watching other people dealing with pain. I was given a great formation program and I am very grateful for novitiate, and student life. But in the same way that I spoke about ministry I learned a whole lot about the charism from a parishioner in Chicago. We buried her husband before he was 40 and then she was given three little kids with cystic fibrosis. I met every Friday with her, which she called spiritual direction, but I know for me it was my formation to what our charism is. Those kinds of people I have just been gifted with. Every moment of my life someone in my life has been like that. They are just gifted people who teach me about the Cross. I mean they don’t wear a habit, but they certainly know it. So yes, it has been a mixture of both. It has been Passionists who have passed on, and some of it has been reading Fabiano Giorgini and those kinds or people, and I treasured that. But I also know I’ve learned the charism through the lived experience of people.

In some idealistic ways we always talk about the historical Jesus vs. the suffering of the body of Christ today. It is not a theory for me today, I know it concretely. I walked that with people and have been privileged to hear their stories.

Why the Passionists? Why the Passionist charism? Do you find more meaning in it then somebody else’s charism?

I’m not sure. I think I could be a Jesuit or Franciscan. I mean I like to study. And I think we bring people lots of freedom and grace when we can educate and pull them out of their own darkness. There are a lot of good charisms out there. Number One, I love to preach. I like words. And I like the Word. Not just as a linguistic technique but as God’s promise. It’s living. It’s dynamic. It’s double-edged and I really believe all that wonderful rhetoric we use. Because words change us. So I rely a lot on words. They are not the emotional rip-offs. They are not a way to manipulate people. But I think the power of words really changes us. Whether it is the lyrics of a song, or the dialogue of a movie or play, or listening to a homily, or just listening to a conversation in a restaurant with someone I love, I am always changed by those words. Part of our charism has got to do with preaching and with words. But I also think it is the Passion. It is suffering. It is finding meaning in disciplining ourselves to articulate that in words. That is the best means of communication we have to understand our pain. I was a Psych. major in college. Analysis means to free up. And I have watched through counseling, spiritual direction, reconciliation, preaching, I have seen people get through their suffering by being "freed up" through the analysis, through the words that happen.

Prayer: Why is prayer important? Why is prayer important to you? How does prayer change you?

I heard an interview that Bill Moyer did with Joseph Campbell. Moyer had asked Campbell about the role of priesthood, and Campbell’s response went back to the eastern concept of Shaman, and the role of the priest in that context is to link people to God. To be so at one, to be so in union with God yourself, that you have the power to bring your people into that mystical experience of unity. I’m pretty sure that is what our task as religious, especially as priests, but as religious is to be –-Men and women of prayer. Basically that means to be in union with God. It doesn’t mean that we have to spend three hours in front of the blessed Sacrament necessarily every day, or that I have to do centering prayer, or whatever practice I find for me. But it does mean that I have such a rhythm in my life of union with God that I can pull other people into that. If I’m just part of an overstimulated, narcissistic culture that kind of bounces people away, then I don’t think we do anything good for folks. So there is a functional approach to my prayer life. I want to be so centered in God that I can pull people into that unity. At this point of my life I find solitude very easy. I love eight day retreats. There are times that if I am very anxious in ministry or with getting a job done, I can just close my eyes and think of the chapel in Los Angeles where I made my last retreat, and it is like a blanket of assurance which just comes over me. I can visually or temporally re-create that, because of what happened there, because of the solitude and how I was transformed in that solitude. The richness of our Judeo-Christian tradition is that we find God mostly in prayer and quiet.

Fortunately, as a Passionist I’ve been privileged and spoiled to do what I like to do and to try new stuff. And our leadership has enabled me to do that. I am grateful for that. Even the last time I told our Provincial that I would like to do this full-time I said, "But I don’t know for how long. I might want to get back into a retreat center in three or four years." And he said, "fine." I think we live with that kind of freedom. So we are lucky.

Any other words of advice as an ex-vocation director?

Two things, first of all do your homework. Do you remember that article you gave me from Ken Burns? He made the distinction between nostalgia and history. And he says that nostalgia is just a sentimental recall of a past that never was. To understand history you’ve got to work. You’ve got to read data, you have to spend time. You just can’t take ten seconds soundbites off Dan Rathers’ evening report or the latest comment from Jay Leno’s program. You have to spend time and go deeper. And I think the same is true with vocation discernment. It takes conversations with mom and dad, a priest, others you trust, and spiritual direction. It takes solitude and scripture. But eventually, after you do your homework you have to listen to your heart. And you have to trust your own fire. Basically I think God works through our own experience. After you do your homework. You just cannot get off on that immediately. Then trust your own experience. What turns you on? What fires you up? What are you confident, happy, and sure about? That’s probably God’s will.