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| Father Robert Barron is shown with Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI, president of Oblate School of Theology, left, and Father Louis Lougen, OMI, chairman of the Oblate School of Theology Board of Trustees, following commencement on May 15.
Photo provided |
By J. Michael Parker
For Today’s Catholic
SAN ANTONIO • Today’s Catholic priests and other ministers must be “God-intoxicated” in order to bring the water of life to a world that is so thirsty for God that it’s like a dry, weary land, Oblate School of Theology’s newest graduates were told at the school’s May 15 commencement.
Father Robert Barron, the Francis Cardinal George Professor of Faith and Culture at the Archdiocese of Chicago’s Mundelein Seminary, presented that challenge to the 22 doctoral and master’s degree candidates in the school’s Immaculate Conception Chapel.
The term “God-intoxicated” was used to describe a 17th-century Jewish philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, who was shunned by his Jewish community. Father Barron said that if Catholic academics are not obsessed with God, all their academic degrees and accomplishments will count for nothing.
He presented three biblical archetypes of God-intoxicated people: Adam before the fall, the prophet Elijah and the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Adam, he said, “walked in the cool of the evening in easy fellowship with Yahweh, the Creator and his creature communing friend to friend.” Adam was aligned to God’s being and energy, drawing in the divine life with every breath. When one is so configured, when God is unambiguously the center of one’s preoccupations, one’s interior life falls into harmony,” Father Barron said.
The rose windows of the great Gothic cathedrals evoke this truth, he said. At the center of each is usually a depiction of Jesus, surrounded by other pictures in harmony with that one, reflecting the concept of a well-ordered soul, with God in the center and the individual’s mind, will, imagination, powers and ambitions arranged in subordination to God.
“When something other than God — pleasure, the esteem of others, one’s own ego and ambition — becomes the object of one’s worship, one’s life disintegrates and falls into disharmony and cacophony,” the priest said. He added that this is just as true of cultures and societies.
The task of the priest, which Father Barron called the “Adamic task,” is to foster this God-centered ordering of the lives of individuals, cultures and societies.
“All of ancient Israel’s covenants, laws, rituals and practices were oriented toward recovering the adoratio of Eden,” he said. “All of you — and not only the ordained — are meant to go out as priests; that is to say, as fosterers of adoratio.”
The priest said Elijah challenged Ahab, the worst king in Israelite history. When Ahab accused the prophet of being a “troubler of Israel,” Elijah countered that the king was the troubler since he had followed the false gods of Baal.
Elijah challenged the priests of Baal to a contest on Mount Carmel in which they called on their false gods without success and Elijah called on Yahweh. Yahweh sent fire from heaven to consume the sacrifice that Elijah had prepared.
Father Barron indicated this story should not be read merely as “chest-thumping religious chauvinism.”
He pointed out St. Augustine’s teaching that human beings are made for God and wired to be satisfied only in God; thus, “our hearts are restless until they rest in God,” and when we seek our joy in something less than God, we become unsatisfied and are caught in addictive patterns.
The priest quoted St. Thomas Aquinas as citing four classic paths taken by sinful souls, seeking final joy either in wealth, pleasure, power or honor. These are the false gods we supplicate in vain. When we hook our infinite desire for God onto something less than God, we necessarily become addicted according to an easily describable spiritual law.
“We seek satisfaction, for example, in wealth, but that finite end, good in itself, is not God. When the buzz of attaining some wealth wears off, as it must, we convince ourselves that we need more wealth. We strive and work desperately to attain it and when we do, the buzz returns, but now its duration is shorter. In short order, we find ourselves obsessed with the acquisition of wealth, damaging ourselves as we strive compulsively to acquire it, all the while chasing after wind,” Father Barron said.
An important task of God-intoxicated ministers and priests, he declared, is to perform the prophetic Elijah function in the midst of a world that insistently calls out to gods that can never respond.
Father Barron challenged his listeners to imitate Elijah’s Adamic function as a cultivator of the orthodoxy that would create a healthy culture.
“You must be, to use the overworked phrase, counter-cultural, witnessing by the very quality of your love to the right ordering of both the individual personality and the corporate person of the society. You must, by the strange way that you live, mock the vanities and pretentions of a culture predicated upon the worship of false gods,” the priest declared.
Explaining his third archetype, Father Barron said that when Jesus addressed his mother as “woman,” both at the Cana wedding feast and at the cross, he was signaling the correlation between Mary as mother of the church and Eve as mother of all the living.
He said the early Fathers of the Church, beginning with Ireneaus, delighted in ringing the changes on this theme.
“The disaster that Eve brought about through disobedience is undone by the obedience of Mary; Eva (Eve in Latin) is reversed by the Ave of the angel at the Annunciation, and so on. Again, we might be tempted to interpret this as just charming piety, but in effecting this association between Mary and Eve, the Fathers were onto something of great moment.”
To explain this correlation further, Father Barron contrasted two understandings of freedom. The one dominating today’s culture sees freedom merely as the capacity to choose among various options without any internal or external constraints. Father Barron said that Dominican moral theologian Servais Pinckaers, who died in 2008, called it “the freedom of indifference.”
The biblical understanding of freedom, Father Barron said, is the disciplining of desire to make the achievement of good “first possible and then effortless.” He illustrated this as the freedom with which John Updike wrote English, Michael Jordan played basketball and Daniel Barenboim conducts Mozart. Barenboim is an Argentine Jewish musical conductor.
The priest said this freedom is not about self-determination but a submission to laws and disciplines in which the actors are involved: English prose writing for Updike, basketball for Jordan and the structure of Mozart sonatas for Barenboim.
“Michael Jordan could do anything the game demanded — he was free — precisely because he had so internalized the rhythms, moves and logic of basketball that they were second nature to him. Updike could write anything he wanted — he was free — in the measure that he had subjected himself to the disciplines of English syntax, immersed himself so thoroughly in the ocean of the English vocabulary, and had listened so attentively to the poetic resonance of the language.”
“Pinckaers called this more biblical interpretation of freedom the ‘freedom for excellence,’” Father Barron said.
In the modern reading of freedom, he said, law, or the objectivity of the good, tends to be read as a restriction; in the second reading, law and objective value are the very ground on which liberty grows. The supreme expression of this objective good is the law of God and the demands that God places on our freedom, the priest explained.
Long before Jean-Paul Sartre said, “If God exists, I cannot be free; but I am free; therefore, God does not exist,” Father Barron, said, the author of Genesis grasped the conflict between God’s word and a false conception of freedom.
“In his telling, Eve and Adam grasped at divinity for themselves, making their own egos the criteria of good and evil, embracing thereby the freedom of indifference. And this, necessarily, placed them and their spiritual descendants into conflict with God,” he said.
When the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary and announced that God had chosen Mary to be the mother of the redeemer, the priest explained, “he proposed something extraordinary for her freedom. There was no way that she could have understood the full implications … she allowed her desire to be shaped by a power that could do infinitely more than she could ask or imagine, and she became thereby free.”
Father Barron noted Paul’s statement that he was “a slave to Christ Jesus” and that it was Christ setting him free.
“In terms of the freedom of indifference, this doesn’t make a lick of sense, but in terms of the freedom for excellence, it is perfectly coherent. The more we surrender to the supreme good, the freer we are to become the saints God wants us to become. What Mary teaches us is not servile docility but rather the real, life-expanding freedom that comes from God-intoxication. All of you should go forth today to announce that same exhilarating truth.”