Some years ago, a uniquely silly phrase enjoyed its fifteen minutes of fame. For one brief, tarnished moment, bumper stickers across Seattle urged me to “Practice random acts of kindness and senseless beauty.” As silly as this directive may be, it unfortunately does seem to describe the expectations of most adult faith formation. We provide adult Catholics little or no serious preparation for the crucial task of evangelizing our world—a task entrusted to the laity—as if it could “just happen.” Like so many dice, we toss our parishioners into the world hoping to turn up a winning combination, but only now and then; deep down we realize the odds are very much against us.
I confess that I find the words “random” and “senseless” intensely annoying. How could someone seriously propose that we put human acts of kindness in the same category as a game of roulette, or have us believe that a gesture involving neither talent nor ingenuity would result in the creation of beauty? I sincerely hope that no one expects torrents of purely impulsive kindnesses and artless beauty to someday pour forth from my remarkably ordinary heart and soul. I may be accident-prone, but I am not prone to accidental niceness!
“Random” implies lack of forethought, deliberation, and purpose. In reality it takes considerable shrewdness to discern what is true kindness in this particular situation, and then real moxie to act on our discernment even when it involves sacrifice. As Dorothy Day knew all too well, “Love, in reality, is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.” Cultivating kindness is an arduous art: it stretches our mind, our heart, and our will. Real kindness is about as random as a successful organ transplant.
As for “senseless beauty,” who can even envision something truly beautiful that lacks all meaning, intention, or traces of intelligence? It takes smarts to make art. As Eric Gill, the English lay Dominican sculptor and writer observed, “Art is skill”.
But with or without artistic talents or creative charisms, God calls all of us to create a life filled with thoughtful beauty. One of the most complex and satisfying tasks for adults is the challenge of “crafting their own life. . . they are to make of it a work of art, a masterpiece” (Letter to Artists, John Paul II). As the lives of the saints witness, a beautiful life, a life alight with God’s transforming and redeeming grace, is neither random nor senseless.
A priest at a recent Called & Gifted workshop asked me a most interesting question. Why does God give certain charisms only to a few? For instance, if a few people having the gift of healing is a wonderful thing, why not give the gift to millions? We simply don’t know why God distributes the gifts the way that he does. But although such questions are natural and intriguing, they can distract us from a far deeper mystery: why does God bother giving us any gifts at all?
Why delegate any real power to us to affect things for good or ill? Why not just heal all our wounds and forgive all our sins by divine fiat? Why does God get us involved and ask us to be real causes—and not just causes of trivial things, but of ideas, decisions, actions, and movements whose consequences ripple through time affecting the lives of millions on into eternity?
When we ask such questions, God does not answer directly. Instead, he gives us a mystery: the Incarnation. The Church has long recognized that God did not have to take on our humanity in order to save us. Rather, he freely chose to redeem us through the medium of a fully human life and death. He even chose to become incarnate through the consent and cooperation of a human teenager. St. Irenaeus, in 190 AD, used particularly strong words to describe the consequences of the decision made by a young woman named Mary:
“Eve. . .having become disobedient, was made the cause of death for herself and for the whole human race, so also Mary, betrothed to a man but nevertheless still a virgin, being obedient, was made the cause of salvation for herself and for the whole human race . . . Thus, the knot of Eve’s disobedience was loosed by the obedience of Mary. What the virgin Eve had bound in unbelief, the Virgin Mary loosed through faith.” (Against the Heresies, emphasis added).
Argh! Everything in me wanted to shout, “It is not okay!” God will not save us without us, and he has chosen not to save the world without us either. God not only invites us to be real causes, he insists on it. As Christ began, so he works today: he continues to pour out the graces of his redemptive sacrifice through fully human means.
As Blaise Pascal observed, God has raised us far beyond our merits “to the dignity of being causes”—graced, intelligent, intentional, prayerful causes. Just as Mary was called, so are we called to bring Christ into this world: through our conscious assent and deliberate cooperation. We could never have earned the graces of redemption, but we must intentionally choose to cooperate with them, both for our own sake and for the sake of others.
As apostles, we are called to shape the world about us through thoughtful and deliberate choices that have real, historical consequences. Our cooperation with the work of redemption cannot be random or senseless. How many people’s lives and salvation, how many communities, organizations, families, and cultures hang in the balance dependent, upon the life choices of ordinary Catholics?
A formation designed for adults converts nominal Christians into disciples, and prepares disciples to live as apostles: gifted men and women of faith whom God calls to intentionally and deliberately shape the world they live in through their love and work. Well-formed adults undertake with joy and zeal all the things we try—with little success—to coax them into doing out of guilt or duty. Apostles want to pray and worship. They love the sacraments. They give and serve and study with energy and passion. Well-formed Catholics hunger to discern and answer God’s call, to reach out to the suffering and marginalized, and even to talk to others about what God has done for them.
This is why the Church uses the same language about the apostolic formation of the laity as she does about the formation of priests: “Formation is not the privilege of a few, but a right and duty of all” (The Vocation and Mission of the Lay Faithful, 63). This is why Cardinal George of Chicago made his bold statement in an address to the US Bishops last summer:
“The greatest failure, I would argue, of the post-Vatican II Church, is the failure to have formed and to call forth a laity engaged in the world in order to change it, a laity engaged in the world politically, economically, culturally and socially, but on faith’s terms, not just on the world’s terms.”
I suspect that I have already met a few of the Mother Teresas and Father Damiens of the 21st century in places like Boise, Atlanta, Jakarta, and Alaska. They may never be revered as saints, but they are gifted with a powerful compassion that brings real comfort to those who suffer and restores their dignity. Like Mother Teresa, they are ordinary, believing Catholics who, in the process of saying “yes” to an extraordinary call, are slowly becoming extraordinary themselves. And like her, they did not arise in a vacuum, but have been nurtured in their faith and vocation by Christian family and friends.
We know that God is calling many new Mother Teresas and Dorothy Days, Jacques Maritains and Francis Xaviers through whom he intends his grace and mercy to reach the world in our generation. We know, by faith, that we have as many vocations as we have baptized men and women. But the saints, apostles, and Christian leaders of the 21st century will not emerge by accident. They must be called forth and nurtured intentionally. Our problem is not that there is a shortage of vocations, but that we lack the support systems and leadership to foster 98% of the vocations God is giving us.
We must not limit formation to those who have already discerned God’s call. Formation awakens Christians to God’s call and clarifies it. Formation empowers men and women to hear and respond to the call that is already present. Pope John Paul II writes, “The fundamental objective of the formation of the lay faithful is an ever-clearer discovery of one’s vocation and the ever-greater willingness to live it so as to fulfill one’s mission” (The Lay Members of Christ’s Faithful, 58). Where formation is available to all, a culture of vocation is created; it becomes normal for adult Catholics to be discerning God’s call for their life. And where discernment becomes normal, not only will cutting-edge lay vocations soar, but so will the numbers of priestly and religious vocations.
Most formation programs for laity focus on ministry in a church setting or on personal growth. But we need leaders who can offer lay Catholics a formation geared toward the lay office, towards being an effective lay apostle in the midst of the secular world. Towards this end, Fr. Michael Sweeney and I are offering a new seminar next summer. If you are a pastor, a parish staff person, diocesan leader, or just someone who would like to effectively form adult Catholics, consider coming to one of our two formator training weeks in the summer of 2004 (see facing page for more information). To realize the potential of the parish as a house of formation, we need a new kind of pastoral leader, one committed to nurturing, challenging, and calling forth the next generation of apostles. Come join us!