I speculated recently to Sherry Weddell about the enormous success of the recent Called and Gifted Workshop at our parish. Here at St. Dominic’s in San Francisco, I suspected that the success was due in large part to our familiarity with small-group faith-sharing which is also a key element of programs such as Renew 2000. In Sherry’s experience, however, the gifts discernment process is an entirely unique phenomenon, introducing its own world of issues, questions, triumphs, and challlenges. In retrospect, I would certainly agree.
I first heard of the Called and Gifted Workshop three years ago in Seattle at the Western Dominican Province’s annual Parish Ministry Conference. The Workshop was then not as developed as it is now. Nevertheless, I was overwhelmed by a sense that here was something breathtakingly fresh and complete, a gift to the Church through which She could revivify Herself at this important juncture in Her history.
We knew that the Holy Father has called the Church to a new evangelization, a call echoed by the Dominican Chapter at Caleruga, Spain and again by our meeting in Seattle. The new evangelization includes lay Catholics bringing Christ to the world through the exercise of the gifts given to them by the Holy Spirit for their work in the world. We quickly recognized that discerning one’s gifts was key to the new evangelization.
I am, I confess, a Romantic. I frequently incline toward the intuitive logic of things and away from the empirical standards against which they must prove their worth. I was stirred in the soul (it felt right) leaving the brain (it is right) to catch up.
I was hardly alone in this. On the flight home from the conference, two of my colleagues and I were eagerly discussing bringing Called and Gifted to our parish. We were bubbling with excitement, or rather sealed in a bubble of excitement, of air too thin to admit of caution! How would we do it? When? What was required? Who? Bother such questions! We simply couldn’t wait to tell our parishioners about it. So at the next Parish Assembly, we did, promising that in the near future we would bring the Called and Gifted Workshop to the parish.
The lesson to be learned here is this: never promise anything that you aren’t ready to deliver. We had excited our parishioners to a pitch without a ready plan to match. As the months went by and other priorities supervened, talk of the workshop receded to an occasional skeptical mutter ("Sure, we believe that Called and Gifted will come to our parish! Where was that bridge you had to sell me?")
Truth to tell, the staff was all the while wrestling to bring the Workshop here. We were in frequent communication with the Catherine of Siena Institute, by then booked through with Workshops across the United States and Canada. But it was not until two years later, in the spring of 1999, that we finally make arrangements with the Institute to hold the Called and Gifted Workshop in September and the Extended Workshop in November.
The Extended Discernment Program has three parts: The first part is a personal interview with each participant that addresses individual questions and helps each person choose a particular charism to explore. This is followed by a 6-8 week period of intentional discernment and small group discussion facilitated by the parish. The program is brought to a close with a second weekend put on by the Institute which focuses on discernment, vocation, and collaboration between laity and clergy and ends with a Mass of consecration.
Despite the two-year-long wait, we knew that many people would want to participate in both the Called and Gifted Workshop and the Extended Program. Realistically, however, we could not have Institute Interviewers coming all the way from Seattle to San Francisco. The only solution was to train our own interviewers! In July, Fr. Michael Sweeney and Sherry Weddell traveled from Seattle to San Francisco to conduct Interviewer Training for us. Thirty parishioners, personally invited by the pastor for their leadership qualities and spiritual maturity were immersed in a two days and one night of training from which they emerged glazed and exhausted, but quite happy and ready to play their vital roles in their fellow-parishoners’ spiritual discernment.
Between the July training and the September workshop, our team of thirty met several times to plan:
This enabled participants in the first workshop to sign up for interviews on the spot.
Meanwhile, six weeks before the Called and Gifted Workshop itself took place, we published our first notice about it in the parish bulletin. Interest stirred from two years of dormancy, then swelled over the next month as additional notices were published weekly, each highlighting an aspect of the program. We supplemented the bulletin items with posters placed at strategic points in and about the Church and with announcements at Mass. We are grateful to the Catherine of Siena Insititute for providing advertising copy, which we then tweaked to the desired tone and mood!
We cast about without success for a meeting hall to accommodate 200-plus participants, including laity from other Bay Area Dominican parishes whom we had invited and others from the San Francisco Archdiocese. Forced to fall back on our own smallish parish hall, we set an attendance limit of 100, which we then had to relax upwards to 125 as the volume of registration grew!
Space does not allow here for an account of the Called and Gifted Workshop in September, of its impact—spiritual, psychological, intellectual—upon the participants, of the tremendous depth and resonance of the material, of the weight and penetration of its points. But one-half of the attendees immediately signed up for the Extended Discernment Program.
Since then, Extended Discernment Program participants have received interviews, chosen a specific gift to explore, and experimented with that gift for at least two hours a week. They have met twice in small groups to share their experiences under the guidance of the facilitators. At the end of each general session, questions provided by the Institute are distributed for consideration for the next session. We all look forward to November and the closing weekend workshop with Mass of commissioning.
It is as if something that lay deep within our faith, like a forgotten dream, has now been retrieved and set in its proper place in our lives. At St. Dominic’s, the Called and Gifted experience is now central to lay formation. It will be an ongoing, annual part of parish life.
Stedman Matthew, a native of Montserrat and former trust banker, serves as Parish Administrator for St. Dominic’s parish in San Francisco.