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By Walter J. Burghardt, S.J.
[Woodstock Report, June 1992, no. 30]
Copyright © 1992 Woodstock Theological Center
All rights reserved
The following is a shortened form of a homily given in May 1992 to the Graduate and Law Schools of Gonzaga University, Spokane, Washington, by Walter J. Burghardt, S.J., founder and director of Woodstock's Preaching the Just Word project. We publish it here not only for its intrinsic merits, but as an excellent example of the kind of "Just Word Homily" that Father Burghardt encourages preachers to develop and deliver in the 5-day retreat he offers entitled "Preaching the Just Word."
Ten days ago I had a homily all set for you. It was based on the first reading you selected for your exodus liturgy, your exit from Gonzaga. I had the Lord saying to you what the Lord said to the Israelites in exile:
Thus says the Lord who created you, who formed you: "Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.... You are precious in my sight ... and I love you." (Isa 43:1-4)
Ten days ago all hell broke loose in L.A.: looting, arson, shoot-outs; 58 dead, 2,000 injured, 120 critically; a billion dollars in damage; an area larger than the District of Columbia in flames. And into the flames went a homily too Pollyannish, too unreal, for your exodus, your movement from campus to concrete, from church to world, from the life of the mind to death on the streets. Two stages to my movement: one downward, the other upward.
Not long before his death, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote to his mother to share with her the title of his next sermon. The title? "Why America May Go to Hell." I don't know what America's black martyr intended to say. But after seven decades of America-watching, as a priest now totally involved in justice issues, let me suggest to you why America may go to hell. Briefly and pungently, because of what sociologists like Robert Bellah see as a frightening phenomenon dominating our times: the resurgence of late-19th-century rugged individualism, a horrifying emphasis on "me" and "mine." What is of supreme importance is for me to get to the well first before it dries up. The race is to the swift, the shrewd, the savage, and the devil take the hindmost. And the resurgence is most evident in the younger generations.
The data, the facts? We trumpet America's love for its children, yet we let one of every five little ones grow up hungry. Fifteen countries are ahead of us in life expectancy; 40,000 each year do not reach birthday number one. One-point-six million each year are kept from seeing life outside the womb. We proclaim our young as the flower of the future, yet every 26 seconds a child runs away from home, every 47 seconds a child is abused or neglected, every 67 seconds a teenager has a baby, every 7 minutes a boy or girl is arrested for drug abuse, every 36 minutes a child is injured or killed by a gun.\1
... We have literally "out-lawed" racism, yet one black child out of three is poor; a black male in Harlem has a life expectancy of 46 years, less than males in Sudan or Cambodia;\2 there are more blacks in jail than in college. Twenty-seven years after Watts, South Central Los Angeles has lost about 70,000 industrial jobs. An African-American scholar and activist tells us, "Black male unemployment is a devastating blow to the men themselves and heaps a crushing burden on the women they might otherwise marry. It sears the children they father and destroys the families they might otherwise strengthen. It poisons the physical and psychological environment in which they are confined."\3 Is it any wonder that, when a black man is clubbed and kicked by four white policemen and a jury with 10 whites virtually absolves them from guilt, pent-up passions burst violently upon the City of Angels? ...
What has all this to do with Martin Luther King's phrase, "Why America May Go to Hell"? It goes back to a declaration from Dostoevsky, "Hell is not to love any more." Can we honestly say to these sisters and brothers of ours, the children and the teenagers, the women and the blacks, "Do not fear. When you walk through fire, you shall not be burned. God calls you by name. You are precious to God. God loves you"? Which leads naturally into my second point, my upward movement.
Yes, God loves them; God's Son died for each one of them. The sobering question is: How genuinely do you and I love them? The same Bellah who insists that the dominant characteristic in young economic man and young economic woman is autonomy, personal fulfillment, told us Catholic theologians at an annual convention that Catholics come up little different from the rest of the American population.
I am not claiming that love has left America. Across this rich land of ours millions of Americans live the second great commandment of the law and the gospel; they love others, the less fortunate, at least as much as they love themselves. In my own Maryland the Catholic Church operates the largest private, nonprofit social-service system you can find in the state: shelters for the homeless, soup kitchens and food pantries for the hungry, adoption services for children unwanted, programs for youth, residences for the handicapped, counseling for the troubled, homes for the ill and aging, migration and refugee assistance, services for crisis pregnancies, hospitals, AIDS ministries.\4 And such love dots our land, from rock-ribbed Maine to your Evergreen State of Washington.
And still it is not enough. Every major city in this "land of the free" continues to cry out to us in black accents, "Let my people go!" The most vulnerable of humans, our children, still beg mutely for scraps from our rich tables. The elderly are now economic problems, a threat to the very children to whom they gave life.
What does this say to you as you take your diploma into the streets of your city? What is foremost in your mind? Is it simply TGIO, "Thank God it's over"? Is it fear, apprehension: It's a scary world out there, jobs at a premium, death around every corner? Is it one of the three goals that preoccupy so many graduates: money, power, prestige? Or is it what you heard St. Paul tell the Christians of Colossae in our readings today: Above everything else that you put on, "put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony" (Col 3:14)?
Graduates of '92: You are incredibly gifted, by nature and grace. However limited you see yourself, you share two of God's precious possessions: You have the leisure to think, and you are free to love. These gifts, honed here in Spokane, make it possible for you, incumbent on you, to realize in your lives what Jesuit education has a high mandate to fashion: "young people and adults able and willing to build a more just social order, . . . men and women for others."\5
... Take seriously St. Paul's declaration to the Christians of Rome: "hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us" (Rom 5:5). God's love for each one of you, the love that "calls you by name," that makes you "precious in [God's] sight", is incredibly realistic. It means that within you is a living Power, the Holy Spirit, the divine Force that turned fearful men like Peter and most of the original Twelve into apostles who changed their world. It means that in the power of the Spirit you can love as Jesus loved, love without discrimination, love even unto crucifixion. In the power of the Spirit you can say to your crucified sisters and brothers what Yahweh said to Israel, "You are precious in my sight . . . and I love you."
... So then, go from Gonzaga as women and men for others, but also as women and men of Power. Dynamize your acre of God's world, even if it only means that you touch one crucified child of God with your love. Live like this, and you will experience the joy that, Jesus promised, "no human being will take from you" (Jn 16-22).
God lead you, God feed you, God speed you.
1. See Mary Rose McGeady, God's Lost Children: Letters from Covenant House (New York: Covenant House: 1991) 31.
2. "From the United Nations 1992 Human Development Report, as given in the Cleveland," Plain Dealer, April 24, 1992, 11A.
3. Roger Wilkins, "Looking Back in Anger: 27 years after Watts, Our Nation Remains Divided by Racism," Washington Post, Outlook, May 3, 1992, C1-2.
4. See the booklet Catholic Social Services in Maryland, ed. J. Kevin Appleby (Maryland Catholic Conference, 1992).
5. Documents of the Thirty-second General Congregation of the Society of Jesus, December 2, 1974-March 7, 1975 I, 4 (Washington, DC: Jesuit Conference, [1975]) 35-36.