LOVING SERVANTS OF THE WORD OF GOD

 A talk on Dominican Spirituality given on 12 October 2019 during a 'Come & See' weekend held at St Dominic Priory, St Louis, Missouri

 

Spirituality and Charism

 

I have been asked to say something about 'Dominican Spirituality'. You are familiar with the term 'spirituality', it is in common use: Benedictine spirituality, Carmelite spirituality, Jesuit spirituality, and so on. It refers, we can say, to the style of a particular religious order or congregation, to the customs, practices and traditions that are specific to that congregation. All religious orders hold the main things in common - the Bible, the sacraments, the life of the Church in its pastoral and apostolic activity. But each of them lives these central realities of the Christian life with a particular style or flavour. Each has certain practices, devotions, ways of doing things, which gives its particular character to the form of life of each congregation. This begins with the founder or foundress, their way of following Christ and of living the Christian life. Sometimes the historical context and the particular need for which a congregation is established serve to shape its spirituality, to give it a particular style. But it begins with the founder: he or she proposes ways of praying, priorities in the apostolate, theological emphases, ways of organizing the life of the community - these then constitute the form of life which he or she establishes as a new gift of the Spirit for the Church.

 

This brings us to a second term, the term 'charism'. Each founder or foundress receives a particular gift or grace of the Holy Spirit who raises them up in the Church to respond to a new need. We can say then that a particular spirituality expresses and serves a particular charism. So Dominican spirituality refers to our way of doing things together - our way of being together, of praying, of studying, of preaching, and so on, in order to express the charism of Saint Dominic and in order to serve that charism, to make it present in the life of the Church today.

 

The best short description of the Dominican charism which I have heard is the phrase I have put as the title of this talk: we are to be loving servants of the Word of God. I heard if from William Barden, a very distinguished Irish Dominican of the last century. It has stayed with me ever since I first heard it because I think it is a beautiful short description of what the order is about. If we meditate on that phrase, if we think about each word in it, then the charism of the Order will be revealed to us and so also the Order's spirituality will emerge from that phrase because our spirituality is everything that expresses and serves the charism.

 

The word 'Word'

 

Let us begin with the word 'Word'. We are to be the loving servants of the Word of God. God has many attributes, there are many faces of God and many names of God. Different religious orders focus on different attributes or aspects of God - His mercy perhaps, or His Sacred Heart, His missionary character, and so on. Dominicans focus on God as 'Word'. Think about the reasons for which we use words. It is in order to communicate, to share our thoughts and feelings, to share ourselves with others. Words are about articulation and communication. They are about sharing knowledge and truth. Words are about intelligibility, making things understandable and accessible. So these are the preoccupations of the preacher: the Word of God, the ways by which God Himself has articulated and expressed who He is and what His plan is for humanity. It is about God sharing with us His knowledge of Himself, His own truth. And it is about the intelligibility of that communication - words are not just random or arbitrary sounds, they belong in a language and language is about intelligibility. It is always from within a particular language that we see the sense of things, understand connections, grow in knowledge, see what is true.

 

We can use the word 'dialogue' for this. Pope Paul VI in his first encyclical Ecclesiam suam (1964) gives a rich biblical and theological reflection on the meaning of the word 'dialogue'. It refers in the first place, he says, to the dialogue of revelation, the conversation which God established with His people in order to share with them the truth about Himself and to bring them into sharing His life. In the dialogue of revelation God offers eternal life to His people. Eternal life is to know God and Jesus Christ whom He has sent: we read this in the Gospel of Saint John (17:3). So the preacher is a person who is called to position himself within this dialogue between God and humanity. The preacher's task is to tell people about the life of friendship and love God wishes to share with them. And his further task is to call people to respond in faith to this invitation, to help people to share through faith in the gift that is offered to all.

 

The Word of God of which we are to be the loving servants is then the Scriptures which record this dialogue of revelation. In another sense the Word of God is Jesus, the Word become flesh. For at a certain moment this communication by God of His own intelligibility, of His plan for His people, was translated into the form of a human being, Jesus of Nazareth. So we are to be followers of Jesus, His loving servants, wanting to serve him under this particular aspect of communication, dialogue and conversation, of sharing knowledge about God and bringing people to realise the truth.

 

Serving the Word

 

So how are we to serve the Word? Well in the first place we must receive it. You have heard, I am sure, that God gave us two ears and one mouth to indicate that we should do twice as much listening as we do talking. So the first thing we must do is listen to the Word. It is the same as when we are in conversation with other human beings: we have to listen to what they are saying and seek to understand it, we have to receive it before we think of saying anything ourselves.

 

So in the Dominican's service of the Word of God there is this first moment: we listen to the Word. It means, obviously, study and prayer, a study of the Scriptures in the first place, always returning to them no matter what else we might study along the way. But we must pray the Scriptures as well. These are texts that surrender their spiritual and theological meaning only when they are received in faith. So our vocation is a contemplative one, we must ponder the words of Scripture prayerfully as well as studiously. We also celebrate the Word in the liturgies that we have together and our spirituality is a liturgical spirituality also. It is another way in which we receive the Word of God, chanting the psalms and canticles of the Bible over and over again, singing God's praises in the Liturgy of the Hours, and of course celebrating the Mass together, the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Eucharist.

 

Dominican spirituality is not fully seen if we just look at the life of Dominican friars. Along with the friars - and already among them we have friars who are ordained priests and friars who are not ordained - we have nuns and sisters, we have lay members of the Order, associated diocesan priests, people consecrated in secular institutes. The Dominican charism requires an 'order', or a 'family', if it is to be expressed fully and served effectively. So we are blessed in having contemplative nuns, founded by Saint Dominic some years before the friars were officially established. The nuns sacramentalise, they make physically present for us, this contemplative aspect which is part of the vocation of every Dominican.

 

So we are to serve the Word of God by receiving it, in the different ways mentioned. But we are also to share it, to communicate and to proclaim what we have come to see and understand and appreciate in our prayer and contemplation, in our study and liturgical celebration. We are not 'O.S.', Order of Students, we are 'O.P.', Order of Preachers. From the earliest days we have it, that the purpose of our study is in order to be useful to our neighbours. So the second moment in our loving service of the Word of God is this moment of preaching, communicating, telling about the wonderful things the Lord is doing. We do that in our shared life in the first place. Our hope is that living together as a community of brothers building Christian communion is already a kind of preaching of the Word of God. Of course we do it in explicit speaking as well, by preaching and teaching in the normal sense of those terms (talking, writing, broadcasting). We do it in many works of charity and witness. All across the world Dominicans are engaged in education, in parish ministry, in chaplaincies at universities, hospitals and prisons, working with indigenous people, working with migrants, working with homeless children - the list of activities and projects is long. But whatever Dominicans do is done under this rubric of 'loving service of the Word of God', in order to communicate to people the love and friendship to which God invites us all. 

 

So we must receive and contemplate the Word in the Scriptures. We contemplate the Word of God who is Jesus Christ, staying with Him, learning from Him each day, watching how He does things, how He receives people. We strive to be His faithful disciples. We contemplate the Word also in what is happening in the Church and in the world, studying these, keeping an eye out and an ear open to see what the signs of our times are revealing about God's purposes today. What is it God wants us to communicate to His people at this particular moment in their history? what is their need?

 

Loving servants

 

If we go looking in the Scriptures for people whom we might consider as 'proto-Dominicans' we will find ourselves, I believe, considering two groups. (Apart from Jesus himself whom we can regard as the first Dominican!) The two groups with whom we often compare ourselves are the prophets of the Old Testament and the apostles of the New Testament.

 

We speak about our charism of preaching as a participation in the prophetic work of the Church. The prophets were men and women deputed by God to speak to the people about what was happening in their lives and to re-assure them that God was still present with them no matter what was happening in their lives. We know the prophets are the servants of God's word because they tell us this themselves: 'the word of the Lord came to Isaiah ... to Amos ... to Jeremiah' and so on. Their task was to interpret for the people what was happening at the historical moment in which they found themselves. That interpretation meant bringing the light of God's Word to bear on their present situation. It meant putting God's Word into the mix of what was happening, to challenge or to comfort the people depending on what the particular need was at a particular time.

 

The apostles then are the prophets of the New Testament. They are the men deputed by Christ to continue his mission in the world and through them the Church continues that mission. It is an apostolic Church and we speak about ourselves as an apostolic order. We believe that Saint Dominic re-imagined the apostolic form of life for a new moment in the Church's history. Like the apostles the Dominicans were to be with Christ, remaining always with Him or returning always to him, learning everything from Him, and preaching His message and bringing forgiveness and healing to all to whom they are sent.

 

This the apostles did - and Dominicans do - 'in medio ecclesiae', in the heart of the Church. It is a phrase the liturgy applies to Saint Dominic but it applies also to the order as a whole. We are to be at the heart of the Church. I was wondering how to bring into this presentation the fact that for Dominicans our shared, fraternal life is an essential part of our spirituality. And perhaps this is the point at which we can do it. The prophets tend to be very much individual servants of the Word of God, isolated and perhaps lonely, often on the margins of the community, talking back to it from where they are. Think of how strange a figure Ezekiel was, or John the Baptist. The apostles on the other hand tend to move as a 'college'. It comes to our lips very quickly: the college of apostles. They moved around, at least in groups of two or three. So there is always a sense of community and communion among the apostles. They are called to be with Jesus not just then to preach the communion which He has come to establish, but to begin to live that communion with Him. And this is where we can see how a common life is essential to Dominican spirituality, necessary to express and to serve the charism of Saint Dominic. Communion is the goal of our preaching, not just as an ideal but as a lived reality, an experience of reconciliation, mercy and friendship which by our preaching we hope to build up - therefore we must 'put our money where our mouth is' and begin to live that communion with each other. I believe that our preaching carries a particular flavour when it is the preaching of one who is living with others and experiencing from day to day the blessings and challenges of such a shared life.

 

So there it is. I have offered you a sketch of Dominican spirituality, which expresses and serves the charism of the Order. It is a spirituality which is, I believe neatly but profoundly captured in saying that we are to be loving servants of the Word of God.

 

PS I do not say anything about us being the loving servants of the Word of God. To do so would add to this presentation by bringing in the Holy Spirit, the Love of the Blessed Trinity, sent in turn by the Father and the Son. It would help to make clear that our preaching is not just intellectual but also spiritual – cf ST I 43 – involving imagination, devotion, beauty, power, inspiration: all that falls under the work of the Spirit, the characteristics of a ‘real’ assent as compared with a ‘notional’ assent.