Catechists in the Diocese of Broken Bay were celebrated on Saturday 3 November at a special Mass at Our Lady of the Rosary Cathedral. Fr David Ranson, Diocesan Administrator led the Mass beautifully.
Homily - Very Rev Dr David Ranson
The ministry of catechesis is the ministry of sharing the Word of hope, of possibility and of promise. As bearers of the good news to the children with whom we share the story of grace, we seek, in the Spirit, to awaken a hope, a possibility and a promise in their hearts.
To be sent forth with such a Word, that Word which opens new vistas for the imagination, is no easy task, however. It is not easy precisely because of the changing and challenging times in which we live. And I think there are two considerations that make our own ministry of the Word particularly difficult.
Firstly, we face an unusual contemporary confusion between communication and connection - the result of the communication revolution in which we live and as profound in its dimensions as was the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century. David Malouf, the Australian writer, brings this into summary when he says in a short essay entitled, “Attending to the Word”:
Of course, technologies can be useful. They make life easier, they get things done faster, they can free us from all sorts of drudgery. But we also need to be discriminating, to stand back and ask ourselves what they are leading us into . . . You all know what that has led to: the amazing proliferation of forms and documents and demands for documentation that we now have to deal with, the incursion of bureaucracy into our lives in the demand that every bleep and spasm our poor presence registers in the economy, or in the vast apparatus and government surveillance, should have its appropriate number and entry on a file.1
The need to broadcast, the desperate need to connect which may be indicative of a profoundly felt isolation, brings us to a second feature of our changing and challenging times which renders the ministry of the Word of hope, possibility and promise difficult: the bombardment by words that we daily experience. Malouf likewise identifies this as a feature of our daily experience
A daily newspaper demands just as much attention from us as will allow its contents – all the universal spectacle it offers of food, fashion, famine, travel, motoring, atrocities, IT, TV, celebrity gossip, ads, restaurant reviews, film and theatre reviews, book reviews, politics, sport – just as much attention as will allow all this, for good commercial reasons, to pass straight through our heads into instant oblivion, since Tuesday’s paper, like Tuesday night’s TV programme, has to be cancelled out and dumped into the litter bin of history so that Wednesday’s paper can move in. A daily paper, like a day’s TV, is a black hole that has, every twenty-four hours, to be filled with substance of just enough consistency as will offer no obstruction to what must fill the same hole the day after. . . We are smothered by words. By product. Mountains of writing that will inform – but only in ways we do not need and do not need to retain – or will divert or titillate or disturb – but not too seriously.
How then are we to speak a Word of hope, of possibility and of promise in this context? How is the simple word that we bear and called to share going to be heard in such a desperate clatter?
If the Word we bear as catechists is going to have effect, it must be grounded in silence – our silence.
Silence: the forgotten but essential ingredient of preaching and teaching. We are bearers, then, not simply of a Word but also of a Silence. It is how we able to carry the reality of the silence, our effectiveness to bearers of the Word will be strengthened, in a world bombarded by words and overwhelmed by forms of connection. If we are to undertake a ministry of the Word, as we do as catechists, we must also be those who are familiar with silence. It is only in the practice of silence that we can really be open to the transformative Word of the Gospel in the midst of the voluminous words which swamp us on a daily basis.
Perhaps we are more used to silence than we admit. We not need to create silence artificially, imagining it as the eradication of external noise. No, rather we must attend to the ordinary experiences of silence which life itself presents for our attention, especially the absences that present in our life. The ‘silence of absence’ creates intervals in our life, moments of disconcerting pause in the symphony of our existence. When we respect the intervals that are part of our life, whatever they may be or however they may be expressed we develop in the humility of genuine freedom. The one who can enter into the silence that their life furnishes them, and who can allow the intervals to expose their heart, is the one beginning to grow in that capacity for the communication required by the project of evangelisation.
Then we can truly offer what we might call the ‘poetic’ word - that word which seizes others’ imagination but which can only come through intense listening and waiting. As we stumble and stutter to offer the word of life to both ourselves and to our world, then we regain that prophetic voice which we are commissioned to exercise in our ministry. Then we will speak with that same imagination as “the young Galilean poet of the haunted spirit,” that one, single Word every spoken by the Father.2
In our ministry of the catechesis, bearers of both word and silence in a noisy world, do we dare to be that passionate as that one Word.
1 David Malouf, “Attending to the Word,” Address on the Occasion of the 2001 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.
2 See John O’Donohue, “The Agenda for Theology in Ireland Today I,” The Furrow 42 (1991), 698, and John of the Cross, Maxims on Love, 21 in The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, translated by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez, (London: Thomas Nelson, 1964), 675.