Homily for Sunday, December 22, 2024

[Father Paul]

I have shared with you before that I spent four years in the seminary back in the late '80s—I left in the spring of 1989. I decided I wanted to study philosophy in more depth. My original intention was to take a year off, get this “philosophy” out of my system, and then return to the study of theology—a natural break. I ended up taking a full six years off before returning to the seminary in the mid-'90s. At first, I wanted to leave the seminary to study more philosophy, and I did, but during that year off, I learned a lot more than philosophy. Let me explain.

At the end of my third year, when I had completed all my philosophy studies for the seminary, I spent one month with the Trappists in Orangeville. Many of you may remember that monastery; it was a foundation from Oka in Quebec where they made the cheese. Our job was making fruitcake. My job specifically was putting the whisky in the cakes after they were baked. At that time, we had annual sales of about 30,000 cakes, and they were delicious. We also went through a lot of booze.

But I remember, before I went in, someone said I would meet “Brother Louis,” an elderly gentleman with a long grey beard, who also happened to be a mystic. Beards were not that common back in the day, so to see him was quite a sight. He looked like Gandalf the Grey. I was very excited to meet him because I had no doubt he was a mystic. He spent his entire life in the monastery, but he had an honorary doctorate from, I believe, Laval University for his work in animal husbandry. He was 84 when I met him; he had entered the monastery when he was a teenager. Imagine that, spending his entire life in a monastery, praying the psalms seven times a day, seven times a week, and 90 percent of his other time in silence. Just listening to the voice of God.

So, what was it like meeting a mystic? He used to pray the stations of the cross every morning at around 4:30, in the hallway to our cells; my cell was next to his. Yes, we called them cells, with a very thin 2-inch mattress. We could have straw mattresses if we liked. I swear I could hear him weeping sometimes. But there was something about him that really surprised me. It was his eyes. When I met him and interacted with him (I used to walk with him to the main barn once or twice a week), the only thing he said to me was, “It’s dusty here.” We were watching these little mini tornadoes on the dirt road. But when he would look at me, he was the kindest, most gentle, most loving person I had ever met. His eyes were just filled with love and compassion.

Okay, lots of people are kind and have loving eyes, but what I suddenly realized was that if I were to meet Jesus 2000 years ago walking down the street, that’s what I would have seen, those eyes. In fact, when I walked with him on that dusty road, it did feel like I could have been walking with Jesus.

This point was emphasized very strongly during my experience in the monastery. We had to study the history of monasticism and some of the early mystics so we could understand what being a monk was actually about. It wasn’t about praying the psalms or being all holy in that sense; it was about love. St. Bernard of Clairvaux called the monastery a school of love.

Suddenly I realized that I didn’t have to be a priest to be a man of love. I didn’t even have to be married; in fact, it didn’t matter at all what I did, as long as I did it with great love.

This was in some ways very disillusioning for me, and I returned to the seminary for one more year of theology but lost all motivation for the priesthood, and even for religion in general. As far as I was concerned, my main vocation was love, and I didn’t even need to be Catholic to do that.

Don’t leave yet. My journey took me to meet Mother Teresa in 1992, and when I met her for the very first time, I remember the exact moment (I had arrived at the mother house to sign up as a volunteer in Kolkata a half hour early by mistake). Mother Teresa was walking by, she stopped, turned, and looked at me, and she had the same eyes as Brother Louis from the monastery. She kept walking, but a few days later when I met her again in person, she was speaking to a group of us, and she said the same thing that I had learned from the monastery: you don’t have to travel all the way to Calcutta to be a man or woman of love. You can do that anywhere; in fact, you must do that everywhere. Especially at home, in your rich countries where there is an epidemic of loneliness. How? Everything you do, do it with great love.”

There is only one more thing to add. Several weeks later, another nun, Sr. Christina and I were with a man who was dying of malnutrition. At that particular moment, I was having some difficulty adjusting to life in the third world, and I was feeling rather useless, not even sure if that’s where I wanted to be. So I asked Sr. Christina, perhaps for the first time in my life, “How do I do this? How do I serve? What am I supposed to do?” She said, simply, “All you have to do is love him.” 

then I watched her as she held his hand and wiped his brow with a cool cloth. The only word he knew in English was “pain.” I remember asking the nun, “I wonder what his name is.” She said, “You don’t know his name? His name is Jesus. Because He said, ‘Whatever you do to the least of my brothers or sisters, you did it to me.’”

Not right away, but it was that thought, that philosophy, that ‘theology’—because all theology is probably contained in that statement—that’s what eventually led me back to the faith. That, and the fact that Mother Teresa herself told me to go back to the seminary. “A vocation is a beautiful gift from God, don’t throw it away.”

So today, practically on the eve of Christmas Eve, we lit the fourth Advent candle, which is the light of love.

At this time, I invite our wonderful hospitality ministers to give one more wristband symbolizing love. Wear it with pride, wear it with love.

I conclude with a saying of Mother Teresa, actually not realizing until this moment, it seems to describe perfectly the path that I am trying to travel, however imperfectly, beginning with my experience in the monastery:

The fruit of silence is prayer  

The fruit of prayer is faith  

The fruit of faith is love  

The fruit of love is service  

The fruit of service is peace.