One may
be fascinated every time he listens to a great preacher. He may ask:
Where do they get what they preach? He may even go further and question How
does this preacher sustain his ministry? What powers up to preacher? How long
does it take him to prepare his homily? How does he ‘stay alive’ in his
ministry? The spirituality of the Preacher can be the force behind these
magnanious task carried-out by preachers. What, then, is this Spirituality of
the Preacher?
Preaching can be understood as the ministry of the Word. It is an attempt to
affect a person’s thinking by appealing to the heart. While teaching, on one
hand, is trying to affect a person’s heart by appealing to their thinking,
preaching on the other hand, is an appeal to the heart, the emotions and the
soul of the person. Preaching attempts
to reason with a person’s mind. It appeals to the intellect and provides a
person with many angles of understanding. It does not accomplish quick changes in a person’s behaviour but it
begins to allow for a solid foundation upon which behaviour is directed.
Spirituality originates from the word spirit; spirit as life in the
Semitic sense. The word spirit is taken from “ruah” which originally means
breath, wind; the breath that gives life, life-giving breath or life itself. It
is not opposed to matter, or body, but to evil, death. It is not life within or
apart from the body, but one’s deep or true being/life. It is the spirit that
makes one alive. In Genesis 2:7 God breathed into man’s nostrils the breath of
life and then man became a living being.
In the Filipino context we can relate this breath with hinga. From hinga
we can draw other significant words such as bunting hininga, naghihingalo, malagutan
ng hininga, pahingahan, mahingan, etc. These Filipino words are very much
related to life. It is in this sense
that we are to understand the word spirit, as life, the life-force in a person,
which fires, defines, shapes, motivates, one’s decisions, actions, aspirations
in life. Spirituality as a religious reality is a person’s way of living out
one’s religious or at least ethical conviction. The distinctive reality in
Christianity is the person of Jesus
Christ. “Christian Spirituality is therefore a participation in the
mystery of Christ through the interior life of grace, actuated by faith,
charity, and the other virtues.”
The Spirituality of the Preacher can be
understood through the formula pronounced by an odaining bishop to a newly
ordained deacons as the former gives the book of Gospels to the latter: Receive
the Gospel of Christ, whose herald you now are.
Believe what you read, teach what you believe, and practice what you
teach. Emphasis have to be given on the acts of receivng, believing, reading,
teaching and practicing.
The preacher receives the book of Gospels. He
receives the ministry. He receives them from the mother Church. The act of
receiving highlights the sense of gift being given by a mother to a son. In this context the Word of God in the life of
the Church is proclaimed, received, believed, written, copied, multiplied,
studied, reflected, ritualized, sacramentalized, celebrated, prayed, expounded,
practiced, lived, fulfilled, witnessed, retold, handed on, given. It is through
this cycle that the Word gains an ecclesial dimension. This cycle becomes possible only as the one
receiving the Word makes a space in the shelf of his heart.
Reading involves reflection; an insightful
readiing. It is a conversation; a dialogue between the lived experience of the
preacher and the Christian tradition found in Sacred Scriptures, Liturgy, Rosary,
Sacramental Life, Living Tradition, Lives of the Saints, Theological Heritage,
Social Teachings, Religious Life, Councils, Encyclicals and Exhortations.
Through this dialogue the preacher is able to generate a new truth and meaning
for living.
A preacher who believes can be compared with an
artist. The artist convinces us of the truth by dealing with us holistically. Artists
try to make us feel the truth. Good art gets the truth inside us on a level
deeper than the surface of our minds. On
this level, truth is most irresistible.
The mind may not only resist the truth but may even accept it and keep
it at a personal distance (Anthony Padovano, In
Faith Needs Imagination).
Teaching is trying to affect a person’s heart by appealing to their
thinking. Through teaching certain truths are ingrained in a person’s
understanding, enabling the person too to perform those truths.
Practicing is walking the talk. It includes remembering, calling to mind, deepening, It
aims for a graceful and grace-filled execution of an act. This is achieve
through repetitive virtuos acts. And the perfect place to pracctice one’s
vocation as a preacher is one’s religious community. Timothy Radcliffe said: Religious
communities are like ecological systems, designed to sustain strange forms of
life. A rare frog will need its own ecosystem if it is flourish, and make its
hazardous way from spawn to tadpole to frog. If the frog is threatened with
extinction, then one must build an environment, with its food and ponds and a
climate in which it can thrive.
St. Dominic de Guzman is a perfect portrait of a Preacher. Such
image is projected onto the Constitutions and Ordination of the Friars
preachers: There is only one identifying
sign, a type of genetic code if you will, for the members of the Order and the
Dominican family; that is the preaching for the salvation of humanity
(Fundamental Constitution V), the ministry of the Word, the mission of
evangelization. The Fourth Lateran Council lamented, “no one is giving the
bread of the Word to the faithful.” Dominic understood that herein lay the root
of the problems of the Church in his time. He then decided that this would be
his mission and that of his followers. Dominic conceived his foundation as a
preaching project. He presented this propositum vitae to both Popes Innocent
III and Honorius III for their approval. This project was presented in such a way
that all of the elements of Dominican life would be inspired by the ministry of
the Word and oriented in that direction.
The General Chapter, celebrated in Rome wished to remind the entire
Dominican family, nuns, friars, apostolic sisters, and Dominican laity, of this
identifying sign as we approach the Jubilee Year of 2016. The nuns,
specifically dedicated to prayer, participate in the ministry of preaching,
listening to the Word, celebrating it and proclaiming the Gospel through the
example of their lives. This was the specific mission of the Order in a Church
that was also in need of evangelization and in a world filled with
opportunities but also with foolishness and much suffering. The importance of
our mission demands that we make good use of the Word and of words.
Pope Francis in Evangelii Gaudium 27 says: I dream of a missionary option, that is, a
missionary impulse capable of transforming everything, so that the Church’s
customs, ways of doing things, times and schedules, language and structures can
be suitably channelled for the evangelization of today’s world rather than for
her self-preservation. This was a prophetic intuition because the preaching of
the Good News is the beginning of the process that leads to faith, to the
conversion of a life that is lived centered in the Gospel, the building up of
the Christian community, the humanizing of life in the style of Jesus.
Evagrius of Pontus provides a concrete image of
what a theologian suppose to be. According to him, a
theologian is one who"rests
his head on the chest of Christ." It speaks of the indispensable
prerequisite for any fruitful study of the Bible, a relationship with the Lord
in the intimacy of prayer.
Thus, we go back to the
questions: Where do preachers get what they preach? How do preachers sustain
their ministry? What powers up the preacher? How long does it take to prepare
their homily? ANSWER: It takes a
life-style. It takes a life-time. And the formula; Receive
the Gospel of Christ, whose herald you now are. Believe what you read,
teach what you believe, and practice what you teach, can serve as one’s guide
to achieve such desired life-style.
