Often at book signings, authors will do readings from their books. In this case, this would involve subjecting you to a sermon. You’ll be glad to know that I will spare you that. But I do want to speak for a few minutes about what preachers try to do when they preach, or at least what this preacher tries to do. In particular, I want to think about how preaching is situated within particular times and places, yet strives to make present in those times and places an enduring—one might even say eternal—word.
Mary Jane O’Brien, a long-time and much-beloved parishioner at Corpus Christi who died in 2016, once said to me, after I had given a homily that quoted some Church Father, “you are able to find those old guys saying the most interesting things.” And Mary Jane was not someone inclined to think that old guys had very much interesting to say. So it is in honor of Mary Jane that I would like to begin my remarks with St. Augustine.
In book nine of his Confessions, Augustine tells of being in the port city of Ostia with his mother Monica, not too many months after his conversion and baptism. They are preparing to leave Italy and return to their home province of North Africa, which for Augustine meant leaving behind his secular ambitions, which he had come to see as built on shifting sands, and seeking what God desired for him on the periphery of the Empire. They are standing looking out a window, engaged in conversation about what the life of the saints in heaven must be like, a life freed from the transitoriness of time. Augustine says, “our minds attempted in some degree to reflect on so great a reality” (9.10.23), and as they spoke, he says, “our minds were lifted up by an ardent affection toward eternal being itself…. And while we talked and panted after it, we touched it in some small degree by a moment of total concentration of the heart. And we sighed…as we returned to the noise of our human speech where a sentence has both a beginning and an ending.” He concludes, “But what is to be compared with your word, Lord of our lives? It dwells in you without growing old and gives renewal to all things” (9.10.24).
I think of preaching as an attempt to take that word that never grows old and gives renewal to all things, that word that we at best touch in some small degree in our most exalted moments, and render it in the noise of our human speech, where a sentence has both a beginning and an end. Augustine had a keen sense of how paradoxical our attempts are to speak of the eternal God in words that only exist as moments in the flux of time. As he says near the outset of Confessions: “What has anyone achieved in words when he speaks about you? Yet woe to those who are silent about you” (1.4.4). It is this paradox that accompanies all attempts to speak about God, but perhaps preaching most of all. For preaching is theology—God-talk—at its most ephemeral. Even when we try to make our words memorable, so that they live on in our hearers’ hearts after their sound has faded in the air, even the most memorable words will someday be forgotten. Even if, like me, you write them out, because you don’t trust yourself to speak without a script, they are often addressed to such highly specific times and places that their relevance would seem to pass away, carried on the tide of time. This ephemeral quality is not, of course, accidental, for preaching demands that we address our own particular moment, moments that come hurtling toward us from the future and quickly fade into the past, even as we seek to honor the timeless word. But I do wonder if such ephemeral theology merits printing and binding into a book.
When I was persuaded by Maureen to attempt a book of homilies, I was keenly aware of this question. So I was tempted to pick out homilies from the past fifteen years that were more “universal” in their content: homilies that could have been preached anywhere, at any time, and, in theory, to any congregation. Of course, having read Augustine a few times, I was pretty sure that no homily—indeed, no human act of speech—ever attains that sort of universality. But I also found that the less my homilies were tied to particular moments, particular people, particular places, the less “bite” they had, the less interesting they were. I found myself rereading the most generic ones, those that did not in any way reflect their time and place of origin, and thinking, “meh.” The less-generic ones seemed to draw some sort of energy from the particularities of their origin, an energy that may be noisy by comparison with the stillness of the timeless divine word, but noisy in the way that Jesus, the Word made flesh, is noisy: proclaiming, promising, denouncing, consoling. So I decided to lean into particularity.
In a sense, this book is a gamble that my reaction as an author will also be the reaction of my readers, that they too will feel in these homilies a hint of the energy unleashed by the timeless word taking flesh in time. Which is to say that the homilies in this collection are by design artifacts from particular places and moments: the homily I gave at my father in law’s funeral in Pittsburgh that required the negotiating of some complex family dynamics; the homily I gave at Cathedral of Mary Our Queen on the Sunday after the January 6 attack on the Capitol that led, after Mass, to what I will euphemistically call a spirited discussion; and the homilies I gave at my dining room table and streamed over Facebook in the first months of the coronavirus pandemic. But most of these homilies are homilies I gave in this place, listened to (if perhaps no longer remembered) by some of you sitting here today. I dedicated this book to the people of Corpus Christi because it draws much of its energy from their lives.
A few familiar names appear, such as Mary Hurson and Theo Kostic in the homily I gave at their baptism, but far more individuals are present in these homilies than those that are explicitly named. Because many of you were on my mind and in my heart as I wrote these homilies. I would often be thinking of what specific people were going through—their joys and sorrows, hopes and anxieties—and even if their names were never spoken, they shaped what I had to say. Some question raised at an RCIA session, some conversation at the church door, some struggle that was shared with me in private: all of those are in here, unspoken and yet somehow, I hope, speaking through my words.
But it was not simply individuals who shaped this book. It was a community, the parish of Corpus Christi, a community shaped by certain practices. Some of these are practices that are universal to Catholics and Christians: listening together to God’s Word, initiating new members into Christ’s body, being nourished together at the Lord’s table. But some are practices that are particular, if not unique, to Corpus Christi. The practice of people expecting, even demanding, that homilies address the concrete realities of life, an expectation and demand that people are not afraid to articulate (I am forever grateful to Gerri Gray for telling me repeatedly that I need to give people something to do in my homilies). The practice of celebrating the liturgy in a way that underscores the full, conscious, and active participation of the whole assembly, which provided the context of worship in which my homilies were preached. The practice of welcoming those on the margins of the Church, which meant preaching to a congregation with a lot—a lot—of questions about the teachings of the Church, and a disinclination to simply accept them without argument. The practice of sharing our lives with each other outside of the liturgy, of providing me an opportunity to glimpse the richness and complexity of the lives of those who listened to me.
This place is called Corpus Christi, the body of Christ. Its very name is a reminder that the Word takes flesh in particular times and places. For my first twelve years as a deacon, it was the body in which I tried to let the Word take flesh through my own noisy, time-bound words. To whatever degree I succeeded, the credit belongs to the Spirit who is at work in you, and, as in all things, to God belongs the glory. Thank you.
