Homily for Priesthood Vocation Retreat
Bishop of Lake Charles
Vocation Reflection
February 6, 2011
Chapel of the Assumption
Tabor Retreat House
“You are the salt of the earth…. You are the light of the world.” Matthew 5:13, 14
No one should become a priest because he cannot think of anything else to do with his life. We become priests because we have something to offer. The priest is not for himself. The priesthood is for others, and they are God and His People.
In the Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus says to His disciples, “You are the salt of the earth… You are the light of the world” (Matthew 5:13, 14), he is using two essential images that say a lot about the priesthood. They actually say a great deal to anyone who wants to be a follower of Christ, but to be a priest one must first have a deep relationship with Jesus Christ as His follower. This is a given. Once that relationship is established, then “salt” and “light” become even more important for what the follower must be as a priest. There are, I believe, two dimensions to salt and light.
First, both transform. Salt makes food tastier, and light illumines. One enhances flavor, and the other reveals what surrounds us. To transform is salt and light’s basic function and service, because fundamentally without them we would be missing a great deal. Jesus Christ emphasizes this when He asks who can restore salt’s flavor if it goes flat and who would light a lamp only to put it under a bushel basket. They are essential, because they transform.
Second, neither salt nor light are responsible for their qualities. Who gives salt its flavor? Who creates light? Salt and light do not create the qualities that make them what they are. God does. So whatever good they accomplish, they are instruments of the one who gave salt flavor and the one who lit the match to light the candle.
What do these images and words of our Lord in the Sermon on the Mount have to say to us who live either having accepted a call from God or who think they might have a call from God to be a priest?
We are meant to be transforming—salt seasoning and light illumining. I think of the great priests I knew growing up as a child. There were a bunch of them. There was a priest in a rural parish who was a displaced person from Poland after World War II. He had a severe speech defect. As a young priest, he was present in a parish when Germany invaded Poland in 1939. As I recall the story, the invaders had nailed his pastor to the door of the parish church and cut out a portion of the tongue of the young assistant priest. He was very difficult to understand, but he was attentive to his parishioners and they loved him. That few understood what exactly he said was forgiven, because he was a good priest. He was the salt of the earth. There was another priest, whom I succeeded as pastor in my first parish. He was from Czechoslovakia and had been a prisoner in a Russian concentration camp. He had escaped. He had many stories to tell. He was one of the most no-nonsense people I have ever met, but he too was consistent, steady, prayerful, and hard working, and his parishioners loved him. He was a light to the world. Recently, I attended the March for Life in Washington. One priest I know told me that on one such march he had brought a group of high school students from his Catholic school. They were making their way to the March, taking the Metro, along with thousands and thousands of others, pushing and jostling their way onto the train, when a well dressed woman, obviously on her way to work, turned, looked at the young people and said, “Why don’t you people get a life? It’s just a piece of tissue.” For the first time in their lives, they encountered someone who represented the “culture of death.” They were startled. Some cried. Some got angry. However, what they could not fail to recognize was that they had been a witness. The witness of “salt” and “light” transforms because you are who you are and you give example by being true to yourself—and when the witness is truly present, those opposed to it react strongly. They don’t like it, and, as we say, they “come out of the woodwork.”
A priest is called to witness. Who he is has the power to transform more than what he does, because who he is informs what he does. He must first be “the salt of the earth” and “the light to the world” before he flavors and illumines. Everything he does flows from what he is—in his personal relationship with Jesus Christ, his prayer life, his intellectual life, his conscience, and his moral life.
The second dimension to salt and light was that God gives them to us. Neither salt nor light are responsible for their qualities. God gave them and meant them to be what they are. In vocation we must ask ourselves the question, is this what God wants me to do? Where is the answer to that question? The answer is found, not entirely but to a large part, in the qualities that God has given to us already. St. John Vianney, the patron of parish priests, was notoriously a bad student. He had major troubles with his studies. The story is told about one of his more intelligent classmates that gave John Vianney a hard time in seminary, remarking on his slow comprehension. The story continues that John Vianney went and knelt at the desk of his more intelligent classmate and begged forgiveness for having made him impatient with his ignorance. The classmate went on to be a bishop—which is where the story originates, and John Vianney went on to be a saint. Each had his gift to give. John Vianney’s was his zeal, motivated by a love for God and his parishioners that consumed every waking moment. Each of us has a quality, often more than one.
Many of us are here, as priests or seminarians or prospective seminarians, because someone said to us, “You should be a priest.” Why did he or she make that observation—to make us feel good about ourselves? I think not. What was said to us was said out of love for the Church. That person saw in us what made for a good priest. Somehow, someway, someone recognized in us some quality that person thought would make a good priest. These qualities season life. These qualities are not meant to be placed under a bushel basket.
The question to ask in discernment is not: what is best for me? Vocation is not about me. The real question to ask is: what is best for the Church? We do not become priests because we cannot think of anything else better to do with our lives. We become priests because we have something to offer, because we have come to know better how and why we are “the salt of the earth” and “the light of the world.”