Augustinian Convocation Homily, June 9,2009

 Early one Sunday morning a priest got on a BART subway train at the Civic Center Station in San Francisco, going from his monastery to do Sunday supply at our Lady of Grace Church, Castro Valley.  After he got comfortably settled and opened his breviary to start to pray morning prayer, a man got on at the Powell Street Station and with unsteady gate made his way swaying into the seat opposite the padre.  The man was somewhat disheveled and obviously under the weather from drinking all night and he had lipstick marks on his cheek.  "Uh-oh", thought the priest, "there goes my quiet time to pray the Office.  I'm sure this guy is going to start a long conversation."  Quite soon the guy looked up from the newspaper he held and said, "Father, what is the cause of arthritis?"  The priest jumped at the chance to shut him up and said, "Arthritis is caused by frequently staying up all night...drinking large quantities of liquor...and carousing with loose women."  Sure enough, the guy looked very taken aback and subdued and sad...and he didn't say another word.  After continuing awhile with his breviary, the priest began to relent, and feel sorry for the guy.  Finally the priest looked up and said: "I'm really sorry you are suffering from arthritis."  The guy looked up himself and said, "Oh, no Father, don't worry about me.  I just read here that the pope has arthritis."
  Whether we sometimes--like that priest-- falter in our ideal of serving others unselfishly or whether we live up to our ideals in every situation, you and I have the common heritage of Augustinian spirituality to sustain us and to direct us in our ministry.  Today's Gospel is about the Good Shepherd, a model which St. Augustine certainly exemplified in his multi-faceted ministry.  Although Augustine did not suffer death for the flock at the hands of the Vandals, he followed his own advice in a letter of his, advising clerics not to flee for safety from the oncoming Vandals if they would be leaving vulnerable members of the flock behind, and we know that the Vandals were at the gates of Hippo when Augustine died his natural death.  Augustine was the "good shepherd" doing what Paul advises Timothy in our 2nd reading, preaching the word at distant places when it was inconvenient because of Augustine's poor health, correcting, reproving, appealing, putting the needs of his community above his own needs.
 
 I was thinking about our Augustinian spiritual heritage and the heritages of other religious orders and the image of rivers came to me.  We in the 21st century stand at the mouth of our own river of tradition and receive what it brings to us from the streams and tributaries which are the beginnings of the river.  Some religious orders are like the Metolius River in Oregon.  It has no tributaries.  The Metolius comes up out of the ground in one particular spot.  Within 5 feet of its origin, it is 10 feet wide and becomes wider quite soon.  Within a hundred feet it is a good sized river.  Religious orders like the Metolius have a founder with a strong charism and vision like St. Ignatius of Loyola, and today's Jesuits follow the pattern he set out.  There is a strong beginning without any tributaries between the origins and today.
 
 Our Augustinian Order is more like the mighty Mississippi, where one branch starts in western Montana and southern Alberta, Canada; another branch starts in northern Minnesota and another set of tributaries starts in western Pennsylvania and western new York.  One of our Augustinian branches starts with Augustine himself, with the several forms of religious life he led: in the community of friends in Tagaste, in the garden monastery at Hippo, and, finally, the community of clerics in the bishop's house.  A second tributary is the tradition of the hermits of Tuscany and the early French Augustinians who founded Clare Priory in England.  A third tributary is the tradition of mendicant friars.  All of these origins of our Order resonate in different ways in each of our lives.  Some of us feel a more contemplative bent; others center life around their apostolate; others around the activities of the community.  Something which I value highly in our Order is the tolerance we have for members to live out this diversity of influences.  I remember during a Vocation Discernment Retreat in San Diego, John Keller speaking about this diversity and saying: "Jerry Bevilaqua is a hermit, Tom Whelan is a monk, and I am an apostolic oriented person."  Whichever stream of influences makes the model you or I claim as that which we can personally live most fruitfully, we have in common the ideal of our first reading today from the Acts of the Apostles about the community ideal of the first Christians, one of the passages crucial for Augustine and ourselves in understanding our calling.
 
 In this emphasis on living in common and having possessions in common, Augustine is very much a person for our times.  People today are thirsting not just for a place which calls itself a community (and we have many such today, from sports teams to clubs to hobby groups to retirement homes), but people are thirsting for the real kind of community found in the Acts of the Apostles and the ideals of Augustine.  Augustine is also a person for our times in the way he reached out to people all over the then-known world.  Today we communicate instantly by e-mail to friends on every continent of the world.  Augustine was doing the same sort of global communication with what was available to him.  With no postal service, besides writing books, he used travelers to take his letters to hundreds of people not only in North Africa, but to the Near East and to Europe.  A third characteristic of today, besides the thirst for genuine community and the fact of our instant communication, is that we live in a world of multiple choices available to people.  People, instead of continuing the identity given them by their parents, are choosing their own identity, by the car they drive, the place they live, their job, the clothes they wear, their set of friends, and more important for us, the religion they practice. 30% of those baptized as Catholics have moved to another religion or to no religion.  The pew research on religion shows that people are moving freely not just to another parish but from one religion to another.  Augustine faced this dilemma where people were moving from Catholicism to Donatism, from orthodox belief to Pelagianism, and he was tireless in his writing and his preaching to point out the implications of the choices people were making.  A fourth characteristic of the 21st century is that people make choices not by research or listening to persuasive arguments, but through their personal experience.  Research tells us that after five minutes in a new church environment, people have made up their minds as to whether they will return again or not...long before thy have heard the sermon.
 
 In so far as we, like Augustine, have a real grasp of the major issues of our day and imitate his zeal for helping people grasp the implications of the choices open to them; in so far as we continue to be enthused by Augustine's vision of life in common, spending time in fraternal meals and discussion, community prayer and ministry and the sharing of our goods in common; in so far as we continue to imitate Augustine in using the best means of communication open to us; in so far as we continue to create parishes, schools, and religious houses which are warm and welcoming, with a perceivable sense of community, with true love and concern for each other--then we will certainly continue to have an Order built on a common tradition which remains immensely effective for the kingdom and very attractive to new members.  Our common future is built on how you and I live each day.      by Tom Whelan, O.S.A.