Powerful Words For The Illness of Our Time

The following is an excerpt from a homily given by Detroit Archbishop Allen H. Vigneron to more than 160 priests and 800 members of the faithful gathered for the Chrism Mass on Holy Thursday, April 2, 2015. These words are powerful and this servant of God hits the nail right on the head for one of the major spiritual diseases of our time.

And for that I’d like to begin with some phrases from the sequence in Pentecost, when in the liturgy we say to the Holy Spirit, “Heal our wounds, our strength renew; On our dryness, pour your dew. Melt the frozen, warm the chill.” Being dry, being frozen, being chill — that seems to me to be a condition which is very particular to our time.

Has there ever been a time like ours when a people who once heard the Gospel, living in a culture that had over time been shaped according to the principals of the Gospel, has so willingly become asleep about the Gospel, and shed the Gospel, and become indifferent to the Gospel?  Are we not frozen, chill, and dry? Are we not bored with Christ? Is that not the condition that the Holy Spirit needs to heal in our time? Have we not come to a time when, sad as it is, hearts no longer seem to be restless, but rather more drugged, befuddled. Are we not at a time when there’s a loss of confidence that there is out there, somewhere, some good worth striving for? So that the typical attitude of our time in so many is simply, “Whatever.” …?

I think Cardinal Ratzinger was speaking about this at the beginning of the millennium. He said: The deepest poverty is the inability of joy, the tediousness of a life considered absurd and contradictory. This poverty is widespread today, in very different forms in the materially rich as well as the poor countries. The inability of joy presupposes and produces the inability to love, produces jealousy, avarice — all the defects  that devastate the life of individuals and of the world.”

I was reading in Blessed John Henry Newman some lines that seemed to well articulate this being frozen, chill and dry. Newman wrote: “What a truly wretched state is that coldness and dryness of soul, in which so many live and die, high and low, learned and unlearned. Many a great man, many a peasant, many a busy man, lives and dies with closed heart, with affections undeveloped, unexercised.”

As I, as a pastor, consider the challenges of today, I look and see so many who are resigned in order to be destitute of what is good and noble, because our age claims to have discovered that anything that presents itself as worth the warmth of one’s heart is mere trumpery — an illusion confected in order to manipulate, often with a view to gaining power or money. Don’t we live in an age when so many are dry, chill and frozen because every claim seems to be merely an advertisement, and we know what advertisements are about.

I recognize as a pastor this attitude of heart what the ancients call acedia — the noonday devil. The sort of weariness that saps the vitality out of life. The kind of thing that’s very typical of people who are past their prime. About this condition Dorothy Sayers writes: “This is the sin which believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, loves nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and only remains alive because there is nothing it would die for.” We have known it far too well for many years. Incessant activity, she says, this desire to always be connected which is typically of our time, she observes — these are all disguises for an empty heart and an empty brain and the empty soul of acedia.

I realize I’ve gone on at length, and perhaps I risk boring so many of you. But I do believe in my heart as a priest that this condition is the great wound which the Holy Spirit, we must call upon Him to heal today. This kind of weariness that saps life of its vitality. Imagine if you would a retelling of the parable of the merchant who searches for a fine pearl. And in our day, might that parable be about a merchant who doesn’t care anymore? Who goes from market to market, never even able to recognize the pearl of great price? And to this condition there has to be a response. God does not want it to be this way. This is of great evil — a great affliction that so many should be bored with Jesus Christ. And we must then, the Church and especially we pastors, we must — as Pope Francis says — give people back the joy of the Gospel. We have to help them rediscover the joy that comes from knowing that they are loved by God, and that they can reciprocate that love to God, and that God wants it back.

We have to teach our age to ask from God, to expect everything from God, even God himself. Somebody has to teach the 21st century in the United States to believe again that each of us is made for some purpose beyond oneself. To strive for that purpose by acts that perhaps are great, but perhaps are simple and small… but to strive nonetheless for a great good. Indeed to strive for someone who is great and good. To strive for someone who is the greatest and the best.

Someone has to teach our age about Jesus. And that then is the strategy of the Holy Spirit — to lead in the re-proposing of Jesus Christ. To bring those whom Christ loves face-to-face with Him. Because it is out of that face that his love shines. It is the work of the Holy Spirit to present Jesus as his most attractive. Jesus healing our wounds. Jesus forgiving our sins. Jesus standing with us in our trial. It is the work of the Holy Spirit to make Christ present in the power of his Love. To touch us with his anointing externally in the sacraments. To touch us in the anointing of our hearts and minds through his internal action. This is the case for all of us. For you and me who are already fully initiated sacramentally in to the Church. It is the work of the Holy Spirit to stir into an ardent flame whatever ember might be banked up and suffocated by our own difficulties and our own trials, our own acedia. It is the work of the Holy Spirit to do this for us who seem to be all-in and all-committed. It is the work of the Holy Spirit to do this for those who are lax and languid in their life of faith. People we see at Christmas and Easter and funerals. It is the work then finally of the Holy Spirit to do this to make Christ present, to anoint them, to help them know Christ, even for those who have never yet heard of him.

We are all called then to be instruments of the Holy Spirit. It is only the Holy Spirit who can make Jesus present. But we, each of us, can do our part. That’s what the New Evangelization is about. To assist the Holy Spirit in making supple once again minds that have become brittle and dry because they are — falsely, but they are nonetheless — resigned to a meaningless existence. We’re called to be instruments of the Holy Spirit because only he can melt frozen hearts, hearts that are frozen in lovelessness. And it is our great vocation, in the beginning of the 21st century as the Catholic people in the Archdiocese of Detroit, to assist the Holy Spirit in warming spirits that have become so chilled… that acting in order to lay hold of what is truly good seems just too impossible. What is the New Evangelization? It is about dedicating ourselves totally to assist the Holy Spirit in making present Jesus Christ in His compelling love.

And so, now you see the secret. It’s all pretty clear. I’m calling us all to work in these years ardently for the New Evangelization, and I’m preaching today in order to connect the sacred chrism and the power of the Holy Spirit with the New Evangelization initiative.

I need your prayer! I need everybody’s prayer! It’s not just for me. It’s not just for the priests. It has to be for all of us. Who could remain indifferent in the face of this acedia, this noonday devil!? This being bored with Jesus!? We must pray that the Holy Spirit will touch, in great power, hearts. That he will ignite the dry, the frozen and the chilled. We must pray for ourselves. We must pray for each other. You must pray for me and I pray for you. That the Spirit whom we call down into the chrism today will come in power into every pore and every part of the mystical body here in southeast Michigan.

Take courage! Or, to use a very plain and homely expression, pull up your socks! Be open, and ready, for what the Holy Spirit will do. Because it will be great if we let Him be great. Be persevering. Don’t be faint-hearted. Don’t give up at the first or the second or the third or the 77th failure. And, above all, be confident. Be confident in the power of the Holy Spirit to change hearts and make things new.

The world thinks it’s old. The world feels like it’s middle-aged and, “oh, it hurts, and my knees don’t work, and I’m just tired and it’s all just too much.”

But we’re not old, our Church. We’re young. The spirit is alive.

The Spirit has come from the heart of the risen Jesus, and he will do this. That’s what I’ve come to the Cathedral today to say and testify to, and that’s what I ask all of you to join me in believing and doing.

Amen.