Fr Billy Swan
A true story tells of a newly ordained priest who was assigned to a parish as associate pastor. He had a reputation of being a good preacher – clear, articulate and well prepared. On his first Sunday at the parish, he delivered what he thought was a good homily. After Mass, the pastor was waiting for him in the sacristy. “How did that that go?” he asked. “Not bad” was the reply “but I felt some connection with the people was missing”. The following week, he spent even more time and effort on his Sunday sermon. Again, the pastor was waiting to meet him afterwards. “Better this week?” he asked. “No. Worse. I felt I lost them halfway through”. The following Sunday, he prepared like never before. The content of the homily was excellent as was the delivery and the time he took to preach it. “So how did you get on this week?” again the pastor asked. “Terrible” was the answer of the young priest. “What is wrong with these people? I can’t connect with them”. The wise pastor then asked another question. “Tell me, those people you have just celebrated Mass with, do you love them? You cannot preach to, catechize or evangelize people if you don’t love them first”. For the following Sunday, the young priest applied this wisdom. As he prepared his homily, he visualized the people as he prayed with the Sunday readings. He prayed for those he was about to preach to and asked Christ for the grace to love them as he does. And from that loving heart, a beautiful homily emerged – one that connected, inspired and warmed the hearts of all who heard him from that day on.
The story makes the point that in all our efforts to evangelize and catechize, the fruits of those efforts will increase in the measure that we love those we seek to reach. It reminds us that what matters is not only what we say or teach but the way we say it and the love with which we teach the faith we seek to share.
Our point of departure, as always, is Christ himself. He faithfully preached and taught the truth of the Gospel by word and example and with authority behind it (Mark 1:27). His words reached into people’s hearts and resonated with their deepest desires – so much so that they said of him: “No one has preached like this man” (John 7:46). His proclamation of the Gospel was never aimed at winning arguments but winning people and leading their hearts to believe in him. His words of truth were never separated from love, even when they were challenging and highly critical. When he upbraided the Pharisees, his passion was motivated by love of them and his desire for their conversion. Through Christ, the love of God made man was not offered to us as a theory or an idea. Rather it came through a human heart on fire with love and poured out as a gift through a wound endured in suffering. After his resurrection as he encountered the disciples on the road to Emmaus, his unpacking of the Scriptures resulted in their hearts becoming enflamed with new hope, faith and joy.
This affective dimension of Christian preaching was not lost on people like St Augustine. In his classical work ‘On Christian Doctrine’ what matters is not only the content of that doctrine but the passion and love with which it is proclaimed. Concerning the love of Christ, far from it being an idea, he likens it to “the brightness of the fire burning in their hearths” (Sermon 84, 3).
Borrowing from Aristotle, Augustine says effective persuasion depends on ethos (the character of the speaker), logos (the content of preaching) and pathos - the emotions aroused by the preacher in his listeners (On Christian Doctrine, 4.13.29). Quoting Cicero, Augustine has learned that: “A great orator has truly said that ‘an eloquent man must so speak as to teach, to delight and to persuade’…To teach is a necessity, to delight is a beauty, to persuade is a triumph” (On Christian Doctrine, 4.12.27). He uses the analogy of spices that flavor food to describe preaching and teaching imbued with eloquence “not telling them what they ought to do, but urging them to do what they already know ought to be done” (On Christian Doctrine, 4.11.26; 4.12.27).
It is here that Augustine adds an important caveat to preaching and teaching with affection and delight. Moving people’s hearts is not an end in itself but serves the final purpose of making Christ known and leading people to faith in him. Moreover, it is more important to speak truthfully than to speak pleasingly: “Let him say wisely what he does not say eloquently, rather than say eloquently what he says unwisely” (On Christian Doctrine, 4.28.61). This takes us back time and time again to the goal of evangelization which is not to produce feelings but to change lives.
That said, the affective aspect of evangelization was kept alive by some of the greatest saints of our tradition. Meditating on the Lord’s Epiphany, St Bernard of Clairvaux wrote that: “The more he humbles himself on my account, the more powerfully he engages my love” (Sermon I, Epiphany, 1-2). In his recent encyclical on the Sacred Heart, Pope Francis recalls Saint Bonaventure instructing Christians not to pray for light, but for “raging fire” (Journey into the Mind of God, 7, 6; Dilexit Nos, 26). Francis similarly points to the theology underlying the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius Loyola that is based on spiritual “affection…affectus” (Dilexit Nos, 24).
Finally, for St John of the Cross, God engages us through spiritual affection. Through spiritual affection, God “refreshes, delights and gladdens the soul” (Spiritual Canticle, 11.3).
It is in continuity with this tradition of affective preaching that Pope Francis speaks of the Church’s task to “warm hearts”. In an interview shortly after his election, he insisted we must be “capable of warming people’s hearts, walking at their side in the dark, talking with them and even entering into their night and their darkness, without losing our way” (With A. Spadaro, Interview with Pope Francis, in La Civiltà Cattolica, 19th September 2013).
In The Joy of the Gospel, the Holy Father instructed priests to preach with closeness to their people as a “heart to heart communication” and with a “warmth and tone of voice” (The Joy of the Gospel, 142, 140). Similar to the advice of the parish priest to his young associate about loving the people, Pope Francis says: “Preparation for preaching requires love. We only devote periods of quiet time to the things or the people whom we love; and here we are speaking of the God whom we love, a God who wishes to speak to us” (The Joy of the Gospel, 146). For Francis, evangelization that is born out of affection for the other produces “a kind of music which inspires encouragement, strength and enthusiasm” (The Joy of the Gospel, 139).
We can’t evangelize people without loving them first. To all of us in the Church who have influence on others as parents, grand-parents, priests, catechists, teachers, writers and guides; let us remember that it is not just what we communicate that counts but the pathos, warmth and love towards others with which we do so. May our words and our witness be heart-warming, burning away coldness and indifference, engaging the hearts of those we seek to evangelize and moving them towards union with the heart of Christ whose heart is a furnace of love and mercy.
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