Continuing his series of posts on homiletics, Fr. Philip Powell, OP, offers some advice on how to listen to a homily. A representative sample:
4. Listen now, argue later. OK. Fr. Oprah is on and on and on about his latest trip to the therapist and he’s boring the snot out of you with tales of his evolving consciousness and how close he is to exploding into Cosmic Oneness with the Womb of Universal Is-ness. First, put down the missalette. Just put it down. Pay attention to key words and image and repeat every word in your head. Why? Because for better or worse, ugly or pretty, he’s the preacher and (however hard it is for us to understand why) the Church has seen fit to make him a priest. He has something you need to hear. Even if you need to hear in order to reject it. Listen now, argue later. If you start arguing when he launches into a description of his Naked Rebirthing Sweat Lodge Ritual with Richard Rohr and you tune out because you need to argue, then you can’t hear what it is you need to hear from him. You’re spending your homily time arguing with someone who can’t hear you argue and couldn’t care less if he could. So, don’t waste your homily time arguing with your version of Fr. Oprah’s homily. Hear him out and argue on his time later.
That’s good advice for me. Another great Dominican, Fr. Giles Dimock, once told my Sacraments class that we are not called to be sacramental SWAT teams, nitpicking every point in the celebration of the Mass such that we never actually worship. That’s not to say that we should just ignore gross heterodoxy that invalidates the Mass, but that’s not the usual sort of problem we encounter at Mass.
Offer up the illicit abuses. It’s more effective than confrontation most of the time.
Dom
Where is Fr. Giles now? I was at Steubenville when he arrived and he literally transformed the campus. Fr. Giles was always moderate and while I don’t recall the “SWAT TEAMS” reference, it surely sounds like Fr. Giles.
It is good advice, for another reason.
Also, while I greatly sympathize with people who have to endure a homily that contradicts the Faith, more often people are unhappy about weak homilies, or a priest who seems to be self-indulgent, or too wordy, or all over the map, and the like.
And in those cases, without excusing the priest, I think that’s a time to receive it in humility. Perhaps the priest is culpable, and if so, shame on him.
But perhaps he’s a fine priest who just can’t preach; perhaps he’s a hardworking priest who’s gotten into the habit of not preparing his homily. Perhaps he’s having a bad day; perhaps, if you walked in his shoes . . . you get my point.
Not excusing; but understanding is in order.
After all, remember the judgment that hangs over the head of everyone who preaches and teaches in Christ’s name. Remember the weakness of men. Remember that priest may go to hell; and your purgatory on earth of enduring this will get you to heaven earlier.
Dan,
I don’t know where Fr. Giles is now. Last I heard he was at Holy Apostles Seminary in Connecticut but that was quite a while ago.
This does not hit close to home, it hits me square and center. I will try to follow the good Dominican’s advice but it is also helpful to know that I can read Fr. Martin Fox’s homily online.
Tim L
I’ve heard a few homilies like the one he describes. He does not mean that you have to swallow heresy whole. On the contrary.
He means that you should listen and think—so you can learn to tell the difference between right and wrong teaching.
The problem with this is that a lot of people don’t have the training to analyze homilies and can’t tell the bad ones from the good ones. THUS, they will end up absorbing a lot of contradictory stuff, which has the net effect of confusing people right out of the church down to the protestant church down the street. Or worse out of religion altogether, disillusioned and badmouthing church. Cognitive dissonance.
And actually, it’s not the business of Catholics to discern their own versions of church teaching. The church should be teaching from revelation, not asking us to somehow intuit the truth for ourselves. That would be protestant.