Belles Beginning Mass Homily

August 24, 2019  Saint Mary's College

First Year Students Mass

Welcome to Saint Mary’s College!  How many of you arrived by horse and chariots? In carts? Upon mules and dromedaries?  How many of you know what a dromedary is?   You represent 31 states and 3 nations, from the east and the west and the north and the south, and you are here for your next great experiment with truth—for continuing your education.  

 At Saint Mary’s, you will exercise the discipline that is education to become fully alive or, in the words of  Saint John Newman, to flourish--to grow not into the conventional person the limited world would have you be but into who you REALLY are at the very core of your being.  You are here to flourish!

You enter through the narrow gate, where you will encounter the core of your being:  your God.  None of us can know our true selves until we come to know and love the core of our being -without a relationship with the living presence we call God.  God!  What a word!  What an over used, misunderstood and mysterious word. We have certain perceptions of that word, many of which are still immature, undisciplined, poorly educated, and incomplete and can impede our spiritual and intellectual growth. We cannot cleave to those images of God but need to examine and evaluate all of them if we are to grow into who truly are.  We might keep some aspects of the images.  We will tweak others.  Others we might drop entirely, realizing they were more like fairy tales, told to attract us through them into a more adult belief, but no longer of value. As we mature spiritually, our faith becomes not a theory but a love affair. We flourish!

For Cardinal Newman, the ideal Catholic institution of higher learning is a community of thinkers, engaging in intellectual pursuits not for any external purpose, but as an end in itself. Same for Sister Madeleva, who envisioned for Saint Mary’s a broad, liberal education which teaches women "to think and to reason and to compare and to discriminate and to analyze."  

 

So welcome to the community that is Saint Mary’s College. We do what we do here as a community because that’s who we are – individuals come together with unique talents and gifts in pursuit of a common goal –renewing the face of the earth!  Here we grow in knowledge of God by learning about the entire community of creation, everything that exists, visible and invisible, fact and theory.

No one of us knows God fully. So we learn together in classrooms and laboratories -- as a community We live and eat together --as community.  We pray together as community and we play together as community. 

You are most welcome to this community, not to fit into to something already established, but to join in forming the new community Saint Mary’s will become because you are now added to that great cloud of witnesses who have gone before.  We only continue to flourish if we welcome the addition of your presence, your gifts, and your talents. 

Jewish philosopher and theologian Martin Buber contends that community comes about first through living in mutual relationship with a Living, Ultimate Reality at its Center. For Christians,  the Living, Ultimate Reality at our Center is the Risen Christ, who walks with us through the narrow gate, We walk in mutual relationship with Him as we listen to His word and embody his incarnate Spirit into our common flesh—body and blood, as we will do anew in just a few minutes.

Second, Buber continues, community comes about when its members live in that same mutual relationship with one another. We become who we receive-one in communion with all creation as the Risen Christ. 

Our integrity as a community depends on the mutuality of our relationships.  We live as a community when we welcome all who journey with us and exclude no one for any of the reasons our world gives us to do so: differences of origin, socio-economics, race, ethnicity, sexual identity, religious belief or lack thereof—all are us and all are welcome.

We encounter Ultimate Reality through communal religious practices like this one, but also through nature, science, the arts, human relationships, and serving each other, because everything that is, is one—is Christ!  We are the Risen Christ! In knowing ourselves, we know Christ.  In living as one with Christ, we become our true selves, and we recline together at His  table as equals, as one in being with the living God.  Then, with all creation, we flourish! Welcome!  Flourish!  We need you and we love you, but ours is an easy discipline, because we know Christ and we know you.