Pastoral work requires vibrant interior life
I just attended a clergy gathering where they presented the pastoral thrust of a local church for the year 2010. I was immediately excited with the theme. It’s a big, ambitious plan, and there’s no doubt about its importance and relevance. I hope we the clergy can truly deliver.
There’s the rub. Let’s pray that the whole thing translates into a living, palpable reality, and not just a beautiful project with brilliant ideas, fiery slogans and catchy sound bites, well-crafted modules, all sound and fury that sadly do not go deep enough as to generate life and effect clear transformations of people.
They need to be given life. And for that, a lot depends on the vitality of the spiritual life and the depth of doctrinal orthodoxy of the clergy involved.
I think that unless everything given and received in this plan is done in the context of sincere prayer, unless both the givers and recipients realize they are doing God’s will, many misimpressions can arise, sowing the seeds of failure of this otherwise most worthwhile effort.
We need to overcome the misimpression, for example, that this annual effort is just a yearly routine of programming the clergy. That, for sure, is never intended, but no one can deny that a good number of those involved understand it that way.
Thus there are many signs of resistance, if not open, then passive and disguised. There are even those who succumb to that psychological anomaly, passive-aggressive. That´s when one is friendly in front of you, but hostile at your back.
The point is while it is indispensable to come out with a well-defined strategy, a lot more effort, often arduous, tricky and thankless, should be given to make sure the personal spiritual life and formation of each priest is in good shape.
The latter concern is many times taken for granted or presumed to be taken care of by each priest. Or again given an officious treatment with more congresses, modules, slogans and sound bites.
But there seems to be no vital system of really knowing the state of a cleric’s spiritual life and pastoral competence, and of giving prompt help. Many of the spiritual exercises given to the priests fail to achieve their real purpose, since they remain in the external and official aspects. They hardly touch the interior life.
Certainly, this problem is already quite well known to everyone, especially those in authority. For sure, solutions and remedies have been pursued and applied. I like to think that they continue to be given up to now.
But a lot more is needed, and the reminder to all priests that they—we—should really take care of our spiritual life and our continuing formation should never be stopped. It should, in fact, be always given, and in a prominent and explicit way, and not implicit.
This is because no one can doubt the inalienable link between a priest’s interior life and his pastoral work. And the challenges, problems, pressures that face any priest today are not only growing in number but also in complexity. The means to help us should understandably be continually refined, modified and adapted to reality.
It’s for this reason that the continuing formation of the clergy is most often done in silence, hidden, face to face with God and a spiritual guide, never anonymous. It can not be mainly done in some public forum. It has to be personally given and received. The collective means are only subsidiary to the personal means.
When this on-going formation is understood by many as done mainly in the collective means, we are lost. Nourishing the interior life, internalizing the doctrine of Christ and the Church requires the hidden, spiritual processes proper of gestation and growth.
It is done mainly through prayer, through a personal encounter with God. Unless this is achieved, all the other means would be useless. Prayer unites one with God. With it the doctrine he knows acquires a certain life that can vitally impact with any situation one finds himself in.
Though there will always be resistance, the priest would know how to handle things, his words becoming not only his, but those of God himself, with the same power to transform and convert people. Again, even if there will always be those who refuse to believe, just like what Christ experienced!
(Fr. Cimagala is the Chaplain of Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (CITE), Talamban, Cebu City. Email: roycimagala@gmail.com)
