Msgr. Peter J. Vaghi
Title of Series: "What's the Word? Dei Verbum 40 Years Later"

"God’s Word -- Why Bother to Listen?"

Session 1 - September 9th, 2004

It is hard to believe that we have been coming together at St. Patrick now for 17 years on First Friday morning. I thank you for your presence here this morning as we begin a new year together, a year when we focus on the Word of God--the living Word of God.

We will come to understand hopefully what the Word of God means, how it is that God's living word is communicated to us each day and how we are able to hear God speaking to us even amidst the distractions and din of our daily lives. More fundamentally, we will address why it is that we should even bother to attempt to hear the whisper of God's voice in our lives and how we can do it.

In an Angelus message this summer, on July 18, our Holy Father said: "Listening to the Word of God is the most important thing in our lives." In the headlines of the L'Osservatore Romano that week, we read: "Our Priority: listening to God's Word."

In Novo Millennio Ineunte (At the Beginning of the New Millenium), our Holy Father is quite clear in his call that each of us should try and live a holy life. In fact he repeatedly challenges us to embrace a vocation to holiness. He writes: "There is no doubt that this primacy of holiness and prayer is inconceivable without a renewed listening to the word of God...It is especially necessary that listening to the word of God should become a life giving encounter, in the ancient and ever valid tradition of lectio divina, which draws from the biblical text the living word which questions, directs and shapes our lives." NMI 39 Hence when we speak of "listening" to the word of God, we speak of an encounter with a living Person. That person is Jesus Christ. He reveals fully the Father, our God, to us. He communicates uniquely His living presence.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, that great Swiss theologian, in his wonderful book, entitled Prayer, went so far as to say: "Man was created to be a hearer of the word, and it is in responding to the word that he attains his true dignity. His innermost constitution has been designed for dialogue." (22) There is then something about the very structure of the human person which constitutes us to desire an encounter with God and His Word, even if we fail to understand that yearning. In that famous quote from St. Augustine's Confessions, we read: "for you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you." CCC 30 Let us listen to the voice of God; let us enter into his rest.

A number of years ago, on a John Carroll Society pilgrimage in the footsteps of St. Paul, in the midst of a very hot August day, Cardinal Laghi and I climbed a steep and rocky hill in Athens to get a glimpse of the Areopagus on Mars Hill where in 51 A.D.St. Paul gave his famous "Men of Athens" speech. It was a speech delivered to lawyers, the judges and philosophs of His day (none of them schooled in the language or person of Jesus). It is referred to in CCC 28 and enshrined forever in Acts 17:22-31.

It was there on Mars Hill that St. Paul directly refers to this gathering of the Greek intelligentsia, at this cultural center of Athens, as religious people. This does not mean that they were religious in belief or practice. But they were religious in the deepest sense of that word.

Paul addresses them: "You Athenians, I see that in every respect you are very religious. For as I walked around looking carefully at your shrines, I even discovered an altar inscribed 'To an Unknown God.'" And then in very philosophical language, he tries to tell them about Jesus, the one true God. Quoting Aratus, one of their poets, he tells them "In him we live and move and have our being."

Speaking of St. Paul in his Athens speech, the Pope in Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason) writes "The Apostle accentuates a truth which the Church has always treasured: in the far reaches of the human heart there is a seed of desire and nostalgia for God." (24) The Athenians were not open to Paul or what he had to say and so he left. This experience is one known so often to each of us--at cocktail parties, at work, even in the home, at the Areopagus of our day. The God who means so much to us can leave others unmoved and untouched. At times, we are even distracted and fail also to hear His living Word, to encounter Him personally.

In our day, there are also many shrines dedicated to an unknown God. There are many who explicitly or implicitly reject the existence of a living God, the Word of God. In our secular age, it is easy, for many, even normative, to live without even thinking of God or hearing His Word.

In one of his addresses this summer to the American Bishops during their Ad Limina visit, on June 4, the Pope said: "In the wake of increasing secularism and fragmentation of knowledge, 'new forms of poverty' have arisen, particularly in cultures which enjoy material well-being, that reflect a 'despair at the lack of meaning in life.' ...Faced with these tragic flaws in social development... [there]...must be placed at the service of the complete knowledge and realization of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which alone 'fully discloses humankind to itself and unfolds its noble calling.'"

These contemporary challenges should not be cause for discouragement. At the very beginning of the catechism, after all, it insists that, as in the time of ancient Athens, whether Jesus Christ is explicitly acknowledged as Lord and Savior, there is a desire (a capacity) and a quest for God written in every human heart without exception. That is so precisely because we are created by God and for God. Speaking of the Lord, as I mentioned earlier, St. Augustine writes that "our heart is restless until it rests in you." God never ceases drawing us to Himself even where He is not explicitly known to us.

At the beginning of Fides et Ratio, Pope John Paul II writes that: "....God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth--in a word, to know himself--so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves." In Veritatis Splendor, the Pope writes similarly: "In the depth of his heart there always remains a yearning for absolute truth and a thirst to attain full knowledge of it. This is eloquently proved by man's tireless search for knowledge in all fields." (VS 1) In this sense, we are religious by nature, religious in the sense that we are created to transcend ourselves. "Human beings would not even begin to search for something of which they knew nothing or for something which they thought was wholly beyond them. Only the sense that they can arrive at an answer leads them to take the first step." (FR 29)

This step, this search, is one thing. But how do we come to know and discover and even love God, His Word? The catechism lists two ways: l.) by looking at God's creation--the physical world and the human person and 2.) by listening to God's revelation. The first way is an act of reason; the second is an act of religion. The first way is open to all humanity; the second only to believers. What we discover by the first way is called the law of nature or natural law; what we discover by the second way is the law of Christ or the law of the Gospel. Our focus this year will be on the second way--by listening to God's revelation.

The Church teaches that God can be known with certainty from the created world by the natural light of human reason. As St. Paul writes in his letter to the Romans: "Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made." Rom l: 20 In the natural beauty of Alaska this summer, I experienced God in the incredible nature, the unspoiled beauty of this part of His universe. Without this innate capacity, which I experienced first hand, not one of us would be able to welcome God's revelation. Each of us has this capacity precisely because we are created in the "image of God." This doctrine, the so-called "natural means" of coming to know God, is of great importance for it is the presupposition of the Church's dialogue with all men and women regardless of their religious background. It justifies the confidence that it is possible to speak to all men and women about God.

But note well--our human words always fall short in their ability to speak about the mystery of God. To be able to enter into real intimacy with God, to encounter Him personally, moreover, our Creator willed both to reveal Himself and to give us the grace that empowers us to accept this revelation in faith. That grace is given to you and me by virtue of our baptisms and life in Christ.

As Hans urs von Balthasar writes: "Harassed by life, exhausted, we look about us for somewhere to be quiet, to be genuine, a place of refreshment. We yearn to restore our spirits in God, to simply let go in him and gain new strength to go on living. But we fail to look for him where he is waiting for us, where he is to be found: in his Son, who is his Word." (16)

The challenge this year, in this series of talks, is to help us come to know the Lord alive precisely in His Word, in His Son, to come to know where and how to find Him, to allow Him to find us despite all that gets in the way. Why bother, you might ask? The answer-- His Word is life-giving. His Word is the key to a new way of living, a way of living in Him, a new way of freedom for He is the truth that sets us free. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. He was in the beginning with God." John l:1-3 And in the words of St. Paul: "And for this reason we give thanks to God unceasingly, that, in receiving the word of God from hearing us, you received not a human word but, as it truly is, the word of God, which is now at work in you who believe." l Thess 2: 13

Now to a practical point. This year we will be studying that great document of the Vatican Council entitled Dei Verbum, (The Word of God) Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation which was voted on by the Council Fathers and promulgated by Pope Paul VI on November 18,1965--40 years ago next November.

It is very hard, if not impossible, to overestimate the value of this document ecumenically, theologically and spiritually for each of us. It bespeaks how it is that God communicates Himself to us, how He speaks and continues to speak to us and sets forth His plan for our salvation. As the Preface of the document states: "this Synod wishes to set forth the true (authentic) doctrine on divine Revelation and its transmission."

1. Hearing the word of God with reverence and proclaiming it with faith, the sacred synod takes its direction from these words of St. John: "We announce to you the eternal life which dwelt with the Father and was made visible to us. What we have seen and heard we announce to you, so that you may have fellowship with us and our common fellowship be with the Father and His Son Jesus Christ" (1 John 1:2-3). Therefore, following in the footsteps of the Council of Trent and of the First Vatican Council, this present council wishes to set forth authentic doctrine on divine revelation and how it is handed on, so that by hearing the message of salvation the whole world may believe, by believing it may hope, and by hoping it may love. (1)

The first line of the Preface is a great summary of the entire document-- "Hearing the Word of God with reverence and proclaiming it with faith...."

The "priority" of listening, hearing-- a necessity Then proclaiming--with confident assurance "Hear and proclaim"

Particular passage of St. John--proclaim "eternal life"--not an ideology or philosophy but a person

Linked to "apostolic succession"--what was manifested to us--what we have seen and heard "words and deeds" --life made visible in Jesus Christ

Purpose--"fellowship" with us (communion)

Divine Revelation given always for the purpose of salvation-- "summons to salvation" (possession of God's own life) Jesus comes as savior of the world.

St. Augustine: hearing that one may believe; believing one may hope AND hoping one might come to love (pastoral--bishop)

Incarnation is a revelation of God's love which evokes love in the one who hears it.

Ultimate goal--love in response to a God who communicates His love to each of us.