I have to write to discover what I am doing. […] I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again. — Flannery O’Connor (Quote Investigator).
This month I’ll be taking another step in what I’ve described HERE as a “spiritual mutt’s surprising journey.” The spiritual mutt would be me, and at the end of August I’ll take part in a retreat and recommitment ceremony for Dominican Associate, lay persons who formally “embrace the Dominican traditions of prayer, study, community, and ministry [and who] respond to God’s call to share the Gospel by preaching it through the witness of their lives.”
The Dominican Sisters of Springfield are nothing if not well organized — take it from a spiritual mutt who’s been an associate for two years now — and we have a packet of discernment materials to get us thinking before the retreat. For me, thinking means journaling. I’m with Flannery O’Connor on that one (see above). So here goes.
First, a couple of definitions. Discernment simply means exercising good judgment, but in a religious context it also “describes the interior search for an answer to the question of one’s vocation” (thus sayeth Wikipedia). And a vocation is simply a calling. In this case, to “participate in the mission of the Church by putting into action our call to preach the Word with our lives.”
So how does a self-identified Zen Lutheran with a broad-church Episcopal background and a taste for shoutin’-glory Southern gospel music get to be a Dominican Associate?
For one thing, any baptized Christian is eligible. For another, and more importantly, I went through what the Springfield Dominicans describe as a “nine-month [spiritual] formation process in which candidates study dimensions of church and Dominican life as they are interwoven in study, prayer, community and ministry.” Debi and I were both impressed with the Dominican sisters’ social justice work in town, and when we learned the program was open to non-Catholics, we enrolled in the formation and discernment classes.
Much of it was new to me, and to a lifelong history nerd it was fascinating. The Dominican Order, or Order of Preachers, was established by St. Dominic de Guzmán in the early 1200s. While its early focus was on winning over Cathari heretics, it soon developed into a teaching order with an comprehensive intellectual legacy. Medieval theologians Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas Aquinas were Dominicans, for example, as were mystics like Meister Eckhart and Johannes Tauler, who influenced Luther in important ways.
(Luther’s nemesis Thomas Cajetan, who succeeded in getting him excommunicated after the Diet of Augsburg in 1518, was also a Dominican. Neither Luther nor Cardinal Cajetan was exactly a model of ecumenical good will, and I wonder what they would think about today’s Catholic-Lutheran dialog, the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification of 1999 and the Joint Declaration of Pope Francis and [Lutheran] Bishop Munib Younan in 2016.)
Other parts were entirely familiar. Even the parts that weren’t as familiar had a way of leading me to think, oh, I already knew that, I just didn’t have words for it. For example Jesuit spiritualty, which I discovered in spiritual direction with one of the Dominican sisters, combined deep spiritual wisdom with common-sense advice I should have known all along.
This isn’t the time or place for me to try an Apologia for Vita Sua, but I found the Dominican Associate program to line up nicely with almost everything that had come before. Sometimes it answered longstanding questions. More often, it posed the questions in new ways.
I grew up in an Episcopal parish, but we lived in a government town that attracted scientists who worked for the Tennessee Vally Authority Forestry Division and the Atomic Energy Commission projects in nearby Oak Ridge. So I learned very early to listen politely to bible stories about the walls of Jericho, Daniel in the lion’s den, angels brandishing swords and talking donkeys — but to draw my own conclusions. (I did like that story about Balaam’s ass, though.) My father was a tree crop geneticist for the TVA, and I drew my own conclusions about natural selection, too, even though it was against state law to teach evolution in the public schools. The Episcopal Church was, and still is, OK with evolution and science in general. (In fact, one of the priests in Oak Ridge was a nuclear physicist.) But it left me cynical about church and state alike when they get too cozy with each other.
So when I left home for college, I left the church too. Period. That door remained closed, slammed shut, for the next 40 years or so as I watched — From a safe distance! — the antics of fundamentalist TV evangelists, the Moral Majority and the self-proclaimed Christian Right. At the same time, I was reading Jewish novelists — Chaim Potok’s stories of young Talmudic scholars in Brooklyn and the Bronx especially appealed to me as a grad student in English — and a variety of Christian theologians and biblical scholars.
Fast-forward to the 1990s. When my family lived in Atlanta, I made a habit of pulling off I-24 south of Nashville at the University of the South, where Debi and I would curl up for hours in the college bookstore and I’d come away with Paul Tillich or the current issue of the Sewanee Theological Review. Also in the 90s, I started working a 12-step program, and my mother moved to a senior high-rise in Springfield; she joined a Lutheran congregation and began maneuvering me to join her at church. The music was better than an AA meeting, so I went along with it.
At the same time, I was teaching freshman English at a Catholic junior college. We had a mix of students, one-third Catholic, another third evangelical Protestants or Lutherans who wanted a faith-based education and one-third kids who wanted to go out for sports or preferred not to drive to the community college across town. As a lay faculty member, I didn’t do catechesis. But I read Commonweal and US Catholic regularly in case points of doctrine came up in class discussion. That never happened, but I kept reading anyway.
To cut a long story short, I was ready to learn more about the Dominican sisters. More importantly, I respected the work they’ve done in the Springfield community. They have a way of supporting little 501c3s and helping them get their heads around things like budgeting and strategic planning. They played a similar role when my college, which had been founded by the Ursuline sisters, merged into Benedictine University.
When I joined the associates’ program, I wanted to help with their social justice efforts. As it happened, I’ve gotten back much more than I’ve given. All of that is prime material for journaling. Like Flannery O’Connor said, I don’t know what I’ve got till I write it down.
The formal commitments Debi and I made in 2022 are up for renewal this month. Along with the Springfield congregation’s other associates, we received a packet of 2024 Discernment Materials. “Every five years, Associates are asked to take time to pray, study, reflect and contemplate their commitment to Associate Life,” it explains, along with a quote from St. Catherine of Siena, “Be who you are meant to be and you will set the world on fire,” and other material designed to get the discernment process under way before the retreat. It’s Aug. 24, so it’s time now to get started.
We’re invited to reflect on the following:
- Relationship with God. “Who is God for you today? How has your relionship with God changed over the years? How do you encounter God? How do you pray? When do you pray? What are the ways that you share your faith with others?”
- Relationhip with Church/Community. What is the mission of the church? How do I participate in the mission of the church? In what ways does the church affect your life?
- Associate Life. What is my commitment to Associate Life? How do you live out the Mission to seek truth, make peace and reverence life? How do you live out the Four Pillars of Dominican Life [i.e. prayer, study, community, and ministry]?
My plan (subject, as always, to my good intentions and my tendency to procrastinate) is to journal on the discernment questions. If any of it’s worth sharing to the blog, I’ll link it to this post.
[Uplinked Aug. 3, 2024]
Ordinary Time 
