Priests make annual sojourn of quietude with the Lord

Published: 10.10.08

During the month of October, your priests will be attending one of four priest retreats held at San Pedro Spiritual Center. The retreats begin on a Monday evening and end early on a Friday. Our priests treasure this opportunity to “go off to a quiet place” in order to be with the Lord and away from the distractions and tensions of parish ministry.

Pope Benedict, at a recent Chrism Mass, reminded the priests of Rome: “Being a priest means becoming an ever closer friend of Jesus Christ with the whole of our existence. The world needs God – not just any god but the God of Jesus Christ, the God who made himself flesh and blood, who loved us to the point of dying for us, who rose and created within himself room for man. This God must live in us and we in him. This is our priestly call: Only in this way can our action as priests bear fruit.”

Every priest makes an annual retreat because that friendship with Christ – which as Pope Benedict rightly reminds us is the core of our priesthood – is nurtured in prayer. But, the retreat is more than just “personal time”; even if with the Lord. It is that, but more. Since the priest is a “man for others,” even his effort to tend to his own spiritual life is done with a view toward the people he serves in his parish ministry. As priests, we know that the better we seek to know Jesus, the more we listen to him and stay with him, the better we will represent him, in spite of our faults and failures, as another Christ, or as Pope John Paul II was fond of saying, “in persona Christi.”

As Pope Benedict says, “The world needs God … the God of Jesus Christ.” And because the world needs God, it needs priests. It needs priests to speak of God; it needs priests who live in God and allow God to live in them.

In the Second Eucharistic Prayer, just after the consecration, the priest celebrant prays: “We thank you for counting us worthy to stand in your presence and serve you.” These words, taken from an Old Testament text, describe the essence of our priestly ministry: We are to stand in the Lord’s presence and we are to serve him.

As priests, the Eucharist is the center of our priestly life. Through our words, especially in the words of consecration, we are privileged to invite Jesus in the assembly of prayer. Daily, we are called to stand in his presence. Our whole life, then, must be a standing with the Lord. We must look to him and be there for him. We must live with our gaze on him so as to keep the world open to God. We stand with the Lord; but we also stand for him – for, it is not our word or ourselves that we preach, but Christ’s word, Christ’s person.

This is quite a job description – and, when one looks at the range of activities that “keeping the world open to God” entails, you can understand how challenging – and yet how beautiful – this vocation is. And, we priests are often painfully conscious of how far short we fall in rising to the challenge. To cite Pope Benedict again, “We must ceaselessly struggle against this becoming accustomed to the extraordinary reality, against the indifference of the heart, always recognizing our insufficiency anew and the grace that there is in the fact that he consigned himself into our hands.”

If you notice that your parish priest is away one week this month, it’s because he is on retreat. During these days, he is available to the Lord to encounter him more intensely in prayer. Because he is a priest, he is there for the Lord – and for you. Oremus pro invicem: Let us pray for one another.

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