Dimiui Shostakovich has described his Fifth Symphony (D Major, Opus 47), composed just 30 years ago, as  the assertion of personality. It is man with all his emotions and experiences that I saw as the focus of design in this work

Van Antwerp, Eugene I.

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Concordia Seminary, St. Louis: Scholarly Resources

Concordia Theological Monthly Volume 41 Article 73 12-1-1970 Spiritual Formation for Ministry Eugene I. Van Antwerp National Catholic Educational Association, Washington, D.C. Follow this and additional works at: https://scholar.csl.edu/ctm  Part of the Practical Theology Commons Recommended Citation Van Antwerp, Eugene I. (1970) "Spiritual Formation for Ministry," Concordia Theological Monthly: Vol. 41, Article 73. Available at: https://scholar.csl.edu/ctm/vol41/iss1/73 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Print Publications at Scholarly Resources from Concordia Seminary. It has been accepted for inclusion in Concordia Theological Monthly by an authorized editor of Scholarly Resources from Concordia Seminary. For more information, please contact seitzw@csl.edu. . . Spirirual_ Formation for Ministry D imiui Shosrakovich has described his Fifth Symphony (D Major, Opus 47), composed just 30 years ago, as "the assertion of personality. It is man with all his emotions and experiences that I saw as the focus of design in this work." Spiritual formation, in the Roman Cath-olic tradition, is somewhat like that Fifth Symphony: at times a little cacophonous, sometimes a single aspect of man stands out like a single instrument, sometimes ( like the contrast between the first and second movements) a little polar or para-doxical thinking ( ''unless the grain of wheat dies • . :•), sometimes as though the orchestra has escaped the control of the conductor when the instruments make new muted sounds-but ultimately every-thing is resolved: the emotions and experi-ences forming the personality under the controlling hands of the conduaor. Spir-itual formation is the attempt, by each human person, to integrate his personality and all that goes into forming it, as a hu-man being, a Christian, and ( in our case) as a priestly servant of God and the people of God. Such formation is essential to min-isuy-not merely for the sake of personal-ity development, not merely as an escha-tological sign, nor as evidence of living faith, but for effeaive minisay in the church and world today. (When I first Wrote the last phrase, I realized that I had capitalized "Oiurch," but not "world; so then I capitaliffll both; but finally I put both into lower case.) EUGBNB I. VAN ANTWDP The t1u1hor is e:xec111i11e seueltlf"J in 1h11 Semi-nary Deparlmenl of lh  Nalional C111holic Bdt1ealio11al Associalion, W ashinglon, D. C. I'd like to share my thoughts with you in three areas: human development in its full sense, aware Christianity, and minis-terial preparation. TI1is is not an attempt to uichotomize man, but simply an ar-rangement by which I can marshal my thoughts a little better. The quest for identity, man's constant search for his place in the life situation, is highly personal. Fundamentally, we can do nothing real unless we have come to some understanding of ourselves, of who and what and where we are. Even the simplest of statements, like "I love God," is meaningless unless we know who that "I" is. In a cerebral fashion, we can learn the meaning of "love" and of "God" and make that statement in a cold clarity; but to make the statement itself become a hu-man action, an act of love by its very utter-ing, the "I" must be involved in more than cerebral fashion. Just as the suiving for knowledge is more than a suiving for facts, so the development of the individual is not mere formal education, but the whole human growth of mind and body and emotions, of reactions and situational re-sponses, of strivings beyond the simple tasks we did yesterday. Heard melodies are sweet, but those un-heard are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on. - ]. Keats, Otlt1 lo " Grecil,,, Um. Man needs to go on and beyond, to see and to dream, to experience and to imag-ine, to live and to grow, to stretch his 732 1Van Antwerp: Spiritual Formation for MinistryPublished by Scholarly Resources from Concordia Seminary, 1970SPIRITUAL FORMATION FOil MINISTRY 733 wings like Daedalus, to see things as they might be and ask, "Why not?" We human beings, and especially we ministers of the Gospel, need not only the awareness of the past and the joy of the present but the happy wonder of what is to come. This centers, in large measure, on how truly human ( in all its implications) we .really are. They tell the story of the little girl who was bothering her father on a .rainy day, so he scissored a map of the world into small pieces and told her to put it together again. She was done in five minutes in-stead of the hour he had hoped for, and he asked how she could have done it so fa.st. "Easy," she said, "the other side had a picture of a man, and I knew that if the man was put together .right, the world would be right, so I got the man .right first." This self-identity must lead to an under-standing of self, but also to genuine ac-ceptance of self. Sam Keen says: If we lose the self, we lose the other; if we lose the body, we lose the world ..• love of both neighbor and cosmos rests upon love of self.1 The Lonergarian journey culminates here too, for Lonergan goes from the ex-perience of things and people to under-standing, to judgment, to decision, and ultimately to conversion of the person. Or, as Karl Rabner would say: Man is a person when he accepts the dialogical character of life or-dered to mystery, accepts freedom, duty, responsibility, unrepressed sinfulness, his neighbour's ineffable individuality, pain, 1 To • D""""I GOil (New York: Haipet IE llow, 1970), p. i,o. and death. Complete personality is rooted in the genius of the heart, not of the in-. tellect.2 Our understanding of man, however, has a mystery ingredient. Tertullian's phrase nima na111rali.1e, chnsliana sums it up; we are Christians, and we have as a portion of our being a relationship to God through Christ. "For you have called us out of darkness into your own wonderful light" ( Preface, new Order of Mass), and as committed Christians we are committed to a life of being "caught in the act," the act ot Jiving as Christians, of attempting to become better Christians. "Do not fool yourself by just listening to His Word. Instead, put it into praaice" (James 1: 22). Each of us, in process terminology, has moved beyond alpha, but only to beta stage, and we are yet a long way from Chardin's Omega Point. Or as Camus phrased it (Jean Pierre Camus, not Albe.rt Camus): He who believes himself to be far ad-vanced in the spiritual life has not even made a good beginning.-Th• Sf,iril of SI. Prtmm ti• St1l•s, 13, 5. The seminary is a proper place for such growth in understanding of our faith and our relationship with Christ. Bishop Thomas Grady, chairman of the Bishops' Committee on Priestly Formation, said .re-cently: There are many parallels between Christ's relationship with his apostles and moder  seminary techniques: the importance of small groups, the imporcance of personal contaet with faculty members, the impor-tance of field education, the importance of on-the-job ttainiq, the need for super-I THOlo,;ul OidiotMr/ (New York: Her-der a Heider, 1965), p. 354. 2Concordia Theological Monthly, Vol. 41 [1970], Art. 73https://scholar.csl.edu/ctm/vol41/iss1/73734 SPIRITUAL FORMATION FOR. MINISTR.Y v.ision, for correction, for support, for ad-vanced explanation, for periods of quiet and extended reflection and so on • • • [but] ••• the training of the apostles ••• was basically a deepening of their rela-tionship with Jesus, their active acceptance of a call, a commission, a mission, and au-thority from Christ, a deepening of their union with Him. If somehow you filter out Christ, then for the apostles there is nothing left. No matter how well trained they are, no matter how efficient, without Christ they are nothing: they are branches without a vine, withered and dead. Unless they preach the Good News, they preach no news. He went on to add: The seminary should be a model commu-nity of faith and trust and love - or, rather, of faithful, trusting, loving people. · The seminary should be a group of people truly at one with each other in God, united in truth and in justice and in peace. Its liturgy should not be something extra, or "another thing," but should be the au-thentic and joyous expression of a com-munity of faith and love. The seminarians should be ready to serve mankind in the name of the Lord Jesus, because they have had the •xt,mmc• of church, the experi-ence of mutual respect and service, the daily experience of sharing life in Christ. The seminary should not be just a center of learning or of training; it should be a cent.er of Christian experience.1 It is lived faith that brings us deeper into the knowledge of God; "It is Thy grace which enables us to endure Thy presence" (Cardinal Newman). And to really know God, imagination is of more value than I Bishop G.radJ made these remarb when ~ki"S to the SeminarJ Depanment of the National Catholic Educational Auociation meet-iq in Atl ntic Cir,, N. ]., April 2, 1970. conceptual thought; art, more than science; prophecy, than history; love, than fear; community, than solitude; faith, than knowledge. This faith-commitment of the individual to the Christian life was expressed by the Second Vatican Council: The mystery of salvation should be so proposed that the students perceive the meaning, order and pastoral end of their studies. At the same time, they should be helped to establish and penetrate their personal lives with faith, and be strength-ened in embracing their vocation with a personal dedication and a joyful heart. -Decree o,i Prioill, Por111alion, n.14. The third area of spiritual formation is that of direct ministerial preparation, prep-aration for a special role of service within the people of God, a preparation which must be personal as well as professional, which should change the man as well as the world. Cardinal Dearden, speaking to the Roman Catholic bishops of the United States in April, said: Our call and our insertion into the peo-ple of God come through Baptism. Upon each one of us it confers basic privileges and rights and duties. It establishes our relationship with one another and, through Christ, with our heavenly Father. It gives us title to participation in the life and activities of the church. Within that church there are given, through the will of Christ, special charges and responsibilities. • • • A concern for the total life and growth and development of the church is central in the bishop's responsibility. At the call of Christ, through the church, he accepts burdens and crosses that are heavy, and opportUnities that are challenging and full of hope. 3Van Antwerp: Spiritual Formation for MinistryPublished by Scholarly Resources from Concordia Seminary, 1970SPIRITUAL FORMATION FOR MINISTRY Ministerial preparation assumes many things and ignores others. It assumes a thorough theological education today, based on a general liberal education; it assumes the theory and practice of authen-tic liturgy; it assumes a knowledge of com-munity dynamics, etc. It totally ignores prestige and wealth ( "not many of you are wise, not many powerful"). Some of the things I think a young man should have in order to present himself to the church for ordination are as follows: 1. He should have an understanding of Christian ministry as portrayed in the New Testament, as lived by the great men of the past and present, and the possibilities of multiministry in the near future. 2. He should have made the vital synthesis of personal faith and life, through convic-tion and the acceptance of the experiences of his life. 3. He should have a vivid awareness of the contemporary world, its problems and hopes for solution, and especially the world's willing acceptance of the absence of God. 4. He should have developed a commit-ment of service to the people of God. 5. He should have already accepted the fact that to follow Christ is to move through the desert, past rejection and into the Passion before the glory of Easter, and he must be prepared to accept apathy as well as disappointment and pain. The formation of a spiritual life, prop-erly understood, is the action of the Holy Spirit manifested in all human activity. Through His action the Spirit aims to form all men into the unity of God's peo-ple and thus lead them back to the Father. Prayer, therefore, in its widest sense, is all that men do whereby they are open and responsive to the Spirit. As such, prayer pervades the total act1v1ty of Christian men and the Christian community. We are now in an era heralded by men whose words have been sometimes wise and sometimes foolish, but whose words have contributed to the strengthening of the Spirit in our day. · In a more strict sense, prayer is under-stood as those moments of immediate rec-ognition and acceptance of this action of the Spirit and the loving surrender to God through the power of the same Spirit. For both individual and community, some forms and structure of prayer are necessary. Without them the life of faith cannot easily be sustained; yet for effectiveness, both individual and community must be free to be constantly creative in renewing, forming, and changing the forms to the needs of the life and tasks at hand. Just as the seminarians' demand for relevance in the curriculum and the faculty's demand for excellence are neither conuadiccory nor mutually exclusive, so denominational structures of prayer and individual or com-munity needs are compatible. The specific goals of spiritual formation were well stated in the prospeccus for this series of talks: Included in that term "style of life" among many other aspeccs are: academic and in-telleccual competence; the ability and willingness for ministry; the development of character, personality and the ability to relate helpfully to others; a growing rela-tionship with God; growth in holiness of life, including both obedience in personal life and in the wide range of Christian mission; and the recognition of the Chris-tian brotherhood and of both the accep-tance of responsibility and the ability to edify. With all our suiaures about love of 4Concordia Theological Monthly, Vol. 41 [1970], Art. 73https://scholar.csl.edu/ctm/vol41/iss1/73736 SPI1U1UAL POllMATION POB. MJNISTllY neighbor as one of the two great com-mandments; our understanding the Lord's words about the Last Judgment: "When you did it to the least of My brethren"; our awareness that today "the words of the prophet are written on subway walls and tenement halls"; yet, Augustine phrases for us the ultimate goal of all spiritual forma-tion: What do I love when I love Thee? Not beauty of body, nor the fair har-mony of time, nor the brightness of the light so glad-some to our eyes, nor sweet melodies of varied songs, nor the fragrant smell of .flowers, and ointments, and spices, not manna and honey, not limbs that carnal love embraces, None of these do I love when I love my God. And yet- I love a kind of lisht and melody, and fragrance, and meat, and embrace-ment; When I love my God light, melody, fragrance, meat, embrace-ment of my inner man -What space cannot contain shineth into my soul, and there sounds what time bears not away, and I smell what breathing does not disperse, and I taste what eating does not di-minish, and I cling to what satiety cannot di-vorce. This is that which I love, when I love my God. Washington, D . C. I 5Van Antwerp: Spiritual Formation for MinistryPublished by Scholarly Resources from Concordia Seminary, 1970

Spiritual Formation for Ministry

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