4th Sunday of the Year (C)

Nearly 70 years ago, a young Italian priest found himself on a train sharing a compartment with some high schoolers. This being Italy in the 1950s, it was rather natural for a conversation between a priest and young people to revolve around religion, as they, like practically every Italian, were all Catholic. Yet the priest quickly picked up on the fact that these young people only had a tenuous grasp on the basics of the faith. They knew their prayers, but not much else. What was worse––and what shook the priest to his core––was that to these young people, the faith simply didn’t matter; it was irrelevant to their lives. Their belief in God, in Christ, and in the Church had nothing to say to their everyday lived experience. 

This priest’s name was Father Luigi Giussani, and this encounter on the train changed Father Giussani’s life because it opened his eyes to a tremendous crisis––a crisis, as he saw it, at the level of education. 

Father Giussani soon after asked his bishop to allow him to resign from his teaching post at the local seminary and to begin teaching high school, so that he could address this education crisis head-on. What was missing in education, Father Giussani thought, was that schools only cared about teaching the head and, in doing so, they failed to educate the heart. And without educating the heart, whatever is taught to the head will quickly be dismissed as irrelevant to one’s life. 

Across the country today, Catholic parishes and schools are once again beginning Catholic Schools Week, and it’s in this light that Father Giussani and what he had to say about education comes to mind. It’s obvious that the crisis that Father Giussani observed 70 years ago has extended in time and space beyond 1950s Italy and has reached us today. Look around you. 

The rapid decline of practicing Christians of all denominations across this country and beyond, including the downward trajectory of Mass attendance in our own parish, is evidence of the fact that the crisis of education has infected the Church at every level. And I don’t mean that this is a failure of our Catholic Schools, but a failure of the Church more broadly. The Church, in her dominical mission to preach the Gospel to all nations, has failed to present that Gospel in such a way that reaches the whole of the person (and not just their head!). The authentic proclamation of the Gospel does not consist in lecturing people about Christ, but rather showing them how Christ speaks and gives answer to the ‘joys and hopes, griefs and sufferings’ of their daily life. The mission of the Church is to reflect the light of Christ onto our day-to-day experience, to give our life meaning. 

To educate the heart, for Father Giussani, means to awaken the heart to its deepest desires and to propose to the heart the definitive answer given by the Gospel which alone fulfills those desires and gives ultimate meaning to our life. What I think Father Giussani was correct in assessing is that we need to pay more attention to the heart than we do the head, because we’re led and persuaded more by what aims to win our love than what seeks to change our minds.[1]

Ironically and tragically, that it’s easier to win our love than to change our mind is something that the secular world has gotten right while the Church has gotten it wrong. Think about the stores at which you regularly shop and how they have convinced you how you should live, what you should value, and what you should desire, all without making you read and sign a manifesto of their company’s beliefs. When I shop at REI, I find myself wanting to spend more time outdoors, to become more enamored by the beauty of creation, and to live life more fully like those hikers, bikers, and kayakers around me. Companies are immensely successful at telling us how we should be in the world without making a single logical argument. 

It’s a complete and utter tragedy that the Church has been unable to do the same, because the desires that the Church exists to bring to their fulfillment are infinitely greater and more fundamental to who we are than any good or product a company can market to us. In the words of the Lord spoken to us through the prophet Jeremiah: “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, before you were born I dedicated you.” You and I have been created and shaped by God with a yearning deep within us for the ultimate. And this yearning will never be satisfied by anything that is finite or temporal but will only rest when it comes to rest in what St. Paul tells us is the greatest of all that will endure in the end: Love. 

What we love now, those finite and temporal goods, are but shadows and figures, partial and obscure reflections, of that complete and radiant Love that made us. And the Love that made us made himself one of us, so that the very Love for which our hearts long has a face and a name: Jesus Christ. He is a person, a real person, and the Church exists as the privileged place for us to encounter him. 

We have become unaware of our heart’s most fundamental desire because the world has already gotten to our heart and won our love. What we need to be awakened to recognize is that our heart still yearns for something more. Father Giussani said that the true task of education is to educate “the human heart as God made it”[2]: to reveal to the human heart its true desire and to introduce the heart to the One for whom it longs. 

Where does this education happen? I put before you that this awakening to desire, the true education of our heart, happens first and foremost when we gather here, in this Cathedral, on Sunday mornings. In fact, it happens (or can happen) whenever we come together to worship. And I don’t at all mean to suggest that it’s the homily’s job to awaken us. (Homilies tend to have the opposite effect!).

Rather, it’s the very act of worshipping God together that awakens us to our true desire. If we pay attention to what we’re doing, and not simply go through the motions, we come to see that the act of divine worship is an education of our heart. We trace the cross over our bodies as a reminder of the love Christ poured out for us by shedding his blood; and we strike our breasts in contrition to failing to live lives worthy of that love. We lift our voice to sing hymns of praise and thanksgiving to the God of Love who has shown his mercy to us; and we unite our prayer to the Church’s worship around the world in offering the one, eternal sacrifice of love to our most merciful Father. We look up to the heroic examples of the saints represented in glass and stone; and we look around to the living witness of our brothers and sisters in flesh and blood who reflect to us the love of God. 

And it’s here, above all, where Christ, the love of our heart, comes to us and unites himself to us in the Eucharist to give us the strength to carry on in this world toward our true home, where we will be united with him, in love, forever.

In so many words, when we gather to worship, we truly do “lift up our hearts” to the Lord our God. Let our hearts, then, be lifted up and be set this day and forever more, not on the shadows of the world, but on the eternal Love for which they are made. 

Servant of God, Luigi Giussani, pray for us.

 

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[1] This argument is made in: James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation. Cultural Liturgies, vol. 1. (Ada: Baker Academic, 2009). 

[2] Luigi Giussani, The Risk of Education: Discovering Our Ultimate Destiny, trans. Mariangela Sullivan (Montreal: MQUP, 2019), xxvii.