Having reflected on the Sunday readings in the first part of the week, I typically like to set about writing down ideas for a homily on Thursday, producing a draft on Friday, and revising it Saturday morning. I often find that one or more ideas in the homily, to which I was indissolubly wedded on Friday, seem less important on Saturday morning, allowing me to craft a somewhat briefer and more tightly-focused homily. But occasionally, as was the case this week, Saturday rolls around and I find that I need to throw out the entire, nearly-finished homily I had been working on all week and start afresh. Sometimes this is because of something that happens: a world event or, as in one case, a heart-felt question asked of me by an RCIA candidate about sexual abuse in the Church that I felt deserved an answer in a public forum like a homily.
This week, however, it was more a matter of an interior movement of the Spirit (or at least I hope it was the Spirit; we’ll see what the fruits are). I had spend the week developing thoughts on mercy (which is our common homiletic focus for Advent) in light of the Sunday readings and had produced what I thought was a nice theological reflection on three “moments” of divine mercy: our creation, our calling to eternal life with God, and our forgiveness in Christ. In the course of working on this I was perusing the writings of Catherine of Siena, who has some wonderful things to say on God’s mercy. One line that had made it into the homily was from chapter 13 of the Dialogue, where she speaks of how we have “declared war on [God’s] mercy and become [God’s] enemies,” then going on to say that in Christ God has, “[given] this warring human race a way to reconciliation, bringing great peace out of our war.” In the homily as it stood on Friday evening this was more or less a throwaway line, somewhat tangential to the homily.
But over the course of Friday night and Saturday morning Catherine’s words began to nag at me. Particularly as I heard and read more news reports about the shootings in San Bernardino, read some Facebook posts from parishioners about the distress they felt over these events, followed some debates about “prayer shaming”, I kept thinking about Catherine’s statement that we humans had declared war on God’s mercy. I felt a moral obligation to address as best I could the various ways in which we make war on God’s mercy and how prayer addresses the violence of our world on a level deeper than any policy reforms, as important as they may be. So on Saturday morning, I threw out the homily that I had been developing all week and produced this homily instead.
As is obvious from the text I have linked, I write my homilies out in full and deliver them pretty much as written (people tell me that they do not come across as “read,” but I am more or less reading the text). This allows me to be precise with my wording and frees me to speak in a somewhat more “elevated” tone than if I were formulating the words on the fly from bullet points on an outline. Based on the feedback I get, it works for me. But one of the dangers, I think, of putting in the time to write out a homily in full is that it can make you less willing to throw it out. For that matter, whether written-out or not, any good homily takes hours of preparation, and the more time spent the more difficult it is to abandon. But part of being an effective homilist is precisely this willingness to abandon your hours of careful work to respond to events and to the Spirit’s prompting.
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