Its All Grace: Wisdom from Fr. Michael J. Himes

It’s All Grace Wisdom from Fr. Michael J. Himes

It’s All Grace Wisdom from Fr. Michael J. Himes

DEDICATION This book is dedicated to the teacher that lives within each of us. May the words of Fr. Michael Himes remind us to “Love not just what you teach, but who you teach.”

FORWARD Fr. Michael J. Himes was a beloved priest, theologian, teacher, and friend. Some of his profound wisdom lives in the pages of this little book, which chronicles several of his most popular public lectures and writings at Boston College, many sponsored through The Church in the 21st Century Center (C21 Center). True to the mission of the C21 Center, Fr. Himes sought to be a catalyst for conversation about life’s great questions. He helped students understand how to live their faith in a rapidly changing world, charged them to lead lives of meaning and purpose, and inspired them to “give themselves away” in the service of others. Fr. Himes was immensely wise and charitable, and also someone with a deeply hopeful worldview. Through his life’s work, he sought to pass on that hope to the next generation. We decided to gather his wisdom with the aspiration that Fr. Himes’s words in this collection will help you to reflect on your faith and inspire you to live a life of self-gift.

About the Title “It’s All Grace”... When asked by a close friend, “What would the message of your life be?” Fr. Himes referenced the concluding line from one of his favorite movies, Babette’s Feast. He said thoughtfully, “I hope my life would reflect the phrase, ‘It’s All Grace.’” John Walsh, '17, '20

CONTENTS Life’s Great Questions.....................................................................7 A Lesson in Love............................................................................23 Living Catholicism.........................................................................27 Catholics: Why We Are a Sacramental People................................ 33 Hope in a Wintry Season................................................................43 Finding Hope When Life Doesn’t Go as Planned........................... 51 Celebrating Catholic Education...................................................... 57 The Last Lecture.............................................................................63 In Memory.....................................................................................85

LIFE’S GREAT QUESTIONS What brings you joy? What are you good at? Who does the world need you to be? These are the central questions of Fr. Himes’s framework of vocational discernment, called the “Three Key Questions,” which is woven into the fabric of reflection at Boston College. The following is an excerpt from his decades-old educational video, teaching the importance of these questions.

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here are many things that a university should do for the students who come to it, and one of the most important is assisting students to make good

decisions about the way they’re going to lead their public and private lives. I suggest there are three questions that help to make that decision. The first question is: Is whatever role you’re considering a source of joy? Secondly: Is it something that taps your talents, that really engages all of your abilities and gifts and uses them in the fullest and richest way possible? And thirdly: Is this role a genuine service to the society at large? Or, if I can put those three questions in a slightly snappier fashion: Do you get a kick out of it, are you any good at it, and does anybody want you to do it? First of all, the question about joy. Now, I have to make a distinction: there is a difference between joy and happiness. I’m not asking, “Does this vocation make you happy?” because happiness is dependent on all sorts of external factors. It’s affected by whether I slept well last evening, whether breakfast agrees with me, what the weather is like, whether I’m feeling well on a particular day—all sorts of external factors come into play affecting whether or not I’m feeling happy at any given moment. Joy, however, is 8 | It's All Grace

something much deeper and much more central. It comes from within. It’s a sense of the genuine rightness of the way in which one lives one’s life. Happiness can change from day to day. If on any particular day you were to ask me, “Are you happy being a priest?” the answer on a particular day might be, “Well, not terribly, because I’m busy, and I’m preoccupied, and things have gone wrong, and the car didn’t start, and there’s too much noise, and I skipped lunch.” But if you ask me at any time, “Is being a priest a joyful way to live a life?” the answer is certainly, “Yes, it is.” This is a deeply and importantly good way for me to live my life. That’s what I mean by joy: the sense of the rightness of the way in which one is living one’s life. On the other hand, I’m not talking about satisfaction either. Indeed, St. Augustine in his Confessions suggests that a human being is one whose heart is restless until it rests in God. Therefore, for Augustine, dissatisfaction— restlessness—is not a bad thing. Indeed, it’s the best thing about us. It’s what constantly moves us forward, makes us grow, expands our horizons, and deepens our perceptions. Dissatisfaction is a very healthy and a very valuable thing. The great American 20th-century poet Marianne Moore ends one of her finest poems with the line: “Satisfaction is a lonely thing. How pure a thing is joy.” Wisdom from Fr. Michael J. Himes | 9

A sense of contentment—a sense that, “Yeah, everything’s fine as it is, I don’t have to grow, I don’t have to change, I don’t have to do anything beyond what I am doing”—can be an obstacle to one’s vocation. By contrast, joy always pushes us forward. To be really joyful at one’s role in life is to feel a kind of impulse, a kind of pressure to move forward, to do more, to expand oneself more deeply, to open one’s talents even more widely than one had before. So the question is, first and foremost: What gives you joy? What is the source of your joy? How do you begin to discover that? The first thing I should point out about discovering it is that to answer this question, you may consult lots of other people—parents, friends, teachers, counselors, spiritual directors. You may invite them to help you discern what is a source of joy for you. But, finally, no one but you can say, “This is my joy.” You have to discover that for yourself. In doing so, one useful approach can be to ask: What have you discovered about yourself to this point? Over the years, I’ve often said to students that one of the best ways to get inside any creative thinker’s mind—a philosopher, a theologian, an artist, a scientist—is to ask 10 | It's All Grace

what their obsessions are. That is to say, what are the things that they can’t leave alone? Questions, concerns, issues that they return to over and over and over again— that when they’re talking about one issue, lo and behold, they end up making it a question about this other concern. One of the questions that you might consider is: What are your obsessions? What are the concerns, the questions, and the issues that you find yourself turning to again and again because they intrigue you, lure you in, and get you to ask more questions? That’s a very good indication that this is a place where your joy lies. And if you are going to spend a life, for heaven’s sake, spend it in a way that gives you joy. There would be nothing worse than to come to the end of your life—certainly your professional life—and say, “On the whole, it was dull.” The most important thing you can do is come to a point in your life where you can say, “This, whatever this is, is a genuine joy for me.” Now, that joy may lead you in many, many directions. It may bring you on to further questions. There’s never a point where you can say the issue of my calling is settled. Vocations lead to vocations. Answering one question may well raise other questions and lead you forward. There’s no point in your life where you can say, “Vocational discernment is settled; I don’t need to ask those questions Wisdom from Fr. Michael J. Himes | 11

any longer.” The only time your vocation is settled is when you’re perfectly settled—and that will probably happen about a quarter of an hour after they seal the casket. What you need to do is look for the ways joy leads you forward. Look at the ways it moves you on to other questions. Some people—close friends, people who have known you a long time, people with whom you’ve been very honest and whose opinion you genuinely trust—may be able to tell you, “In my observation, the times when I’ve seen you most energized and most alive.” That may be a very helpful thing to hear, because although no one else can answer the question for you, they may be able to help you frame the question—and it is in framing the question that one begins the process of answering it. By all means consult others; but remember only you can finally say, “This is a genuine source of joy in my life.” Happiness is something quite distinct. If you end up happy, I’ll be delighted and I’m sure you will be, but it’s not what your life is about. It’s not about contentment or satisfaction. Indeed, there are few things that I would wish for people more than that they remain discontented and dissatisfied. Joy is the delight one takes in being dissatisfied. It’s the deep delight that one feels in being called to something still before you, to a new decision and 12 | It's All Grace

a new way of living. So the first question in discerning what you do with your life is: is it a source of joy for you? Now, the second question: is this vocation, this role, this profession, this way of living a life that you’re considering something that you’re good at, that’s going to lead you to expand your abilities, that’s going to lead you to be ever more creative in the course of your life? That can really only be distinguished by other people. For example, I may get great delight in being a brain surgeon. There’s absolutely nothing I enjoy more than chopping off the top of the skull and getting my fingers into the old gray stuff inside the cranium. But if all of my patients end up vegetables, that’s a very good indication that I am not a brain surgeon by vocation. Are you successful at what you’re doing? Are you good at it? Other people have to tell us that. For 10 years in my own life, I was dean of a seminary, and one of the things I noticed that happened very frequently was that students who came to the seminary were very open to its direction during the first year or two years that they were there. During that time, the students were making decisions about what they wanted to do, about whether or not they decided that priesthood was Wisdom from Fr. Michael J. Himes | 13

their vocation. They were asking that first question: was it their joy? At a certain point, usually about two years in, the students would come to a conclusion: yes, they wanted to be ordained or no, they didn’t. As soon as they decided that the answer was yes, they became increasingly impatient with the seminary. “You were here to help me decide whether or not I wanted to be a priest. Well, thank you very much, you’ve done your job, I’ve made my decision, the answer is yes, so be it, let me get on with my life.” And it always came as something of a shock to the students when, as dean, I had to suggest to them that there was another question that had to be answered: did the Church want them to be priests? Years ago, I was giving a lecture, and someone in the audience—who, it turned out, was a quite prominent psychologist—came up to tell me how much he had enjoyed the lecture. I went through my usual, “Oh, thank you very much, that’s so gracious of you, yes, yes, yes, you’re very kind.” And he said to me, “Don’t brush it aside that way. You think it’s no great deal to give the lecture you just gave because you do that kind of thing regularly. You don’t realize that it’s really a service to others and that you’re good at it.” 14 | It's All Grace

It struck me that that’s often true: the things that we’re best at are the things that, in many ways, come easiest to us—the things we feel most comfortable and most natural doing. We don’t realize that they’re really quite remarkable. I suspect that a really great pianist doesn’t think giving a superb performance of a piece of music is anything all that remarkable. They’re used to it. They do it all the time. They’ve been doing it for years. It’s only the rest of us—the hearers of the music, the audience—who can say, “That was really extraordinary.” Only others can reflect back to us what we do and how well we do it. That’s why it’s so important to allow other people to review our talents with us. Of course, we also have to be open to the fact that there are things we think we do superbly well, and someone else has to say to us, “You know, you’re really not all that good at it. You know, that’s really not your strength.” The humility to hear what we’re good at and the humility to hear what we’re not good at is an enormously important virtue in discerning this vocational question. If joy is the quality to look for in answering the first question, the need for a genuinely humble openness to other people’s directions and suggestions is central to answering the second question. There would be nothing Wisdom from Fr. Michael J. Himes | 15

worse, I think, than arriving at such a pitch of expertise in whatever we do that we come to the point of being able to say, “I can do that rolling off a log. I could do that in my sleep. It no longer excites me, it no longer challenges me, it no longer makes me grow.” Look for the task that will continue to stretch you. That’s all-important in discerning the really vital vocation in your life. To help us discern what our talents and gifts are, we need a circle of friends. Those friends may be people who are close to us the way our best friends are, but they may also be parents, teachers, coaches, and mentors in all sorts of ways. The fostering of a community of friends who can be honest with us, whom we can genuinely hear, before whom and with whom we can be open and humble—that circle of friends is crucial to vocational discernment. So: What are you good at? Where are your talents? How might you still grow? Those are the questions that now have to be answered. The third question to consider in discerning vocation is: Does anybody need you to do it? What does the community of people in which you live really need from your talents? Is the role you’re considering a way of selfgift, a way of serving others? 16 | It's All Grace

It may very well be that I am an extraordinarily accomplished and successful shepherd. Sheep simply go mad for me; I walk into a room and sheep curl up and purr. But the fact is that the community in which I live in New York doesn’t really have much need for a shepherd. If that’s so—even though it may be a source of happiness and joy to me and may be something I’m good at—it’s not my vocation. One needs to respond to the needs of the community in which one finds oneself. I am absolutely convinced that the central issue in being a human being, and therefore in being a Christian, is what the New Testament calls agape: a very particular form of love which is self-gift. That is the center of the Christian life. Therefore, it’s crucial as we make decisions about what we’re going to do with our lives that we ask: how can I best give myself to the people around me? Just as in the case of my second question, the people who answer this are not the ones making the decision— it’s the people whom we are serving that we need to hear from. What do the people around us really need? What is it that they want us to do? Once we know that this is a source of joy, once we know this is something I’ve got talents and abilities to perform—and I think that those Wisdom from Fr. Michael J. Himes | 17

talents and abilities will be stretched and expanded for the rest of my life in doing this work—is it something that people around us really need us to do? Does the community call us to this work? That’s absolutely central in our consideration. We need to be able to listen to others about their needs. St. Thomas Aquinas says that the crown and summit of the ethical life is what he calls caritas—charity—or what the New Testament describes as agape. When Thomas says it’s the crown and summit of the ethical life, he means that all the other virtues play into self-gift. There are two virtues that are crucial to being able to give oneself away in a meaningful and important way to others. Those two virtues are wisdom and courage. Wisdom is much more than simply knowledge. It’s not just having information or knowing certain techniques. It is, I suggest to you, preeminently knowing that the other is other. I sometimes suspect—and I say this as I look at myself, not just at the people around me— that many of us live our lives as if we were the stars of a motion picture in which we have the lead role. Indeed, it often strikes me as I see students on campuses walking about with Walkmans that now many of us even have our 18 | It's All Grace

own private soundtracks for our movies, so that whenever I walk into a room, somewhere at the back the Star Wars theme is playing. The hero has arrived. Everyone else may have a role, but they’re clearly supporting parts. The film is about me, and everyone else plays a role in my life. One of the most difficult things to do is to arrive at the wisdom which perceives other people as other people, not simply as role players in your world. I’m sure you’ve heard people say things like, “I could read her like a book,” “I know exactly what he thinks,” “I know just how she feels.” I am always tempted to say, if you know her or him like a book, then you don’t know them at all, because you see, they’re not a book, they’re a human being. The fact is that we need to perceive others as others, not project on them what we would like if we were in their shoes, because we’re not in their shoes. The second virtue which is crucial to agape is courage. Courage enables us to risk giving ourselves to people who may not always appreciate the gift. I don’t think there is anything more devastating in human experience than being an unrequited lover—than being someone who genuinely extends himself or herself for others and is not appreciated. We have to be willing to hear what others Wisdom from Fr. Michael J. Himes | 19

need and to give ourselves in response, even when our attempt to respond may not be appreciated. Wisdom and courage are absolutely necessary for leading a genuinely agapic life. So when I ask the question, “Do people need your gift?” I’m really asking, “Have you discerned what the people around you really most deeply require, and have you got the courage to respond to that need?” It may very well be that you have discovered your joy. It may very well be that you know what your abilities are. Now you need to discover what the people around you really most desire, hope for, and cherish. One last point which concerns all three questions: what is our deepest and most fundamental vocation? We all have multiple vocations. For example, I’m a priest and an academic. I’m a teacher and a writer. I’m also a friend, a son, a brother, and an uncle. I’m a citizen. I fill many roles in the course of my life: private and public, professional and personal, but there is one vocation which embraces all our other vocations—to be a human being. We are called to be as intelligent, as responsible, as free, as courageous, as imaginative, as loving as we can possibly be. All of my other vocations—all of the many ways in which I live my 20 | It's All Grace

life—must contribute to that one all-embracing demand: to be fully, totally, absolutely as human as I can possibly be. And one way into that is to ask the questions: What gives you joy? What are you really good at? What do the people around you really need?

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A LESSON IN LOVE “You may forget everything else. Everything else in your life may disappear. You may forget even who loved you and how they loved you, but you never totally forget having loved someone else, because it is the most fundamental of all activities.” An excerpt from an Agape Latte talk at Boston College by Fr. Michael Himes on November 4, 2014.

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y father died a number of years ago, and my mother was living alone for years. We knew that she shouldn’t be alone any longer, so she

decided to come and live with me, which I was absolutely delighted by. We had about 12 great years together here in Boston. My mother was an avid theatergoer and concertgoer, so we went regularly to the Boston Symphony and the theater here in Boston, and she’d show up at lectures at Boston College and at other universities because she just was interested in all sorts of things. Finally, Mother began to show the unmistakable signs of dementia, probably Alzheimer’s. Eventually, it came to the point where we couldn’t leave her alone for a moment, so she went into a nursing home. For the next seven years, I went every night to that nursing home and fed her because they found it hard to get her to eat unless it was me feeding her. I would hold her hand and just talk about anything that popped into my head until Mother dozed off for the evening, and then I would head out. About a year before she died, Mother said she was having a particularly bad evening. She seemed very distracted. She didn’t know she wasn’t recognizing anybody. I said to her, “Now, dear, do you know who I 24 | It's All Grace

am? Do you remember who I am?” She really scrutinized me, and then she said, “I’m sorry, I don’t know that I remember your name, but I do know that you’re someone I loved very much.” I’ve always said to my brother Ken, a Franciscan friar, that Mother was the best theologian in the family—that the two of us were just amateurs compared to her, because she got it exactly right. You may forget everything else. Everything else in your life may disappear. You may forget even who loved you and how they loved you, but you never totally forget having loved someone else, because it is the most fundamental of all activities. Not being loved, but loving. That’s what family gives us an intimate chance to do, in circumstances that may be very supportive or very painful. We have the opportunity to learn how to give ourselves to one another wisely and courageously and with tremendous forgiveness and deep acceptance. If you learn that, you’ve learned everything that you need to know. If you learn everything else and you never find that out, you’ve missed what it is to be a human being, because human beings are called to be the people who do what God is. God is agape, and we get to enact Wisdom from Fr. Michael J. Himes | 25

it. That is the most extraordinary statement about being a human being that I know.

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LIVING CATHOLICISM “The Church needs each of us to participate in its life or it has no life. Living our Catholicism is the assurance that there is and will be a living Catholicism.” This article was originally published in C21 Resources—“Living Catholicism: Roles and Relationships for a Contemporary World” (fall 2013).

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atholicism is alive. Understanding this simple statement is crucial to understanding the nature of the Catholic Church. It is often easy to reduce

Catholicism to a philosophy we subscribe to or a list of truths we believe in. While philosophies and statements of truth are an integral part of being human, Catholicism is so much more. Catholicism is the ongoing history of the People of God. In other words, Catholicism is the life of what we have come to call “the Church.” Catholicism is alive because we are alive as a community of believers. The way we live our lives is the life of Catholicism. If we are honest with ourselves, this is a daunting realization. The relationships we have with others and the roles we fulfill in our communities are the life of Catholicism. St. Teresa of Avila put this sentiment into provocative and poetic words when she wrote: “Christ has no body but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes with which he looks compassion to the world. Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good. Yours are the hands with which he blesses all the world.”

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The too often unasked—and so, not surprisingly, unanswered question about the Church is, “Why have one?” This is not a question about the Church’s mission, important as such a question is. Rather, it is a much more pressing question: “Why do I need a Church?” Why do we need a Church with all its attendant problems and questions? Two reasons: because the Word has become flesh, and because God is love. Christianity is not about timeless truths; first and foremost, it is news—good news, in fact—about particular events in the lives of particular people living at a particular time and in a particular place. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the term often used to describe this aspect of Christianity was “the scandal of particularity.” Certainly there is something shocking about the claim that the whole of human history reaches its fulfillment in the life, death, and destiny of one Jewish man in Palestine in the latter years of Augustus’s reign and the first years of Tiberius’s. How one person and his story are of ultimate significance for every human being before him and every human being after him is a very big question, indeed. But it may be important to reconfront that “scandalous” claim today from a slightly different angle. Wisdom from Fr. Michael J. Himes | 29

If Christianity is about the proclamation of news about unique events at one point in time and space, then there is only one way in which you and I can learn that news: someone has to tell us. News requires a reporter. We have, of course, heard the good news from reporters; in my case, I first learned the Gospel from my parents, my family, my teachers, and my pastors. And they learned it from their parents, families, teachers, and pastors. That is why my relationship to God in Christ necessarily requires my relationship to others; I would have no awareness of God in Christ apart from that relationship. The second point that highlights our need for the Church is that God is love. Faith in the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is impossible without love for one another. There is certainly nothing new in that statement; the Gospel and Epistles of John certainly said it powerfully 19 centuries ago, and it has been repeated by women and men who have lived Christianity wisely and well. One cannot understand what it means to say that “God is love” (1 Jn. 4:8 and 16) if one has no concrete experience of love. An agapic community is the precondition for true belief in God. All talk about God runs the risk of 30 | It's All Grace

blasphemy, and all talking to God in prayer runs the risk of idolatry. It is perilously easy to chatter about or to our own best image of God rather than God. What guards against that danger is the “controlling metaphor” for God in the Christian tradition: agapic love. If you have no experience of agapic love, then quite literally you will not know what you are talking about if you say, “I believe in God.” The Church, from the domestic church of the family to the Church universal, is to be an agapic community. Needless to say, on all its many levels it fails again and again, but it confesses its failure and lovingly struggles to love. Ultimately, the reason we need the Church is that we cannot believe apart from community. To speak of spirituality without roots in a community is to flirt with idolatry. Trying to enter into relationship with God in some private, individualistic fashion is a guarantee that one will be talking to oneself. Apart from the day-to-day attempt to love those around us in practical ways one simply cannot claim that one is in relationship with God. Never was this said more clearly or decisively than by the author of the First Epistle of John: anyone who claims that he loves God but does not love his brothers and sisters is lying (4:20). You are charged with bearing the Good News in your life and you are charged with loving others Wisdom from Fr. Michael J. Himes | 31

so that they might know God as love. The Church needs each of us to participate in its life or it has no life. Living our Catholicism is the assurance that there is and will be a living Catholicism.

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CATHOLICS: WHY WE ARE A SACRAMENTAL PEOPLE “Those occasions that get us to notice, accept, and celebrate the love of God, which is always present in our lives—any person, place, thing, or event; any sight, sound, taste, touch, or smell that causes you to notice, say yes to, accept, embrace, and celebrate the love of God—those are sacraments.” An excerpt from a lecture at Boston College by Fr. Michael Himes on February 15, 2012.. Wisdom from Fr. Michael J. Himes | 33

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hy is there something rather than nothing? Why does the universe exist? Why the Big Bang and not the great silence? Why is

there anything? The answer I suggest to you is because God loves it. There are many possible ways you could answer it. Different people have answered it. Some very distinguished theologians have answered it by saying it’s to show the glory of God, to reveal the power and the justice of God. All of those are wonderful things and I’m in favor of all of them, but they’re not actually the reason why there’s something rather than nothing. All of them imply that God is getting something out of creating, that God becomes glorified, God is seen to be just, God is manifested in his works. But that all implies that the universe is doing something for or to God. And of course you can’t do something for God. God doesn’t need the universe. God, you remember, is God. God doesn’t need anything. God is perfect, complete, full, absolute. What is it that God calls the whole universe into being in order to give? There are two possibilities I suggest to you. The first is that the universe is called into being so God can give it something other than God—something 34 | It's All Grace

very good, something very wonderful, but not God’s self. The problem with that is anything that exists that isn’t God is just more of the universe, so it doesn’t really answer the question. The only possibility I suggest to you that really holds up is God calls everything into existence so God can give God’s self to it. The universe exists so that God can give God’s self to the universe. The universe exists because God loves it. Now I want you to think about that with me for a moment, because it’s perfectly easy to say yes to it without recognizing the immense implications of that. Please notice I’m not saying that God loves every human being; I am saying that, but I’m saying a lot more than that. I’m saying God loves every single creature—you, me, the chair, your city, God, your pet cat, your favorite rhododendron, a little crustacean scuttling across the Marianas Trench in the Pacific at this moment, a pebble on the third moon of the planet Neptune. Everything that exists, exists because God loves it. Everything is resting on the love of God. Is there a name for that love of God, God’s self-gift outside the Trinity, that which brings the universe into Wisdom from Fr. Michael J. Himes | 35

existence? There is: grace. Grace is simply theological shorthand for God’s gift of God’s self outside the Trinity, beyond, as it were, the Trinity. Now if you think about that for a moment, what we’re saying is everything that exists—absolutely everything that exists—exists because God loves it. That’s an extraordinary claim, but that’s absolutely at the center of the whole of the Christian tradition. Everything that exists, exists because God loves it into being and holds it in love. This is what I like to refer to as the sacramental principle. It’s been defined in a number of ways over the course of centuries. This is my handy-dandy definition of the sacramental principle: the sacramental principle holds that what is always and everywhere true must be noticed, accepted, and celebrated somewhere, sometime. Think of the things that are always present to us and how easily we ignore them. Think, for example, of your heart beating. You don’t pay attention to your heart beating most of the time. It’s only if something goes wrong and your heart starts beating irregularly that you may notice it— 36 | It's All Grace

otherwise, you just take it for granted. Think about blinking. You don’t notice the blinks unless something calls your attention to it. A number of years ago, I was struck by a bout of Bell’s palsy, and everything on the left side of my face froze, including the ability to blink. I had to tape my eyes shut at night, and in the course of the day I had to remember to periodically reach up and hold the lid down to keep the eyeball moist. You don’t think about blinking until something calls your attention to it. You don’t pay any attention to the oxygen in a room until the oxygen gets to be stale. That which is always and everywhere present is easily ignored. If we’re going to really attend to something that is always and everywhere present, it needs to be celebrated and noticed somewhere, sometime. Think of celebrating someone’s birthday. We say to them on their birthday that we love them, that we care about them, that they mean a great deal to us. That’s certainly not because the other 364 days of the year we couldn’t care less about them, but on this one day every year we really tell them that we care about them. Wisdom from Fr. Michael J. Himes | 37

Well, that’s the principle of sacramentality: what is always and everywhere true must be noticed, accepted, and celebrated somewhere, sometime. And that which is always and everywhere true is the absolute self-gift of God. It is God’s love, which means that God’s love can easily be overlooked unless somewhere, sometime we notice it, accept it, and celebrate it. Those occasions that get us to notice, accept, and celebrate the love of God, which is always present in our lives—any person, place, thing, or event; any sight, sound, taste, touch, or smell that causes you to notice, say yes to, accept, embrace, and celebrate the love of God—those are sacraments. How many sacraments are there, therefore? How many things exist in the universe? Anything and everything can be a sacrament. There are the seven great communal sacraments, to be sure, but they are only the great communal instances of something much, much more embracing. Everything that we encounter can be a sacrament.

How do sacraments bring us to see the love of God? Well, that goes back to a statement that comes from St. Augustine, which St. Thomas Aquinas quotes endlessly: sacraments “effect what they signify.” That is to say, 38 | It's All Grace

they effect—they cause—something that they signify, something that they point at. What precisely do they point at? This is the key: they point not out, but in. The point about a sacrament is not that it’s a sign that gets us to think about something else. For example, when we see a red octagon, there’s no immediate or direct connection between the red octagon and slowing the car. That’s a sign; it’s pointing to something outside itself. Think what happens when you walk into a room and there is someone who is a very dear friend of yours who greets you with a warm smile and an embrace. Is that a reminder of the fact that they love you, or is that the very embodiment of the fact that they love you? It’s not pointing outside to something—it’s pointing inside itself, to what makes it to be real at all. That’s how sacraments function. They don’t point out, they point in. They bring us to recognize what is always true in them, and because it is true of them, we begin to recognize it may be true of anything. The most beautiful statement of this that I know of anywhere in the English language is from Gerard Manley Hopkins. He’s describing walking home. As Hopkins is walking home, he’s lamenting the fact that the summer is gone, winter is coming, and he’s not looking forward to Wisdom from Fr. Michael J. Himes | 39

it at all. And suddenly he finds himself noticing: look at the foliage, look at the way the leaves are changing colors, look at the joy of people out in the fields bringing in the harvest, look at the way the clouds scud by at this time of year with the wind off the sea. It leads him to give what I think is the most beautiful statement of the sacramental principle in the English language. Hopkins says, “These things were here, and but the beholder wanting.” The beauty of the foliage, the loveliness of the fall, it was already here. What changed on his walk home? Hopkins changed, not the world around him. It’s not that now the world is beautiful; it was always beautiful. Hopkins just wasn’t looking at it. That is the heart of the sacramental principle. Everything is sacramental. Everything is an adoring explosion of the love of God. If we could really attend to one thing closely enough that we could see it for what it is in its depths, we would be seeing grace. We would be seeing the love of God which holds all things in being. It’s we who have to change, not the world. The world is already engraced. We just don’t notice it. We need to be more attentive. Sacramentally, this is why in the Roman Catholic liturgy is everything in the kitchen sink. What do you like? Are you particularly sensitive to color? Good, we 40 | It's All Grace

have paintings, mosaics, and stained glass. Do you like music? We’ve got choral music and orchestral music, folk music, Gregorian chants, and the great Masses of Haydn and Mozart. Do you have a strong sense of taste? We give you something to drink and something to eat. We pour oil on you, we put you to bed when you get married, we impose hands on you, we appoint you to office. Do you like incense? Do you have a strong sense of smell? We wave incense at you. We wave banners, we wear vestments, we change colors, we parade in and out. Everything is fair game because th whole thing is engraced. It just needs somebody to notice it. And sacraments are those occasions that get us to notice what is always and everywhere the case. That’s why we are a sacramental people. We’re a sacramental people because what else could you possibly be, if that’s what the universe is like? We are the people who are called to notice it, and we do it by reverencing it. Everything deserves that reverence. To actually see it for what it is is to see it as engraced. The real heart of asceticism—of a disciplined spiritual life—is not somehow knocking oneself around, as if God delights in seeing God’s creatures beat themselves up, Wisdom from Fr. Michael J. Himes | 41

deprive themselves of things they like to eat, refuse to do things that they find very pleasant. That’s not what God is interested in. The real point of spiritual discipline is that we stop looking in the mirror long enough that we might possibly start looking out the window; that instead of concentrating on ourselves all the time, we attend to what’s there to be noticed. That’s the heart of sacramentality, and that’s the heart of the spiritual life, because if we see what’s there to be seen, we see the absolute love of God.

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HOPE IN A WINTRY SEASON “Hope is the virtue of endlessly reaching out in the conviction that we are always being reached toward. God is always in the process of embracing us, and, therefore, we can embrace back.” A lecture given at Boston College by Fr. Michael Himes on October 14, 2010..

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W

hat is hope? First, I want to begin by contrasting hope with optimism. Hope, of course, is a theological virtue. Optimism

is not; it’s a particular emotional state, and, most importantly, optimism has to do with tomorrow. It’s the belief that things will be better tomorrow and we have reason to look forward with expectation. Hope isn’t about tomorrow. Hope is about today.

It’s an activity. Think about the claim that hope endures. That’s a very odd claim, if one thinks that hope is to be one with God. When that happens, won’t hope cease? St. Paul says it doesn’t. Hope goes on even when we are face to face with God. How is that possible? What exactly is hope about? I suggest it’s based ultimately on God’s activity in us. Now, that of course is true of all virtues, and it’s preeminently true of the theological virtues. When we are believers, it’s not because we’ve arrived at some kind of understanding and certitude and make an act of faith; it’s always God’s work that’s going on. It’s a grace. It’s a gift. The same thing is true about love. As St. Augustine says very forcefully: God loves us not because we are lovable but because God is loving. It’s not about us, it’s about God. 44 | It's All Grace

How is it rooted in God’s activity? What exactly is it that God is doing that is the ground of our hope? It is rooted in God’s constant quest of us. St. Augustine pointed out many times in the course of his preaching and teaching that the first thing we hear about God in Scripture is that God talks. God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God said, “Let the day be separated from the night,” and it happened. God is endlessly communicating God’s self. If we are made in the image and likeness of God, then the most important thing to know about ourselves is that we are made to be talkers. We’re made to be people who speak and communicate ourselves. All through our lives we are endlessly attempting to say who we are. We do it not only in words, but in gestures, the decisions we make, and the lives we lead. Think of what we mean when we speak of body language. At this moment, all of you are communicating by the way you’re sitting, how you’re dressed, and how you’re dealing with people around you. All of you are saying something about who you are. Augustine insists we can’t communicate ourselves perfectly because we’re never done being us. If you were going to tell me perfectly who you are, you would have to be complete, and you’re not. Indeed, in the very act of telling me who you are perfectly, you would be more Wisdom from Fr. Michael J. Himes | 45

than you were, so what you would say wouldn’t be accurate anymore. The only person who could communicate himself perfectly, Augustine insists, is somebody who is perfectly what he is totally; in other words, God. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Our words are always words about ourselves. God’s word isn’t about God, it is God. All of us are attempting to communicate ourselves, and we’re doing it because that’s what it is to exist at all—to exist is to exist as one who gives oneself away. God is love, and all of us are those who try to communicate ourselves in love because we are made in the image and likeness of God. That’s the ultimate foundation for hope. The ground of our hope is precisely that God is always reaching out to us. You don’t have to fight to break the silence of God. God is constantly pouring God’s self out. God is always speaking God’s self. We may not always hear very well, but God is never not speaking. Hope is the virtue of endlessly reaching out in the conviction that we are always being reached toward. God is always in the process of embracing us, and, therefore, we can embrace back. 46 | It's All Grace

Why is hope so important in the Christian life? Let me offer you a reading of one of the most fascinating passages that I know of in the Christian and Jewish traditions: Chapter Three of Genesis. Chapter Three of Genesis is the point at which the Hebrew tradition tries to deal with the question, “Where does evil come from?” If we say God is the source of everything, then God must be the source of evil, and if we say God isn’t the source of evil, then God is not the source of everything. What’s the first thing you hear about being a human being? We are made like God. And what’s the first temptation in Chapter Three of Genesis? Eat this, and then you’ll be like God. The implication is, of course, you’re not like God now—you don’t think God is going to share godlikeness with you and with me. You’ve got to get out there and seize it, you’ve got to earn it. God isn’t going to give it to you simply because God likes you so much. The first temptation in Genesis Chapter Three is the inability to believe that we’re as good as God says we are. It’s the inability to accept that we are made in the image and likeness of God. It’s all about despair. When God says, “Let there be light,” this is the voice that murmurs, “Bad idea, let there be darkness—better that there be nothing.” If it’s not God, it’s garbage. Whatever we mean by Satan, Wisdom from Fr. Michael J. Himes | 47

we don’t mean the enemy of God. As Ignatius Loyola pointed out long ago, God doesn’t have enemies. Satan is the enemy of God’s creatures. Satan is the one who loves God too much the wrong way. Satan thinks God is wonderful, and anything that isn’t God ought not to be at all. If you’re not God, you’re garbage. Either be perfect or don’t exist. Once one rejects the goodness of being, there are no limits to the horrors that can follow. That’s despair. To be turned in on oneself is a very sure way to come to despair. It is a constant effort to turn oneself out, because that’s what hope is; it’s about reaching out because we are so completely confident that there is one reaching toward us and that’s why we reach back.

What does that mean at this point in the life of the Christian community? We never come to God alone. God always brings us into his love as a member of a people, as part of the Church. It’s because we are always connected to others that we are a people of hope. It is that conviction that God doesn’t drop us, even though we don’t deserve it. That is not only the source of our ability to live with ourselves in hope but to live with one another in hope. Reaching out to others is always a danger, and the danger is that people will not 48 | It's All Grace

accept the gift. To be willing to face that danger and pain is of the very essence of hope. That’s true of all of us in relation to our families and circles of friends. It’s true of our society, it’s true of our country, and it is true of the Church. What do we do? We go on hoping. That’s what’s so necessary, because you see, in hope we end up doing what God does. You see, if we are going to be united with God, then we will what God wills. What is it that God wills? At least one part of what God wills is us, and so I have to will me, day after day. I have to go on saying, “Today I’m going to be Himes again,” with all that means: all of its problems and its failures, all of its weakness, all of its stupidity, all of its blindness, and its stubbornness, and its selfishness. We have to go on willing ourselves. We cannot afford the luxury of choosing not to be. So, in a wintry season—perhaps in our old lives, our families, our circles of friends, in the country, at the church, in our economy—we have to be the people not who go and proclaim optimism. It’s not about optimism. Tomorrow is likely to be really tough. It may be worse than today. But in it, and through it, and under it, and around it, God is reaching toward us, and we therefore Wisdom from Fr. Michael J. Himes | 49

can reach back. We can hope. We can choose to continue to be. And if we do that—if we will what God wills—then we may discover that all the time we thought we were just reaching we were already being held.

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FINDING HOPE WHEN LIFE DOESN’T GO AS PLANNED “Hope is communal.” An excerpt from an Agape Latte talk at Boston College by Fr. Michael Himes on September 24, 2019.

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Y

ou undoubtedly are watching this arm shake like this at the moment. That’s because there’s something wrong somewhere up here in my

brain. I have to take a new dose of pills, and then it will gradually subside. I remember when this started. It started when I was at the dentist. I had cracked a tooth. It was a very old filling, and it cracked. The dentist said to me, you really need to do a root canal and cap that tooth. So I went to the oral surgeon, and in the course of his working on the tooth, all of a sudden, just like flicking a light switch, this arm started shaking. The dentist was scared to death. Subsequently, I went to several doctors and several neurologists. They kept saying it was Parkinson’s disease. When I explained how it had started, they’d say, “That’s rather strange. That’s not the way Parkinson’s disease usually works.” They said it was Parkinson’s with anomalies. Well, that’s not the best way to explain something to someone. You know, I wasn’t proud of going to bed at night saying to God, “Thank you for giving me Parkinson’s with anomalies. I’m so glad that you have. I would’ve felt terribly disappointed not to have a couple of anomalies in there.” Finally I found a very distinguished 52 | It's All Grace

neurologist, one of the leading experts in the United States on Parkinson’s. He looked at it and said, “It’s probably either a very small stroke or a very small aneurysm somewhere in the brain. For the moment, just keep living with it. If it doesn’t incapacitate you, live with it.” Well, that was 1999. I’ve been living with it a long time now. What do you do with this? I think you say thank you. I mean, on the whole, having an arm that shakes is better than having an arm that doesn’t move because you’re dead. I think that it’s allowed me access to understanding how other people feel who are faced with far more serious, far more difficult, far more painful diseases. This has given me a much richer sense of what people go through. I hope it has made me more compassionate than I was before. I live in hope that someday this will be okay—but that will be in God’s doing, not in mine. It reminds me of a line that I’ve always loved, a very wise statement and a very beautiful statement. It’s what was, according to his biographers, the last thing Beethoven said before he died. Beethoven, who had been quite totally deaf for at least 25 years before his death, on his deathbed said to his friends, “I am going to be able to hear in heaven.” I’d like to think that I’m going to be able to stop Wisdom from Fr. Michael J. Himes | 53

shaking when I’m in heaven—but it will be a gift of God, not an accomplishment of mine. It will be something I live in hope of. Hope is communal. If I’m ever going to get rid of this shaking, it’s going to be because the whole world has changed, not just because this one place in the world changes. It’s not that out of all the creatures that exist, God has chosen to do this for Michael Himes. It’s that God has willed, for all of God’s creatures, the fullness of their being. In our interaction with one another, we sometimes foster that fullness of being. Sometimes we block it. Sometimes we make it more difficult for people around us. Whatever we are doing, it’s something that’s done in a community. We don’t understand hope if we think hope is a purely personal choice or a purely personal experience. It’s not. It’s an experience that belongs to everyone, and we have to be willing to share it with everyone because if we don’t we’re never going to let hope transform our lives and our world as it should. What I wish for you is that you have your own arm shaking sometime, in a way that you didn’t expect, because that’ll help you to grow. And I offer you my deep and abiding good wishes as you think about hope for your 54 | It's All Grace

future. Don’t think of it as your accomplishment. Think of it as your gift. Don’t think of it as something that God demands from you. Think of it as an enormous present that is given to you.

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CELEBRATING CATHOLIC EDUCATION “If you hold on to your life, if you try to preserve your life, if you grasp your life and don’t let it go, you will lose it; but if you give it away, if you hand it over, if you are willing to die, you will discover that you cannot run out of life.” On September 15, 2012, Fr. Michael Himes delivered a homily at a Mass in Fenway Park that celebrated the Sesquicentennial Anniversary of Boston College. The following is an excerpt from his remarks on Jesuit, Catholic higher education.

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I

f you want to know what it is to be a human being, if you want to know who you and I are or could be at our very fullest and best, look at Jesus of Nazareth.

In Him, we see the fullness of humanity revealing the fullness of divinity. What follows from that? What follows from it is an all-important principle. The principle is that if you really want to be like God—and that’s about as good a definition of holiness as I know—if you really want to be like God, be as human as you can possibly be. The perfectly human is the realization of the presence of the perfectly Divine. The fullness of God is found in the fullness of humanity and vice versa. What flows from that is the all-important principle of Catholic education, which is that anything that helps us to become more fully, richly, perfectly, splendidly human is making us more like God. Whatever humanizes, divinizes. Whatever makes us more human makes us holy. That is the very core of the whole of the Catholic and Jesuit traditions of education. It explains why we think that education is a holy work. If education means humanization then education is central to the Church’s mission, because education is simply the long process by which we become more truly and authentically human. This is true of the teaching of religion and philosophy 58 | It's All Grace

but also the teaching of chemistry, physics, history, and economics. All education makes us more like God because whatever makes us more human makes us holy. If that’s true, then think of what a blessing to the Church the Jesuit tradition is. The reason that the Jesuit tradition is so priceless and so powerful is because it’s so Catholic. That’s what lies at the heart of Catholicism: the conviction that we are engaged in making one another holy by making one another more completely human. Therefore, nothing is foreign to us. There’s no question that we have to be afraid of asking, no position that we need be frightened of exploring, no task that we need to be too daunted to undertake. That brings me to when Jesus says in Mark’s Gospel: If you hold on to your life, if you try to preserve your life, if you grasp your life and don’t let it go, you will lose it; but if you give it away, if you hand it over, if you are willing to die, you will discover that you cannot run out of life. If you hold on to it, you lose it. If you give it away, it becomes everlasting. As I edge ever so gingerly through late middle age, I find that there are certain key issues which have become Wisdom from Fr. Michael J. Himes | 59

absolutely central to me. There aren’t as many things as I once thought were super important, but those things that I still do think are crucially important are now unshakably central to my life. One of them is that claim: what you hold on to, you lose; what you give away, you can never run out of. This applies to your education as well. If you think of your education as a gift given to you to be grasped, as something that you’ve achieved and will hold on to; if you think of your education as a training to make more money or get a better job; if you think that your education is all about your success in being able to provide for yourself and your family, then I must say that I think you’re unworthy of your education. The reason to be educated is to teach somebody else. You will never fully grasp the fruits of your education until you give it away to another. The measure of the success of your education is the measure to which the lives of people who never got to come to Boston College are richer, fuller, and more genuinely human because you did go to Boston College. It’s in the process of giving it away that you will fully possess it. You never own what you don’t give away. What you do give away, you can never lose. That’s what the 60 | It's All Grace

Gospel is. It is the story of the fullness of God present in a perfectly human human being, and the way in which He gave everything until there was nothing left to give. “Father, I hand myself over to you.” It is finished. He’s all used up, there’s nothing left, and the tomb can’t hold Him. He can live because He has given away everything. To be able to give away everything is what all of us are in training to do from the moment of our baptism. In doing it, we become a little more human, and in becoming a little more human, we become genuinely holy. If I had to give one image for everything that Catholic education is about, it would be the very last canto of the Divine Comedy. Dante, who of course gets everything right, describes in that last canto what can’t be described. He tries to describe the beatific vision. He tries to describe what it is to see God. Needless to say, he fails. He just fails less than anybody else who has ever tried. Dante says that what he saw was a dazzling light. That’s a familiar image for the presence of God, but he goes on to say that that dazzling light, which seemed to destroy his sight, was steadily making his eyes stronger and clearer. He says that the light seemed to emanate from three concentric spheres of different colors, together forming one dazzling white light. This is an image, of course, of the Trinity. As Wisdom from Fr. Michael J. Himes | 61

his sight grew stronger, he could gaze more deeply into that light. In its very center, he saw one who looked just like him. He saw the Incarnation. He saw the fullness of humanity united to the divinity in the person of Christ, and in that dazzling last line, he says, “Then I knew the love that moves the sun and all the stars.” What unites us with God is our humanity. Thanks to the Incarnation, you and I and God have one thing in common. We’re all human. If you wish to be like God, be more human. The way to be more human is to help others be more human by giving yourself away. To discover that is to have discovered everything that is important in the Christian tradition. It is to genuinely be educated. It is to be the kind of person that the Society of Jesus has been forming for five centuries. It is to be people who see the love that moves the sun and all the stars. That’s the gift that has been given to us by Boston College. Give it away.

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THE LAST LECTURE “The key in coming to know anyone or anything is to ask, “Tell me your story,” and to give an attentive hearing to that story; to attend to what is said, what is shown, and what is revealed to you in the conviction that reality is there to be seen.” On November 18, 2008, Fr. Michael Himes delivered the inaugural “Last Lecture” at Boston College, an opportunity for longtime faculty members to consider three questions: “If granted the possibility to give a last lecture, what would you say? What wisdom would you impart to the world? What would you want as your legacy?” Over 1,000 students, faculty, and staff were in attendance. Wisdom from Fr. Michael J. Himes | 63

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t’s a rather awe-inspiring thing to be invited to give one’s last lecture. It does wonderfully concentrate your mind. I thought long and hard about it, and

in particular in relation to this statement from Søren Kierkegaard, the great 19th-century Danish philosopher of religion: There is something quite definite I have to say, and I have it so much upon my conscience that, as I feel, I dare not die without having said it. For the moment I die and thus leave this world, as I understand it, I shall in that very second, at such speed does it go, in that very same second, I shall be infinitely far away in a different place. Where still within the same second, frightful speed, the question will be put to me, “Have you uttered the definite message quite definitely?”

Well, that’s of course the great question. Have I uttered the great message? Have I uttered the definite message quite definitely? If this is my last chance to do it, well thank you for being present while I give it a try. What is the definite message that has to be said? It is a statement that I’ve spoken, preached, and prayed about 64 | It's All Grace

many times, a statement which appears repeatedly in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. It’s the statement of Jesus that if you hold on to your life, you lose it, but if you give your life away, it becomes everlasting life. For a long time, I think I misunderstood that statement, because for a very long time, when I spoke about it, when I prayed and preached about it, I thought of it as a commandment, as if Jesus is saying, “Now that’s what you ought to do, that’s how you ought to live.” Only after a long time did it occur to me that it’s not a commandment at all. It’s a description. Jesus is not saying, “That’s how you want to live.” He’s saying, “That’s how things are.” You want to know what existence is like. It’s like this: If you hold on to it, you won’t have it, but if you give it away, you can’t run out of it. You will see it become everlasting because being and giving oneself turn out to be exactly the same thing. There’s a way at which that is said powerfully in the First Letter of John. It is the author of the First Letter of John’s way of saying, “God is love.” My way of saying it is that the foundation of existence is the gift of the self to another. That’s really an extraordinary claim, but as I look back at my own life, my experience is that it is precisely Wisdom from Fr. Michael J. Himes | 65

correct. That it is the central thing that needs to be said: if we’re going to exist, we give ourselves away. W.H. Auden, who is a particular favorite poet of mine, wrote in a book review that was published in 1930 that the first criterion of success in any human activity is intensity of attention—or, less pompously, love. When I say you have to love something in order to know it, I don’t mean that you have to have warm emotions or deep sentimental affection for the thing. That may happen, and that may be wonderful, but that’s not the heart of what I mean by love. I mean an activity. The activity is giving yourself to something. You have to give it your time and your energy. You have to give it your intelligence. You have to focus yourself on it. Only then do you ever really understand it. Above the many books that I never wrote is a general systematic sacramental theology. And the way at which I had thought about writing that book was as a discussion of a series of propositions. The first proposition of the book was going to be “things tell you what they are.” You don’t have to torture the truths out of things. Everything that exists is open and ready to tell you about itself. It’s eager to reveal its innermost depths. That’s true of 66 | It's All Grace

everything that exists, but there’s a necessary first step, and if I can illustrate the first step, I will tell you a story. It’s the main element of the plot of a great medieval German epic called Parsifal. The young man, Parsifal, is out of the world as it were, seeking adventure. One day, as it’s drawing toward evening, he comes upon a castle and enters the castle. He is immediately welcomed by all the people in the castle and becomes the honored guest at dinner that evening. And the host is a man who’s dressed as a king, but he’s obviously ill. His honor is lying on a cot and seems to be very weak, but he’s very welcoming to Parsifal. The meal goes on, but at the end, servants enter carrying a cup and a spear. The king immediately begins to suffer immense pain, and Parsifal stares in astonishment. Then everything vanishes, except for one servant who tells Parsifal, “You have failed the test, and you must leave.” Parsifal leaves the castle and tries to come back the next day, and the castle is not there. The epic poem goes on for many pages, and Parsifal learns a great deal. Finally, he finds himself back one evening in front of that castle again. He doesn’t know how he’s made his way back to it, but there it is, and he enters and is again shown into the dining hall. Once again, a meal is served and the Wisdom from Fr. Michael J. Himes | 67

king is still on the cot looking weak. Again, the grail and the spear are brought into the hall and the king cries out in great suffering. This time, Parsifal speaks. “What is the source of your pain?” At that moment, the king is healed. The necessary first step is to ask the right question. Parsifal wasn’t supposed to have the answer, but he had to have the right question, and the right question is, “Tell me your story. How did you get hurt? What causes this pain? Tell me your story.” The key in coming to know anyone or anything is to ask, “Tell me your story,” and to give an attentive hearing to that story; to attend to what is said, what is shown, and what is revealed to you in the conviction that reality is there to be seen. If reality is going to give itself to us, we first have to give ourselves to it. But what do you do with reality when you begin to see a glimpse of the truth of things? You’ve got to teach. All of us are engaged in teaching. I’ve been engaged in it in a particular and absolutely wonderful way, but everyone is involved in teaching. How do we do that? How do we give it to others? The first step at giving it to others is to be convinced that they want to learn it. 68 | It's All Grace

Let me tell you yet another story. This is a story of a Sunday afternoon in 1763. James Boswell tells this story in his magnificent biography, his great 18th-century Life of Dr. Johnson. It’s a beautiful Sunday morning in London in 1763. Johnson and Boswell decide they’re going to go for lunch downriver to Greenwich, so they go down to the Thames Embankment and hire a boat with a young teenager who is going to row them down to Greenwich to have lunch. Boswell was hounding Johnson with questions and making notes of Johnson’s conversation to include in the great biography afterwards. Boswell asked Johnson, “Do you think that it’s necessary for everyone to be classically educated? Do you think for people to lead really fulfilled, good lives everyone has to be educated in Greek and Latin?” And Johnson said, “No, of course not. That’s not necessary for everyone. It’s necessary for those people who are called to be fully educated, but there are vast numbers of people whose lives would not in any way be benefited or shaped, who would not gain any reward from being educated in that fashion. To them, such education simply doesn’t apply. Not everyone needs to know the Wisdom from Fr. Michael J. Himes | 69

songs that the sailors sang as they rode the Argonauts in the ancient world.” Then Johnson turned to the young boy who was rowing the boat and said, “You, boy, what would you give to know what the Argonauts sang?” The boy replied, “Sir, I would give whatever I had.” Johnson was so pleased with the response that he tipped the boy double. Tipped the boy double? I’d have set up a trust fund for him to go to Oxford or Cambridge! With all due respect to St. Thomas Aquinas, who is often described as the patron saint of the intellectual life, the patron saint of the intellectual life, for my money, is an unnamed teenager from 1763 who would have given everything he had simply to know what the Argonauts sang. We are all hungry to know, and we begin knowing when we ask the right question—when we invite reality to open itself. Teachers are the people who get the immense privilege of introducing others to what might be the right question. In order to do that, we have to be immensely respectful of one another, and that requires a trust about the possibility of friendship. One of the things that’s puzzled me greatly over the last 15 years has been the disappearance of friendship as a topic for people to 70 | It's All Grace

think about. In the ancient world, everybody regarded friendship as a subject about which philosophy ought to be interested. That was true of the Middle Ages. It’s true of the Renaissance. Certainly, people enjoy friendship, but it’s no longer seen as a philosophical question. How is it possible that we are capable of friendship? I’ve often thought that if I were defining a human being, I don’t know that I could come up with a better definition than the animal that’s capable of friendship. What is friendship and what does it mean that we’re capable of it? It’s something that embraces the whole person. Cicero, in his book on friendship, defines it as “a full agreement on all matters of importance, both human and divine, combined with genuine benevolence and sincere affection.” That’s a wonderful definition because it says friendship takes the whole person. It’s genuinely wanting the best for that other person, and it’s also something that involves the emotions. It involves sincere affection. How is it possible that we’re capable of friendship? I think it’s possible precisely because it is the very essence of what it is to exist. One of the things that happens in our friendships is we get to learn what it is that our friend needs, wants, and longs to know. We, insofar as we’re Wisdom from Fr. Michael J. Himes | 71

able, help the friend to know, to gain that knowledge and experience by helping them to discern what the right question might be to ask. It’s at the heart of what it is to be a human being. We live in a world in which it’s possible for people to think that they really exist by possessing things. It is an enormous shift to come to recognize that you only have things by giving them away. I don’t know how you’re going to give yourself away. I’ve tried long and hard to figure out how I give myself away most effectively, most fully. I urge you to be immensely attentive to the question. Attend to the ways at which you can give yourself to the people around you, the ways you can enter into friendship with others. Begin by asking them the great question for you: “Tell me your story. What makes you the way you are? Why is what’s important to you important to you?” So, if the most important thing to say is that to exist is to give yourself away, what does that say about what I’ve done with my life? What does that say about teaching theology? One enormously influential and wonderfully destructive way of teaching theology is to think that it’s imparting information. That’s an immense mistake. Theology is not about getting information from 72 | It's All Grace

God. Theology is about experiencing God. It’s about the exploration of our lives as human beings, and how it leads us to a deeper knowledge of the foundation of being. One of the things that I’ve tried to do in teaching theology has been to invite people to check their experience. Then, the teaching of theology is, “Here’s what people for 20 centuries have found to be revelatory in the Christian tradition. See if it matches up with your experience.” See if the ways in which people have lived and prayed and thought—the way they’ve entered into friendships and marriages, the way they’ve raised their children, the way they’ve shaped their society— illuminates your experience at this moment. It’s about allowing experience to give new insight into the tradition and allowing the tradition to give coherence and an intelligibility to everything we experience throughout our lives. What does that mean? It means if you’re going to teach it, you’ve got to spend a lot of time with the tradition. You’ve got to spend a lot of time talking to a lot of dead people—Thomas Aquinas and Augustine, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; Ignatius and Francis of Assisi; Teresa of Avila and Catherine of Siena. But Wisdom from Fr. Michael J. Himes | 73

you’ve also got to spend a lot of time talking to your contemporaries and examining yourself. It means you have to be very reflective about your own experience; you have to carefully attend to what seems to be most important in your life and in the lives of the people around you. Plato famously maintains that Socrates said the unreflective life is not worth living. William James remarked that, yes, that was perfectly true, but it was also true that the unlived life wasn’t worth reflecting on. One has to live life in order to have anything worth reflecting on. It’s not a matter of locking ourselves in some ivory tower—even very comfortable ivory towers like the BC campus—and thinking our way toward reality. It’s about being part of reality, about living. It’s about entering into experience. It’s about seeking out new experiences. It’s about being a little bit daring with your life. It’s about doing what you didn’t think it was in you to do. Now, I must confess, I feel rather hypocritical saying that to you because, from one point of view, few people have managed to live a more sheltered life than I. But I also find, as I look back over my life, that I surprised myself over and over again with the discovery that I was 74 | It's All Grace

able to do and to feel what I never thought I could do or feel. Maybe one of the reasons that friendship seemed so important to me as a subject is that I’m constantly astonished that I’m able to experience friendship. It’s an extraordinary thing to discover that you can give yourself to another. If I may tell you yet another story. We started with the Middle Ages in Germany, and then we went to 1763. This time, we go to 1947, a very good year. It was the year I was born. My mother always told this story. These were the days when pregnant mothers, as it came time to give birth, frequently were anesthetized. Natural childbirth was a kind of odd idea in that generation, and so my mother remembers being at the hospital on Mother’s Day and it being time that they thought they should bring her to the delivery room from the waiting room. Then, she was anesthetized. When she woke up, she was lying in bed looking out the window of her room, and she realized the baby had come. She didn’t know anything about it. She didn’t know if it was a boy or a girl. She didn’t know whether the delivery had been a safe one or not. She didn’t know whether the baby was alive until they arrived to tell her that it was a Wisdom from Fr. Michael J. Himes | 75

boy and everything was fine. But, she says, as she lay in the bed that morning waiting to hear what had happened, it was the single most important religious moment in her life. She said she had this immense sense of responsibility that somewhere in that hospital, somewhere in the world, there was now a life. And, as she said, she would never again be able to make a decision without taking that other life into account—that what had happened was the taking on of a solemn but joyful obligation. Well, you see, all of us take on solemn and joyful obligations in our lives. For most of you, one of the most solemn—and I hope most joyful—will be your marriage. It will be your parenthood. But there will be moments when you find yourself genuinely called to gather all the strands of your life together as it were at one moment and to give them over to someone or something else. You have to live life. You have to enter into relationships with other people. You have to commit yourself to causes. You have to dedicate yourself to ideals. You have to be willing to give yourself to work if you’re going to have anything worth reflecting on. Then you can bring the fruits of that reflection. You can bring the center of all of those events that shape the life that you’ve lived. You can bring to it what you learned from the tradition and see where they 76 | It's All Grace

touch one another. If they don’t touch one another, then say that too. Do not ever be afraid of saying, “I’ve tried to understand the tradition, and I’ve tried to understand my experience, and they just don’t fit with one another.” And don’t begin by assuming that your experience is wrong. Be immensely respectful to the traditions that shape us, but don’t be subservient to them. Remember those traditions have been shaped and formed by people exactly like you. They have immense richness and wisdom, but they also have blind spots—places where they’re underdeveloped. They need you and me to reflect on them. They need the generations yet ahead of us to reflect on them. So don’t feel that you have to shoehorn your experience into the shapes and forms of the Christian tradition. Be willing to shatter the tradition, to make it bigger, to make it richer, to make it more inclusive than it was when it was passed on to you. The tradition is there for you to develop, not in order to hem you in or tie you down or confine you to past forms and shapes of experience. Be honest with your experience, be respectful of the tradition, and hold them together. That’s what theology does. That’s why it’s been so important for me to be engaged in theology and why it’s Wisdom from Fr. Michael J. Himes | 77

been so important for me to give it to others. You’ve heard many times in different ways that the best way to learn something is to teach it. That is absolutely, literally true. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard myself giving a lecture and said to myself, “By George, Himes, that was really brilliant!” Most things are when I hear them said in the reassuring ring of my own voice. But I’ve been astonished at what I found myself saying because I hadn’t expected to say that. That it literally is in the process of passing it on that I discovered what I really thought. Since this is the last lecture, I might admit to something that you may not have been aware of. And that is that all of the times I’ve preached, all the times I’ve lectured, have always been in my own mind experiences of conversation. Now you may say, “Well, what kind of conversation was it? You did all the talking!” No, no, no, no. I did all the verbalizing, but a great deal of the communicating was done by you. It’s done by your being here—by your body language, by the expression on your face, by those little nods you give when you agree with something. All those other moments when you give a puzzled, “I don’t think so,” and you’re not aware of doing it. We’re in conversation all the time, and it’s in that conversation that I discover what it is I believe, what it is 78 | It's All Grace

I teach, and where I learn theology. We’re all engaged in that discovery together. So if you are going to learn anything by giving it away, how do you give it away? Are you all going to become teachers? Well, in one sense you are, but you’re not necessarily going to have tenure and receive a salary. What does it mean for you to give to others what you learn? Well, the first way you do it is by allowing it to shape you. I’ve come to think over the course of the years that if there is one single virtue that I would love to believe that I had, it’s integrity. By integrity, I don’t simply mean honesty. Honesty is wonderful, but I mean the word integrity very literally. It’s the quality of being an integer, a whole number. It’s the quality of being one whole thing. It’s what happens at your wake, when your spouse talks to your pastor, who talks to your business partner, who speaks to your next-door neighbor, who talks to your in-laws, who speaks to your children, who talks to your doctor, who speaks to your attorney—that they all know they met the same person. That they can all say, “Yeah, that was the one I knew too.” That they all knew you because you were one and the same. You had integrity. How do you teach? You teach by becoming whole, by Wisdom from Fr. Michael J. Himes | 79

becoming who you are, by having integrity. The first way you teach is with integrity. The second way you teach is with generosity. Again, I feel hypocritical speaking of this, but it’s the effervescence of being. One of the most striking things about existence is the way it bubbles up. I think the name for that effervescence of existence, that bubbling up, that overflowing quality of existence, is joy. It’s about having deep delight in what you do and how you live and who the people around you are. It’s a sense of immense joy, of immense pleasure in the depth and the truth of one’s experience. There’s a line in a novel by Henry Adams called Esther in which Adams says, “What a wonderful thing it is to wake in the morning with the mind turned outward instead of in.” To get up in the morning saying, “Today I get to do this. Today I get to see that one. Today I get to work with these people. Today I get to be involved in this and to feel excited and energized, and to be filled with joy by it.” That’s the most wonderful thing in life. It prevents one from getting trapped with one’s thoughts turned inward. I suggest to you that’s one of the qualities that you bring to teaching. You do it with joy, and most importantly, you do it with confidence in the importance of what you have to say. 80 | It's All Grace

Graduate students, especially my teaching assistants, have asked me over the years, “What do you do to become a really good teacher?” And I often say to them, “Look, there’s the stuff you immediately expect, the obvious stuff: you planned the lecture and you organized the course. You obviously expect that. But the most important thing you do—the thing that moves you from being a competent and effective teacher, I think, to being a great teacher—is you’ve got to fall in love with who you teach and what you teach. If you are in love with what you teach, if you really are convinced this is so good, so important, so valuable, then it’s wonderful to be able to teach it. And if you really fall in love with who you teach, if you really are convinced that those people are so marvelous, so loving, so gifted, so bright, so immensely important, then your desire to give this really great gift to those really great people will force you to become a good teacher. You won’t have any way to avoid it. It’ll push you and prod you because this is so good and they’re so good. They deserve one another. And what will all of that do? Well, I’ve come back to my beginning. It will allow you to fully exist because it will be a way of giving yourself away. Now, I can’t prove, logically, a single syllable I’ve said to you this evening. The only demonstration of it is Wisdom from Fr. Michael J. Himes | 81

to live it, to see if it works. Live as if by giving yourself to others you will not be able to run out of existence, and I am convinced that your existence will be richer and fuller than you ever dreamt. And what does that mean about your destiny? I don’t know, but I suspect I’m closer to finding out than you are. I think that when you get, as Kierkegaard says, far away in an instant, that when the question, “Did you say the quite definite message quite definitely?” is put to you, you’ll be able to say yes because the quite definite message is who you are. You see, the quite definite message that I had to say was Michael Himes. That’s a different message than you have to say, but do say it quite definitely because it’s all important. I’ve always thought the single most elegant farewell that I know of is Chaucer at the end of The Canterbury Tales. And I’ll paraphrase it to bring to a close what I’m saying to you this evening. Chaucer says, “If I have done any of you any good, I ask you to give thanks to God, and if I have done any of you any harm, I ask you to credit it to my lack of ability and not my lack of will, for I would gladly have done better if I could.” Well, I would gladly have done better if I could, but it was the best I had in me. The thing I wish for you is that sometime in your life you get a chance to say to people who mean an enormous 82 | It's All Grace

amount to you what it is that has been truest in your own life, because it’s in a moment like that when everything you gave away is given back in spades.

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IN MEMORY “We become the people who celebrate the reality of God—that God is pure and perfect self-gift.” The following obituary, written by Fr. Himes’s former student John Walsh, was published by the Office of University Communications at Boston College in June 2022.

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W

idely respected Catholic theologian Rev. Michael J. Himes, a beloved faculty member at Boston College for almost three decades,

died on June 10. From 1993 to 2021, Fr. Himes was a professor of theology at BC, where his teaching, preaching, and ministry became integral to many aspects of the Boston College experience. For more than a decade, he was one of the first members of the University community to greet incoming freshmen and parents as keynote speaker at summer orientation sessions. His hour-long talk, “What Makes a Great University?”, was often met with a standing ovation by both students and parents. Fr. Himes developed a vocational discernment

framework called the “Key Three Questions” which has become woven into the fabric of reflection at Boston College. The three questions—“What brings you joy?” “What are you good at?” and “Who does the world need you to be?”—also served as the foundation of many Boston College retreat programs, in particular, the Center for Student Formation’s “Halftime” retreat. For many years, he preached at the weekly noon Mass on Wednesdays, filling St. Mary’s Chapel with students, faculty, and staff who sought his gifts as a homilist and 86 | It's All Grace

remarkable ability to make the Gospel accessible from the pulpit. In recognition of these gifts, he was invited to be the homilist at Boston College’s Sesquicentennial Anniversary Mass, celebrated at Fenway Park in front of a crowd of approximately 20,000. His homily exhorted all Boston College educated students to “give away” the gift of receiving a BC education: “The measure of the success of your education at Boston College is the measure to which people’s lives are richer, fuller, and more genuinely human because you did go to Boston College.” Fr. Himes also delivered many well-attended public addresses during his time at Boston College, perhaps most notably as the inaugural speaker for the “Last Lecture Series” (2008) and as featured speaker at the Church in the 21st Century Center’s Agape Latte program, where he discussed family (2014) and hope (2016). As a lecturer and professor of theology, Fr. Himes was known for his dynamic, animated lectures, quick wit, charitable sense of humor, and astounding ability to quote and synthesize great works of scholarship, all without notes. He often said the key to being a great teacher is to “Love what you teach and to love who you teach,” and the immense popularity of his classes appeared to confirm Wisdom from Fr. Michael J. Himes | 87

the success of his approach, particularly his course, The Problem of Belief in Modernity, which scrutinized the most notable proponents and critics of faith to ultimately shape a foundation for responsible belief in Catholicism. “Michael Himes was the model of a priest-professor who saw his teaching as central to his vocation,” said Professor of Theology Stephen Pope. “Students were spellbound by his lectures and found in him someone who helped them come to see their own religious yearnings and spiritual aspirations in new and powerful ways.” In 2002, the BC chapter of Phi Beta Kappa selected him as Teacher of the Year. In addition to courses cotaught with his dear friend and colleague Michael J. Buckley, S.J. (the former faculty member and director of BC’s Jesuit Institute who died in 2019), Fr. Himes regarded teaching alongside his beloved younger brother and fellow priest, BC Professor of Theology Kenneth Himes, O.F.M., as one of his life’s greatest blessings. Their offices were adjacent to one another in Stokes Hall, and they co-authored the book Fullness of Faith (1993), which explores the “public significance of theology” and was awarded the Catholic Press Association Book Award in 1994. 88 | It's All Grace

Fr. Himes’s other notable publications include Doing the Truth in Love: Conversations about God, Relationships, and Service (1995), Ongoing Incarnation: Johann Adam Möhler and the Beginnings of Modern Ecclesiology (1997), and the book and video series The Mystery of Faith: An Introduction to Catholicism (2004). He received honorary degrees from St. Joseph’s College, Molloy College, Sacred Heart University, Felician College, and Holy Cross College of Notre Dame. An avid reader and a scholar with many interests, Fr. Himes’s home was filled with an impressive collection of books and notable works across many disciplines. According to his brother, Fr. Kenneth Himes, “Michael was a natural storyteller and public speaker. When we were growing up in Brooklyn, if it was a rainy day and we could not go outside to play, Michael would gather a bunch of us kids on the stairwell in our apartment building and amuse us with stories from Aesop, the Brothers Grimm, Walt Disney, or Arthurian legends. All his life he used that talent to entertain, to teach, to inspire others.” Fr. Himes’s love for Boston College was well noted among members of the BC community. When interviewed in 2021, shortly before his retirement, he shared this Wisdom from Fr. Michael J. Himes | 89

parting thought with the Boston College Chronicle in gratitude for his career on the Heights: “Being a part of Boston College is not only a job or profession; it is a vocation. It’s a lifelong project which one undertakes not only for one’s self but for all who will enter this ongoing conversation. At BC, we’re engaged in an ongoing conversation which enables us to come together as a community. Central to Boston College is that it’s a place where people are giving themselves away to others, and in doing so, we become what is most valuable to say about being human. We become the people who celebrate the reality of God—that God is pure and perfect self-gift. Boston College has given me rich frameworks and many opportunities to participate in conversation for which I am profoundly grateful.” Prior to his time at Boston College, Fr. Himes taught at the University of Notre Dame from 1987 to 1993 and served as dean of the Seminary of Immaculate Conception in Huntington, New York, from 1977 until 1987. He held a Ph.D. in the history of Christianity from the University of Chicago, and was ordained a priest in the Diocese of Brooklyn, New York, in May of 1972. A native of Brooklyn, he is survived by his brother, Kenneth, and sister, Eileen, as well as his nephew, Andrew E. Moschner, and his wife, 90 | It's All Grace

Lauren M. Moschner. He is predeceased by his parents, Robert M. Himes and Mary V. Himes, née Gill.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Special thanks to the C21 editorial board for curating this collection of resources. John Walsh ’17, ’20, Dennis Wieboldt ’22, ’23, Molly Wysocki ’26, Eileen Corkery ’17, Karen Kiefer ’82, P’17, P’18, P’20. P’23 Many of the essays in this book are transcribed from past C21 Center events and publications featuring Fr. Michael Himes. Others appear through the generosity and collaboration of university partners who helped preserve his voice and share his wisdom with the wider Boston College community. Intersections first filmed Fr. Himes presenting the “Three Key Questions” for use at the Halftime retreat series, a tradition continued ever since by the Center for Student Formation. The Center for Ignatian Spirituality sponsored the Last Lecture Series, while the Clough School of Theology and Ministry sponsored his lecture, “Hope in a Wintry Season.” Special thanks to the Office of University Communications for "Celebrating Catholic Education" and "In Memory." We are deeply grateful to these partners for helping ensure that Fr. Himes’s words of wisdom continue to serve as a catalyst for reflection and conversation. With thanks to Andrew Craig ’17, MATM ’19, for the cover artwork and content design for C21 Guiding Lights resources page, featuring lectures from Fr. Michael Himes. 92 | It's All Grace

The Church in the 21st Century (C21) Center at Boston College is a catalyst and resource for the renewal of the Catholic Church. The Center offers publications, events, digital media content, and easily adoptable faith-sharing programs for individuals, schools, and parishes worldwide. bc.edu/c21 church21@bc.edu

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