To Be Grounded in the Supernatural
We are called to serve out of communion with God
Deacon James Keating Comments Off on To Be Grounded in the Supernatural
“God is … at work, he acts … he has not lost his own function in a world where everything would function autonomously without him,” according to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in “The God of Jesus Christ: Meditation on the Triune God” (Ignatius Press, $17.95).
Since God is spirit, he is easy to ignore. It can become habitual to think our actions alone move our ministry, or even events within the culture. We are duped into believing, through amnesia, that when we minister, God refrains from boldly intervening. We can easily function as if it all depended upon our own natural talents, skill sets, virtue or intellect. In making this move into a contradictory life, where we are clerics minister alone, we render the supernatural inert. We seal ourselves off from God. It is God who wills to dynamically use our vulnerability toward his grace to enact conversion in the hearts of the people to whom we minister.
One way to know if we have become ministerially self-enclosed is to measure any increase in stress or anxiety. Isolated ministry tends to carry undue fear as its partner. It invites a man to be concerned about his performance or effectiveness. There is a tendency to judge oneself based upon effectiveness, payoff or results. These tendencies may indicate that one may have waded into ministering alone. Instead, we are called to serve out of communion with God, sent on mission from this very same communion.
To minister from within, the supernatural is to anchor our actions in daily or regular assistance at Mass. Here, in the service we render the priest and community at the altar, we establish our identity more deeply in its configuration to the servant mysteries of Christ. As deacons, we participate in the actions of Christ as we proclaim his very words from the ambo, preach out of those words, and then radiate our communion with him in our daily work and ministry. In the spiritual act of assisting at the altar, a deacon is called to yield to the Eucharist’s objective mystery. In so doing, the life, death and resurrection of Christ abides in the deacon as the source of his ecclesial service. “Yet I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me” (Gal 2:20).
There was a time in diaconal-formation history when American formators relativized the importance of deacons being at the altar to assist in celebrating the Paschal Mystery. One hopes those days have passed. How misguided for those who might still hold up the corporeal and spiritual works of mercy as a deacon’s essence. Those works are impotent if they do not flow from a deacon’s objective configuration to Christ in ordination, subjectively nourished through his participation in Christ’s actions at the altar.
Abiding in Prayer
As clerics abide in prayer at the altar, they become more integrated in their vocation. This integration between worship and ministry signals an ever-growing spiritual maturity. Such maturity is recognized by a man who discerns in confidence how God is inspiring his ordained ministry. From this discernment, a deacon grows in trust that power in ministry will flow from prayer. Such power is simply the grace of God converting, healing, instructing, consoling or blessing all the people to whom deacons are present. Deacons consume the mystery of Christ’s own ministry at the altar; in so doing, they desire that same mystery to affect their daily round of service. Deacons want God to move them. As they mature in prayer, they become more wary of self-initiated projects and ideas. They wait to be sent and become more discerning and patient. Clergy know that ministry bears fruit only to the extent that they are being sent by God, and it falls flat to the extent that they act out of self-promotion, fear or a drive to achieve. “Without me you can do nothing” (Jn 15:5).
To connect diaconal ministry to the activities of Christ within the Eucharist is to become open to the relations that Christ wants to expose us to by his incarnation — namely, the Father and the Spirit. The Eucharist is the portal through which we enter and ground our ministry in the supernatural. Service at the altar places us within the saving actions of Christ. These actions enable deacons to give testimony about those saving actions in ministry. Without a supernatural fount, our ministry can be reduced to sheer activism.
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INSTITUTE FOR DIACONATE RENEWAL
Get additional information about the Institute for Diaconate Renewal’s retreat opportunities for deacon formators. The retreats nurture the interior life through contemplative, silent and directed retreats, as well as consultations. Visit the website www.institutediaconaterenewal.org for more information.
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Cardinal Robert Sarah, in his book “He Gave Us So Much: A Tribute to Benedict XVI” (Ignatius Press, $24.95), wrote: “The Activist … places his own activity above everything. This limits his horizon to only what is doable. … [He] cuts himself off. The activist builds his own prison. … Instead, true wonder says no to this restriction to the empirical, the mere here and now. True wonder prepares man for an act of faith that opens wide before him the horizon of the eternal.”
Without the intentional grounding of ministry in the supernatural, deacons can lose sight of the real possibilities latent in their preaching, counsel or charity. Deacons can inadvertently slip into a mundane or political understanding of their actions, thinking they are simply pragmatic or useful.
Nevertheless, having ministry nourished by the supernatural does not remove it from temporal reality. Paradoxically, the more clerics rely upon the life of God to supply the effects of ministry, the more they, like the Incarnation itself, fasten themselves to everyday life. French mystic and evangelizer Madeleine Delbrel once said, “Christ does not provide his followers with a set of wings to flee into heaven, but with a weight to drag them into the deepest corners of the earth.”

And so, the deacon who allows the liturgy to define his ministry will then communicate the liturgy into the “deepest corners of the earth.” The deacon is a carrier if you will. He carries what has affected him — the life of God within the liturgy — to others who await its power in the “deepest corners of the earth.” This transmission of the divine mystery is not simply the effect the Eucharist has upon the deacon as a member of the baptized. No, this transmission reaches the deacon’s own unique configuration to Christ. Over time, this configuration to Christ’s own servant desire to reach the deepest corners is effected at the Eucharist.
It is the deacon’s participation in Christ’s own servant desires that defines the diaconal vocation; and, hence, it is into that specific relation to Christ that the Eucharist orders its grace. Such a participation is concretized through a conscience formed at the source of divine charity and self-forgetfulness, Christ’s own Eucharistic foot-washing. The Eucharist influences a man as a deacon, not as a generic “servant” or sociological charity worker. The actions of Christ within the Eucharist effect a deepening of the Christological reality that objectively defined the man as a deacon at ordination. It is receiving that Christological reality more deeply at each Eucharist that drives the deacon from the altar to evangelize the deepest corners of the earth.
Filling Spiritual Needs
One can further secure diaconal ministry in the supernatural by regular Holy Hours, the practice of lectio divina and committing to an annual silent directed retreat. This last suggestion is most vital, and I hope that soon this kind of retreat will become the norm for most deacons as it is fast becoming for priests. The traditional retreat usually sponsored by a diocese tends more toward a seminar weekend or even a fellowship weekend. Both ongoing formation and diaconal fellowship are praiseworthy for those in holy orders, but such activities are not retreats.
A silent directed retreat with only one or two presentations and the hours filled by silent prayer, Scripture reading, Mass and spiritual direction truly allows the deacon to listen to God and grow in hunger to do so after the retreat ends. Nationally, the Institute for Diaconate Renewal in Steubenville, Ohio, is now offering such quality retreats, especially for deacon directors.
Guarding the source of our ministry in the supernatural and sensing when we are drifting into isolation from God are two labors that promote the spiritual power of diaconal ministry. All deacons are called to have and cultivate an interior life nourished by the Eucharist. Such a life is formed and deepened by a deacon when he assists at daily Mass, where possible, and his choice to commit to ongoing spiritual reading on the beauty and truth of the Eucharistic gift.
Satan would love for men in holy orders to function autonomously from God. And as commitments pile up and busyness becomes an addiction, such autonomy becomes more of a possibility in our lives. Deacons are ordained, giving space to Christ so he can live his servant mysteries over again in their bodies. Such space is a deacon’s gift to God. God’s gift to deacons is an intimate personal fidelity to the cleric so that the deacon can live those mysteries in supernatural power. Only our drift toward autonomy can thwart such supernatural potency.
DEACON JAMES KEATING, Ph.D., is a professor of spiritual theology at Kenrick-Glennon Seminary in St. Louis.
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A DEACON’S RETREAT
Deacon James Keating offers a self-directed retreat for deacons in his book “A Deacon’s Retreat” (Paulist Press, $9.95), which is designed to lead the deacon into silent adoration and deeper appropriation of his call from Christ to become a deacon. It offers a compressed “taking-time-for-one’s-own-soul” that can revivify and reanimate the body and soul of the deacon. Its structure is based on the deacon’s faculties and functions at Mass. And the book guides the deacon to prepare for Christ’s effectiveness in his life to become an icon of peace to those he preaches to.
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