After a lovely summer break back in the US of A, this year’s new House of Brigid team met for our yearly orientation on Notre Dame’s campus. It was a tiring 6 days full of repeated introductions, exciting conversations, and a shake too many personality tests for my appetite (I believe I was still digesting the Walker Percy I had consumed earlier in the year), but all in all it looked to be an exciting beginning. Alongside our trainings and community exercises, we had the wonderful opportunity to meet and share dinner with many of the souls supporting House of Brigid with their prayers and labor behind the scenes. There is little more welcoming than a few evenings of good food, good cheer, and good company. What’s more, we were surprised to have a good deal of friends, former professors, and former HoB members attend our missioning mass in the Basilica. Though tiring, it was a beautiful week.
At this point, however, we encountered what would be our first lesson of the year in ministerial service, except it came in the form of bureaucratic folly: our visas were getting delayed. Here we had spent all week excitedly preparing ourselves to board a plane to what was for many a strange land, and now we were facing down having to leave a part of us behind for a time. Thankfully this issue would appear to be just a temporary delay, but all the same we had seen a prefiguring of how our service often goes. All too often our lofty ambitions can come into contrast with the sluggish inertia of our surroundings or, more likely, the unexpected delays that make us regroup our plan of action.
But our work was not made useless just because rust and erosion persist. I was also reminded today of something I had read through our director, Fr. Bill. And wouldn’t you believe it; it was a Sermon by Blessed (soon to be Saint) Cardinal John Henry Newman, Sermon 9. Jeremiah, a Lesson for the Disappointed:
“I call resignation a more blessed frame of mind than sanguine hope of present success, because it is the truer, and the more consistent with our fallen state of being, and the more improving to our hearts; and because it is that for which the most eminent servants of God have been conspicuous. To expect great effects from our exertions for religious objects is natural indeed, and innocent, but it arises from inexperience of the kind of work we have to do,—to change the heart and will of man. It is a far nobler frame of mind, to labour, not with the hope of seeing the fruit of our labour, but for conscience’ sake, as a matter of duty; and again, in faith, trusting good will be done, though we see it not. Look through the Bible, and you will find God’s servants, even though they began with success, end with disappointment; not that God’s purposes or His instruments fail, but that the time for reaping what we have sown is hereafter, not here; that here there is no great visible fruit in any one man’s lifetime.”
As I mentioned before, this small obstacle will be the first of many lessons we encounter this year, lessons that hone our capabilities and shape our patience for the slow pace of this promising world. And yet, these need not always be viewed as signs of failure. Instead, we might live in hope that someday we will see them as steps on the way to something beyond our ken. Already as part of the third year of volunteers at the Newman Centre, I can see changes coming to fruition that our members from 2017 unknowingly laid the foundations for. I can only hope that we might be doing the same this next year.
But anyways, missing a core member for these first few days has still been a real buzzkill. Perhaps though we can find some levity in what my friend Rachel jokingly told me today: you know it’s God’s work when the process is frustrating, under-recognized, and yet desperately needed.
