Homily for the Memorial of Saint Bruno

October 6, 2023
Assumption Seminary
San Antonio, Texas

Philippians 3:8-14
Psalm 1:1-2, 3, 4, 5
Luke 9:57-62

An Apostle is one who is called by Christ, promptly answers the call from Christ, and then follows and is sent from Christ into the mission he has received from the Father: to establish the Kingdom of God. Authentic hearing, prompt response, and generous obedience and priority of Christ’s mission of salvation are three aspects of what is known as an apostolic heart. The vocation to the priesthood requires an apostolic heart and that heart is developed and grown for freedom’s sake through your formation in the seminary.

Saint Paul writes to the Philippians, “I consider everything as a loss because of the supreme good of knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord.” Listen to those words of Saint Paul, the Apostle carefully, “I consider everything as a loss.” There is a real sense of loss and sacrifice on Paul’s part in accepting the call of Christ Jesus, especially received in such a radical and dramatic way. He has lost his comfortable status as a Pharisee; he has lost his extraordinary status as a Roman citizen; he has lost his friends or at least his fellow clique members who see him as a traitor. Paul is not speaking metaphorically. He has experienced a real loss.

These are part of the sufferings of self-gift that he describes in today’s reading, “may gain Christ and be found in Him, not having any righteousness of my own based on the law but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God, depending on faith to know Him and the power of His resurrection and the sharing of His sufferings by being conformed to His death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.” This is both the gift received and the gift offered by Saint Paul in the Apostolic character of his vocation in Christ. Saint Paul has released his own opinions and accomplishments of righteousness in the Law, only by belonging to Christ on Christ’s terms of sacrificial love which justifies Paul. This is Paul’s vocation on Christ’s terms, not his own.

You each are here because you believe that you too have received such a call from Christ, and you too should honestly know that in answering this call there is a real sense of loss that accompanies your commitment to the new belonging to Christ that He offers you. There is the real temptation with the sense of loss to lose sight of Christ Jesus and to take your hand off the plow and to look back with nostalgia on your former way of life — even if that former way of life was religious in character like your warm experiences of college seminary or undergraduate campus ministry. How do you not give in to this temptation to abandon the mission of the Kingdom in favor of burying that which is already dead?

Saint Bruno, whose hermitic way of life became the foundation for the Carthusian monastic order, was a spiritual giant. The Carthusians are the only religious order never to undergo a reform. He wrote, “In the solitude and silence of the wilderness, for their labors in the contest, God gives His athletes the reward they desire: a peace that the world does not know and joy in the Holy Spirit.” The Apostolic heart follows Christ into the wilderness where Christ encountered the temptation of the devil to abandon His mission and to turn back in the spirit of fallen humanity. The desert is not a peaceful place for a vacation. It is not New Mexico, Colorado, or even West Texas. The desert is more rightly considered to be a wilderness that requires real discernment for major decisions of faith and morals. The characteristic of the wilderness is that it is uncharted. The wilderness has no map. A person cannot navigate the dangers of the wilderness alone. Just as the Israelites had no map through the wilderness to the promised land, just as Christ had only the obedience to His Father. You have only Christ Jesus to lead you through the wilderness of these spiritual battles. Christ ordinarily does so through the ministry and counsel of your spiritual director and formation advisors as you contemplate your experiences of meeting Christ in your ministry, your studies, and your prayerful life.

Being a disciple of Jesus Christ is a lifelong journey with an eternal destination that begins to take shape in the present moment. This configuration is a continual answer to an ongoing call that requires wisdom, good counsel, humble flexibility, and a willingness to be configured to Christ. Your prioritization of Christ before friendships and even the most important of familial relationships cannot be overlooked on your part. In a very real sense, the Kingdom of God is not of this world and to the extent that we follow Jesus closely, neither are we. Yet, this being set apart from this world is also for the sake of our share in Christ’s love for the world to save it from sin and self-destruction by the uniting of our imperfect love with the perfect love of Christ Jesus. Assumption Seminary is your place to “forget what lies behind and to strain forward to what lies ahead, continuing in the pursuit toward the goal, the prize of God’s upward calling, in Christ Jesus.”