Shepherd's Gate
Rector's Conference on Sincerity
You're living your holy hour. No I really, I really mean it. It's the end of January, February is about to come, it's dark, it's cold, you're busy. Spring break looks to be very far away and we've got Mt. 2000 coming up next weekend. Live your holy hour, it's the best way to live as a saint. And speaking of Mt. 2000, I do want to take just a moment at the beginning of my rector's conference to thank Greenin and the core team and all of you for all that you have done and will be doing next weekend. It's an effort that's painful at times, some of you will even lose a little bit of sleep. There will be a lot of effort put forth that has been and will be put forth, but that's a good sign. Pain actually is a good sign because we're doing something great, great. And the first goal of Mt. 2000 of course is the holiness of those young retreatants that come to the Mount. They're going to go to confession, they're going to be encouraged and guided in their faith by the talks that will take place. They'll encounter Christ in the Eucharist. They will see with their own eyes the King. They will pray, they'll be in small groups with many of you. This is an opportunity and the first goal is really the holiness of those retreatants. That's why we do it. But it's also, and you might not realize this fully, maybe, but it's also very formative for you, part of your seminary formation. It's formative because it helps you get a little organized at times and how to organize a big event like this, to work in collaboration, in teams, small and larger, to interact with parishes and schools that some of you are from even or are part of your diocese, an experience also to bring young people to Christ. It's something that as a church we've not been doing very well lately, we need to do better in bringing young people and young adult men and women to Christ. Mt. 2000 is a way to do that, and it's a way to also learn how to do that. So it's very formative, and again, thank you to all of you, because I know all of you will have a role, some small, some really big, but we're all in it together. So on to the topic. The topic of today's rector's conference is sincerity. Groucho Marx once said, sincerity is the key to success. Once you can fake that, you've got it made. I agree with the first sentence, not the second, right? It is the key to success, and I do think that sincerity is a key to success for seminary formation, particularly in your relationship with your formation advisor and your spiritual director. Jesus himself tells the truth and is sincere even when that truth is hard. We know that, we've read the scriptures, time and time again. Like for instance, when he explains that what God has joined, let no man put a sundur. That was a hard saying, right? And yet he said it, because it was true, it is true. Jesus is even complimented by his enemies, the Pharisees, for being truthful and sincere. Sure we know that you speak and teach rightly and show no partiality, but truly teach the way of God. His own enemies recognize his truthfulness, his sincerity. And our Lord himself also identifies and corrects hypocrisy, and a woe to you scribes and Pharisees who hypocrites. That word, as you might know in Greek, hypocrites means a staged player, a pretender, someone who wears a mask and fangs himself to be what he is not. A hypocrite is a person who outwardly displays in a religious sense kind of righteousness, but inwardly is deceitful and insincere. Christ himself is the truth, and if we want to be holy, we must be another Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me by being sincere, we are living Christ who is the truth. Now since God is truth himself, as I said, no one can be holy without living this virtue of sincerity. It is treated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church under the Eighth Commandment, and it does say God is the source of all truth, and that man tends by nature toward truth. It goes on to say truth is uprightness in human action and speech. It is called truthfulness, sincerity, or candor. Truth or truthfulness is the virtue which consists in showing oneself true in deeds, and truthful in words, and in guarding against duplicity, dissimulation, and hypocrisy. So in our very nature, we tend toward being sincere and toward the truth. It is a supernatural virtue. That at times we need to ask for it if we find ourselves not being as sincere as we know we should be. It is truly a reflection about living out the life of God in our life. There is a story about Theodore Roosevelt, who before becoming president was a rancher, in one of his cow punchers, lassoed a maverick steer and lit a fire and prepared to brand that steer. Now, that part of the range where he found the steer actually was not part of Roosevelt's land. It was part of his neighbor, Gregory Lang. And according to the Cattleman's rule, the steer, therefore, didn't belong to Roosevelt but belonged to Lang. So as his cowboy was applying the brand, Roosevelt said, "Wait, that shouldn't be my branding. It should be Lang's." "Well, that's all right, boss," said the cowboy. "No, no, no," he said, "But you're putting on my brand." And the man said, "Well, that's right." And Roosevelt said, "Drop that iron right now and get back to the ranch and get out. That I don't need you anymore. A man who will steal for me will steal from me." He wasn't being truthful. He knew that that steer didn't belong to Roosevelt. He needs an accompanying virtue, the accompanying virtue is that of humility. Pride can lead us to see the faults of others very easily and even exaggerate them at times, but not to take into account who I really am in the ways that I'm good and the ways that I'm bad. Being sincere means recognizing who I am humbly before God and in his grace. In humility, we accept and we thank God for our gifts and our talents and our vocation and our virtues. And we're sincere in speaking, especially with our formation advisor and spiritual director, in speaking of those things. At the same time, in humility, we recognize our faults, our sins, our errors, for which we need to ask pardon from God and for which we need conversion. And yet this too is part of who we are in humility. So without sincerity, without this simplicity, if you will, this truthfulness about ourselves, it'd be very difficult to have a relationship truly of love with another and of dealing with people. If we're just a hypocrite wearing a mask all the time, we're not very sincere about who we are, what we say and what we do, then it makes relationships very difficult and troublesome. The opposite of sincerity, there are a number of things that are the opposite of sincerity. One is hypocrisy. And we all know what that is, of course, I've just gotten us explaining it. You say things, you even sometimes preach things and teach things, and yet you live in a completely different way. It's a kind of Phariseeism, kind of clericalism, remember that? It's putting on that facade that really looks good, but isn't. Then there's also another opposite, if you will, of sincerity, and that's ambiguity. When you're not really very frank or clear, you know yourself, but you don't really make that clear to others. Sometimes I see that in pure evaluations. After a number of years, it takes a while for guys to get to know each other, but after a number of years, we've got a whole group of classmates saying, "I don't really know him." There's an ambiguity about who he is. He's not really, "We don't really know him." There's also what you would call slyness where you kind of say and do things for a selfish motive. You're trying to impress others with a false sense of the goodness of yourself and your opinion and your motives, and that's only to get what you want. And finally, another danger, or what is really opposite to sincerity, is duplicity, right? That's somewhat similar to hypocrisy, putting up a facade to please other people when to impress them, and yet it's really not who you are. So with whom should we be sincere? Well, obviously, the first person is God because God knows you anyway. Yet sometimes we're not all that sincere with him. He knows us through and through, right? But we can put up that facade as well. Let me know you, oh you who know me, then shall I know even as I am known. But you, Lord, know everything about a human being because you have made him. So God knows us better than sometimes we even know ourselves. Being forthright with him in our prayer, being sincere, remember nothing is going to scandalize God because he knows you already, and he is mercy. We have to have in a certain sense, especially in our prayer, what could be called a savage sincerity. But speaking to him as a child speaks to his or her mother or father, right? To be completely sincere. Another person, of course, to be sincere with is your formation advisor. This is external form, and there's a strong link between sincerity and trust. When we're sincere with others, they will trust that what you're saying is true about yourself. The formation advisor doesn't need to earn your trust. You know that, don't you? Formation advisor doesn't need to earn your trust. It ought to be there based on the fact that you're committed to being a priest. You've committed yourself to the church and her way of formation to the priesthood. So that trust ought to be automatic, if you will. But your formation advisor should know that you're really speaking sincerely to him. The content of what you share should be, in some way, a direct proportion to the help that you're going to get, and your formation advisor wants to help you. He's not out there to get you. I'm not looking to throw anybody out. I want all of you to be priests, because I love being a priest, and I would love the fact that all of you could become priests. The more we are sincere with others, the more that they will then be able to trust you, and say, "Oh, yeah, he's really telling me who he is, what's going on in his life?" Positive and negative. But the person above all that we should be very sincere with here in the seminary and as a priest is your spiritual director. Because your spiritual director in that internal forum is like a doctor. And you know, when you go to the doctor, you need to be sincere, and tell him everything that's, any health problems, God bless you, and go to the doctor, please, if you would. So you need to expose at times those wounds and also your strengths as well. And help him to guide your soul. That sincerity is the greatest way that he can help you, because then he knows you. If we lack sincerity, we're going to become like that, that demon who's mute in the gospel. We have to speak what's good and what's bad, our struggles and anxieties and those things that we really enjoy and love, we have to speak it to get it out. So that's why it's very important to be sincere with your spiritual director, because he is again that doctor of the soul that wishes to guide you toward greater holiness, but sincerity is needed. He needs to know you. Now, just overall, sincerity and formation with his spiritual director, formation advisor, professor, you know, even the rector, right? His best lived, and one of the best things that you can do is just practice the presence of God. We're always in God's presence, and we know that he knows us through and through, and we want to please him in all things, and he is truth himself. So by practicing the presence of God, we will be like him, we will be sincere. It's also an exercise of divine fiddiation, divine childhood. Like children, we have to be trusting, and I know children will say the darndest things, right? Because they just want to tell you what's on their mind, right? They're trusting. We have to be the same in formation, just like a little child. That early Christian literary work, the shepherd of Hermos, says, and says this to all Christians, keeps simplicity and beguiles, like little children who do not know the evil which destroys men's lives. Do we have to become again more like a child, or children will inherit the kingdom of God? The more child like we become, the more sincere we will be. Now no one is perfect, so that sincerity like a child is also going to be, well, I did this, right? I didn't do that right, right? You know, you've probably heard the phrase, I'm okay, you're okay, right? Well, these days I'm okay, and you're okay, and I'm perfect. Well, that's not the case, right? Being sincere is not incompatible with our own weaknesses, our own errors, our own sins. It means at times admitting that we did something wrong, right, and asking for forgiveness. In formation, we're not out to get you, we're not out to get you. You want to see growth, and that growth sometimes comes when we fail. And we learned to say, yep, I didn't do that right, I didn't say it the right way, I should have said it, I didn't, I need to do better, all right, let's do better. As I said, sometimes trust is an issue for living sincerity, and your advisor, your professor, your brother's seminarian, your supervisor on PFE, your vocation director, even your bishop, can't form you without that automatic trust, that you can speak, right, and tell another who you are, what you've said and done. When an atmosphere of trust exists, we don't have fear that others will see our weaknesses and struggles, and we're eager to share our plans, our dreams, our desires. We know that one who loves us will help us to overcome our limitations and prevent them from becoming barriers, and in formation barriers to becoming a good priest. Not of course it's going to, I think above all, and finally, we'll take faith. We need faith too, trust to be sincere and also faith. If we're sincere with God, we can ask Him for that supernatural virtue of faith, which is supernatural trust. We are sincere in formation because we see other people with the eyes of faith. We see someone that the church has placed alongside of me, to accompany me, my formation advisor, my spiritual director, with the eyes of faith, with someone who's going to help me discern and become a good priest. He's helping me to prepare to be a priest of Jesus Christ who is truth himself. So gentlemen, sincerity, sincerity in all things, revealing the truth of yourself is not only just simply in your best interest, it's the best interest of your vocation and the best interest too, I think, of the church. And so we can really look toward the saints, the deacons, once again we're in ours, we're St. John B. And he was, and a man who spoke the truth and was completely sincere about his desires and lived the truth in every aspect of his ministry. He was there for 41 years. People came to him in confession because they knew he would be sincere and they could be sincere with him. The confessional is that very special place in which sincerity, above all, needs to be lived, for we are before God in the person of the priest. And what is it that we receive when we expose good and bad, when we ask for forgiveness for our sins, we receive mercy, mercy, mercy, mercy? And so gentlemen, let's ask St. John Vienna, the patron of priests, to help us really be sincere in all of formation, to truly be men of the truth, for that is who Christ is. [BLANK_AUDIO]