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Introductory Remarks: St. Paul Parish Committee on Contemporary Spiritual-and-Public Concerns
FR. JIM SAVAGE INTRODUCTION – SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2007
Given by Andrew Griswold, member of the CSPC Committee:
Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the seventh in this year’s series of lectures sponsored by the Committee on Contemporary Spiritual-and-Public Concerns here at St. Paul Parish. I am Andrew Griswold, a member of our Committee. This afternoon’s talk is the first of our events this year scheduled on a Sunday, so it is appropriate that we are here in the upper church. I’d like to take just a moment to let you know about our next talk, also on a Sunday; that will be in three weeks, on the 11th of March, at 3:30 p.m. in DiGiovanni Hall. We are pleased to present one of the most trusted diplomats for the Tibetan people in exile, and for the Dalai Lama: Dr. Lobsang Sangay, the first Harvard Ph.D. from Tibet. Lobsang will speak on:
“A Good Friday Agreement for Tibet?”
Lobsang has been in conversation with our Committee President, Jerome Maryon, and so he now thinks that one of the best hopes for the Tibetan people may be to emulate the Irish Good Friday Agreement established between Belfast, Dublin, and London. It is unprecedented for a Track II diplomat from Tibet to take such an approach. That he should do it on the Sunday before St. Patrick’s Day is a blessing; and that he should do it here is an honor. We hope that you will all mark your calendars and plan to join us here on Sunday, the 11th of March.
The subject of today’s talk is Eastern Christian Spirituality, or, the
spirituality of the Eastern Churches. We might consider it a particularly opportune moment to take up this topic, as we recall two events, one in the near future, the other in the recent past. First, a look ahead. In this year of 2007, the liturgical calendars of the East and the West converge, and all Christians will celebrate the Resurrection of Our Lord on Sunday, the eighth of April. For our Orthodox brothers and sisters, the period of preparation for the Paschal Triduum, Lent, begins tomorrow, while Catholics will mark the beginning of the season with Ash Wednesday this week. As the Churches of the East and West set out together on this year’s Lenten journey, what better occasion to recall, and then deepen, our understanding of Eastern Christian spiritual practices?
Looking to our recent past, we must call to mind the historic visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Turkey and the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarch in Istanbul last November. After celebrating, together, the Divine Liturgy for the Feast of St. Andrew, Apostle and Patron of the Church of Constantinople, on November 30, the Pope and the Patriarch issued and signed a common declaration on the current relationship between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. In this document, they made reference to the ongoing work toward unity carried out in the course of the last forty years, and renewed the call for prayer and dialogue to build cooperation and a common witness. As their Declaration states, “True dialogue in charity must sustain and inspire relations between individuals and between churches.” The same precept may be applied to a broad range of interfaith outreach efforts, and it expresses well the vision of our own CSPC Committee, as we seek, in our own limited way, to advance this same “dialogue in charity” on a variety of spiritual-and-public concerns.
In order to have dialogue, one must first have understanding. If we wish to know our brothers and sisters in the Eastern Churches more fully, what better way to start than to learn about their spiritual traditions? Those traditions and practices will be the subject of our speaker’s remarks this afternoon; I am no expert in this area, so like you, I too will be an avid listener, eager to deepen my knowledge and understanding. But by way of introduction, I believe it would not be inaccurate to say that traditions in the East developed somewhat differently than in the West, in ways that often could be considered as complementary. For many centuries the ascetics of the Eastern Churches have developed the discipline of prayer, reverencing the tradition of the Church Fathers, and emphasizing the indwelling of the Holy Spirit to bring about the cure of the human heart. Surely this rich tradition of prayer can be a great gift to modern Western culture, in which we are so often rushed about with the demands, information and images of a nonstop, 24/7 society. This can all too easily lead to a condition, as the Eastern tradition might express it, of “our mind being scattered.” With a strong practice of prayer, we can recover our centeredness and our connection to God.
The important contributions of Eastern Christian theology and spirituality, and their potential to help all Christian believers were acknowledged specifically by Pope John Paul II in his Angelus message of August 11, 1996. The Pope said here in part, “How many things we have in common! It is time for Catholics and Orthodox to make the extra effort to understand each other better and to recognize with the renewed wonder of brotherhood what the Spirit is accomplishing in their respective traditions towards a new Christian springtime.” The Pope went on to add, “ May the Holy Spirit grant us the wisdom of heart so dear to Eastern spirituality and essential to any genuinely Christian experience.”
We are most fortunate today to have a speaker with us who can enlighten us on many points of Eastern Christian spirituality: none other than our own parochial vicar of St. Paul’s, Fr. Jim Savage. Fr. Jim’s family history contains, within itself, elements of interfaith dialogue. Raised in nearby Medford – my own adopted home town – his forebears include both good Catholics and a line of old New England ministers. One of Fr. Jim’s notable ancestors, on his Yankee, Ballou side, was the Rev. Adin Ballou, who in 1841 founded the community of Hopedale, Massachusetts, near Milford, as an experiment in what he termed “Practical Christian Socialism.” Late in his life, Adin Ballou corresponded with Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian author and novelist. Tolstoy, it is said, much admired Ballou’s work, and through his own writing, he helped to transmit Ballou’s pacifist principles to the twentieth century’s foremost examples of nonviolent resistance: Mohandas K. Gandhi, the Mahatma, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
We could certainly say that Fr. Jim inherited elements of his ancestor’s idealism and spiritual seeking. It was during the very period of turmoil in the late 1960s, when America endured the assassination of Dr. King, and American Catholics first began to live out the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, that he received his priestly formation here in the Archdiocese of Boston. In a time when what was then commonly called “the counterculture” was in its heyday, Fr. Jim followed Christ’s original call to be countercultural. Graduating from St. John’s Seminary, he was ordained in the Archdiocese in 1970. He went on to complete a graduate degree in liturgy from the University of Notre Dame, demonstrating his deep interest in and love for the liturgy which continues today. Before his appointment to St. Paul’s, Fr. Jim served in three other parishes of the Archdiocese: first St. Zepherin in Cochichuate, then St. Peter’s in Plymouth Center, during one of the Town of Plymouth’s many growth spurts in the late 1970s, when both public school populations and religious education class sizes were exploding. He went on to St. Eulalia in nearby Winchester, where he continues to be warmly remembered.
Since arriving at St. Paul’s, Fr. Jim has used his many talents for the benefit of our community. He directs the parish Religious Education program for children, while at the same time he leads our program for the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults: the RCIA. In its current form, the RCIA comes out of the Second Vatican Council, and looks back to the traditions and practices of the early Church, in another instance of Eastern and Western Christianity drawing closer together in recent times. Many current members of St. Paul’s have been baptized or have entered full communion with the Catholic Church through the RCIA program here ... including myself. Not unlike Fr, Jim, I too have a bit of a Unitarian and Congregationalist New England background. I think there was something reassuring about those Yankee accents of his when I first heard his homilies at St. Paul’s. Then, as I came to know Fr. Jim better, he became my mentor in my own journey along the path to a full relationship with Christ.
Fr. Jim has continually helped St. Paul’s to maintain our standard of careful and thoughtful liturgies. His growing collection of beautiful icons is shared with the parish on many solemn liturgies and feast days, for the enrichment of the whole community. Fr. Jim has also led several trips with St. Paul’s parishioners to lands rich in the Christian heritage, including his well remembered trip “in the footsteps of St. Paul” to Turkey and Syria.
This afternoon, we look forward eagerly to a different sort of journey, in which Fr. Jim’s insights into Eastern Christian Spirituality will surely bring us broader understanding of mind, and deeper wisdom of heart, equally inspired by the Holy Spirit. Ladies and Gentlemen, Fr, Jim Savage.
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