Countless numbers of high school students are finishing their prep careers, graduating, and undoubtedly vowing never to return to the halls that defined their formative years. However, for newly ordained Dominican Priest Fr. Nicholas Monco, O.P., a return to his alma mater not only means more than having a stable job in a poor economy, but also a much deeper, spiritual calling back to his roots.

Fr. Monco, O.P. is a 2002 Fenwick High School graduate and this fall he will return as a priest and a teacher for students not much younger than himself.

“I look almost as I did in high school. A lot of those kids will probably look older than I do,” Fr. Monco, O.P. said. “There’s a way in which that will help. But, other than connecting to movies and pop culture, there’s a way that kids connect to people who are in love with something. They know the difference between a teacher who is going through the motions and someone who loves what they do. I’ll be one of the teachers who loves what they do.”
Though Fr. Monco, O.P. was encouraged to consider the priesthood, it took time for him to answer the call.

“Fenwick was a crucial part of the way I engaged my faith. I’m not sure I would have gotten that in another school,” Fr. Monco, O.P. said. “Initially, I dismissed people who suggested the priesthood. But it came down to asking myself, what did I actually love to do. Where did I keep getting drawn back to? It kept coming back to the spiritual life, theology and talking to people about God.”

“Fenwick was the place where I began to think about my vocation in earnest,” he added. “I was very impressed by [the Dominican Friars on staff] love for Jesus, for their priesthood, and their dedication to the school. It made me think they found something worth loving.”

Fr. Monco, O.P. isn’t nearly the first Fenwick grad to return to the school as a teacher. Currently, Fenwick boasts 30 former graduates, making up roughly 25 percent of its staff.

Fenwick President Fr. Richard Peddicord, O.P. has only been at the school for one year, but he also taught Fr. Monco, O.P. at the Aquinas Institute of Theology in St. Louis, MO, another Dominican ministry of the Central Province.

“It’s pretty unusual to have a newly ordained priest join a Catholic high school faculty in 2013 knowing what we do about the priest shortages,” said Fr. Peddicord, O.P. “Father Monco makes it very clear that we’re doing something right. It tells a great story about the vocations we’re getting as a province and the commitment the Central Province has to Fenwick as a breeding ground.”

Fr. Charles E. Bouchard, O.P.

The origins of this talk are in an invitation I received some time back from the coordinator of adult faith formation at St. Francis Xavier College Church in St. Louis. When she asked me to give a talk as part of their series, I asked what she thought a good topic might be. She said, “I think people are worried about how to handle fear in their lives.” My first thought was “I haven’t got anything prepared on fear!” But I agreed to do it. When the day came, we had three or four times more people than usual. Clearly, we had struck a responsive chord.

The bombing at the Boston Marathon reminded us all that we live in a dangerous world. But it is not just the catastrophic events we have to fear. There are ordinary ones, too: medical problems, emotional crisis, unemployment, loss of a friend or of a spouse, marital difficulties. All of these things make us anxious and afraid. What are we, as Christians, to do with fear?

We can fear many things, but in the end fear arises from the “apprehension of a future evil,” or of the prospect of losing something we value. St. Thomas Aquinas points out that there is a positive side to fear. “Fear is born of love,” he says, “since we fear the loss of what we love.” (ST 2-2. Q. 19, a 3). “Fear can alert us to our loves in a powerful way,” he continues, and it can also conduce us to work well because it gives us greater solicitude and seriousness (ST 1-2, q. 44, a 4). Fear itself is not bad, as long as we fear what we ought to fear, and as we ought to. The problem arises when we fear things that have no power to harm us, or when we love the wrong things too much.

We are more familiar with the downside of fear. It is a serious limitation of our freedom, our vision and our ability to choose well. How often have we failed to choose the right thing because we were afraid? How often has our courage failed us and allowed us to do the lesser good?

This is true on both a personal and a social level. In a column in the New York Times, Frank Furedi says that “fear has transformed safety into one of the main virtues of society.” This is not a good thing, especially if it makes us too anxious and prevents us from acting for the good. “The disposition to perceive one’s existence as being at risk has a discernible effect on the conduct of life…it leads to a worldview which equates the good life with self-limitation and risk-aversion.” Furedi says that fear serves the interests of those in power, because it favors order and the status quo and militates against change. Ultimately it can destroy political life, because “fear becomes the story we share in the absence of any shared account of goods and goals. The only thing we have in common is what we want to avoid. Nothing draws us into the future.”
This should be a great concern to Catholics, for whom the common good, a rich set of social and political circumstances that maximize participation, allow us to achieve happiness and foreshadow the Reign of God, is central to our social teaching.

It is clear that fear is a risk to us both personally and as a culture. But I believe our tradition gives us two powerful antidotes: Contemplation and Community.

Contemplation

“Contemplation” is a scary word for some. It seems like it is the realm of experts, nuns and monks and mystics who have the will and the time to be contemplative. But it is a basic human discipline. If we acknowledge that human beings – religious or not – have a spiritual side, then they are called to contemplate.

Before TV, radio, cell phones, movies, rapid travel and all the rest, maybe we had more time to reflect. Some historians have explored the “history of the night,” and have found that for much of human history people had two periods of sleep. One right after sunset, and another one, a “second sleep” after an hour or two of wakefulness in the middle of the night. This “in between time” was a perfect opportunity for reflection, prayer, or contemplation. Today that time is lost to us. Have we found an alternative?

There are other words that also describe “contemplation.” Focus, for example. The contemplative life is not staring into an abyss, or lurching toward nothingness. For Dominicans it is a deep and loving look at the real. This is why study and prayer are so closely related in our tradition – indeed, they are almost interchangeable, because if we look deeply into reality, even when we study science or philosophy or art, we are bound to ask “What does this tell me of God?” This is why the frequent antagonism between science and faith is so dismaying. In the end, we are all looking for the same thing.

We might also call contemplation “mindfulness.” Psychologist Ben Williams says mindfulness is an important therapeutic tool. It has a “deep religious context as a spiritual tradition. It can be brought to any situation, and can be thought of as a manner of approaching life. It involves cultivating a present-minded focus, awareness, and acceptance of experience. It is a kind of waking up from the automatic and unconscious manner in which we typically go about our lives.” Dr. Williams said he has found the practice of “mindfulness” to be helpful to many of his patients.

Or we could simply refer to contemplation as “paying attention.” I remember someone once saying that with God’s grace erupting in life all around us, the least we can do is be there. Do we really pay attention to what is happening to us, to the world around us? Do we pay attention to our emotions, our hopes, our fears?

Community and Connection

Community is a second antidote to fear. After the Boston Marathon bombing, the media noted how “people came together” in a time of crisis. It is a sad commentary that human “coming together” has to be newsworthy. We are inherently social, and we should come together, seeking a common life. In fact, there is no other way we can live our lives as humans. We can only do so together, yet economic prosperity, travel and (especially in the U.S.) lots of physical space, allow us to entertain the illusion that we can “go it alone,” independent of one another.

Sociologist Brene Brown says “connections are why we’re here. They give meaning and purpose to our lives.” This is another way of saying that our relations with other people re the only things that matter. Being really connected also requires vulnerability, and vulnerability requires the skills of “letting ourselves be seen, deeply seen, and to love with all our hearts.”

This should not be an unusual, exceptional thing. It is the very fiber of our lives.

For St. Thomas, this idea of connection is found in friendship. There are many kinds of friendship– casual, marital, family, business – but each of them requires a certain level of commitment and vulnerability. Friendship is so important, Aquinas says, that it is really a “school for virtue.” As theologian Paul Waddell says Friends practice their love on us, and thus bring us into being in a way we could never have accomplished ourselves. A good friend is someone who draws the best out of us, someone who creates us in the most promising way. In this sense, friendship is a moral reality and perhaps the constitutive moral activity of our lives, because through it we receive from another the good the good we most devotedly love.

Aquinas finds the model for this dynamic friendship in the Trinity. “The perfect goodness of divine happiness and glory postulate friendship within God. It appears that God’s charity would not love to the utmost were he only one person, nor even if he were only two, for with perfect friendship the lover wills that what he loves should also be equally loved by another.” (Disp. de Potentia, IX, 9).

We might also describe this “connectedness” as solidarity, which we often hear of in terms of “solidarity with the poor.” It’s true that we should seek solidarity with the poor, but we need to seek solidarity with everyone. Solidarity is simply a way of saying that we believe the relations – the connections – among us are real, and that we act as though they are real. Solidarity means that we acknowledge that we have more in common with others than not, even when we are separated from them geographically, economically or socially. We share a human condition that leads us to seek connection.

What could be a stronger antidote to fear, and to the prospect of loss that gives rise to it?

Community and Mysticism

Let me conclude with a story from Thomas Merton. In his book “Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander,” he describes an experience he had at the corner of 4th and Walnut in Louisville, Kentucky in 1956 (a historical marker still stands at the spot). This is what he wrote:

“In Louisville, at the corner of 4th and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I was theirs, that we could not be alien to one another, even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation… I have the immense joy of being a man, a member of a race in which God himself became incarnate. But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around, shining like the sun.”

So the world is a fearful pace, but these two things – contemplation and community, both at the heart of the Dominican vocation – are important antidotes to it.
Let us deepen our ability to reflect, to focus, to “pay attention,” so that we can find God’s plan which transcends all fear. And let us deepen our connections with others, starting with those we love most deeply, and build an ever-widening circle that will lock out fear and bring us to God’s Kingdom.

Last week we got a close-up view of fear in action.  We saw police, marathon runners, detectives, physicians and nurses, and ordinary citizens.  Each of them was acting in fear, responding to the real danger of more violence or terrorism. The moment the suspect was apprehended, the fear evaporated.  People were laughing and smiling.  The danger was gone and with it the fear.

But of course it’s not over.  There is still a lot to fear: the possibility of an attack by North Korea, another economic crisis, another terrorist attack, the prospect of more guns and more criminals on our streets, the ever present danger of illness or accident.  We can’t escape these dangers, but to some extent we can control what they do to us.

Fear is not a bad thing.  Sometimes it serves as an emotional “early warning system” that something is wrong and that we are in danger.  But fear can also control us.  St. Thomas Aquinas says fear comes from the prospect of losing something we love. He says that we must be careful about what we love as well as about how we love.  Scott Bader-Saye paraphrases Aquinas in his excellent book, Following Jesus in a Culture of Fear:  “We can fear what we should not, either because the threat is not in fact great or imminent or because what we fear losing is not in fact a proper love (like riches or power). Or we can fear as we should not; that is, we may fear a real and legitimate threat but fear it excessively.” He goes on to suggest that perhaps our fear has become cultural – that it is not just my fears or your fears, but our fears; taken together, these begin to shape the way in which we as a people live our lives.

When we’re afraid, we have options.  For instance, we can flee.  After 9/11, some Americans moved from big cities into the relative peace of remote rural areas that are presumably safer.  Or we can hide,  keeping our heads down, staking out our territory,  tightening our border controls and immigration laws.  Or we can resort to violence and fight.   “We are a nation at war,” Senator Lindsay Graham proclaimed, apparently calling for military action.

These strategies might work temporarily for animals, whose fear is instinctual.  They flee or fight without thinking.  People are different.  We understand danger and we know about fear – the fear of mortality, the fear of limits, the fear of illness and death.  Ultimately, we cannot flee or hide from these, nor can we resist them by violence.  Loss is part of life, and so is fear. We have no choice but to acknowledge the prospect of loss and the reality of fear.  In the end, we can only go through fear.  We can’t avoid it or destroy it.

Antidotes to fear

There are several antidotes to fear. Courage is our first defense.  Courage is a virtue that enables us pursue good in spite of adversity.  We need “everyday courage” in order to lead our lives, because there is always something that can go wrong.  We need extraordinary courage sometimes, when the threat we face is immediate and serious.

Contemplation, or focus, is another antidote to fear.  If some fear results from the prospect of losing something we love too much, then contemplation helps us focus on what is really important and let the rest go.  People often have life-changing events that “put everything into perspective.”  Illness or natural disaster can help us see the relative unimportance of possessions, for example, and our fear of losing them diminishes greatly.  Even apart from tragedy, a habit of careful reflection on what we love and what we ought to love can often free us from unnecessary fears.

Community is probably the most important antidote to fear.  It is essential if  we want to avoid creating a culture of fear.  There is “strength in numbers,” and even greater strength in solidarity with those who are suffering.   We saw dramatic examples of this after the Boston Marathon. People who didn’t even know each other bonded and became aware of their common humanity. Coming together in time of crisis should not be an event so rare it is featured on the evening news.  It should be a basic human inclination.

Perhaps this is what Christ meant when he said, “Where two or three are gathered, there am I.”

Facing fear is all about connection.  For more insight into this basic human need, see Brother Nick Monco’s video at: http://www.preachingfriars.org/st-thomas-aquinas-and-psychology/thirsting-connection

Fr. Charles Bouchard, OP

Provincial

Photography by Chris Kirzeder

The Rev. Benedict M. Ashley, a philosopher, theologian and Dominican friar for 71 years, passed away recently. The life of this distinguished friar of the Province of St. Albert the Great was chronicled in many places upon his death.

Click here to read the The Chicago Tribune Account…

Click here to read more

Aquinas Institute is a graduate school of theology of ministry located in St. Louis and affiliated with Saint Louis University. It offers graduate degrees in a number of areas, including a Master of Divinity, Master of Arts and specialize programs in Health CareMission and Catechesis of the Good Shepherd. Aquinas also offers the only Catholic doctoral program in preaching in the entire country. For more information see www.ai.edu

We pray for her and those who died with her. We also pray for her wonderful family and the Fenwick family feeling this loss.

Read the Chicago Tribune account of a memorial mass and tribute celebrated at Fenwick High School on April 9 by visiting  http://www.chicagotribune.com/
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