NEWS & VIEWS
Amen: Growing Gains
Liz O'Connor |  Spring 2009

As I write this, all of us at the National Pastoral Life Center are caught up in preparations for the celebrations of the Center’s 25th anniversary year.

It seems that anniversaries are excellent opportunities for looking back. Even those like me who have been with the NPLC only a few years feel steeped in its history and traditions. We pass on the stories, now semi-legendary, of founder Msgr. Phil Murnion, and his original associates; we recall with affection the tenure of his successor, the Rev. Eugene Lauer, a gentle man and a gentleman; we seek the best from the past as we move into the future with our current dynamic executive director, Paulist Father John Hurley. We remember and miss those who have left the center for various reasons, particularly Sister Catherine Patten, who twice served as interim director and who left us for Rome where she is serving the central administration of her international congregation, the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary.

We are also at the beginning of Lent, which each year is also a time for looking at the past and looking toward the future. As the elect who will be baptized at the Easter Vigil take these weeks to delve deeply into their readiness to make a life-long commitment to the Christian faith, the rest of the church prepares for the Easter re-commitment to our own baptismal vows. No matter on what calendar date we were actually baptized, Easter is symbolically our anniversary, and we celebrate the Triduum with washings and the lighting of candles, with songs and processions, with the blessings of water and oils.

Lent is a time to repent. We are called to fast, pray, give alms, be shriven, but also to repent—literally to turn our thinking around, to turn away from the barriers we erect between ourselves and God’s love, to find instead new ways of allowing God’s grace to change and perfect us. We look back on the year or years behind us and see where we’ve become dusty or rusty in our determination to live out our baptism, and we look for ways, old or new, to polish our commitment and make it firm again. The anniversary of our baptisms is a time for renewed determination to devote ourselves more consciously and purposefully to our relationship with God.

It’s said to take three weeks of constant practice to establish a new habit. I find that bad habits can be formed in about three days and breaking them can take much longer than three weeks, while good habits are hard to stick to and a snap to break. A friend used to speak of such realities as being among the lesser-known effects of original sin. In any case, the church in its wisdom gives us six weeks during Lent to begin to cast off the old and take on the new, with room for backsliding and starting over and the hope that the best of new patterns will remain with us through Easter and beyond.

The older I get, the less ambitious I become in my resolutions. I look back on a tattered trail of broken ones—more varied and perhaps more numerous broken New Year’s resolutions than Lenten attempts—and remind myself that for me, successful change is most often wrought in small incremental steps. I’ll have a better chance of actually succeeding if I encourage myself to pray for fellow passengers between subway stops than if I resolve to add an hour of meditation each day. When looking ahead, it’s good to be ambitious and optimistic but perhaps, at least for me, best to be realistic.

As the NPLC takes this anniversary opportunity to reflect on our past and our future, we see the ways we have grown and changed. Some of those changes have been modest and incremental; others, such as the addition of new project areas, have been ambitious and optimistic. We look at the signs of the times and seek new ways to serve the needs of Catholic pastoral leaders near and far. This time of preparation for our celebration has included a formal process of strategic planning, a good method of shaking out the dust and re-imagining the future. We are being both optimistic and realistic. As the Spirit is with each of us as we prepare for the joy of Easter, so I am convinced that the Spirit is with the NPLC as we plot a course of service for the coming quarter-century.

is the editor of CHURCH magazine.