2024 Guest Speaker

0:06We are honored to award Monsignor James Shea this doctorate of humane letters, honoris causa. I'm terrified to give this speech. Two days ago, just as the University of Mary's board of trustees was convening for the annual reappointment of the president of the university, I lost my voice completely. I wasn't worried about losing my job, although maybe I should have been. But I was worried about losing my voice because I thought, what will I do if I come here and I'm not able to speak? What good is a commencement speaker who can't speak? He's useless. And then I thought about it a little bit and I realized that the graduates today have consecrated their lives to the care of those whose minds are in distress.

1:13And so I thought if I lose my voice, I'll just stand here useless and pathetic and it will stimulate in each of the graduates the anterior cingulate cortex and waves of empathy will flow toward me, and it will actually be okay. But then I thought some more, and I remembered that the families would also be here, and I have no idea what family of origin issues drove you into the behavioral sciences. And so then I was terrified again. I'm a wreck. Do you remember Monty Python had a song, I'm worried? In it, he sings about all the things that he's worried about, the Middle East fashions today, which he says are bad for our feet, his hair falling out, the baggage retrieval system they have at Heathrow Airport in London.

2:33And then about three quarters of the way through, he has this verse. He says, I'm worried about the very next verse. It isn't the best that I've got. I'm worried about whether I should go on or whether I shouldn't just stop. I'm worried about whether I ought to have stopped. I'm worried because it's the kind of thing I ought to know, and I'm worried about the baggage retrieval system they have at Heathrow. Well, I'll tell you what I'm really worried about. I'm worried that there's no adequate way for me fully to express my appreciation and my admiration for Divine Mercy University. I think that the work that's happening here and the contribution that Divine Mercy is making to the church and to our nation are irreplaceable.

3:34Father Charles, the work that you and your excellent and esteemed faculty are doing is wonderful, and it gives great joy, I'm sure, to God and to all the angels. At the University of Mary, we shamelessly and energetically use the Christian Catholic meta model of the person to infuse solid Christian anthropology into all of our programs in psychology and social work and criminal justice and counseling. I'm just so very grateful for that. And so the holy spirit is at work here and I just am worried that there's no real way that I could fully express how much admiration and appreciation I have for what all of you are doing here. And then to receive this honorary doctorate, when I heard about it, I said, I don't deserve it.

4:29I don't deserve it. Then I thought a little bit more and I thought, no, I think I do deserve it. In fact, I deserve more than an honorary doctorate. I think I deserve an earned doctorate in the behavioral sciences and abnormal psychology because I've spent fifteen years in higher education. If it sounds like I have a little bit of self pity about all of my exertions in higher education, it's because I have a lot of self pity. Two weeks ago, the Bishop of Helena, Montana delivered the commencement address at the University of Mary. We had 1,100 graduates. His name is Bishop Austin Vedder. He and I grew up on farms about 15 miles away from each other in the same county, although he's much older than I am.

5:35I've known him since I was a young boy. He told a story in the midst of his commencement address, which touches upon what I want to speak with you about today, and so I'm going to steal it. My patron saint today is not Saint Dimfna. It's Saint Dismas, the good thief. He told about when he was seven years old, his father on the farm gave him a pale calf. A pale calf is when a calf is born, it's allowed to nurse from its mother for a while, and then it's taken away. And the family drinks the milk, and the calf is fed formula out of a pail. That's a pale calf. So if you're seven years old and your father gives you a pale calf, you get to raise it until it's an 800 pound steer, and then you sell it and you get to keep the money, which is a pretty good deal for a first grader.

6:40So bishop Vetter's father gave him a pale calf, and he fed it and cared for it, and it got sick. And so he gave it more formula, which was a mistake, and then he didn't let it outside of the barn, which also was a mistake, and the calf died. So the little boy sat down in the straw and started to cry. And his dad came out into the barn. He said, why are you crying? He said, dad, I tried so hard. I did everything I could, and the calf died. Dad, I did my best. And his dad said, no, you didn't. Doing your best would have been to tell me. Doing your best would have been to ask me for help. And so his dad gave him another pale calf. And the second calf got sick too. But then he told his dad, and his dad came out and they got this little calf medicine, and they let it out of the barn into the fresh air and the sunshine, and it still died.

8:09And even though he was sad, it wasn't devastating this time because he had told his dad and he wasn't all alone. This is a powerful lesson about God, but it's also an important lesson about the work the apostolate and the ministry that the graduates of Divine Mercy University are embarking upon. The world is brimming with people out there who are trying so hard, and they don't feel like they're getting anywhere, and bad things happen to them, and they're all alone. And in the midst of the world like that, God has put his hand on your shoulder, and he's touched your mind with wisdom and with training so that you can go out and shatter that loneliness. And the past is the age of regret. There's also a sense in which we can't do anything about it, but the present is here now, which also, by the way, is where god is so that we don't have to be alone in the midst of our lives.

9:33Mother Teresa said, yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. Let us live in the presence. It's all we've got. When we look at the life of Jesus, what is revealed to us is quite astonishing. Notice how the Lord, though he is constantly in movement, though he his energies and exertions do not flag, he's not setting out to achieve anything. He puts the full force, all of the power of his soul into anything or anyone that he is present to at any given time as if he has nothing else to do and no one else to see or to meet. He doesn't focus upon the achievement of any great goal. Instead, his preoccupation is to do the will of the father, and so he makes himself present to the circumstances no matter what they are.

10:49And in doing so, he revolutionizes the circumstances. It's quite extraordinary and this then is the criterion by which his life is judged because by any other measure, if we're honest, the life of Jesus is an epic failure. The majority of people who heard him left him. His closest friends abandoned him in his hour of greatest need. When he instructed his disciples to go out to preach, he said if there's a town that doesn't receive you, move on. How can we explain or begin to understand this evident indifference about how the gospel would be received when he had come into the world to save the world. It's because he had come to do the will of the father and be in communion with his father at all moments was what he had come to do and what he did at all times to include when he was hanging on the cross because the cross is then the image of all our hope.

12:06What would it mean then for us to to seek perfection, not by our own efforts, but by gazing at the life of Christ and truly imitating Jesus in that regard. What would it mean to live like that? What it would what it what what would it mean to be like that when living in a family, at work, in a friendship, at prayer. It changes everything. It makes our whole life into a kind of presence. And this is the perfection which God offers to us, and it's the kind of presence which is especially necessary for those who are accompanying others in the midst of the turpitude and turbulence, the chaos and vicissitudes of human life in a fallen world. Saint John Henry Newman says that we have as our vocation to be used by God for his purposes, not to accomplish or to shape or to form.

13:33This, my friends, is a great relief for us. I remember early on fourteen years ago, fifteen years ago, when I was first the president of the University of Mary. I was 34. I didn't know what I was doing. I was more incompetent then than I am now. More. More. And I felt like I would never be able to achieve what I had been given to do, that the weight placed on my shoulders was too great, and that even if I worked all day and all night and never rested, even if I allowed myself to be grounded to dust, nothing would come of it. And then the lord in his mercy in his divine mercy spoke to me in prayer. Just a simple word. He said, you don't have a lot of things to do. You have one thing to do, stay in communion with me today.

14:36You have one thing to do, just stay in communion and tell me what you need. Tell me about it. Calves die. Calves die. The first calf died and the result was devastation and tears upon the straw. The second calf died and the result was communion with the father. It looked like the same thing had happened and yet they were completely different. That transformation is the mission of every graduate of Divine Mercy University. Congratulations.