Remember where you came from

A Reflection for Saturday of the Eighteenth Week in Ordinary Time

Find today’s readings here.

The past year in the world of American theology has felt like an eternity spent reading the obituary page: At times it seemed like every other week we were receiving the news of the death of another great theologian. You might have your own list, but I think of Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, Roger Haight, S.J., Walter Brueggemann, David Tracy, Theresa Kane, R.S.M., Les Orsy, S.J., Martin Marty, Wendy Wright, Larry Cunningham, Mary Collins, O.S.B., John Coleman, S.J., John R. Donahue, S.J., Rosemary Haughton (she spent 30 years in the United States, she counts) and Anne Clifford, C.S.J. And that’s leaving out Pope Francis.

(Why is my list almost entirely men? I blame society, not myself, as Jesus instructed us to do.)

The combined contribution of these scholars to our faith and understanding is hard to overestimate. In the course of writing reflections on many of them this past year for America, I was humbled by the sheer erudition and industry reflected in their obituaries. How does someone write 58 books? What magic elixir allowed a professor to teach college students until the age of 99? How is it possible to mentor 200 graduate students through their dissertations? You were fluent in how many languages? And, frankly, how does one navigate every changing current and tide in the church, in the country, in academia, while following one’s compass true north?

I discovered this week while researching the great Harvard theologian Francis Schüssler Fiorenza that at one point when he was studying at the University of Münster, the faculty included Joseph Ratzinger, Walter Kasper, Karl Rahner and Johann Baptist Metz. A former editor at America told us that he was once outside the Catholic Theological Society of America’s annual meeting and saw a car from New York pull up: a carpool of Avery Dulles, Elizabeth Johnson and Roger Haight. That’s some rarified company. 

Today’s first reading feels to me like a reminder—through Moses, from God—of the need for humility and gratitude when we realize what gifts we have inherited (even if just intellectually and spiritually) from our families and friends and ancestors and mentors. It has to be done humbly, of course; no one gets to take credit for something they received without earning. But the wisdom, virtue, accomplishments and abilities we do inherit are not entirely unlike what Moses tells the people they will find in the Promised Land: “a land with fine, large cities that you did not build, with houses full of goods of all sorts that you did not garner, with cisterns that you did not dig, with vineyards and olive groves that you did not plant.”

Mentors and forebears and families offer us that: spacious and fruitful places in which to live out our own discipleship in our own way, but still part of a community existing across time and space. They helped us learn what we needed in order to fear God and to serve God. Should we not accept these gifts our mentors have given, since we did not earn them—and often feel like we don’t deserve them? Scripture doesn’t say that. It just reminds us to remember to give thanks to God for them, and to remember where you came from. And to cherish the great gifts these figures in our lives continue to be.

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