My Mother's Role in My Spiritual Formation

Both my Mother and my Father Taught in the University

of Pittsburgh in the School of Social Work. This 

Photo was probably taken in the 1970s or early 80s

My Mother’s Influence

While both my father and my maternal grandmother were essential to my brother and my early spiritual formation, the person who spent the most time with us, and who undoubtedly had the biggest influence on our lives, was my mother. My mother grew up as an only child. She absorbed lessons about her church and the Bible from her parents, both of whom were deeply involved in the ministry of their church. Growing up as a minister’s daughter, however, she was reluctant to become a minister’s wife. She saw how minister’s wives had to be perfect hostesses and how their lives were always on public display, being carefully scrutinized by everyone in the community. My mother, as a young adult, wanted more breathing room. Before she married my father she made him promise that he would forgo the Hawkins family tradition and never enter the clergy. My father agreed to this condition, but began to have doubts when the couple found it difficult to conceive.  My father prayed for a son and promised God that if his prayers were answered he would go into the ministry. Soon afterward, my older brother was conceived and my mother found herself entertaining guests in our home as a newly ordained minister’s wife.

Had I not known the story behind their marriage I never would have suspected that my mother became a clergyman’s wife reluctantly. She threw herself wholly in all of the responsibilities that come with this particular form of ministry. She taught Sunday school, organized women’s literary meetings, volunteered for charitable services and assisted my father in visiting the sick and the bereaved, this in addition to raising two boys and teaching at the university. My grandmother’s passion for the poor influenced my mother also. Her professional career centered on working with children in poverty, which led her to devote a lot of her attention to programs to promote education. She brought these skills and passions with her, in her role as a minister’s wife. She organized programs in her church to promote education.

My mother’s vision of faith was decidedly ecumenical and receptive to interfaith dialogue. It was from her that I learned to appreciate how essential faith is to the cultural life of a society and a community. She saw to it that my brother and I would grow up with broad religious exposure. She enrolled us in a Unitarian nursery school, a Jewish weekend and summer camp, Catholic elementary and middle schools, a Quaker high school, and accompanied our attendance at Presbyterian, Lutheran and Anglican services and Roman Catholic Masses. When it came time for me to make a decision about whether or not I would pursue my long-established interest in Roman Catholicism my mother became my confidante and sounding board; both parents, in the end, were models of support.

(From My Spiritual Autobiography)

How My Grandmother Influenced My Spiritual Formation

This picture of my Grandmother was no doubt taken before I was born

My maternal grandfather, Matthew Levi Emanuel, was a Baptist minister and a school teacher. He died within a year of my birth. My maternal grandmother, however, lived to see both of her grandchildren grow into young adults. My grandmother was a devout member of her church and she was a powerful role-model of faith for my brother and me. The Bible was the center of her life. I never heard her raise her voice in anger when we were around and I very rarely saw her lose her temper. She lived a modest and orderly life. When she had a house, she kept everything in order. As she got older, and moved into an apartment, she had few possessions, beyond what she felt she really needed. She had a particular passion for the poor and the unfortunate. Whenever we were with her and we passed a homeless person, or someone with a severe disability, on the street she would say to us, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” She selflessly volunteered her time and energy for service and outreach in her church.

My grandmother believed in simplicity and was not wasteful. I think this grew out of her compassion for those who were less fortunate. It seemed, to her, particularly sinful to waste the resources that we had while others had to do without. One day, when my parents were away and she was babysitting, I was playing in the attic with the light on in the middle of day. I must have been in third grade at that time. My grandmother came up the steps and turned out the light, telling me not to waste electricity because the only light I needed in the middle of the day was “God’s light”. I remember the sun shining through the window pane, flooding the room with natural light, and thinking to myself, “But our light is better than God’s light.”

(From my Spiritual Autobiography)

My Father's Influence on My Spiritual Formation

My Father’s Influence

My family background and early life experience may be described as being church-based, with significant interfaith and ecumenical exposure. The ministry has played a large role within both my father and my mother’s sides of the family. My paternal great grandfather immigrated to the United States, in the 19th century, from the West Indies. He built A.M.E. churches up the coast of Florida, eventually settling further inland, in Gainesville. Since that time, each generation on my father’s side of the family has produced an A.M.E. minister. Both of my father’s parents died when he and his two brothers were children, so the boys were often rotated between the homes of relatives in Florida, and were eventually sent to a boarding school using some of the money from a trust fund their parents established before they died.

My parents had three sons, but the youngest was stillborn. I was the second to be born and I have an older brother. Although both of my parents eventually became academics and taught at the University of Pittsburgh, both my brother and I grew up with an awareness that one of us should enter the clergy, as each generation had done that preceded us. My parents never really pressured either of us on this matter, but my father brought us with him as he made the rounds, performing his ministerial duties along with the work he was doing at the university. Every Sunday, of course, my father presided over the services at church and we were quizzed on his sermons as he took the family out to dinner. In this environment my brother and I could not help but to feel close to my father’s ministry.

As a minister, my father always had an eye on the “competition”. He learned from watching other clergymen at work. While my mother listened to Billy Graham’s sermons, my father studied the speaking style of Martin Luther King and the delivery of Bishop Fulton Sheen. My father was constantly reading up on ecumenical and interfaith theological arguments, particularly as they affected the civil rights movement. He also stayed on top of the literature to make the gospel more accessible to young people. It was through my father, and his circle of ecumenical and interfaith friends in the clergy, that we learned about changes that were occurring in the Catholic Church, as a result of Vatican II, and attempts in mainstream Protestant churches and Jewish synagogues to respond to the challenges of war, poverty and prejudice.

(From my Spiritual Autobiography)

What Are the Challenges Outside of, and Within, the Catholic Church?

Because I have spent much of my time, during the past 36 years, on university campuses I have seen and felt the effects of changes in the intellectual climate in higher education first hand. I have seen and felt the effects of the cultural shifts that have removed the process of reasoning from its grounding in faith. During a time when Western culture is increasingly characterized by relativism, materialism, secularism, and radical individualism the church stands out as a sign of contradiction. It awakens people from a false identity, as beasts or machines, and calls them back to their humanity. Frequently, however, the witness that the church provides is not received or is not understood. People have been taught that it is important to study technology, but not ethics; that it is important to be able to affect outcomes, but not to grasp meaning; and that it is important to have empirical knowledge, but not knowledge of the spirit. The consequences of this cultural relativism, this indifference toward inquiry into meaning, are the poor, wandering souls that one might see staggering down Forbes Avenue on any Thursday, Friday or Saturday night, resembling sheep without a shepherd. As a teacher I have been struck by how often my students have expressed the emptiness they feel, and how -- even if they anticipate having a good job with a steady income, they feel that their lives are adrift and that their relationships are devoid of meaning.

I’ll never forget the time when, as an undergraduate, I had an office meeting with one of my professors about film criticism. When she found out that I had converted to Catholicism she yelled at me for the better part of an hour. She was trying to convince me that Catholicism was irrational, but she never gave me a chance to respond. Her tirade was loud enough that several other faculty members looked in on us to see who had disturbed her so violently. The experience was memorable not so much because I was intimidated by it -- I had grown accustomed, by that time, to having contrarian views in the classroom -- the experience made an impression on me because I began to realize how deeply ingrained hatred of the sense of the sacred had become in institutions of higher education, and how emotionally invested critics of religion had become in their secularist and relativist worldviews. Although I somewhat understood the nature and the challenge of institutionalized ideologies that were anti-religious, I was unsure of how to respond. How does the church re-evangelize its people in a cultural environment that is so intolerant of the church’s teaching? How does the church equip students with the tools they will need in order to inquire into anything more than empirical truths? What criteria should one use when one is looking for a more comprehensive truth? How would one recognize that truth when one encountered it?

Of course, my experience with the rise of the intolerant secularist ideologies in higher education occurred before a series of scandals that rocked the church from within were made public. The church’s internal scandals, and the insatiable appetite of popular media to exploit them, has created an opening for long-standing critics to attack the church and to try to shame it into silence. Needless to say, this situation has created a much harder environment for the church to present the face of Christ to humanity -- but this is a situation that we have brought upon ourselves. The scandals have added to the skepticism and cynicism of the general public. They have provided ammunition for those who have argued that there is no reason for a person to commit themselves to anything beyond self-gratification and a utilitarian approach to others. People now have an excuse to turn inward. The scandals have reinforced the notion that religion should, at best, be a private matter and that its voice should not be heard in the public arena. The church must root out the corruption within it, primarily to help the victims of abuse to heal, but also because these scandals weaken the church’s ability to proclaim the Gospel. The world is looking for the answers that only the church -- through its apostolic ministry, its liturgy, its sacraments and the communion of the universal body of Christ -- can give, but they are reluctant to trust an institution that they believe does not live by its own teachings.

The Church is going through troubling times, but there have been troubling times in the past and there will -- no doubt -- be troubling times in the future. Anyone who has read the accounts of these scandals should be disturbed by them, but to be scandalized is not to be undone. The church is a divinely inspired institution, but it is run by people who are not perfect. There are no solutions in turning one’s back on the church. My personal experience has been that every time I have searched for answers to the meaning of life, outside of the church, I have come up empty. I have vainly sought solutions in technology, politics, the academy, economics, and popular culture. There were no answers to be found in any of these things once Christ was removed from the core of them. I have spoken with many others who have experienced the same thing. As imperfect as the church is, each time I have searched for answers outside of it I found myself coming back and saying, along with Simon Peter, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

(From my Spiritual Autobiography)

Conversion is at the Core of My Catholic Identity and Discernment of a Priestly Vocation

The story of my spiritual formation is a story of my conversion to the Roman Catholic Church. Although I was introduced to Christianity through the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) church, I converted to Roman Catholicism, 36 years ago, in order to encounter Christ more deeply and more fully. I believe that the primary mission of the church is to show the world the face of Christ. Through my conversion to Catholicism I was able to encounter Christ through the sacraments and in communion with the universal church. My story of conversion is not a story of a one-shot and sudden revelation, but of a gradual unfolding over time that has involved ongoing instruction and spiritual formation. I have had moments that I might call “epiphanies” in this process, but they occurred in relation to a series of experiences that were much more subtle and much less dramatic. They were so subtle, in fact, that it has only been in retrospect that I have been able to see how the hand of God has been constantly at work in my life.

I believe that my conversion experience has been edifying for friends of mine, who were born into the Catholic Church but who did not appreciate the value of the tradition they were born into, and for non-Catholics who have had difficulty understanding how one would be drawn to the church. Over the past ten years I have frequently found myself in the unexpected position of re-evangelizing non-practicing Catholics, whose days have been so absorbed by their work and other activities that they had forgotten the essential role that the Mass once played in their lives.

I realize that the process of discernment about the priesthood does not rest with my thoughts and feelings alone; the Church discerns with me. I have been encouraged, in this process of discernment, by parishioners, clergy and the religious. Through them, I have learned to open myself to listen to what the Holy Spirit is telling me and to respond to God’s call if this is His will for my life. I do not enter this process of discerning the priesthood, at this late stage of my life, lightly, rashly or suddenly. This process of discernment has come through a great deal of prayer and through conversations with priests and members of my parish. I began to take seriously the possibility of a calling about ten years ago, when I began to serve as a lector and a Eucharistic minister in my parish, St Paul Cathedral. I have been a weekly nocturnal Eucharistic adorer at the Newman Center for the past seven years. I have been strengthened in this inquiry by praying the Liturgy of the Hours, intermittently, for the past seven years also.  

In broad outline, the process of my spiritual formation has involved becoming a Catholic not just once, but many times. As all men of faith must recommit themselves to Christ each day, and as a Church we repeat our Baptismal vows each Easter, so I have reaffirmed my commitment to living in communion with the Church after periods of uncertainty or dryness. Future blog posts on my spiritual autobiography will trace this process in greater detail.

(From my Spiritual Autobiography)