{"id":809,"date":"2008-10-07T14:57:08","date_gmt":"2008-10-07T14:57:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2008\/10\/i-am-yours.html"},"modified":"2008-10-07T14:57:08","modified_gmt":"2008-10-07T14:57:08","slug":"i-am-yours","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/10\/i-am-yours.html","title":{"rendered":"“I Am Yours”"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the Pope’s remarks yesterday at the Synod.\u00a0 Worth savoring.<\/a>
\nBut first. The question has been asked,\u00a0“Why a Synod on the Word of God?”\u00a0 Because one of the most damaging tendencies of the last few decades in Catholic catechesis and preaching has been the way in which Church leaders, preachers and teachers have approached Scripture and, in turn, communicated the meaning and importance of Scripture to those in the pews or the desks. Historical-Critical methodology has been adopted as the sole <\/em>prism through which to explain and teach Scripture – the Church, as usual, about 100 years behind the Protestants. It is ironic that this approach gained so much force in Catholic circles\u00a0just when Protestant Scripture scholars were beginning to re-evaluate where their own scholarly trajectory had taken them.
\n(If you want to know what I mean by this critique – and we have talked about this quite a bit on this blog – just consider how the Scriptures are often preached in your parish. If a homily on the Sermon on the Mount is centered on explaining how different Matthew and Luke’s settings of the beatitudes are, and then ends with a general exhortation to have hope when you are sad…there you go. If your kids come out of high school religion class knowing their letters: J,P,D and Q – and unable to talk about the scope of salvation history and what it has to do with them, today…there you go. For once it all just literary business, who cares?
\nIt is not that the scholarship is unimportant (and do understand that the H-C methodology is only one branch of Scripture scholarship) – by no means is it so. The problem is, as Ratzinger pointed out frequently before he became Pope and many times afterwards, it strips the Scriptures of their power and their connection to the deeper Word. Hence, a Synod.)<\/p>\n

Therefore, exegesis, the true reading of the Holy Scripture, is not only a literary phenomenon, not only reading a text. It is the movement of my existence. It is moving towards the Word of God in the human words. Only by conforming to the Mystery of God, to the Lord who is the Word, can we enter within the Word, can we truly find the Word of God in human words. Let us pray to the Lord that He may help us to look for the word, not only with our intellect but also with our entire existence.
\nAt the end: \u201cOmni consummationi vidi finem, latum praeceptum tuum nimis\u201d. All human things, all the things we can invent, create, are finite. Even all human religious experiences are finite, showing one aspect of reality, because our being is finite and can only understand one part, a few elements: \u201clatum praeceptum tuum nimis\u201d. Only God is infinite. And therefore His Word too is universal and knows no boundaries. Coming into communion with the Word of God, we enter a communion of the Church that lives the Word of God. We do not enter into a small group, with the rules of a small group, but we go beyond our limitations. We go towards the depths, in the true grandeur of the only truth, the great truth of God. We are truly a part of what is universal. And thus we go out into the communion of all the brothers and sisters, of all humanity, because the desire for the Word of God, which is one, is hidden in our heart. Therefore even evangelization, the proclamation of the Gospel, the mission are not a type of ecclesial colonialism, where we wish to insert others into our group. It means going beyond the individual culture into the universality that connects all, unites all, makes us all brothers. Let us pray once again that the Lord may help us to truly enter the \u201cvastness\u201d of His Word and thus open the universal horizon to humanity, what unites us despite all the differences.
\nAt the end, we return to a preceding verse: \u201cTuus sum ego:salvum me fac\u201d. This translates as: \u201cI am yours\u201d. The Word of God is like a stairway that we can go up and, with Christ, even descend into the depths of His love. It is a stairway to reach the Word in the words. \u201cI am yours\u201d. The word has a face, it is a person, Christ. Before we can say \u201cI am yours\u201d, He has already told us \u201cI am yours\u201d. The Letter to the Hebrews, quoting Psalm 39, says: \u201cYou gave me a body… Then I said, \u2018Here I am, I am coming\u2019\u201d. The Lord prepared a body to come. With His incarnation He said: I am yours. And in baptism He said to me: I am yours. In the Holy Eucharist, He always repeats this: I am yours, so that we may answer: Lord, I am yours. In the path of the Word, entering the mystery of his incarnation, of His being among us, we wish to appropriate His being, expropriate our existence, giving ourselves to Him, He who gave Himself to us.
\n\u201cI am yours\u201d. Let us pray the Lord that we may learn to say this word with our whole being. That way we will be in the heart of the Word. That way we will be saved.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the Pope’s remarks yesterday at the Synod.\u00a0 Worth savoring. But first. The question has been asked,\u00a0“Why a Synod on the Word of God?”\u00a0 Because one of the most damaging tendencies of the last few decades in Catholic catechesis and preaching has been the way in which Church leaders, preachers and teachers have approached Scripture…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-809","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\n"I Am Yours" - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/10\/i-am-yours.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\""I Am Yours" - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"From the Pope’s remarks yesterday at the Synod.\u00a0 Worth savoring. 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The question has been asked,\u00a0“Why a Synod on the Word of God?”\u00a0 Because one of the most damaging tendencies of the last few decades in Catholic catechesis and preaching has been the way in which Church leaders, preachers and teachers have approached Scripture…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/10\/i-am-yours.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2008-10-07T14:57:08+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"awelborn\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"\"I Am Yours\" - Via Media","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/10\/i-am-yours.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"\"I Am Yours\" - Via Media","og_description":"From the Pope’s remarks yesterday at the Synod.\u00a0 Worth savoring. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=809"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}