Doctrinal Formation

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

“And he entered Capernaum, and immediately on the Sabbath he went into the synagogue and began to teach them. And they were astonished at his teaching, for he was teaching them as one having authority, not as the scribes” (Mark 1:21-22).

When Our Lord begins His public life, He begins to teach. He begins to communicate ideas. He gives the people what we would call today doctrinal formation.

Doctrine is a series of ideas. When Jesus went to the people and preached to them, He didn't give them technology. He didn't give them money. He gave them ideas.

Christianity very often is a series of ideas that God wants us to put into practice. Ideas are very important.

In this Center, you are going to find yourself exposed to many ideas, many good ideas. It's very important in the course of our life to expose ourselves to good ideas, because those good ideas can be expressed in our life through good actions.

As followers of Christ trying to fulfill our baptismal vocation, it's very important that we try to fill our life with good actions.

Repeated good actions are called virtues. They’re habits, and good habits are virtues. We try to foster good habits, good virtues.

The process whereby we do all of this is called formation.

While we may go to Kibondeni to learn how to do this and do that, hopefully here, we also learn more things rather than just the technical things. We learn how to be a good person or a better person.

Hopefully, horizons open up to us whereby we see the good that we can do in the world.

Our exposure to good ideas helps all of that to take place. We absorb good ideas. We see that's a good thing, and we appreciate the goodness of certain ways of doing things.

We see ways in which we can influence the lives of other people for the good because ultimately, part of our Christian vocation is that we try to lift up the whole world around us. We lift it up onto a better plane. Make the world a better place.

When Our Lord began to teach—that's why He began to teach. He began to communicate good ideas that hopefully would lift up the lives of the people there.

There were certain ideas that were more important than others. Our Lord talked about the soul of man. Man is not just a body.

I was in the grounds of the house where I live the other day, reading a book and studying something. There was a gardener there who stopped me and asked me a rather unusual question. He said, “Father, where is the soul in our body?”

I was rather impressed. I don't think I've been asked a question like that even in a theology class. “Where is the soul in the body?” I said the soul is everywhere.

“And can you touch the soul?” That was an even better question.

You can't touch the soul because the soul is a spiritual reality. It's not something material that we can feel, but it's there. It gives life to the whole of our body.

Then there were a couple of more questions along the same lines. I said, ‘Those are very good questions. Keep asking those questions. Okay, one more, I need another very good question.’

These are questions we should try and know because these are very important things. What is the soul? How does the soul work?

The soul is immortal. From the moment of our conception, we have a soul. That soul is destined to live forever and forever and forever. Powerful truth.

Our bodies one day will die. Sometimes we take an awful lot of care of our body, which is very important. We have to wash our hair; we have to make ourselves look clean; we have to do all sorts of things.

Sometimes we are very concerned about our appearance, but one day our body will get old and it will get wrinkled, and our hair will turn grey. All these other things will happen.

The body will die and we'll end up in the ground someplace, but our soul will live forever.

God is more interested—He is interested in our body, but He’s also interested in our soul, because it's going to last forever. Ultimately our soul will be united with our body in heaven.

Just as we take very good care of our body and are concerned about our appearance, we should try and have the same concern for our soul, so that our soul is always in a state of grace.

Grace is a gift that God gives to us whereby He comes to live in our souls. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit live in our soul in grace.

We get that grace through the sacraments. That's why the sacraments are so important. The Church lives for the sacraments.

When we live in the state of grace, when our soul is in the state of grace, then our soul and our body are beautiful in the eyes of God. That's the most important thing in our life: that we would be beautiful in the eyes of God.

It does not matter how we may be in the eyes of other people in the world. Certainly, it's less important.

Every day of our life we have to try and strive to make sure that we are beautiful in the eyes of God.

If we ever lose a little bit of that beauty because we commit a venial sin or a mortal sin, or we're negligent about our spiritual life or about our virtues, then we have to try and recover that beauty.

We do that through the sacrament of Confession. The confessional box is like a spiritual beauty parlor; we get new graces each time. That's why the Church recommends that we go to Confession frequently.

These are some of the ideas that Christ came to communicate—ideas that help us to be beautiful, to lead good lives, lives that are beautiful in the eyes of God and the eyes of others, so that they're attractive. Every human person on the planet finds beauty attractive.

Pope Benedict liked to say that we have to try and foster the cult of beauty in the world (Benedict XVI, General Audience, August 31, 2011; Address to Artists, July 4, 2011; Message, August 24, 2002).

Sometimes the world presents very ugly things to mankind. We're here to present beautiful things. We're caught up in the cult of beauty.

All the things that Christ communicated are beautiful.

Christ Himself is divine beauty Incarnate. That's why we find His work and His ideas so beautiful and so powerful.

Those ideas that Christ came to teach us—our doctrinal formation—it's really important to grasp those ideas. That's why the Church teaches us the Catechism from a very young age.

I don't know the first question of the first Catechism that you ever looked at or studied. I remember when I was a kid, only just starting to read, we had a Catechism, and the first question was: “Who made the world?” God made the world. “Who is God?” God is Our Father in heaven.

Those are very simple little ideas, but they’re very important ideas. There are an awful lot of people walking around the world who don't know who made the world or who God is. We've been given those truths.

There was a little girl once who went to a national park with her Mom. In the national park she saw an elephant. She got this idea of elephant: big animal, big feet, big tusks, big trunks, small tail.

She went away and she became very interested in elephants. She wanted storybooks about elephants and drawing books about elephants.

When she went through primary school and secondary school, she maintained her interest in elephants and began to read books about elephants and documentaries about them.

Eventually, she was able to go to university and she studied zoology. She specialized in elephants.

Eventually she got a Master's and then a Ph.D., and she wrote books about elephants. She began to tour the world, lecturing about elephants. She became a world expert on elephants.

It was said that all her knowledge of elephants was built up on one simple concept of elephant that she learned one day with her Mom as a kid in a national park.

The moral of the story is that all our ideas are built up on a few very simple, basic ideas.

Somebody said once we don't have to know too many things in this world, we just need a few ideas, but those ideas we have to have them very, very clear.

That's why our doctrinal formation comes to be very important. We get to know the teaching of Christ and the specific ideas that He communicated, because all our later ideas are built up on those few ideas.

It's like if somebody is going to build on an extra room to their house, or an extra room on the school, or an extra building—you look at the foundations. Can the foundations take on this extra room, or extra classroom, or extra building? You go back to the basics.

Something similar happens in our knowledge. We go back to the basic ideas: who man is, who made the world, why we are here.

Pope St. John Paul used to say that there are three basic questions that every human person has to keep asking them in their life. “Where have I come from? Where am I going? What is my life all about?” (cf. John Paul II, Encyclical, Fides et Ratio, September 14, 1988).

He said that on the answers to those questions will very often depend on the happiness that we achieve in this world. We have to know where we're going, to know what life is all about.

The formation that we're exposed to in this house helps us to be able to answer those questions, to come up with the solutions, and hopefully to be able to spread it to other people so that they come to know some of these things: that man has a soul, that we have an eternal destiny, that the greatest evil in the world is sin.

Sometimes other things are presented to us as sins.

The world tends to tell us that it's evil not to have money, or not to be able to do certain things, or not to have certain things, or unemployment, or diabetes, or hypertension, or cancer. ‘All these things are sins, or they're evil. The greatest evil that we have to try and avoid is COVID.’

All these things are not greatest evil, because all these things can be used to bring about good: suffering, death, sickness. We offer those things to God on the Cross. All those things can help us to achieve heaven.

Not that we try and go after them and receive them and have them, though we try and avoid them. If God wants us to have them, we accept them with humility and we offer them to Him. It's not an obstacle to heaven, to eternal happiness.

The only thing that can keep us out of heaven is sin. Therefore, sin is the greatest evil. That's the message we have to try and communicate to our friends in all sorts of ways.

It's a very simple idea: anything rather than commit sin. Trying to flee occasions of sin. Trying to learn how to have certain good actions and certain habits so that we're not led into sin, because “the devil is around us like a lion ready to pounce” (cf. 1 Pet. 5:8).

You have to try and avoid all those situations so that we can go forward.

Therefore, a great service that we give to our friends is exposing this idea that sin is the greatest evil. If you're thinking about something, and something is wrong, thinking of doing something, then the worst possible thing you can do is to do that thing.

That's a great charity. It shows a great love of others when we spread that idea of what is right and wrong, because happiness comes from doing things that are right. It's a very important idea as well.

Misery comes from doing things that are evil.

Sometimes the world may tell us messages that poverty is misery, and we have to alleviate poverty and misery through contraception, through doing things that are wrong, or abortion. But that can bring an awful lot more misery.

It's only a half-truth to say that poverty is misery. You may go to some very poor areas of the country or of the city. You might find some very poor people, but they may have a smile on their face. Some of the kids there are the happiest kids you ever met in your whole life.

You can go to the wealthiest areas of the city or the country—sometimes people are not so happy there either. Wealth doesn't make us happy. Money doesn't necessarily make us happy. It's only a half-truth to say that wealth is happiness.

To say that poverty is misery is only a half-truth. It's much truer to say that misery is doing things that are wrong. Misery is doing things that are wrong.

That’s why we try to help people not to do things that are wrong. Try and do things that are right. Happiness comes from doing things that are right.

That's a very important idea that Christ came to teach us.

God gave us the Ten Commandments so that we will have a very good idea about what is right and what is wrong.

If we live by the Ten Commandments, then we have a great chance of being happy in the world. We know those basic ideas that are contained in the Ten Commandments: not to tell a lie; not to steal; not to commit sins of impurity; to honor our parents; to honor God's name.

We stand a great chance of living in the truth, walking by the truth. That's where happiness comes from.

All sorts of opportunities can present themselves in our daily conversation with our friends to communicate the truth and beauty of what is right.

There's a book in a bookstore downtown in Nairobi that tells the story of a nun one time in Dublin Airport. She was going to London for something.

She was sitting there waiting for the plane and there was a lady beside her. She began to talk to her. They got into a conversation and she asked this lady, “Why are you going to London, are you going to visit some friends?”

The lady said, "No, I'm going for an abortion.” The nun was a bit surprised: Eight o’clock in the morning, I didn't expect to bump into this; early in the morning in this particular place.

She told the lady, “That means you're going to murder your baby, murder your child.”

The lady said, "The doctor says the baby is going to be handicapped and I've got four children already. I can't manage another one. All my friends agree with me that God is merciful, and God will understand, so I'm going to have this abortion.”

The nun told her: “You're going to murder your baby. And even if nobody has told you that you're going to murder your baby, I'm telling you now so that you can't say that ‘nobody told me.’”

The lady said, “Everybody agrees with me, and the doctor says, so I think I'm doing alright and God will be merciful,” et cetera, so she went off.

The following day she was going into the abortion clinic and the words of this nun that had said to her the day before “you're going to murder your baby” were ringing in her ear. She found she couldn't go through with it. She walked out.

A couple of months later she gave birth to a healthy baby boy. She was surprised. She was told he was going to be handicapped.

She went back to the doctor and said, "You told me this baby was going to be handicapped.” The doctor said, "Yes, but we all make mistakes.”

She was so happy to have this healthy baby, so she went to seek out this nun. She said, “I want to thank you for what you told me in the departure lounge of the airport at eight o'clock that morning. If you hadn't told me that, I would have murdered this beautiful little boy. I'm so happy with him now.”

Sometimes the words that we communicate to our friends in odd moments about truth, about beauty, about love, about what is right and wrong, can change their life.

If that lady hadn't heard those words, maybe she might have heard them ten years later after she had committed the deed. Very often, people do hear these things much later and they realize what they've done.

Sometimes the quick fix can seem so rational and so easy. Sometimes it can bring terrible suffering in its wake, terrible consequences.

Those ideas that Christ came to communicate can shape our life for the good. Therefore, it's very good that we try and absorb those ideas as much as possible.

Try to use well every day that you have in this Center. Try to think: What idea can I learn today? Maybe try to write those things down, so at the end of a year or six months, maybe you have a whole pile of very powerful ideas.

There was a lady who used to come to see me for spiritual direction in Singapore. I told her, “After each session, maybe five or ten minutes each week, try to go away from here with one idea, and maybe, write down those ideas.”

She was a very clever, intelligent lady and she began to do precisely that. She wrote down the ideas.

I told her, “After a period of time, you'll have twenty ideas, but they'll be very powerful ideas that the Holy Spirit has communicated to you.”

She began to do that and after six months she came back and said, “Father, I've been writing down all these ideas. And I have put a number to them. I realize a lot of the things you tell me come back to, more or less, circulate around those ideas.”

She said, “Now when I come to talk to you and I look for my idea, very often they're already written down in my notebook. And I say, Oh, that's number five, that's number eleven. This week I got number fourteen.”

She came back to the same ideas all the time, but all the time growing and enriching in those ideas.

If you try and identify one of those ideas, some little thing that you learn on a daily basis, you'll end up after a period of time with a lot of very powerful ideas.

You realize, hopefully, ‘My exposure here has changed my life, given me some very solid things on which to build my family, my work, my existence, my personality, the person I want to be—ideas that I can influence the world and make the world a better place.’

We all have to try and have desires to make the world a better place. Everybody wants to change the world, but one of the ideas that Christ has come to teach us is that we change the world by changing ourselves. And that's not so easy.

It's very easy to want to change the world out there. The world has to be different because the world is bad.

We come to realize: ‘I'm the problem; I have to be better.’

That's where the real challenge is: that idea of personal transformation, personal holiness, which is the goal of our Christian vocation, of our Baptism.

Holiness and apostolate. God wants me to be better. In what way does He want me to be better? He wants me to be more charitable, more orderly, more punctual, more industrious, more honest.

You can think of a whole series of virtues where you could start right away. That's why we're here in this Center.

We haven't just applied to come and live here, or ‘I need someplace to stay in Nairobi,’ or go to Kibondeni, or a whole pile of other reasons. Those may be the superficial reasons, the reasons we see.

There are much deeper reasons. Deep down in our life, God is acting. God brings us in contact with people, with places, with events, with formation, because He wants us to be exposed to those things.

He wants our soul, our heart, our mind to be shaped in a certain way. He wants us to be a better Christian, a better Catholic, a better instrument of His in the world, a better apostle.

He has something more in mind for us, something greater, leading us to greater things. Therefore, He's exposing us to greater things.

Part of that along the way is formation and doctrinal formation. He wants us to absorb those ideas, make them our own, so we can have an influence. We can maximize our potential.

During the course of this past year or two, we all got exposed to Eliud Kipchoge breaking the world record and becoming one of the most famous Kenyans in history.

It was a great achievement—did his country proud, and his town proud, and his family proud.

God wants each one of us to be like Eliud Kipchoge, to make an impact, to leave a mark, to break records, to have an influence.

He didn't just wake up one morning and say: ‘I think I'll break the world record.’

All the cameras come out. We see him crossing the finish line and all the photos in the newspaper are of that glorious moment.

But we don't see him running over the hills of Eldoret on a morning like today, when it's raining and it's cold.

Maybe he got to bed late last night, and he's feeling a bit miserable, and he feels like going back to bed. But he knows: ‘I have to keep going, climbing this mountain, strengthening my muscles, developing myself so I can break that record, to improve my time.’

To grow, to be a saint, to be a better apostle takes that same sort of sporting spirit, that determination, that fortitude, that commitment. That's what Our Lord is hoping for from us.

He says: “Enter by the narrow gate” (Matt. 7:13). “Take up your cross and follow me” (Matt. 16:24).

‘Be a little bit more demanding on yourself, because I want to build you up to be a very effective apostle.’

If we try and grow in those ideas, we’ll know a lot of things. You'll be surprised by the things you'll pick up by coming to meditations like this, or to talks, or to recollections, or to other activities that are available.

When I was in Form 4, I used to attend a sort of discussion group in a certain place, a spiritual sort of house.

We used to sit around on a Sunday morning once a month and talk about things, but we never had too much to talk about. We were supposed to discuss things.

Then I started going to a Center of Opus Dei and listened to meditations like this, just sort of being there. I wasn't aware that I was absorbing too many things.

Then I used to go to these discussion groups and, after a couple of months of going to the meditations in the Center of Opus Dei, I found that in the discussion group I was the one doing all the talking.

In spite of myself, I seemed to have absorbed a whole series of ideas in those formative activities that I was exposed to. No one was more surprised than I was.

I could see very clearly the difference, what I had learned and absorbed, without really doing too much but just being there, listening.

We pick up things that are very important, that hopefully will influence the lives of other people. The little things that we say in our conversations, the fruit of our formation, can be very important.

I remember being in Form 3 in 1967, I think, or Form 2, and abortion was legalized in England. One teacher came into the class one day and just happened to make a comment about this, that this thing was legalized; this is so terrible, so barbaric.

I didn't know what he was talking about. I didn't know what had happened in England. I didn't know what this thing called abortion was, but I do remember his comment.

That's just one simple comment in the middle of a class, and I still remember that, sixty years later (not quite sixty years; fifty years maybe, later).

It was interesting that little remark left its mark. Sometimes the little remarks that we make in our daily conversations with our friends—commenting on this or commenting on that—can leave their mark, because the Holy Spirit is there.

We spread that formation. We spread those ideas.

There's a famous saint who was a Jewess. She was one of the patrons of Europe, St. Edith Stein. She was a Jew for many years, and she said, “Before I was converted, to seek the truth was my only prayer” (cf. Edith Stein, The Science of the Cross).

Seek the truth. God has called us to be truth seekers, be looking for truth in everything we do, everything we see.

We find great truths in the Catholic Church, in our faith. Truths we can be proud of. Truths that shape society, shape the world, that help us to know what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is bad.

Good ideas produce very good fruits in concrete ways; help people to do good things.

When we see that “they were astonished at his teaching” (Mark 1:22), we can come to understand why a little more.

We can make resolutions to use our time well while we're in the Center, to use all the opportunities that we have to be exposed to that truth, so that we can fill our lives with that truth, with that beauty, and ultimately that love that Christ wants to give us.

Our Lady is the Seat of Wisdom. All those ideas and those truths pass through her.

If we try to be very close to Our Lady, she will help us to grasp those ideas and to put them into practice in our daily life.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

JSD