Let me see again. A meeting with Jesus Christ prompts a prayer for recovery. Let me see again. When Jesus enters our life, what was lost is found again: immediately Bartimaeus’s sight returned.
At this Academic Mass, the work of the university – the studying, the teaching, the research – all the service that is done here is solemnly consecrated to God. Look O Lord on the offerings we make…that whatever is done by us in your service may be directed above all to your glory. The offertory prayer of today’s Mass expresses our intention: may all our service be directed to the glory of God.
What is it to consecrate the work of a university? What is it to offer to God an academic year, its labours and its hopes? Consecration is a handing over. Studies are held up to the Lord’s gaze confident that they will be returned illuminated by the light of his truth. Consecrated study will reveal more to us. If we can hand our work over to the God who is Truth, he will restore it to us filled with understanding and wisdom. We must truly hand our studies over. To return our work completely to its Source is to seek to be rid of all selfishness. We do not hand it over in order to get it back. Even though we know of the divine generosity. Even though we are aware of the pattern of restoring what has been lost, of giving back what has been offered up. We consecrate our work to the Lord as thoroughly and as unselfishly as we can. There is a loss in this, at least at first. We will not have any more what we give away. A valuable possession is renounced. We hand over our studies, however, not to be rid of them but to make them holy. We consecrate them to place them under divine protection. This precaution is taken in no nervous spirit. Boldly we make a present to God of what we might well have kept. There is a renouncing of what might have gone on being enjoyed.
Prudence might counsel waiting before consecrating our studies. Do we need time to improve our work? Would we like to learn more before committing ourselves so completely? Might we prefer to perfect ourselves, or allow ourselves to be perfected, before attempting such feat of goodness? The university year is full of things which we have not yet done. Why not hold on to this valuable time and offer it at the end of a degree, or upon the completion of a research project, or as part of a celebration of retirement! To consecrate to God the work of the university is not to dispense anyone in it from their task or calling. Offering our life in this way allows the Lord to do with it what he wants. The holiness, the goodness, the perfection will be gifts from him. But our help, our labour or giving of ourselves, are still wanted. God gives back to us better what we offer to him. However, as we make our offering we do not think of this habit of his. As we give, we do not rush ahead to receiving. We hand over as completely as we can and accept the loss that there is in the making of such an offering. We now do our work for God and not for ourselves. The university and our energetic activity in it are dear to us and today we hand them over, losing them at least for a moment. Our studies are already very important. Now we allow them to be sacred and we even sacrifice them. Not giving up on them, we hand them over to the One who now directs them and who knows their ultimate purpose.
Consecrating the university is allowing ourselves to be consecrated. This act confers a holiness on our life and work which can surprise us by its impact. Even a fleeting desire for holiness alters us. The most modest opening to the divine sanctifying is a major development in any existence. Giving ourselves to God means big changes. There are the transformations which he effects in us. There are the paths we no longer walk. Grace hedges about everything but our choices remain our own. We can amaze ourselves by choosing holiness. Quite quickly, it seems, the offering as a gift to God of our cherished studies and of the university year is being understood as the sacrifice of ourselves, the offering of ourselves to God. This is no small offering. And since there is loss in offering, at least at first, this no small renunciation. The command of self, the control of self, to be the arbiter of one’s own destiny: these are great achievements and can be full of virtue, yet today we submit them to God’s government. Self-possession can be a treasure long sought, but here we are renouncing it. We are declaring it God’s possession, not ours. There is a realism in this. Everything belongs already to God. Yet the acknowledgement and the handing over are costly. Painful as the making of our offering of ourselves can be it is not really a loss. To allow our self-command to be consecrated to God is to become freer, more in charge of our decisions. This giving up of control leaves us more capable of autonomously adopting good habits and ways of being than we were before.
Let’s go back for a moment to our intention. Why are we making this offering? Why are we consecrating our studies? Why are we handing over to God, once more, this year, a great university and its many good purposes? Is it not principally out of gratitude? We have received all this, this excellent life, all these possibilities: let us give thanks for them and allow them to be made holy. We offer up the way we are living, the way we wish to live. We bring our life to the altar. We hand it over to God. Is he not the source of it? Our thanksgiving emerges from our realising what our Creator has given us. The impulse to offer, to consecrate, to sacrifice in gratitude has its own strong logic. Everything has come from God. He is our source. Seeing the gift, we turn to the giver, offering back. Do we do so extravagantly? Grudgingly? Routinely? It could seem almost not to matter! Giving back becomes a kind of reflex: we receive, and we return. A delight in gifts from the Lord provokes a humble giving back.
Discovering ourselves to have great possessions, we willing to consecrate them, to make an offering of them. The university unites in itself much of what is most dear to us. Unified in this community is all that we know and seek to know. The wisdom we possess and the understanding form which we are searching are held together. The friends, the companions, the family in which we discover truth are here. The university sometimes reverently, sometimes quite briskly, bundles all these communities in which we seek the truth into one great ‘house of inquiry’. Knowledge has its compartments but in the university, we are aware also of its unity, its integrity, its completeness. The universe, everything that is, is contemplated here serenely even on the busiest days of the most intense term as well as in the calmest vacation.
We could easily cling onto to the gift of such a life: so rich, se deep, so intimately bound up with who we are. Yet today we hand it over. We give it up. And ourselves with it. Such an offering cannot be made impersonally or dispassionately. To make this holy offering we must be holy ourselves, or at to want to be on the way to being so. To make this great gift we must renounce a lot. The life of serious study imposes its own discipline which is accepted as cheerfully as possible. But at the Academic Mass we are more aware of the well-ordered life that is personally and deliberately chosen. A rule of life can be interiorised and assimilated. The disciplined life can be self-consciously adopted. Occasionally, examining the conscience, it can seem that we just drifted into living the way we do. Nevertheless, there is a providence which governs such things. We are freely choosing to live in a good way and our life up until now, despite some chaos, has been preparing us for that right choice.
Our holy action at the Academic Mass, our consecration of our studies, our offering to God of the university’s life for another year, is not a gamble, an extravagant bet, placed in the hope of a big win. The unselfishness mentioned earlier is the condition of our prayer. We renounce ourselves before we do anything else. Or we ask for the help to do so. Our expectation is not a reward but rather that we can make our modest contribution to the giving of glory to God: that whatever is done by us in your service may be directed above all to your glory. This is our AMDG at the top of the page. For the greater glory of God. We mean to make good use of the time allotted to us. We intend to work hard at the tasks which have been given to us. We want to do the best we can. All these ambitions are folded into our hope of giving glory to God. The university year, our life, all that we think and say can be a prayer, both a contemplation and an intercession, offered disinterestedly to the One who made us and who sent us into the world to do his will. To him be the glory.
Does this sound too ambitious, at least spiritually. We make our offering of the university year without having already attained perfection. We seek God’s blessing acutely aware of our need of it, and of mercy and forgiveness too. Can not the Lord work with our mixed motives? Does he not sometimes contrive, by some miracle of grace, to bring blessings even from our bad intentions? Is the college year, again from the spiritual point of view, being presented as if we had already attained the virtues and progress which we only hope to acquire and achieve if the terms ahead go well? Could we not make our offering as best we can and then set to work to deepen it, earnestly desiring that the best transformations should take place, in due course, in us and in our friends and the whole community of the University? How holy do we have to be in order to be serious about seeking holiness?
It is not only in the faith and in the moral life that we are often expected to proceed as if we had already made all the effortful and grace-filled progress that, as yet, we think, we only hope to make. A sort of paradox of inquiry operates in many domains. We cannot begin to know unless we already know at least that we do not know. Acknowledging that we do not yet fully understand the most important things is a valuable kind of knowledge and is not only preliminary. The university humbly seeks the truth recognising that it does not yet possess it and yet grateful for all the wisdom which has been already conferred and discovered.
Do we already have that for which we are looking? Our dream, our vision, our hope: these we possess, sometimes in great detail, even if we know that are likely to be lots of surprises in the actual living of all this. Our discoveries are a kind of rediscovery. Our finding is a finding again. The gifts to which are so gratefully open are a giving again, a restoration, a finding of what was lost. Let me see again and immediately his sight returned. Our meeting with Christ allows us to have again what was lost. What was lost by us. What was lost long before us. Jesus came to save us from the effects of an old fall and of recent ones. When he comes again, he will restore everything that has been lost.
The consecration of ourselves and our studies and of the university year is an act of renewal and also a finding again of wisdom, knowledge and truth which have been out of sight. The university possesses them and unveils them to us. The truth reveals itself to a community which labours adventurously in a long tradition to build up understanding. All knowledge is in God and our learning about anything is our learning about him.
Let me see again. As we always knew, what is offered to God is going to be restored to us abundantly. Consecrating studies, dedicating the university year, making sacred all that we do: these are sacrifices made in gratitude. There is even more thankfulness when our offering is returned to us transformed. An Academic Mass associates the Eucharistic transformation and communion with the wonder of the getting of wisdom. A community of learning delights in all that it has discovered and rediscovered including the way in which God outdoes us in self-giving and sacrifice. With gifts which he himself has provided we make an offering to God to which he responds by giving us the body and blood of his Son. These are offered back to him for the salvation of the world. In the University, by gifts which have been received from God, men and women are enabled to attain to truths which, offered back to him, are restored to those who make the offering as wisdom and as the light by which we can live justly and truly. Let us see again, we pray. The truth offered is offered back to us. Gratefully and joyfully, we begin to live once more in imperishable light. It is the light of Christ. The Lord is our light.
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Academic Mass 2024 on 27th October. Fr Peter Gallagher SJ is the Provincial of the Jesuits in Britain
