In 1995, I was beginning my final semester of classes in preparation for a Master’s Degree in Philosophy at the Louisiana State University.  The plan was to begin working on my thesis in the early summer with the hope of possibly graduating in the late Fall of 1995 or possibly Spring of 1994.  After leaving seminary college in 1983, it had taken me a long time to return to complete my undergraduate degree and then go on into post-graduate study. I had great support in doing this from friends and family.

Suddenly in the middle of February of 1995, my brother was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.  It was very far advanced when detected, and my brother made the decision to forego any treatment.  So he came to live with Leonard and I to spend his last days in hospice.  It was less than three weeks that he was with us after he moved in that he passed. It was so fast, so graced, painful, and indeed one of the most transformative experiences in my life.

Looking back on this, I realize how the suddenness of his illness changed my life completely and instantaneously.  In a moment, my plans to finish my Master’s degree were put on hold.  I withdrew from the university to take care of my brother.  I knew that he wanted me to be near him.  It wasn’t a hard decision for me to make at all.  It almost did not even seem like a decision at all.  It was clear that we were to take care of my brother.  I refrain from calling it intuition, selflessness, or any other description.  It just was what needed to be done.  That is really quite amazing to me, when I think about it.  It was just the thing to do.  It was like a conscription.

In his book, The Holy Longing, Ronald Rolheiser describes this type of experience of being conscripted to act as consecration.[i]  When we normally think of consecration, we usually think of things like a church building, or an altar, a vowed life-style, or even the action taking place in the Mass at the Eucharist.   Along with these more common associations, Rolheiser goes on to specify that to consecrate something means to set aside, displace from normal usage, to derail from normalcy.

When we are talking about people, or disciples of Christ, being consecrated, this means that something higher or more urgent in a sense usurps your agenda and your ‘freedom,’ and conscripts you to act.  It is sudden, definitive, and really a baptism by fire in many ways.  It does not leave you alone and once engaged, it does not leave you.  It is indelible and with you for life.

In today’s first scripture reading from the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 20:28-38), we hear this unrelenting conscription and consecration in Paul as he tearfully parts from the church communities that he helped form and encourages them with this same definitive consecration in Christ that is theirs:

Keep watch over yourselves and over the whole flock
of which the Holy Spirit has appointed you overseers,
in which you tend the Church of God…
I unceasingly admonished each of you with tears.
And now I commend you to God
and to that gracious word of his that can build you up
and give you the inheritance among all who are consecrated.

Likewise, in John’s Gospel (Jn 17:11b-19), Jesus is passionately praying to his father as he too takes leave of his disciples to embrace his ultimate consecration, and again, reminding his disciples of their own consecration:

Holy Father, keep them in your name
that you have given me,
so that they may be one just as we are one.
When I was with them I protected them in your name that you gave me,
and I guarded them, and none of them was lost…
They do not belong to the world
any more than I belong to the world.
Consecrate them in the truth.
Your word is truth.
As you sent me into the world,
so I sent them into the world.
And I consecrate myself for them,
so that they also may be consecrated in truth.”

This consecration is the holiest of relationships, the most sacred, because it [brackets] so to speak everything else.  Be mindful that this bracketing is not a disparagement or a dismissal of the ‘world’ as it is referred to in the scriptures.  Instead, consecration is a truthful grasp of reality that contextualizes and embraces everything else with an indelible effect.   Everything gets prioritized within the context of the divine preciousness of love and care that is the Truth of the Spirit.  Moreover, this Truth itself thrusts us back into the world to engage this consecration.

Jesus is passionately expressing his very self in the divine power of human consecration, being set aside, derailed from the status quo patterns of normalcy, conscripted to act in a way of descent that transmutes and arises in newness. Again, though, we must not miss perhaps the most important point.  Like Paul in his passionate goodbye to the presbyters in the Church of Ephesus, Jesus is cultivating and passing on the precious power of consecration to his disciples, who do not belong to the world yet are sent into the world.

Consecration is living in the Spirit of Truth, because it conscripts us toward each other in compassionate care and insistent accountability within the world.  What was once viewed as freedom envisaged through private agendas is now transformed into spacious passageways of holiness that draw us together in the wholeness of Truth.  And this truth is never far away.  It’s right here in our everyday lives on the earth and in the world.  The Spirit is within and around us.

If we live consecrated lives to each other, we allow our own private interests and agendas to be disrupted for all in need, and vice versa, we allow others to heal us in their own consecration.  Consecration is the very life of the Spirit!  Is it no wonder that the consecration in the Eucharist is only realized through communion?   We are consecrated in the Spirit of Christ and are thrust toward one another in the world with God.

Whether we like it or not by power and by right you are incarnate in the world, and we are all of us dependent upon you. We are all of us together carried in the one world-womb; yet each of us is our own little microcosm in which the Incarnation is wrought independently with degrees of intensity, and shades that are incommunicable. And that is why, in our prayer at the altar, we ask that the consecration may be brought about for us.[ii]

[i] Ronald Rolheiser, The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality (Doubleday: 1999), 121-127.

[ii] Teilhard de Chardin, HYMN OF THE UNIVERSE (Harper and Row: 1961),