You are at an anniversary dinner. The table is ready, and the guests enter and are seated. Your eyes take in the marvelous feast before you. Now be honest. Do your really pay much attention to the bread and butter? So it is with the Church's rich saintly fare. There are flamboyant dishes like Teresa of Avila, replete with Spanish dancing and castanets. There is the delightful little poor man of Assisi who would preach to the birds if no one else would listen. But St. Dominic? Who even knows who he is!
We need bread-and-butter saints. They are the staff of life, and Dominic is rich fare. God in Catherine's Dialogue says Dominic's ship is "well ordered." Rather than understand this as "running a tight ship" I'd like to suggest otherwise.
First, Dominic made sure that nothing in the Dominican rule of life would bind under pain of sin. This differs from other religious communities. Freedom was utmost in Dominic's vision. This means the brothers who would join him to preach the Word would be responsible for their own faithfulness to the Dominican way of community life. No one was going to police them. This allowed the Order to flourish like a marvelous garden with scholars and lawyers, artists and teachers, mystics and administrators. First and foremost, the Dominican, clergy or lay, is a man or woman of the Word, not just by imitation, but by identification. The mirror and measure for all one is and does is the incarnate Word.
Next, the Dialogue refers to the Dominican habit as a gift from Mary, the Mother of God. To be exact, Dominic probably took the white habit of the Norbertine canons when he served as a canon. It is the scapular given by Mary to Blessed Reginald that makes the Dominican habit unique. Mary's assurance was that it was a sign that she protected them, front and back. Dominic chose a belt rather than a rope, because a knight needed a belt on which to hang his sword. The Dominican was to be a knight of the Word, and his sword was the rosary because that was the only way the faithful could access the gospel life of Jesus before the printing press was invented in 1442. Many were not able to hear preaching regularly, for before the Dominicans, only the bishop could preach at the liturgy.
Finally, we need to remember why Dominicans came on the scene in the first place. Dominic could not stay a canon regular in Spain because the Albigensian heresy spreading throughout France haunted him. This heresy was a recycled form of a gnostic hatred of matter as evil. To Dominic this was an affront to the incarnate Word who had entered our history and pressed our humanness to himself in an unbreakable union. Dominic had a grace-permeated mind. All of creation spoke of God to him, and I suggest this is the challenge this very unshowy saint presents to us. In our day we have a different heresy. We don't hate matter. We worship it. We idolize it. It consumes us. This humble preacher-saint calls us back to the simple "bread and butter" of our baptismal identity with with incarnate Word who heals our dis-ease. Dominic points us to whose we are. All our material goods are negotiable. Dominic challenges us to reclaim our sacramental worldview as Catholics. Pressured by our consumerist culture we can slip into spiritual dementia and forget that all is gift. We can't take any of it with us when we go. Our focus needs to be to remain safely in the arms of the Shepherd. So simple...so ordinary...so "bread and butter." May this feast of this very ordinary man challenge all of us to keep our eyes in the right place to live our very extraordinary ordinary lives.
