Celebration Time!

The Dominicans and the Jubilee of Mercy

It’s Anniversary time. We’re 800 years old! It’s a time for looking back at what has been, and looking forward for what can be. It’s also a time for reclaiming who we are and what we are all about. For Dominicans that means being something first, then doing something. We are the Holy Preaching. We don’t just imitate the Word of God. We identify with it. We are first of all a word of hope, then of joy, then of peace. We are worded women and men, and in this celebration year we are also called to be a word of mercy. How so?

Dominicans walk a tightrope. (This image comes from Edward Schillebeeckx, OP.) We walk through history with a balance pole. On each end is a pail. One pail holds the Gospels, the Documents of the Church, and the Creeds. In the other we carry the New York Times, the Economist, the Science News, and the New Internationalist. If we let either go, we fall off the tightrope. Because we identify with the Incarnate Word, we are people of the both/and, not people of the either/or. We look for the truth wherever it may be found, even in the enemy, and we honor it. We live a spiritual act of mercy. We instruct the ignorant, and the first object of our outreach of mercy is ourselves. Our study is our penance, our daily asceticism. It prepares us to sow the Word we identify with, to give it away so there is always room for more. Thus we are mendicants. We are beggars. The Jubilee has begun – may our minds, our mouths, our hands overflow with mercy.