Br. Lucas Hall

Dominic

“The last act is the greatest treason; to do the right deed for the wrong reason.” These famous words of T.S. Eliot make plain a fairly straightforward truth: that external appearances of good, motivated by evil, are not actually good. Eliot didn’t invent this; how often the psalms decry those “who speak peaceably with their neighbors, while strife is in their hearts,”[i] or lament “presumptuous sins” and “secret faults.”[ii] How often Christ himself speaks of one’s motives, attitudes, and internal dispositions as equivalent to one’s external deeds, describing lust as adultery and hatred as murder,[iii] while insisting that those who fast and give alms while publicly advertising their piety have no reward with God, for they have already received their reward of public acclaim, which was their true intention.[iv]

This necessity of linking our good external actions and our good internal intentions is appropriate for this day, as we commemorate St. Dominic, the founder of the so-called Dominican Order, or more properly, the Order of Preachers. There is much I could say about his biography, but I will focus on a few bits; as a young priest in the early 1200s, he encountered the Cathar movement, a religious sect with gnostic beliefs, a dualistic conception of the universe that deemed physical existence as a curse and imprisonment for beings of spirit and light, and sought by fasting, prayer, and good deeds to find escape and release from the curse of physical existence. These Cathars gained a great following, often because of their great devotion. This conflict began with words, but ended with violence; Cathar sympathizers assassinated a local representative of the Pope, beginning years of retaliatory violent persecution. So this was the scene Dominic saw before him; a Church that had been morally and pastorally lax, and a sect that was very devotionally serious but had a view that rendered all the good things of God as evil, all the while cities were growing as more people moved from the countryside and old models of pastoral ministry weren’t providing the needed formation and support for these people. Dominic was concerned.

And so he launched forth with a new order, dedicated to preaching, teaching, and pastoral care. Related to monastic orders, in its devotion to prayer and penance among its members, and related to the non-monastic clergy, in its practice of outside ministry, but structured in such a way that was more flexible than either of those two other groups, to meet the dynamic, shifting needs of the local populations.

I say “needs,” but Dominic excelled at bridging the gap between our needs, plural, shifting based on context, different between individual people and even changing within the same person day-by-day, and our need, singular, universal, and for God, the ability to offer ourselves fully to God. We offer ourselves fully by offering intense action, giving our efforts to fasting and alms, works of piety and works of charity; we also offer ourselves fully by offering deep devotion, sincerity of heart, a spirit of love and affirmation that God, all that God has made, are good. It is nothing more and nothing less than the love of God with our whole heart, the love of neighbor as ourselves, in thought, word, and deed. It is the right deed, for the right reason.

[i] Psalm 28

[ii] Psalm 19

[iii] Matthew 5:21-28

[iv] Matthew 6:1-5