Dear Friends,

From the beginning of my study for the diocesan priesthood at Holy Cross Seminary in La Crosse, Wisconsin, we were encouraged to “know ourselves”.

My initial response, was, what was there to know? A lot, I learned, and I am still not finished.

Initially, that idea of “knowing yourself” was a very external concept in which I looked at my likes and dislikes, what I preferred to eat, watch on television, wear, what cigarettes I smoked, what I liked to do for fun, that kind of thing, as did all my seminary classmates.

The college Spiritual Director was Father Joseph Grassl, a kind, quiet man who gathered us once a week in the late afternoon, a bad time, to be sure, for a talk on spirituality, a topic that I had never heard of before because conventional Catholicism is always concerned with physical behaviors treating the “spiritual” like a scoresheet.

We teach and say we believe that we are a composite union of body/soul, soul being the term we use for the spiritual dimension of the human person but in practice most conventional ministry in our Church is focused on the external behaviors that have their origins in historically specific cultural and community values and not in, necessarily, Christ, which is one reason why it is important to take the task of “knowing yourself” seriously, so you don’t get an identity imposed on you.

“Soul” is the powerful unconscious and sub-conscious identity that we all have and where the real influences of joy and sorrow, peace and violence, hopes and despairs, are to be found at the still point where we are in communion with the Mystery many of us call God, but is known by many other names or “no name” at all.

Father Grassl never gave us talks on sexual morality or virtues and vices or sins and confession, or talks about a Sweet Jesus, Mother Mary, or pious saints, he did try to teach us to learn to be still and just be, so that the Spirit could be heard.

The phrase that he gave us to try and facilitate the art of quiet and stillness, “Be still and know that I am God.”

The idea was to say the phrase either with words or hold the words in our mind repeatedly but dropping a word each time as in, Be still and know…Be still…Be…

The idea was to try and get ourselves out of the business of being God and just being ourselves, and to pay attention to the thoughts that intrude on the “just being” and the stillness as those thoughts and distractions are the shadow side of our identity and we ignore them to our own peril, trust me on that, if you will.

Father Grassl introduced me and my classmates to ideas of the self that go inside, beneath surface identities, to the still point where, I believe, we are one with the Mystery many of us call God.

This is not something you learn as in riding a bike or baking bread, it is a new lesson every day and many times during the day.

In my literature classes, I was introduced to James Baldwin, T S Eliot, William Faulkner, Martial, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, Rainer Rilke, and John Steinbeck, among others.

Perhaps, the most significant movements toward knowing myself were in my being asked to audition for plays by Father Lyle Schulte, one of my philosophy professors. It should be noted that at the end of my freshman year of college in a very radical move for the times, the seminary, all males, forged a relationship with Viterbo College, all females, and we took classes together and worked in the drama productions together.

The idea behind that, again radical for that time and even more radical, for these times, was that healthy priests, effective pastoral ministry, had to be based on mature and successful relationships with peers. I learned through my work in those plays a lot about mature and successful relationships not based on or within Church structures where the balance of power was held by the priest but to be able to engage others with a sense of mutual equality and respect.

I was cast in two of Arthur Miller’s plays, The Crucible, reader’s theater, and as Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, Henry in Henry IV Part I, Dr. Faustus in Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, various characters in Hogan’s Goat by William Alfred, among others.

I will not pretend that at the time I had deep insights into the scripts of these plays, but as time has gone on, I have, formed values based on those plays and rejected other values explored in those plays especially regarding the possibilities of the abuse of power as compared with the possibilities of using strength in the service of the Gospel.

In acting in those plays I developed a kind of confidence that is not a Wizard of Oz confidence but a confidence that was based on my own inner sense of value and worth, that is why, I think, I never said no to making it easy for anyone to benefit from the ministry of the Church at the times of baptism, marriage, or death and why I decided to never talk about money and, eventually, to discontinue “taking up collections”.

While I have the need for approval and affirmation like all of us, I tried to not to institutionalize mine in my ministry for and with the Church, the Church properly understood as the folks at hand.

It is a daily, many times a day, sometimes, task to return to the inner still point and try to, though not very successfully most of the time, to detach myself from the envy, pride, sloth, anger, and assorted other negative human responses that I am prone to hold onto.

Father Grassl used Viktor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning, as the basis of his weekly talks my junior and senior years of college and introduced me to the importance of psychology and psychoanalysis in spiritual formation and humane and human ministry.

An unexpected inheritance, midway through my life, from the Estate of Bishop Gaughan, in my role as Executor, enabled me to travel and pursue spiritual and ministerial formation with, what I believe to be, the finest minds and hearts of Catholic theologians/spiritual teachers in this country- Richard Rohr, Ronald Rohlheiser, Jack Shea, Joyce Rupp- and I was able to earn a Doctor of Ministry degree and study with some of the wisest and most competent men and women in the Archdiocese of Chicago.

Peace,

Father Niblick