Joy: "Ministerial Identity"

Every Tuesday, the Pastoral Ministry students at Villanova gather in a circle of couches and comfy chairs for one hour. This time of discussion is so fruitful and listening to the Campus Ministry Interns and the other three students is so enlightening. Joyce, our professor, will sometimes speak of her experience of a lay woman working at the parish level, going back to school for her MDiv, and working in her various ministries at the time when lay ecclesial ministers were in the post-Vatican II creative space of brand new beginnings in the Church.  We were assigned to read Michael Downey's Ministerial Identity: A Question of Common Foundations for our Pastoral Ministry class this week.  So good.  This is a paragraph from the portion speaking of the importance of prayer [bold emphasis added]:

"A baptismal spirituality is a whole way of life wherein we learn to lean into the Word of God, to find a lamp unto our feet, so that we can behold the gift that is always and everywhere being offered.  

It is a whole way of life by which we become a living doxology, so that all we say and do becomes an act of praise to the Father, through Christ, by the presence and power of the Holy Spirit given in baptism.  

This is consecrated living.  Prayerful living.  

A way of being held in the knowledge that all that I am and all that I have is first and finally gift.  

Prayer is a way of living with, in, and from that gift.  All the time.  

Ministry that springs from any other motive other than this is misguided."

You are gift. All the time.