Homily delivered by Father Theodore Murnane, SVD during the Funeral Liturgy for Father Eugene Verstraelen, SVD

Homily delivered by Father Theodore Murnane, SVD during the Funeral Liturgy for Father Eugene Verstraelen, SVD
Wednesday, September 12, 2007, 2 PM
Main Chapel
University of San Carlos

My dedication to Father Eugene is a passage from a fourth century Bishop of Milan, St. Ambrose:

He who reads much with understanding is filled. He who is filled, waters others…Let your discourses then, be flowing, let them be clear and lucid, so that you may bring pleasure to the ears of the people by your discourse on morals, and with the charm of your word soothe the faithful, that they may readily follow your guidance.

For a few minutes this afternoon, I will serve as the biblical lamp stand of the Gospel to allow the light of the person and life of Fr. Eugene Verstraelen, a member of the Catholic missionary congregation Society of the Divine Word (SVD)—a man who read much with understanding—to flood our lives: his simplicity of life and joyous openness to every person; his rich intellectual life as a scholar and a minister of the Word; and, finally, what because of training and temperament he himself could not articulate.

The first sketch—espying the simplicity of his life and his joyous openness to every person—includes a photo of Father Eugene, in swimming trunks and peaked, khaki cap, relaxing in the shallows off Dinagat Island with eight-year old Nikki, granddaughter of Waray and Mithese Baltar; secondly, the big floppy, blue canvass bag with yellow-strap handles bearing a change of clothes, electric razor, and two small, thumb-worn Bibles, one in Hebrew and the other in Greek, which Father Eugene carried early last Friday aboard ship to Cebu; and, upon arrival, the considerate gesture of choosing at breakfast to sit with a lone confrere when he could have enjoyed the company of a larger table.

The sketch reveals a man and a religious who acquired sense of peace with God and himself, together with a religious and an intellectual freedom that allowed him to treat everyone, everywhere, with the same impartial attention.

The second sketch—outlining Father Eugene’s rich intellectual life—is the daily reading of the Bible, both in Hebrew and Greek; his discussion in Cebu earlier this year of René Gerard’s anthropology of violence in the Bible and Murray Gell-Mann’s work on complexity, extrapolating quantum field theory to evolution, and to human and computer adaptive systems; and, further back in his career, his linguistic competence and scientific promotion of a formal-functional analysis of language analogous to that of Noam Chomsky’s generative grammar. The fruit of this labor appears in the work of his protégé, Mimi Borromeo-Trosdal and, in a second generation of scholars, Airlin Espina and Astrid Sala-Boza.

The second sketch elicits a sympathetic understanding of a retiring priest-scholar, saddened by the declining number of academically trained confreres at the University and the diminishing interest in things of the mind and the spirit in his own religious community. As he surmised, this situation would have implications for the institution’s future.

The third sketch—masking what Fr. Eugene himself could not articulate—or what is common lore of management workshops today—one’s blind spot—this sketch includes a lengthy manuscript where he presses into service the full range of his reading and his understanding of things scriptural on a critique—always with apology, of course—of Church policy and practice today; secondly, the decline of education in the Philippines, epitomized for him by the thoughtless absences of primary education teachers from their task for this workshop or that; and, thirdly, and blind spot I did say, his low estimation of things administrative. This was true whether they were:

School meetings—everything would be fine, if we only gave our lessons well;

Province or district assemblies—increasing deafness in one ear afforded him a beneficent shield;

Trips to Rome on Society affairs—unabashedly again, a waste time and money.

Curiously enough, this third sketch is nothing short of a patch over an inner eye that could see—but which he himself could not articulate. For Father Eugene held the tools for understanding—and dealing with—the shallow amalgam of a no-longer effective roles of ministry in the Church and contemporary—often popular—pastoral practice and, correlatively, a lingering worldview that is creationist, hierarchical and dogmatic. Human advancement, he understood, has not only shown human agency and hori-zontal relations to be rightful complements in the world today to the transcendence we seek, but also a modern world that is elbowing out the static, essentialist categories in which many of us were educated in favor of more dynamic, interactive or if you would—dialogical modes of engage-ment. Father Eugene was grounded in the theological anthropology in Karl Rahner’s Theological Investigations as exemplified in the human consciousness of the Redeemer, an understanding of the dialectics of pluralistic societies in Bernard Lonergan’s Method in Theology made intelligible through the notions of religious, moral and intellectual conversion and, finally, the work of a host of other authors, ancient and modern, that forms the seedbed of our modern democratic tradition and the ideals of purposeful communicative action.

But now, let us return to where we began. Back to the shallows—and the deep sea where he swam every day—off Dinagat Island, to Father Eugene’s adopted family, Nikki, Mithese and Waray; but also back to his former students and, perforce, to us, his companions on a common journey to the Lord. Let not our present grief choke off the gratitude we owe for the gift of Fr. Eugene, his simplicity of life and joyous openness to every person. In the irritants of our daily lives; in the decisions we face, both momentous and not so; in the suspicion, fear, and intolerance with which we cloth our relations with others, let us open our hearts to draw from the equanimity we experienced in Fr. Eugene, his joyous and unadorned presence among us.

And, back to the University where Fr. Eugene taught. Let not his retirement in Surigao or his quiet slipping away lead us to make light of the significance of the presence among us of one, who maintained a rich intel-lectual life as a scholar and a minister of the Word throughout his life. Through the example of a man—whom we could easily consider imprac-tical, we have a call to invest in the cultivation of our own minds, in a personal engagement in the substance of what we purport of offer our students. This intellectual and spiritual capital demands no less priority than that we give position and professional opportunities, celebratory events and awards, new buildings and decorous surroundings. Beyond mere human resource management policy, our own personal investment in the culture of the mind should goad us to an active recruitment of similar-minded confreres and lay scholars who, together with us, will renew the academic enterprise at the University.

Finally, back to the Philippine Southern Province. If we as SVD confreres to be fruitful in our self-giving—replicas of the kenosis of the Divine Word, our self-empting will be rendered fruitless unless we possess a certain fullness of mind and heart. Indeed, our present philosophical and theologi-cal training far outstrips, in breadth and relevance, the education Fr. Eugene and many of us had prior to the Second Vatican Council. But this knowledge must be made operative through reading, discussion and, above all, daily reflection on our pastoral and social practice. Beyond traditional sacramental practice, and in face of a lack of understanding of the practices we now espouse and the press of deadlines for reporting on funded social projects, we must re-infuse our pastoral leadership and management practices by a continual mining of the underlying principles—the dynamics of small communities and the ability to draw people together around their ideal of the Christian life—that alone will maintain our pastoral leadership and management practice effective and relevant today.

In conclusion, my essáy this afternoon contends that Fr. Eugene Verstraelen, SVD, in both his relations with others and his interior life, adhered to the exhortation of Saint Ambrose:

Let your discourses then, be flowing, let them be clear and lucid, so that you may bring pleasure to the ears of the people by your dis-course…Your sermon and treatment should need no bolstering from without. Rather, let your discourse be its own defense as it were, and see that you utter no empty or unnecessary word.