03/15/21 Fr. Matthew Hawkins

[Music] good evening and welcome to the journey home i'm marcus grodi your host for this program as i've said many times this is a great privilege and i thank uwtn for this mother angelica for inviting me to be the host for this program all all these years and i thank you for the emails that we we really get a lot of emails of people that are very grateful for this program hearing the stories and encouragement of faith and i i pray in the same way that tonight's story is an encouragement to you our our guest in a way is a unique guest well in many ways i will say he's a unique guest father matthew hawkins he's a former african methodist episcopal and the reason i say unique i have not had that many former ame pastors or amy converts to the church but i often get a comment from people that i don't have enough african-american guests on the show and father we'll talk about that because the truth is there aren't as many as there ought to be and it comes with converts so father hawkins first of all welcome to the journey thank you so much what a great privilege to have you here great to be here and as i was telling father just a little bit ago he's a newly ordained priest ordained the same month as my son peter and i wish my son we're here for you guys to talk i almost wish he was interviewing you because i know you two young priests would have a lot to share but what i'd i'll do is i'll back off and uh turn the table over to you because we'd love to hear your story father uh so um well the yeah i grew up in the uh in ame household my father was an amy minister and he came from a long line of amy ministers uh going back to the 19th century really every generation had at least one ame minister uh in in it and uh when it came time when his generation was you know came of age uh there were three of the boys and none of them entered the ministry and when my father married my mother uh they met at uh my mother was going to spellman college and my father was at morehouse university and that's where they met in atlanta and so when he was courting her my mother came from a baptist household her father was a baptist minister and she saw what the life of a minister's like wife was like you know that you live in a fish bowl everybody knows what you're doing everybody gossips and that kind of thing she didn't want any parts of that to be a minister's wife so she made him promise that he would not go into the ministry if they were going to get married so he made that promise uh but then they had difficulty conceiving and this went on for like nearly a decade and finally my father said you know he was praying and he said is it because i haven't gone into the ministry and you know if you um you know if you allow us to conceive then i will uh i'll become a minister and so you know a month later my mother was pregnant with my older brother and so he kept his promise and and went into the ministry and and and so that tradition continued and so there was an expectation for our generation uh my brother and and uh me uh that one of us would go into uh the ame ministry and that was that was kind of an expectation um it wasn't really clear who i figured it was gonna be him that he would go into the ministry or be a clergy of some kind he was the older brother um but the other thing was that uh so we had a a household that was both you know in there was the influence of the baptist church because of my mother and grandmother and then of course the amy tradition was very strong there but it was an ecumenical uh householders in in the sense that they appreciated interfaith and ecumenical dialogue they sent us to jewish summer camps and eventually to a catholic sent me to a catholic elementary school my brother to a catholic middle school attended a quaker high school so we had all of this broad exposure and um you know well i didn't interrupt my father but i'm thinking i'm guessing that our audience doesn't know a lot about amy i would think that many of us would assume that in the south that african americans are mostly baptist but i don't myself don't know that big of a difference between the baptist and the ame traditions well the baptists certainly are the largest and especially the national baptist convention and then you have the progressive baptist union i think our convention is is smaller than the amy church actually the ame has had a disproportionate influence on african-american history because it's emphasized education so it's produced a lot of the leadership in african-american communities so it's it's smaller in number actually the number of ames in the united states is is about is probably pretty much the same number as there are african-american catholics if you're looking at absolute numbers okay but of course the percentage of the churches it is a historically black protestant tradition church uh as is the uh national baptist convention and the progressive uh baptist convention and uh am i right to assume that you know we've got baptist methodists uh we have one of the more calvinist ones more armenian is that the same difference in the baptists and the ami uh the ama church is definitely methodist it really didn't break in terms of theology uh with the methodist church the as is true really with all of the churches in the uh the black uh protestant tradition of historically black protestant tradition churches is they were formed because they couldn't worship uh with uh the white members of those churches right uh you know and so and even in the catholic church i mean if you go to the basilica in baltimore there's the slave gallery so the slaves had to stay up in the balcony to worship there well that was the same thing in the methodist church and that was the same for some of the other churches as well so when they broke away it wasn't because they had differences in theology with the methodist church but it was because they wanted to worship on the basis of equality and they felt that uh the message of the gospel was that uh all people were equal in the in the eyes of god that was the origin of of those churches did the amy pastors then when the uh when the african-american branch broke away were they able to get training at the other seminaries or did they have to train themselves to start start their own seminaries yeah they they had to really form their own uh internal training uh that eventually led to the seminaries but they uh so it was whatever they could really pull together although many of the ministers in the ame church had gone to uh to the other seminaries and there were and so there were some divisions there you know were you trained within the ame church were you trained at a methodist seminary because it depended on your social status on your social classes whether or not you would have access uh to that kind of seminary training and so and and there were also uh you know there were also influences by the episcopalian church and so how does that fit within uh the the amy church and but it really came down on the side of methodism as opposed to really relying heavily on the episcopalian influence but that was also a part of it i was going to say higher low higher low church right uh i would say it's it's really more the low church uh in in terms of uh how it manifests itself in the ame right yeah yeah all right all right so uh you're one of those sons uh that's expected uh but well we had broad exposure uh growing and as i say my parents were what an ecumenical that's pretty amazing that you had that experience and it was also you know it was in the midst of the civil rights movement in vatican ii the early days of vatican ii so you had a combination of at that time uh and i think it's unfortunate right now that we don't have the degree of interfaith and ecumenical dialogue that occurred at that time so it wasn't so unusual if you were in the ministry then you probably knew somebody else in another ministry whether the person was a rabbi or a priest or a protestant minister uh because you were you know you dealt with very similar issues in terms of working with congregations your your your polity was much different but um but you dealt with with similar issues in terms of working with people and then again the civil rights movement brought a lot of people together uh of different faiths and and and different communions and so uh so i think that in many ways that was a unique time but we were encouraged and the the catholic church was in the early stages of vatican ii and trying to figure it out and uh so that was a a source of curiosity among many protestants and uh and and it was also uh uh you know something that uh that opened up new opportunities for uh for dialogue uh so but it gave us the opportunity to be exposed uh broadly to be exposed to judaism to be exposed to catholicism in addition to the baptist church and the the methodist church and the uh we were living in pittsburgh originally so we were in the north my father took a job with city hall he was the first african-american with the kind of executive position city hall in saint pete florida and and that was very sensitive position for him to be and this was in 1968 and so 6768 and uh uh so it was a very uh it was a sensitive situation because uh he was a northerner and although he grew up in florida and he did grow up in saint pete but you know he married my mother and uh and her family was from new york did his accent change from spending time in the north no no no he still had that floridian accent and and my mother in many ways still had the her mother and father were from from georgia and they kept the georgia traditions and methods of raising children and an accent and everything else but um but for as far as the people in saint pete were concerned he was a northerner and uh so they didn't see that as his coming home to saint pete as he saw it and so there were in the african-american community there was some suspicion that oh you hired somebody from the north who wouldn't know the city and and there were you know there's some truth to that um but at the same time that was kind of the compromise if they were going to have an african-american in that position in city hall uh that was breaking new ground for them and then [Music] but they didn't want somebody who was involved in many of the controversies in the city our guest is father matthew hawkins father i i you know this is an understatement that i know there's a lot of progress that still needs to happen today in the area of racism but sometimes i think that people fighting to battle today forget the battles and the advances that were made during the time you're talking about i mean that was a difficult time but a lot improved i think well a lot improved but but a lot of ground has been lost i mean in those days uh you know one of the things about st pete was that when we moved there was that um again i don't want to put a a a happy face on segregation because it wasn't a very good time period right but as a person in elementary school now we were forced to go to you know you had to go to black schools and the whites had to go to the white school but the elementary school that i went to the principal and the teachers all taught sunday school of the amy church in other words there was that kind of because it was part of the same neighborhood so there was that continuity between church and the school even though it was a public school uh my brother went to a high school and the only high school for african-americans richest one and all of people no matter what neighborhood you were from if you were black you had to go to that high school that was different from the elementary school because that meant that you were crossing boundaries of neighborhoods where there could be conflicts and certainly the people didn't know each other in the high schools so here he was the skinny kid from the north playing the violin and wearing glasses and he's in this uh junior high school rather i'm sorry the junior high school and and so within the first week one of the kids threw a knife at him and it landed between his legs on the desk and on the seat wooden seat and you know so my mother yanked him out now the one school that would take blacks at that time was the catholic junior high school and so she enrolled him you know the next day in that catholic junior high school and that's how i got my exposure to catholicism because he would bring home the religion books right he was in seventh grade and he had religious studies so you know he was a typical seventh grader he wasn't really reading the books but i was reading and i was really curious and it opened my eyes because it it was a sea change i was used to seeing church and religion basically it's teaching immorality do good don't do bad right and and it really stopped at that well you know by the time i was in fifth grade i figured okay i've got this you know do you have anything more to say right um but that seemed to be the only message in terms of moral instruction how to behave and and and what to do and what not to do but when i was reading his books that he was bringing home that was trying to explain to seventh graders what was what vatican ii is all about and everything uh it was talking about making christ present to people it was talking about how you treat your friends and befriending the outsider the outcast and and one of the things you know my father really emphasized from at least third grade from what i remember was because that um that it was our responsibility if there were students who had at that time it was the learning disabilities you didn't know why really students were but if you had students who were considered quote unquote slow in the classroom and so the other kids would make fun of them uh that we weren't to be a part of that and as a matter of fact we were to support those kids right i mean he was he was he was uncompromising on that and we better not be part of that crowd that would make fun of them and alienate them and bully them in any school that we were in and i remembered when i first got a sense of what our religion meant and what it meant to be a member of our family was there was a candidate for governor who was running and and the campaign office was in on between going home and walking to school so all the kids loved we would go there and we'd get bumper stickers and we'd get buttons and we would get balloons and everything because and we would take them home and i remember and we would take them to school as well you know we just you know just we were just really loved it and so i remembered overhearing one of the teachers saying um it's so cute the way the kids are into this campaign it's too bad their candidate's going to lose and everybody i knew everybody in our neighborhood was for this particular candidate so we thought yeah what do you mean he's going to lose everybody's form so i went home and i was upset and i said to my father dad the teacher says i overheard the teachers talking they said our candidate is going to lose and so he said well uh son that's that's not it looks likely that the candidate will lose i mean if you you know i've been following the polls and i don't think that the candidate is going to win this election so i said well dad why are we supporting a loser we ought to be supporting the winner and my father said in this family uh we're always on the side of the underdog yeah yeah and you you just always remember and so his point was that principle was more important than winning it's not just winning for the sake of winning or shifting sides to be on the winning team but you always have to stand for principle he was clear about that a bit and that was in terms of the family but also in terms of religious father and so father and that's what i was seeing in this catholic grade book for seventh graders teaching them about how to live their faith and what it meant to live out and live their faith and it was bringing people in it was uh uh really a eucharistic way of living yeah uh drawing people in and and uh and breaking down barriers and so i thought oh so there's more to religion than just do good don't do bad there's actually and and that really did appeal to me and that was really one of my first exposures to uh catholicism all right all right at the time did you at that age did you discern this is ama this is catholicism or just or just religion expanded no yeah you know in a protestant household it was very clear [Laughter] there were we uh one of the things i always heard growing up uh you know just from people in the community my father's friends and other uh who were protestant ministers it was um well first of all when we lived in pittsburgh before moving to saint pete we would always walk to school and we would walk past the catholic school in the catholic church and in in those days you know i was too young to know that the neighborhood recently changed it used to be an italian neighborhood right a working-class italian neighborhood and it only recently changed to being a working-class african-american neighborhood but the the catholic church in the catholic school still had you know white students there basically so you had all the white students going to the catholic school and all the black students going to the public school and that was a big distinction that was in our minds but also a source of curiosity and i remember and so i asked my father well you know what's up with these catholics what does it mean to be a catholic and so he said well you know i mean they don't um they don't really believe their faith i said what do you mean he said well they have to go to church on sunday it says well if they have to go to church it seems to me that is more religious than we are not less religious and so and and so well you know it's not it's not really um they're just sort of going through the motions and i remember when my mother took me to she was voting and the voting the polling place was in the catholic school so it was the first time i ever was inside the catholic school and i saw these crucifixes on the wall and everything and i was what do you mean they aren't religious look at this you know there's nothing but religion here you know and and there there is this kind of devotion uh so there were sort of the mixed signals but they didn't fit if the argument against catholicism was that it was not sincere it was a different expression of religiosity but certainly the religiosity was there the other thing was children's film festival they used to show these movies on television for children from around the world all different parts of the world and so i'd see these movies from south america from africa and you'd have these catholic kids and they were devoutly making the sign of the cross you know and they were saying their prayers and so forth and and i thought this is a that there was a deep spirituality there uh that i didn't see in the protestant churches and so the ritualistic aspect of it and later as i learned about the sacraments and the liturgy that that introduced a kind of a kind of mysticism to enter into that i found was actually very attractive that again it moved beyond simply the moral instruction do good and don't do bad yeah with the question of having an encounter with christ yeah well you know sometimes parents we said well let's let's start with the do this and the don't do that we'll fill in the gaps later and the problem is we don't always fill in the game again you know we want to make sure they don't end up in jail so we start there you know they'll burn their hand on the stove but we've got to make sure we fill in the rest of the gas well yeah and i think early on um we do have to it's it's a process of socialization uh if if if you know parents are bored with the mass and and a lot of that also is the priest's responsibility to be if if we run through the masses though we're bored if the priest when we're celebrating mass if it seems as though we're bored with the celebration uh then of course it's not going to connect with people in the pews but the other thing is that how reverently we celebrate mass and how reverently the adults participate in mass will have an impact on the kids even if they don't know the details of it i think we can push beyond that do good don't do bad at a much earlier age when when i was in sixth grade that's when i first went to catholic elementary school it was after we moved back to the north back to pittsburgh and my parents were in between home we we were living with my godmother in the hill district of pittsburgh and and uh you know we didn't know where we were going to be a couple of months later so the most convenient thing was to enroll us in in me in the elementary school st paul elementary school my brother in the junior high school uh and so i was in the boys choir uh they they had a boys choir and they we were singing in latin they were drilling us in latin and everything it was it was a great experience uh but uh and so we were also supposed to sing at least two sundays uh out of the month in mass and so it was my first time being at a sunday mass and we were all dressed in these red robes and we you know would process uh down the aisle you know and up to the choir loft these winding stairs and uh and we would sing now i'm a protestant kid i've had very little religious instruction in the catholic school and to the extent that i had it it wasn't you know it didn't necessarily register because they weren't preparing me for a confirmation right i mean i wasn't a candidate for confirmation um but uh so i really didn't know you know necessarily you know what exactly was going on in the mass but what i did know was that it was beautiful what i did know was that it was something that was special and by the time i was in sixth grade i was pretty much in full rebellion against organized religion let me tell you i mean i've been in you know my father's church and and had a lot of respect for the traditions in the role of the amy church in the community but church itself as a preacher's kid was not exactly something that i was by that age to put him mildly looking forward to and of course my brother was older so he could also influence that even further and he had had his feel so so it was strange to me figuring that i'm you know i'm pretty much done with religion that when i went to the mass because of the beauty of the mass and and because it just had integrity that it felt painless it felt enjoyable and it reached the point where my father said because my brother and i were [Music] you know really complaining a lot about having to go to church on sunday and so he said okay well boys i'll make a deal with you you know i mean you're ministers kids you have to be in church at least two sundays we aren't catholics so you don't have to be in church every sunday so i'll tell you what two sundays out of the month you have to be uh you have to go to church and says really two sundays have a month he said yeah i said well that's fine i'm covered i'd go to the catholic church every day he said oh no no no no the catholic church doesn't count but yeah but i actually enjoyed it and and so and my point with that is that even if and i see this now with uh as i'm working with students in middle school and in elementary school and and some in high school but especially the younger ones the ones in elementary school and middle middle school they may not know everything about the structure of the mass point of fact many of them don't know much about the structure of the mass and what's happening but what they can appreciate is that something sacred is happening here what they can appreciate is that there is something sacramental and the non-catholics who attend mass in some of our schools are pretty much 90 protestant but they also uh they can appreciate it if we deliver it in a way that indicates that that there is something special here and something reverential uh occurring here and i do think that's terribly important because it's not really head knowledge that's at the core of our faith that explains the experience but first you have to have the experience and as i'm stressing with eighth graders this year is we're having we have very free willing discussions every friday in their classroom and uh what i'm trying to stress with them is that um you know of course we want you to study the catechism and that's necessary we want you to but what is your encounter with christ what is your experience of the faith what's your experience of the sacraments because the explanation the apologetics helped to clarify the experience but it's important to have that experience oh i couldn't agree more father we'll take a break now but i couldn't agree more with what you were saying because i was brought up lutheran i know so many young people that were brought up in churches they could recite the liturgy with their eyes closed but they didn't know jesus you know and and i think maybe there are even parents out here wondering what happened when i brought my child up through everything but why in the process did they not come to know christ what was missing you know when we come back from the break chris i want to make sure we get through your story before the program's over but to me this is an issue how do we make sure right that our young people have that encounter with jesus christ with everything else they're getting now do you make sure that people talk about that when they get back in a moment we'll see [Music] welcome back to the journey home i'm marcus grodi your host and our guest is father matthew hawkins what a great privilege uh father we we interrupted you and you were up and you were back up in pittsburgh you're and you're experiencing the catholic school so uh i probably have delayed you in your journey so i'll let you jump back into it so we make sure we get you into the into the church before we're done well it was a good experience being in in the catholic school and i think uh part of it yeah a lot of people say today because there are a lot of city catholic schools that are like two of our schools uh we have three schools in the parish i'm in right now or the two parishes combined uh that i'm in and uh but two of the three are 90 protestant yeah and so a lot of uh catholics will say well you know isn't that a waste of money isn't that a waste of resources why are we educating all these protestants but i look at it a different way myself being a person who was protestant in the catholic school and that is that it's our responsibility as bishop baron emphasizes evangelizing the culture we have to evangelize the culture and that's where we really make the connection and again i don't want to i know i'm going to sound dismissive of apologetics but that that's not where people connect again that is the the explanation that comes after the experience but the way that people experience life and the way that they experience their faith is through the culture it's very experiential and so the impact when i was in the catholic elementary school in pittsburgh it wasn't the nuns didn't go they weren't trying to convert me overtly like say well you must believe this and you must believe that they that wasn't but what they did do is expose us to a culture where we could encounter beauty and truth and then as that resonates with you you know and as you get older you're going to make your own decisions but if you never have exposure to that and this goes for cradle catholics as well if you've never had that exposure then how is it really going to grow and then you seek the answers you know then you turn to the apologetics and so forth but but there has to be that experience that encounter that that that makes this present to you and uh so i did experience that in elementary school and uh and so later in life uh by the time i hit junior high school i was pretty much of an agnostic um we had a very good seventh grade teacher i i don't blame him uh but uh but he was an agnostic and middle school teachers have a huge and now people say well that shows why we need to be careful about who we have teaching no he gave us questions he challenged us uh i would say why a lot of us became agnostic at that stage is that when we took those questions and brought them to uh people in our respective churches uh they didn't have any answers or they didn't even want to engage us and they didn't even have to have answers all we wanted was honesty we wanted authenticity you know we wanted to engage us in dialogue look i have these questions um and i'm wondering you know what your response is to them and if the response is uh young man you should read your catechism then that's that that is not going to work uh so you know by the time i was in seventh grade and and i was confronting especially the elders in my father's church because they historically black protestant churches have a dress code whether it's uh formal or or formally enforced or not but and and that is you know so you wear a suit and tie you know if you're a man and the women wore dresses and everything you you you dress for church that was something that that they weren't about to compromise on so here i am the preacher's kid although this was the church my father was he was teaching full-time at the university of pittsburgh didn't want to have a church so he was the assistant pastor at that and and the the head pastor was my godfather who was who was a bishop in the amy church and uh so i was first of all i didn't even want to go to church and uh my parents were forcing me so i would sit in the back of the church back to you my mother's up near the front right i i think she didn't even want to be seen with me actually because i was there with blue jeans and you know casual shirts and everything and i'm sitting there in the back uh and it just occurred to me that you know i was thinking all this time oh she's giving me space she was probably saying i don't want to be seen with this kid are you kidding me he's not mine yeah but i'm i was sitting back there and so one day the you know my godfather the bishop calls me into his office and he's got all his elders surrounding him and he says uh boy what are you rebelling against i said what do you mean well i'm not rebelling against anything well you see you come to church in blue jeans and casual shirts you must be rebelling against something and i said i'm not rebelling against every sunday we sing the hymn just as i am without one plea but that thy blood was shed for thee and i'm just coming just as i am and so he said you know he asked me some other questions and and so i gave them answers based on science and and and all the elders were just laughing they had a good old time and they weren't taking it seriously but i thought well he doesn't have any answers and they aren't really engaging me and uh but this this agnostic teacher is yeah um and that's why i think it's critically important for us to take very seriously especially when once people are in middle school uh take very seriously their questions and their concerns and we we might not in all likelihood well we definitely aren't going to have all the answers we might not even have most of the answers but it's very important to listen and it's important to take their questions seriously because those questions are important for them and they're trying to figure out how to live their life they're trying to figure out what works and what doesn't work and and if we act like these are non-questions then we've taken ourselves entirely uh out of the ballpark well eventually given them an answer yeah yeah yeah we've given it yeah we've given them an answer and that's what happened to you exactly well you know my parents forever persistent by the time i reached high school you know they um they enticed me to go to because they knew i want to get away from home anyway and so they said well you know there's this quaker boarding school upstate new york [Laughter] you know you think i thought well yeah of course i want to go there and so i went to the quaker boarding school now the thing about the quakers is that um you know that worked for me because uh you know you sit in meetings for worship and you contemplate the light within and so it's not heavy on dogma and doctrine and everything else but it's but it is not denying the presence of god and it's discovering that presence of god and that was the thing to get around it and by the way my father tried everything as i think back on it he was trying everything to keep me in church uh and i do have to give him credit he went to extraordinary lengths i mean you know one day would come home with the good news bible for teenagers right and maybe if we give him bible and language that he would understand this would get him in i was looking at him reading it this guy this has nothing to do with me these are people from 2000 years ago it's got nothing to do with me so he um would bring these albums jesus christ superstar spell you know well you know i understand the kids like this maybe you'll like that um but one day he brought home an album uh the misa bossa nova the bossa nova mask coming out of chicago and i played that thing and it was like it was just incredible like the scales fell from my eyes because it just resonated and again it wasn't something that i understood intellectually but the songs you know uh which was the kyrie but it was a bit of course it was in english so you know lord have mercy lord have mercy christ have mercy and i just instinctively felt the need to sing that and lamb of god who takes away the sins of the world have mercy on us it was just so beautiful and of course the our father was beautifully sung and i would just sing that over and over again and i really did feel the presence of god uh with that liturgy the bossa nova liturgy it connected with me because it was you know it was it was an arrangement that that that was attractive to to a teenager well to adults to anybody really but um but also the lyrics did matter you know it wasn't just oh well this is a catchy beat and so that was one crack in my wall of resistance toward organized religion and through that crack and again it was coming from the catholic church right so once again it gave me the sense that well there's something there and so i'd had these a good experience in terms of reading my brother's religion book when i was still in elementary school i had the good experience when i was in elementary school and finally going to a catholic school you know there was something uh that it humanized the culture all around the school and all around the cathedral and everything i mean it added something to life in the city there was that was very clear even though you couldn't quite put a finger but it it's it's it it's civilized city life that was clear that the presence of the church there was so important for that um and and then the misa bossa nova the bossa nova mass you know once again it's like well you know it's not really god that i have a problem with it's these elders [Laughter] but uh you know and and so uh so that connected and so then when i went to the quaker boarding school of course there again there was this um oh well there are other ways of doing this and it was contemplating the life light within now i always felt guilty because i did value that sitting still for the hour and contemplating the light with them but i was 17. and i i never felt that i really got in a good hour and i didn't you know my mind was all over the place it was never really focused and i always felt you know at some point i'm going to do this and i never really get it and i you know this is actually leaping decades ahead forward but that was the reason why i enrolled as a for eucharistic iteration as a nocturnal adorer it was because of that quaker boarding school because one of the things that we would do is um uh occasionally there were these special days when we would get up at four o'clock in the morning and we would have the steak and egg breakfast and then you would go and uh and worship that was like very memorable the high point there were many high points during that school mountain climbing was one of them but that was another one and so i always felt that i have to do this right so when at the newman center in pittsburgh near the university the oratory uh we started perpetual eucharistic adoration i said oh i'm signing up for the four o'clock you know i did that for seven years to make up for the quaker boarding school experience when i felt that i didn't get it right and it was a lot easier to do of course i was older so maybe that had something to do with the two but but also having a focus i think one of the reasons why it was so hard to contemplate the light within was there there really wasn't a focus okay and so what do you what are you looking i mean it could be yourself really and and not the lord what are you taking in that's transforming you right uh but during the eucharistic adoration you know it was just the transformative experience so i do credit the quaker boarding school for making me a good adore of the eucharist but um so i was kind of you know again it was a struggle it was back and forth there were cracks in the resistance but but those cracks were there but there was also the resistance to fully embracing any kind of formal religion and by the time i was an undergrad uh the i'm not going to name the school because i don't want to and i'm sure their policies have changed but when i was an undergrad there uh there are the they would have the i think they felt the freshmen were not civilized enough to be on campus yet so the thing was they put all the freshmen in two freshmen dorms that were about a quarter of a mile away from the school it was in a rural area to see who would survive and after you demonstrated after a year if you survived academically and you hadn't uh gotten drunk to the point of of completely passing out then you could move on campus so it was an animal house it was a total zoo uh that first year and i was in that animal house and uh you know while i wasn't yeah i wasn't religious i wouldn't consider myself uh goody two shoes by any stretch of the imagination but this was crazy i mean you had people who were drinking and passing out in their own vomit and i thought this is i mean it wasn't it wasn't a question of of right and wrong of morality it was this is stupid you know this is this just doesn't make sense and the only people who weren't doing that were these evangelical christian kids they were part of this protestant evangelical movement and and my girlfriend was part of this protestant evangelical movement so that was and so i just had to join it you know i mean first of all you know everybody wants peers friends around them and those are the only ones who seem sane reasonably sane and then of course you know the girlfriend made a it was an extra uh made it extra necessary so i joined this group but as i started attending their meetings it just seemed that the theology was i mean i had had exposure to again in the jewish summer camps we you know we did study judaism we studied hebrew and and so forth we were exposed to the psalms uh catholic elementary school we did have religious ed it was you know quaker high school it was you know very much uh my grandmother's side of the family uh with the baptist influence we would go to their church you know fairly frequently but and and the ame influence and i thought in all of this mainstream and we also went to a presbyterian church in florida that's another story but but in all of this exposure so i thought i had a pretty good understanding of religion i was a preacher's kid after all you know and i thought but there's nothing this doesn't fit um anything that i've gotten from any of these traditions and uh what seemed to be missing was well there were a lot of things that that appeared to be missing but above all the emphasis seemed to be on evangelizing cultivating relationships within the tradition and it's like what does this mean what what what is the prayer life uh uh in this entity so i told my girlfriend i said you know yeah there's something missing here i can't quite put a finger on it and she said well uh you know uh how much of the bible have you read i said well preachers kid i haven't read any of it and she said well they know bible verses and there were all these bible verses they memorized and they could spell it off and she said so so what do you know and so i said well yeah i might not know bible bible verses but what i what i want to do is how about if we go to a different church every sunday go to methodist church one sunday baptist church another sunday presbyterian church another sunday catholic church another sunday and and see where we belong and see if it connects or and if if nothing connects we come back here and so she said well you know you go on your journey i'm not going to do that right so i did that so one sunday went to a presbyterian church then a methodist church and a baptist church the last church i went to was a catholic church and why the last [Laughter] and it just clicked it just clicked i mean the now i went overboard because again i was kind of a coming from the mindset of a protestant so i thought it was all about the homily [Music] so we they had three priests who were really good homilies and one was very earthy down to earth he was a former construction worker and so he made things in very earthy terms the other studied a lot of thomas merton and so there was a lot of mysticism and the other was actually the sociology teacher at the university and so he would make these connections in terms of what was happening in society today so i would go to mass you know three sunday masses plus week yeah you know mass during the weekdays at six o'clock in the morning i was taking in as many masses as i could to hear these homilies and uh and so you know priests invited in those days that was before rcia so you had you received instruction directly from the priest and the priest said well do you want to receive the eucharist i said yeah he said well then let's go through instruction and uh and so we went through the catechism life in christ and uh uh and and so it just connected in the back of the church there were there was all this literature all these books uh the books on different forms of spirituality john of the cross you know thomas merton thomas the kempis you had of course thomas aquinas saint augustine on and on you had this huge banquet of windows ways of really deepening your spirituality and following different paths and i thought you know why didn't anybody tell me about this before why didn't i know about this you know uh in all of these different forms of prayer and eventually i learned about contemplative prayer and lectio divina uh eucharistic adoration uh the liturgy of the hours and on and on and the rosary fascinated me you know and and a lot of my friends would say well why are you praying that's for old women why are you bringing rosie i said no you know no it isn't this the the repetition of the hail mary's you enter into a space and it really that enables me to enter into contemplative prayer and so um it keeps me focused right and so i really valued that prayer and it's been in the scriptural rosary as well because then i could go through when the protestants were critical why are you praying to marry and what's that got to do with the bible and i said this whole thing is about the bible the the decades are different scenes within the bible i am praying that i'm literally praying the bible um and so it was a great it had a greatly liberating effect for me and then of course once the cat by this time i was on campus you know i was like you know it survived the first year so i'm on campus and uh the people across the hall and so forth there was a student directly across the hall that i'm still in contact with through facebook um and they were just so super you know these were catholic students and i think in many ways it inspired their faith because they sort of took them for granted one of the things i heard so frequently from catholics was i didn't think anybody ever joined our church yeah i thought you you're born in it and if you aren't born in you wouldn't want to have anything to do with it and so i think it really encouraged them and so they were very they would accompany me to mass and they would do everything they could to support this quest that i was on uh to learn more more and more about catholicism and and preparing at this point for uh confirmation very supportive and and that part of it was was important in terms of my formation as well and so eventually i'm you know transferred to university of pittsburgh and and was confirmed at st paul cathedral wow but it was um but that was the important journey and it was having these windows these insights into the especially the spirituality of the catholic church the prayer life of the catholic church but also the appreciation i think people underestimate uh pope john paul the first but he had a real appreciation for literature and of course uh you know his smile was just infectious but if you wanted to know what it meant um uh you know i was seeing all these televangelists and everything else yeah john paul the first to me stood in contrast to that and he was so modest when did you come into church what year about that was uh 1978. so seven years when was john paul when i received what was the year of the three popes i forgive you i think that was uh 78. right then so you come in the year when whoever the three popes of the three popes yeah wow it's just also fascinates me to to think that in many ways it was your experience with those quakers that introduced you to this this the spiritual life but you're waiting for the rosary to give you something to focus on you know i mean really i mean there to introduce you into the right focus exactly that's what it was about and and that's that making those connections because the one thing now my mother i didn't i was never worried about my mother she was the one after all who enrolled us in catholic school so i knew she didn't have a problem and she always said positive things about catholicism uh my father being a protestant minister and a proud protestant minister at that i thought you know would be a bit of a different story especially since he was hoping one of us would be yeah an amy minister um you know at one point as i was going through this process of religious instruction i remember telling the priest after coming home from vacation because my father you know i hadn't told him yet and uh i said to the priest um i think i want to be a protestant minister he said well how can you i said i can be a catholic and a protestant minister right he said no you you can't preach protestantism and be a catholic that doesn't work and i said i can introduce them to mary you know you know it still hadn't quite worked out but um so when i uh decided to sit down and talk with him about it what i explained to him was that by my becoming a catholic i was not at all rejecting what he and my mother had given me in terms of that i explained to him you introduced me to christ through the amy church and to the baptist church and uh and and i will i i value that and i will always value him but what i'm finding in the catholic church you know we have fragments of the liturgy in our services the fragments are there but when i attend mass of the catholic church i'm seeing the other parts and there are larger connections and i'm also kind of going to the source and exploring the fullness of of the tradition that we come out of and that's the reason why i'm going in the catholic church not because i'm rejecting what you've given me but because i want to embrace it more fully and i want to understand it more deeply and my father's attitude was so long as the boy's going to church i'm so long as he's out of that agnostic stuff you know this is a good thing father we've got about two and a half minutes left uh quickly you're called to the priesthood how did that happen in the process that was uh that was quite a uh well there's a a humorous side of it was that um i was attending a meeting of the ladies auxiliary of the knights of peter claver they invited and you know because i wanted to be supportive there are very few black catholics and one of the things the grand lady said now i want all the men here to stand up and so you know we all stood up and she said now all the men who were uh who were married sit down saw all the men who married sit down she said okay the ones who are standing get their names and turn it over to the bishop and so then i thought well look i'm a lot older i've been teaching at the university and i but i had a friend who was much younger and i thought you know he was from haiti and i said you know he would make a good you know because we needed african-american priests and i thought yeah well he'd be perfect he'd be perfectly smart he's devout and everything else i said you know you ought to sign up for the seminary i was at this meeting of the ladies of peter claver they took down my name but i i want to give them yours and you should sign up for the seminary i said well i don't know i don't i don't want to do this alone he said if it's so important you aren't married why don't why don't you sign up if this is such a good thing and i said okay i will i will we can go together i'll accompany you i'll support you so uh so i signed up next time i saw him he said i said did you sign up for this they're having a come and see week and they said yeah but um you know i'm going to japan i have a girlfriend in japan i'm going to go back to japan and i think we might get married so he went back to japan married this girl i went off to seminary and there was a lot more involved than that though it was it was the sermon and it was seven years of eucharistic adoration and and a whole lot of other things uh but especially the prayers and encouragement from parishioners that led to that but that that's quite a a journey in and of itself but that was but i thought it was kind of humorous uh trying to encourage somebody else and i wound up being the one going father as we close could we have your blessing well absolutely please in the name of the father and the son and the holy spirit amen heavenly father we ask that you send down your blessing upon everybody who's been involved in this broadcast may your spirit of truth reach out to all who watch and all who participate in this most important ministry and we ask that this will help to bring people to the church and to a deeper encounter with christ this we pray through christ our lord amen and may almighty god bless you the father the son and the holy spirit thank you father thank you so much for sharing want to have you back because i want to hear about more of your details and and also some other questions i would love to ask you sometime about what can we do as a catholic church to be more open to the african-american community in our country absolutely it's something we need to pray about thank you very much for your witness and for your willingness to serve him as a priest thank you so much for doing that and thank you for joining us on this episode of the journey home i do pray that father hawkins journey is an encouragement to you god bless you see you again next week [Music] you

Channel: EWTN

Views: 18,701

Rating: 4.9626865 out of 5

Keywords: jht, jht01730, ytsync-en

Id: lVshI8_1oVQ

Length: 56min 10sec (3370 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 15 2021