HOMILIES TO TRANSFORM HEARTS AND MINDS Andre Papineau, SDS Paper, $20.95 112 pages, 5½" × 8½" ISBN 0-89390-690-5 April, 2010 View Table of Contents View Excerpt Quantity:

We all go through many life transitions — things like graduating, marrying, moving from one city to another, being depressed, losing a job, and these are but a few examples. But how often do we think of any of these transitions as opportunities for conversion experiences in which we might come to a deeper understanding of self, world, and God?

In this book you will find twenty-five brief, scripture-based homilies that are, hopefully, about our own experiences in transitions and their potential as conversion experiences.

Advance Reviews:

     “Homilies have great potential.  They can change our minds and hearts and thereby give us a whole new life. Andre Papineau has written these homilies to help us experience a deeper conversion. If they are read prayerfully, transformation will happen”. — Bishop Robert Morneau, Green Bay, Wisconsin

     “As the saying goes, ‘When life shuts one door, God always opens another.’ It may just as readily be true, however, that if one door is opened, all the other doors slam shut in the draft. What Andre Papineau does is open new doors one at a time with each reflection, so that the draft he creates slams shut all those old worn out ones that we once thought made so much sense. Caution: a new way of thinking can bring about a change of mind which may very well lead to a change of heart and a new way of living”. — Rev. Joseph Juknialis, author

     “Andre Papineau opens up the Scriptures in language, stories and metaphors that are accessible to the ordinary person in the pew.  How refreshing and inspiring to hear the Gospel stories with new ears.” — James R. Zullo, FSC, Ph.D.

     “In Homilies… Andre Papineau, with gentle humor and keen insight, points out the human foibles and wisdom of Jesus' companions… and of Jesus himself.  Ultimately Papineau helps us embrace our own humanity as we walk in faith with this God-Man.” — Dr. Daniel Di Domizio, Professor of Religious Studies at Cardinal Stritch College, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

     “With his familiar wit, verve and creativity, Andre Papineau has produced a first rate set of reflections on the Sunday readings.  He connects the Word of God with the reality of our lives. No preacher could ask for more or settle for less.” — Steven Avella, Priest of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee

About the Author
Andre Papineau is a member of the Salvatorian community and associate professor of pastoral studies at Sacred Heart School of Theology in Franklin, Wisconsin. He has been teaching homiletics there since 1979.  With advanced degrees in drama and theology, he gives presentations, lectures, and workshops on preaching, storytelling, and transitions for teachers, clergy, and the general public across the country.  He is the author of ten books including Jesus and the Kingdom of Nobodies and Breaking Up, Down and Through on transitions.

The sermons in this book are about transitions, more specifically transitions that are also about conversions.  What it is not about are transitions that aren’t conversions.  There are multiple transitions in our lives, e.g. a betrayal, a prolonged illness, etc., and in the midst of those which seem endless and meaningless we wonder how anything worthwhile might come out of them.

 On the other hand, we might go through the same experiences, and, as a result of one or another of those experiences, we emerge with a greater capacity to care about others, or are more sensitive to similar experiences in the lives of neighbors, or persons we don’t even know personally. We have undergone a change of heart and mind we had never anticipated. And as you might have heard or read, this kind of change is called metanoia, a technical term often translated as a change of heart and mind, a conversion experience.  The famous French philosopher and writer, Blaise Pascal in the 17th century wrote a line in his famous book Pensees, that “the heart has its reasons that the mind knows not of.”  I read these words as a confirmation that our hearts might go out to God without our really understanding this as we go through our transitions that are conversion experiences.

 I’d like to suggest that, as we read some of these sermons, we keep in the back of our mind what I refer to as the three phases of a transition that can also be the occasion for a conversion experience.  I do not refer to these explicitly in the sermons.  Indeed, I wasn’t even consciously aware of these phases when I wrote the sermons over a period of years.  However they are present in varying degrees.  They are: breaking up, breaking down, and breaking through.

Breaking Up.  We all know what it means to break up.  Breaking up is when your husband or wife leaves you or vice-versa. It’s also saying goodbye to friends who aren’t friends any longer because of some bad feelings, even betrayals.  Breaking up can be difficult because someone might have been so identified with another person, e.g., a husband or wife, or work place that breaking up leaves the person feeling lonely or relieved or possibly a combination of feeling relief and loneliness.

Breaking down.  Breaking down is closely related to breaking up.  Breaking down means the person might feel lost since the other, meaning a person or institution or religious affiliation, had contributed to giving one a sense of belonging, an identity.  The person might ask, “Who am I now that my wife has died, or I’ve retired, etc.?”  Even if the person has new opportunities for his or her future, he or she might still feel uncertain about the future.  In other words, even under the best of circumstances a person can feel ambivalent about having broken way because being with the others, e.g., a spouse, a job, a religious community, might have been difficult, but it also had been one of the important worlds in the person’s life.  Now the uncertainty of the future is all the person has.
The person is truly in a “liminal” state being neither here nor there.
 
 But then there is the breakthrough, the sense that one is getting his life back together again…but with a difference! “How are you feeling?” someone asks.  “Well, not too bad.  I guess I’m seeing a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel!”  There’s a glimmer of hope.  It might take days, weeks, months, even years to experience that sense that one is now truly going through and not stuck, unable to move.  Some days are better than others but to be breaking through is cause for hope, or hoping is the beginning of breaking through.

 Breaking Through.  Years ago I worked with persons who were going through a divorce. The process was often a long process of feeling hurt, abandoned, lost and trying to get on with their lives, sometimes by getting together with the very persons from whom they were getting divorced.  The future seemed so uncertain that the divorced person wondered if reuniting with a spouse, even an abusive one, wouldn’t be better! But gradually the person began to get his or her life together with the help of friends or support groups. The person was wiser for the experience and more compassionate toward others who had experienced similar problems.

 Notice the introductions to groups of sermons. These introductions highlight some particular dimension of a conversion experience associated with the sermons within each of the groups. It is my hope that you will find in these sermons points of contact with your own transitions that you might not have realized were also conversion experiences, experiences of which your heart had reasons that your mind knew not of.