A Brief History of Walter J. Burghardt S.J. and his life as an example of discipleship

In part I borrow this title from the first homily I heard the Reverend Walter J. Burghardt deliver shortly after I risked trading the joy and beauty of green grass around my rural undergraduate school for numerous niches in concrete corridors “connecting” Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary.  This was barely two years after Father Walter Burghardt himself returned to the city of his birth, that city of endless live possibilities that Kurt Vonnegut once disparaged as “Skyscraper National Park.”

After decades in woodsy Maryland where Walter’s body now lies interred, the Jesuits risked moving Woodstock College to Manhattan so that seminarians might learn new ways of pastoring and living out the discipleship to which they were committing themselves.  One highlight of this experience was the exchange of professors and preachers between the interdenominational Union, Roman Catholic Woodstock, and Jewish Theological seminaries as well as Columbia University.  In the autumn of 1971 in the circular chapel of Columbia, Jesuit Walter J. Burghardt preached, “The Risk And The Joy: After a Quarter Century of Teaching.”  This erudite scholar caught my attention with his inclusion of a portion of Margery Williams’ children’s classic, The Velveteen Rabbit.  “’What is REAL?’ asked the Rabbit….  ‘Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?’  ‘Real isn’t how you are made,’ said the Skin Horse.  ‘It’s a thing that happens to you.  When a child loves for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become REAL.’”  I remember wondering, who is this person, this professor, this priest who is so comfortable with himself and his congregation that he includes a bunny in his sermon?

Nearly 40 years later looking back on the life that formed this man, this particular disciple, I will introduce you a bit more fully to Walter — the boy, Burghardt — the Jesuit, Walter J. Burghardt — one of the twelve most effective preachers in the English-speaking world.

The Disciplined Boy

Walter was the second son of John and Mary (Krupp) Burghardt, both turn of the twentieth century immigrants who intimately knew risk.  Arriving at Ellis Island a year apart, John and Mary each had suffered the stress of steerage like hundreds of thousands of other emigrant Europeans willing to risk leaving — if not the comforts, at least the familiarity of — home.   Mary’s landing was not the immediate end of her journey; she was detained at Ellis Island until her Uncle Franz came and vouched she would have housing.  Our government could not imagine a future for a single woman other than becoming a ward of the state or resorting to prostitution.  Mary did neither.  First she worked as a housemaid and three years later she married.  She and John had two sons around whose lives they built their own.  The Burghardts never owned property choosing instead to invest their money in their boys’ education.  Walter so excelled in grade school that three times he was promoted half way through the year.  Discipline.  Wearing military style uniforms both Walter and Eddie went to St. Francis Xavier, a Jesuit-run high school on the lower west side of Manhattan.  Discipline.  When “Pop” heard a teacher say students should study three hours a night, that became the rule of the roost.  Discipline.  So not surprisingly, Walter entered the seminary with the discipline necessary to become a serious scholar.

The Scholarly Jesuit

At only 16-1/2, Walter graduated from high school and entered the Society of Jesus arriving first at St. Andrew-on-Hudson just above Poughkeepsie, then studying and later teaching by the Patapsco River near Baltimore.  While Walter was studying for his doctorate at Catholic University, Johannnes Quasten was the singular person who “made ancient texts come alive as no one ever had” for Walter.  In Long Have I Loved You, Burghardt says of Patristics:

The Fathers were witnesses to the Church’s traditional faith, and its doctors; but their witness was not uttered, and their doctrine was not formed, in vacuo.  They spoke as living men, to living men, whose souls were stirred by man’s permanent restlessness, his desire for God, but whose thinking and living were conditioned by the temporal exigencies of a passing epoch that was simply a stage in the march of our total humanity towards the vir perfectus.  Consequently, the Fathers not only give us their witness itself; they also are models for our own manner of witnessing.

For nearly three decades Burghardt taught patristics and published an impressive series of books on the subject.  For him the Fathers of the Church were “not only teachers of Christian doctrine but masters of the spiritual life.”  He agreed with Quasten that “Christianity is inescapably involved in the ebb and flow of time, that affirmations and doctrines, words and syllables cannot be interpreted in isolation from their original milieu.”

In 1967, after the death of his long time friend and mentor, Jesuit John Courtney Murray, Burghardt took over the reins of Theological Studies regarded by many as one of the finest theological journals of the last century. That same year Woodstock College moved to Manhattan; going back to the city of Walter’s past had profound impact on the preaching of his future.

The Passionate Preacher

Of Walter’s two dozen published books one of his favorites is the little volume, Hear the Just Word and Live It.   Early in the text he reminds us that

“. . . to listen is to risk.  It takes your precious time, often when you can least afford it.  You take on other people’s problems, when you have enough of your own. . . .

Still, the risk can be matched by a matchless joy.  For listening, really listening is an act of love; and so it is wonderfully human, splendidly Christian.  More human, more Christian, than sheer knowledge.”

This listening, of course, is listening to God, to other people, to our own earth crying out as it is decimated by global warming and abuse of its resources.  This listening includes news via paper or electronic media.  How can one not remember the words of Jesus compelling us to visit the imprisoned when we learn that right now in this country one in every hundred persons is incarcerated?

As aids in preparing his homilies on justice, Walter kept hundreds of news clippings on hunger, prisons, poverty, hurricane Katrina, the war in Iraq, and immigration (never forgetting that in 1907— the port’s busiest year — his father was among the one and a half million people to pass through Ellis Island in 1907 alone), Katrina, and the tsunami.   This passionate preacher savored commentaries by Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, and especially Bob Herbert of the New York Times.

Theologian Bernard Häring would remind us that “if the Church doesn’t listen to the world, then the world will never listen to the Church.”  For Burghardt that notion must feed our preaching as much as theologian Bernard Lonergan’s imperative that we must be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible.

Add to these insights Walter’s experiences at Jewish Theological Seminary with Abraham Joshua Heschel’s inspiration still stirring souls of seminarians, at Union with Raymond E. Brown’s enthusiasm in the poetry of John’s Gospel motivating “would be” and renowned theologians of many denominations, and at Columbia with professors aplenty prodding philosophy students.  Yes, the five years back in the city of his birth changed Walter’s preaching forever.

From the edge of Harlem to later in the capitol of our country, he listened (both a risk and a joy) and he responded (always more risk and frequently more joy).  Listening and responding — undoubtedly the best combination of assets for a dynamic preacher.   Many of us remember Walter’s inspiration for the Preaching the Just Word project.  After he moved to Washington, D.C., he shuddered in church with the realization:  “Saturday night live, Sunday morning deadly!”  Several years later he was jubilant over a November 2001 scene in the popular television show West Wing.   The President (Martin Sheen) and First Lady (Stockard Channing) return from church and both are in foul moods — she because she thinks her husband is an oratorical snob and he because he thinks the pastor “was a hack.  He had a captive audience and . . . he didn’t know what to do with it.”

The President adds:  “Words when spoken out loud for the sake of performance are music.  They have rhythm and pitch and timbre and volume.  These are the properties of music.  And music has the ability to find us and move us and lift us up in ways that literal meaning can’t.”  I can easily imagine Walter’s proclaiming that paragraph with passion, with panache, with pizzazz!

In their Preaching the Just Word project, both Burghardt and his beloved friend, diocesan priest Raymond Kemp, embraced their colleague Jesuit John Donahue’s succinct observation that the biblical idea of justice can be defined as fidelity to relationships.  Throughout his years as cofounder, coeditor, and contributor to The Living Pulpit, Walter reiterated this sense of biblical justice:  fidelity to our relationships with God, with each other, and with our earth.

Remembering his wise and wonderful words still nestled in our hearts and minds, it is obvious why in 1996 Walter J. Burghardt was named one of the twelve most effective preachers in the English-speaking world.  His uniquely remarkable talents of listening with love and preaching with passion will be his lasting legacy.  From preaching in the pulpit to publishing on paper; from sacraments at the altar and baptismal font to supper and Crown Royal at the table of family and friends; from responding himself to God’s call for justice to supporting Marian Wright Edelman and her Children’s Defense Fund, Walter’s relationships —  and thus ours — were enhanced with his listening and his preaching.  With love.