October 31, 2015

LAST WORD: The Needle in the Haystack

_MG_9146_cmyk_resizedBY REV. R. GABRIEL PIVARNIK, O.P.

I cracked open the hide-bound tome and revealed the illuminated page to my students. We were huddled around a small table in the basement of Phillips Memorial Library. The dusty missal in front of us was opened to the liturgical texts for the blessing of oils on Holy Thursday. On the computer screen just above us were the pages of a much later book opened up to the same celebration.

With a sheepish grin, I queried them, “OK, who can tell me what the difference is between the two texts?”

“Are you serious? It’s in Latin!” one student exclaimed.

Another rolled her eyes to the ceiling in exasperation. A third seemed oddly intrigued and began to stare back at me as if he knew there was a secret to be discovered.

“Just look,” I responded. “You don’t need to know the language to see the difference.”

Slowly, all of the students started to peer at the screen above and the text below. Some started looking for the obvious differences: the different constructions of the missal, the one illumination that was clearly hand-painted and the other that clearly was not, or the different size of the text in each. And then one of them began veering in the right direction.

“It’s got to be in the text. Look at the differences in the words. Compare them line by line.”

I was asking them to find a needle in a haystack. But that was exactly what I had done. Nearly four years earlier, I had inadvertently found a reference to a change in the prayer text for the consecration of chrism, the scented oil used in celebrations like baptism and confirmation. It was a change that shouldn’t have been there but that was vitally important. My search had taken me through ancient sacramentaries, pontificals, and ceremonials; seemingly endless requests through Interlibrary Loan; and finally, the archives of the library.

“Wait! Here it is. It’s this line!” exclaimed my earlier intrigued student. And then he did my work for me. “But that doesn’t make sense. I don’t know Latin that well, but that line is about healing people who are sick.”

And in that moment, their research had revealed the truth to them that I had already found — the text had migrated from the consecratory prayer over chrism to the prayer for the oil of the sick. It shouldn’t have been there, but it was — and it was the truth.

This is what research in a Catholic and Dominican institution of higher learning is like. We seek out the truth wherever it may be found and wherever it might take us. Even if it is a truth we didn’t expect — in the lab, in an ancient text, in ourselves. In the end, we aren’t actually searching for a needle in a haystack — we are searching for the truth — and that can be found all around us.

Rev. R. Gabriel Pivarnik, O.P. is vice president for mission and ministry, director of the Center for Catholic and Dominican Studies, and an assistant professor of theology.