Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, February 5, 1994 TAG: 9402050035
SECTION: RELIGION PAGE: 6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RICHARD MASCHAL KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Waiting there, 25 miles up the road, are people in desperate need, AIDS sufferers whose lives have been shattered by illness and despair. Hoover's short trip to minister to them is part of a larger journey, a spiritual quest that has consumed much of his life.
Over many years and in different places, the 57-year-old Catholic priest has struggled with issues of faith and purpose, the ups and downs of belief and the arduous work of self-understanding.
He began his professional life as a Presbyterian minister, before going through a period when he was angry with God and thought he was finished with the institutional church. He then knit together his spiritual life with the kind of prayer and contemplation found in the quiet and order of a monastery.
Along the way, his view of God changed.
He found resources in an inner life.
And, at last, he found a place of rest at the Oratory.
"Somehow, I feel like God's grace has worked through all the twists and turns of my life," says Hoover. "The richness has come out of the struggle."
His spiritual journey is in some ways like the one many of us make as we search for meaning and understanding in our own lives. This time of year, as we face a fresh calendar, such a journey is much on our minds as we reflect on where we've been and where we're going.
Conrad Hoover's quest has something to tell us.
A journey takes place in space and time. Hoover's has gone from his youth in Norristown, Pa., a small town north of Philadelphia where he grew up in a religious Presbyterian family, to New York City, where he went to seminary. It continued during his first assignment as a Presbyterian minister in Baltimore and his years in Washington, before coming to Rock Hill in 1986.
Along the way, he's been a scholar, writer, inner-city activist, spiritual director, hospital chaplain, college teacher of theology and finally a minister to persons with AIDS.
"I've done the gamut," he says.
But a spiritual journey also happens inwardly. During his, Hoover has moved from a concern with academic success to working more directly with people, from an intellectual view of God to a more direct personal encounter.
B.A., M.Div., MSL, D.Min. - Hoover trails after his name an alphabet soup of letters, abbreviations of his academic degrees: bachelor of arts, master of divinity, master of library science and doctor of ministry.
He studied at Union Theological Seminary in New York in the late 1950s at the end of a golden age when Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr taught there.
But what moved him closer to God was a crisis of faith.
He spent most of the 1960s in Baltimore at Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church, heading up an inner-city ministry. There were struggles over civil rights, the integration of public facilities and of the church's neighborhood youth program.
Hoover, on the front lines, was scheduled along with others to meet with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 before King changed his itinerary and went instead to Memphis.
"It was an exciting time to be in the church," says Hoover.
But after almost a decade working for change, he felt burned out, filled with frustration and a sense of futility. The assassinations of King and Robert Kennedy hit him hard. The civil-rights movement fractured over the issue of black power.
"I felt a personal disillusionment with the organized church and myself as a human being," he says. He was depressed, angry at God, and, he now realizes, "full of a lot of self-pity and blame."
In the late '60s, he left the Presbyterian denomination and moved to Washington.
"I just felt like everything was over, everything I had prepared myself for, and now it was all gone," Hoover recalls.
What began the turnaround was a book, "Contemplative Prayer," by Thomas Merton - "the first book by a Catholic I had read."
Hoover had joined the Church of the Saviour, a non-denominational church in Washington. Because he had seminary training, he was made retreat minister, a sort of spiritual director who leads people in self-discovery. Eventually, he led retreats all over the country, many for fundamentalist Protestant groups.
Merton, who died in 1968, was a Trappist monk deeply interested in both spirituality and social justice. "That book literally turned my life around," says Hoover. "Merton is so interested in how you make yourself receptive to God by making yourself empty and living into the dark and the pain and how once you do that, grace is able to break through."
All along, Hoover maintained a personal sense of God.
But while he believed, he found his faith had "no inner guts."
He had been emptied by his experiences in Baltimore. Guts - a firmer, deeper grounding - came from Merton and Hoover's own experience of monastic life. "I became a monastery groupie," he says with a smile. A favorite place was Holy Cross Abbey, a Trappist monastery in Berryville, Va.
In the monastery's quiet and ordered routine, Hoover saw another way to live the Christian life. Up at 3 a.m., with prayers at 3:30 a.m. during a six-week retreat in the 1970s, he found a balance between prayer and work - and a new way of praying. "I had no understanding of the importance of being quiet," he says. "Listening was a whole new concept. Prayer was not words but being quiet and listening, crying out in pain or joy and then listening."
Hoover began to feel the power of the contemplative life within and how that could prepare him for the active life without. He also was struck by the power of the Eucharist, the sharing of the bread and wine, the body and blood of Christ. When he got home to Washington after his retreat, he began to take part in mass daily at a neighborhood church.
Drawn to the Roman Catholic faith and feeling he had to have some integrity about what he was doing, he decided to become a Catholic - but with great difficulty. He didn't want his friends at the Church of the Saviour to feel rejected.
But with the help of his spiritual director in Washington, Father John Haughey, a Jesuit priest who later came to St. Peter's Catholic Church in Charlotte, he converted.
That part of the journey, all that change, seemed to prepare him for the next phase of his life. "My training, my experience, my understanding of the God of life and death all come together in the AIDS work," he says.
While in graduate school at Catholic University in Washington in the early 1980s, he'd heard about this baffling new disease. After he came to the Oratory in 1986, a nephew died of AIDS as did a close friend in Washington.
Hoover had conducted retreats at the Oratory while he was at the Church of the Saviour, and it appealed to him as a place where he could lead the contemplative life but also have an active ministry. From the Oratory - a community of priests and lay brothers who are part of a movement begun in Rome 400 years ago - he began to minister to people who have AIDS.
Through the Metrolina AIDS Project in Charlotte, he worked with its first group meeting of AIDS sufferers. Now, he works through the Regional AIDS Interfaith Network, or RAIN. He is, he says, "an AIDS ombudsman."
He has a list of 25 people with whom he keeps in regular contact. He visits them, helps with errands and chores, goes to lunch with them, helps them dress or prepare meals - whatever they need. He also loves them, demonstrates his feelings by hugging them.
Too many times, he conducts their funerals.
By his count, he had done 40 funerals, as of two years ago. He stopped counting. It was too overwhelming.
Early on, he had some of the fears many have about those with the disease. Once, he went to lunch at a restaurant on Park Road with a friend with AIDS. The man offered his unfinished bowl of soup to Hoover. "I thought, Oh my God,"' he says. "But by God's grace, I said, Yes, I'd like to do that,' and I finished the soup."
Hoover calls the moment the "sacrament of the soup," an outward sign of the grace he felt and shared. His work with those who have acquired immune deficiency syndrome seems to have completed his spiritual journey - for now. He marvels at the lessons about human courage and dignity he's gained through his contact with AIDS sufferers, however painful it has been at times.
"They give us new ideas, new vision," he says.
"They help us to cut to the essential values of life, what it means to truly love someone and receive love from him or her. They teach us that a rich life involves much more the giving of one's self to others than receiving from them for one's own aggrandizement.
"And above all, they teach us the value of living fully and creatively in the present moment, which is both a mental-health value and a spiritual value."
And he found throgh all his twists and turns a new understanding of God. "Now, I know God in a more personal way. God is not sitting on a throne issuing directives but is the suffering, compassionate God who walks with us through our experience and helps us to heal both ourselves and the world around us. He is the God who says, I will never leave you; I will walk with you through this world. You won't have to be alone.' "I'm just trying to
be both the embodiment and the proclaimer of that message."
by CNB