Speaking Responsibly
September 6, 2010
The
social fabric of our country appears in our time to be fragile.
From multiple manifestations of increased xenophobia, to
cultural and religious fragmentation, to hostile and vile
political discourse, we seem increasingly unable to communicate
with and trust each other to the minimal degree required for
civil discourse and shared civic responsibility. To some degree
all of these symptoms appear related to a loss in the
foundational disposition of trust, or what the spiritual
tradition calls faith; without a basic level of trust, human
society, much less human community, is not possible. In order
to have trust or faith in each other we must be able to believe
in the truth of what the other says to us; we must inhabit a
culture of truthfulness in speech and responsibility for our
words. The measure of responsible speech is not its efficacy
but its honesty, its responsibility to those being addressed and
to the Truth. In our time it often seems that the value of
speech is measured more by its manipulative success and
financial effectiveness than by its veracity; for the most part
there is no accountability or responsibility to the truth even
for those whose voices dominate our airways and our public
discourse day after day. What difference might it make in our
common life, if our public leaders, our journalists, and our
media personalities of all political persuasions were held
accountable for the truthfulness of their assertions?
READ MORE...
Teresa of Avila: the Interior Castle
August 30, 2010
Teresa
of Avila was exhausted and over-extended with business matters
and a heavy travel schedule when she was ordered in 1577 to
write her last book, The
Interior Castle.
She did her best to get a “second opinion,” in effect to
reverse the order, but to no avail.
The priest she consulted agreed that she should write the
book. And write she
did. In a mere two
months, during a six-month period of intense activity, she
produced her crowning literary work and a spiritual treatise of
enduring value. The
Kavanaugh-Rodriguez introduction to the English translation
offers a testimony by one of the sisters in her community of
Teresa’s absorbed and rapid writing each day following
communion. Although
Teresa believed by this point that she had written herself out
and had said all she had to say on the subject of prayer, she
applied herself to the task before her.
In Where Lovers
Meet: Inside the Interior Castle (ICS Publications, 2008),
Susan Muto points out that in the course of writing the book
the Saint “discovered something she had known all her life: that
obedience lessens the difficulty of doing what, humanly
speaking, seems impossible.” (p. 18)
This insight entered into the text itself, for Teresa was
tireless in stressing that human effort comes to naught and that
we must rely on grace alone.
(p. 19)
READ MORE...
MODERN WOMEN OF THE SPIRIT: Élisabeth Leseur and Madeleine
Delbrêl (I)
August 19, 2010
Attitudes
toward saints have changed significantly in the past fifty
years. Immediately after the Second Vatican Council, regard for
the place of saints in their personal faith and spirituality
changed among Western Catholics. That is quite understandable
given the way these women and men had previously been presented
as superhuman intercessors for the living, romantically
portrayed in plaster casts or stained glass windows. The saints,
it seemed, were too remote from the realities that late modern
women and men contended with in their daily lives; they seemed
removed from the complexities of the politics and technologies
of the late twentieth century. For many forward-looking
Catholics, the saints became an undesirable reminder of the
highly pietistic preconciliar church that they wanted to leave
behind. Such was the situation for some fifteen years until
Catholic and Protestant thinkers began to re-assess the place of
saints in Christian faith and spirituality. Notre Dame Professor
Lawrence Cunningham articulated one of these earliest
reconsiderations when he defined a saint as “a person so grasped
by a religious vision that it becomes central to his or her life
in a way that radically changes the person and leads others to
glimpse the value of that vision.” For Cunningham, saints were
not lifeless plaster cast statues but historically-located
individuals who, at a crucial point in their life, became so
in-touch with the Transcendent that they endeavored – whether
gradually or immediately – to center their lives on this
reality.
READ MORE...
self-actualizatioN
August 16, 2010
Self-actualization is a term that gained currency in our culture
about half a century ago. At first blush the concept appears
benign enough: it appears to do no more than to reflect our
innate drive to achieve our full potential, to bring to fruition
our unique capacity for human flourishing, Hence the dictionary
definition: the realization or fulfillment of one’s talents
and potentialities, esp. considered as a drive or need in
everyone. (The New Oxford American Dictionary)
The self-actualizing tendency would seem to be ideally
suited for life in societies structured around competition.
Here, though, a different picture begins to emerge. Is the
so-called self-actualizer pursuing a path of inborn
possibilities, or is s/he unwittingly bending to cultural
imperatives that lead to loneliness and isolation? The
“promise” of self-actualization is slippery indeed, if in fact
the search for one’s direction in life culminates in the
exclusion of other people and the refusal of the mystery as it
manifests itself in all dimensions and spheres of one’s
existence.
READ MORE...
Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine
An Autobiography by Huston Smith with Jeffrey Paine
August 9, 2010
Tales of Wonder is the autobiography of Huston Smith,
well known scholar, student and teacher of the great religious
traditions of humankind. Smith has authored countless works and
is, perhaps, best known for The Religions of Man,
originally published in 1964 and later reissued as The
World’s Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions. His most
recent books prior to this autobiography are Why Religion
Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief
and The Soul of Christianity: Restoring the Great Tradition. The
former, released just prior to the events of September 11, 2001,
could not be more topical and significant, given not only the
caricature of religion in much of the “secular” world but the
abuse of the great traditions at the hands of fundamentalists of
all stripes. The latter is a personal and foundational apology
for Christian faith from the mind and heart of a most dedicated
adherent.
READ MORE...
Learning REVERENCE from the Psalms
August 2, 2010
Psalm
8 is a prayer-poem with which most of us can readily identify.
It is a psalm of praise and a profound recognition of the
Sovereignty of God, based on a mode of presence that the
greatness of creation, including the Psalmist’s own being,
evokes. Its theme is grounded in the truth of who God is and
who we. The experience of that relationship gives rise to the
primordial human disposition of awe and the reverence which
accompanies it. According to Fr. Adrian van Kaam:
Reverence is the flower of spiritualization. Its source is the
sacred fascination people experience in the presence of what
transcends them. Everything worthy of a person’s dedication
receives meaning from its relatedness to that mystery which
overwhelms well-disposed people in moments of silent
contemplation and pure receptivity. Unrelated to this mystery,
experiences lose their radiance and fail to evoke reverence. (Fundamental
Formation, pp. 159-60)
READ MORE...
Mourning, Not Melancholy:
A REFLECTION ON
Nothing Was the Same: A
Memoir BY
Kay Redfield Jamison
July
26, 2010
Kay Redfield Jamison, Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns
Hopkins University School of Medicine and co-director of its
Mood Disorders Center, is a renowned expert in the study of
manic-depressive illness and the author of several books on the
topic, including the co-authorship of the standard medical text
on the illness: Manic-Depressive Illness: Bipolar Disorders
and Recurrent Depression and a memoir of her own struggle
with the illness: An Unquiet Mind. As her honorary
professorship in English at The University of St. Andrews
attests, she is also a lucid and elegant writer.
READ MORE...
Learning Wisdom from the Psalms
July 19, 2010
I’d
like to begin with a story that a friend of ours, a Director of
Novices of his religious community, would often tell. A novice
of his once said to him, and I’m sure it was more than one who
did this, “I don’t get anything out of praying the psalms.”
Since the novice had been in the community for some time the
Director knew him well. And so his response to him was: “I
think you have difficulty with the psalms because you have
difficulty receiving anything that is given to you.” The Novice
Director here was pointing to a lack, one I think we can all
recognize to some degree in ourselves, of what Fr. Adrian van
Kaam calls “transcendent openness.” The depth of our encounter
with the Psalms, and thus of their meaningfulness to us, depends
on the level of our transcendent openness, our capacity in the
moment to attune to, receive, and respond to new disclosures of
the Spirit to us.
READ MORE...
The Psalms - Praises, Pleas & Protests
Rev. Brenda Bennett
July
12, 2010
Last week, as I met with family members to prepare a funeral, I
was asked if I would include the “prayer” that begins, “The Lord
is my shepherd.” The psalm’s promise of Divine peace and
protection had touched the heart of this next-of-kin just as it
had spoken to her father in the days before his death.
People who are bereft, bewildered or battered by life,
find that the psalms can give utterance to their deepest
thoughts and feelings. They were the prayers of ancient Israel
but they have acted as the pleas and protests of persons in
distress throughout the ages.
READ MORE...
MESSENGERS OF UNIVERSAL LOVE
July 5, 2010
One of the obvious things about our world is that it is hurting.
Wherever we turn we are confronted with a suffering and
incomplete humanity. We may be especially surprised by the
capacity of individuals and groups of persons or nations to
inflict violence on others. And when we consider the already
realized potential for evil and injustice, we may choose to look
away, to try to forget the world with its overwhelming needs,
and to evade our personal responsibility to minister to that
world.
READ MORE...
Spiritual Presence
June 28, 2010
In
the general introduction to his four-volume series on The
Presence of God: The Foundations of Western Christian Mysticism
Bernard McGinn explains that “Christian mystics over the
centuries have never been able to convey their message solely
through the positive (italics added) language of
presence.” (p. xviii) Mystics such as Teresa of Avila
speak fervently and eloquently about their quest to attain a
special consciousness of the divine presence. But, as
McGinn points us, the pursuit and experience of presence tells
only half of the story: in fact, mystical language of necessity
employs a paradoxical dual strategy of presence and absence.
“Positive” or cataphatic mystics such as Origen and Bernard of
Clairvaux present the alternating rhythms of presence and
absence in terms of the comings and goings of the Divine Lover,
as in the “Song of Songs.” “Negative” or apophatic mystics
have tended to emphasize the “no-thingness” of God; that is that
our consciousness of Divine Presence proceeds by way of
negation. God is not an object, not just one more thing
apprehended by focal consciousness. Indeed, we must empty
our mind (consciousness) of concepts, images and words.
Simone Weil conjectured that if “contact with human creatures is
given us through the sense of presence . . . contact with God is
given us through absence.”
RADE MORE...
Love of Neighbor and Transcendent Openness
June 21, 2010
In
the passage from the works of Oswald Chambers that is quoted for
June 19 in My Utmost for His Highest, we read: “If I
am devoted to the cause of humanity only, I will soon be
exhausted and come to the place where my love will falter; but
if I love Jesus Christ personally and passionately, I can serve
humanity though human beings treat me as a doormat.” The longer
one lives the more one identifies with the experience of Linus
in Charles Schultz’s famous comic strip Peanuts: “I
love mankind; it’s people I can’t stand.” The truth of the
matter is that for all our attempts to love our neighbor as
ourselves, to love not only our friends but also our enemies,
there are many times when we don’t like the people around us
very much. There is little doubt that for most of us the
attempt to love others who often seem to us to be careless,
mindless, selfish, arrogant, and on and on is, at best,
exhausting, if not impossible. Recently, as I entered the
security line at an airport for an eagerly anticipated trip home
both stressed and tired from a daylong meeting, I found myself
increasingly frustrated and agitated by the perceived
incompetencies of the security personnel and the slowness and
inattention of my fellow travelers. Later, on the plane, I sat
next to a young woman who proceeded to take off her shoes, cross
her legs, and dangle her bare foot in front of me for much of,
thankfully, only an hour or so flight. By the time I arrived
home, I was very tired and significantly agitated and angry.
And all this from relatively minor, if not perhaps totally
subjective, affronts. Commonplace experiences such as these are
potent reminders of how difficult it is to practice the
spiritual directives that call us to revere and love the other.
READ MORE...
FAITH AND PUBLIC LIFE:
A REFLECTION ON ILL FARES THE LAND BY TONY JUDT
June 14, 2010
In
his most recent book (Ill Fares the Land, New York,
Penguin, 2010), Tony Judt, University Professor and Director of
the Remarque Institute at New York University, reflects on the
state of political life in the United States and Great Britain.
His title is drawn from a passage in Oliver Goldsmith’s The
Deserted Village:
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.
As a historian, Judt points out that the greatest political
crises occur when an untenable disparity of wealth between
segments of a society develops. He believes that the crises in
which we today find ourselves are due to this disparity.
READ MORE...
Presence and Gratitude
June 7, 2010
The
conflicting tendencies toward resentment and gratitude are often
at war with each other in the human heart. Even when the mind
knows it should be grateful, resentful feelings tug and pull
away from rational response. Blind urges conspire and tempt one
to trust in power rather than presence to remedy and heal the
aching soul. For millennia the developed spiritual systems of
humanity have understood the dynamics at play within this
psychological-spiritual polarity. Resentment is a corrosive
attitude which threatens our well-being, destroys reason and
diminishes our capacity for enjoyment. Gratitude is more like
an inborn readiness to receive with open hands what is given in
one’s reality. Resentment, the interloper, refuses; gratitude
accepts.
READ MORE...
Memorial Day 2010
Beginning this week and for the next three months of June, July
and August, the regular Weekly Reflection will be replaced by
two Bi-Monthly Reflections appearing on the first and third
Monday of each month. On the alternative Mondays of the month a
short essay featuring one or more contemporary books on such
topics as prayer, religion, psychology, education or society
will appear under the title of Book Reflections.
We will continue to post at least once
during each of these months a special focus article, essay or
poetry.
May the months before us offer ample
opportunities for recreation and the kind of leisure that
fosters reflective living
Hearing THE APPEAL OF THE OTHER
May
24, 2010
The
first reading for the liturgy of Pentecost Sunday from the Acts
of the Apostles (Acts 2: 1-11) relates in vivid and highly
allusive scriptural imagery the gift of the Spirit. It is, as
in the creation account of the first chapter of Genesis, in the
power of a mighty wind that the Spirit of God is manifest. As
in Genesis the creative Spirit of God brings light out of
darkness and order out of chaos, so in Acts the arrival of
Spirit brings inner light and clarity to the darkness and
confusion in those who find themselves living the experience of
Jesus’ absence. The second allusion is to the story of the
Tower of Babel in Genesis 11:1-9. In the Scriptural account of
the fulfillment of Jesus’ promise, the action of Spirit involves
the reversal of God’s punishment at Babylon. The story of the
Tower of Babel is, at its core, a reiteration of the story of
the Fall. In this mythic account, the dispersion of peoples,
our inability to understand each other, is due to our refusal to
accept the reality of our shared humanity and the limits of our
being human. As Adam and Eve fell prey to the temptation to “be
as gods,” the people of Babylon similarly succumb to what Adrian
van Kaam calls “inverted awe,” that is, they become awe-filled
at their own capacities, specifically, their “technological”
capacities. They attempt to reach the heavens by building a
tower, to claim by force what can only be received. As a
punishment, the Lord says to his divine cohort: “Come, let us go
down there and confuse their speech, so that they will not
understand what they say to one another.” (Gen. 11:7) In the
second chapter of Acts, God’s Spirit comes down and reverses the
punishment of Babel: “Why, they are all Galileans, are they
not, these who are speaking? How is it then that we hear them,
each in our own native language?” (vs. 7-8) We who receive the
Spirit of God, given through Jesus, are restored to the depths
of our common humanity and thus to our kinship as children of
God. With our disposition of awe restored to its proper Divine
object and by that restoration our capacity to recognize and to
live the will of God, we again speak the same language.
READ MORE...
Living in the Present
May
17, 2010
When
she died early in the twentieth century Therese was only 24
years old. In her short life she wrote an autobiography and a
book’s worth of poems, served as novice mistress of her
Carmelite community, and managed to “become a saint,” whether or
not she would have considered herself to be one. Her
prayer-poem “My Song for Today” reveals
extraordinary focus on the present moment. In the third stanza
of the poem, for example, she declares: “To pray for tomorrow,
oh no, I cannot! . . .” Sufficient unto the day are the worries
thereof. For Therese the testing ground for faith was in the
present, and she prayed that “her little boat” would be guided
over the stormy waves in peace — just for today!
READ MORE...
Guided Retreat 2010
Dispositions
for Praying the Psalms
Monday June 28 – Thursday July 1, 10:00 am – 3:00 pm
This year our Guided Retreat will focus on the prayer
poems that constitute the Book of Psalms. The Psalms reflect
every conceivable human experience and emotion both from the
point of view of the life of the individual person and of the
community within whose life and call the individual life is
lived out. For the Christian believer the Psalms are a unique
connection with “the mind of Christ,” for the consciousness of
Jesus took shape through his living and praying with their
words.
FOR MORE
INFORMATION...
THE NEW COMMANDMENT
May
10, 2010
In John’s Gospel, Jesus tells his disciples: “Now is the
Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him. If God is
glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself, and God
will glorify him at once. . . .I give you a new commandment:
love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love
one another.” (John 13: 31-2, 34) The acts of love that
constitute each moment of the life, and now the impending death,
of Jesus are acts of God. So the “new commandment” is new only
in its recognition of the source of the love whereby
the Disciples are to love one another. That is, their love for
each other is the love of Jesus for each of them and through
them to others.
READ MORE...
EMBRACING SOLITUDE
May 3, 2010
The
poet and essayist W. H. Auden was insistent on the
irreducibility of our solitude: “In the last analysis we live
our lives alone. Alone we choose, alone we are responsible.”
He bemoaned the fact that “so many people try to forget their
aloneness, and break their heads and hearts against it.” Being
utterly alone is surely a fearsome thing; great reserves of
energy may be expended in the service of keeping the experience
at bay. Emily Dickinson may have had dreaded aloneness in mind
when she described the solitude of space, sea or even death as
“society” compared to the “polar privacy” of solitary inwardness:
There is a solitude of space
A solitude of sea
A solitude of death, but these
Society shall be
Compared with that profounder site
That polar privacy
A soul admitted to itself –
Finite infinity.
READ MORE...
DISPOSITIONS FOR AGING SPIRITUALLY
April 30, 2010
As
we grow older we are more apt to ask ourselves what is really
meaningful for our life. We may question the meaning of past
events, the meaningfulness of the future. Occasionally the
questioning will be more proximate and personal: Is my life
meaningful? Has what I have done amounted to anything of
value? Does it ― do I ― make a difference? Such questions are
value-laden. We are questioning/evaluating our worth. Elias
Norbert relates these questions of meaningfulness to the way we
will ultimately face dying itself:
The way a person dies depends not least on whether and how
far he or she has been able to set goals and to reach them, to
set tasks and perform them. It depends on how far the dying
person feels that life has been fulfilled and meaningful ― or
unfulfilled and meaningless. The reasons for this feeling are
by no means always clear ― that too is an area for investigation
that is still wide open. But whatever the reasons, we can
perhaps assume that dying becomes easier for people who feel
they have done their bit, and harder for people who feel they
have missed their life’s goal, and especially hard for those
who, however fulfilled their life may have been, feel that the
manner of their dying is itself meaningless.
READ MORE...
RESTORING THE JOY OF OUR YOUTH
April 26, 2010
In
last week’s reflection on Hospitality and Homecoming,
it was pointed out that Mary, in offering a space of hospitality
for Jesus, recognizes “that in some way she herself is the
guest, and that he who is coming is also the host whose
hospitality she should be prepared to receive.” Jesus offers
the fullness of his presence, both before and after his death,
to those who welcome him, who create a hospitable space for
him. And those who so welcome him discover that he to whom they
have opened their lives becomes the host who welcomes them. To
receive Jesus without condition is at the same time to receive
one’s own “inwardness in a new way.” It is to know the
freshness and newness of the present moment; it is to be
restored to “the joy of our youth.”
READ MORE...
HOSPITALITY AND HOMECOMING
April 19, 2010
A
recent but posthumous book by Henri Nouwen, Home Tonight:
Further Reflections on the Parable of the Prodigal Son,
opens with a reflection on Nouwen’s arrival at L’Arche Daybreak
in 1986. Unnervingly, Nouwen was confronted daily by one of the
members in the group home, who always asked the same two
questions of people: “So, where’s your home?” and “Are you home
tonight?” In her Introduction, Sue Mosteller writes that with
his frenetic schedule Nouwen “very often had to falteringly
explain to John that he would again be absent from the table
that evening.” Mosteller suggests that Nouwen, who came to
Daybreak in search of a home, needed John’s constant reminders
that he was on a journey ― home. Nouwen had written earlier in
his career that hospitality is “the creation of a space where
the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy.”
(Monastic Studies 10, 1974). One is left with an impression of
unrealized longings.
READ MORE...
STAY WITH US
April 12, 2010
It
is Holy Saturday 2010. At the front of the small
parish Church
of St. Therese of the Child Jesus in the town of Kipushi, Democratic Republic of Congo, a large
paschal fire is already burning as the members of the
Congregation gather to celebrate the Easter Vigil. They come
dressed in bright, beautiful and celebrative colors and carrying
the candles they have purchased in the small shops around town.
They fill not only the benches of the Church but the many small
plastic chairs that have been added along the sides of the
church and down the main aisle, as well as into the foyer and
out onto the front porch. The Church is decorated with strings
of colored and flashing lights, many hand cut and fashioned
decorations, even an electric lantern that will flash with the
other smaller lights during the singing of the Gloria. In the
excitement of meeting and conversation as friends and family
gather, there is already not only an air of expectancy but a
sense of deep life, love, and hope that already manifests the
truth of Resurrection.
READ MORE...
EASTER
April 5, 2010
In
The New Being Paul Tillich wrote:
It is love, human and divine, which overcomes death . . .
Death is given power over everything finite, especially in our
period of history. But death is given no power over love. Love
is stronger. It creates something new out of the destruction
caused by death; it bears everything and overcomes everything.
It is at work where the power of death is strongest. . . . It
rescues life from death. It rescues each of us, for love is
stronger than death.
We thank the Rev. Brenda Bennett for
her distilled reflections on the meaning of the paradigmatic
events of Holy Week and Easter:
READ MORE...
HOLY
WEEK REFLECTION: LIFE AS IT IS
March 29, 2010
In
his text Opening the Hand
of Thought,
the Zen master and Abbot Kosho Uchiyama writes that the term
gosho or
afterlife refers to
“the life that arises when one clarifies this matter of death.
It means knowing clearly just what death is, and then
really living out one’s life.
. . . As long as this matter of death remains unclear,
everything in the world suffers.” (p. 8) As we enter this year’s
celebration of Holy Week, we are once again drawn into the
remembrance of and participation in the passion, death, and
resurrection of the Lord Jesus.
This week we turn our attention, in a focal way, to the
reality of death and the mystery of the embracing of the human
condition unto death by God in Jesus.
We face death as an undeniable reality of human existence
and openly await that clarification of its meaning in
resurrected life that comes after that going through and
“reproducing [in our lives] the pattern of his death.”
READ MORE...
THE PROBLEM OF ACEDIA
March 22, 2010
For
those who have adopted a regime of fasting, sacrifice and
spiritual practice during Lent, the season may at some point
provide an occasion of encounter with the demon of acedia. The
word has many meanings and perhaps as many applications. Thomas
Merton cites it as one of the main obstacles to contemplative
prayer, but the term may be applied broadly to describe the host
of interior difficulties that inevitably arise when we strive in
earnest to grow and live spiritually. According to Merton acedia,
a condition of spiritual inertia, is marked by inner confusion,
coldness and a lack of confidence.
READ MORE...
THE HUNGRY SOUL BY LEON R. KASS, M.D.
March 18, 2010
Books about eating; yes, the field is full. But unlike the
bumper crop of material on weight loss, cancer prevention, and
cholesterol lowering, eating is not the problem, not the
solution, but a vital clue to the sacredness of life. Kass’ book
offers up courses about what it is to be human. Those offered
range from the necessity of food and its digestion to the
evolution of the family meal and dietary laws. There are
generous servings of philosophy, physiology and Biblical
commentary.
READ MORE...
THE SERVICE OF RECONCILIATION
March 15, 2010
The liturgy of the Fourth Sunday of Lent draws us into
what St. Paul clearly understands to be the core of his
preaching: “the service of reconciliation.” This message, as
presented in 2 Corinthians, has two aspects. The first is that
reconciliation with God is “the work of God” through the life
and ministry of Jesus Christ, and the second is that this
reconciliation calls those who receive it into the “service of
reconciliation” to all others.
READ MORE...
ASCETICISM AND RELAXATION
March 8, 2010
Although we do not ordinarily associate the practices of
rest and relaxation with the ascetical mandates of Lent,
scripture as well as the literature of the spiritual masters
remind us that we are called to care for the body and mind as
the temple of the Lord. Even our efforts at renunciation are
meant to restore bodily health and spiritual presence, enhancing
at once our receptivity to the Spirit and renewing our
relationship to the Divine. An important part of our daily
routine during Lent can therefore be found in the Lord’s
invitation to us to come away and spend time alone with him.
READ MORE...
LENTEN PRACTICE: LECTIO DIVINA
March 1, 2010
As
discussed in last week’s reflection, the Lenten call to
conversion is a call not only to turn away from but to turn
toward. St. Paul, in the letter to the Romans, speaks of
this as the living of a new life, born of a new consciousness.
Do not model yourselves on the behavior of
the world around you, but let your behavior change, modeled by
your new mind. This is the only way to discover the will
of God and know what is good, what it is that God wants, and
what is the perfect thing to do. (Romans 12: 2)
This
renewal of mind comes from our growing identification with the
mind of Jesus Christ (Philippians 2:5). In this light, we
repent of the degree to which we have lost our true mind, to the
degree that we have come to live from a false mind or
consciousness that has become dissociated from our spiritual
identity. In this way, the practices of Lent are aimed at
our remembering who we most deeply are and to whom we most
deeply belong. Through the practices of Lent we seek to
recover our identification with the mind of Christ.
READ MORE...
CONVERSION OF LIFE
February 22, 2010
The
call to conversion of life is as old as human society. In the
Judeo-Christian tradition, conversion is strongly linked to
atonement for wrong-doing and the need to repent and do penance
for sin. However, as Richard N. Fragomeni observes in The
New Dictionary of Catholic Spirituality:
. . . in recent years a more comprehensive understanding of
conversion has sought to include the full depth of biblical
insight into the understanding of the process as a turning from
and a turning toward.
This new understanding places the emphasis on the transformation
of personality and on God’s gift of grace within the process.
Without denying the reality of sin and guilt, contemporary
approaches to conversion foster the development of
self-awareness rather than self-judging and introspection as the
effectives means of bringing about healthy change.
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REFLECTIONS UPON ASH WEDNESDAY
February 18, 2010
Offered by Rev. Brenda Bennett of
Middleton, MA
Ash
— the powdery residue of burnt matter
—
is an age-old symbol of penitence and purification; derived
from the even older tradition of immolating living beings as an act
of oblation and worship. God told followers in ancient Israel that
kindness was God’s only requirement, never cruelty or suffering
(Amos 5:21-24). Yet we still live as if that were not the case.
Mythology and folklore provide us with
other, more beneficent, images of ash’s potential to transform. From
and through ash life can be renewed and restored. The phoenix, when
aged or injured, is said to ignite itself on a nest of myrrh and,
from the remaining ashes, emerges as a new, young bird.
Cinders and ash are also central to a
classic folk tale that tells of wrongs righted, love found and life
reclaimed. The ash represents sadness and sorrow, alienation and
abuse. Through the goodness and love of others a grim existence is
redeemed, replaced by wholeness and happiness. This good news story,
this gospel, shares its name with the Lenten symbol:
Aschenputtel or Ashpot in German; in English, the Cinder Maid
or Cinderella.
Like the phoenix, Cinderella is re-born
out of the ashes of her brokenness and pain. She is, to quote Jesus,
“born again.” (John 3:3). His message, like those of myth and
folktale, was one of hope and possibility. Transformation of our
lives and transcendence of our sorrows can emerge from the ashes of
our brokenness and the cinders of our past, if we allow God to help
and heal us; if we open ourselves to God’s renewing and restoring
love.
That was the message Jesus died to
proclaim. That is the true meaning of Lenten ashes.
A PERSONAL DIALOGUE WITH SCAR TISSUE BY
MICHAEL IGNATIEFF
February 17, 2010
It is over eleven years since she began to leave us.
Sometimes focally, often diffusely and unconsciously, a sense of
pathos colors my entire life: my prayer, my relationships, my
work. And now on a Sunday afternoon in the Fall of 1995, I sit
and try to make a connection, to find a place where I can be
with her. My mother, recently turned eighty, sits in a wheel
chair and tries to speak, to tell me about what she has been
experiencing. Occasionally a decipherable word or phrase
emerges, and I seize upon it, like a drowning man grabbing for a
rope, and reiterate it. As I do she smiles. She seems pleased at
our communication and encouraged to say more. But in the spaces
between my exhausting efforts to hear and find responses, I miss
her. As I reflect later that evening, “You never miss someone as
much as when you’re with them, but they are not there.”
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ASH WEDNESDAY
February 17, 2010
This is the time of tension between dying
and birth
The place of solitude where three
dreams cross
Between blue rocks
The place of solitude where three
dreams cross
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.
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REMEMBRANCE AND HOPE
February 15, 2010
As we celebrate Ash Wednesday the liturgical formula from
the Book of Genesis reverberates in our consciousness: “Remember
that you are dust and unto dust you shall return.” We begin
this season of repentance and preparation with a suspension of
our ordinary forgetfulness of our destiny. We remember that we,
as we take ourselves to be, come from the dust of the earth and
are on our way to returning to that from which we came. A most
sobering recollection! And yet, as we enter this Season of Lent
2010, there is also an invitation to know the profound
consolation and the transcendent hope that a mindful living of
these words affords us.
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