Mersey Leven Catholic Parish
Parish Priest:
Fr Mike Delaney
mob: 0417 279 437;
email: mdelaney@netspace.net.au
Postal Address:
PO Box 362, Devonport 7310
Parish Office: 90 Stewart Street, Devonport 7310
Office Hours: Tuesday, Wednesday,Thursday 10am-3pm
Office Phone: 6424 2783 Fax: 6423 5160
Email: mlcathparish-dsl@keypoint.com.au
FaceBook: Mersey Leven Catholic Parish
Weekly Homily Podcast: podomatic.com/mikedelaney
Parish Mass Times: mlcpmasstimes.blogspot.com.au
Parish Magazine: mlcathparishnewsletter.blogspot.com.au
Secretary: Annie Davies/Anne Fisher
Pastoral Council Chair: Mary Davies
Archdiocesan Website: www.hobart.catholic.org.au for news, information and details of other Parishes.
Parish Priest:Fr Mike Delaney
mob: 0417 279 437;
email: mdelaney@netspace.net.au
Postal Address:
PO Box 362, Devonport 7310
PO Box 362, Devonport 7310
Parish Office: 90 Stewart Street, Devonport 7310
Office Hours: Tuesday, Wednesday,Thursday 10am-3pm
Office Phone: 6424 2783 Fax: 6423 5160Email: mlcathparish-dsl@keypoint.com.au
FaceBook: Mersey Leven Catholic Parish
Weekly Homily Podcast: podomatic.com/mikedelaney
Parish Mass Times: mlcpmasstimes.blogspot.com.au
Parish Magazine: mlcathparishnewsletter.blogspot.com.au
Secretary: Annie Davies/Anne Fisher
Pastoral Council Chair: Mary Davies
Archdiocesan Website: www.hobart.catholic.org.au for news, information and details of other Parishes.
Weekday Masses 18th – 22nd May
2015
Monday: 7:00pm – Devonport
… St John I
Tuesday: 9.30am - Penguin
Wednesday: 9:30am – Latrobe … St Bernardine of Siena
Thursday: 10:30am – Karingal … St Christopher Magallanes
Friday: 9:30am – Ulverstone … St Rita of Cascia
Next 23rd
& 24th May 2015
Saturday Vigil: 6:00pm Penguin & Devonport
Sunday Mass: 8:30am Port Sorell
9:00am Ulverstone
10:30am Devonport
11:00am Sheffield (LWC)
5:00pm Latrobe
**Monday 18th May, 2015 7pm – Requiem Mass at Our Lady of Lourdes Devonport for the late Victoria Obiorah whose funeral will be taking place in Nigeria at the same time.
Eucharistic Adoration:
Devonport: Every Friday 10am - 12noon, concluding with Stations of the Cross and Angelus
Devonport: Benediction with Adoration - first Friday of each month.
Prayer Groups:
Charismatic Renewal – Devonport Emmaus House Thursdays commencing 7.30pm
Christian Meditation - Devonport, Emmaus House Wednesdays 7pm.
Ministry Rosters 23rd & 24th May 2015
Devonport:
Readers Vigil: M Gaffney, M Gerrand, H Lim
10.30am: E Petts, K Douglas
Ministers of Communion:
Vigil: M Heazlewood, B & J Suckling,
G Lee-Archer, M Kelly, T Muir
10.30am: G Taylor, M Sherriff, T & S Ryan,
M & B Peters
Cleaners 22nd May: K.S.C.
29th May: P & T Douglas
Piety Shop 23rd May: H Thompson
24th May: P Piccolo
Flowers: M Knight, B Naiker
Ulverstone:
Reader: E Cox
Ministers of Communion: E Reilly, M & K McKenzie, M O’Halloran
Cleaners: K Bourke Flowers: A Miller Hospitality: M McLaren
Penguin:
Greeters: J & T Kiely Commentator: Readers: M Murray, T Clayton
Procession: M & D Hiscutt Ministers of Communion: A Guest, J Barker
Liturgy: Penguin Setting Up: E Nickols
Care of Church: M Bowles, J Reynolds
Latrobe:
Reader: S Ritchie Ministers of Communion: M Mackey, P Marlow
Procession: J Hyde & Co Music: Hermie & Co
Latrobe:
Reader: S Ritchie Ministers of Communion: M Mackey, P Marlow
Procession: J Hyde & Co Music: Hermie & Co
Your prayers are asked for the sick: Lorraine Keen, Karen Aiken, Alyssa Otten, Merlyn Veracruz.
Sr Carmel Hall, Meg Collings, Phillip Sheehan, Margaret Hoult,
Shirley Sexton, Bob McKay, Geraldine Roden, Tony Hyde,
Fr Terry Southerwood, Sr Gwen Dooley ssj, Kath Smith & …
Let us pray for those who have died recently: Jean Clare,
Sr Maria Kavanagh mss, Pauline Burns, Fr Jim Stephens, Emily Sherriff,
Marie O’Connor, Noelene Britton, Betty Martin, Victoria Obiorah.
Let us pray for those whose anniversary occurs about this time:
13th – 19th May – Ernest Wilkins, Norah Lillas, Ethel Dooley, Audrey Enniss, Marian Hamon, Mary (Mollie) Stevenson, Kathleen Laycock, Lance Cole, Patricia Down, Bonifacio Rahinel. Also Mark McCormack and Margaret, Derek & Rohan Lynd.
Scripture Readings
This Week; The Ascension of The Lord
First Reading: Acts 1:1-11
Responsorial Psalm:
(R.) God mounts his throne to shouts of joy: a blare of trumpets for the Lord.
Second Reading: Ephesians 4:1-13
Gospel Acclamation:
Alleluia, alleluia! Go and teach all people my gospel. I am with you always, until the end of the world. Alleluia!
Gospel: Mark 16:15-20
Sr Maria Kavanagh mss, Pauline Burns, Fr Jim Stephens, Emily Sherriff,
Marie O’Connor, Noelene Britton, Betty Martin, Victoria Obiorah.
Let us pray for those whose anniversary occurs about this time:
13th – 19th May – Ernest Wilkins, Norah Lillas, Ethel Dooley, Audrey Enniss, Marian Hamon, Mary (Mollie) Stevenson, Kathleen Laycock, Lance Cole, Patricia Down, Bonifacio Rahinel. Also Mark McCormack and Margaret, Derek & Rohan Lynd.
May they rest in peace
Scripture Readings
This Week; The Ascension of The Lord
First Reading: Acts 1:1-11
Responsorial Psalm:
(R.) God mounts his throne to shouts of joy: a blare of trumpets for the Lord.
Second Reading: Ephesians 4:1-13
Gospel Acclamation:
Alleluia, alleluia! Go and teach all people my gospel. I am with you always, until the end of the world. Alleluia!
Gospel: Mark 16:15-20
PREGO REFLECTION ON TODAY'S GOSPEL:
I take time to become still and ask for the grace to meet the Risen Lord as I pray with this Gospel. It may help to recall the different ways Jesus met the disciples after after his resurrection…in the garden, by the tomb, in the
upper room, sharing food. In the light of these joyful, sometimes confusing, meetings for the disciples I now take time to read this passage slowly. Perhaps I use my imagination to picture the scene that is unfolding. What time of day do I imagine this took place, what does the scenery around us look like? Perhaps I enter the scene as one of the Eleven or maybe I am observing, wondering what it all could mean. How do I respond hearing these words of Jesus, “Go out to the whole world, proclaim the Good News”? What are the signs of my faith that I proclaim in my daily life? I may not have the gift of tongues but do my actions and word tell of God's love for creation? What are the challenges in my life that I have to handle with care? Are there opportunities for me to be a healing presence for others? As I watch Jesus being taken up into heaven how do I feel now? Am I excited? Am I daunted, frightened even? However I feel, I take time to talk to the Risen Christ. As I draw my prayer to a close I remember that the Lord is working with me as I try my best to proclaim the Good News in my life.
Readings Next Week: Pentecost Sunday
First Reading: Acts 2:1-11 Second Reading: Galatians 5:16-25
Gospel: John 15:26-27, 16:12-15
Fr MIKE'S WEEKLY RAMBLINGS:
As I mentioned last week there are some important events
taking place this coming week. On Monday evening we have the Requiem Mass for
Mrs Victoria Obiorah commencing at 7pm at OLOL Church. All parishioners are
welcome to attend.
My six classmates celebrating their 40th Anniversary of
Ordination arrive over the 24 hours from the boat docking on Monday morning.
The first to arrive are Fathers Eugene McKinnon and Pat Purcell. Eugene &
Pat started their training two years earlier but left for a short time,
returning to complete their studies with us. Euge is PP of Donald in the
Ballarat Diocese and has worked in PNG and been on the Executive as well as
being Chair of the National Council of Priests. Pat has worked as an Army
Chaplain as well as in a number of Parishes in the Archdiocese of Melb and is
now semi-retired.
On Monday afternoon Mick Morley and Chris Toms arrive. Mick
is PP of Kyabram and Tatura in the Sandhurst Diocese and has seen a number of
appointments including being a member of the Clergy Life and Ministry Team
caring for his fellow clergy. Chris has worked with the Catholic Education
Office in Melbourne in the RE Department as well as serving in a number of
parishes.
Tuesday morning sees the arrival of Peter Slater and Leo De
Marzi. Peter is from the Sale Diocese and has served two terms as Administrator
of the Diocese when their Bishop had retired or been appointed elsewhere as
well as being Vicar General for quite a number of years. Leo is PP of the
Parish of Coburg East in Melbourne and has been a good all round PP during his
40 years of priesthood.
We will be concelebrating Mass on Wednesday evening at OLOL
at 6pm and all parishioners are most welcome to join us for this special
celebration.
Until next week, please take care on the roads and in your homes.
Donations to the Archdiocesan Welfare Collection go primarily to support Centacare Tasmania’s welfare services, with a small proportion going to the Apostleship of the Sea. Centacare Tasmania Family Services (Welfare) delivers a broad range of specialised and professional support including counselling, accommodation, refugee services, emergency child care, advocacy, education and training services throughout the state. Its particular strength is in its family centred approach, acknowledging that whatever impacts on a family impacts on the children in specific ways. It recognises that children can be major casualties in family disruption and that listening to the voice of children impacts on the long-term consequence for all involved in resolving family conflict. Services are available to all without discrimination on the basis of age, gender, race religion, physical disability, marital or social status.
THE APOSTLESHIP OF THE SEA: is an apostolic work of the Catholic Church caring for the spiritual, social and material welfare of all seafarers regardless of colour, race or creed. It ensures that there is a Chaplain available in every port in every country of the world to service every seafarer in the world.
ST VINCENT DE PAUL SOCIETY:
WINTER DRIVE:
Due to an alarming shortfall of clothing and furniture, the society would appreciate parishioners support with donations of both categories mentioned. Please contact our East Devonport office 6427:7100, for collection of bulk goods and furniture. VINNIES SLEEPOUT:
Each of stores is promoting our fundraiser for the sleepout. A large hamper of groceries (valued around $400) is being raffled throughout the region. Please call in and purchase a ticket $1 each/3 for $2.
MACKILLOP HILL - Reschedule!!
Spending Time with Thomas Merton – * 20th Century spiritual master * gifted religious thinker * writer of remarkable insight * social commentator of courage & conviction. Tuesday 19th May, 7:30pm - 9pm; MacKillop Hill, Forth, $15 /Donation. Bookings phone 6428:3095 / mackillophill.forth@sosj.org.au
SACRED HEART CHURCH WORKING BEE: Saturday 23rd May at 9:00am – please bring own gloves and gardening tools. Everyone welcome to help out!
PENTECOST SUNDAY CHILDREN’S MASS:
Families are invited to the Pentecost Sunday Children’s Mass on Sunday 24th May at Our Lady of Lourdes Church, Devonport at 10:30am. You are invited to wear something red or orange and since Pentecost is commonly thought of as the Birthday of the Church please stay for cake and craft activities in the hall afterwards.
LOST FROM PARISH HALL DEVONPORT:
Large
stainless steel jug/dipper also one floral, flannel-backed tablecloth. Please
contact the Parish Office if you know of the where-about of these items. Reward
offered – 1 chocolate!!
FOOTY POINTS MARGIN TICKETS:
Round
6 – Geelong won by 41 points.
Winners; Anne Fisher, Adele Derrico, Maurice
Vanderfeen.
Thursday Nights OLOL Hall D’port. Eyes down 7.30pm –
Callers 21st May Rod Clark & Alan Luxton.
NEWS FROM ACROSS THE ARCHDIOCESE:
REAL CARE, LOVE AND COMPASSION: – the alternative to euthanasia’ pamphlets released by the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference are available at all Mass Centres. Download more at www.catholic.org.au/euthanasia. The pamphlets have been endorsed by the National Catholic Education Commission and Catholic Health Australia.
WORLD YOUTH DAY 2016 INFORMATION SESSION: Are you interested in joining with great young people from around Tasmania on a life-changing journey of faith? Catholic Youth Ministry will be coordinating the Tasmanian Pilgrimage to World Youth Day in July 2016 which will be hosted by the Archdiocese of Krakow, Poland! WYD is open to young people aged 16 – 35. If you are interested in this amazing opportunity, don’t miss Information Session on Wednesday 20th May, 7.00pm at Sacred Heart Church, Ulverstone. More Info contact Rachelle: rachelle.smith@aohtas.org.au or 0400 045 368
ST MARY'S COLLEGE OLD SCHOLAR'S ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING AND LUNCHEON: Saturday, May 23rd at Lillian’s home, 11 James Street, Forth. If you would like to attend, RSVP Lillian 6428:2773 or Felicity 6424:1933 by May 18th. The luncheon cost is $10.
ST SCHOLASTICA'S COLLEGE, Glebe Point, NSW annual re-union at the College Sunday 24th May 2015. For more information contact Karen Debenham: 029460:4462, 0419999084 - email: karendebenham@optusnet.com.au
WALK WITH CHRIST – HOBART CITY SUNDAY 7TH JUNE 1:15pm to 3:15 pm
Celebrate the Feast of Body and Blood of Christ by walking with Jesus in the most Blessed Sacrament through the city of Hobart. Commencing from St Joseph's Church (Harrington St) at 1.15pm, walk with us to St Mary's Cathedral for Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament concluding with Benediction at 3:00pm. Experience our rich Catholic heritage, in solidarity with Catholics all over the world, and through the ages, by bearing public witness to our Lord and Saviour present in the Eucharist. If you are unable to walk the distance, join us at the Cathedral at 2:00pm for the arrival of the procession, prayers and the Adoration. There will be a 'cuppa' afterwards. Can't join us in person? Prayer intentions written in the 'Book of Life' in your parish will be taken on the procession and presented at the Cathedral.
Evangelii
Gaudium
“Among the vulnerable for whom the Church
wishes to care with particular love and concern are unborn children, the most defenceless
and innocent among us. Nowadays efforts are made to deny them their human
dignity and to do with them whatever one pleases, taking their lives and
passing laws preventing anyone from standing in the way of this. Frequently, as
a way of ridiculing the Church’s effort to defend their lives, attempts are
made to present her position as ideological, obscurantist and conservative. Yet
this defence of unborn life is closely linked to the defence of each and every
other human right. It involves the conviction that a human being is always
sacred and inviolable, in any situation and at every stage of development.”
-
Par 213 from
Evangelii Gaudium, Pope
Francis, Nov. 24, 2013
Saint of the Week – St Rita of Cascia (May 22)Born in Roccaporena, near Spoleto, Italy, in 1381, Margarita (as she was baptised) expressed from an early age the desire to become a nun. Her elderly parents insisted that she be married at the age of 12, to a man described in accounts of her life as cruel and harsh.
She spent 18 extremely unhappy years, had two sons, and was finally widowed when her husband was killed in a brawl. Both sons also died, and St Rita, still anxious to become a nun, tried unsuccessfully to enter the Augustinians in their convent at Cascia. She was refused because she was a widow and because of the requirement that all sisters should be virgins. Finally, in 1413, the order gave her entry, and she earned fame for her austerity, devotion to prayer and charity.
In the midst of chronic illnesses, she received visions and wounds on her forehead which resembled the crown of thorns. She died on May 22 at Cascia, and many miracles were reported instantly. Canonised in 1900, she is honored in Spain as La Santa de los Impossiblesand elsewhere as a patron saint of hopeless causes.
Words of Wisdom
“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us
sinners now/and at the hour of our death.”
-
From
the Hail Mary
Meme of the week
Many of the memes
we source and share contain an element of humour. This is not such a meme. But
it is worth sharing because the message is one we all need to hear and embrace.
ARTIFICIAL
LIGHT
What's the use of an old-fashioned, hand-held lantern? Well, its light can be quite useful when it's pitch-dark, but it becomes superfluous and unnoticeable in the noonday sun. Still, this doesn't mean its light is bad, only that it's weak.
If we hold that image in our minds, we will see both a huge irony and a profound lesson in the Gospels when they describe the arrest of Jesus. Gospel of John, for example, describes his arrest this way: "Judas brought the cohort to this place together with guards sent by the chief priests and Pharisees, all carrying lanterns and torches." John wants us to see the irony in this, that is, the forces of this world have come to arrest and put on trial, Jesus, the Light of the world, carrying weak, artificial light, a lantern in the face of the Light of the world, puny light in the full face of the noonday sun. As well, in naming this irony, the Gospels are offering a second lesson: when we no longer walk in the light of Christ, we will invariably turn to artificial light.
This image, I believe, can serve as a penetrating metaphor for how the criticism that the Enlightenment has made of our Christian belief in God stands before what it is criticizing. That criticism has two prongs.
The first prong is this: The Enlightenment (Modernist Thought) submits that the God that is generally presented by our Christian churches has no credibility because that God is simply a projection of human desire, a god made in our own image and likeness, and a god that we can forever manipulate to serve self-interest. Belief in such a god, they say, is adolescent in that it is predicated on a certain naiveté, on an intellectual blindness that can be flushed out and remedied by a hard look at reality. An enlightened mind, it is asserted, sees belief in God as self-interest and as intellectual blindness.
There is much to be said, positively, for this criticism, given that much, much of atheism is a parasite off of bad theism. Atheism feeds off bad religion and, no doubt, many of the things we do in the name of religion are done out of self-interest and intellectual blindness. How many times, for instance, has politics used religion for its own ends? The first prong of the criticism that the Enlightenment makes of Christian belief is a healthy challenge to us as believers.
But it's the second prong of this criticism that, I believe, stands like a lantern, a weak light, dwarfed in the noonday sun. Central to the Enlightenment's criticism of belief in God is their assertion (perhaps better called prejudice) that faith is a naiveté, something like belief in Santa and the Easter Bunny, that we outgrow as we mature and open our minds more and more to knowledge and what's empirically evident in the world. What we see through science and honest observation, they believe, eventually puts to death our belief in God, exposing it as a naiveté. In essence, the assertion is that if you face up to the hard empirical facts of reality without blinking, with honesty and courage, you will cease to believe in God. Indeed, the very phrase "the Enlightenment" implies this. it's only the unenlightened, pre-modernist mind that still can believe in God.
Moving beyond belief in God is enlightenment.
Sadly, Christianity has often internalized this prejudice and expressed it (and continues to express it) in the many forms of fear and anti-intellectualism within our churches. Too often we unwittingly agree with our critics that faith is a naiveté. We do it by believing the very thing our critics assert, namely, that if we studied and looked at things hard enough we would eventually lose our faith. We betray this in our fear of the intellectual academy, in our paranoia about secular wisdom, in some of our fears about scientific knowledge, and by forever warning people to protect themselves against certain inconvenient truths within scientific and secular knowledge. In doing this, we, in fact, concede that the criticism made against us is true and, worse still, we betray that fact that we do not think that the truth of Christ will stand up to the world.
But, given the penetrating metaphor highlighted in Jesus' arrest, there's another way of seeing this: After we have conceded the truth of the legitimate findings of science and secular wisdom and affirmed that they need to be embraced and not defended against, then, in the light of John's metaphor (worldly forces, carrying lanterns and torches, as they to arrest the Light of world to put it on trial), we should also see how dim are the lights of our world, not least, the criticism of the Enlightenment.
Lanterns and torches are helpful when the sun is down, but they're utterly eclipsed by the light of the sun. Worldly knowledge too is helpful in its own way, but it is more-than dwarfed by the light of the Son.
___________________________________________
Fr Richard Rohr
These articles continue from a series of emails from Fr Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation Series
The Desert Fathers and Mothers
The men and women who fled to the desert emphasized lifestyle practice, an alternative to empire and its economy, psychologically astute methods of prayer, and a very simple (some would say naïve) spirituality of transformation into Christ. The desert communities grew out of informal gatherings of monastic monks, functioning much like families. A good number also became hermits to mine the deep mystery of their inner experience. This movement paralleled the monastic pattern in Hinduism and Buddhism.
The desert tradition preceded the emergence of systematic theology and the formalization of doctrine. Faith was first a lifestyle before it was a belief system. In some areas, like Alexandria in Egypt, you had to be a long-standing monk before you could be a bishop, which entirely changed the character of bishops. These early monks and bishops were probably the link from the desert period to what became the "Eastern Church" with its unique insights. Since these desert monks were often formally uneducated, they told stories instead of using formal theology, much like Jesus did, to teach about essential issues of ego, love, virtue, surrender, peace, divine union, and inner freedom. But later, they also became much more formalized and argumentative, just like the Church in the West.
Thomas Merton brilliantly recognized the importance of this early, desert form of Christianity. He describes those who fled to the wilderness as people "who did not believe in letting themselves be passively guided and ruled by a decadent state," who didn't wish to be ruled or to rule. He continues, saying that they primarily sought their "true self, in Christ"; to do so, they had to reject "the false, formal self, fabricated under social compulsion 'in the world.' They sought a way to God that was uncharted and freely chosen, not inherited from others who had mapped it out beforehand" (The Wisdom of the Desert, pp. 5-6). Can you see why we might need to learn from them? Next week we'll look more closely at the non-dual wisdom of the Desert Fathers and Mothers.
Adapted from the Mendicant, Vol. 5, No. 2
The Early Eastern Church
In addition to the Desert Fathers and Mothers, I particularly value the wisdom of the Greek-speaking theologians in early Christianity, the "Fathers" of the Eastern Church. These names would be known in a Western seminary and some church calendars, but they would not be familiar names for most lay Catholics or Protestants: Origen, Athanasius,Basil, the two Gregorys (of Nazianzen and Nyssa), Evagrius Ponticus, John Chrysostom, Pseudo-Dionysius, the two Cyrils (of Alexandria and Jerusalem), and others. Their writings were formative in the early development of Christian theology--some of which we've retained, and unfortunately, much of which we've forgotten or labeled heretical. (Following next week's meditations on the Desert Fathers and Mothers, we'll learn from a few of these Eastern Christian teachers.)
Early Eastern Christianity set the foundation and ground for what we would now call contemplation. The term hesychasm ("resting" in God) applies to this primary concern in the Eastern Church. They are, as it were, the "Buddhists" of Christianity. The Western Church was always more missionary-oriented, more practical, and also focused on academic learning. That made a big difference in our two approaches, and obviously there are strengths and weaknesses to both. Our biggest loss was that we did not balance one another out.
Among many of the early Fathers there is also a common belief in apokatastasis (universal restoration) that has largely escaped the Western Church. Most Catholics and Protestants would be shocked at their early belief that salvation is cosmic and universal, and that this is the precise and perfect meaning of Christ's victory. While this early belief is validated by Scripture and by the very Trinitarian nature of God, the Western church went down the road of a very limited victory for God, a reward/punishment understanding of salvation at which almost no one won, including God. (I'll say more about this later in the meditations and you might also wish to listen to my talk, Hell, No!)
Both Desert Christianity and the Eastern Fathers of the Church are essential, yet almost lost pieces of the great Perennial Tradition. They are foundational to retrieving true orthodoxy (or "rightness," a word not used by Jesus). The Early Church in its simplicity, non-liturgical emphasis, and non-hierarchy was itself an alternative to what was later called Orthodoxy!
It focused on very different things than the Church did after both East and West aligned with power, money, and war. All streams of the Great Tradition have something to teach us; we exclude or neglect them to our own detriment. By reclaiming the many divergent roots of our faith tradition, we come closer to experiencing the wholeness and union that God surely desires for us and offers to us.
Adapted from the Mendicant, Vol. 5, No. 2
A Search for God
The desert tradition offers a rich teaching of surrender, through contemplation, to the wonderful and always too-much mystery of God. The desert fathers and mothers are like the Zen Buddhist monks of Christianity; their sayings are often like koans that cannot be understood with the rational, logical mind. The desert mystics focused much more on the how than the what. Note that this is very different from the primary emphasis of Christianity in recent centuries--the what of beliefs and doctrine.
Thomas Merton observed that the Western church had largely neglected the teaching of contemplation for at least the last 500 years. He helped modern Christianity recover an awareness of contemplative practice, in part from his reading of the desert fathers and mothers. They were surely bona fide Christians and yet knew none of the doctrines which many of us today take as essential orthodoxy, such as the two natures of Christ, the doctrine of the Trinity, the inerrancy of the Bible, and on and on. This early period is a clearing house for essential Christianity.
The desert mystics' primary quest was for God, for Love; everything else was secondary. Merton writes: "All through the Verba Seniorum we find a repeated insistence on the primacy of love over everything else in the spiritual life: over knowledge, gnosis, asceticism, contemplation, solitude, prayer. Love, in fact, is the spiritual life, and without it all the other exercises of the spirit, however lofty, are emptied of content and become mere illusions. The more lofty they are, the more dangerous the illusion."
1) The desert fathers and mothers focused on these primary practices in their search for God: 1) leaving, to some extent, the systems of the world;
2) some degree of solitude to break from the maddening crowd;
3) silence to break from the maddening mind; and 4) some "technologies" for controlling the compulsivity of mind and the emotions. All of this was for the sake of growing a person capable of love and community.
Contemplation became a solid foundation for building a civilization and human community. Contemplative consciousness labels things less easily and does not attach itself to one solitary definitive meaning. In contemplation, one experiences all things as somehow created in the image of God and therefore of equal dignity and deserving of respect.
If we hold that image in our minds, we will see both a huge irony and a profound lesson in the Gospels when they describe the arrest of Jesus. Gospel of John, for example, describes his arrest this way: "Judas brought the cohort to this place together with guards sent by the chief priests and Pharisees, all carrying lanterns and torches." John wants us to see the irony in this, that is, the forces of this world have come to arrest and put on trial, Jesus, the Light of the world, carrying weak, artificial light, a lantern in the face of the Light of the world, puny light in the full face of the noonday sun. As well, in naming this irony, the Gospels are offering a second lesson: when we no longer walk in the light of Christ, we will invariably turn to artificial light.
This image, I believe, can serve as a penetrating metaphor for how the criticism that the Enlightenment has made of our Christian belief in God stands before what it is criticizing. That criticism has two prongs.
The first prong is this: The Enlightenment (Modernist Thought) submits that the God that is generally presented by our Christian churches has no credibility because that God is simply a projection of human desire, a god made in our own image and likeness, and a god that we can forever manipulate to serve self-interest. Belief in such a god, they say, is adolescent in that it is predicated on a certain naiveté, on an intellectual blindness that can be flushed out and remedied by a hard look at reality. An enlightened mind, it is asserted, sees belief in God as self-interest and as intellectual blindness.
There is much to be said, positively, for this criticism, given that much, much of atheism is a parasite off of bad theism. Atheism feeds off bad religion and, no doubt, many of the things we do in the name of religion are done out of self-interest and intellectual blindness. How many times, for instance, has politics used religion for its own ends? The first prong of the criticism that the Enlightenment makes of Christian belief is a healthy challenge to us as believers.
But it's the second prong of this criticism that, I believe, stands like a lantern, a weak light, dwarfed in the noonday sun. Central to the Enlightenment's criticism of belief in God is their assertion (perhaps better called prejudice) that faith is a naiveté, something like belief in Santa and the Easter Bunny, that we outgrow as we mature and open our minds more and more to knowledge and what's empirically evident in the world. What we see through science and honest observation, they believe, eventually puts to death our belief in God, exposing it as a naiveté. In essence, the assertion is that if you face up to the hard empirical facts of reality without blinking, with honesty and courage, you will cease to believe in God. Indeed, the very phrase "the Enlightenment" implies this. it's only the unenlightened, pre-modernist mind that still can believe in God.
Moving beyond belief in God is enlightenment.
Sadly, Christianity has often internalized this prejudice and expressed it (and continues to express it) in the many forms of fear and anti-intellectualism within our churches. Too often we unwittingly agree with our critics that faith is a naiveté. We do it by believing the very thing our critics assert, namely, that if we studied and looked at things hard enough we would eventually lose our faith. We betray this in our fear of the intellectual academy, in our paranoia about secular wisdom, in some of our fears about scientific knowledge, and by forever warning people to protect themselves against certain inconvenient truths within scientific and secular knowledge. In doing this, we, in fact, concede that the criticism made against us is true and, worse still, we betray that fact that we do not think that the truth of Christ will stand up to the world.
But, given the penetrating metaphor highlighted in Jesus' arrest, there's another way of seeing this: After we have conceded the truth of the legitimate findings of science and secular wisdom and affirmed that they need to be embraced and not defended against, then, in the light of John's metaphor (worldly forces, carrying lanterns and torches, as they to arrest the Light of world to put it on trial), we should also see how dim are the lights of our world, not least, the criticism of the Enlightenment.
Lanterns and torches are helpful when the sun is down, but they're utterly eclipsed by the light of the sun. Worldly knowledge too is helpful in its own way, but it is more-than dwarfed by the light of the Son.
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Fr Richard Rohr
These articles continue from a series of emails from Fr Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation Series
The Desert Fathers and Mothers
The men and women who fled to the desert emphasized lifestyle practice, an alternative to empire and its economy, psychologically astute methods of prayer, and a very simple (some would say naïve) spirituality of transformation into Christ. The desert communities grew out of informal gatherings of monastic monks, functioning much like families. A good number also became hermits to mine the deep mystery of their inner experience. This movement paralleled the monastic pattern in Hinduism and Buddhism.
The desert tradition preceded the emergence of systematic theology and the formalization of doctrine. Faith was first a lifestyle before it was a belief system. In some areas, like Alexandria in Egypt, you had to be a long-standing monk before you could be a bishop, which entirely changed the character of bishops. These early monks and bishops were probably the link from the desert period to what became the "Eastern Church" with its unique insights. Since these desert monks were often formally uneducated, they told stories instead of using formal theology, much like Jesus did, to teach about essential issues of ego, love, virtue, surrender, peace, divine union, and inner freedom. But later, they also became much more formalized and argumentative, just like the Church in the West.
Thomas Merton brilliantly recognized the importance of this early, desert form of Christianity. He describes those who fled to the wilderness as people "who did not believe in letting themselves be passively guided and ruled by a decadent state," who didn't wish to be ruled or to rule. He continues, saying that they primarily sought their "true self, in Christ"; to do so, they had to reject "the false, formal self, fabricated under social compulsion 'in the world.' They sought a way to God that was uncharted and freely chosen, not inherited from others who had mapped it out beforehand" (The Wisdom of the Desert, pp. 5-6). Can you see why we might need to learn from them? Next week we'll look more closely at the non-dual wisdom of the Desert Fathers and Mothers.
Adapted from the Mendicant, Vol. 5, No. 2
The Early Eastern Church
In addition to the Desert Fathers and Mothers, I particularly value the wisdom of the Greek-speaking theologians in early Christianity, the "Fathers" of the Eastern Church. These names would be known in a Western seminary and some church calendars, but they would not be familiar names for most lay Catholics or Protestants: Origen, Athanasius,Basil, the two Gregorys (of Nazianzen and Nyssa), Evagrius Ponticus, John Chrysostom, Pseudo-Dionysius, the two Cyrils (of Alexandria and Jerusalem), and others. Their writings were formative in the early development of Christian theology--some of which we've retained, and unfortunately, much of which we've forgotten or labeled heretical. (Following next week's meditations on the Desert Fathers and Mothers, we'll learn from a few of these Eastern Christian teachers.)
Early Eastern Christianity set the foundation and ground for what we would now call contemplation. The term hesychasm ("resting" in God) applies to this primary concern in the Eastern Church. They are, as it were, the "Buddhists" of Christianity. The Western Church was always more missionary-oriented, more practical, and also focused on academic learning. That made a big difference in our two approaches, and obviously there are strengths and weaknesses to both. Our biggest loss was that we did not balance one another out.
Among many of the early Fathers there is also a common belief in apokatastasis (universal restoration) that has largely escaped the Western Church. Most Catholics and Protestants would be shocked at their early belief that salvation is cosmic and universal, and that this is the precise and perfect meaning of Christ's victory. While this early belief is validated by Scripture and by the very Trinitarian nature of God, the Western church went down the road of a very limited victory for God, a reward/punishment understanding of salvation at which almost no one won, including God. (I'll say more about this later in the meditations and you might also wish to listen to my talk, Hell, No!)
Both Desert Christianity and the Eastern Fathers of the Church are essential, yet almost lost pieces of the great Perennial Tradition. They are foundational to retrieving true orthodoxy (or "rightness," a word not used by Jesus). The Early Church in its simplicity, non-liturgical emphasis, and non-hierarchy was itself an alternative to what was later called Orthodoxy!
It focused on very different things than the Church did after both East and West aligned with power, money, and war. All streams of the Great Tradition have something to teach us; we exclude or neglect them to our own detriment. By reclaiming the many divergent roots of our faith tradition, we come closer to experiencing the wholeness and union that God surely desires for us and offers to us.
Adapted from the Mendicant, Vol. 5, No. 2
A Search for God
The desert tradition offers a rich teaching of surrender, through contemplation, to the wonderful and always too-much mystery of God. The desert fathers and mothers are like the Zen Buddhist monks of Christianity; their sayings are often like koans that cannot be understood with the rational, logical mind. The desert mystics focused much more on the how than the what. Note that this is very different from the primary emphasis of Christianity in recent centuries--the what of beliefs and doctrine.
Thomas Merton observed that the Western church had largely neglected the teaching of contemplation for at least the last 500 years. He helped modern Christianity recover an awareness of contemplative practice, in part from his reading of the desert fathers and mothers. They were surely bona fide Christians and yet knew none of the doctrines which many of us today take as essential orthodoxy, such as the two natures of Christ, the doctrine of the Trinity, the inerrancy of the Bible, and on and on. This early period is a clearing house for essential Christianity.
The desert mystics' primary quest was for God, for Love; everything else was secondary. Merton writes: "All through the Verba Seniorum we find a repeated insistence on the primacy of love over everything else in the spiritual life: over knowledge, gnosis, asceticism, contemplation, solitude, prayer. Love, in fact, is the spiritual life, and without it all the other exercises of the spirit, however lofty, are emptied of content and become mere illusions. The more lofty they are, the more dangerous the illusion."
1) The desert fathers and mothers focused on these primary practices in their search for God: 1) leaving, to some extent, the systems of the world;
2) some degree of solitude to break from the maddening crowd;
3) silence to break from the maddening mind; and 4) some "technologies" for controlling the compulsivity of mind and the emotions. All of this was for the sake of growing a person capable of love and community.
Contemplation became a solid foundation for building a civilization and human community. Contemplative consciousness labels things less easily and does not attach itself to one solitary definitive meaning. In contemplation, one experiences all things as somehow created in the image of God and therefore of equal dignity and deserving of respect.
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