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.
Weekday Masses 16th - 19th June
2015
12Noon & 6.30pm - Masses for St Anthony Relic Visit
Friday: 11:00am - Mt St Vincent … St Romuald
Next 20th
& 21st June 2015
Eucharistic Adoration:
Devonport:
Every Friday 10am - 12noon, concluding with Stations of the Cross and
Angelus
Prayer Groups:
Ministry Rosters 20th & 21st
June 2015
Devonport:
21st June: O McGinley
Flowers: M Breen, S Fletcher
Ulverstone:
Penguin:
Latrobe:
Port Sorell:
Your prayers
are asked for the sick:
Meg Collings, Bettye Cox, Phillip Sheehan, Margaret Hoult, Shirley Sexton & …
Let us pray
for those who have died recently:
Let us pray for those whose anniversary occurs about this
time:
10th – 16th June
– Flores McKenzie,
Norah Astell, Agnes Rose, Fr Wilfred Speers CP and
Edith Crabtree. Also Pat & Hilda Griffin, Johannah Marsterson, Emily
Reynolds, Julia Windridge, Kit Hayes, Harry
Maker and Edith Tierney.
May they rest in peace
Scripture Readings
This Week - 11th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year B
First Reading: Ezekiel 17:22-24
Responsorial Psalm:
(R.) Lord, it is good to give thanks to you.
Gospel Acclamation:
Alleluia, alleluia!
PREGO REFLECTION ON TODAY'S GOSPEL:
I settle myself comfortably to pray today’s gospel. I get
in touch with my mood. How am I feeling?
I read the text slowly; maybe I find it easier to stop
after the first paragraph and stay with those lines. What images do they
trigger in me? Perhaps I recall the wonder I felt as a young child when I first
saw that my seeds had germinated in a pot. Or maybe it is an apparently casual
remark I made which slowly grew and led a friend to want to know God more
intimately. I speak to the Lord about these things and I listen to him.
When I am ready I move on to the second parable.
Eventually, I give thanks to the Lord for the insights he
has given me. Slowly, I take my leave, telling him what today’s prayer has
meant to me.
Readings Next Week: 12th Sunday in
Ordinary Time
First Reading: Job 38:1. 8-11 Second Reading: 2 Corinthians 5:14-17 Gospel: Mark 4:35-41
14th – 21st
June, celebrated in Australia since 1968
This year’s Refugee Week theme, ‘With
courage let us all combine’, celebrates the courage of refugees who have
refused to deny their beliefs or identity in the face of persecution, fled
their homeland and often endured terrifying and dangerous journeys only to face
the cruelty of detention before working hard to make a new life for themselves
and their families. This theme also serves as a call to action for all
Australians: how can we stand up against injustice and work together to make
our country one that lives up to its national anthem as a nation with boundless
plains to share?
Blessed are the wanderers and those adrift.
WEEKLY
RAMBLINGS:
Thanks to those people who have indicated that they are
available to assist during the visit of the relic of St Anthony of Padua which
will take place next Thursday (18th) in Devonport. As announced last week there
will be two Masses during the visit – 12 noon and 6.30pm – both will be
followed by a time of Veneration. Anyone else able to help by being present at
some time other than the times of Mass and Veneration as a form of Security for
the Relics please see the Notice Board at OLOL for vacant time slots.
I wrote some time back about the land owned by the
Archdiocese at Coppers King Road, Cupona that has been mentioned in the paper
for failure to pay rates and taxes. The land has not been used, nor rates levied
as far as I can determine, for many years and the deeds are being transferred
to the local landowner who owns the land surrounding the particular piece of
land – as well as the various other lots which are also mentioned in the Public
Notices. However, the Council is required by law to announce that the land is
to be auctioned and must place notices in the Paper indicating the auction.
The last stages of the preparation for the children
preparing to receive the Sacraments of Confirmation and First Eucharist occur
this weekend – please continue to remember these children and their families in
your prayers over the coming weeks leading up to the celebrations on the first
weekend of August.
Please keep in mind the presentation by Marea Richardson on
“From Struggle to Hope”- Grief and Loss across the Life Span at MacKillop
Hill on Saturday 27th June. Please see the Notice on the next page for
further details.
Until next week, please take care on the roads and in your
homes.
CWL ULVERSTONE: Meeting Friday 19th June Community Room, Sacred Heart Church
Ulverstone 2:00pm.
menALIVE Weekend for men:
On 27th /28th
June Meander Valley Parish is holding a men’s weekend. Thousands of Catholic
men have been inspired and encouraged by these weekends across Australia. Presented
and run by any experienced MenAlive team from Hobart. Interesting talks,
discussions, reflection and fellowship. Registration forms available in Church
foyers. For more information please phone John Barton 6393:2221(after hours).
MACKILLOP HILL SPIRITUALITY CENTRE - WILLIAM ST,
FORTH
PLANNED GIVING PROGRAMME:
SACRAMENTAL PROGRAM:
As a parish, we look forward to celebrating their First
Eucharist and full initiation into the Church on August 1st and 2nd
and we continue to pray for them on their journey of faith.
TRIVIA NIGHT – PRESENTED BY
ENDEAVOUR F1
FOUNDER’S
DAY
OLOL School is
holding its inaugural Founder’s Day in Term 3. This will be a day of
celebrating and commemorating our history as a Josephite School in the Mersey
Leven Parish. We are looking for any old photos or memorabilia to set up a
display on the day.
FOOTY POINTS MARGIN TICKETS:
Round
10 – RICHMOND won by 27 points. Winners; Zillah Jones (this is not a miss
print!!), Lorna Jones, unknown.
Thursday Nights OLOL Hall D’port.
Eyes down 7.30pm –
Evangelii
Gaudium
“Peace in
society cannot be understood as pacification or the mere absence of violence
resulting from the domination of one part of society over others. Nor does true
peace act as a pretext for justifying a social structure which silences or
appeases the poor, so that the more affluent can placidly support their
lifestyle while others have to make do as they can.”
-
Par.218 from
Evangelii Gaudium, Pope
Francis, Nov. 24, 2013
Saint of the Week – St Romauld, abbot
(June 19)
In 976, Sergius, a
nobleman of Ravenna, quarrelled with a relation about an estate, and slew him
in a duel. His son Romuald, horrified at his father's crime, entered the
Benedictine monastery at Classe, to do a 40 days' penance for him. This penance
ended in his own vocation to religion.
After three years at
Classe, Romuald went to live as a hermit near Venice, where he was joined by
Peter Urseolus, Duke of Venice, and together they led an austere life in the
midst of assaults from the evil spirits.
St Romuald founded
many monasteries, the chief of which was that at Camaldoli, a wild desert
place, where he built a church, which he surrounded with a number of separate
cells for the solitaries who lived under his rule. His disciples were hence
called Camaldolese.
He is said to have
seen here a vision of a mystic ladder, and his white-clothed monks ascending by
it to heaven. Among his first disciples were Sts Adalbert and Boniface,
apostles of Russia, and Sts John and Benedict of Poland, martyrs for the faith.
He was an intimate friend of the Emperor St Henry, and was reverenced and
consulted by many great men of his time.
It is said that St
Romuald once passed seven years in solitude and complete silence.
Meme of the week
This image was
used to illustrate a homily I found on line. It was by an Australian priest, Fr
John Speekman, to mark the 16th Sunday in Ordinary Time (July 23,
2013).
_____________________________________________
A PRIMAL UNDERSTANDING OF THE EUCHARIST
An article by Fr Ron Rolheiser. The original article can be found here
Christian de Cherge, the Trappist Abbott who was martyred in Algeria in 1996, tells this story of his first communion. He grew up in a Roman Catholic family in France and on the day of his first communion he said to his mother: “I don’t understand what I’m doing.” She answered simply: “It’s okay, you don’t have to understand it now, later you will understand.”
Jesus, no doubt, must have given his disciples the exact same advice at the Last Supper, at their first communion. When he offered them bread and said, “This is my body”, and then offered them wine and said, “This is my blood”, they would not have understood. There would have been considerable confusion and bewilderment: How are we supposed to understand this? What does it mean to eat someone’s body and drink someone’s blood? I suspect that in the face of their non-understanding, like Christian de Cherge’s mother, Jesus would have also said: You don’t have to understand it now, later you will understand.
Indeed in instituting the Eucharist at Last Supper, Jesus didn’t ask his disciples to understand what they were doing, he only asked them to faithfully celebrate it until he returned. Their understanding of what they were doing in celebrating the Eucharist only developed as they grew in their faith. But initially, Jesus didn’t ask for much of an understanding, nor did he give them much of an explanation for what he was celebrating with them. He simply asked them to eat his body and drink his blood.
Jesus didn’t give a theological discourse on the Eucharist at the Last Supper. He simply gave us a ritual and asked us to celebrate it regularly, irrespective of our intellectual understanding of it. One of his more-explicit explanations of the meaning of the Eucharist was his symbolic action of washing his disciples’ feet.
Little has changed. We too aren’t asked to fully or even adequately understand the Eucharist. Our faith only asks that we are faithful in participating in it. In fact, as is the case for all deep mysteries, there is no satisfactory, rational explanation of the Eucharist. Nobody, not a single theologian in the world, can to anyone’s intellectual satisfaction, adequately lay out the phenomenology, psychology, or even spirituality of eating someone else’s body and drinking his blood. How is this to be understood? The mind comes up short. We need instead to rely upon metaphors and icons and an inchoate, intuitive understanding. We can truly know this mystery, even as we can’t fully understand it.
During my seminary and academic training, I took three major courses on the Eucharist. After all those lectures and books on the Eucharist, I concluded that I didn’t understand the Eucharist and that I was happy enough with that because what those courses did teach me was how important it is that I celebrate and participate in the Eucharist. For all the intellectuality in those courses, their true value was that they ultimately said to me what Christian de Cherge’s mother said to him on the day of his first communion: You don’t have to understand now, later you will understand. Contained in that, of course, is the fact that there is something profound here that is worth understanding, but that it’s too deep to be fully grasped right now.
Perhaps this can be helpful in our search for what to say to some of our own children and young people who no longer go to church and who tell us that the reason they don’t go is that they don’t find the Eucharist meaningful. We hear that lament all the time today: Why should go to church, it doesn’t mean anything to me?” That objection is simply another way of saying what young Christian de Cherge said to his mother at his first communion: I don’t understand this. Perhaps our answer then could be along the lines of the response of his mother: You don’t have to understand now, later you will understand.
The British theologian, Ronald Knox, speaking about the Eucharist, submits this: We have never, he claims, as Christians, been truly faithful to Jesus, no matter our denomination. In the end, none of us have truly followed those teachings which most characterize Jesus: We haven’t turned the other cheek. We haven’t forgiven our enemies. We haven’t purified our thoughts. We haven’t seen God in the poor. We haven’t kept our hearts pure and free from the things of this world. But we have, he submits, been faithful in one very important way; we have kept the Eucharist going. The last thing Jesus asked us to do before he died was to keep celebrating the Eucharist. And that we’ve done, despite the fact that we have never really grasped rationally what in fact we are doing. But we’ve been faithful in doing it because we grasped the wisdom in what Christian de Cherge’s mother to her son: You don’t have to understand this; you just have to do it.
_________________________________________________
Learning to See: Everything Is Holy
- a series of Reflections by Fr Richard Rohr. Receiving his daily email reflections can be organised here
Religionless Christianity
Most religious searches begin with one massive misperception. People tend to start by making a very unfortunate, yet understandable, division between the sacred and the profane worlds. Early stage religion focuses on identifying sacred places, sacred time, and seemingly sacred actions that then leaves the overwhelming majority of life unsacred. People are told to look for God in certain special places and in particular events--usually, it seems, ones controlled by the clergy. Perhaps this is related to the clergy's need for job security, which is only natural. Early stage religion has limited the search for God to a very small field and thus it is largely ineffective--unless people keep seeing and knowing at larger levels.
In Franciscan (and true Christian) mysticism, there is finally no distinction between sacred and profane. The whole universe and all events are sacred (doorways to the divine) for those who know how to see. In other words, everything that happens is potentially sacred if you allow it to be. Our job as humans is to make admiration of reality and adoration of God fully conscious and intentional. Then everything is a prayer and an act of adoration. As the French friar Eloi Leclerc beautifully paraphrased Francis, "If we but knew how to adore, we could travel through the world with the tranquility of the great rivers. But only if we know how to adore."
For those who have learned how to see fully, everything--absolutely everything--is "spiritual." This eventually and ironically leads to what the Lutheran mystic Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) called "religionless Christianity." Bonhoeffer saw that many people were moving beyond the scaffolding of religion to the underlying and deeper Christian experience itself. Once we can accept that God is in all situations, and that God can and will use even bad situations for good, then everything and everywhere becomes an occasion for good and an encounter with God.
God's plan is so perfect that even sin, tragedy, and painful deaths are used to bring us to divine union, just as the cross was meant to reveal. God wisely makes the problem itself part of the solution. It is all a matter of learning how to see rightly, fully, and therefore truthfully. Recently, I watched a family-made video of a dear teenage daughter's last moments dying from cancer, as she lovingly said good-bye. The family was ecstatic with tears and joy, through profound faith and hope in eternal life and infinite love. This experience, standing on the threshold of death with their loved one, likely did more long-lasting good for that family than years of formal religious education. I know that to be true from many personal experiences. The result is "religionless Christianity," which ironically might be the most religious of all.
Adapted from Franciscan Mysticism: I Am that which I Am Seeking, disc 1 (CD, MP3 download),
and Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi, pp. 10-11
God Is in Everything
Christ has something in common with all creatures. With the stone he shares existence, with the plants he shares life, with the animals he shares sensation, and with the angels he shares intelligence. Thus all things are transformed in Christ since in the fullness of his nature he embraces some part of every creature. --Bonaventure
There is no other teacher who takes the vision of Francis and Clare to the level of a total theology and philosophy, a fully symmetrical worldview, as well as Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, Italy (c. 1221-1274). As Paul did for Jesus, so Bonaventure did for Francis. Bonaventure's vision is positive, mystic, cosmic, intimately relational, and largely concerned with cleaning the lens of our perception and our intention. With this awareness, we can see that God is with us in everything we experience in life and can be found in and through everything, even and often most especially our limits and our suffering (because in those states we long for meaning and purpose so desperately).
Bonaventure was profoundly Trinitarian in that his framework for reality was love itself--always and forever flowing, overflowing, and filling all things in one exclusively positive direction. He called the Trinitarian God a "fountain fullness" of love. Reality is always in process, and fully participatory; it is love itself, and not a mere Platonic world, an abstract idea, or a static, impersonal principle. God as Trinitarian Flow is the blueprint and pattern for all relationships and thus all of creation, which we now know from atoms, to circulatory systems, to ecosystems, and galaxies is exactly the case.
Bonaventure's "vision logic," as Ken Wilber would call it, and the lovely symmetry of his theology, can be summarized in what Bonaventure named the three great truths, phrased simply here:
Emanation--We come forth from God bearing the divine image; our very DNA is found in God.
Exemplarism--Everything, the entire chain or nest of being, is an example and illustration of the one God Mystery in space and time, by reason of its "origin, magnitude, multitude, beauty, plentitude, activity, and order."
Consummation--We return to the Source from which we came; the Omega is the same as the Alpha, and this is God's supreme and final victory.
Adapted from Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi, pp. 161, 163-166
Identity in God
Saint Bonaventure took the spiritual intuition of Francis and made it into a theology. He taught that there are three books from which we learn wisdom: 1) The Book of Creation, 2) The Book of Jesus and Scripture, and 3) The Book of Experience. He also taught that there are three pairs of eyes. The first pair of eyes sees all things as a fingerprint or footprint of God (vestigia), which evokes foundational respect and teachability. The second pair of eyes are the hard work of honest self-knowledge--awareness of how you are processing your reality moment by moment. This is necessary to keep your own lens clean and open, and is the work of your entire lifetime. The third pair are the eyes of contemplation, which allow you to see things in their essence and in their core meaning. Only then can you receive the transmitted image of God on your soul. "Deep calls unto deep" as the Psalmist says (42:8), and all outer images can then mirror and evoke your own inner divine image. This is really quite brilliant and simple.
In his book, The Soul's Journey into God, Bonaventure says we must "begin at the bottom, presenting ourselves to the material world, seeing it as a mirror through which we may pass through to God, the Supreme Craftsman." He teaches that to really see things, we must "recognize in all material things their origin, their process, and their end." Everything comes from God, exemplifies God, and then returns to God. [1]
Ilia Delio, Keith Douglass Warner, and Pamela Wood explain how this Franciscan spirituality leads to caring for creation [2]:
- "The life of Francis shows us that to appreciate the book of creation we must come to know ourselves as creatures of God and as creatures of creation. Without self-knowledge, there can be no real knowledge of creation as our home and the womb of our birth. Without the human person to give voice to creation, to celebrate its giftedness and sacredness, creation becomes mute and vulnerable to manipulation.
- "The key to creation's holiness, therefore, is in human identity--who we are in our Creator, the Trinity of divine love. This identity is revealed to us in Jesus Christ, the Word in whom we are made flesh. If God is alive in us, as [God] was in Francis, then we are alive to the world of God's good creation. However, if God is dead in us, then we are dead to the deeper meaning of creation as well.
- "Francis realized that God humbly bends low in love and hides in simple, ordinary, fragile beings. So too we must realize that God is in our midst. Only when we can recognize creatures for what they are--expressions of God's overflowing love--can we recognize the source of our own lives as well. The love that gave birth to all creatures is the same love that has brought us into existence. This is what Francis realized, the luminous web of God's love revealed in Jesus Christ. We are called to live in this luminous web of love."
References
[1] Richard Rohr, adapted from an exclusive video teaching within the Living School program.
[2] Ilia Delio, Keith Douglass Warner, and Pamela Wood; Care for Creation: A Franciscan Spirituality of the Earth (St. Anthony Messenger Press: 2008); 52.
The Univocity of Being
John Duns Scotus (c. 1266-1308) was a philosopher theologian who in many ways paralleled Bonaventure's ideas and also developed the doctrine of the univocity of being. Up to that point the philosophers said God was a Being, which is what most people still think today. Both the Dominican Thomas Aquinas and the Franciscan Duns Scotus said Deus est ens, God is being itself. The Dominicans said everything other than God participated in being only by analogy and by attempts to make connections, but it was not really the same being as God's being. Yet Scotus believed we can speak "with one voice" (univocity) of the being of waters, plants, animals, humans, angels, and God. We all participate in the same being. God is one (Deuteronomy 6:4), and thus reality is one too (Ephesians 4:3-5).
This gives us a foundation for understanding the sacredness of everything and our connection with everything. We are already connected to everything--inherently, objectively, metaphysically, ontologically, and theologically. We don't create the connection by going to church or reading the Bible, although we hopefully enliven the connection. In Francis' worldview, we begin with "original blessing," as Matthew Fox rightly said. Our DNA is already divine; that is why we naturally seek to know and love God. There has to be a little bit of something inside you for you to be attracted to it; like knows like. You are what you are looking for!
Duns Scotus' idea, univocity of being, is universally attractive and meaningful. Without using that exact term, master teacher Thich Nhat Hanh shows how it is key to the health of the planet as well as to reconciliation and peace [1]:
"We have to look deeply at things in order to see. When a swimmer enjoys the clear water of the river, he or she should also be able to be the river. . . .
- "If we want to continue to enjoy our rivers--to swim in them, walk beside them, even drink their water--we have to adopt the non-dual perspective. We have to meditate on being the river so that we can experience within ourselves the fears and hopes of the river. If we cannot feel the rivers, the mountains, the air, the animals, and other people from within their own perspective, the rivers will die and we will lose our chance for peace.
- "If you are a mountain climber or someone who enjoys the countryside, or the green forest, you know that the forests are our lungs outside of our bodies, just as the sun is our heart outside of our bodies. Yet we have been acting in a way that has allowed two million square miles of forest to be destroyed by acid rain, and we have destroyed parts of the ozone layer that regulate how much direct sunlight we receive. We are imprisoned in our small selves, thinking only of the comfortable conditions for this small self, while we destroy our large self. We should be able to be our true self. That means we should be able to be the river, we should be able to be the forest, the sun, and the ozone layer. We must do this to understand and to have hope for the future."
As Christians, we would say that our True Self is our Christ Self. Since Creation is the Body of God and Christ is "all in all" (Colossians 3:11, 1 Corinthians 15:28), the seeing that Thich Nhat Hahn describes should be natural to us. Contemplatives in all religions invariably come to the same insight because it is the deepest level of truth: Being is One.
Adapted from Franciscan Mysticism: I Am That Which I Am Seeking, disc 1 (CD, MP3 download)
Of Holons and Wholeness
The "univocity of being" gives a philosophical foundation to what we now call the circle of life, ecosystems, unitive thinking, and mysticism itself. Our being is not just analogous or similar to God's being, but we may speak of our two supposedly different beings "with one voice." From this alone we know that Duns Scotus, the "Blessed" man who coined the term, was a non-dual thinker, a contemplative.
Scotus was laying a philosophical foundation for what Michael Talbot and Ken Wilber are describing as a holographic universe, where "everything is a holon." Scotus' insight is also affirmed by Mandelbrot's discovery of fractals, the repetitive and imitative patterns found in nature, mathematics, and art. We literally see that the part contains the whole or replicates the whole, and yet each part still has a wholeness within itself. This "appreciative accumulation" is what makes any whole Whole!
We now believe such wholeness is true physically, biologically, and spiritually, and can even be seen as a basis for understanding mystical union. It implies that there is an "inherent sympathy" between God and all created things, and between the other "ten thousand things," too. "The ten thousand things" is a Taoist and Zen expression for everything that exists. All things--every human, creature, and even human-made objects--are somehow manifestations of formlessness. In this view, we don't need to grade or classify "things" as good or bad, valuable or worthless. God can use everything to teach, delight, help, and challenge us.
Each of us replicates the Whole and yet has a certain wholeness within ourselves--but we are never entirely whole apart from connection with the larger Whole. Holons create a very fine language for what I call the mystery of participation, for understanding how holiness transmits and how God's life is an utterly shared phenomenon. If you try to be "holy" alone, you are not holy at all.
Salvation is not a divine transaction that takes place because you are morally perfect, but much more is an organic unfolding, a becoming who you already are, an inborn sympathy with and capacity for the very One who created you. Each being is both a part that is like the Whole and yet also contributes to the Whole, just as Paul teaches in his analogy of the body (1 Corinthians 12:12-30). This is the basis for the inherent dignity of everything and the foundation for all non-violence. Sadly, the world we live in today has very little sense of this wonderful wholeness, and therefore of holiness and non-violence.
Adapted from Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi, pp. 176-178
What You See Is What You Are
Franciscan spirituality emphasizes a real equivalence, symbiosis, and mutuality between the one who sees and what can be seen. Francis had a unique ability to call others--animals, plants, and elements--"brother" and "sister" because he himself was a little brother. He granted other beings and things subjectivity, "personhood," and dignity because he first honored his own dignity as a son of God (although it could be the other way around, too). The world of things was a transparent two-way mirror for Francis, which some of us would call a fully "sacramental" universe.
All being can correctly be spoken of with "one voice" (univocity) as John Duns Scotus put it. What I am you also are, and so is the world. Creation is one giant symphony of mutual sympathy. Or, as Augustine said, "In the end there will only be Christ loving himself."
To get to this 3-D vision, I must know that I am, at least in part, the very thing I am seeking. In fact, that is what makes me seek it. But most do not know this good news yet. God cannot be found "out there" until God is first found "in here," within ourselves, as Augustine profoundly expressed in his Confessions in many ways. Then we can almost naturally see God in others and in all of creation, too. What you seek is what you are. The search for God and the search for our True Self are finally the same search. Francis' all-night prayer, "Who are you, O God, and who am I?" is such a perfect prayer because it is the most honest and always true prayer we can continue to offer.
A heart transformed by this realization of oneness knows that only love "in here" can spot and enjoy love "out there." Fear, constriction, and resentment are seen by spiritual teachers to be an inherent blindness that must be overcome. These emotions cannot get you anywhere, certainly not anywhere good. Thus all mystics are positive people--or they are not mystics. Their spiritual warfare is precisely the work of recognizing and then handing over all of their inner negativity and fear to God. The great paradox here is that such a victory is a gift from God, and yet somehow you must want it very much (Philippians 2:12b-13).
The central practice in Franciscan mysticism, therefore, is that we must remain in love, which is why it is a commandment as such (John 15:4-5), in fact, the great commandment of Jesus. Only when we are eager to love can we see love and goodness in the world around us. We must ourselves remain in peace, and then we will see and find peace over there. Remain in beauty, and we will honor beauty everywhere. This concept of remaining or abiding (John 15:4-5) moves religion out of esoteric realms of doctrinal outer-space where it has for too long been lost. There is no secret moral behavior required for knowing or pleasing God, or what some call "salvation," beyond becoming a loving person in mind, heart, body, and soul yourself. Then you will see all that you need to see!
Adapted from Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi, pp. 7-10
Parish Priest: Fr Mike Delaney
mob: 0417 279 437;
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 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 16th - 19th June
2015
Tuesday: 9:30am - Penguin
Wednesday: 9:30am - Latrobe
Thursday: 10:30am - Karingal
12Noon & 6.30pm - Masses for St Anthony Relic Visit
12Noon & 6.30pm - Masses for St Anthony Relic Visit
Friday: 11:00am - Mt St Vincent … St Romuald
Next 20th
& 21st June 2015
Saturday Vigil: 6:00pm Penguin & Devonport
Sunday Mass: 8:30am Port Sorell (LWC) 9:00am Ulverstone
10:30am Devonport
11:00am
Sheffield
5:00pm Latrobe
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 20th & 21st
June 2015
Devonport:
Readers
Vigil: A McIntyre,
M Williams,
C Keily-Hoye
10:30am:
F Sly, J Tuxworth, K Pearce
Ministers of Communion:
Vigil:
T Muir, M Davies, J
Cox, M Gerrand,
T Bird, S Innes
10:30am: C Schrader, R Beaton, B & N Mulcahy, L Hollister
Cleaners 19th June: K.S.C.
26th June: P
Shelverton, E Petts
Piety Shop 20th June:
R Baker
21st June: O McGinley
21st June: O McGinley
Flowers: M Breen, S Fletcher
Ulverstone:
Reader: M McLaren
Ministers of Communion: B Deacon, J Allen, G Douglas, K
Reilly
Cleaners: K.S.C. Flowers: G Doyle Hospitality: B O’Rourke
Penguin:
Greeters: Fifita Family Commentator: Readers: M & D Hiscutt
Procession: Fifita Family Ministers of Communion: J Barker
Liturgy:
Penguin Setting Up: E Nickols Care of Church: Y & R Downes
Latrobe:
Reader: P Marlow Ministers of Communion: M Eden, Z Smith
Procession: J Hyde Music: Jenny
Port Sorell:
Readers: D Leaman, T Jeffries
Ministers of Communion: P Anderson Cleaners/Flowers/Prepare: G Wylie
Your prayers
are asked for the sick:
Joy
Carter, Reg Hinkley, Kath Smith, Nellie Widger, Michelle Nickols, Lorraine
Duncan, Karen Aiken, Maryanne Doherty, Alyssa Otten, Merlyn Veracruz, Sr Carmel Hall,
Meg Collings, Bettye Cox, Phillip Sheehan, Margaret Hoult, Shirley Sexton & …
Meg Collings, Bettye Cox, Phillip Sheehan, Margaret Hoult, Shirley Sexton & …
Let us pray
for those who have died recently:
Pat Malone, Eva Zvatora, Graham Appleby, Audrey Mitchell, Geok Lan Low, Margaret
Everett, Gertrude Haasmann, Mike O’Halloran, Beryl Purton, Nanette O’Brien, Lorraine
Keen, Joseph Sallese, Bridget Stone, Paul Sulzberger, Tas Glover, Sylvia Street, Daisy Murray
& Daphne Walker.
Let us pray for those whose anniversary occurs about this
time:
10th – 16th June
– Flores McKenzie,
Norah Astell, Agnes Rose, Fr Wilfred Speers CP and
Edith Crabtree. Also Pat & Hilda Griffin, Johannah Marsterson, Emily
Reynolds, Julia Windridge, Kit Hayes, Harry
Maker and Edith Tierney.
May they rest in peace
Scripture Readings
This Week - 11th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year B
First Reading: Ezekiel 17:22-24
Responsorial Psalm:
Responsorial Psalm:
(R.) Lord, it is good to give thanks to you.
Second Reading: 2 Corinthians 5:6-10
Gospel Acclamation:
Gospel Acclamation:
Alleluia, alleluia!
The seed is the word of God, Christ is the sower; all who
come to him will live for ever. Alleluia!
GOSPEL: Mark 4:26-34
PREGO REFLECTION ON TODAY'S GOSPEL:
I settle myself comfortably to pray today’s gospel. I get
in touch with my mood. How am I feeling?
However well known the gospel story might be, the Lord
always has something new to show me. What will it be today? I ask the Holy
Spirit to help me see.
I read the text slowly; maybe I find it easier to stop
after the first paragraph and stay with those lines. What images do they
trigger in me? Perhaps I recall the wonder I felt as a young child when I first
saw that my seeds had germinated in a pot. Or maybe it is an apparently casual
remark I made which slowly grew and led a friend to want to know God more
intimately. I speak to the Lord about these things and I listen to him.
When I am ready I move on to the second parable.
Perhaps other images of growth come to mind, the small
stream becoming a wide river providing shelter to many fish, or the tiny baby
growing into a powerful leader, protecting the poor and the needy. I let my
mind go where the Spirit leads it.
Eventually, I give thanks to the Lord for the insights he
has given me. Slowly, I take my leave, telling him what today’s prayer has
meant to me.
Readings Next Week: 12th Sunday in
Ordinary Time
First Reading: Job 38:1. 8-11 Second Reading: 2 Corinthians 5:14-17 Gospel: Mark 4:35-41
14th – 21st
June, celebrated in Australia since 1968
This year’s Refugee Week theme, ‘With
courage let us all combine’, celebrates the courage of refugees who have
refused to deny their beliefs or identity in the face of persecution, fled
their homeland and often endured terrifying and dangerous journeys only to face
the cruelty of detention before working hard to make a new life for themselves
and their families. This theme also serves as a call to action for all
Australians: how can we stand up against injustice and work together to make
our country one that lives up to its national anthem as a nation with boundless
plains to share?
Blessed are the wanderers and those adrift.
Blessed are the strangers at our door.
Blessed are the unfed, the homeless on the road.
Blessed is the child crying in pain.
Blessed is the mother working to provide for her
children,
left behind in her native country.
Blessed are those who welcome Christ to be born
again
when they welcome these ones.
Blessed are we who struggle to make a place in our
hearts
for all of our brothers and sisters.
Amen.
WEEKLY
RAMBLINGS:
I wrote some time back about the land owned by the
Archdiocese at Coppers King Road, Cupona that has been mentioned in the paper
for failure to pay rates and taxes. The land has not been used, nor rates levied
as far as I can determine, for many years and the deeds are being transferred
to the local landowner who owns the land surrounding the particular piece of
land – as well as the various other lots which are also mentioned in the Public
Notices. However, the Council is required by law to announce that the land is
to be auctioned and must place notices in the Paper indicating the auction.
The last stages of the preparation for the children
preparing to receive the Sacraments of Confirmation and First Eucharist occur
this weekend – please continue to remember these children and their families in
your prayers over the coming weeks leading up to the celebrations on the first
weekend of August.
Please keep in mind the presentation by Marea Richardson on
“From Struggle to Hope”- Grief and Loss across the Life Span at MacKillop
Hill on Saturday 27th June. Please see the Notice on the next page for
further details.
Until next week, please take care on the roads and in your
homes.
CWL ULVERSTONE: Meeting Friday 19th June Community Room, Sacred Heart Church
Ulverstone 2:00pm.
menALIVE Weekend for men:
On 27th /28th
June Meander Valley Parish is holding a men’s weekend. Thousands of Catholic
men have been inspired and encouraged by these weekends across Australia. Presented
and run by any experienced MenAlive team from Hobart. Interesting talks,
discussions, reflection and fellowship. Registration forms available in Church
foyers. For more information please phone John Barton 6393:2221(after hours).
MACKILLOP HILL SPIRITUALITY CENTRE - WILLIAM ST,
FORTH
“From Struggle to Hope”- Grief and Loss across the Life Span - Presented by Marea Richardson
Change and transition, loss and suffering are as much a
part of our life as the seasons of the year, and therefore must serve some
purpose. Saturday 27th June 10.00am
– 3.00pm Bookings essential. Cost: $35.00 Phone 6428:3095 email: mackillophill.forth@sosj.org.au
PLANNED GIVING PROGRAMME:
New envelopes are being distributed
during June. If you are not already part of this programme and would like to
join, or do not wish to continue giving, please contact the Parish office.
Please note the new envelopes should not be used until July.
SACRAMENTAL PROGRAM:
This Saturday, 13th June, our parish children
participating in the program of preparation for the Sacraments spent the day
together to learn more about Eucharist. They enjoyed activities to
help them learn about Jesus and the Last Supper, Eucharist meaning thanksgiving,
The Mass as Eucharistic celebration, Communion as the Body of Christ, and the
community nourished by the Eucharist as the Body of Christ.
As a parish, we look forward to celebrating their First
Eucharist and full initiation into the Church on August 1st and 2nd
and we continue to pray for them on their journey of faith.
TRIVIA NIGHT – PRESENTED BY
ENDEAVOUR F1
(To raise funds for a team of
School Children from Ulverstone to represent Australia at the International
Final of The Endeavour F1 Challenge) At Ulverstone High School Friday
19th June at 7pm. Raffle will be drawn. Tickets available on
the night and prior through Ulverstone High School. $15 per head with 6 per
table. Guest Quiz Master Nick Owen. Free drinks and nibbles. Interactive Race
Demonstration, prizes for winning team. Auction will be held including signed
2015 Hawthorn Guernsey. RSVP: Your table australia@endeavourF1.com or
through Ulverstone High School.
FOUNDER’S
DAY
August 6
2015
OLOL School is
holding its inaugural Founder’s Day in Term 3. This will be a day of
celebrating and commemorating our history as a Josephite School in the Mersey
Leven Parish. We are looking for any old photos or memorabilia to set up a
display on the day.
We are also
interested in hearing from any former pupils or teachers, who would be willing
to speak to students, or write/record an account of what OLOL was like in
‘their day’. If you can help in any way, please contact the OLOL Office, 6424:1744.
FOOTY POINTS MARGIN TICKETS:
Round
10 – RICHMOND won by 27 points. Winners; Zillah Jones (this is not a miss
print!!), Lorna Jones, unknown.
Thursday Nights OLOL Hall D’port.
Eyes down 7.30pm –
Callers 18th June Jon
Halley & Alan Luxton
Evangelii
Gaudium
“Peace in
society cannot be understood as pacification or the mere absence of violence
resulting from the domination of one part of society over others. Nor does true
peace act as a pretext for justifying a social structure which silences or
appeases the poor, so that the more affluent can placidly support their
lifestyle while others have to make do as they can.”
-
Par.218 from
Evangelii Gaudium, Pope
Francis, Nov. 24, 2013
Saint of the Week – St Romauld, abbot
(June 19)
In 976, Sergius, a
nobleman of Ravenna, quarrelled with a relation about an estate, and slew him
in a duel. His son Romuald, horrified at his father's crime, entered the
Benedictine monastery at Classe, to do a 40 days' penance for him. This penance
ended in his own vocation to religion.
After three years at
Classe, Romuald went to live as a hermit near Venice, where he was joined by
Peter Urseolus, Duke of Venice, and together they led an austere life in the
midst of assaults from the evil spirits.
St Romuald founded
many monasteries, the chief of which was that at Camaldoli, a wild desert
place, where he built a church, which he surrounded with a number of separate
cells for the solitaries who lived under his rule. His disciples were hence
called Camaldolese.
He is said to have
seen here a vision of a mystic ladder, and his white-clothed monks ascending by
it to heaven. Among his first disciples were Sts Adalbert and Boniface,
apostles of Russia, and Sts John and Benedict of Poland, martyrs for the faith.
He was an intimate friend of the Emperor St Henry, and was reverenced and
consulted by many great men of his time.
It is said that St
Romuald once passed seven years in solitude and complete silence.
“Criticism of others is thus an oblique form
of self-commendation. We think we make the picture hang straight on our wall by
telling our neighbours that all his pictures are crooked.”
Meme of the week
This image was
used to illustrate a homily I found on line. It was by an Australian priest, Fr
John Speekman, to mark the 16th Sunday in Ordinary Time (July 23,
2013).
_____________________________________________
A PRIMAL UNDERSTANDING OF THE EUCHARIST
An article by Fr Ron Rolheiser. The original article can be found here
Christian de Cherge, the Trappist Abbott who was martyred in Algeria in 1996, tells this story of his first communion. He grew up in a Roman Catholic family in France and on the day of his first communion he said to his mother: “I don’t understand what I’m doing.” She answered simply: “It’s okay, you don’t have to understand it now, later you will understand.”
Jesus, no doubt, must have given his disciples the exact same advice at the Last Supper, at their first communion. When he offered them bread and said, “This is my body”, and then offered them wine and said, “This is my blood”, they would not have understood. There would have been considerable confusion and bewilderment: How are we supposed to understand this? What does it mean to eat someone’s body and drink someone’s blood? I suspect that in the face of their non-understanding, like Christian de Cherge’s mother, Jesus would have also said: You don’t have to understand it now, later you will understand.
Indeed in instituting the Eucharist at Last Supper, Jesus didn’t ask his disciples to understand what they were doing, he only asked them to faithfully celebrate it until he returned. Their understanding of what they were doing in celebrating the Eucharist only developed as they grew in their faith. But initially, Jesus didn’t ask for much of an understanding, nor did he give them much of an explanation for what he was celebrating with them. He simply asked them to eat his body and drink his blood.
Jesus didn’t give a theological discourse on the Eucharist at the Last Supper. He simply gave us a ritual and asked us to celebrate it regularly, irrespective of our intellectual understanding of it. One of his more-explicit explanations of the meaning of the Eucharist was his symbolic action of washing his disciples’ feet.
Little has changed. We too aren’t asked to fully or even adequately understand the Eucharist. Our faith only asks that we are faithful in participating in it. In fact, as is the case for all deep mysteries, there is no satisfactory, rational explanation of the Eucharist. Nobody, not a single theologian in the world, can to anyone’s intellectual satisfaction, adequately lay out the phenomenology, psychology, or even spirituality of eating someone else’s body and drinking his blood. How is this to be understood? The mind comes up short. We need instead to rely upon metaphors and icons and an inchoate, intuitive understanding. We can truly know this mystery, even as we can’t fully understand it.
During my seminary and academic training, I took three major courses on the Eucharist. After all those lectures and books on the Eucharist, I concluded that I didn’t understand the Eucharist and that I was happy enough with that because what those courses did teach me was how important it is that I celebrate and participate in the Eucharist. For all the intellectuality in those courses, their true value was that they ultimately said to me what Christian de Cherge’s mother said to him on the day of his first communion: You don’t have to understand now, later you will understand. Contained in that, of course, is the fact that there is something profound here that is worth understanding, but that it’s too deep to be fully grasped right now.
Perhaps this can be helpful in our search for what to say to some of our own children and young people who no longer go to church and who tell us that the reason they don’t go is that they don’t find the Eucharist meaningful. We hear that lament all the time today: Why should go to church, it doesn’t mean anything to me?” That objection is simply another way of saying what young Christian de Cherge said to his mother at his first communion: I don’t understand this. Perhaps our answer then could be along the lines of the response of his mother: You don’t have to understand now, later you will understand.
The British theologian, Ronald Knox, speaking about the Eucharist, submits this: We have never, he claims, as Christians, been truly faithful to Jesus, no matter our denomination. In the end, none of us have truly followed those teachings which most characterize Jesus: We haven’t turned the other cheek. We haven’t forgiven our enemies. We haven’t purified our thoughts. We haven’t seen God in the poor. We haven’t kept our hearts pure and free from the things of this world. But we have, he submits, been faithful in one very important way; we have kept the Eucharist going. The last thing Jesus asked us to do before he died was to keep celebrating the Eucharist. And that we’ve done, despite the fact that we have never really grasped rationally what in fact we are doing. But we’ve been faithful in doing it because we grasped the wisdom in what Christian de Cherge’s mother to her son: You don’t have to understand this; you just have to do it.
_________________________________________________
Learning to See: Everything Is Holy
- a series of Reflections by Fr Richard Rohr. Receiving his daily email reflections can be organised here
Religionless Christianity
Most religious searches begin with one massive misperception. People tend to start by making a very unfortunate, yet understandable, division between the sacred and the profane worlds. Early stage religion focuses on identifying sacred places, sacred time, and seemingly sacred actions that then leaves the overwhelming majority of life unsacred. People are told to look for God in certain special places and in particular events--usually, it seems, ones controlled by the clergy. Perhaps this is related to the clergy's need for job security, which is only natural. Early stage religion has limited the search for God to a very small field and thus it is largely ineffective--unless people keep seeing and knowing at larger levels.
In Franciscan (and true Christian) mysticism, there is finally no distinction between sacred and profane. The whole universe and all events are sacred (doorways to the divine) for those who know how to see. In other words, everything that happens is potentially sacred if you allow it to be. Our job as humans is to make admiration of reality and adoration of God fully conscious and intentional. Then everything is a prayer and an act of adoration. As the French friar Eloi Leclerc beautifully paraphrased Francis, "If we but knew how to adore, we could travel through the world with the tranquility of the great rivers. But only if we know how to adore."
For those who have learned how to see fully, everything--absolutely everything--is "spiritual." This eventually and ironically leads to what the Lutheran mystic Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) called "religionless Christianity." Bonhoeffer saw that many people were moving beyond the scaffolding of religion to the underlying and deeper Christian experience itself. Once we can accept that God is in all situations, and that God can and will use even bad situations for good, then everything and everywhere becomes an occasion for good and an encounter with God.
God's plan is so perfect that even sin, tragedy, and painful deaths are used to bring us to divine union, just as the cross was meant to reveal. God wisely makes the problem itself part of the solution. It is all a matter of learning how to see rightly, fully, and therefore truthfully. Recently, I watched a family-made video of a dear teenage daughter's last moments dying from cancer, as she lovingly said good-bye. The family was ecstatic with tears and joy, through profound faith and hope in eternal life and infinite love. This experience, standing on the threshold of death with their loved one, likely did more long-lasting good for that family than years of formal religious education. I know that to be true from many personal experiences. The result is "religionless Christianity," which ironically might be the most religious of all.
Adapted from Franciscan Mysticism: I Am that which I Am Seeking, disc 1 (CD, MP3 download),
and Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi, pp. 10-11
God Is in Everything
Christ has something in common with all creatures. With the stone he shares existence, with the plants he shares life, with the animals he shares sensation, and with the angels he shares intelligence. Thus all things are transformed in Christ since in the fullness of his nature he embraces some part of every creature. --Bonaventure
There is no other teacher who takes the vision of Francis and Clare to the level of a total theology and philosophy, a fully symmetrical worldview, as well as Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, Italy (c. 1221-1274). As Paul did for Jesus, so Bonaventure did for Francis. Bonaventure's vision is positive, mystic, cosmic, intimately relational, and largely concerned with cleaning the lens of our perception and our intention. With this awareness, we can see that God is with us in everything we experience in life and can be found in and through everything, even and often most especially our limits and our suffering (because in those states we long for meaning and purpose so desperately).
Bonaventure was profoundly Trinitarian in that his framework for reality was love itself--always and forever flowing, overflowing, and filling all things in one exclusively positive direction. He called the Trinitarian God a "fountain fullness" of love. Reality is always in process, and fully participatory; it is love itself, and not a mere Platonic world, an abstract idea, or a static, impersonal principle. God as Trinitarian Flow is the blueprint and pattern for all relationships and thus all of creation, which we now know from atoms, to circulatory systems, to ecosystems, and galaxies is exactly the case.
Bonaventure's "vision logic," as Ken Wilber would call it, and the lovely symmetry of his theology, can be summarized in what Bonaventure named the three great truths, phrased simply here:
Emanation--We come forth from God bearing the divine image; our very DNA is found in God.
Exemplarism--Everything, the entire chain or nest of being, is an example and illustration of the one God Mystery in space and time, by reason of its "origin, magnitude, multitude, beauty, plentitude, activity, and order."
Consummation--We return to the Source from which we came; the Omega is the same as the Alpha, and this is God's supreme and final victory.
Adapted from Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi, pp. 161, 163-166
Identity in God
Saint Bonaventure took the spiritual intuition of Francis and made it into a theology. He taught that there are three books from which we learn wisdom: 1) The Book of Creation, 2) The Book of Jesus and Scripture, and 3) The Book of Experience. He also taught that there are three pairs of eyes. The first pair of eyes sees all things as a fingerprint or footprint of God (vestigia), which evokes foundational respect and teachability. The second pair of eyes are the hard work of honest self-knowledge--awareness of how you are processing your reality moment by moment. This is necessary to keep your own lens clean and open, and is the work of your entire lifetime. The third pair are the eyes of contemplation, which allow you to see things in their essence and in their core meaning. Only then can you receive the transmitted image of God on your soul. "Deep calls unto deep" as the Psalmist says (42:8), and all outer images can then mirror and evoke your own inner divine image. This is really quite brilliant and simple.
In his book, The Soul's Journey into God, Bonaventure says we must "begin at the bottom, presenting ourselves to the material world, seeing it as a mirror through which we may pass through to God, the Supreme Craftsman." He teaches that to really see things, we must "recognize in all material things their origin, their process, and their end." Everything comes from God, exemplifies God, and then returns to God. [1]
Ilia Delio, Keith Douglass Warner, and Pamela Wood explain how this Franciscan spirituality leads to caring for creation [2]:
- "The life of Francis shows us that to appreciate the book of creation we must come to know ourselves as creatures of God and as creatures of creation. Without self-knowledge, there can be no real knowledge of creation as our home and the womb of our birth. Without the human person to give voice to creation, to celebrate its giftedness and sacredness, creation becomes mute and vulnerable to manipulation.
- "The key to creation's holiness, therefore, is in human identity--who we are in our Creator, the Trinity of divine love. This identity is revealed to us in Jesus Christ, the Word in whom we are made flesh. If God is alive in us, as [God] was in Francis, then we are alive to the world of God's good creation. However, if God is dead in us, then we are dead to the deeper meaning of creation as well.
- "Francis realized that God humbly bends low in love and hides in simple, ordinary, fragile beings. So too we must realize that God is in our midst. Only when we can recognize creatures for what they are--expressions of God's overflowing love--can we recognize the source of our own lives as well. The love that gave birth to all creatures is the same love that has brought us into existence. This is what Francis realized, the luminous web of God's love revealed in Jesus Christ. We are called to live in this luminous web of love."
References
[1] Richard Rohr, adapted from an exclusive video teaching within the Living School program.
[2] Ilia Delio, Keith Douglass Warner, and Pamela Wood; Care for Creation: A Franciscan Spirituality of the Earth (St. Anthony Messenger Press: 2008); 52.
The Univocity of Being
John Duns Scotus (c. 1266-1308) was a philosopher theologian who in many ways paralleled Bonaventure's ideas and also developed the doctrine of the univocity of being. Up to that point the philosophers said God was a Being, which is what most people still think today. Both the Dominican Thomas Aquinas and the Franciscan Duns Scotus said Deus est ens, God is being itself. The Dominicans said everything other than God participated in being only by analogy and by attempts to make connections, but it was not really the same being as God's being. Yet Scotus believed we can speak "with one voice" (univocity) of the being of waters, plants, animals, humans, angels, and God. We all participate in the same being. God is one (Deuteronomy 6:4), and thus reality is one too (Ephesians 4:3-5).
This gives us a foundation for understanding the sacredness of everything and our connection with everything. We are already connected to everything--inherently, objectively, metaphysically, ontologically, and theologically. We don't create the connection by going to church or reading the Bible, although we hopefully enliven the connection. In Francis' worldview, we begin with "original blessing," as Matthew Fox rightly said. Our DNA is already divine; that is why we naturally seek to know and love God. There has to be a little bit of something inside you for you to be attracted to it; like knows like. You are what you are looking for!
Duns Scotus' idea, univocity of being, is universally attractive and meaningful. Without using that exact term, master teacher Thich Nhat Hanh shows how it is key to the health of the planet as well as to reconciliation and peace [1]:
"We have to look deeply at things in order to see. When a swimmer enjoys the clear water of the river, he or she should also be able to be the river. . . .
- "If we want to continue to enjoy our rivers--to swim in them, walk beside them, even drink their water--we have to adopt the non-dual perspective. We have to meditate on being the river so that we can experience within ourselves the fears and hopes of the river. If we cannot feel the rivers, the mountains, the air, the animals, and other people from within their own perspective, the rivers will die and we will lose our chance for peace.
- "If you are a mountain climber or someone who enjoys the countryside, or the green forest, you know that the forests are our lungs outside of our bodies, just as the sun is our heart outside of our bodies. Yet we have been acting in a way that has allowed two million square miles of forest to be destroyed by acid rain, and we have destroyed parts of the ozone layer that regulate how much direct sunlight we receive. We are imprisoned in our small selves, thinking only of the comfortable conditions for this small self, while we destroy our large self. We should be able to be our true self. That means we should be able to be the river, we should be able to be the forest, the sun, and the ozone layer. We must do this to understand and to have hope for the future."
As Christians, we would say that our True Self is our Christ Self. Since Creation is the Body of God and Christ is "all in all" (Colossians 3:11, 1 Corinthians 15:28), the seeing that Thich Nhat Hahn describes should be natural to us. Contemplatives in all religions invariably come to the same insight because it is the deepest level of truth: Being is One.
Adapted from Franciscan Mysticism: I Am That Which I Am Seeking, disc 1 (CD, MP3 download)
Of Holons and Wholeness
The "univocity of being" gives a philosophical foundation to what we now call the circle of life, ecosystems, unitive thinking, and mysticism itself. Our being is not just analogous or similar to God's being, but we may speak of our two supposedly different beings "with one voice." From this alone we know that Duns Scotus, the "Blessed" man who coined the term, was a non-dual thinker, a contemplative.
Scotus was laying a philosophical foundation for what Michael Talbot and Ken Wilber are describing as a holographic universe, where "everything is a holon." Scotus' insight is also affirmed by Mandelbrot's discovery of fractals, the repetitive and imitative patterns found in nature, mathematics, and art. We literally see that the part contains the whole or replicates the whole, and yet each part still has a wholeness within itself. This "appreciative accumulation" is what makes any whole Whole!
We now believe such wholeness is true physically, biologically, and spiritually, and can even be seen as a basis for understanding mystical union. It implies that there is an "inherent sympathy" between God and all created things, and between the other "ten thousand things," too. "The ten thousand things" is a Taoist and Zen expression for everything that exists. All things--every human, creature, and even human-made objects--are somehow manifestations of formlessness. In this view, we don't need to grade or classify "things" as good or bad, valuable or worthless. God can use everything to teach, delight, help, and challenge us.
Each of us replicates the Whole and yet has a certain wholeness within ourselves--but we are never entirely whole apart from connection with the larger Whole. Holons create a very fine language for what I call the mystery of participation, for understanding how holiness transmits and how God's life is an utterly shared phenomenon. If you try to be "holy" alone, you are not holy at all.
Salvation is not a divine transaction that takes place because you are morally perfect, but much more is an organic unfolding, a becoming who you already are, an inborn sympathy with and capacity for the very One who created you. Each being is both a part that is like the Whole and yet also contributes to the Whole, just as Paul teaches in his analogy of the body (1 Corinthians 12:12-30). This is the basis for the inherent dignity of everything and the foundation for all non-violence. Sadly, the world we live in today has very little sense of this wonderful wholeness, and therefore of holiness and non-violence.
Adapted from Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi, pp. 176-178
What You See Is What You Are
Franciscan spirituality emphasizes a real equivalence, symbiosis, and mutuality between the one who sees and what can be seen. Francis had a unique ability to call others--animals, plants, and elements--"brother" and "sister" because he himself was a little brother. He granted other beings and things subjectivity, "personhood," and dignity because he first honored his own dignity as a son of God (although it could be the other way around, too). The world of things was a transparent two-way mirror for Francis, which some of us would call a fully "sacramental" universe.
All being can correctly be spoken of with "one voice" (univocity) as John Duns Scotus put it. What I am you also are, and so is the world. Creation is one giant symphony of mutual sympathy. Or, as Augustine said, "In the end there will only be Christ loving himself."
To get to this 3-D vision, I must know that I am, at least in part, the very thing I am seeking. In fact, that is what makes me seek it. But most do not know this good news yet. God cannot be found "out there" until God is first found "in here," within ourselves, as Augustine profoundly expressed in his Confessions in many ways. Then we can almost naturally see God in others and in all of creation, too. What you seek is what you are. The search for God and the search for our True Self are finally the same search. Francis' all-night prayer, "Who are you, O God, and who am I?" is such a perfect prayer because it is the most honest and always true prayer we can continue to offer.
A heart transformed by this realization of oneness knows that only love "in here" can spot and enjoy love "out there." Fear, constriction, and resentment are seen by spiritual teachers to be an inherent blindness that must be overcome. These emotions cannot get you anywhere, certainly not anywhere good. Thus all mystics are positive people--or they are not mystics. Their spiritual warfare is precisely the work of recognizing and then handing over all of their inner negativity and fear to God. The great paradox here is that such a victory is a gift from God, and yet somehow you must want it very much (Philippians 2:12b-13).
The central practice in Franciscan mysticism, therefore, is that we must remain in love, which is why it is a commandment as such (John 15:4-5), in fact, the great commandment of Jesus. Only when we are eager to love can we see love and goodness in the world around us. We must ourselves remain in peace, and then we will see and find peace over there. Remain in beauty, and we will honor beauty everywhere. This concept of remaining or abiding (John 15:4-5) moves religion out of esoteric realms of doctrinal outer-space where it has for too long been lost. There is no secret moral behavior required for knowing or pleasing God, or what some call "salvation," beyond becoming a loving person in mind, heart, body, and soul yourself. Then you will see all that you need to see!
Adapted from Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi, pp. 7-10
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