Mersey Leven Catholic Parish
To be a vibrant Catholic Community
unified in its commitment
to growing disciples for Christ
Postal Address: PO Box 362
Parish Office: 90 Stewart Street
(Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday 10am - 3pm)
Office Phone: 6424 8383 Fax: 6423 5160
Secretary: Annie Davies / Anne Fisher
Pastoral Council Chair: Jenny Garnsey
Parish Mass times for the Month: mlcpmasstimes.blogspot.com.au
Weekly Homily Podcast: mikedelaney.podomatic.com
Our Parish Sacramental Life
Baptism: Parents are asked to contact the Parish Office to make arrangements for attending a Baptismal Preparation Session and booking a Baptism date.
Reconciliation, Confirmation and Eucharist: Are received following a Family–centred, Parish-based, School-supported Preparation Program.
Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults: prepares adults for reception into the Catholic community.
Marriage: arrangements are made by contacting one of our priests - couples attend a Pre-marriage Program
Anointing of the Sick: please contact one of our priests
Reconciliation: Ulverstone - Fridays (10am - 10:30am)
Devonport - Saturday (5:15pm – 5:45pm)
Care and Concern: If you are aware of anyone who is sick or in need of assistance in the Parish please visit them. Then, if they are willing and give permission, could you please pass on their names to the Parish Office. We have a group of parishioners who are part of the Care and Concern Group who are willing and able to provide some backup and support to them. Unfortunately, because of privacy issues, the Parish Office is not able to give out details unless prior permission has been given.
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Archdiocesan Website: www.hobart.catholic.org.au for news, information and details of other Parishes.
Parish Prayer
Heavenly Father,
and calling us to serve as your disciples.
as we use our gifts to serve you.
as we strive to bear witness
to the Gospel and build an amazing parish.
Amen.
Eucharistic Adoration - Devonport: Every Friday 10am - 12noon, concluding with Stations of the Cross and Angelus
Weekday Masses 9th - 12th May, 2017
Tuesday: 9:30am
Penguin Wednesday: 9:30am Latrobe Thursday: 10:30am Eliza Purton
12noon Devonport
Friday: 9:30am Ulverstone
Next Weekend 13th & 14th May, 2017 Saturday Vigil: 6:00pm Penguin
Devonport
Sunday Mass: 8:30am Port Sorell
9:00am Ulverstone
10:30am Devonport
Ministry Rosters 13th & 14th May, 2017
Devonport: 
Readers: Vigil: M Gaffney, M Gerrand, H Lim 10:30am
J Phillips, K
Pearce
Ulverstone:
Penguin:
Latrobe:
Port Sorell:
Readings next week – Fourth Sunday of Easter
PREGO REFLECTION:
I meet the risen Jesus – the Shepherd who gave his life for
me.
I ask him to help me become still so that I can open my heart to hear his
word and let it touch me.
I listen to his voice.
Speak Lord Jesus!
I may like
to speak to him about the many ‘voices’ that seek to influence me in my daily
life and bring me joy … and also sometimes worries and anxieties. I tell him of
my gratitude for the blessings I have, as well as of my problems and sorrows,
my hopes for myself and for others.
I ask for renewed trust in his care and
guidance as he leads me in my daily life and for the grace to be able to listen
to his voice in whatever way he is calling me today.
Readings next week – Fifth Sunday of Easter
Your prayers
are asked for the sick: Elaine Milic, David Welch &
…,
Let us pray for those who have died recently: Beverley Cloney, Beverley O'Connor, Ivan Walsh, Clare
Kuhnle, Alfred
Grieve, Margaret Cameron, Susan Reilly, George Archer, John
Munro, Ila Breen, Glen Graham, Christine Illingworth and Darcy Atkinson.
May they rest in peace
Weekly
Ramblings
Thanks to all those who have offered to assist with
transport for Fr Phil to get him to Penguin on Saturday evenings – your
assistance is gratefully appreciated.
I would like to extend an invitation to all parishioners to
join in prayer for the work of the Parish Pastoral Council for its next meeting
on Wednesday, 10th at 6.30pm. In the past I have invited any parishioners who
are able to join me at OLOL Church from 5.15pm for an hour – if that is not
possible would you please pray during that time – between 6.30-8.00pm for the
meeting and for our reflection and future directions.
Next Friday evening I will be in Hobart for the Mass to be
celebrated as the remains of Bishop Willson, our first bishop, are interred in
the crypt in St Mary’s Cathedral. In 1994 I visited the Cathedral in Nottingham
(UK - his home diocese) where they had recently refurbished the crypt where he
had been interred following his death. It is a special that our two Dioceses
have been able to work together that he might now be returned to Tasmania where
he had such an incredible impact on the early settlement and set the foundation
for the Church in our State.
Please take care on the roads and in your homes,
ST VINCENT DE PAUL COLLECTION:
FATIMA
100 YEARS.
To commemorate this special centenary Pope Francis will be
visiting Fatima on the 12th /13th May and whilst there,
he will canonise Jacinta and Francisco Marto - the youngest non-martyrs in
Church history. To coincide with this special event the Pilgrim Statue will be
in St. Mary’s Cathedral, Hobart on Saturday 13th May at 1pm when Archbishop
Julian Porteous will solemnly consecrate Tasmania to the Immaculate Heart of
Mary.
CCR HEALING
MASS;
THE SISTERS
OF ST JOSEPH
Warmly invite Mersey Leven Parishioners to celebrate with
them the 130th anniversary of the arrival of the first Sisters of St Joseph in
Westbury on 24 May 1887. You are invited to Holy Trinity Church, Westbury
on Wednesday, 24 May 2017 at 1pm for Prayer and Afternoon Tea.
GRAN’S VAN:
The Gran’s Van co-ordinators Lyn Otley and Shirley Ryan wish to thank all
those Mersey Leven Parish parishioners who most generously assisted with Gran’s
Van on the Sunday evenings during April. Your support enabled us to again provided
assistance to those in need in our community.
FOOTY
TICKETS: Round 6 (28th April)
footy margin 2 – winners; Margaret Wood,
BINGO - Thursday Nights - OLOL
NEWS FROM ACROSS THE ARCHDIOCESE:
REINTERMENT OF BISHOP
ROBERT WILLIAM WILLSON DD - FIRST CATHOLIC BISHOP OF HOBART 1844 – 1866
THE JOURNEY CATHOLIC RADIO
PROGRAM – AIRS 7th May
TWO SCENES FROM POPE FRANCIS’S REVOLUTION OF TENDERNESS
By James Carroll
This article is originally from the The New Yorker. The original article can be found here
Five decades ago, in an essay in The New York Review of Books, Hannah Arendt described an exchange she had had with a “Roman chambermaid” about Pope John XXIII. The beloved pontiff had died, of stomach cancer, two years earlier, not long before the Second Vatican Council, which he convened, transformed the liturgy and the spirit of the Catholic Church. “How could it happen that a true Christian would sit on St. Peter’s chair?” the chambermaid asked, apparently referring to the succession of venal company men who had held the office over the centuries. “Didn’t he first have to be appointed Bishop, and Archbishop, and Cardinal, until he finally was elected to be Pope? Had nobody been aware of who he was?”
A version of the same question has often been asked about Pope John’s current successor, Francis. Did the conservative, crimson-garbed men who elevated him to the papacy, in 2013, know what they were getting? In the past four years, Francis has spoken forcefully and forthrightly about the world’s most urgent problems—the bankruptcy of free-market capitalism, the plight of migrants, the stresses of liberal democracy, climate change, demagogic populism, economic inequality. He has done all this with verve, good humor, and a self-accepting modesty. And, most important, he has been heard. The dangerous currents of world politics have made him into a global tribune of human aspiration; it is no longer news that the Pope is a true Christian. Last week, Bruno Giussani, the European director of ted, said that “Francis has become possibly the only moral voice capable of reaching people across boundaries and providing clarity and a compelling message of hope.”
This unexpected endorsement coincided with an equally unexpected event—Francis’s appearance, via video feed, at Vancouver’s ted2017 conference, where he spoke on the theme “The Future You.” For twenty minutes, the Pope held the rapt attention of the technopreneurs, a post-religious legion if ever there was one. (So far, ted’s virtual congregation has viewed his talk more than a million and a half times.) Francis has, in the past, challenged “media and the digital world” for preventing “people from learning how to live wisely, to think deeply, and to love generously,” but his subject in Vancouver was broader than the “mental pollution” of screen overload. He offered his audience of future-inventing techies both a positive message and a challenge, pleading with them not to forget the marginalized. “How wonderful would it be if the growth of scientific and technological innovation would come along with more equality and social inclusion?” he said. “Let us help each other, all together, to remember that the other is not a statistic or a number. The other has a face.”
The Pope underscored the deeper message of his ted talk a few days later, on a trip to Egypt. There he joined in the pain of the country’s Coptic Christians, who have been reeling from a pair of isis-inspired bombings that killed forty-five worshippers on Palm Sunday and maimed dozens of others. “Your sufferings are also our sufferings,” Francis said, referring not only to the recent attacks but also to the sect’s long history of assault and discrimination. With Pope Tawadros II, his Coptic counterpart, Francis engaged in what he called an “ecumenism of blood,” even issuing a surprise joint declaration whereby the two churches, alienated for a millennium and a half, recognized each other’s baptisms. Across an ancient boundary, Francis was a Christian standing with beleaguered fellow-Christians.
On the same trip, the Pope crossed another, more pointedly symbolic boundary. His journey retraced the mythic pilgrimage of his namesake, St. Francis, who travelled to Egypt, in 1219, in a futile attempt to end the Crusades. The saint may have imagined converting the local sultan, but what he mostly sought was a détente between Islam and Christianity. That religious divide persists today, of course, and still carries a Crusader legacy. In Cairo, Pope Francis met with Muslim leaders at Al-Azhar University, which was established more than a hundred years before Oxford and remains the most important religious educational institution in the Muslim world. Condemning the “barbarity” of terrorism, he invited the gathered clerics to join him in saying “once more a clear and firm ‘No!’ to every form of violence, vengeance, and hatred carried out in the name of religion or in the name of God.” Francis referred indirectly, but plainly, to Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, Egypt’s authoritarian President, saying, “History does not forgive those who preach justice but then practice injustice. History does not forgive those who talk about equality but then discard those who are different.” Sisi was not the only one to hear that rebuke; his heartened opposition did, too.
It may seem strange to yoke the élite ritual of a ted talk to a high-risk reckoning with inflamed religiosity in a war zone. In fact, though, Francis only ever addresses “The Future You” wherever he goes. Last month, in a speech before the heads of the European Union, his theme was solidarity, and he returned to it at ted2017. Solidarity, he said, is not just for social workers or community organizers or activists—the do-gooders. No. Why shouldn’t it be the prime value for everyone, “the default attitude in political, economic, and scientific choices, as well as in the relationships among individuals, peoples, and countries”? To ted’s vast hall of uplifted, eager faces, and to its dispersed multitude of screen-watchers, the Pope could not have been more frank. “Please, allow me to say it loud and clear: the more powerful you are, the more your actions will have an impact on people, the more responsible you are to act humbly,” he told them. “If you don’t, your power will ruin you, and you will ruin the other.”
Francis spoke to the privileged in Vancouver and to the besieged in Cairo when he said, in his ted talk, “Many of us, nowadays, seem to believe that a happy future is something impossible to achieve.” That is not true in either case—or so this old man insists. He speaks, yes, as a Christian, but also as a moral voice that history has wondrously lifted up. “The future does have a name, and its name is hope,” he said. “A single individual is enough for hope to exist, and that individual can be you. And then there will be another ‘you,’ and another ‘you,’ and it turns into an ‘us.’ ” Then begins the longed-for revolution, which Francis presumes to label “a revolution of tenderness.” That no other world figure talks this way, in ted or out, is not the problem. It’s the point.
AN EXTRAORDINARY BOOK
An article by Fr Ron Rolheiser OMI. The original article can be found here
Dorothy Day is alleged to have said: Don’t call me a saint; I don’t want to be dismissed that easily! A new biography on her by her granddaughter, Kate Hennessy, Dorothy Day – The World will be saved by Beauty: An Intimate Portrait of my Grandmother, will, I believe, go a long way in preventing anyone from turning Dorothy Day, soon to officially canonized by the church, into what she feared, a plaster-saint who can be piously doted-upon and then not taken seriously.
We’re all, I’m sure, familiar with who Dorothy Day was and what her life’s work was about. Indeed, Pope Francis in addressing the US Congress, singled out four Americans who, he suggests, connected spirituality to a life of service in an extraordinary way: Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day. This new biography gives us an honest picture of who this remarkable woman actually was.
This book is extraordinary for a number of reasons: Kate Hennessy is a very good writer, the book is the product of years of research, she’s Dorothy’s granddaughter and had a very close and special relationship with her, and she manages in telling Dorothy’s story to keep both a healthy critical and aesthetic distance. Her insight is both privileged and rare, privileged because of her intimate relationship with Dorothy and rare because most authors who are that intimately tied to their subject cannot maintain a balanced critical distance. Hennessy admits that doing this was no easy task: “That is the danger of holiness on your own doorstep, in your own family. Either you cannot see it for the view is too close, or if you do, you feel you haven’t a chance of being the person she was. You feel it is a sad mistake that you are related.”
And that combination makes for an extraordinary book that lets us see a side of Dorothy Day we would never see otherwise. Beyond this being a close-up of Dorothy Day, Hennessy shares stories about some of the key people surrounding Dorothy: Her relationship to the man who fathered her child, Forster Battenham, with whom she maintained a life-long friendship. Hennessy’s biography shatters the myth that upon her conversion Dorothy coldly and forever turned her back upon this man. Not true. They remained close their whole lives and Foster, until her death, remained an intimate companion and a faithful supporter.
Central too to this biography is the story of Dorothy’s daughter, Tamar, who, while vitally important in Dorothy’s life, is unfairly absent in virtually everything that’s known about Dorothy in the popular mind. Tamar’s story, which holds its own richness and is not incidental to the history of the Catholic worker, is critical to understanding Dorothy Day. There’s no understanding of Dorothy without understanding her daughter’s story and that of her grandchildren. To understand Dorothy Day you also have to see her as a mother and grandmother.
Hennessy shares how, when her diaries were opened some years after Dorothy’s death, Tamar initially was bitterly resistant to having them released for publication and how that resistance was only lifted when, thanks to the man who transcribed them, Robert Ellsberg, the family and Tamar herself realized that her resistance was rooted in the fact that Dorothy’s diaries themselves were unfair in their neglect of Tamar’s story and the role of her story within the bigger narrative of Dorothy’s life, work, and legacy.
The book is a story too of some of the people who played key roles in founding the Catholic Worker: Peter Maurin, Stanley Vishnewski, and Ade Bethune.
This isn’t a story that follows the classical genre for the lives of the saints, where form is often exaggerated to highlight essence and the result is an over-idealization that paints the saint into an icon. Hennessy highlights that Dorothy’s faith wasn’t a faith that never doubted and which walked on water. What Dorothy never doubted was what faith calls us to: hospitality, non-violence, and service to the poor. In these things, Dorothy was single-minded enough to be a saint and that manifested itself in her dogged perseverance so that at end she could say: “The older I get the more I feel that faithfulness and perseverance are the greatest virtues – accepting the sense of failure we all must have in our work, in the work of others around us, since Christ was the world’s greatest failure.”
That being said, her life was messy, many of her projects were often in crisis, she was forever over-extended, and, in her granddaughter’s words: “She was fierce, dictatorial, controlling, judgmental, and often angry, and she knew it. It took the Catholic Worker, her own creation, to teach her her lessons.”
This is hagiography as it should be written. It tells the story of how a very human person, caught-up in the foibles, weaknesses, and mess that beset us all, can, like St. Brigid, cast her cloak upon a sunbeam and see it spread until it brings abundance and beauty to the entire countryside.
The Wisdom Jesus
This article is taken from the daily email from Fr Richard Rohr OFM. You can subscribe to these emails here
I’ve invited Cynthia
Bourgeault, one of CAC’s core faculty members, to explore Jesus’ teachings over
the next two weeks, drawing from her rich understanding of the ancient Wisdom
Tradition.
Jesus as Wisdom Teacher
When I talk about Jesus as a wisdom master, I need to
mention that in the Near East “wisdom teacher” is a recognized spiritual
occupation. In seminary I was taught that there were only two categories of
religious authority: one could be a priest or a prophet. That may be how the
tradition filtered down to us in the West. But within the wider Near East
(including Judaism itself), there was also a third, albeit unofficial,
category: a moshel moshelim, or teacher of wisdom, one who taught the ancient
traditions of the transformation of the human being.
These teachers of transformation—among whom I would place
the authors of the Hebrew wisdom literature such as Ecclesiastes, Job, and
Proverbs—may be the early precursors to the rabbi whose task it was to interpret
the law and lore of Judaism (often creating their own innovations of each). The
hallmark of these wisdom teachers was their use of pithy sayings, puzzles, and
parables rather than prophetic pronouncements or divine decree. They spoke to
people in the language that people spoke, the language of story rather than
law.
Parables, such as the stories Jesus told, are a wisdom genre
belonging to mashal, the Jewish branch of universal wisdom tradition. As we
shall see shortly, Jesus not only taught within this tradition, he turned it
end for end. But before we can appreciate the extraordinary nuances he brought
to understanding human transformation, we need first to know something about
the context in which he was working.
There has been a strong tendency among Christians to turn
Jesus into a priest—“our great high priest” (see Letter to the Hebrews). The
image of Christos Pantokrator (“Lord of All Creation”) dressed in splendid
sacramental robes has dominated the iconography of both Eastern and Western
Christendom. But Jesus was not a priest. He had nothing to do with the temple
hierarchy in Jerusalem, and he kept a respectful distance from most ritual
observances. Nor was he a prophet in the usual sense of the term: a messenger
sent to the people of Israel to warn them of impending political catastrophe in
an attempt to redirect their hearts to God. Jesus was not that interested in
the political fate of Israel, nor would he accept the role of Messiah
continuously being thrust upon him.
His message was not one of repentance (at least in the usual
way we understand it; more on that later this week) and return to the covenant.
Rather, he stayed close to the ground of wisdom: the transformation of human
consciousness. He asked those timeless and deeply personal questions: What does
it mean to die before you die? How do you go about losing your little life to
find the bigger one? Is it possible to live on this planet with a generosity,
abundance, fearlessness, and beauty that mirror Divine Being itself?
These are the wisdom questions, and they are the entire
field of Jesus’ concern.
Reference:
Right Practice
But what did Jesus actually teach? How often do you hear his
teaching assessed as a whole? When it comes to spiritual teachers from other
traditions, it seems right and fair to ask what kind of path they’re on. What
does the Dalai Lama teach? What did Krishnamurti teach? But we never ask this
question about Jesus. Why not? When we actually get below the surface of his
teaching, we find there’s a lot more going on than meets the eye. And it
doesn’t have much to do with being “nice.”
One of the most important books to appear in recent years is
called Putting on the Mind of Christ by Jim Marion. [1] His title is a
statement in itself. “Putting on the mind of Christ” is a direct reference to
St. Paul’s powerful injunction in Philippians 2:5: “Let the same mind be in you
that was in Christ Jesus.” The words call us up short as to what we are
actually supposed to be doing on this path: not just admiring Jesus, but
acquiring his consciousness.
For the better part of the past sixteen hundred years
Christianity has put a lot more emphasis on the things we know about Jesus. The
word “orthodox” has come to mean having the correct beliefs. Along with the
overt requirement to learn what these beliefs are and agree with them comes a
subliminal message: that the appropriate way to relate to Jesus is through a
series of beliefs. In fundamentalist Christianity this message tends to get
even more accentuated, to the point where faith appears to be a matter of
signing on the dotted lines to a set of creedal statements. Belief in Jesus is
indistinguishable from belief about him.
This certainly wasn’t how it was done in the early
church—nor can it be if we are really seeking to come into a living
relationship with this wisdom master. Jim Marion’s book returns us to the
central challenge Christianity ought to be handing us. Indeed, how do we put on
the mind of Christ? How do we see through his eyes? How do we feel through his
heart? How do we learn to respond to the world with that same wholeness and
healing love? That’s what Christian orthodoxy really is all about. It’s not
about right belief; it’s about right practice.
References:
The Kingdom of Heaven
So what do we take it to be? Biblical scholars have debated
this question for almost as long as there have been biblical scholars. Many
Christians, particularly those of a more evangelical persuasion, assume that
the Kingdom of Heaven means the place you go when you die—if you’ve been
“saved.” But the problem with this interpretation is that Jesus himself
specifically contradicts it when he says, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you”
(that is, here) and “at hand” (that is, now). It’s not later, but lighter—some
more subtle quality or dimension of experience accessible to you right in the
moment. You don’t die into it; you awaken into it.
The other approach people have consistently tried is to
equate the Kingdom of Heaven with an earthly utopia. The Kingdom of Heaven
would be a realm of peace and justice, where human beings lived together in
harmony and fair distribution of economic assets. For thousands of years
prophets and visionaries have laboured to bring into being their respective
versions of this kind of Kingdom of Heaven, but somehow these earthly utopias
never seem to stay put for very long. Jesus specifically rejected this meaning.
When his followers wanted to proclaim him the Messiah, the divinely anointed
king of Israel who would inaugurate the reign of God’s justice upon the earth,
Jesus shrank from all that and said, strongly and unequivocally, “My kingdom is
not of this world” (John 18:36).
Where is it, then? Author Jim Marion’s wonderfully
insightful and contemporary suggestion is that the Kingdom of Heaven is really
a metaphor for a state of consciousness; it is not a place you go to, but a
place you come from. [1] It is a whole new way of looking at the world, a
transformed awareness that literally turns this world into a different place.
Marion suggests specifically that the Kingdom of Heaven is
Jesus’ way of describing a state we would nowadays call “nondual consciousness”
or “unitive consciousness.” The hallmark of this awareness is that it sees no
separation—not between God and humans, not between humans and other humans.
These are indeed Jesus’ two core teachings, underlying everything he says and
does.
References:
One with God, One with
Each Other
His most beautiful symbol for this is in John 15 where he says,
“I am the vine; you are the branches. Abide in me as I in you.” A few verses
later he says, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you. Abide in my
love.” While he does indeed claim that “the Father and I are one” (John
10:30)—a statement so blasphemous to Jewish ears that it nearly gets Jesus
stoned—he does not see this as an exclusive privilege but as something shared
by all human beings. There is no separation between humans and God because of
this mutual inter-abiding which expresses the indivisible reality of divine
love.
We flow into God—and God into us—because it is the nature of
love to flow. And as we give ourselves into one another in this fashion, the
vine gives life and coherence to the branch while the branch makes visible what
the vine is. (After all, a vine is merely an abstraction until there are actual
branches to articulate its reality.) The whole and the part live together in
mutual, loving reciprocity, each belonging to the other and dependent on the
other to show forth the fullness of love. That’s Jesus’ vision of no separation
between human and Divine.
No separation between human and human is an equally powerful
notion—and equally challenging. One of the most familiar of Jesus’ teachings is
“Love your neighbour as yourself” (Mark 12:31, Matthew 22:39). But we almost
always hear that wrong: “Love your neighbour as much as yourself.” (And of
course, the next logical question then becomes, “But I have to love me first,
don’t I, before I can love my neighbour?”) If you listen closely to Jesus
however, there is no “as much as” in his admonition. It’s just “Love your
neighbour as yourself”—as a continuation of your very own being. It’s a
complete seeing that your neighbour is you. There are not two individuals out
there, one seeking to better herself at the price of the other, or to extend
charity to the other; there are simply two cells of the one great Life. Each of
them is equally precious and necessary. And as these two cells flow into one
another, experiencing that one Life from the inside, they discover that “laying
down one’s life for another” is not a loss of one’s self but a vast expansion
of it—because the indivisible reality of love is the only True Self.
Reference:
The Egoic Operating
System
Our pre-installed binary system runs on the power of
“either/or.” I call it the “egoic operating system.” This dualistic “binary operator”
is built right into the structure of the human brain.
The egoic operating system is a way of making sense of the
world by dividing the field into subject and object, inside and outside. It
perceives through differentiation. One of the most important tasks of early
childhood is to learn how to run the operating system. By the time she was one
and a half, my granddaughter could already sing along with the Sesame Street
jingle, “One of these things is not like the other,” and pick out the cat from
among three dogs.
When we become aware of our identity using this egoic
operating system, we experience ourselves as persons with distinct qualities
and attributes. When we introduce ourselves, we usually begin by listing these
characteristics: “I am a Pisces, a six on the Enneagram, a person who loves the
ocean, an Episcopalian, a priest.” We identify ourselves by what makes us
unique and special. Of course, that same list also makes other people separate
from me; they are outside, and I’m inside. I experience myself as a distinct
and fixed point of identity that “has” particular qualities and life
experiences, and these things make me who I am.
But this sense of identity is a mirage, an illusion. There
is no such self. There is no small self, no egoic being, no thing that’s
separated from everything else, that has insides and outsides, that has
experiences. All these impressions are simply a function of an operating system
that has to divide the world up into bits and pieces in order to perceive it.
Like the great wisdom teachers of all spiritual traditions, Jesus calls us
beyond the illusion: “Hey, you can upgrade your operating system, and life is
going to look a whole lot different when you do it.”
The binary operating system does have some real importance;
it’s not a mistake. It enables us to perform basic cognitive tasks. But most
people get stuck in it and rely on the egoic operating system to create a sense
of identity. We walk through our lives perceiving, reacting to, and attempting
to negotiate the world “out there.” It’s like being lost in a mirage. A system
based in duality can’t possibly perceive oneness; it can’t create anything
beyond itself—only more duality and more trouble. So the drama of the “separate
self” goes on and on.
But we do have the capacity, if we so choose, to shift to a
whole different basis of perception. We come into this life with another
untapped operating system, and we can learn to steer by it, understand through
it, and ultimately discover our deepest sense of identity within it.
Reference:
Self-Emptying
But how does one make this shift in consciousness? It’s one
thing to admire it from a distance, but quite another to create it within
oneself. This is where spiritual praxis comes into play. “Praxis” means the
path, the actual practice you follow to bring about the result that you’re
yearning for. I think it’s fair to say that all of the great spiritual paths
lead toward the same centre—the larger, nondual mind as the seat of personal
consciousness—but they get there by different routes.
While Jesus is typical of the wisdom tradition in his vision
of what a whole and unified human being looks like, the route he lays out for
getting there is very different from anything that had ever been seen on the
planet up to that point. It is still radical in our own time and definitely the
“road less travelled” among the various schools of human transformation. Many
of the difficulties we run into trying to make our Christianity work stem from
the fact that we haven’t realized how different Jesus’ approach really is. By
trying to contain this new wine in old wineskins, we inadvertently missed its
own distinct flavour. In Jesus everything hangs together around a single centre
of gravity, and we need to know what this centre is before we can sense the
subtle and cohesive power of his path.
What name might we give to this centre? The apostle Paul
suggests the word kenosis. In Greek the verb kenosein means “to let go,” or “to
empty oneself,” and this is the word Paul chooses to describe “the mind of
Christ.”
In this beautiful hymn, Paul recognizes that Jesus had only
one “operational mode.” Everything he did, he did by self-emptying. He emptied
himself and descended into human form. And he emptied himself still further,
“even unto death on the cross.” In every life circumstance, Jesus always
responded with the same motion of self-emptying—or to put it another way,
descent: taking the lower place, not the higher.
Reference:
VISION “3”
This article is taken from the blog by Fr Michael white, Pastor of the Church of the Nativity, Baltimore. You can find the original article here
Vision is a picture of a preferred future.
This Easter season we’ve been looking at Vision and how it forms our perspective. Our perspective impacts the way we see the world. Our ability to be a good parent, a good boss, a good son or daughter, will only be as good as our perspective.
If we can’t see it right, then we can’t live it right. The Resurrection gives us the right perspective on the future. Jesus rose from the dead. He took what appeared to be utter failure – his death on the cross and turned it into the greatest victory ever.
We need to see life through the lens of the resurrection. If Jesus can conquer the grave and we share in that victory, then no failure is ever final. We can live with hope knowing if God raised to life his dead Son, he can do anything.
Internally, we have been calling this Easter message series Vision “3” because it is the third time we have returned to the topic in the last few years. “Vision” is the name we gave to our Capital Campaign to build a new church, which we launched in 2014, originally raising $8m. That was a wonderful amount pledged, but to get started on the project we had in mind we needed more. So, we eventually hosted Vision “2” in the Spring of 2015, which included a wider circle of support and brought our total pledges closer to $10m. By this time last year we found ourselves around $12m, which gave us enough confidence to break ground and begin construction.
Now with the end in sight (September 2017) we find ourselves at over $13.5m in pledges, our total budget standing firm at $15m.
Vision “3” is about closing that gap and bringing this whole project to completion with no debt. Specifically, this coming weekend is “Commitment Weekend” and the final time we’ll be asking everyone to commit to our campaign:
If you originally committed to a two or three year pledge, we’re looking for one more year.
If you haven’t yet committed, we’re inviting you to join us at this time.
This is not the launch of a new campaign — we’re just landing the plane of the campaign we began three years ago.
To complete this building project debt free will be an incredible testimony to the faith commitment of this parish.
That’s the way we began this whole project three years ago – looking at the campaign from a faith perspective: the perspective of God’s vision for our parish.
and calling us to serve as your disciples.
as we use our gifts to serve you.
as we strive to bear witness
Eucharistic Adoration - Devonport: Every Friday 10am - 12noon, concluding with Stations of the Cross and Angelus
Benediction with Adoration Devonport: - first Friday of each month.
Legion of Mary: Wednesdays 11am Sacred Heart Church Community Room, Ulverstone
Prayer Group: Charismatic Renewal – meetings will be held on Monday evenings in the Community Room, Ulverstone at 7pm.
Weekday Masses 9th - 12th May, 2017
Tuesday: 9:30am
Penguin Wednesday: 9:30am Latrobe Thursday: 10:30am Eliza Purton
12noon Devonport
Friday: 9:30am Ulverstone
Next Weekend 13th & 14th May, 2017 Saturday Vigil: 6:00pm Penguin
Devonport
Sunday Mass: 8:30am Port Sorell
9:00am Ulverstone
10:30am Devonport
11:00am Sheffield 5:00pm Latrobe
Ministry Rosters 13th & 14th May, 2017
Devonport:
Readers: Vigil: M Gaffney, M Gerrand, H Lim 10:30am
J Phillips, K
Pearce
Ministers of Communion: Vigil B, B.
& B Windebank, T Bird, J Kelly, R Baker
10.30am: S Riley, M Sherriff, R Beaton, D & M Barrientos
Cleaners 12th
May: P Shelverton,
E Petts 19th May: B Paul, D Atkins, V Riley
Piety Shop 13th
May: R McBain 14th May: P Piccolo
Ulverstone:
Reader/s: M McLaren
Ministers of Communion: M Byrne, D Griffin, K Foster, R Locket
Cleaners: K.S.C. Flowers: A Miller Hospitality:
M McLaren
Penguin:
Greeters: J Garnsey Commentator: Y Downes Readers: T Clayton, M Murray
Ministers of
Communion: J
Barker, J Garnsey Liturgy: Pine Road
Setting Up: A Landers Care of Church: M Murray, T Clayton
Latrobe:
Reader: M Chan Ministers of Communion: H Lim, I Campbell Procession of
Gifts: J Hyde
Port Sorell:
Readers: M Badcock, G Duff Ministers of Communion: B Lee Cleaners/Flowers/Prep: A Hynes
Readings next week – Fourth Sunday of Easter
First Reading: Acts 2:14, 36-41;
Second Reading: 1 Peter 2:20-25;
Gospel: John 10:1-10
PREGO REFLECTION:
I meet the risen Jesus – the Shepherd who gave his life for
me. I ask him to help me become still so that I can open my heart to hear his word and let it touch me.
I listen to his voice.
Speak Lord Jesus!
I may like to speak to him about the many ‘voices’ that seek to influence me in my daily life and bring me joy … and also sometimes worries and anxieties. I tell him of my gratitude for the blessings I have, as well as of my problems and sorrows, my hopes for myself and for others.
I ask for renewed trust in his care and guidance as he leads me in my daily life and for the grace to be able to listen to his voice in whatever way he is calling me today.
Readings next week – Fifth Sunday of Easter
First Reading: Acts 6: 1-7
Second Reading: 1 Peter 2: 4-9
Gospel: John 14: 1-12
Your prayers
are asked for the sick: Elaine Milic, David Welch &
…,
Let us pray for those who have died recently: Beverley Cloney, Beverley O'Connor, Ivan Walsh, Clare
Kuhnle, Alfred
Grieve, Margaret Cameron, Susan Reilly, George Archer, John
Munro, Ila Breen, Glen Graham, Christine Illingworth and Darcy Atkinson.
Let us pray
for those whose anniversary occurs about this time: 3rd – 9th
May
Fr Dan McMahon, Don Breen, Robert Charlesworth, Audrey
Enniss, Leonard Field, Kathleen Bryan, Jean Clare, Kathleen Mack, Edward
McCormack, Pim Schneiders, Lauris Pullen, Don Burrows, Felicia Periera and
Aileen O’Rourke.
May they rest in peace
Weekly
Ramblings
Last weekend I began my conversations with the various Mass
Centres regarding the development of my Vision for the Parish and, with the
help of the Pastoral Council at the gatherings and into the future, exploring
some of the ways we might move forward. These conversations are not meant to
present answers but rather to keep parishioners informed of what is happening.
This weekend I will be speaking at Penguin, Port Sorell and Devonport at
10.30am. Next weekend I will be speaking at Devonport on Saturday evening and
at Sheffield on Sunday morning.
Thanks to all those who have offered to assist with
transport for Fr Phil to get him to Penguin on Saturday evenings – your
assistance is gratefully appreciated.
I would like to extend an invitation to all parishioners to
join in prayer for the work of the Parish Pastoral Council for its next meeting
on Wednesday, 10th at 6.30pm. In the past I have invited any parishioners who
are able to join me at OLOL Church from 5.15pm for an hour – if that is not
possible would you please pray during that time – between 6.30-8.00pm for the
meeting and for our reflection and future directions.
Next Friday evening I will be in Hobart for the Mass to be
celebrated as the remains of Bishop Willson, our first bishop, are interred in
the crypt in St Mary’s Cathedral. In 1994 I visited the Cathedral in Nottingham
(UK - his home diocese) where they had recently refurbished the crypt where he
had been interred following his death. It is a special that our two Dioceses
have been able to work together that he might now be returned to Tasmania where
he had such an incredible impact on the early settlement and set the foundation
for the Church in our State.
Please take care on the roads and in your homes,
ST VINCENT DE PAUL COLLECTION:
Next weekend the St Vincent de Paul collection will be in
Devonport, Ulverstone, Port Sorell, Latrobe and Penguin to assist the work of
the St Vincent de Paul Society.
FATIMA
100 YEARS.
A Pilgrim Statue of Fatima will be visiting parishes
throughout Tasmania in May to commemorate the centenary of Our Lady’s
appearances to Jacinta, Francisco and Lucia at Fatima in 1917. The
Statue will be at Our Lady of Lourdes Church, Devonport on Monday 15th
May. Devotions will start at 1pm and will conclude with Mass at
2pm followed by prayers for healing.
To commemorate this special centenary Pope Francis will be
visiting Fatima on the 12th /13th May and whilst there,
he will canonise Jacinta and Francisco Marto - the youngest non-martyrs in
Church history. To coincide with this special event the Pilgrim Statue will be
in St. Mary’s Cathedral, Hobart on Saturday 13th May at 1pm when Archbishop
Julian Porteous will solemnly consecrate Tasmania to the Immaculate Heart of
Mary.
For more details regarding the Hobart visit, please ring
Maree Triffett on 6228:7108. For OLOL, please ring Ophelia McGinley on 0423 115
419.
CCR HEALING
MASS;
Catholic Charismatic Renewal are
sponsoring a Healing Mass at St Mary’s
Catholic Church Penguin on Thursday 18th May commencing at 7pm
(please note early start). All denominations are welcome to come and
celebrate the liturgy in a vibrant and dynamic way using charismatic praise and
worship, with the gifts of tongues, prophecy and healing. After Mass teams will
be available for individual prayer. Please bring a friend and a plate for
supper in the hall afterwards. If you wish to know more or require transport,
please contact Celestine Whiteley 6424:2043, Michael Gaffney 0447 018 068, Zoe
Smith 6426:3073 or Tom Knaap 6425:2442.
THE SISTERS
OF ST JOSEPH
Warmly invite Mersey Leven Parishioners to celebrate with
them the 130th anniversary of the arrival of the first Sisters of St Joseph in
Westbury on 24 May 1887. You are invited to Holy Trinity Church, Westbury
on Wednesday, 24 May 2017 at 1pm for Prayer and Afternoon Tea.
The Gran’s Van co-ordinators Lyn Otley and Shirley Ryan wish to thank all
those Mersey Leven Parish parishioners who most generously assisted with Gran’s
Van on the Sunday evenings during April. Your support enabled us to again provided
assistance to those in need in our community.
FOOTY
TICKETS: Round 6 (28th April)
footy margin 2 – winners; Margaret Wood,
BINGO - Thursday Nights - OLOL
Hall, Devonport. Eyes down 7.30pm! Callers for Thursday 11th
May – Merv Tippett & Terry Bird.
NEWS FROM ACROSS THE ARCHDIOCESE:
REINTERMENT OF BISHOP
ROBERT WILLIAM WILLSON DD - FIRST CATHOLIC BISHOP OF HOBART 1844 – 1866
On 12 May 2017 an historic event will take place at St
Mary’s Cathedral, Hobart. Following Mass at 7.00 p.m. Bishop Robert Willson’s
mortal remains will be reinterred in the Cathedral Crypt.
Bishop Willson’s contribution to both religious and secular
life in Tasmania is writ large in history. He established parishes and schools
across the island and he worked to better the lives and conditions of convicts
and the insane.
The formal reception
of his mortal remains will take place at St Joseph’s Church Hobart on Thursday
11 May, the Church to which Bishop Willson was welcomed on his arrival in 1844.
He will lie in state from 12 noon until 6.00 pm and from 9.00 a.m. until noon
the following day. At noon on 12 May the hearse will leave St Joseph’s and
follow a route familiar to Bishop Willson, including past the Old Hobart
Penitentiary, the Female Factory in Degraves Street, South Hobart and his
former home Stephensville, (now part of St Michael’s Collegiate School) and
then to St Mary’s Cathedral where the bishop will lie in state until 7.00 p.m.
when Mass will be concelebrated by Archbishop Porteous and priests of the
Archdiocese. Following the Mass Bishop Willson will be taken in procession to
the Cathedral crypt to his final resting place.
All parishioners are warmly invited to spend some time in
prayer during the lying in state as well as attend the Mass and reinterment on
Friday 12 May at 7.00 p.m.
THE JOURNEY CATHOLIC RADIO
PROGRAM – AIRS 7th May
This week on the Journey, we have Peter Gilmore talking
about Living the Gospel, Sr Hilda sharing her wisdom from the Abbey and Bruce
Downes, The Catholic Guy inspires us with his piece on Lighting a Fire.
Our music is carefully selected to complement our guest speakers and to help us
create a show that is all a about faith, hope, love and life. Go to www.jcr.org.au or www.itunes.jcr.org.au where you
can listen anytime and subscribe to weekly shows by email.
TWO SCENES FROM POPE FRANCIS’S REVOLUTION OF TENDERNESS
By James CarrollThis article is originally from the The New Yorker. The original article can be found here
Five decades ago, in an essay in The New York Review of Books, Hannah Arendt described an exchange she had had with a “Roman chambermaid” about Pope John XXIII. The beloved pontiff had died, of stomach cancer, two years earlier, not long before the Second Vatican Council, which he convened, transformed the liturgy and the spirit of the Catholic Church. “How could it happen that a true Christian would sit on St. Peter’s chair?” the chambermaid asked, apparently referring to the succession of venal company men who had held the office over the centuries. “Didn’t he first have to be appointed Bishop, and Archbishop, and Cardinal, until he finally was elected to be Pope? Had nobody been aware of who he was?”
A version of the same question has often been asked about Pope John’s current successor, Francis. Did the conservative, crimson-garbed men who elevated him to the papacy, in 2013, know what they were getting? In the past four years, Francis has spoken forcefully and forthrightly about the world’s most urgent problems—the bankruptcy of free-market capitalism, the plight of migrants, the stresses of liberal democracy, climate change, demagogic populism, economic inequality. He has done all this with verve, good humor, and a self-accepting modesty. And, most important, he has been heard. The dangerous currents of world politics have made him into a global tribune of human aspiration; it is no longer news that the Pope is a true Christian. Last week, Bruno Giussani, the European director of ted, said that “Francis has become possibly the only moral voice capable of reaching people across boundaries and providing clarity and a compelling message of hope.”
This unexpected endorsement coincided with an equally unexpected event—Francis’s appearance, via video feed, at Vancouver’s ted2017 conference, where he spoke on the theme “The Future You.” For twenty minutes, the Pope held the rapt attention of the technopreneurs, a post-religious legion if ever there was one. (So far, ted’s virtual congregation has viewed his talk more than a million and a half times.) Francis has, in the past, challenged “media and the digital world” for preventing “people from learning how to live wisely, to think deeply, and to love generously,” but his subject in Vancouver was broader than the “mental pollution” of screen overload. He offered his audience of future-inventing techies both a positive message and a challenge, pleading with them not to forget the marginalized. “How wonderful would it be if the growth of scientific and technological innovation would come along with more equality and social inclusion?” he said. “Let us help each other, all together, to remember that the other is not a statistic or a number. The other has a face.”
The Pope underscored the deeper message of his ted talk a few days later, on a trip to Egypt. There he joined in the pain of the country’s Coptic Christians, who have been reeling from a pair of isis-inspired bombings that killed forty-five worshippers on Palm Sunday and maimed dozens of others. “Your sufferings are also our sufferings,” Francis said, referring not only to the recent attacks but also to the sect’s long history of assault and discrimination. With Pope Tawadros II, his Coptic counterpart, Francis engaged in what he called an “ecumenism of blood,” even issuing a surprise joint declaration whereby the two churches, alienated for a millennium and a half, recognized each other’s baptisms. Across an ancient boundary, Francis was a Christian standing with beleaguered fellow-Christians.
On the same trip, the Pope crossed another, more pointedly symbolic boundary. His journey retraced the mythic pilgrimage of his namesake, St. Francis, who travelled to Egypt, in 1219, in a futile attempt to end the Crusades. The saint may have imagined converting the local sultan, but what he mostly sought was a détente between Islam and Christianity. That religious divide persists today, of course, and still carries a Crusader legacy. In Cairo, Pope Francis met with Muslim leaders at Al-Azhar University, which was established more than a hundred years before Oxford and remains the most important religious educational institution in the Muslim world. Condemning the “barbarity” of terrorism, he invited the gathered clerics to join him in saying “once more a clear and firm ‘No!’ to every form of violence, vengeance, and hatred carried out in the name of religion or in the name of God.” Francis referred indirectly, but plainly, to Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, Egypt’s authoritarian President, saying, “History does not forgive those who preach justice but then practice injustice. History does not forgive those who talk about equality but then discard those who are different.” Sisi was not the only one to hear that rebuke; his heartened opposition did, too.
It may seem strange to yoke the élite ritual of a ted talk to a high-risk reckoning with inflamed religiosity in a war zone. In fact, though, Francis only ever addresses “The Future You” wherever he goes. Last month, in a speech before the heads of the European Union, his theme was solidarity, and he returned to it at ted2017. Solidarity, he said, is not just for social workers or community organizers or activists—the do-gooders. No. Why shouldn’t it be the prime value for everyone, “the default attitude in political, economic, and scientific choices, as well as in the relationships among individuals, peoples, and countries”? To ted’s vast hall of uplifted, eager faces, and to its dispersed multitude of screen-watchers, the Pope could not have been more frank. “Please, allow me to say it loud and clear: the more powerful you are, the more your actions will have an impact on people, the more responsible you are to act humbly,” he told them. “If you don’t, your power will ruin you, and you will ruin the other.”
Francis spoke to the privileged in Vancouver and to the besieged in Cairo when he said, in his ted talk, “Many of us, nowadays, seem to believe that a happy future is something impossible to achieve.” That is not true in either case—or so this old man insists. He speaks, yes, as a Christian, but also as a moral voice that history has wondrously lifted up. “The future does have a name, and its name is hope,” he said. “A single individual is enough for hope to exist, and that individual can be you. And then there will be another ‘you,’ and another ‘you,’ and it turns into an ‘us.’ ” Then begins the longed-for revolution, which Francis presumes to label “a revolution of tenderness.” That no other world figure talks this way, in ted or out, is not the problem. It’s the point.
AN EXTRAORDINARY BOOK
An article by Fr Ron Rolheiser OMI. The original article can be found here Dorothy Day is alleged to have said: Don’t call me a saint; I don’t want to be dismissed that easily! A new biography on her by her granddaughter, Kate Hennessy, Dorothy Day – The World will be saved by Beauty: An Intimate Portrait of my Grandmother, will, I believe, go a long way in preventing anyone from turning Dorothy Day, soon to officially canonized by the church, into what she feared, a plaster-saint who can be piously doted-upon and then not taken seriously.
We’re all, I’m sure, familiar with who Dorothy Day was and what her life’s work was about. Indeed, Pope Francis in addressing the US Congress, singled out four Americans who, he suggests, connected spirituality to a life of service in an extraordinary way: Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day. This new biography gives us an honest picture of who this remarkable woman actually was.
This book is extraordinary for a number of reasons: Kate Hennessy is a very good writer, the book is the product of years of research, she’s Dorothy’s granddaughter and had a very close and special relationship with her, and she manages in telling Dorothy’s story to keep both a healthy critical and aesthetic distance. Her insight is both privileged and rare, privileged because of her intimate relationship with Dorothy and rare because most authors who are that intimately tied to their subject cannot maintain a balanced critical distance. Hennessy admits that doing this was no easy task: “That is the danger of holiness on your own doorstep, in your own family. Either you cannot see it for the view is too close, or if you do, you feel you haven’t a chance of being the person she was. You feel it is a sad mistake that you are related.”
And that combination makes for an extraordinary book that lets us see a side of Dorothy Day we would never see otherwise. Beyond this being a close-up of Dorothy Day, Hennessy shares stories about some of the key people surrounding Dorothy: Her relationship to the man who fathered her child, Forster Battenham, with whom she maintained a life-long friendship. Hennessy’s biography shatters the myth that upon her conversion Dorothy coldly and forever turned her back upon this man. Not true. They remained close their whole lives and Foster, until her death, remained an intimate companion and a faithful supporter.
Central too to this biography is the story of Dorothy’s daughter, Tamar, who, while vitally important in Dorothy’s life, is unfairly absent in virtually everything that’s known about Dorothy in the popular mind. Tamar’s story, which holds its own richness and is not incidental to the history of the Catholic worker, is critical to understanding Dorothy Day. There’s no understanding of Dorothy without understanding her daughter’s story and that of her grandchildren. To understand Dorothy Day you also have to see her as a mother and grandmother.
Hennessy shares how, when her diaries were opened some years after Dorothy’s death, Tamar initially was bitterly resistant to having them released for publication and how that resistance was only lifted when, thanks to the man who transcribed them, Robert Ellsberg, the family and Tamar herself realized that her resistance was rooted in the fact that Dorothy’s diaries themselves were unfair in their neglect of Tamar’s story and the role of her story within the bigger narrative of Dorothy’s life, work, and legacy.
The book is a story too of some of the people who played key roles in founding the Catholic Worker: Peter Maurin, Stanley Vishnewski, and Ade Bethune.
This isn’t a story that follows the classical genre for the lives of the saints, where form is often exaggerated to highlight essence and the result is an over-idealization that paints the saint into an icon. Hennessy highlights that Dorothy’s faith wasn’t a faith that never doubted and which walked on water. What Dorothy never doubted was what faith calls us to: hospitality, non-violence, and service to the poor. In these things, Dorothy was single-minded enough to be a saint and that manifested itself in her dogged perseverance so that at end she could say: “The older I get the more I feel that faithfulness and perseverance are the greatest virtues – accepting the sense of failure we all must have in our work, in the work of others around us, since Christ was the world’s greatest failure.”
That being said, her life was messy, many of her projects were often in crisis, she was forever over-extended, and, in her granddaughter’s words: “She was fierce, dictatorial, controlling, judgmental, and often angry, and she knew it. It took the Catholic Worker, her own creation, to teach her her lessons.”
This is hagiography as it should be written. It tells the story of how a very human person, caught-up in the foibles, weaknesses, and mess that beset us all, can, like St. Brigid, cast her cloak upon a sunbeam and see it spread until it brings abundance and beauty to the entire countryside.
The Wisdom Jesus
This article is taken from the daily email from Fr Richard Rohr OFM. You can subscribe to these emails here
I’ve invited Cynthia
Bourgeault, one of CAC’s core faculty members, to explore Jesus’ teachings over
the next two weeks, drawing from her rich understanding of the ancient Wisdom
Tradition.
Jesus as Wisdom Teacher
When I talk about Jesus as a wisdom master, I need to
mention that in the Near East “wisdom teacher” is a recognized spiritual
occupation. In seminary I was taught that there were only two categories of
religious authority: one could be a priest or a prophet. That may be how the
tradition filtered down to us in the West. But within the wider Near East
(including Judaism itself), there was also a third, albeit unofficial,
category: a moshel moshelim, or teacher of wisdom, one who taught the ancient
traditions of the transformation of the human being.
These teachers of transformation—among whom I would place
the authors of the Hebrew wisdom literature such as Ecclesiastes, Job, and
Proverbs—may be the early precursors to the rabbi whose task it was to interpret
the law and lore of Judaism (often creating their own innovations of each). The
hallmark of these wisdom teachers was their use of pithy sayings, puzzles, and
parables rather than prophetic pronouncements or divine decree. They spoke to
people in the language that people spoke, the language of story rather than
law.
Parables, such as the stories Jesus told, are a wisdom genre
belonging to mashal, the Jewish branch of universal wisdom tradition. As we
shall see shortly, Jesus not only taught within this tradition, he turned it
end for end. But before we can appreciate the extraordinary nuances he brought
to understanding human transformation, we need first to know something about
the context in which he was working.
There has been a strong tendency among Christians to turn
Jesus into a priest—“our great high priest” (see Letter to the Hebrews). The
image of Christos Pantokrator (“Lord of All Creation”) dressed in splendid
sacramental robes has dominated the iconography of both Eastern and Western
Christendom. But Jesus was not a priest. He had nothing to do with the temple
hierarchy in Jerusalem, and he kept a respectful distance from most ritual
observances. Nor was he a prophet in the usual sense of the term: a messenger
sent to the people of Israel to warn them of impending political catastrophe in
an attempt to redirect their hearts to God. Jesus was not that interested in
the political fate of Israel, nor would he accept the role of Messiah
continuously being thrust upon him.
His message was not one of repentance (at least in the usual
way we understand it; more on that later this week) and return to the covenant.
Rather, he stayed close to the ground of wisdom: the transformation of human
consciousness. He asked those timeless and deeply personal questions: What does
it mean to die before you die? How do you go about losing your little life to
find the bigger one? Is it possible to live on this planet with a generosity,
abundance, fearlessness, and beauty that mirror Divine Being itself?
These are the wisdom questions, and they are the entire
field of Jesus’ concern.
Reference:
Adapted from Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus:
Transforming Heart and Mind—A New Perspective on Christ and His Message
(Shambhala: 2008), 23-24.
Right Practice
A well-known Southern Baptist theologian quips that the
whole of his Sunday school training could be summed up in one sentence
(delivered with a broad Texas drawl): “Jesus is nice, and he wants us to be
nice, too.” Many of us have grown up with Jesus all our lives. We know a few of
the parables, like those about the good Samaritan or the prodigal son. Some
people can even quote a few of the beatitudes. Most everyone can stumble
through the Lord’s Prayer.
But what did Jesus actually teach? How often do you hear his
teaching assessed as a whole? When it comes to spiritual teachers from other
traditions, it seems right and fair to ask what kind of path they’re on. What
does the Dalai Lama teach? What did Krishnamurti teach? But we never ask this
question about Jesus. Why not? When we actually get below the surface of his
teaching, we find there’s a lot more going on than meets the eye. And it
doesn’t have much to do with being “nice.”
One of the most important books to appear in recent years is
called Putting on the Mind of Christ by Jim Marion. [1] His title is a
statement in itself. “Putting on the mind of Christ” is a direct reference to
St. Paul’s powerful injunction in Philippians 2:5: “Let the same mind be in you
that was in Christ Jesus.” The words call us up short as to what we are
actually supposed to be doing on this path: not just admiring Jesus, but
acquiring his consciousness.
For the better part of the past sixteen hundred years
Christianity has put a lot more emphasis on the things we know about Jesus. The
word “orthodox” has come to mean having the correct beliefs. Along with the
overt requirement to learn what these beliefs are and agree with them comes a
subliminal message: that the appropriate way to relate to Jesus is through a
series of beliefs. In fundamentalist Christianity this message tends to get
even more accentuated, to the point where faith appears to be a matter of
signing on the dotted lines to a set of creedal statements. Belief in Jesus is
indistinguishable from belief about him.
This certainly wasn’t how it was done in the early
church—nor can it be if we are really seeking to come into a living
relationship with this wisdom master. Jim Marion’s book returns us to the
central challenge Christianity ought to be handing us. Indeed, how do we put on
the mind of Christ? How do we see through his eyes? How do we feel through his
heart? How do we learn to respond to the world with that same wholeness and
healing love? That’s what Christian orthodoxy really is all about. It’s not
about right belief; it’s about right practice.
References:
[1] See Jim Marion, Putting on the Mind of Christ: The Inner
Work of Christian Spirituality (Hampton Roads Publishing Company: 2000; 2nd
ed., 2011).
Adapted from Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus:
Transforming Heart and Mind—A New Perspective on Christ and His Message
(Shambhala: 2008), 28-29.
The Kingdom of Heaven
Throughout the gospel accounts, Jesus uses one particular
phrase repeatedly: “the Kingdom of Heaven.” The words stand out everywhere.
“The Kingdom of Heaven is like this,” “The Kingdom of Heaven is like that,”
“The Kingdom of Heaven is within you,” “The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.”
Whatever this Kingdom of Heaven is, it’s of foundational importance to what
Jesus is trying to teach.
So what do we take it to be? Biblical scholars have debated
this question for almost as long as there have been biblical scholars. Many
Christians, particularly those of a more evangelical persuasion, assume that
the Kingdom of Heaven means the place you go when you die—if you’ve been
“saved.” But the problem with this interpretation is that Jesus himself
specifically contradicts it when he says, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you”
(that is, here) and “at hand” (that is, now). It’s not later, but lighter—some
more subtle quality or dimension of experience accessible to you right in the
moment. You don’t die into it; you awaken into it.
The other approach people have consistently tried is to
equate the Kingdom of Heaven with an earthly utopia. The Kingdom of Heaven
would be a realm of peace and justice, where human beings lived together in
harmony and fair distribution of economic assets. For thousands of years
prophets and visionaries have laboured to bring into being their respective
versions of this kind of Kingdom of Heaven, but somehow these earthly utopias
never seem to stay put for very long. Jesus specifically rejected this meaning.
When his followers wanted to proclaim him the Messiah, the divinely anointed
king of Israel who would inaugurate the reign of God’s justice upon the earth,
Jesus shrank from all that and said, strongly and unequivocally, “My kingdom is
not of this world” (John 18:36).
Where is it, then? Author Jim Marion’s wonderfully
insightful and contemporary suggestion is that the Kingdom of Heaven is really
a metaphor for a state of consciousness; it is not a place you go to, but a
place you come from. [1] It is a whole new way of looking at the world, a
transformed awareness that literally turns this world into a different place.
Marion suggests specifically that the Kingdom of Heaven is
Jesus’ way of describing a state we would nowadays call “nondual consciousness”
or “unitive consciousness.” The hallmark of this awareness is that it sees no
separation—not between God and humans, not between humans and other humans.
These are indeed Jesus’ two core teachings, underlying everything he says and
does.
References:
[1] See Jim Marion, Putting on the Mind of Christ: The Inner
Work of Christian Spirituality (Hampton Roads Publishing Company: 2000; 2nd
ed., 2011).
Adapted from Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus:
Transforming Heart and Mind—A New Perspective on Christ and His Message
(Shambhala: 2008), 29-31.
One with God, One with
Each Other
When Jesus talks about Oneness, he is not speaking in an
Eastern sense about an equivalency of being, such that I am in and of myself
divine. Rather, what he has in mind is a complete, mutual indwelling: I am in
God, God is in you, you are in God, we are in each other.
His most beautiful symbol for this is in John 15 where he says,
“I am the vine; you are the branches. Abide in me as I in you.” A few verses
later he says, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you. Abide in my
love.” While he does indeed claim that “the Father and I are one” (John
10:30)—a statement so blasphemous to Jewish ears that it nearly gets Jesus
stoned—he does not see this as an exclusive privilege but as something shared
by all human beings. There is no separation between humans and God because of
this mutual inter-abiding which expresses the indivisible reality of divine
love.
We flow into God—and God into us—because it is the nature of
love to flow. And as we give ourselves into one another in this fashion, the
vine gives life and coherence to the branch while the branch makes visible what
the vine is. (After all, a vine is merely an abstraction until there are actual
branches to articulate its reality.) The whole and the part live together in
mutual, loving reciprocity, each belonging to the other and dependent on the
other to show forth the fullness of love. That’s Jesus’ vision of no separation
between human and Divine.
No separation between human and human is an equally powerful
notion—and equally challenging. One of the most familiar of Jesus’ teachings is
“Love your neighbour as yourself” (Mark 12:31, Matthew 22:39). But we almost
always hear that wrong: “Love your neighbour as much as yourself.” (And of
course, the next logical question then becomes, “But I have to love me first,
don’t I, before I can love my neighbour?”) If you listen closely to Jesus
however, there is no “as much as” in his admonition. It’s just “Love your
neighbour as yourself”—as a continuation of your very own being. It’s a
complete seeing that your neighbour is you. There are not two individuals out
there, one seeking to better herself at the price of the other, or to extend
charity to the other; there are simply two cells of the one great Life. Each of
them is equally precious and necessary. And as these two cells flow into one
another, experiencing that one Life from the inside, they discover that “laying
down one’s life for another” is not a loss of one’s self but a vast expansion
of it—because the indivisible reality of love is the only True Self.
Reference:
Adapted from Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus:
Transforming Heart and Mind—A New Perspective on Christ and His Message
(Shambhala: 2008), 31-32.
The Egoic Operating
System
I would like to reflect on this idea of Jesus as a master of
consciousness from a slightly different angle with the help of a contemporary
computer metaphor: We come into existence with a certain operating system
already installed. We can make the choice to upgrade.
Our pre-installed binary system runs on the power of
“either/or.” I call it the “egoic operating system.” This dualistic “binary operator”
is built right into the structure of the human brain.
The egoic operating system is a way of making sense of the
world by dividing the field into subject and object, inside and outside. It
perceives through differentiation. One of the most important tasks of early
childhood is to learn how to run the operating system. By the time she was one
and a half, my granddaughter could already sing along with the Sesame Street
jingle, “One of these things is not like the other,” and pick out the cat from
among three dogs.
When we become aware of our identity using this egoic
operating system, we experience ourselves as persons with distinct qualities
and attributes. When we introduce ourselves, we usually begin by listing these
characteristics: “I am a Pisces, a six on the Enneagram, a person who loves the
ocean, an Episcopalian, a priest.” We identify ourselves by what makes us
unique and special. Of course, that same list also makes other people separate
from me; they are outside, and I’m inside. I experience myself as a distinct
and fixed point of identity that “has” particular qualities and life
experiences, and these things make me who I am.
But this sense of identity is a mirage, an illusion. There
is no such self. There is no small self, no egoic being, no thing that’s
separated from everything else, that has insides and outsides, that has
experiences. All these impressions are simply a function of an operating system
that has to divide the world up into bits and pieces in order to perceive it.
Like the great wisdom teachers of all spiritual traditions, Jesus calls us
beyond the illusion: “Hey, you can upgrade your operating system, and life is
going to look a whole lot different when you do it.”
The binary operating system does have some real importance;
it’s not a mistake. It enables us to perform basic cognitive tasks. But most
people get stuck in it and rely on the egoic operating system to create a sense
of identity. We walk through our lives perceiving, reacting to, and attempting
to negotiate the world “out there.” It’s like being lost in a mirage. A system
based in duality can’t possibly perceive oneness; it can’t create anything
beyond itself—only more duality and more trouble. So the drama of the “separate
self” goes on and on.
But we do have the capacity, if we so choose, to shift to a
whole different basis of perception. We come into this life with another
untapped operating system, and we can learn to steer by it, understand through
it, and ultimately discover our deepest sense of identity within it.
Reference:
Adapted from Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus:
Transforming Heart and Mind—A New Perspective on Christ and His Message
(Shambhala: 2008), 33-35.
Self-Emptying
Jesus teaches the art of metanoia, or “going into the larger
mind.” Underlying all his teaching is a clarion call to a radical shift in
consciousness: away from the alienation and polarization of the egoic operating
system and into the unified field of divine abundance that can be perceived
only through the heart.
But how does one make this shift in consciousness? It’s one
thing to admire it from a distance, but quite another to create it within
oneself. This is where spiritual praxis comes into play. “Praxis” means the
path, the actual practice you follow to bring about the result that you’re
yearning for. I think it’s fair to say that all of the great spiritual paths
lead toward the same centre—the larger, nondual mind as the seat of personal
consciousness—but they get there by different routes.
While Jesus is typical of the wisdom tradition in his vision
of what a whole and unified human being looks like, the route he lays out for
getting there is very different from anything that had ever been seen on the
planet up to that point. It is still radical in our own time and definitely the
“road less travelled” among the various schools of human transformation. Many
of the difficulties we run into trying to make our Christianity work stem from
the fact that we haven’t realized how different Jesus’ approach really is. By
trying to contain this new wine in old wineskins, we inadvertently missed its
own distinct flavour. In Jesus everything hangs together around a single centre
of gravity, and we need to know what this centre is before we can sense the
subtle and cohesive power of his path.
What name might we give to this centre? The apostle Paul
suggests the word kenosis. In Greek the verb kenosein means “to let go,” or “to
empty oneself,” and this is the word Paul chooses to describe “the mind of
Christ.”
Here is what Paul has to say (Philippians 2:6-8):
Though his state was that of God,
yet he did not deem equality with God
something he should cling to.
Rather, he emptied himself,
and assuming the state of a slave,
he was born in human likeness.
He, being known as one of us,
humbled himself, obedient unto death,
even death on the cross.
In this beautiful hymn, Paul recognizes that Jesus had only
one “operational mode.” Everything he did, he did by self-emptying. He emptied
himself and descended into human form. And he emptied himself still further,
“even unto death on the cross.” In every life circumstance, Jesus always
responded with the same motion of self-emptying—or to put it another way,
descent: taking the lower place, not the higher.
Reference:
Adapted from Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus:
Transforming Heart and Mind—A New Perspective on Christ and His Message
(Shambhala: 2008), 62-66.
VISION “3”
This article is taken from the blog by Fr Michael white, Pastor of the Church of the Nativity, Baltimore. You can find the original article here
Vision is a picture of a preferred future.
This Easter season we’ve been looking at Vision and how it forms our perspective. Our perspective impacts the way we see the world. Our ability to be a good parent, a good boss, a good son or daughter, will only be as good as our perspective.
If we can’t see it right, then we can’t live it right. The Resurrection gives us the right perspective on the future. Jesus rose from the dead. He took what appeared to be utter failure – his death on the cross and turned it into the greatest victory ever.
We need to see life through the lens of the resurrection. If Jesus can conquer the grave and we share in that victory, then no failure is ever final. We can live with hope knowing if God raised to life his dead Son, he can do anything.
Internally, we have been calling this Easter message series Vision “3” because it is the third time we have returned to the topic in the last few years. “Vision” is the name we gave to our Capital Campaign to build a new church, which we launched in 2014, originally raising $8m. That was a wonderful amount pledged, but to get started on the project we had in mind we needed more. So, we eventually hosted Vision “2” in the Spring of 2015, which included a wider circle of support and brought our total pledges closer to $10m. By this time last year we found ourselves around $12m, which gave us enough confidence to break ground and begin construction.
Now with the end in sight (September 2017) we find ourselves at over $13.5m in pledges, our total budget standing firm at $15m.
Vision “3” is about closing that gap and bringing this whole project to completion with no debt. Specifically, this coming weekend is “Commitment Weekend” and the final time we’ll be asking everyone to commit to our campaign:
If you originally committed to a two or three year pledge, we’re looking for one more year.
If you haven’t yet committed, we’re inviting you to join us at this time.
This is not the launch of a new campaign — we’re just landing the plane of the campaign we began three years ago.
To complete this building project debt free will be an incredible testimony to the faith commitment of this parish.
That’s the way we began this whole project three years ago – looking at the campaign from a faith perspective: the perspective of God’s vision for our parish.
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