Mersey Leven Catholic Parish
To be a vibrant Catholic Community
unified in its commitment
to growing disciples for Christ
Parish Priest: Fr Mike Delaney Mob: 0417 279 437
Priest in Residence: Fr Phil McCormack Mob: 0437 521 257
Postal Address: PO Box 362
Parish Office: 90 Stewart Street
(Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday 10am - 3pm)
Office Phone: 6424 2783 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 6th - 9th June, 2017
Tuesday: 9.30am Penguin
Devonport: 
Readers: Vigil: M Gaffney, M Gerrand, H Lim
10:30am: J
Phillips, K Pearce, K Von Bibra
Ulverstone:
Latrobe:
Penguin:
Port Sorell:
Readings this week – PENTECOST SUNDAY – Year A
PREGO REFLECTION:
I begin by breathing gently and becoming still.
I then read the text
prayerfully.
It may help my prayer to imagine that I am in the room with the
disciples.
I imagine the scene and place myself within it.
What strikes me?
I
stay with whatever is occurring to me … perhaps the locked doors and the
half-light of the room; maybe the fear in the disciples’ faces. I note any
feelings arising with me.
Then I see Jesus standing among us.
I spend some time
looking at him: his face, the wounds in his hands and side as he shows them to
us.
I allow him to look at me.
How do I feel now?
‘Peace be with you’, he says.
Are there any areas of my life where I don’t feel at peace?
Perhaps I would
like to share that with him now.
Then I hear him invite me to share in his
mission, as he breathes on me and gives me the Holy Spirit. Maybe I recall the
time when I was confirmed.
What was it like? How did I feel then?
In the
remaining moments, I pray for a greater trust in the power of the Spirit at
work in me, enabling me to forgive those who have sinned against me.
I end with
a slow ‘Our Father’.
Readings next week – The Most Holy
Trinity – Year A
Your prayers
are asked for the sick:
Robert Windebank, Mary Hutchinson, Fr Laurie Bissett MSC, Victoria
Webb, Victor Slavin & …,
Let us pray for those who have died recently:
Fr Mark McGuinness, Anne
Watson, Ivan Walsh, Beverley
Cloney.
Let us pray
for those whose anniversary occurs about this time: 31st May – 6th
June
Weekly
Ramblings
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.
MT ST
VINCENT AUXILIARY:
Will be holding a ‘Craft and Cake
Stall’ after 9am Mass in the Community Room, Sacred Heart Church on 11th
June. Bring your spare change along and pick up some delicious home cooking and
home-made craft!
OLOL READERS ROSTER:
FOOTY
TICKETS: Round 10 (26th May)
footy margin 6 – Winners; Michael Barry
BINGO - Thursday Nights - OLOL
Hall, Devonport. Eyes down 7.30pm! Callers for Thursday 8th
June – Merv Tippett & Terry Bird.
NEWS FROM ACROSS THE ARCHDIOCESE:
CHARITABLE WORKS ANNUAL COLLECTION
The Charitable Works Annual Collection is an appeal that supports
CatholicCare Tasmania and the Apostleship of the Sea, Australia. This appeal will be held this
weekend 3rd & 4th June, 2017. Envelopes will be available from
all Mass Centres.
CatholicCare Tasmania is the official social services
and welfare arm of the Archdiocese of Hobart. The agency has a strong
commitment to supporting and nurturing families in all their diversity as the
basic building blocks of caring, healthy and just communities.
WALK WITH CHRIST – Hobart City, Sunday 18th June 1:15pm to 3:00 pm.
GOING ON, AHEAD
The original article by Fr Ron Rolheiser OMI can be found here
“I go on ahead to prepare a place for you!” Jesus speaks those words to his disciples on the eve of his death as he sits at table with them and senses their sadness as they grapple with his dying, his going away. His words are meant to console them and give them the assurance that they aren’t being abandoned. It’s just that he is going on ahead to prepare a place for them to come and join him later.
That story speaks to me very personally because of how one of my sisters died. She was young, the mother of a large family, and seemingly too young to leave her young children behind. She was dying of a cancer that, while relentlessly doing its deadly work, mercifully left her relatively pain-free and clear in mind and heart to the very end. The cancer eventually took her to a point where she could no longer eat, but could still be nourished for a time by intravenous transfusions. But these too eventually no longer worked and, once unhooked from the intravenous needles, she was told that she had roughly a week still to live. She chose to spend those last days in a hospital rather than at home, with her family having easy, 24-hour, access to her hospice bed.
The days leading up to her death were a sacred time. I took her communion several days before she died and, with her head still very clear, she told me what I should say at her funeral liturgy. She had chosen that exact text where Jesus, on the night before he dies, tells his heavy-hearted disciples that he is going ahead, to prepare a place for them. She shared how, before every one of her children was born, before she went to the hospital to give birth, she had carefully prepared everything at home for the new arrival, the crib, the diapers, the clothing, the room. She brought each of her children home to a place she had carefully prepared. And now she was going on ahead of them again, to prepare another place for them.
I preached those words at her funeral and despite our grief and despite the fact that in moments like these there is nothing really that can be said that takes away the pain, her raw testimony of faith left us with an image that placed us all, not least her husband and children, inside a bigger story, a faith-narrative, that highlighted two things.
First, the image of her going on ahead of her children awakened our grieving faith to the truth that a mother can go on ahead to prepare a place for her children in much deeper ways than simply bringing a new-born home from a hospital. Second, her “going ahead” was also showing her children, and the rest of us, how to die, how to do that act that we all someday must do. After you watch a good person die, you become less afraid to die yourself because you see how it can be done in an ordinary way, by an ordinary person, in a way that you can also do. In her dying, she prepared a place for us.
But this isn’t a lesson only about dying. This image, I go on ahead to prepare a place for you, is a metaphor which defines the essential task of our adult, mature years. Our task of as “elders”, whether that be as a mother or father, an older brother or older sister, an uncle or an aunt, a teacher, a clergyman, a nurse, a worker, a colleague, or a friend, is to live in such a way so as to create a place where the young can follow. Our task as adults is to show the young how to live at a place where they’ve never been as yet.
And it is both a noble and humble task. Most of us cannot live up to the lofty ideals we see lived out in the lives of the great saints, though their lives have created an ideal place for us. However, while not everyone can live as Mother Teresa did, perhaps they can live like you do and your life can be their exemplar for meaning, wholeness, anonymous sanctity, and dying without unnecessary fear.
I’ve been graced to be at the deathbed of a goodly number of ordinary people who died very ordinary looking deaths, with no choirs of angels silently chanting in the background, no alleluias on their lips, with pain and thirst dominating their concerns, with their hands being tightly grasped by loved ones, and their hearts still very much focused on the pain of leaving this world. And that’s not a bad way to die. In how they managed their deaths they prepared a place for me. Looking at how they died, I am far less fearful and can more readily say: I can do this!
What a grace to have someone go on ahead to prepare a place for you!
Choose life: horizons beyond the tomb walls
‘The walls we build to protect ourselves and to keep others out all contribute to the establishment of a tomb, an abode of the dead, a hell that produces sentiments of anxiety, suspicion, fear and despair’. But the bursting forth of a new world on Easter morning breaks the walls of this tomb and opens our horizons, writes David Neuhaus SJ: ‘resurrection renews hope’. The original article can be found here
The Cambridge Dictionary defines the word ‘horizon’ as ‘the line at the farthest place that you can see, where the sky seems to touch the land or sea’. This Easter, the word ‘horizon’ strikes me as particularly appropriate in order to understand what difference Jesus’s resurrection makes in my life and in our world.
Christ’s victory over death is first noted in the gospel when the women approach the tomb early on Sunday morning. They have come reverentially to anoint Christ’s body, which three days earlier had been hurriedly consigned to a tomb. A heavy stone had been rolled over the mouth of the burial cave, as was common practice, and the Jews, those who were his disciples and those who were his opponents, then observed the Sabbath. In the silence of the Sabbath, a new world, whose seed was conceived in Christ’s crucified body, was mysteriously being formed. This new world would burst forth on the first day of the week, the first day of a new creation. It is into this world that we, disciples of Christ, are invited. It is to this new world that we, disciples of Christ, point with our witness.
As the women approached the tomb, as yet unaware of the new world that awaited them, they asked ‘Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?’ (Mark 16:3) Still firmly rooted in the world that is passing away, their anxiety, sadness and sense of loneliness are all present in this question. Jesus has left them alone and they live this as an abandonment with a profound sense of grief. Yet all this gives way to bewilderment, confusion and fear as they gaze on the tomb, burst open, and on the heavy stone, pushed aside. Mark’s Gospel concludes the scene with the troubling words, ‘So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid’ (Mark 16:8). It is this that must become wonder, joy and thanksgiving as the women, first witnesses of the resurrection, encounter the Risen Jesus.
What distinguishes the old world from the new one? That is a difficult question to answer as we are still living so much in the old. At the Last Supper, Jesus prayed to his Father for his disciples, saying: ‘I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one. They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world’ (John 17:15-16). Indeed, our being in the old world that has still not passed away makes our fidelity to the new world, into which we are invited by Jesus, fragile and sometimes faltering. The new often loses its specific character, its contours blur and its distinct character dissolves as our rootedness in the old overshadows the light of the new.
It is the word ‘horizon’ that distinguishes the old world from the new. Whereas the old world is suffocating, dark and often hopeless, provoking anxiety and sadness, the new world is one in which horizons are open, flooded with light and joy, evoking hope. Death is the reality of the old world, a reality where the horizon is blocked; and resurrection is the reality of the new, where the horizon stretches to where heaven and earth touch.
The dead body of Jesus was laid in a tomb, dark, dank and closed in. Jesus really died! He did not pass through death or act dead, but he truly died as a human being dies. His death, burial and descent into the place of the dead constitute an essential element in his birth, death and resurrection. In the Apostles’ Creed, we recite a summary of the Easter Triduum: ‘[He] suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried; he descended into hell; on the third day he rose again from the dead’. Many have struggled to understand what it means for Jesus, after his death on the cross, to have descended into hell. This is a reference to passages in the New Testament that talk of a descent into the kingdom of the dead after the death of Christ. Most explicitly this is referred to in 1 Peter 3:18-19: ‘For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit, in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison’. In Hebrew, the place referred to as ‘hell’ and described as a ‘prison’ is called Sheol, the abode of the dead.
Sheol in the Old Testament is described as a dark and suffocating place under the earth. In the terrifying story of Korah, Dathan and Abiram, who challenged the leadership of Moses, they were swallowed up by the earth that opened its mouth, and ‘closed over them’, bringing them into Sheol (Numbers 16:30–33). Isaiah spoke of Sheol as a place of imprisonment behind gates (Isaiah 38:10), the Book of Job describes it as a place behind bars (Job 17:16) and the Psalm describes cords and snares that entangle (Psalm 18:5). Elsewhere, Isaiah spoke of Sheol as a place of darkness, a land where there is no memory (Isaiah 14:9, 26:14) like in the Psalms, which describes it as ‘darkness… the land of forgetfulness’ (Psalm 88:12). Solomon describes a place of inactivity, where there is no work and no thought (Ecclesiastes 9:10). It is a place of silence (Psalm 115:17). Most characteristically, Sheol is a place where there is no praise of God. ‘For in death there is no remembrance of you, in Sheol who can give you praise?’ (Psalm 6:5). ‘For Sheol cannot thank you, death cannot praise you; those who go down to the Pit cannot hope for your faithfulness’ (Isaiah 38:18).
Jesus experiences the reality of the tomb and that of Sheol as an essential part of the incarnation through which he enters fully into our human lives. The reality of the tomb is a human reality we fully know in death. However, before we die, we can and often do choose death over life over and over again. We are enslaved to the consequences of our wrong choices. In these choices, the tomb is palpable, a reality of darkness, sin and fear. It is this exit from a place of imprisonment and slavery that the Jewish people celebrate at Passover. Their exit from Egypt is a breaking out of the prison of slavery. The word for Egypt in Hebrew (Mitzrayim) evokes the word for narrow and confining (tzar). It is thus completely coherent that Jesus the Jew chose the Passover as the time to pass from death to life. At Easter, we are invited to renew our commitment to the new world born from the tomb. We are called to burst out of the tomb into life, leaving behind us a tomb that is empty.
The tomb reality is one of walls, the blocking out of light, lack of vision, a place in which there are no horizons. Saint Teresa of Avila described a vision of hell in these words:
Being in such an unwholesome place, so unable to hope for any consolation, I found it impossible either to sit down or to lie down, nor was there any room, even though they put me in this kind of hole made in the wall. Those walls, which were terrifying to see, closed in on themselves and suffocated everything. There was no light, but all was enveloped in the blackest darkness.
Scripture and the saints teach us that Sheol is not just a matter of human destiny. There is a choice involved, between stagnating in a place where all the horizons are shut off with walls or tending towards a place where the horizon is stretching out before us.
The world we often choose to live in resembles Sheol in more than one sense. The walls we build to protect ourselves and to keep others out, the language we mouth to define our ‘us’ against our ‘them’, the resources we spend in order to keep track of who is our ‘us’ and who is our ‘them’, all contribute to the establishment of a tomb, an abode of the dead, a hell that produces the sentiments of anxiety, suspicion, fear and despair that accompany us too often. This Sheol, which we call home, is ever more alive as a discourse of phobia resounds in our capitals, building on a sentiment of fear.
The old world is often our world, a world that encourages apathy in the face of the misery produced by our greed. As we shut the door in the face of our brothers and sisters who clamour for our solidarity and assistance, we sink into the tomb. As we watch unmoved as millions flee their homes because of hunger and war, petrifying our hearts with suspicion and refusal, we adopt the constitution of an old world that crucified Jesus. As we comfortably mouth a language that divides the world into ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’, we betray a gospel that preaches love and pardon. And so we sink into a hopelessness that proposes the walls we build around ourselves in brick and word, in violence and rejection. Resurrection renews hope. The walls crumble. In a Twitter message on 9 February 2017, Pope Francis proclaimed ‘Hope opens new horizons and enables us to dream of what is not even imaginable’. Hope enables us to quit the old world on Easter morning!
Pope Francis, great apostle of the new world, spoke out loud and clear in favour of the new world in his inaugural homily as pope on 19 March 2013:
Saint Paul speaks of Abraham, who, ‘hoping against hope, believed’ (Rom 4:18). Hoping against hope! Today too, amid so much darkness, we need to see the light of hope and to be men and women who bring hope to others. To protect creation, to protect every man and every woman, to look upon them with tenderness and love, is to open up a horizon of hope; it is to let a shaft of light break through the heavy clouds; it is to bring the warmth of hope! For believers, for us Christians, like Abraham, like Saint Joseph, the hope that we bring is set against the horizon of God, which has opened up before us in Christ. It is a hope built on the rock which is God.
A few months later, on his visit to the tomb of Christ, in May 2014, Pope Francis expressed this reality of a new world outside the tomb. The context of his words was the meeting with the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople. His words, however, stretch far beyond that specific context.
We need to believe that, just as the stone before the tomb was cast aside, so too every obstacle to our full communion will also be removed. This will be a grace of resurrection, of which we can have a foretaste even today. Every time we ask forgiveness of one another for our sins against other Christians and every time we find the courage to grant and receive such forgiveness, we experience the resurrection! Every time we put behind us our longstanding prejudices and find the courage to build new fraternal relationships, we confess that Christ is truly risen!
When Jesus bursts out of the tomb, he leads us forth into a new world, a world of open horizons. Isaiah contrasts this new world of life to that of Sheol, as a place of joyful thanksgiving: ‘The living, the living, they thank you, as I do this day; parents make known to children your faithfulness’ (Isaiah 38:19). In bursting out of the tomb, Jesus brings down walls, opens doors and brings the widest horizons into view. As the walls dissolve and the gates are burst open, one can breathe in the air of freedom and walk heads held high, no longer slaves. Thus is accomplished in the promise that God makes at the centre of the Law of Moses:
I will place my dwelling in your midst, and I shall not abhor you. And I will walk among you, and will be your God, and you shall be my people. I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, to be their slaves no more; I have broken the bars of your yoke and made you walk erect. (Leviticus 26:11-13)
Fr David M. Neuhaus SJ serves as Latin Patriarchal Vicar within the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem. He is responsible for Hebrew-speaking Catholics in Israel as well as the Catholic migrant populations. He teaches Holy Scripture at the Latin Patriarchate Seminary and at the Salesian Theological Institute in Jerusalem and also lectures at Yad Ben Zvi.
The Cross
The Mystery of the
Cross
The crucified Jesus offers, at a largely unconscious level,
a very compassionate meaning system for history. Without such cosmic meaning
and soul significance, the agonies and tragedies of Earth feel like
Shakespeare’s “sound and fury signifying nothing” or “a tale told by an idiot.”
The body can live without food more easily than the soul can live without such
transformative meaning.
If all our crucifixions are leading to some possible
resurrection, and are not dead-end tragedies, this changes everything. If God
is somehow participating in the suffering of humans and creation, instead of
just passively tolerating it and observing it, that also changes everything—at
least for those who are willing to “gaze” contemplatively.
We Christians are given the privilege to name the mystery
rightly and to know it directly and consciously, but in many ways we have not
lived it much better than other religions and cultures. All humble, suffering
souls can learn this from the flow of life itself, but the Christian Scriptures
named it and revealed it to us publicly and dramatically in Jesus. It all
depends on whether you have “gazed” long and deep enough at the paradoxical
mystery of life and death.
The Universal Pattern:
Loss and Renewal
So how does this happen? How does the victim transform us?
How does the Lamb of God “take away the sin of the world” (John 1:29; note that
“sin” here is singular)? How does Jesus “overcome death and darkness,” as we
often say? Is it a cosmic magic act? Jesus is saying, “This is how evil is
transformed into good! I am going to take the worst thing and turn it into the
best thing, so you will never be victimized, destroyed, or helpless again! I am
giving you an internal victory over all that might destroy you!”
Jesus takes away the sin of the world by dramatically
exposing the real sin—ignorant hatred and violence, not the usual preoccupation
with purity codes—and by refusing the usual pattern of vengeance, which keeps
us inside of an insidious quid pro quo logic. In fact, he “returns their curses
with blessings” (Luke 6:28), teaching us that we can “follow him” and not
continue the spiral of violence. He unlocks our entrapment from within.
Jesus has set the inevitable in motion. Both the problem and
the strategy have been revealed in one compelling action on God’s part. It is
not that Jesus is working some magic in the sky that “saves the world from sin
and death.” Jesus is unveiling a mystery that redefines the common pattern of
human history. Jesus is not changing his Father’s mind about us because it does
not need changing (as in various “atonement theories”); he is changing our mind
about what is real and what is not. The cross is not a required transaction
(which frankly makes little sense), but the mystery of how evil is transformed
into good.
Jesus on the cross identifies with the human problem, the
sin, the darkness. He refuses to stand above or outside the human dilemma.
Further, he refuses to scapegoate, and instead becomes the scapegoat
personified (as we’ll explore in greater detail next week). In Paul’s language,
“Christ redeemed us from the curse . . . by being cursed himself” (Galatians
3:13); or “God made the sinless one into sin, so that in him [together with
him!] we might become the very goodness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). Is it
beginning to make sense?
Loss and renewal is the perennial, eternal, transformative
pattern. It’s like a secret spiral: each time you allow the surrender, each
time you can trust the dying, you will experience a new quality of life within
you: “How we do not know; of its own accord, the land produces first the shoot,
then the ear, then the full grain in the ear” (Mark 4:27-28). Paul calls this
“the hidden wisdom of God . . . predestined to be for our glory before the ages
began” (1 Corinthians 2:7). Only the humble and the patient recognize the
redemptive pattern, it seems.
Sacred Images
The victim state has been the plight of most people who have
ever lived on this earth, so in all three cases we see Jesus identifying with
humanity at its most critical and most vulnerable level. We see God in radical
solidarity with all the pain of the world “since the blood of Abel” much more
than an omnipotent deity who, with a flick of the hand, overcomes all pain.
Let’s unpack these rich images of compassion and transformation. Today we’ll
focus on the Passover lamb, then we’ll look at the “Lifted-up One,” and next
week we’ll delve into the pattern of scapegoating.
Every year, on the tenth day of Nisan, each family was to
pick out a perfect little lamb without any spot or blemish and take it to their
home and then, on the fourteenth day, kill it (Exodus 12:1-14). In the Passover
commemoration, we have an image of the death of something good and innocent.
All suffering is unjust, undeserved, tragic, and nonsensical. We will never
find any logic to it, but we try to fit it inside of some ledger of
accountability when we blame or accuse someone else. This is the pattern. It is
universal, but most do not see it.
I believe the innocent lamb symbolizes the ego or the
privately constructed self. It is not bad; in fact, it feels like “me.” And it
is. But not the full or deepest me. It is who I think I am; it is what I have
learned that I cannot live without. But when we let go of this temporary
imposter, we break through to a much deeper level of our own life! But it
always feels unjust and unnecessary. It is always a risk, just like Jesus being
carried into the tomb.
Jesus on the cross is not an image of the death of the bad
self but, in fact, the self that feels right and necessary—but isn’t! Jesus had
been misunderstood and misinterpreted. He had every good reason to play the
victim or the blame card, but he did neither. This is astounding when you
consider the main story line of history is exactly the opposite to this day.
To understand Jesus in a whole new way, you must first know
that Christ is not his last name, but his eternal identity both before and
after the Resurrection. The raising up of Jesus is not a one-time miracle that
we must believe, but a revelation of the constant and only pattern. Nothing has
to die permanently! Many scientists now say nothing does die. Or as the
Catholic funeral Mass puts it, “life is not ended, but merely changed.”
Jesus became the Christ, which is to include all of us in
this eternal movement through time and death (see Acts 2:36). That’s why Paul
creates the new term “the body of Christ” (1 Corinthians 12:12), a corporate
image to communicate what is happening to all of us too. Jesus dies, Christ
rises. The small vehicle must die so the more inclusive vehicle can rise. Thus
Paul’s most common shortcut phrase is en Christo, which he uses 164 times.
“Unless the single grain of wheat dies, it will remain just a single grain of
wheat, but if it dies it will bear a rich harvest” (John 12:24). If you prefer
a different language, the small identity must surrender its ego boundaries to
fall into the Larger Identity.
I think this is Jesus’ major message: there is something
essential that you only know by dying. You really don’t know what life is until
you know what death is. Death, which seems like our ultimate enemy, is actually
the doorway. This is how Jesus “overcame” and even “destroyed” death.
The Cross as Cure
Jesus becomes the seeming problem and the homeopathic cure
for the same by dramatically exposing it for what it is, “parading it in
public” (Colossians 2:15) for those who have eyes to see, and inviting us to
gaze upon it with sympathetic understanding.
I believe we are invited to gaze upon the image of the
crucified to soften our hearts toward suffering and to know that God’s heart
has always been softened toward us, even and most especially in our suffering.
This softens us toward ourselves and all others who suffer.
Following Jesus is actually a vocation to share the fate of
God for the life of the world. Jesus invited people to “follow” him in bearing
the mystery of human death and resurrection. It is not a requirement in order
that we can go to heaven later, it is an invitation so that we can live an
entirely full life now.
Those who agree to carry and love what God loves, which is
both the good and the bad of human history, and to pay the price for its
reconciliation within themselves—these are the followers of Jesus—the leaven,
the salt, the remnant, the mustard seed that God can use to transform the
world. The cross is a very dramatic image of what it takes to be a usable one
for God.
These few are the critical mass that keeps the world from
its path toward greed, violence, and self-destruction. God is calling everyone
and everything to God’s self (Genesis 8:16-17, Ephesians 1:9-10, Colossians
1:15-20, Acts 3:21, 1 Timothy 2:4, John 3:17), not just a few. To get there,
God needs models and images who are willing to be “conformed to the body of his
death” and transformed into the body of his resurrection (Philippians 3:10).
They are “the new creatures” (Galatians 6:15), and their transformed state is
seeping into history and ever so slowly transforming it into life instead of
death. This is the basis for all of our hope—in Christ and for history.
Suffering Love
I believe—if I am to believe Jesus—that God is precisely
suffering love. If Jesus is the living “image of the invisible God” (Colossians
1:15), and if there is this much suffering in the world, then God is in some
very real way suffering. God is not watching it, but in it! Did your church
ever tell you that? How else can we understand the revelation of the cross and
that our central Christian image is a naked, bleeding, suffering man?
Christians strangely worship a suffering God, largely without realizing it; and
Christian mystics even say that there is only one cosmic suffering, and we all
share in it, as Paul also seems to intuit (Colossians 1:24).
Many of the happiest and most peaceful people I know love
this “crucified God” who walks with crucified people, and thus reveals and
“redeems” their plight as God’s own. For them, Jesus is not observing human
suffering from a distance; he is somehow in human suffering with us and for us.
He includes our suffering in the co-redemption of the world, as “all creation
groans in one great act of giving birth” (Romans 8:22). We “make up in our own
bodies all that still has to be undergone for the sake of the Whole Body”
(Colossians 1:24).
The genius of Jesus’ ministry is his revelation that God
uses tragedy, suffering, pain, betrayal, and death itself, not to wound you but
in fact to bring you to God. There are no dead ends. Everything can be
transmuted and everything can be used.
Sooner or later, life is going to lead you (as it did Jesus)
into the belly of the whale, into a place where you can’t fix, control,
explain, or understand (usually very concrete and personal; it cannot be merely
theoretical). That’s where transformation most easily and deeply happens.
That’s when you’re uniquely in the hands of God because you cannot “handle” it
yourself.
Suffering is the only thing strong enough to destabilize the
imperial ego. It has to be led to the edge of its own resources, so it learns
to call upon its Deepest Source. Some might call this the God Self, the True
Self, the Christ Self, the Buddha Self, or just the soul. Life at this point is
indestructible! In short, you must discover or “save” your own soul, and
nothing else can compare with this discovery. “For whoever wishes to save his
life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it” (Luke
9:24). (See also Mark 8:36, Matthew 16:26, John 12:25.)
and calling us to serve as your disciples.
as we use our gifts to serve you.
as we strive to bear witness
Amen.
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 6th - 9th June, 2017
Tuesday: 9.30am Penguin
Wednesday: 9.30am Latrobe
Thursday: 10:30am Eliza Purton
12noon Devonport
Friday: 9.30am Ulverstone
Next Weekend 10th & 11th June, 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 10th & 11th June, 2017
Devonport:
Readers: Vigil: M Gaffney, M Gerrand, H Lim 10:30am: J Phillips, K Pearce, K Von Bibra
Ministers of Communion: Vigil B & B
Windebank, T Bird, J Kelly, R Baker, B Windebank
10.30am: S Riley, M Sherriff, R Beaton, D & M Barrientos
Cleaners 9th
June: M & R
Youd 16th June: M & L Tippett, A Berryman
Piety Shop 10th
June: R McBain 11th June: P Piccolo
Ulverstone:
Reader/s: A & F
Pisano Ministers of Communion: M Mott, M Fennell, J Jones, T Leary
Cleaners: G & M
Seen, C Roberts Flowers: M Swain Hospitality:
B O’Rourke, S McGrath
Latrobe:
Reader: P Cotterill Ministers of Communion: I Campbell, M O’Brien-Evans
Procession of Gifts: Cotterill Family
Penguin:
Greeters: S Ewing, J Garnsey Commentator: E Nickols Readers: J Barker, A Guest
Ministers of
Communion: J
Garnsey, S Ewing Liturgy: Pine Road
Setting Up: A Landers Care of Church: J & T Kiely
Port Sorell:
Readers: G Bellchambers, G Duff Ministers of Communion: L Post
Cleaners/Flowers/Prep: C Howard
Readings this week – PENTECOST SUNDAY – Year A
First Reading: Acts 2:1-11
Second Reading: Corinthians 12:3-7, 12-13
Gospel: John 20:19-23
PREGO REFLECTION:
I come to prayer just as I am ... perhaps joyful, at peace
… or maybe struggling with doubts and fears. However I am feeling, I can trust
the Lord.
I begin by breathing gently and becoming still.
I then read the text prayerfully.
It may help my prayer to imagine that I am in the room with the disciples.
I imagine the scene and place myself within it.
What strikes me?
I stay with whatever is occurring to me … perhaps the locked doors and the half-light of the room; maybe the fear in the disciples’ faces. I note any feelings arising with me.
Then I see Jesus standing among us.
I spend some time looking at him: his face, the wounds in his hands and side as he shows them to us.
I allow him to look at me.
How do I feel now?
‘Peace be with you’, he says.
Are there any areas of my life where I don’t feel at peace?
Perhaps I would like to share that with him now.
Then I hear him invite me to share in his mission, as he breathes on me and gives me the Holy Spirit. Maybe I recall the time when I was confirmed.
What was it like? How did I feel then?
In the remaining moments, I pray for a greater trust in the power of the Spirit at work in me, enabling me to forgive those who have sinned against me.
I end with a slow ‘Our Father’.
I begin by breathing gently and becoming still.
I then read the text prayerfully.
It may help my prayer to imagine that I am in the room with the disciples.
I imagine the scene and place myself within it.
What strikes me?
I stay with whatever is occurring to me … perhaps the locked doors and the half-light of the room; maybe the fear in the disciples’ faces. I note any feelings arising with me.
Then I see Jesus standing among us.
I spend some time looking at him: his face, the wounds in his hands and side as he shows them to us.
I allow him to look at me.
How do I feel now?
‘Peace be with you’, he says.
Are there any areas of my life where I don’t feel at peace?
Perhaps I would like to share that with him now.
Then I hear him invite me to share in his mission, as he breathes on me and gives me the Holy Spirit. Maybe I recall the time when I was confirmed.
What was it like? How did I feel then?
In the remaining moments, I pray for a greater trust in the power of the Spirit at work in me, enabling me to forgive those who have sinned against me.
I end with a slow ‘Our Father’.
Readings next week – The Most Holy
Trinity – Year A
First Reading: Exodus 34:4-6. 8-9
Second Reading: 2 Corinthians 13:11-13
Gospel: John 3:16-18
Your prayers
are asked for the sick:
Robert Windebank, Mary Hutchinson, Fr Laurie Bissett MSC, Victoria
Webb, Victor Slavin & …,
Let us pray for those who have died recently:
June Morris, Dorothy Hamilton, Lourdes
Lupango, Jean Horton, Peter Hutchinson, Martin Healy,
Fr Mark McGuinness, Anne Watson, Ivan Walsh, Beverley Cloney.
Fr Mark McGuinness, Anne Watson, Ivan Walsh, Beverley Cloney.
Let us pray
for those whose anniversary occurs about this time: 31st May – 6th
June
Cheryl Robinson, Helen Armsby, Sr Josie Berry, Paul Streat,
Anthony Venn, Viv Down, Karen Blackaby, Theresa Maguire, Jocelyn Waldhauser and
Mary Allford.
May they rest in peace
Weekly
Ramblings
Today is a great day for the Church and for our Parish as
it gives us an opportunity to gather as one Parish Family to celebrate the
coming of the Holy Spirit and the birthday of the Church. I hope that it has
also provided an opportunity for people to get to chat with parishioners they
may not know that well or friends that they haven’t seen in some time.
During this coming week I will be gathering with the other
members of the Council of Priests to further develop the Archbishop’s Pastoral
Plan for the Diocese and share what is happening here in the Mersey Leven
Parish. There will also be an opportunity to discuss other matters that effect
the Diocese and Parishes as well as planning how and when the re-vitalised
Deanery Meetings will occur.
On Wednesday night the Parish Pastoral Council will be
meeting and, as I’ve mentioned in my homily this weekend, I am asking that we
all pray for the success of our meetings. I will be in OLOL Church from 5.15pm
for an hour before the meeting and invite any parishioner able to join me
either in the Church or in your home to pray at that time.
Also on Wednesday I will be meeting with other Christian
Leaders in the Devonport area for Breakfast and for Prayer. I have only
recently joined this gathering so your prayers for the success of this sharing
would also be appreciated.
Please take care on the roads and in your homes,
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.
MT ST
VINCENT AUXILIARY:
Will be holding a ‘Craft and Cake
Stall’ after 9am Mass in the Community Room, Sacred Heart Church on 11th
June. Bring your spare change along and pick up some delicious home cooking and
home-made craft!
OLOL READERS ROSTER:
Rosters are
available in the Sacristy this weekend.
FOOTY
TICKETS: Round 10 (26th May)
footy margin 6 – Winners; Michael Barry
BINGO - Thursday Nights - OLOL
Hall, Devonport. Eyes down 7.30pm! Callers for Thursday 8th
June – Merv Tippett & Terry Bird.
NEWS FROM ACROSS THE ARCHDIOCESE:
CHARITABLE WORKS ANNUAL COLLECTIONThe Charitable Works Annual Collection is an appeal that supports CatholicCare Tasmania and the Apostleship of the Sea, Australia. This appeal will be held this weekend 3rd & 4th June, 2017. Envelopes will be available from all Mass Centres.
CatholicCare Tasmania is the official social services
and welfare arm of the Archdiocese of Hobart. The agency has a strong
commitment to supporting and nurturing families in all their diversity as the
basic building blocks of caring, healthy and just communities.
The Apostleship of
the Sea, Australia
is an ecumenical mission designed to meet the needs of visiting seafarers who
are often away from family and friends for months at a time.
WALK WITH CHRIST – Hobart City, Sunday 18th June 1:15pm to 3:00 pm.
Celebrate the Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ by
walking with Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament through the city of Hobart. Be at
St Joseph's Church (Harrington St) by 1.15 pm, and walk with us to St Mary's
Cathedral for Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament and Benediction concluding at
3:00. There will be a 'cuppa' afterwards. If you can't do the walk
come to the Cathedral at 2:00 for prayer and Adoration. Experience our
rich Catholic heritage in solidarity with Catholics all over the world and
through the ages, by bearing public witness to our Lord and Saviour. Can't join
us in person? Prayer intentions written in the 'Book of Life' in your parish
will be taken in the procession and presented at the Cathedral.
HEALING PATHWAYS: incorporating Rachel’s Vineyard
and Grief to Grace, wish to invite you to a fundraising lunch on July 8th 2017
at the Harold Gregg Centre 1 Southerwood Dr Sandy Bay starting at 11.30am
finishing at 2.30pm. Guest speakers will be Archbishop Julian Porteous and
Murray Thomas giving a personal testimony of his experience on Grief to Grace. Cost
is $35 RSVP June 18th 2017. Reservations can be made by calling Anne Sherston
on 0478 599 241 or email info@grieftogracetas.org.au
GOING ON, AHEAD
The original article by Fr Ron Rolheiser OMI can be found here
“I go on ahead to prepare a place for you!” Jesus speaks those words to his disciples on the eve of his death as he sits at table with them and senses their sadness as they grapple with his dying, his going away. His words are meant to console them and give them the assurance that they aren’t being abandoned. It’s just that he is going on ahead to prepare a place for them to come and join him later.
That story speaks to me very personally because of how one of my sisters died. She was young, the mother of a large family, and seemingly too young to leave her young children behind. She was dying of a cancer that, while relentlessly doing its deadly work, mercifully left her relatively pain-free and clear in mind and heart to the very end. The cancer eventually took her to a point where she could no longer eat, but could still be nourished for a time by intravenous transfusions. But these too eventually no longer worked and, once unhooked from the intravenous needles, she was told that she had roughly a week still to live. She chose to spend those last days in a hospital rather than at home, with her family having easy, 24-hour, access to her hospice bed.
The days leading up to her death were a sacred time. I took her communion several days before she died and, with her head still very clear, she told me what I should say at her funeral liturgy. She had chosen that exact text where Jesus, on the night before he dies, tells his heavy-hearted disciples that he is going ahead, to prepare a place for them. She shared how, before every one of her children was born, before she went to the hospital to give birth, she had carefully prepared everything at home for the new arrival, the crib, the diapers, the clothing, the room. She brought each of her children home to a place she had carefully prepared. And now she was going on ahead of them again, to prepare another place for them.
I preached those words at her funeral and despite our grief and despite the fact that in moments like these there is nothing really that can be said that takes away the pain, her raw testimony of faith left us with an image that placed us all, not least her husband and children, inside a bigger story, a faith-narrative, that highlighted two things.
First, the image of her going on ahead of her children awakened our grieving faith to the truth that a mother can go on ahead to prepare a place for her children in much deeper ways than simply bringing a new-born home from a hospital. Second, her “going ahead” was also showing her children, and the rest of us, how to die, how to do that act that we all someday must do. After you watch a good person die, you become less afraid to die yourself because you see how it can be done in an ordinary way, by an ordinary person, in a way that you can also do. In her dying, she prepared a place for us.
But this isn’t a lesson only about dying. This image, I go on ahead to prepare a place for you, is a metaphor which defines the essential task of our adult, mature years. Our task of as “elders”, whether that be as a mother or father, an older brother or older sister, an uncle or an aunt, a teacher, a clergyman, a nurse, a worker, a colleague, or a friend, is to live in such a way so as to create a place where the young can follow. Our task as adults is to show the young how to live at a place where they’ve never been as yet.
And it is both a noble and humble task. Most of us cannot live up to the lofty ideals we see lived out in the lives of the great saints, though their lives have created an ideal place for us. However, while not everyone can live as Mother Teresa did, perhaps they can live like you do and your life can be their exemplar for meaning, wholeness, anonymous sanctity, and dying without unnecessary fear.
I’ve been graced to be at the deathbed of a goodly number of ordinary people who died very ordinary looking deaths, with no choirs of angels silently chanting in the background, no alleluias on their lips, with pain and thirst dominating their concerns, with their hands being tightly grasped by loved ones, and their hearts still very much focused on the pain of leaving this world. And that’s not a bad way to die. In how they managed their deaths they prepared a place for me. Looking at how they died, I am far less fearful and can more readily say: I can do this!
What a grace to have someone go on ahead to prepare a place for you!
Choose life: horizons beyond the tomb walls
‘The walls we build to protect ourselves and to keep others out all contribute to the establishment of a tomb, an abode of the dead, a hell that produces sentiments of anxiety, suspicion, fear and despair’. But the bursting forth of a new world on Easter morning breaks the walls of this tomb and opens our horizons, writes David Neuhaus SJ: ‘resurrection renews hope’. The original article can be found here
The Cambridge Dictionary defines the word ‘horizon’ as ‘the line at the farthest place that you can see, where the sky seems to touch the land or sea’. This Easter, the word ‘horizon’ strikes me as particularly appropriate in order to understand what difference Jesus’s resurrection makes in my life and in our world.
Christ’s victory over death is first noted in the gospel when the women approach the tomb early on Sunday morning. They have come reverentially to anoint Christ’s body, which three days earlier had been hurriedly consigned to a tomb. A heavy stone had been rolled over the mouth of the burial cave, as was common practice, and the Jews, those who were his disciples and those who were his opponents, then observed the Sabbath. In the silence of the Sabbath, a new world, whose seed was conceived in Christ’s crucified body, was mysteriously being formed. This new world would burst forth on the first day of the week, the first day of a new creation. It is into this world that we, disciples of Christ, are invited. It is to this new world that we, disciples of Christ, point with our witness.
As the women approached the tomb, as yet unaware of the new world that awaited them, they asked ‘Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?’ (Mark 16:3) Still firmly rooted in the world that is passing away, their anxiety, sadness and sense of loneliness are all present in this question. Jesus has left them alone and they live this as an abandonment with a profound sense of grief. Yet all this gives way to bewilderment, confusion and fear as they gaze on the tomb, burst open, and on the heavy stone, pushed aside. Mark’s Gospel concludes the scene with the troubling words, ‘So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid’ (Mark 16:8). It is this that must become wonder, joy and thanksgiving as the women, first witnesses of the resurrection, encounter the Risen Jesus.
What distinguishes the old world from the new one? That is a difficult question to answer as we are still living so much in the old. At the Last Supper, Jesus prayed to his Father for his disciples, saying: ‘I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one. They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world’ (John 17:15-16). Indeed, our being in the old world that has still not passed away makes our fidelity to the new world, into which we are invited by Jesus, fragile and sometimes faltering. The new often loses its specific character, its contours blur and its distinct character dissolves as our rootedness in the old overshadows the light of the new.
It is the word ‘horizon’ that distinguishes the old world from the new. Whereas the old world is suffocating, dark and often hopeless, provoking anxiety and sadness, the new world is one in which horizons are open, flooded with light and joy, evoking hope. Death is the reality of the old world, a reality where the horizon is blocked; and resurrection is the reality of the new, where the horizon stretches to where heaven and earth touch.
The dead body of Jesus was laid in a tomb, dark, dank and closed in. Jesus really died! He did not pass through death or act dead, but he truly died as a human being dies. His death, burial and descent into the place of the dead constitute an essential element in his birth, death and resurrection. In the Apostles’ Creed, we recite a summary of the Easter Triduum: ‘[He] suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried; he descended into hell; on the third day he rose again from the dead’. Many have struggled to understand what it means for Jesus, after his death on the cross, to have descended into hell. This is a reference to passages in the New Testament that talk of a descent into the kingdom of the dead after the death of Christ. Most explicitly this is referred to in 1 Peter 3:18-19: ‘For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit, in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison’. In Hebrew, the place referred to as ‘hell’ and described as a ‘prison’ is called Sheol, the abode of the dead.
Sheol in the Old Testament is described as a dark and suffocating place under the earth. In the terrifying story of Korah, Dathan and Abiram, who challenged the leadership of Moses, they were swallowed up by the earth that opened its mouth, and ‘closed over them’, bringing them into Sheol (Numbers 16:30–33). Isaiah spoke of Sheol as a place of imprisonment behind gates (Isaiah 38:10), the Book of Job describes it as a place behind bars (Job 17:16) and the Psalm describes cords and snares that entangle (Psalm 18:5). Elsewhere, Isaiah spoke of Sheol as a place of darkness, a land where there is no memory (Isaiah 14:9, 26:14) like in the Psalms, which describes it as ‘darkness… the land of forgetfulness’ (Psalm 88:12). Solomon describes a place of inactivity, where there is no work and no thought (Ecclesiastes 9:10). It is a place of silence (Psalm 115:17). Most characteristically, Sheol is a place where there is no praise of God. ‘For in death there is no remembrance of you, in Sheol who can give you praise?’ (Psalm 6:5). ‘For Sheol cannot thank you, death cannot praise you; those who go down to the Pit cannot hope for your faithfulness’ (Isaiah 38:18).
Jesus experiences the reality of the tomb and that of Sheol as an essential part of the incarnation through which he enters fully into our human lives. The reality of the tomb is a human reality we fully know in death. However, before we die, we can and often do choose death over life over and over again. We are enslaved to the consequences of our wrong choices. In these choices, the tomb is palpable, a reality of darkness, sin and fear. It is this exit from a place of imprisonment and slavery that the Jewish people celebrate at Passover. Their exit from Egypt is a breaking out of the prison of slavery. The word for Egypt in Hebrew (Mitzrayim) evokes the word for narrow and confining (tzar). It is thus completely coherent that Jesus the Jew chose the Passover as the time to pass from death to life. At Easter, we are invited to renew our commitment to the new world born from the tomb. We are called to burst out of the tomb into life, leaving behind us a tomb that is empty.
The tomb reality is one of walls, the blocking out of light, lack of vision, a place in which there are no horizons. Saint Teresa of Avila described a vision of hell in these words:
Being in such an unwholesome place, so unable to hope for any consolation, I found it impossible either to sit down or to lie down, nor was there any room, even though they put me in this kind of hole made in the wall. Those walls, which were terrifying to see, closed in on themselves and suffocated everything. There was no light, but all was enveloped in the blackest darkness.
Scripture and the saints teach us that Sheol is not just a matter of human destiny. There is a choice involved, between stagnating in a place where all the horizons are shut off with walls or tending towards a place where the horizon is stretching out before us.
The world we often choose to live in resembles Sheol in more than one sense. The walls we build to protect ourselves and to keep others out, the language we mouth to define our ‘us’ against our ‘them’, the resources we spend in order to keep track of who is our ‘us’ and who is our ‘them’, all contribute to the establishment of a tomb, an abode of the dead, a hell that produces the sentiments of anxiety, suspicion, fear and despair that accompany us too often. This Sheol, which we call home, is ever more alive as a discourse of phobia resounds in our capitals, building on a sentiment of fear.
The old world is often our world, a world that encourages apathy in the face of the misery produced by our greed. As we shut the door in the face of our brothers and sisters who clamour for our solidarity and assistance, we sink into the tomb. As we watch unmoved as millions flee their homes because of hunger and war, petrifying our hearts with suspicion and refusal, we adopt the constitution of an old world that crucified Jesus. As we comfortably mouth a language that divides the world into ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’, we betray a gospel that preaches love and pardon. And so we sink into a hopelessness that proposes the walls we build around ourselves in brick and word, in violence and rejection. Resurrection renews hope. The walls crumble. In a Twitter message on 9 February 2017, Pope Francis proclaimed ‘Hope opens new horizons and enables us to dream of what is not even imaginable’. Hope enables us to quit the old world on Easter morning!
Pope Francis, great apostle of the new world, spoke out loud and clear in favour of the new world in his inaugural homily as pope on 19 March 2013:
Saint Paul speaks of Abraham, who, ‘hoping against hope, believed’ (Rom 4:18). Hoping against hope! Today too, amid so much darkness, we need to see the light of hope and to be men and women who bring hope to others. To protect creation, to protect every man and every woman, to look upon them with tenderness and love, is to open up a horizon of hope; it is to let a shaft of light break through the heavy clouds; it is to bring the warmth of hope! For believers, for us Christians, like Abraham, like Saint Joseph, the hope that we bring is set against the horizon of God, which has opened up before us in Christ. It is a hope built on the rock which is God.
A few months later, on his visit to the tomb of Christ, in May 2014, Pope Francis expressed this reality of a new world outside the tomb. The context of his words was the meeting with the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople. His words, however, stretch far beyond that specific context.
We need to believe that, just as the stone before the tomb was cast aside, so too every obstacle to our full communion will also be removed. This will be a grace of resurrection, of which we can have a foretaste even today. Every time we ask forgiveness of one another for our sins against other Christians and every time we find the courage to grant and receive such forgiveness, we experience the resurrection! Every time we put behind us our longstanding prejudices and find the courage to build new fraternal relationships, we confess that Christ is truly risen!
When Jesus bursts out of the tomb, he leads us forth into a new world, a world of open horizons. Isaiah contrasts this new world of life to that of Sheol, as a place of joyful thanksgiving: ‘The living, the living, they thank you, as I do this day; parents make known to children your faithfulness’ (Isaiah 38:19). In bursting out of the tomb, Jesus brings down walls, opens doors and brings the widest horizons into view. As the walls dissolve and the gates are burst open, one can breathe in the air of freedom and walk heads held high, no longer slaves. Thus is accomplished in the promise that God makes at the centre of the Law of Moses:
I will place my dwelling in your midst, and I shall not abhor you. And I will walk among you, and will be your God, and you shall be my people. I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, to be their slaves no more; I have broken the bars of your yoke and made you walk erect. (Leviticus 26:11-13)
Fr David M. Neuhaus SJ serves as Latin Patriarchal Vicar within the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem. He is responsible for Hebrew-speaking Catholics in Israel as well as the Catholic migrant populations. He teaches Holy Scripture at the Latin Patriarchate Seminary and at the Salesian Theological Institute in Jerusalem and also lectures at Yad Ben Zvi.
The Cross
This article is collated from the Daily Emails posted by Fr Richard Rohr OFM. You can subscribe to get these emails here
The Mystery of the
Cross
It is a wisdom that none of the masters of this age have
ever known, or they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory. —1 Corinthians
2:8
Jesus’ life, death, and raising up is the whole pattern
revealed, named, summed up, and assured for our own lives. It gives us the full
trajectory that we might not recognize otherwise. He is the map. The Jesus
story is the universe story. The Universal Christ is no threat to anything but
separateness, illusion, domination, and the imperial ego. In that sense, Jesus,
the Christ, is the ultimate threat, but first of all to Christians. Only when
we follow Jesus through his life, death and resurrection will we have any
universal and salvific message for the rest of the earth.
The lead up to and the follow up from the cross is the great
interpretative key that makes the core pattern clear. It’s no accident that we
have made the cross the Christian logo, because in the revelation of the cross,
many great truths become obvious and even overwhelming, even though we do not
want to see them.
Those who “gaze upon” (John 19:37) the Crucified long
enough—with contemplative eyes—are always healed at deep levels of pain,
unforgiveness, aggression, and victimhood. Contemplative gazing demands no
theological education, just an “inner exchange” by receiving the image within
and offering one’s soul back in safe return. C. G. Jung is supposed to have
said that a naked man nailed to a cross is perhaps the deepest archetypal
symbol in the Western psyche. [1]
The crucified Jesus offers, at a largely unconscious level,
a very compassionate meaning system for history. Without such cosmic meaning
and soul significance, the agonies and tragedies of Earth feel like
Shakespeare’s “sound and fury signifying nothing” or “a tale told by an idiot.”
The body can live without food more easily than the soul can live without such
transformative meaning.
If all our crucifixions are leading to some possible
resurrection, and are not dead-end tragedies, this changes everything. If God
is somehow participating in the suffering of humans and creation, instead of
just passively tolerating it and observing it, that also changes everything—at
least for those who are willing to “gaze” contemplatively.
We Christians are given the privilege to name the mystery
rightly and to know it directly and consciously, but in many ways we have not
lived it much better than other religions and cultures. All humble, suffering
souls can learn this from the flow of life itself, but the Christian Scriptures
named it and revealed it to us publicly and dramatically in Jesus. It all
depends on whether you have “gazed” long and deep enough at the paradoxical
mystery of life and death.
References:
[1] See Jerry Wright, “Christ, a Symbol of the Self,” C.G.
Jung Society of Atlanta Quarterly News (Fall 2001), 6-8. Jung wrote extensively
about Christ as archetype; Wright’s essay offers a brief overview of key ideas
and resources. Available at
http://www.jungatlanta.com/articles/fall01-crist-symbol-of-self.pdf
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as
Spirituality (Franciscan Media: 2008), 185-187
The Universal Pattern:
Loss and Renewal
I believe that the Mystery of the Cross is saying that the
pattern of transformation is always death transformed. Death and life are two
sides of one coin, and you cannot have one without the other. The theological
term for this classic pattern of descent and ascent was coined by Saint
Augustine as “the paschal mystery.” We now proclaim it publicly at every
Eucharist as “the mystery of faith.” But why?
The pattern of down and up, loss and renewal, enslavement
and liberation, exile and return, transformation through darkness and suffering
is quite clear in the first Bible of Nature and in the Hebrew Scriptures; you
do not need to wait for the New Testament. Jesus uses the Jonah symbol and
says, “it is the only sign he is going to give” (Luke 11:29). Jonah in the
belly of the whale seems to be Jesus’ own metaphor for what would later become
the doctrine of the cross.
So how does this happen? How does the victim transform us?
How does the Lamb of God “take away the sin of the world” (John 1:29; note that
“sin” here is singular)? How does Jesus “overcome death and darkness,” as we
often say? Is it a cosmic magic act? Jesus is saying, “This is how evil is
transformed into good! I am going to take the worst thing and turn it into the
best thing, so you will never be victimized, destroyed, or helpless again! I am
giving you an internal victory over all that might destroy you!”
Jesus takes away the sin of the world by dramatically
exposing the real sin—ignorant hatred and violence, not the usual preoccupation
with purity codes—and by refusing the usual pattern of vengeance, which keeps
us inside of an insidious quid pro quo logic. In fact, he “returns their curses
with blessings” (Luke 6:28), teaching us that we can “follow him” and not
continue the spiral of violence. He unlocks our entrapment from within.
Jesus has set the inevitable in motion. Both the problem and
the strategy have been revealed in one compelling action on God’s part. It is
not that Jesus is working some magic in the sky that “saves the world from sin
and death.” Jesus is unveiling a mystery that redefines the common pattern of
human history. Jesus is not changing his Father’s mind about us because it does
not need changing (as in various “atonement theories”); he is changing our mind
about what is real and what is not. The cross is not a required transaction
(which frankly makes little sense), but the mystery of how evil is transformed
into good.
Jesus on the cross identifies with the human problem, the
sin, the darkness. He refuses to stand above or outside the human dilemma.
Further, he refuses to scapegoate, and instead becomes the scapegoat
personified (as we’ll explore in greater detail next week). In Paul’s language,
“Christ redeemed us from the curse . . . by being cursed himself” (Galatians
3:13); or “God made the sinless one into sin, so that in him [together with
him!] we might become the very goodness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). Is it
beginning to make sense?
Loss and renewal is the perennial, eternal, transformative
pattern. It’s like a secret spiral: each time you allow the surrender, each
time you can trust the dying, you will experience a new quality of life within
you: “How we do not know; of its own accord, the land produces first the shoot,
then the ear, then the full grain in the ear” (Mark 4:27-28). Paul calls this
“the hidden wisdom of God . . . predestined to be for our glory before the ages
began” (1 Corinthians 2:7). Only the humble and the patient recognize the
redemptive pattern, it seems.
References:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, “Dying: We Need It for Life” and
“The Spirituality of Imperfection,” Richard Rohr on Transformation, Collected
Talks, Vol. 1, discs 4 and 2 (Franciscan Media: 2005); and
Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (Franciscan Media:
2008), 188-189.
Sacred Images
In Jesus we have a confluence of three sacred healing images
from the Hebrew Scriptures: the Passover lamb, which is the presentation of the
innocent victim (Exodus 12); the “Lifted-Up One,” which is the homeopathic
curing of the victim (Numbers 21:6-9); and, finally, the scapegoat ritual,
wherein the rejected victim, bearing the community’s sins, is beat into the desert,
to die (Leviticus 16).
The victim state has been the plight of most people who have
ever lived on this earth, so in all three cases we see Jesus identifying with
humanity at its most critical and most vulnerable level. We see God in radical
solidarity with all the pain of the world “since the blood of Abel” much more
than an omnipotent deity who, with a flick of the hand, overcomes all pain.
Let’s unpack these rich images of compassion and transformation. Today we’ll
focus on the Passover lamb, then we’ll look at the “Lifted-up One,” and next
week we’ll delve into the pattern of scapegoating.
Every year, on the tenth day of Nisan, each family was to
pick out a perfect little lamb without any spot or blemish and take it to their
home and then, on the fourteenth day, kill it (Exodus 12:1-14). In the Passover
commemoration, we have an image of the death of something good and innocent.
All suffering is unjust, undeserved, tragic, and nonsensical. We will never
find any logic to it, but we try to fit it inside of some ledger of
accountability when we blame or accuse someone else. This is the pattern. It is
universal, but most do not see it.
I believe the innocent lamb symbolizes the ego or the
privately constructed self. It is not bad; in fact, it feels like “me.” And it
is. But not the full or deepest me. It is who I think I am; it is what I have
learned that I cannot live without. But when we let go of this temporary
imposter, we break through to a much deeper level of our own life! But it
always feels unjust and unnecessary. It is always a risk, just like Jesus being
carried into the tomb.
Jesus on the cross is not an image of the death of the bad
self but, in fact, the self that feels right and necessary—but isn’t! Jesus had
been misunderstood and misinterpreted. He had every good reason to play the
victim or the blame card, but he did neither. This is astounding when you
consider the main story line of history is exactly the opposite to this day.
To understand Jesus in a whole new way, you must first know
that Christ is not his last name, but his eternal identity both before and
after the Resurrection. The raising up of Jesus is not a one-time miracle that
we must believe, but a revelation of the constant and only pattern. Nothing has
to die permanently! Many scientists now say nothing does die. Or as the
Catholic funeral Mass puts it, “life is not ended, but merely changed.”
Jesus became the Christ, which is to include all of us in
this eternal movement through time and death (see Acts 2:36). That’s why Paul
creates the new term “the body of Christ” (1 Corinthians 12:12), a corporate
image to communicate what is happening to all of us too. Jesus dies, Christ
rises. The small vehicle must die so the more inclusive vehicle can rise. Thus
Paul’s most common shortcut phrase is en Christo, which he uses 164 times.
“Unless the single grain of wheat dies, it will remain just a single grain of
wheat, but if it dies it will bear a rich harvest” (John 12:24). If you prefer
a different language, the small identity must surrender its ego boundaries to
fall into the Larger Identity.
I think this is Jesus’ major message: there is something
essential that you only know by dying. You really don’t know what life is until
you know what death is. Death, which seems like our ultimate enemy, is actually
the doorway. This is how Jesus “overcame” and even “destroyed” death.
Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as
Spirituality (Franciscan Media: 2008), 189-191.
The Cross as Cure
The second sacred image that the cross echoes is the
“Lifted-Up One,” and it comes from the bronze snake in the desert. YHWH tells
Moses to raise up a serpent on a pole, and “anyone who has been bitten by a
serpent and looks upon it will be healed” (Numbers 21:8). It is like a
homeopathic symbol. The very thing that is killing the Children of Israel is
the thing that will heal them! It is presented as a vaccine that will give you
just enough of the disease so you can develop a resistance to it. The cross
dramatically raises up the problem of ignorant hatred for all to see, hoping to
inoculate us against doing the same thing and projecting our violence onward
into history.
Jesus becomes the seeming problem and the homeopathic cure
for the same by dramatically exposing it for what it is, “parading it in
public” (Colossians 2:15) for those who have eyes to see, and inviting us to
gaze upon it with sympathetic understanding.
The prophet Zechariah calls Israel to “Look upon the pierced
one and to mourn over him as for an only son,” and “weep for him as for a
firstborn child,” and then “from that mourning” (five times repeated) will flow
“a spirit of kindness and prayer” (12:10) and “a fountain of water” (13:1;
14:8). We would now call this “grief work”—holding the mystery of all
suffering, looking honestly right at it, and learning from it, which typically
leads to an uncanny and newfound compassion and understanding.
I believe we are invited to gaze upon the image of the
crucified to soften our hearts toward suffering and to know that God’s heart
has always been softened toward us, even and most especially in our suffering.
This softens us toward ourselves and all others who suffer.
Following Jesus is actually a vocation to share the fate of
God for the life of the world. Jesus invited people to “follow” him in bearing
the mystery of human death and resurrection. It is not a requirement in order
that we can go to heaven later, it is an invitation so that we can live an
entirely full life now.
Those who agree to carry and love what God loves, which is
both the good and the bad of human history, and to pay the price for its
reconciliation within themselves—these are the followers of Jesus—the leaven,
the salt, the remnant, the mustard seed that God can use to transform the
world. The cross is a very dramatic image of what it takes to be a usable one
for God.
These few are the critical mass that keeps the world from
its path toward greed, violence, and self-destruction. God is calling everyone
and everything to God’s self (Genesis 8:16-17, Ephesians 1:9-10, Colossians
1:15-20, Acts 3:21, 1 Timothy 2:4, John 3:17), not just a few. To get there,
God needs models and images who are willing to be “conformed to the body of his
death” and transformed into the body of his resurrection (Philippians 3:10).
They are “the new creatures” (Galatians 6:15), and their transformed state is
seeping into history and ever so slowly transforming it into life instead of
death. This is the basis for all of our hope—in Christ and for history.
References:
Adapted from Richard Rohr Everything Belongs: The Gift of
Contemplative Prayer (The Crossroad Publishing Company: 2003), 179-182; and
Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (Franciscan Media:
2008), 191-192.
Suffering Love
Many people rightly question how there can be a good or just
God in the presence of so much evil and suffering in the world—about which “God”
appears to do nothing. Exactly how is God loving and sustaining what God
created? That is our constant dilemma, and without some answer you can quite
reasonably become an atheist or at least an agnostic.
I believe—if I am to believe Jesus—that God is precisely
suffering love. If Jesus is the living “image of the invisible God” (Colossians
1:15), and if there is this much suffering in the world, then God is in some
very real way suffering. God is not watching it, but in it! Did your church
ever tell you that? How else can we understand the revelation of the cross and
that our central Christian image is a naked, bleeding, suffering man?
Christians strangely worship a suffering God, largely without realizing it; and
Christian mystics even say that there is only one cosmic suffering, and we all
share in it, as Paul also seems to intuit (Colossians 1:24).
Many of the happiest and most peaceful people I know love
this “crucified God” who walks with crucified people, and thus reveals and
“redeems” their plight as God’s own. For them, Jesus is not observing human
suffering from a distance; he is somehow in human suffering with us and for us.
He includes our suffering in the co-redemption of the world, as “all creation
groans in one great act of giving birth” (Romans 8:22). We “make up in our own
bodies all that still has to be undergone for the sake of the Whole Body”
(Colossians 1:24).
The genius of Jesus’ ministry is his revelation that God
uses tragedy, suffering, pain, betrayal, and death itself, not to wound you but
in fact to bring you to God. There are no dead ends. Everything can be
transmuted and everything can be used.
On the cross, in dramatic theatre, God took the worst thing,
the killing of God, and made it into the best thing—the redemption of the world!
If you gaze upon the mystery of the cross long enough, your dualistic mind
breaks down, and you become slow to call things totally good or totally bad.
You realize that God uses the bad for good and that many people who call
themselves good may in fact not be so good at all. (Remember it was the
governing and establishment groups of Rome and Jerusalem that killed Jesus.) At
the cross you learn humility, patience, and compassion. You also learn to
distinguish between “what is happening” and “what is really happening.” This is
called discernment and wisdom.
Sooner or later, life is going to lead you (as it did Jesus)
into the belly of the whale, into a place where you can’t fix, control,
explain, or understand (usually very concrete and personal; it cannot be merely
theoretical). That’s where transformation most easily and deeply happens.
That’s when you’re uniquely in the hands of God because you cannot “handle” it
yourself.
Suffering is the only thing strong enough to destabilize the
imperial ego. It has to be led to the edge of its own resources, so it learns
to call upon its Deepest Source. Some might call this the God Self, the True
Self, the Christ Self, the Buddha Self, or just the soul. Life at this point is
indestructible! In short, you must discover or “save” your own soul, and
nothing else can compare with this discovery. “For whoever wishes to save his
life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it” (Luke
9:24). (See also Mark 8:36, Matthew 16:26, John 12:25.)
References:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Breathing Under Water:
Spirituality and the Twelve Steps (Franciscan Media: 2011), 120-122;
Job and the Mystery of Suffering: Spiritual Reflections (The
Crossroad Publishing Company: 1998), 181;
The Authority of Those Who Have Suffered (CAC: 2005), MP3
download; and
A New Way of Seeing, A New Way of Being: Jesus and Paul,
disc 2 (CAC: 2007), CD, MP3 download.
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