6th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A)

Mersey Leven Catholic Parish

OUR VISION

To be a vibrant Catholic Community 

unified in its commitment 

to growing disciples for Christ 

Parish Priest: Fr Mike Delaney 
Mob: 0417 279 437 
mike.delaney@aohtas.org.au
Assistant Priest: Fr Paschal Okpon
Mob: 0438 562 731
paschalokpon@yahoo.com
Priest in Residence:  Fr Phil McCormack  
Mob: 0437 521 257
pmccormack43@bigpond.com
Postal Address: PO Box 362, Devonport 7310
Parish Office: 90 Stewart Street, Devonport 7310 
(Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday 10am - 3pm)
Office Phone: 6424 2783 Fax: 6423 5160 
Email: merseyleven@aohtas.org.au
Secretary: Annie Davies
Finance Officer: Anne Fisher
Pastoral Council Chair:  Felicity Sly
Mob: 0418 301 573
fsly@internode.on.net

Mersey Leven Catholic Parish Weekly Newsletter: mlcathparish.blogspot.com.au

Parish Mass times for the Month: mlcpmasstimes.blogspot.com.au

Weekly Homily Podcast: mikedelaney.podomatic.com 

Archdiocesan Website: www.hobart.catholic.org.au for news, information and details of other Parishes.

         

PLENARY COUNCIL PRAYER

Come, Holy Spirit of Pentecost.
Come, Holy Spirit of the great South Land.
O God, bless and unite all your people in Australia 
and guide us on the pilgrim way of the Plenary Council.
Give us the grace to see your face in one another 
and to recognise Jesus, our companion on the road.
Give us the courage to tell our stories and to speak boldly of your truth.
Give us ears to listen humbly to each other 
and a discerning heart to hear what you are saying.
Lead your Church into a hope-filled future, 
that we may live the joy of the Gospel.
Through Jesus Christ our Lord, bread for the journey from age to age.   
Amen.
Our Lady Help of Christians, pray for us.
St Mary MacKillop, pray for us.

Parish Prayer

Heavenly Father,

We thank you for gathering us together 
and calling us to serve as your disciples.

You have charged us through Your Son, Jesus, with the great mission

  of evangelising and witnessing your love to the world.

Send your Holy Spirit to guide us as we discern your will

 for the spiritual renewal of our parish.

Give us strength, courage, and clear vision 
as we use our gifts to serve you.

We entrust our parish family to the care of Mary, our mother,

and ask for her intercession and guidance 
as we strive to bear witness

 to the Gospel and build an amazing parish.

Amen.

Our Parish Sacramental Life

Baptism: Arrangements are made by contacting Parish Office. Parents attend a Baptismal Preparation Session organised with a Priest.

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)

Eucharistic Adoration - Devonport:

Every Friday 10am - 12noon, concluding with Stations of the Cross and Angelus 
Benediction with Adoration Devonport:  First Friday each month - commences at 10am and concludes with Mass - in recess until 7th February

Legion of Mary: Wednesdays 11am Sacred Heart Church Community Room, Ulverstone

Prayer Group: Charismatic Renewal – 6:30pm Mondays, Community Room, Ulverstone 

Weekday Masses 18th – 21st February, 2020                                               

Tuesday:         9:30am Penguin                                                              

Wednesday:     9:30am Latrobe                                                                Thursday:      10:30am Karingal 

Friday:          10:00am Meercroft … St Peter Damian

                  11:00am Mt St Vincent                                                                                             

Next Weekend 22nd & 23rd February, 2020

Saturday Vigil:   6:00pm   Penguin

                    6:00pm   Devonport 

Sunday Mass:    8:30am   Port Sorell

                    9:00am   Ulverstone

                   10:30am  Devonport

                   11:00am  Sheffield

                    5:00pm   Latrobe

   

MINISTRY ROSTERS 22nd & 23rd February, 2020

Devonport:

Readers: Vigil: M Williams, C Kiely-Hoye 10:30am: A Hughes, E Barrientos, P Piccolo

Ministers of Communion: Vigil M Heazlewood, G Lee-Archer, P Shelverton, J Kelly

10.30am: M Sherriff, T & S Ryan, D & M Barrientos

Cleaners: 28th Feb: K.S.C. 6th March: M.W.C.

Piety Shop: 22^nd Feb: L Murfet 23^rd Feb: T Omogbai-musa

Ulverstone:

Reader/s: S Lawrence   Flowers: G Doyle 

Hospitality:  T Good Team 

Ministers of Communion: M Byrne, D Griffin, K Foster, R Locket

Penguin:

Greeters   J Garnsey, S Ewing Commentator:  J Barker

Readers: Y Downes, T Clayton Ministers of Communion: J Garnsey, S Ewing 

Liturgy: S.C. J Setting Up: T Clayton Care of Church: G Hills-Eade, T Clayton

Latrobe:

Reader: H Lim Minister of Communion: I Campbell Procession of Gifts: Parishioner

Port Sorell:

Readers: L Post, D Leaman Ministers of Communion: G Duff Cleaners:  A Hynes

Your prayers are asked for the sick:  Judith Xavier, Pat Barker, Paul Richardson, & …

Let us pray for those who have died recently: Annette McCullouch, Barry McCall, Kellie Hofmeyer, Christiana Okpon, Jeremy Martin, Walter Jerrico,  Stan Adkins, Janice Walker, Tony Brown, Patrick Berry, Terence Myers, Gwen Conn, Len Charve, Fr Ray Brain, David McManamy, & … 

Let us pray for those whose anniversary occurs about this time: 

12th – 18th February, 2020

Douglas Howard, Leo McCormack, Jacqueline Chisholm, Michael Ravaillion, John Maguire, Paul Oakford, Venus Martin, Audrey Cabalzar, Lyell Byrne, Nancy Kelly, Geraldine Piper, Leo Castles, Brian Maller, Frederick Breen, Bobby Rothwell, Nellie Healey. Also Fortunato & Asuncion Carcuevas, Jeffrey & Genaro Visorro, Ma. Arah Deiparine, Robert Patrick King, Bruce Smith.

 May the souls of the faithful departed, 

through the mercy of God, rest in peace. 

Amen

Readings this Week: 6th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Year A

 First Reading: Sirach 15: 15-20

Second Reading:  1 Corinthians 2: 6-10

Gospel: Matthew 5: 17-37

PREGO REFLECTION ON TODAYS GOSPEL

I come slowly to this time of prayer. However the day has been, I take my time to settle and become still. I become aware of the presence of Jesus, the teacher, and I ready myself to listen to him.

I ask that his Spirit might open my heart to his call to greater virtue.

I read the Gospel slowly. Perhaps I am struck by Jesus saying ‘you may have learnt something in the past, but now I am saying this to you’ – i.e., something very new. In what way is his teaching different?

Perhaps I imagine Jesus speaking to me, entrusting me with his teaching, encouraging me to go deeper with him. I pause to ponder.

I may well be able to recall occasions when I have fallen far short of Jesus’s teaching. How do I feel about this?

Who or what sustains me when I feel dragged down into despondency?

As I pause to notice what is going on within me, I pray for the grace to remember that Jesus continues to call me, inviting me to trust in his love.

I look to Jesus, again.

Perhaps I wonder at how he approaches life – with integrity, transparency, clarity.

I end, when ready, by asking him to be with me in the decisions of the coming week, helping me to be an honest, trustworthy and dependable presence for those around me.

Glory be...

Readings Next Week: 7^th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Year A

 First Reading: Leviticus 19:1-2, 17-18

Second Reading:  1 Corinthians 3: 16-23

Gospel: Matthew 5: 38-48

 

On behalf of Mersey Leven Parish we would like to congratulate the following…..

David & Angela Smith on their 60th Wedding Anniversary on 20th February

Kieran & Val Brown on their 50th Wedding Anniversary on 21st February

Wishing you all love, joy and happiness as you celebrate these special milestones.

Weekly Ramblings

At the Vigil Mass at Devonport on Saturday, 22nd, the African Community in Tasmania will be gathering with Fr Paschal as an occasion to offer their prayerful support after the passing of his mother, Christiana. As many of the Community will be travelling from the ‘south’ of the state following the Mass there will be a gathering in the Hall for supper – any assistance with setting up for and food for supper would be greatly appreciated.

Fr Paschal will be heading home to Nigeria on Tuesday 25th February and her funeral will be celebrated on Saturday 7th – we will remember her at our Masses that weekend. He will be returning to the Parish on Saturday 4th April in time for Holy Week.

Our Sacramental Preparation Program for children in Grade 3 and above wishing to prepare for the Sacraments of Reconciliation, Confirmation and Eucharist will commence shortly. Meetings will be held on Monday, 24th February at 7pm at OLOL Church and on Tuesday, 25th February at 7pm at Sacred Heart Church. If you know of children who are in Grade 3 or older who wish to be part of this program please get them to contact the Parish Office for enrolment forms.

Materials for Lenten Discussion Groups (Brisbane Archdiocese) and for your personal reflection (Wollongong Diocese) are available today. Both sets of materials are on sale at $6 each. A list of discussion groups can be found in the foyer – please add your name to any of the groups so that leaders know what they need to prepare for.

Take care on the roads and in your homes,

PRAYERS FOR RELIEF :

We continue our Prayer for Relief at Lifeway Baptist Church, 126 William Street Devonport on Tuesday, 18th February at 5pm. This is opportunity for the Churches in Devonport to show their unity as we pray together for relief for all those suffering in all aspects of life.

MACKILLOP HILL SPIRITUALITY CENTRE:

Spirituality in the Coffee Shoppe   -   Monday 24th February 10.30am – 12 noon

You are invited to join us for morning tea and some lively discussion about what’s on your mind.

All welcome!     We look forward to your company at 123 William Street, FORTH.

Phone:  6428:3095        No bookings necessary.       Donation appreciated.

2020 LENTEN GROUPS:

There are several Lenten Groups meeting in our Parish commencing from 26th February.

Groups: Penguin Tuesday mornings after Mass; Devonport Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday evening; Ulverstone Wednesday evening; Devonport Thursday morning; Port Sorell Thursday afternoon; and Latrobe Friday morning.

If you would like to participate in one of these groups, please add your name to a list which can be found in Church foyers.

SEEK THE TRUTH

Acknowledgement and Sorrow for Survivors of Past Sexual Abuse

A ritual will be held to acknowledge the sexual abuse that took place at Marist College (now Marist Regional College) and in the Burnie Parish (now Burnie-Wynyard Parish), particularly while the Marist Fathers were custodians of both.

The Ritual of Acknowledgement and Sorrow has been planned by the Marist Regional College ‘Seek the Truth’ Committee, comprising staff and board members from the College, survivors of abuse, local parishioners and representatives of the Marist Fathers.

This is an important first step in the necessary acknowledgment and healing of past abuse.

Survivors of sexual abuse, together with their partners, family members, friends, and others associated with the College and Parish, are warmly invited to attend. Archbishop Julian Porteous and Marist Fathers Provincial Fr Tony Corcoran will also be present. A light lunch will follow at the Gardens.

The ritual will take place in Burnie on Saturday 21st March 2020, at 11.00am at the Emu Valley Rhodendron Gardens, 55 Breffny Rd, Romaine.

People wishing to attend are invited to indicate their interest to comms@mrc.tas.edu.au

The Committee is also planning a plaque as a tangible sign of lasting acknowledgment and sorrow to be placed at a later date in the Reconciliation Garden at the entrance to Marist Regional College.

THURSDAY 20th February – Eyes down 7:30pm.  Callers Tony Ryan & Errol Henderson

Letter From Rome

Deciding not to decide ... for now

Why the pope has not ruled on married priests or women deacons by Robert Mickens, Rome. February 13, 2020This article is from the La-Croix International website - you can access the site here but complete full access is via paid subscription

In his new apostolic exhortation on the Church in the Amazonian region, Pope Francis has refused a request by bishops at last October's Synod assembly to formally approve the ordination of married priests and women deacons.

In Querida Amazonia (Beloved Amazon) the pope pretty much ignores these two issues all together.

And this, of course, has provoked predictable responses throughout the variegated world of Roman Catholicism.

Traditionalists and doctrinal conservatives, for the most part, are breathing a sigh of relief. Some are even jumping for joy.

They are satisfied the pope did not open the door to what, in their minds, would be a slippery slope towards the total unraveling of the Church as we know it.

Most progressives, reformers and Vatican II types – on the other hand – are deeply disappointed. Some, especially women, are extremely hurt and angry.

They believe Francis missed a golden opportunity to take a decisive step towards eradicating the misogynist and clericalist attitudes and practices that have conditioned the Church's internal life and structures for centuries.

And there is also that not so minor problem of people being deprived of the Eucharist, sometimes for several months at a time, just because there are not enough priests (i.e. men willing to remain celibate for life, according to the current discipline).

For opposite reasons, neither traditionalists nor progressives are happy about this.

Missing the point completely

But if you've read some of the commentary on Pope Francis's decision not to change the discipline of priestly celibacy or approve women deacons, you probably have the impression that this is a "win" for old-time Catholicism and a "loss" for the Church's reformers.

Actually, it might be just the other way around.

And you don't have to look at the fine print or obscure footnotes at the bottom of the page to discover why. Francis tells us so right at the beginning of Queried Amazonia.

Remember, this is an apostolic exhortation.

And as such it is considered to be the pope's response to the final document of last year's Synod assembly, including the bishops' specific requests for concrete changes and new initiative.

But in the very first lines, Francis explains that this apostolic exhortation is going to be different.

"I will not go into all of the issues treated at length in the final document. Nor do I claim to replace that text or to duplicate it," he says.

Rather, he explains that his exhortation will be merely "a brief framework for reflection… that can help guide us to a harmonious, creative and fruitful reception of the entire synodal process."

In other words, the papal text is only part of the process. Francis is not pronouncing the final word or making final decisions with this exhortation.

That should have been clear to anyone who read even just the first page of Querida Amazonia.

And the pope goes further.

I'm Pope Francis, and I approve this message

"At the same time, I would like to officially present the Final Document, which sets forth the conclusions of the Synod," he says.

What does officially present mean? The final document has been available to the public since the day it was presented to the pope at the Amazon Synod.

It sure sounds like the pope is giving his approval to the final document, especially when he then says this:
"May the pastors, consecrated men and women and lay faithful of the Amazon region strive to apply it, and may it inspire in some way every person of good will."

Would the pope urge Catholics to apply a document, or encourage them to draw inspiration from it, if it did not conform to sound teaching and right belief?

In the 2018 apostolic constitution to reform the Synod of Bishops, Episcopalis communio, the pope says:
"Once the approval of the members has been obtained, the Final Document of the Assembly is presented to the Roman Pontiff, who decides on its publication."

If it is expressly approved(my emphasis) by the Roman Pontiff, the Final Document participates in the ordinary Magisterium of the Successor of Peter" (Art. 18 § 1).

Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, the outgoing secretary general of the Synod of Bishops, split hairs over semantics when asked if this is what Francis had done in his exhortation concerning the final document of the Amazon Synod.

The 79-year-old cardinal said the phrase "officially present" was not the proper canonical language.

The Amazon Synod has ended, but it's only just begun

But, in the end, that really doesn't matter. The pope has clearly not stopped discussion on any of the issues raised in the final document or the Synod process, which he sees as ongoing.

Not only is he encouraging further discussion. He is also encouraging a further and deeper development and experience of synodality.

Bishop Erwin Kräutler, an Austrian-born missionary in Brazil, remains convinced that Francis is willing to approve the ordination of married priests, something the pope told him back in 2014.

But Francis will not take the action on his own initiative, the now-retired bishop said.

However, if a national or regional conference of bishops comes to an overwhelming consensus on the need to ordain married priests, what would the pope do?

Kräutler and others believe he would say yes.

It may be only a matter of months before we find out if they're right.

                                      

ON RELIGION

RICHARD ROHR REORDERS THE UNIVERSE

By Eliza Griswold 

February 2, 2020

Not long ago, on his way to the post office in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Richard Rohr, a seventy-six-year-old Franciscan friar, had a spiritual experience. “This light is interminably long,” he told me one morning, in late August, as we stopped at a red light while retracing his route. Rohr hates wasting time, and he had been sitting at the light fuming when a divine message arrived. “I heard as close as I know to the voice of God,” he said. The voice suggested that he find happiness where he was, rather than searching for it elsewhere. “For two and a half minutes, I’m not in control at this stoplight,” he said. Being made to sit still required a surrender to a force greater than his ego; it was an opportunity to practice contemplation, a form of meditative prayer that has equivalents in almost every religion. In Christianity, the practice dates back to the first several centuries after Christ, though it was revitalized in the twentieth century by the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. Rohr told me, “Merton pulled back the veil.”

Rohr is slight, with a white beard and the starry eyes of a person who spends long periods in silence. Over the past four decades, he has gained a devoted following for his provocative vision of Christianity. He runs the Center for Action and Contemplation, a meditation hub and religious school that its residents refer to as Little Vatican City. The campus is made up of a cluster of adobe casitas strung out on a dusty road outside Albuquerque; small shrines to St. Francis and St. Clare dot the land between the runnels of an ancient aquifer, which still courses with water from a nearby river, feeding the garden. Rohr wakes around 5:45 a.m. each day and spends an hour praying wordlessly. “I’m trying to find my way to yes,” he told me, adding that he often wakes up in a state of no. “As in, ‘No, I do not want to be followed around by Eliza today,’ ” he said, smiling impishly. After that, he heads to the center and leads a morning session that includes a twenty-minute contemplation, a daily gospel reading, and the ringing of a Buddhist singing bowl. The center’s classes also include Hindu and yogic methods of integrating the body into prayer, along with teachings drawn from indigenous spiritual traditions that focus on the sacredness of the earth.

More conservative Christians tend to orient their theology around Jesus—his death and resurrection, which made salvation possible for those who believe. Rohr thinks that this focus is misplaced. The universe has existed for thirteen billion years; it couldn’t be, he argues, that God’s loving, salvific relationship with creation began only two thousand years ago, when the historical baby Jesus was placed in the musty hay of a manger, and that it only became widely knowable to humanity around six hundred years ago, when the printing press was invented and Bibles began being mass-produced. Instead, in his most recent book, “The Universal Christ,” which came out last year, Rohr argues that the spirit of Christ is not the same as the person of Jesus. Christ—essentially, God’s love for the world—has existed since the beginning of time, suffuses everything in creation, and has been present in all cultures and civilizations. Jesus is an incarnation of that spirit, and following him is our “best shortcut” to accessing it. But this spirit can also be found through the practices of other religions, like Buddhist meditation, or through communing with nature. Rohr has arrived at this conclusion through what he sees as an orthodox Franciscan reading of scripture. “This is not heresy, universalism, or a cheap version of Unitarianism,” he writes. “This is the Cosmic Christ, who always was, who became incarnate in time, and who is still being revealed.”

“All my big thoughts have coalesced into this,” he told me. “It’s my end-of-life book.” His message has been overwhelmingly well-received. A podcast version of Rohr’s book has been downloaded more than a million times. He has also attracted some high-profile followers. Rohr named his Jack Russell terrier Opie, as a nod to Oprah Winfrey, whom he considers a personal friend; he has appeared twice on her “SuperSoul Sunday” program and has been to dinner at her home in Montecito. “We really connect,” he told me. “She knows I’m not seeking fame or money.” He is also revered by Melinda Gates and is close to Bono. “He’ll just drop me a little love note,” Rohr said. “He’s a very loving person.” Both Gates and Bono have attended private retreats with Rohr. The friar, who has taken a vow of poverty and lives as a modern-day hermit, seems tickled by his occasional brushes with fame.

Many of Rohr’s followers are millennials, and he believes that his popularity signifies a deep spiritual hunger on the part of young people who no longer claim affiliation with traditional religion. These people, whom sociologists call the “nones,” have grown in number, from sixteen per cent to twenty-three per cent of American adults, between 2007 and 2014. “People aren’t simply skeptical anymore, or even openly hostile to the church,” he told me. “They just don’t see a relevance.” Rohr doesn’t believe that most nones are secular, as many assume; he thinks that they are questioning traditional labels but hoping to find a spiritual message that speaks to them. His reach is based, in part, on his willingness to be fearless in his critique of conservative Christianity, which he often talks about as a “toxic religion.” He attempts to strike a difficult balance: calling out the flaws in contemporary Christianity while affirming its core tenets. “People confuse Richard as a deconstructionist when they hear him talk about toxic religion,” Michael Poffenberger, the executive director of the Center for Action and Contemplation, told me, “It’s not an attack on religion; it’s an introduction to the sacredness of everything.”

Rohr lives in Little Vatican City, in a one-room cottage behind a garden of succulents. He asked me not to disclose the exact location. “You’d be amazed at the amount of people who just want to say they met with you,” he told me one afternoon, while sitting in the large, open space that serves as his living room, kitchen, and study. (During my time in New Mexico, one such devotee returned several times, having driven nearly a thousand miles to seek Rohr’s blessing, which the friar gave each time). Rohr spends most of his day in the hermitage, perched on a ladder-back barstool, where he does his writing. “It’s going to sound so woo-woo, but I just sit down and it comes,” he told me. His computer sits atop a bookshelf crammed with biographies of contemporary mystics, including Merton and Thomas Keating. On a shelf by the fireplace, he keeps a fragment of bone belonging to Thérèse of Lisieux, a nineteenth-century saint. He told me that, on a recent trip to France, while standing in the infirmary room where Thérèse died, he saw a butterfly and knew, by divine inspiration, that it was a gift from her. “I felt like I was levitating,” he said, adding, with a smile, “I was not.” The butterfly was trying to escape the room, and he managed to pry open the old window and free it.

Rohr grew up amid a more conventional Catholicism. He was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1943. He comes from a long line of wheat farmers who were hit first by the Dust Bowl and then by the Great Depression. “Daddy had to leave the farm and work on the railroad, painting cars,” Rohr told me. The Rohrs were devout, and Richard attended Catholic school for a dollar a month. “I don’t have any nun horror stories,” he told me. “My experience of the nuns was of happy people. I think that’s one reason I became religious.” He didn’t witness any instances of sexual abuse in his church community. “We didn’t know the word ‘pedophilia,’ ” he said. “But I guess it must have been happening.” The only teaching he remembers receiving about sex was “don’t do it.” “That wasn’t helpful at all,” he said.

At fourteen, Rohr read “The Perfect Joy of St. Francis,” a novel about the life of the saint, and decided to become a friar. He came of age during the progressive era of the Second Vatican Council, when Catholics were challenging the narrow conceptions of church doctrine and calling for a greater engagement with the world. As a novice, he worked in an Acoma Pueblo community, in New Mexico, conducting surveys for the Church on religious belief in the area. Though the community was largely Christian, people also followed traditional religious practices: mothers walked outside with their children just before dawn to greet the sun, a meditation ritual that dates back at least eight hundred years. “We thought we knew something about contemplation,” he told me. “But we were not the only ones.”

Rohr was ordained in 1970, clad in hippie vestments. “In the seventies, Jesus was in,” he said. As a young priest, he led retreats for teen-agers; at one, a group of high-school jocks began speaking in tongues. People flocked to hear Rohr speak, and audio cassettes of his sermons travelled all over the country. His taped retreats were adapted into his first books, which made him a kind of Catholic celebrity. “I became a little demigod,” he told me, ruefully. He started a radical Christian community in Cincinnati, called New Jerusalem, but, by the mid-eighties, he began to feel that it wasn’t sufficiently focussed on global social action. He returned to New Mexico, where he started the Center for Action and Contemplation, in 1987, and the Living School, a two-year, low-residency religious-studies program, in 2014. In the center’s early days, the staff held weekly protests at a nuclear-weapons research facility and worked with a women’s coöperative in Mexico.

Rohr came to his thinking about the Universal Christ through early Franciscan teachings. In the thirteenth century, Francis rebelled against a Catholic Church that had become fixated on its own pomp and hierarchy; he renounced worldly goods, lived in a cave, and found God in nature, revealed to him in figures such as Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Brother Fire, and Sister Water. “His was an entirely intuitive world view,” Rohr said. Later, Franciscan theologians gave heft to Francis’s holistic universe by tying it to scripture—for example, to a passage of Colossians that reads, “The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible. . . . He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” This, they argued, was evidence that God is present in the natural world.

Rohr gave this presence a name. For him, the Cosmic Christ is the spirit that is embedded in—and makes up—everything in the universe, and Jesus is the embodied version of that spirit that we can fall in love with and relate to. (Their simultaneous distinctness and oneness can be difficult for an outsider to grasp; Rohr describes “The Universal Christ” as a sequel to “The Divine Dance,” his book about the mysteries of the Trinity.) He uses many of the same verses as the early Franciscans to support his claims. “Christ’s much larger, universe-spanning role was described quite clearly in—and always in the first chapters of—John’s Gospel, Colossians, Ephesians, Hebrews, and 1 John, and shortly thereafter in the writings of the early Eastern fathers,” he writes. He believes that, after the schism between the Eastern and Western Churches, in 1054 A.D., the Eastern Church held onto a more expansive vision of Christ, but the Western Church increasingly focussed on Jesus the man. “We gradually limited the Divine Presence to the single body of Jesus, when perhaps it is as ubiquitous as light itself—and uncircumscribable by human boundaries.” The notion of Jesus as a god-king—wearing a golden crown and seated on a throne—was pushed by political rulers, who used it to justify their own power, but it limited our understanding of divinity. “It was like trying to see the universe with a too-small telescope,” Rohr writes.

One of the benefits of Rohr’s work is its attempt at radical inclusivity. “Jesus without worship of Christ invariably becomes a time- and culture-bound religion, often ethnic or even implicitly racist, which excludes much of humanity from God’s embrace,” he writes. According to his teachings, you don’t have to follow Jesus or practice the tenets of any formal religion to come by salvation, you just have to “fall in love with the divine presence, under whatever name.” For young people who have become disillusioned with the conservative churches of their childhood—which preached Christianity’s supremacy over other religions and taught that nonbelievers would go to Hell—his message is especially welcome. Many progressive schools of Christianity teach that non-Christians can go to Heaven, but the idea of the Universal Christ allows Rohr to make a robust argument based on a version of orthodoxy, rather than on a vague sense of egalitarianism. His followers appreciate his scriptural rigor. “He’s not coming in and saying, ‘I saw a daisy, now everybody love each other,’ ” Tim Shriver, a longtime student of Rohr’s and the chairman of the Special Olympics, told me. “He’s trying to create a new ur-understanding of religion that isn’t bound by separation, superiority, and fighting.”

Rohr’s ideas have gotten him into trouble in the past. William Paul Young—a self-described fundamentalist Christian and the author of “The Shack,” a Christian novel that has sold over twenty million copies—told me that, though he is Rohr’s friend, he worries that the friar’s teachings will be misunderstood. Young people who are frustrated with their churches might misread Rohr’s work as advocating a vague spirituality that is entirely unconnected with the scriptural Christ. “The danger of universalism is that nothing matters, especially Jesus,” he said. “Some of Rohr’s followers can read it that way.” According to Rohr, during the early seventies, a group of local Catholics secretly recorded his sermons in an effort to have him excommunicated. They delivered the tapes to the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, then the Archbishop of Cincinnati, who reviewed them and determined that they were within the bounds of the Church’s teachings. (The current office of the Archdiocese had no knowledge of the incident.) Grumblings have persisted, but Rohr continues to preach what he believes. “I’m too old for them to bother me anymore,” Rohr told me.

Three years ago, Rohr was diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer. A year and a half ago, while alone in his home, he had a severe heart attack. He rang a friend, who ordered him to call 911 for an ambulance. Rohr refused; he didn’t want to die in the presence of strangers, so his friend raced over to rush him to the hospital. As they pulled out of his driveway, Rohr said goodbye to the little house where he’d lived for twenty years, the trees, the dumpster. “I was ready to go,” he told me. “But, anyway, here I am.” Rohr is undergoing chemotherapy, and the cancer is now in remission, though he has reconciled himself to his mortality. “What did we ever lose by dying?” he asked me. Rohr also has Grover’s disease, an autoimmune condition that makes his skin itch. “And it’s wrinkly,” he said. He noted that the apostle Paul speaks of the tent of the body being folded up, shrivelling and declining as it prepares to depart. “My belief is that the two universal paths are great love and great suffering,” he told me. For much of his life, Rohr has used suffering as a spiritual tool to help him learn to be humble. “I pray for one humiliation a day,” he told me. “It doesn’t have to be major.”

Rohr has an easier time talking about the end of his life than his students and followers do. In Albuquerque, his colleagues are quietly thinking about how his teachings can live on after he dies. Poffenberger, the executive director of the Center for Action and Contemplation, moved to New Mexico from Washington, D.C., in 2014, to help answer this question. “We mentally plan for two years,” he told me. Poffenberger came to Rohr’s work in 2009, after working as an activist and becoming disillusioned by the political system in Washington. He attended one of Rohr’s wilderness men’s retreats (it involved drum circles) and began to follow his teachings. Poffenberger has been attempting to apply the principles of movement ecology, the study of what makes social movements succeed, to Rohr’s wide-ranging ideas. “It’s not just about one’s own individual spiritual journey,” he said. “It’s how that’s tied to social transformation.” He is hoping, for example, to harness Rohr’s large following in support of youth climate strikes and the Reverend William Barber’s Poor People’s Campaign. Perhaps, Poffenberger thinks, as adherence to traditional religions dwindles, social action will become a more relevant form of spiritual practice.

On the morning before I left Albuquerque, I sat with the two men in Rohr’s office, which is crowded with statues of dancing Shivas and other gifts from admirers and friends. They began talking about Rohr’s penchant for icons, which hang on the walls of his hermitage and office. He has forty depictions of Jonah being consumed by a whale, including several funky renditions, and he identifies with the prophet. “I’ve been held safe and spit up on the right shore while preaching a message that no one wanted to hear,” he said. He is also a devotee of ancient Christian iconography, and of iconography from the Eastern Orthodox Church—both of which offer a glimpse into religious thinking that is not dominated by contemporary Western dogmas.

One of his favorite images is Andrei Rublev’s fourteenth-century depiction of the Holy Trinity, in which Jesus, God, and the Holy Spirit form a balanced triangle, none more important than the other. “Until we get the Trinity right, our metaphysics is off,” he told me. “We pulled Jesus out of the Trinity, gave him a white beard and white skin.” Rohr has heard that, on the original, which is hanging at the State Tretyakov Gallery, in Moscow, there’s a residue of glue. (The gallery could not confirm this.) “I’m convinced it was a mirror,” Rohr said. In his book, he describes the Cosmic Christ as a kind of mirror, in which we can see the form of all of creation. “The Christ mirror fully knows and loves us from all eternity, and reflects that image back to us,” he writes. He believes that Rublev’s work evokes this metaphor, inviting the viewer to see herself not as fallen and cut off from God but as an integral part of the divine.

Eliza Griswold, a contributing writer covering religion, politics, and the environment, has been writing for The New Yorker since 2003. She won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for “Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America,” in 2019.

                           

Inner Silence

This article is taken from the Daily Email sent by Fr Richard Rohr OFM from the Center for Action and Contemplation. You can subscribe to receive the email by clicking here 

Silence is not the absence of being; it is a kind of being itself. It is not something distant, obtuse, or obscure of which only ascetics and hermits are capable. Most likely we have already experienced deep silence, and now we must feed and free it and allow it to become light within us. We do not hear silence; rather, it is that by which we hear. We cannot capture silence; it must enthrall us. Silence undergirds our very being as ceaseless, primary prayer.

Silence is a kind of thinking that is not thinking. It is a kind of thinking which truly sees (from the Latin contemplata meaning “to see”). Silence, then, is truly an alternative consciousness. It is a form of intelligence, a form of knowing beyond reacting, which is what we normally call emotion. It is a form of knowing beyond mental analysis, which is what we usually call thinking. Philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) was not wrong when he said, “I think, therefore I am.” He was accurately describing the Western person. Most of us believe that we are what we think, but we are so much more than our thoughts about things.

At their higher levels, all of the great world religions teach that this tyrannical mode of thinking has to be relativized and limited or it takes over—and rather completely takes over—to the loss of primal being. Pretty soon, words mean less and less; they mean whatever the ego wants them to mean. Witness our political discourse today! But this leads to more and more cynicism and suspicion about all words, even our own.

The ego uses words to get what it wants. When we are in an argument with our family, friends, or colleagues, that is what we do. We pull out the words that give us power, make us look right or superior, and help us win the argument. But words at that level are rather useless and even dishonest and destructive.

The soul does not use words. It surrounds words with space, and that is what I mean by silence. Silence is a kind of wholeness. It can absorb contraries, paradoxes, and contradictions. Maybe that is why we do not like silence. There is nothing to argue about in true inner silence, and the mind likes to argue. It gives us something to do. The ego loves something it can take sides on. Yet true interior silence does not allow you to take sides. That is one reason contemplation is so liberating and calming. There are no sides to take and only a wholeness to rest in—which frees us to act on behalf of love.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, Silent Compassion: Finding God in Contemplation (Franciscan Media: 2014), 4-7.

                             

On Hallowing Our Diminishments

This article is taken from the archive of Fr Ron Rolheiser OMI. You can find this article and many others by clicking here  

Thirty years ago, John Jungblut wrote a short pamphlet entitled, On Hallowing Our Diminishments. It’s a treatise suggesting ways we might frame the humiliations and diminishments that beset us through circumstance, age, and accidents so that, despite the humiliation they bring, we can place them under a certain canopy so as to take away their shame and restore to us some lost dignity.

And we all suffer diminishments. Certain things are dealt to us by genetics, history, circumstance, the society we live in, or by the ravages of aging or accidents that, seen from almost every angle, are not only bitterly unfair but can also seemingly strip us of our dignity and leave us humiliated.  For example, how does one deal with a bodily defect that society deems unsightly? How does one deal with being discriminated against? How does one deal with an accident that leaves one partially or wholly paralyzed? How does one deal with the debilitations that come with old age? How does one deal with a loved one who was violated or killed simply because of the color of his or her skin? How does one deal with the suicide of a loved one? How do we set these things under some canopy of dignity and meaning so that what is an awful unfairness is not a permanent source of indignity and shame? How does someone hallow his or her diminishments?

Soren Kierkegaard offers this advice. He, who was sometimes publicly ridiculed during his lifetime, including newspaper cartoons that made sport of his physical appearance (his “spindly legs”), offers this counsel: In the face of something like this, he says, it’s not a question of denying it, covering it up, or trying various distractions and tonics to deaden it or keep its sharpness at bay. Rather we must make ourselves genuinely aware of it, “by bringing it to complete clarity.” By doing this, we hallow it. We bring it out of the realm of shame and give it a certain dignity. How is this done?

Imagine this as a paradigmatic example: A young woman is walking alone along a deserted road and is forcibly picked up by a group of drunken men who rape and kill her and leave her body in a ditch. Her shocked and horrified family and community do as Kierkegaard counsels.  They don’t try to deny what happened, cover it up, or try various distractions and tonics to deaden their pain. Instead, they bring it to “complete clarity”.  How?

They pick up her body, wash it, clothe her in her best clothing, and then have a three-day wake that culminates in a huge funeral attended by hundreds of persons. And their ritual honoring of her doesn’t stop there. After the funeral they gather in a park near where she lived and after some hours of testimony that honors who she was, they rename the park after her.

What they do, of course, does not bring her back to life, does not erase in any way the horrible unfairness of her death, does not bring her killers to justice, and it does not fundamentally change the societal conditions that helped cause her violent death. But it does, in an important way, restore to her some of the dignity that was so horribly ripped away from her. Both she and her death are hallowed. Her name and her life now will forever speak of something beyond the unfairness and tragedy of her death.

We see examples of this on the macro level in way the world has handled the deaths of people like Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Malcolm X, Jamal Khashoggi, and others who were killed by hatred. We have found ways to hallow them so that their lives and their persons are now remembered in ways that eclipse the manner of their deaths. And we see this too in how some communities handle the deaths of loved ones who have been senselessly shot by gang members or by police, where their manner of death belies everything that’s good. The same is true for how some families handle the diminishments of their loved ones who die by drug overdose, suicide, or dementia. The indignity of their death is eclipsed by proper clarity around the very diminishmentthat brought about their death.  Their memory is redeemed. In short, that’s the function of any proper wake and any proper funeral. In bringing to clarity the very indignity that befalls someone we restore her dignity.

This is true not only for those who die unfairly or in ways that leave those they left behind grasping for ways to give them back some dignity. It’s also true for every kind of humiliation and indignity we, ourselves, suffer in life, from the wounds of our childhood which can forever haunt us, to the many humiliations we suffer in adulthood. We cannot change what has happened to us, but we can hallow it by “bringing it to clarity” so that the indignity is eclipsed.

                              

Church is Family

This article is taken from the Blog posted by Fr Michael White, Pastor of the Church of the Nativity, Timoneum, Baltimore. You can find the original blog by clicking here

Our current message series is looking at families…specifically our families and their relationship to our faith.

God created the family and wants our families to be places where we come to know him and learn to love and serve him.

When we refer to “family,” of course, we recognize they come in every flavor. Perhaps your current experience is:

• an immediate family with little or growing children
• empty nesters with grown children
• a single-parent family
• a multiple generation family
• blended family/a family of choice
• perhaps you live alone with family at a distance

Whatever your current experience, we all share a common experience of growing up in a family. And how God was represented to you in your family of origin plays a huge role in how you view God right now.

Chances are that if you grew up in a family where faith and a relationship with God were seen as fairly positive things you see faith and Church as fairly positive things.

On the other hand, if you have had a negative view of Christianity or faith or the Church, it might be connected in some way to your family. Maybe as a child your family went to church but it had nothing to do with faith, much less fun, and it all had to do with fear.

For some, and increasingly for many, you just didn’t go to church as a kid at all. You didn’t have a positive or negative view, you didn’t have any view at all. Your family just didn’t go and didn’t talk about why they didn’t go and the whole thing was completely irrelevant. 

Whatever your experience, your family played a huge role in how you view God. And that’s why it’s important to appreciate and understand that our family includes our church family… at least it should.

We don’t always think of it in that way, but it is an important consideration. In fact, considering our church community as an extension of our family, as a support and foundation for our family, as an encouragement for our family can change everything about our attitude toward church.

It is impossible to remain a consumer if the parish is your family.

It is simply not reasonable to think of church as family and remain indifferent or aloof to it.

It is absurd to suggest you could consider your parish your family and casually walk away when something wasn’t to your liking.

With church as family I am never alone and on my own. I always have support and assistance.

With church as family I have focus and direction when it comes to giving and serving.

With church as family I am probably more consistently and successfully growing in my faith.

                                  

It Is In Our Hands

Nelson Mandela was released from prison on 11th February, 1990. On the occasion of his 90th birthday in 2008  Gilbert Mardai SJ paid tribute to this ‘apostle of justice’ whose example of courage, forgiveness and patience on his ‘long walk to freedom’ are an inspiration to Christians and to all who yearn for a fairer and more human world. at the time Gilbert Mardai SJ, a Jesuit priest from Tanzania, was living and studying in London.

This article is taken from the ThinkingFaith.org website where you can find a wide range of articles by clicking here

On 18 July 1918, Africa and the world were blessed with the birth of Rolihlahla in a tiny village on the banks of the Mbashe River in province of Transkei.  The name Rolihlahla in Xhosa means ‘pulling the branch of a tree’, but its colloquial meaning more accurately would be ‘troublemaker’.  Didn’t Shakespeare write, ‘What’s in a name?’  And how true this was for Rolihlahla!  To the apartheid regime of South Africa in the 1950s and early 1960s, Rolihlahla was indeed a troublemaker.  So much was the ‘trouble’ he made for justice that at the mere mentioning of his name conflicting emotions churned inside people like President P.W. Botha.  To silence him, he was arrested and put in jail.  This measure had little or no effect because the world spoke out against apartheid and for the freedom of this man and his fellow prisoners.

Who would have thought that Rolihlahla was going to be the person so well known today by young and old alike, rich and poor, oppressed and free, sick and healthy?  Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela – what an extraordinary human being!  The whole world is celebrating the life of a man who has given all his life – 90 years – to fight for justice.  He should be called the apostle of justice.  For the cause of justice he was ready to die rather than turn a blind eye to the atrocities committed by the apartheid regime in South Africa.  He was imprisoned on Robben Island for twenty-seven and a half years.  Instead of seeing these years as a time when all his hopes were shattered for ever, he saw them as his ‘long walk to freedom’.

Mandela’s name in Robben Island was 46664 – the 466th prisoner in 1964.  But the world did not reduce his identity to a mere number; he was Mandela, Nelson Mandela.  We celebrate, this year, the 90th birthday of an extraordinary man, an apostle of justice.  Who would have wanted to spend more time in a prison such as Robben Island after twenty-seven and a half years?  And yet, when F.W. de Klerk announced to Mandela on 9 February 1990 that he was going to release him from prison the following day, Mandela preferred to have a week’s notice.  He needed time to notify his people of his release, and he wanted to be released with dignity, not in a rush.  He writes, ‘After waiting twenty-seven years, I could certainly wait seven days.’[1]  What is more extraordinary is his desire ‘to be able to say good-bye to the guards and warders who had looked after [him] and [he] asked that they and their families wait for [him] at the front gate, where [he] would be able to thank them individually.’[2]  He wanted to thank the guards and warders!  Indeed, ten thousand days in prison formed an apostle of justice, for with justice there is respect, total respect, for the dignity of all human beings.

A new life was just beginning.  As soon as he walked out of the gates, he was met by a roaring crowd.  Mandela writes,

When I was among the crowd I raised my right fist, and there was a roar.  I had not been able to do that for twenty-seven years and it gave me a surge of strength and joy.  We stayed among the crowd for only a few minutes before jumping back into the car for the drive to Cape Town.  Although I was pleased to have such a reception, I was greatly vexed by the fact that I did not have a chance to say good bye to the prison staff.  As I finally walked through those gates to enter a car on the other side, I felt – even at the age of seventy-one – that my life was beginning anew.  My ten thousand days of imprisonment were at last over.[3]

The first words that Mandela spoke to the people at the rally at the Grand Parade in Cape Town marked the beginning of a life of a free apostle of justice dedicating his life for the freedom for all.  He said,

Friends, comrades and fellow South Africans.  I greet you all in the name of peace, democracy and freedom for all!  I stand here before you not as a prophet but as a humble servant of you, the people.  Your tireless and heroic sacrifices have made it possible for me to be here today.  I therefore place the remaining years of my life in your hands.[4]

These words were spoken in 1990, two years after the Free Nelson Mandela concert held in London.  He said he was placing the remaining years of his life in the hands of his friends, comrades and fellow South Africans.  By these words Mandela committed himself to making his own the problems and the struggles of his people, the victims of the oppressive apartheid regime.  Eighteen years have passed since he uttered those words.  Four of those years were spent in the campaign for freedom from apartheid.  Five years were spent in the office of President, bearing the responsibility for leading a newly-born democratic nation.  In 2008, Nelson Mandela is back in London having spent nine years as an ordinary citizen of South Africa, but dedicated to the fight against HIV/AIDS through the 46664 campaign.  Yet he does not want to be seen as a prophet; nor does he want to be seen as a messiah.  Mandela sees himself as ‘an ordinary man who had become a leader because of extraordinary circumstances.’[5]

In such extraordinary circumstances an apostle of justice has come into our midst.  Committed to justice and  freedom for all, he dedicated his whole life to this noble cause.  In words strongly reminiscent of the Apostle Paul’s ‘I have run the race’, in the evening of his life, to Timothy (2 Timothy 4:6-8), Mandela writes,

I have walked that long road to freedom.  I have tried not to falter; I have made missteps along the way.  But I have discovered the secret that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb.  I have taken a moment here to rest, to steal a view of the glorious vista that surrounds me, to look back on the distance I have come.  But I can rest only for a moment, for with freedom come responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not yet ended.[6]

Mandela may not have been at the evening of his life then.  But he had ‘walked that long road to freedom’ up to a point. Like Moses, he was able to climb up the hill top and look back on the distance covered and realise what more is still left to cover.  Unlike Moses, he did not die; he continued walking towards the ‘Promised Land’.  London hosted a concert in Hyde Park on 27 June this year to wish Mandela a Happy 90th Birthday.  It was a bash!  Looking frail, but still walking and determined to give a smile to all those who were gathered in the park and those watching all around the world, Mandela waved his hand to greet the people and paused to give a message.  This time it was a message of a man in the evening of his life, and a message that will reverberate through the entire world for many years to come.  This is what he said,

Friends, twenty years ago London hosted a historic concert which called for our freedom.  Your voices carried across the water and inspired us in our prison cells far away.  Tonight we can stand before you free.  We are honoured to be back in London for this wonderful occasion [and] celebration.  But even as we celebrate, let us remind ourselves that our work is far from complete.  Where there is poverty and sickness, including AIDS, where human beings are oppressed, there is more work to be done.  Our work is for freedom for all.  [Friends], and all those watching all around the world, please continue supporting our 46664 campaign.  We say tonight after nearly 90 years of life, it is time for new hands to lift up the burdens.  It is in your hands now.  I thank you.

With these words, the great apostle of justice, ‘a humble servant’, bade farewell to the public arena a free man, this time not raising a fist but waving a hand.  When he walked out of Robben Island he told the people gathered in Cape Town, ‘I therefore place the remaining years of my life in your hands.’  With those words he entered the public arena a free man and, at seventy-two years of age, a very strong man indeed.  Since the work is far from complete he now places it in our hands – ‘it is in your hands now’.  With these words he confirms the right of the poor, the sick and the oppressed to take their future into their hands and our duty to give witness to justice by first being just ourselves.  Time has come to change the course of history.  It seems fitting to recall the words of Ignacio Ellacuría, a Jesuit liberation theologian martyred in 1989 by the Salvadoran military because of his outspoken criticism of the injustices in El Salvador.  He gave this speech on 6 November 1989 and it turns out that this was the last speech he ever made:

Together with all the poor and oppressed people in the world, we need utopian hope to encourage us to believe we can change its course, but subvert it and set it going in another direction […] On another occasion I talked about a “coprohistorical analysis”, that is, the examination of our civilisation’s faeces.  This examination seems to show that our civilisation is very sick.  To escape from such a dire prognosis, we must try to change it from within.[7]

Ellacuría spoke these words nearly twenty years ago, but little has changed in the world today.  What he had in mind were evils such as ‘poverty, worsening exploitation, the scandalous gap between rich and poor, ecological destruction, as well as the perversion of actual advances in democracy and the ideological manipulation of human rights.’[8]  If these evils are not overcome, it is difficult to see how the world today can escape from Ellacuría’s dire prognosis.  It is not surprising therefore that Mandela tells us that ‘there is more work to be done’.  This work cannot be done in silence.  In a world where violence and crime are becoming increasingly rampant it is the responsibility of everyone to speak out against a life that leads to dehumanisation, but more importantly it is the responsibility of everyone to examine our lifestyle and choose carefully the kind of values we want to promote.

So far this year, 21 teenagers have been violently killed on the streets of London.  When the 16-year-old Jimmy Mizen was stabbed to death at a baker’s shop in Lee, south-east London, on 10 May 2008, everyone started asking questions:  What is going on?  What has gone wrong with our society?  Jimmy’s father said,

People are saying something must be done.  I just wonder how futile it is, with more and more legislation and laws.  Perhaps we all need to look to ourselves and look to the values we would like and our responses to situations in our life.  Sometimes we might be drawn into certain ways of living.  It is our choice, but change has got to come from all of us.  Look out for each other and take care of each other and look to the sort of values we need to live with.[9]

Indeed the choice is ours and change must come from all of us.  And, as the Jesuit Provincial, Fr Michael Holman wrote recently, ‘we can ban knives, increase penalties and purchase metal detectors, but they are superficial solutions to a deeper malaise that in many ways our society is reluctant to address.’[10]  A deeper malaise indeed:  if London is not enough, think of Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Darfur, Zimbabwe, and the list goes on – the disturbing evidence of a dehumanised world.

By the example of his life, total dedication and commitment for the cause of justice, Mandela has shown us all what it means to make a difference in the world.  If Mandela made so much trouble to bring about change in South Africa, then trouble is worth making.  Our world today needs as many ‘troublemakers’ as possible – men and women, motivated by the same dedication and commitment as Rolihlahla – to start making a difference.  Of course, this is easier said than done, but the concerts and parties held in honour of this great apostle of justice will mean nothing if no concrete action is taken to actualise the promises made on stage.  In ten years’ time Mandela will be a hundred years old.  I really hope that he will still be alive.  In 2018 we should be able to have concerts, not only in Hyde Park, but in many other places the world over, to celebrate Mandela’s life and to be able to tell him that the world has changed; it has become a better place now, not only because of him, but because of what we have been able to do thanks to his inspirational example.  As we salute Mandela on his birthday this year, we take it in our hands the work of making this world a better place to live in – a world of ‘humane humanity’[11] where joy, creativity, patience, art and culture, hope, solidarity, and, above all, love, are the values we live with.  It is in our hands now to seek the way that leads to peace, to ensure that human rights, human dignity and freedom for all are everywhere respected, and that the world’s resources are generously shared.  It is in our hands now to change the world.

[1] Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom (London:  Abacus, 1995), p. 667.

[2] Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, p. 672.

[3] Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, p. 673.

[4] Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, p. 676.

[5] Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, p. 676.

[6] Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, p. 751.

[7] Quoted in Jon Sobrino, The Eye of the Needle (London:  Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd., 2008), p. 17.

[8] Sobrino, The Eye of the Needle, p. 18.

[9] Quoted in Michael Holman SJ, ‘Our Lost Children’, in The Tablet, 28 June 2008, p. 7.

[10] Holman, ‘Our Lost Children’, in The Tablet, 28 June 2008, p. 7.

[11] I borrow this expression from Sobrino, The Eye of the Needle, p. 46.