Mersey Leven Catholic Parish
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
Deacon in Residence: Rev Steven Smith
Mob: 0411 522 630
steven.smith@aohtas.org.au
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
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
Deacon in Residence: Rev Steven Smith
Mob: 0411 522 630
steven.smith@aohtas.org.au
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
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.
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,
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.
Our Parish Sacramental Life
THE FOLLOWING PUBLIC ACTIVITIES ARE SUSPENDED UNTIL
FURTHER NOTICE
Eucharistic Adoration Devonport, Benediction with Adoration
Devonport, Legion of Mary, Prayer Group.
THERE ARE NO PUBLIC MASSES UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE DUE TO THE
COVID-19 (CORONA VIRUS) PANDEMIC
SUNDAY 22nd 9:00am & 12 Noon
MONDAY 23rd NO MASS
TUESDAY 24th 9:00am
WEDNESDAY 25th 9:00am - Feast of the Annunciation
THURSDAY 26th 12 Noon
FRIDAY 27th 12 Noon
SATURDAY 28th 12 Noon
SUNDAY 29th 9:00am ONLY
MINISTRY ROSTERS ARE SUSPENDED UNTIL FURTHER
NOTICE
Your prayers are asked for the
sick: Sand Frankcombe, Judith Xavier, Pat Barker, Paul Richardson, Tony Kiely, Graham Taylor & …
Let us pray for those who have died recently: Samuel Lint, Eileen Ryan, Bruce Simpson, Archbishop
John Bathersby
Let us pray for those whose anniversary occurs about
this time: 18th – 24th March, 2020
May the souls of the faithful departed,
through the mercy of
God, rest in peace. Amen
PRAYER RESOURCES FOR INDIVIDUALS AND FAMILIES
Weekly Ramblings
The
above comments were prepared by Nick Brodie, a Tasmanian historian, who is
reminding us that 200 years ago our ancestors went through something much
harder that what we might experience in this present time and whose faith and
hope kept them strong. Over the next few
weeks we will be seeking to provide support and provide resources for
parishioners alongside the prayer practices and activities you already use in
your everyday life.
Each
day there is Mass on Demand (https://www.youtube.com/user/cathnews).
You might like to watch Sunday Mass during the week from Halifax (https://livestream.com/saintbenedictparish) or Baltimore (https://live.churchnativity.com/). On Sundays you can watch Mass from You at Home on
Win TV at 6.00am (!!). There is a possibility that Sunday Mass will be
livestreamed from the Cathedral in Hobart – further details later.
Some
further thoughts:
- OLOL Church
will be open every day for people to visit for prayer between 8am-6pm
and efforts will be made to open other Churches as and when possible.
- We will only be
able to contact parishioners if we have your email address and updated mobile
numbers – please email the Parish House (merseyleven@aohtas.org.au)
or text me (0417 279 437) if you don’t have email. We will forward a newsletter
to parishioners each week if we have your details.
· As per the
Archbishop's letter we will be providing pastoral care as needed to those who
are seriously ill. In hospitals and nursing homes we will be required to act
according to the health protocols in place at those centres which might
restrict our access. 
PREGO REFLECTION ON TODAY'S GOSPEL:
After reading the text, I might like to approach this scene
imaginatively.
MACKILLOP HILL SPIRITUALITY
CENTRE:
Spirituality
in the Coffee Shoppe -
Monday 30th March Cancelled until further notice.
letter From Rome
Pope Francis Stymied By The Coronavirus
and calling us to serve as your disciples.
as we use our gifts to serve you.
as we strive to bear witness
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: BY APPOINTMENT ONLY
THE FOLLOWING PUBLIC ACTIVITIES ARE SUSPENDED UNTIL
FURTHER NOTICE
Eucharistic Adoration Devonport, Benediction with Adoration
Devonport, Legion of Mary, Prayer Group.
THERE ARE NO PUBLIC MASSES UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE DUE TO THE
COVID-19 (CORONA VIRUS) PANDEMIC
HOWEVER, MASS IS BEING LIVESTREAMED AT THE FOLLOWING TIMES (CLICK THIS LINK TO ACCESS THE LIVESTREAM)
SUNDAY 22nd 9:00am & 12 Noon
MONDAY 23rd NO MASS
TUESDAY 24th 9:00am
WEDNESDAY 25th 9:00am - Feast of the Annunciation
THURSDAY 26th 12 Noon
FRIDAY 27th 12 Noon
SATURDAY 28th 12 Noon
SUNDAY 29th 9:00am ONLY
MINISTRY ROSTERS ARE SUSPENDED UNTIL FURTHER
NOTICE
Your prayers are asked for the
sick: Sand Frankcombe, Judith Xavier, Pat Barker, Paul Richardson, Tony Kiely, Graham Taylor & …
Let us pray for those who have died recently: Samuel Lint, Eileen Ryan, Bruce Simpson, Archbishop
John Bathersby
Let us pray for those whose anniversary occurs about
this time: 18th – 24th March, 2020
Gwenda
Holliday, Jim Suckling, Gaudencio Flord, Robert Fifield, Myra Dare, Peggy
Leary, Thomas Sage, Eva Rogers, Peter Bolster, David Welch. Also Aileen & Gerard Reynolds.
May the souls of the faithful departed,
through the mercy of
God, rest in peace. Amen
PROJECT COMPASSION – 4th SUNDAY OF LENT:
PRAYER RESOURCES FOR INDIVIDUALS AND FAMILIES
During this time of social isolation it is important that we pray and
stay connected to our community. A range of online resources are available to
assist with this. These include daily prayers and readings, prayer services,
the Sunday Office, commentaries, homilies and reflections as well as Gospel
based activities and resources to support personal and family prayer. Go to: liturgyhelp.com/aus/hobart/pray
and follow the prompts to access. Hopefully these resources will help create
prayerful solidarity with our community and the whole Body of Christ.
Weekly Ramblings
Pre-Mass Tasmanian Catholicism
In early colonial years, Catholic
convicts were observed carrying rosary beads onto their ships. Catechists also
provided them with various books of devotional reading for the voyage and the
hard years ahead. Many of the soldiers sent with them were Catholic too, as
were a few of the earliest settlers, and these undoubtedly did likewise. The
Faith was carried in hearts, but also in signs and actions. Communal recitation
of the rosary was common, for instance, providing a means for Catholics to
gather and pray together.
The first official Catholic
chapel in Tasmania was only founded in the 1820s, almost a generation after
European settlement began. This came soon after the first priest arrived, who
was followed some years later by more priests and a bishop. Prior to this
foundation of the institutional apparatus, Tasmanian Catholicism was lived by
individuals and families and lay communities who – much like certain Amazonian
communities today – were at best occasionally visited by a priest aboard a
passing ship. So, as we undergo the trials of this present pandemic, it is
worth remembering that our own history teaches us that even when the
sacramental life of the Church is limited, through prayer the Faith will
endure.
The
above comments were prepared by Nick Brodie, a Tasmanian historian, who is
reminding us that 200 years ago our ancestors went through something much
harder that what we might experience in this present time and whose faith and
hope kept them strong. Over the next few
weeks we will be seeking to provide support and provide resources for
parishioners alongside the prayer practices and activities you already use in
your everyday life.
Each
day there is Mass on Demand (https://www.youtube.com/user/cathnews).
You might like to watch Sunday Mass during the week from Halifax (https://livestream.com/saintbenedictparish) or Baltimore (https://live.churchnativity.com/). On Sundays you can watch Mass from You at Home on
Win TV at 6.00am (!!). There is a possibility that Sunday Mass will be
livestreamed from the Cathedral in Hobart – further details later.
From
Sunday, 22nd, I will be livestreaming Mass most days – all
you need do is send me an email (mike.delaney@aohtas.org.au)
and I will send you a link with instructions how to use the Zoom program. The
email will also include dates and times when Mass will be celebrated. I will
also be available on Monday 23rd from 9am - 11am if anyone has any problems making the
connection.
Some
further thoughts:
- OLOL Church will be open every day for people to visit for prayer between 8am-6pm and efforts will be made to open other Churches as and when possible.
- We will only be
able to contact parishioners if we have your email address and updated mobile
numbers – please email the Parish House (merseyleven@aohtas.org.au)
or text me (0417 279 437) if you don’t have email. We will forward a newsletter
to parishioners each week if we have your details.
· As per the
Archbishop's letter we will be providing pastoral care as needed to those who
are seriously ill. In hospitals and nursing homes we will be required to act
according to the health protocols in place at those centres which might
restrict our access.
· Obviously we
will be struggling financially during this time so your support by continuing
to use your weekly envelope and forwarding it to the Parish would be greatly
appreciated. If you wish to Direct Debit to the Parish the details are: Name:
Mersey Leven. BSB: 067000 Account: 1031 5724. In the Description box add your
name & envelope number.
· Several other
parish activities including fundraising efforts are either being cancelled or
modified. Info about the Footy Margins can be found on the next page.
· The Sacramental
Preparation program has been cancelled for 2020 – we will work with the
children and families in 2021.
Take
care and look after each other,
PREGO REFLECTION ON TODAY'S GOSPEL:
After reading the text, I might like to approach this scene
imaginatively.
I pay attention to what I notice about the blind man, about
Jesus’s response, about the man’s neighbours, the crowds and the Pharisees.
Then, what do I
sense going on within me? As I pray the text again, I might imagine myself as
the one needing healing.
Jesus touches the parts of me he knows need healing.
What is his touch like? How do I feel now?
When the man had been driven away, Jesus goes to find him.
In prayer, can I let
myself be ‘found’ by Jesus? I look at him with my new sight, and I let myself
be looked at, allowing my love for him to deepen. Perhaps I feel ‘sent’,
wanting to tell others about him … If I can, I end my prayer saying very
slowly, ‘Lord I believe’ ... I worship him in whatever way that is comfortable
for me.
MACKILLOP HILL SPIRITUALITY
CENTRE:
Spirituality
in the Coffee Shoppe -
Monday 30th March Cancelled until further notice.
letter From Rome
Pope Francis Stymied By The Coronavirus
Pope Francis Stymied By The Coronavirus
Catholics should not expect much pastoral creativity from the pope during this long liturgical lockdown by Robert Mickens, Rome. March 19, 2020.
This article is from the La-Croix International website - you can access the site here
but complete full access is via paid subscription
In times of public crisis, people look to their elected leaders for guidance and direction.
And as the coronavirus spreads in communities throughout the world, most of those leaders have enacted severe isolation measures to slow the pandemic's advance.
Those that haven't done so yet, are moving in that direction.
We are in lockdown now. And we're probably going to stay in lockdown far longer than any of us ever expected.
Here in Italy, our virtual house arrest measures are to expire on April 3, at which time the government will reassess the situation. Most of us are bracing for the probability that they will be extended through the end of April – at least.
Liturgical lockdown
And that means that churches, synagogues and mosques – which can technically remain open for private, individual prayer – are offering no communal worship services.
Catholics cannot attend Mass. Churches here – as those in other places around the globe that are in the throes of COVID-19 – are in a liturgical lockdown.
We probably will not be able to gather for Eucharist on Easter.
That likely won't be a huge problem for most people here. Even though Italy is still considered a Catholic country, the most recent survey (April 2019) suggests that the number of Catholics has fallen to 66.7% of the population. Only 34% of the people in that group identifies as "practicing."
Furthermore, it's estimated that only around 18-20% of Italian Catholics attend Mass on Sunday. And that's considered a generous estimate.
In search of episcopal guidance
Still, Catholics here and all over the world are looking to their priests and bishops for guidance. More and more are looking to the pope.
Some are very upset that most of these Church leaders have cancelled all public Masses. Even more are angry and distraught that they've put a moratorium on celebrating weddings and, most importantly at this time, funerals.
Probably the vast majority of practicing Catholics have accepted this fate for what it is – a temporaryburden or sacrifice. And they understand the reason for it: to stop the coronavirus from spreading and claiming more lives among the elderly and those with already existing health problems.
None of us – whether we attend Sunday Mass only occasionally or have never missed a day in our life – are happy about this situation. We are being stretched beyond our comfort zone and what is most familiar to find another way to "keep holy the Lord's Day."
Mass for Shut-Ins
The obligation to attend Mass is not a divine commandment, it is a law established by men of the Church. The obligation can be set aside for valid reasons. And this is done all time. Think of the traveller's dispensation or the dispensation that are granted during severe weather emergencies.
But the question has become a bit more acute: what should we do during this entire period of liturgical and sacramental lockdown?
There are the traditional methods that have been around for decades – Mass broadcast via radio (since the 1930s) and television (since the 1950s).
Currently, the Vatican is live-streaming the daily Mass that Pope Francis celebrates in the chapel at his Santa Marta Residence. And a number of bishops around the world have begun to imitate that in their own dioceses, presiding at televised Masses at least on Sunday, if not each day.
But is this sort of Mass for Shut-Ins the best we can offer during our liturgical lockdown?
A 'caged in' pope who is not very creative right now
It seems extremely unimaginative and clericalist, especially in a pontificate that has – from day one – stressed the need to be creative pastorally and has condemned clericalism.
Francis seems a bit lost right now. He has praised priests for finding creative ways to be near their people in this time of social distancing and self-quarantine. Yet, he has not been able to find any creative means to do so himself.
He is "caged in," as he said with visible frustration the first day he was forced to pray the Angelus in the papal study of Apostolic Palace, rather than at the window overlooking St. Peter's Square. The pontificate of proximity, as some have called it, is also in lockdown.
Trying to break out
The 83-year-old pope is feeling the constraints. So he's started giving interviews over the telephone and via video calls. This is not being creative. And, quite frankly, it doesn't seem to be terribly helpful.
Francis can address the world every single morning from his chapel at Santa Marta and twice on Wednesday. That's the day he also offers his weekly catechesis via TV and live-streaming now that the general audiences are suspended.
Since Ash Wednesday, his only escape from the Vatican was a recent visit to two Roman churches where he prayed before religious icons that are reputed to have almost magical, miraculous powers.
Before an image of the Virgin Mary and a "miraculous" crucifix, the Jesuit pope asked God to stop the coronavirus. That's what he said this week in one of those new interviews.
That may be soothing for some Catholics and for the superstitious. But it is not helping anyone find creative ways to profitably spend our forced liturgical fast.
The pope must not shoulder his alone
On the contrary, these types of gestures reinforce the idea that the burden is on the pope to carry the rest of us through this desert. He is the super-bishop, high priest and holy man who intercedes, in a solitary act, for everyone else.
After he stood at the window and blessed a completely deserted St. Peter's Square following his caged-in Angelus, one writer marveled that Francis was like a new Moses! Except there was no Aaron or Hur to help support his weary arms. He was alone.
But, in fact, the pope is not alone. There are more than a billion other Catholics on this earth who stand with him. They, too, can pray.
He should not be expected to single-handedly devise the methods to do that, especially during this unprecedented situation in which much of the global Church finds itself right now.
Francis has said on different occasions (first of all, in Evangelii gaudium) that the pope should not be expected "to offer a definitive or complete word on every question which affects the Church and the world" or "to take the place of local bishops" in dealing with situations at the local level.
The shepherd amidst the flock
He's also said there's something terribly out of balance when Catholics are concerned "more about law than about grace, more about the Church than about Christ, more about the pope than about God's word."
Catholics need to think about this and be imaginative in finding ways to make sure the liturgical and sacramental lockdown doesn't lead them to merely "watching" the Mass on TV or the internet. Or worse, that it doesn't lead to a temporary time-out from prayer or their regular "religious observance."
We're being challenged to seek out fresh springs and green pastures in this desert in which we've suddenly been thrust. We should not demand nor expect our pastors, including the pope, to know the way any better than us at this moment.
As Pope Francis has said many times, the shepherd leads the flock, but mostly by walking in the midst of the sheep. However, sometimes he must follow behind to keep those in the rear from wandering off.
And it is in those moments he realizes that his sheep have a natural instinct to find the greenest fields.
Catholics need to follow their instincts and search for the spiritual nourishment that their shepherds, at least for now, cannot provide.
Bigger Than Personal Moral Failure
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
Contemplation helps us discern what is truly important in
the largest, most spacious frame of reality and to know what is ours to do in
the face of “evil” and injustice. As a confessor, I know for a fact that many
people beat their breasts about trivial things while not spotting the real
evils that are likely poisoning their hearts and minds and countries. I have
often said that hearing most (though not all!) Catholic confessions is like
being stoned to death with marshmallows. We trained people to feel guilty about
certain “sins” but allowed them to neglect the evils that are all around us and
ignored.
Early Catholic moral theology taught that there were three
major sources of evil: the world, the flesh, and the devil. My moral theology
professor always added emphatically: “In that order!” Yet, up to now, most
Christians have placed almost all of our attention on the secondary “flesh”
level. We have had little education in or recognition of what Paul meant by
“the principalities of the world” and even less understanding of what he meant
by “the ruler who dominates the very air” (Ephesians 6:12). The world and the
devil basically got off scot-free for most of Christian history while
individual humans carried the majority of the blame. Just look at poor Eve! The
implications have been massively destructive, both for the individual and for
society, leading to many twentieth-century catastrophes that often took place
in Christian countries.
When we are made to feel individually responsible for “the
sin of the world” (John 1:29), we become overwhelmed by too-muchness, which
will paralyze us and keep us from working to improve things that we can
improve, further increasing our shame. It is a vicious cycle, one that most of
us are probably familiar with. I believe contemplation is one of the only
things that can free us from it. Contemplation draws us deeper into the mystery
that we are a part of the problem, but not all of it, and that our actions are
essential to solving it, though they may not seem to be doing anything at all.
Perhaps this is what it means to “act in good faith!”
Both Jesus and Paul passed on to their disciples a collective
and historical understanding of the nature of sin and evil, against which
individuals still had to resist but in which they were usually complicit. Jesus
and the prophets judged the city, nation, or group of people first, then the
individual. This is no longer the starting point for many people, which leaves
us morally impotent. We do not reproach our towns, our own religion, or our
nation, though Jesus did so regularly (Matthew 11:20-24; Luke 10:10-16).
My hope is that this recognition of Jesus’ and Paul’s
emphasis on the collective nature of evil will increase both personal
responsibility and human solidarity, instead of wasting time on feeling bad
about ourselves, which helps nobody.
Prayer for
Our Community:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, What Do We Do with Evil? (CAC
Publishing: December 2019) 18, 21, 22-23.
An Alternative Expression Of Love And Trust
This article is taken from the archive of Fr Ron Rolheiser OMI. You can find this article and many others by clicking here
More tortuous than all else is the human heart, beyond remedy; who can understand it. The Prophet, Jeremiah wrote those words more than 25 hundred years ago and anyone who struggles with the complexities of love and human relationships will soon enough know of what he speaks.
Who indeed can understand the human heart, given some of the curious and cruel ways we sometimes have of expressing love. For instance, Nadia Bolz-Weber shares something we all have a propensity for: “Inevitably, when I can’t harm the people who harmed me, I just end up harming the people who love me.” How true. When we’ve been hurt most every instinct in us screams for retaliation; but, most times, it’s not possible, nor safe, to retaliate against the persons who hurt us. Or, perhaps we aren’t even clear as to who hurt us. So, needing to lash out at someone, we lash out where it’s safe to do so, namely, at those whom we trust will absorb it, at those with whom we feel secure enough to do this. We lash out at them because we know they won’t retaliate. Simply put, sometimes we need to be really angry at someone and since we are unable to vent that anger on the person or persons responsible for it we vent on someone whom we unconsciously trust will safely accept it.
If you’re a loving parent, a faithful spouse, a trusted friend, a true counsellor, a good minister, or even just someone who with integrity officially represents a moral agency or a church it can be good to know this. Otherwise it’s too easy to misread some of the anger and recrimination that will come your way and take it too-personally and not for what it really is. When someone whom you’ve loved is angry at you it’s hard to recognize and accept that you’re probably the object of that anger even though you aren’t the cause of it, but rather are the one safe place where this person can lash out without fear of retaliation and have his or her bitterness absorbed. If you don’t grasp the peculiar dynamics of love that are at play here you will inevitably take this too-personally, be torn up inside, lament its injustice, and struggle to carry it with the love that’s unconsciously being asked for.
But this can be very hard to accept, even when we understand why it’s happening. This kind of love demands an almost inhuman strength. For example, as Christians we have a special admiration for Jesus’ mother as we imagine what she must have felt as she stood beneath the cross, watching her son, goodness and innocence itself, suffer a brute, violent injustice. Not to lessen in any way the pain that she would have been feeling then, standing helplessly as she did in that awful injustice, she did have the consolation of knowing that her son loved her deeply. Her pain would have been excruciating, as would be the pain of any mother in that situation, but her pain had a certain (dare I use the phrase) “cleanliness” about it. She was free to fully and openly empathize with her son, knowing that his love was giving her permission to feel what she felt.
But many is the loving mother, loving father, a faithful spouse, or trusted friend whose heart is breaking at the anger and accusation being directed at them by someone they’ve loved and to whom they’ve been faithful. How can they not feel accused, guilty, and responsible for the bitter crucifixion they’re experiencing? Their pain will not feel “clean”. In effect, what they’re feeling is more what Jesus felt as he was being crucified rather than what his mother felt as she witnessed it. They’re experiencing what St. Paul refers to in his Second Letter to the Corinthians when he writes that, though innocent himself, Jesus became sin. That single expression, unless properly read, can be one of the most horrifying lines in scripture. Yet, understood within the dynamics of love, it powerfully highlights what love really means beyond fairytales. Real love is the capacity to absorb injustice with understanding, empathy, and with only the other’s good in mind.
Of course, sometimes the anger directed at us from persons we love is justified and speaks of our betrayal, our sin, and our breaking of trust. Sometimes the angry accusations directed at us validly accuse us of our own sin. In that case, what we’re asked to absorb has a very different meaning. As well, we need to recognize that we also do this to others. When we’re hurt and unable to direct our anger and accusations against those who hurt us, then, as Nadia Bolz-Weber so honestly shares, we often end up harming the people who love us most.
Love has many modalities, some warm, kind, and affectionate, some accusatory, bitter, and angry. Yes, sometimes we have strange, anomalous ways of expressing our love and trust. Who can understand our tortuous hearts!
Never Waste A Crisis
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
Sudden crises have a way of clarifying long-running debates. The essential nature of whatever is at stake tends to become obvious when we are forced to confront it without the haze of extraneous distractions or details. This moment in time is no different. As the current outbreak of the COVID-19 virus sweeps across the country, dioceses and parishes are left wondering how to minister to their communities when physical gatherings are prohibited.
In the past, I have used this blog to work through one of the most intense ongoing debates we have had internally among our leadership team: the role of online services. What does it mean to have an online “campus”? Is it even church? Does it “count?”
This debate is especially fraught in our Catholic context, which understands the Sacrifice of the Mass and accompanying Holy Communion as the Real Presence of Christ. To partake of this presence and the benefits it brings, including union with Christ and nourishment for the soul, a literal, real presence is obviously required. Any online service that proposes a virtual presence would be, by reason, impossible.
And yet Mass has been broadcast on radio and television since their inception (the very first radio broadcast was, in fact, a Mass from the Vatican engineered by Marconi, the inventor of radio transmission). Clearly the Church has seen the value in church experiences that are not live and in-person events. Surely it can be conceded that “hearing” Mass, offering prayer, worshiping through music, and listening to the Scriptures are all inherently of value even if Communion is not received. In fact, many people go to Mass all the time and choose to partake in a spiritual communion for various reasons.
The debate actually concerns whether broadcasting church online serves as a “front door”, a “side door” or a “back” door to church commitment. Will people grow as disciples, or are they just coasting along online, or is it an easy way out, encouraging people to give up on church altogether. In other words, will online broadcasts introduce new people to Mass at church, supplement weekly worship, or make it irrelevant and obsolete?
As Carey Nieuwhof notes in a blog post (here), online as a ‘back-door’ has been shrinking in the experience of most churches. These consumer-oriented and disengaged churchgoers were already on the way out – online church just speeds up the process and makes it more efficient, less messy. Meanwhile, an online campus as a “front” door for newcomers is a growing experience according to Nieuwhof’s research. If the broadcast is a quality one, if your broadcast is interactive with viewers, if everything is done with the unchurched in mind, the online experience can serve as an effective ongoing invitation.
It is true that some number of online viewers are just coasting along with little or no commitment. But given that most “regulars” at your church are only twice a month attendees in person, the online experience can keep them engaged too, which is going to translate into more engagement and greater commitment.
All that said, over the last year we have resolved our internal discussion and confirmed our online experience as a “campus” of our church, and the one with the greatest potential for growth. In fact, in that time it has grown at a far greater rate than attendance at our Ridgely Road campus.
This weekend we are hoping to take it to a whole new level. In view of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are inviting and encouraging all our parishioners to join us online instead of Ridgely Road. We will be broadcasting all our weekend Masses, including for the first time ever our Saturday evening Mass. While we deeply regret the advent of this crisis, we can definitely use it to advance what we see as our best opportunity moving forward. No matter where you are or what happens, our church can be on … online.
The Virtue Of Asceticism
Giving up chocolate? Deleting your Facebook account? We all choose to mark Lent in different ways and more often than not focus on abstaining from something we enjoy, but is this always good for us? Nicholas Austin SJ explores how our attempts at an ascetic way of life for forty days each year can go wrong if our motivations are not rooted in the wisdom of the Christian tradition. How can we rediscover the virtue of asceticism? Nicholas Austin SJ teaches Ethics at Heythrop College, University of London.
This article is taken from the ThinkingFaith.org website where you can find a wide range of articles by clicking here
So what have you decided to give up for Lent? We often we hear that the important thing is not to give something up, but to do something positive. But it’s strange, isn’t it, that the feeling still sticks that Lent is really about giving up stuff? Giving up chocolate, giving up alcohol, giving up desserts, giving up cigarettes, giving up TV, giving up meat on Fridays…. For better or worse, we tend to ask ourselves not ‘What am I going to do, in a positive way, for Lent?’ but ‘What am I going to give up?’ So why are we so fixated on fasting, abstaining, giving stuff up?
The way of asceticism
‘There are only two philosophies of life,’ Fulton J. Sheen once said, ‘one is first the feast and then the headache; the other is first the fast and then the feast.’ Today, more than ever, the time is ripe for a recovery and renewal of this second ‘philosophy,’ the way of asceticism.
At a surface level, asceticism (the constellation of the practices of voluntary self-denial such as fasting from food) does not hold much attraction for us today. In the film version of The Da Vinci Code, the crazy and murderous albino monk, Silas is depicted whipping himself and wearing a chain wrapped around his leg that he tightens so as to draw his own blood. What such a picture conveys is fanaticism, self-hatred and a religious practice divorced from all that is holy, healthy and good.
Yet there are numerous signs in our culture today that, at a deeper level, there is a desire for a freeing asceticism, if only we knew how to practise it. In the era of retail therapy and consumerism, we hear about people who have discovered the benefits of downsizing, de-cluttering and material simplicity. Caught in the incessant and hectic pace of modern life, we yearn for a way to step off the conveyor belt of busy-ness and find some space just to be, to be with others, to be with God. Drowning in an infinite sea of calories, we buy into a multi-billion pound yet apparently ineffective diet industry, with its promises to ‘naturally’ cleanse the toxins from our bodies, ‘juice fasting’ and a thousand varieties of quasi-ascetical practices. Aware of our propensity to unintentional overuse of the internet and our other communication gadgets, we yearn for the freedom that comes from being ‘unplugged,’ but can’t quite bring ourselves to pull the plug, even for a few hours. Is there, then, a way to recover from the Christian tradition the wisdom for an authentic practice of asceticism that can lead to the freedom and prayerfulness that, now more than ever, we yearn for?
Three distortions
The first thing to notice is that the Christian tradition is quite aware that fasting and abstinence can go wrong in a number of fairly predictable ways. I shall note three prominent distortions to which asceticism is especially susceptible, and the remedies that the tradition prescribes.
1. The distortion of excess
The first kind of danger to which asceticism is prone is that of excess. Fasting for long periods, for example, can lead to self-inflation and pride at one’s own achievements, and end up being counter-productive. As almost anyone who has every tried dieting knows, excessive fasting is quickly followed by the binge. At its extremes, it can even be damaging to one’s health, as it was for Saint Ignatius of Loyola shortly after his conversion. Later, as he grew in discernment and maturity, he realised that such heroic fasting was not what God desires.
The traditional corrective to excessive fasting is the doctrine of the ‘mean.’ The mean is the middle-way between too much and too little. A helpful analogy is a musical instrument: to keep it in tune, the strings should be neither too taut nor too relaxed, but in the mean. Saint Thomas Aquinas points out that even fasting is a matter of the mean: one should not fast to such an extent that one damages one’s health, or becomes too weak to perform the tasks of one’s occupation, for that would be to go to excess. Following the Stoic philosophers, he recommends the gradual approach: start small, approach the mean bit by bit. It is better to be patient, to be gentle, rather than attempt the spectacular, and risk the equally spectacular crash.
Today, we are so far towards the other extreme that excess in fasting is hardly our primary danger. Thomas makes a challenging statement that may surprise us today, but is worthy of our serious consideration: fasting, he says, is not merely a church law, but a requirement of human nature itself. In other words, an adult human being cannot hope to find the right balance in life, can’t hope to find the mean, unless by a regular practice of fasting. Otherwise, our desires for things that are good in themselves overrun their bounds and end up enslaving us.
Finding the mean in asceticism today, the mid-point between excess and laxity, is a task that will require attentiveness to the wisdom of the tradition as well as an exercise of the Christian imagination. The new asceticism today will not involve just fasting from food, but from any aspect of modern life in which compulsion starts to take over and we lose our freedom, our balance. If I buy stuff as a means of feeling better, perhaps I need to fast from shopping; if I find myself obsessively checking Facebook and Twitter, or checking my texts or emails, perhaps I need to fast from that; and so on. In any case, what we need is a creative fidelity to the traditional practices of fasting and abstinence, aware that the asceticism of ages past needs to be recovered but also adapted to a new age of consumerism, internet and environmental degradation.
2. The distortion of dualism
The second way that asceticism can be distorted is more subtle, and therefore more insidious. In Catholic spirituality, those seeking progress in the spiritual life were often encouraged to ‘mortify’ their flesh, literally put it to death. Of course, the ‘flesh’ here refers not to the body itself, but to our sinful nature. Nevertheless, the impression unintentionally conveyed, at least sometimes, was that the spiritual life means rejecting all that is of the body. In other words, there is the risk of a dualism that sees the soul as good, and the body and the material world as evil.
Such a dualism is of course strongly discordant with some of the basic tenets of the Christian faith, the doctrines of Creation, Incarnation and Resurrection. We believe that, at the creation, God was able to look at the world he had created and see that it was ‘very good’ (Genesis 1:31). We believe that in Jesus Christ, God became flesh and so sanctified the human body. We believe that, on the last day, the body as well as the soul will be taken up into Christ’s resurrection. There is no place within our faith, then, for a rejection of the body and the material world as impure.
The risk, then, is that our ascetical practices unconsciously become infected by a disdain for our bodies, our passions, our sexuality, which should be seen as a precious gift from God. The point of an authentically Christian asceticism is not to free the soul from the body, nor even to repress the body and its impulses, but to raise these to a truly spiritual level, to integrate them into the spiritual journey towards God.
3. The distortion of empty religiosity
In order to identify the third and final distortion of asceticism, we need to attend to the compelling words of the prophet Isaiah (58:5-6):
Is that what you call a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord?
Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free and break every yoke?
Here the prophet attacks an empty religiosity that attempts to curry favour with God without attending to the basic duty of justice towards the poor. Empty religiosity, by focusing exclusively on external religious practice, is an escape from the real world: the power of religious practice to open the heart to a transformation leading to a deeper love of God and neighbour is lost.
Yet we should not misread Isaiah’s critique as an attack on the practice of fasting as such. Isaiah was speaking in a time when ascetical practices were taken for granted, part of the fabric of everyday life. He called people to realise that their religious practices had no meaning unless there was a union between them and the way they treated others. Today, we are often tempted in a different way, to assume that true religion is simply about how we treat others, and that we no longer need a spirituality incarnated in concrete religious practices such as fasting. In this regard, we may recall the memorable criticism by the anthropologist, Mary Douglas of the view that exterior practice has nothing to do with true spirituality or authentic religion:
For it is a mistake to suppose that there can be religion which is all interior, with no rules, no liturgy, no external signs of inward states. As with society, so with religion, external form is the condition of its existence...
(Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo [New York/Washington: Praeger, 1966], p.62.)
What the prophets call us to is not a rejection of ascetical practice, but an authentic fasting that involves us body and soul. Then fasting will become, not an escape from the real world, but a way of coming closer to those who practise, in the words of Gandhi, an ‘eternal, compulsory fast,’ simply because they do not have enough to eat.
Why fast?
As we have seen, if we are to engage in a healthy and holy asceticism today, we need to attend the wisdom that we find within our tradition, that can help us to avoid the pitfalls of excess, of dualism and of empty religiosity. Equally importantly, the tradition teaches us to avoid over-corrections that lead to a disembodied spirituality or a too relaxed approach. But what, ultimately, are the reasons for asceticism? What is the ultimate point?
Most obviously, fasting can help us to find a proper authority over ourselves. Today we have a thousand ways of making ourselves feel good: I know, I’ll eat something nice, or have a drink, or surf the internet, or check whether a friend has texted me, or turn on the TV, or listen to my iPod, or go clothes shopping, or buy something from Amazon, or play a computer game. All of these things can be good, but if we continually use them to make ourselves feel better, we can become slaves to the things we enjoy. When we don’t have them, we crave them. When we lack them, we feel depressed. When we realise we shouldn’t overdo it, we can’t help ourselves. So in Lent, when we give stuff up, we exercise authority over it, instead of letting it control us. We try to unchain ourselves. We try to become free.
But there’s a deeper reason to fast. ‘Filled with the Holy Spirit, Jesus returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the desert for forty days.’ (Luke 4:1) Recently my class of university students read the autobiography of Dorothy Day, the social activist and found of the Catholic Worker Movement. Some people consider her a modern-day saint. The book tells of how, as an adult, she became an atheist, but then was gradually led back to prayer and to God, so that she converted to Catholicism, and committed her life to working for the poor and for social justice. But she entitles the book, The Long Loneliness. And she describes how, at times, she experienced a terrible loneliness in her life. She longed to be with people, with those she loved, and felt the pain of separation and grief. But despite the pain of loneliness she experienced, it’s as though she realised her loneliness was not all negative. In that experience of being lonely, she longed to be with the poor and she longed to know God.
So I asked my students once they had read the book, ‘Can you relate to that experience of loneliness? Do you ever spend time alone?’ And the responses were striking. One student confessed that those parts of the book about loneliness terrified her. Another student said that she spends virtually no time alone, and when she is alone, she has some electronic device to turn to: her mobile phone, or the computer – checking Facebook or email. Another said he had begun to learn to deliberately make time without his computer or phone, so that he could have time to reflect or think. And another said the only time he really got to be alone was when he went for a run, but that such time was precious to him precisely because it was his only time to think.
The fact is that it is difficult to withdraw into the desert with Jesus today. We live in an age of distraction, where we have a thousand different ways of filling up that void of loneliness. And to some extent, that means we’re missing out. A recent report in the United States surveyed the use of electronic devices by children aged 8 to 18. It wanted to know how much children are plugged-in to an iPod or a television or the internet or a mobile phone and so on: how much time a child spent exposed to the media. A few years ago it was over 6 hours a day; today, the American child spends, on average, 7 hours and 28 minutes a day plugged in to some electronic device. That’s over 50 hours a week.
‘Filled with the Holy Spirit, Jesus returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the desert for forty days.’ And, during his public ministry, Jesus deliberately, repeatedly, persistently, withdrew at times from the crowds in order to be alone. Especially when things were most busy and demanding, he developed the asceticism of alone time. He spent time alone, in lonely places, in order to spend time with God.
And so I think this Lent is an invitation for us to be led by the Holy Spirit into the desert, to accompany our Lord as he withdraws into a lonely place. This Lent is a time for us to unplug a little bit, to cultivate that interiority, to use an old-fashioned but valuable word. Above all, this Lent is a time for us not to be afraid of choosing to be alone, but to trust that, even in our loneliness, indeed especially there, the Spirit of Jesus is with us, drawing us to the Father.
And as the coronavirus spreads in communities throughout the world, most of those leaders have enacted severe isolation measures to slow the pandemic's advance.
Those that haven't done so yet, are moving in that direction.
We are in lockdown now. And we're probably going to stay in lockdown far longer than any of us ever expected.
Here in Italy, our virtual house arrest measures are to expire on April 3, at which time the government will reassess the situation. Most of us are bracing for the probability that they will be extended through the end of April – at least.
Liturgical lockdown
And that means that churches, synagogues and mosques – which can technically remain open for private, individual prayer – are offering no communal worship services.
Catholics cannot attend Mass. Churches here – as those in other places around the globe that are in the throes of COVID-19 – are in a liturgical lockdown.
We probably will not be able to gather for Eucharist on Easter.
That likely won't be a huge problem for most people here. Even though Italy is still considered a Catholic country, the most recent survey (April 2019) suggests that the number of Catholics has fallen to 66.7% of the population. Only 34% of the people in that group identifies as "practicing."
Furthermore, it's estimated that only around 18-20% of Italian Catholics attend Mass on Sunday. And that's considered a generous estimate.
In search of episcopal guidance
Still, Catholics here and all over the world are looking to their priests and bishops for guidance. More and more are looking to the pope.
Some are very upset that most of these Church leaders have cancelled all public Masses. Even more are angry and distraught that they've put a moratorium on celebrating weddings and, most importantly at this time, funerals.
Probably the vast majority of practicing Catholics have accepted this fate for what it is – a temporaryburden or sacrifice. And they understand the reason for it: to stop the coronavirus from spreading and claiming more lives among the elderly and those with already existing health problems.
None of us – whether we attend Sunday Mass only occasionally or have never missed a day in our life – are happy about this situation. We are being stretched beyond our comfort zone and what is most familiar to find another way to "keep holy the Lord's Day."
Mass for Shut-Ins
The obligation to attend Mass is not a divine commandment, it is a law established by men of the Church. The obligation can be set aside for valid reasons. And this is done all time. Think of the traveller's dispensation or the dispensation that are granted during severe weather emergencies.
But the question has become a bit more acute: what should we do during this entire period of liturgical and sacramental lockdown?
There are the traditional methods that have been around for decades – Mass broadcast via radio (since the 1930s) and television (since the 1950s).
Currently, the Vatican is live-streaming the daily Mass that Pope Francis celebrates in the chapel at his Santa Marta Residence. And a number of bishops around the world have begun to imitate that in their own dioceses, presiding at televised Masses at least on Sunday, if not each day.
But is this sort of Mass for Shut-Ins the best we can offer during our liturgical lockdown?
A 'caged in' pope who is not very creative right now
It seems extremely unimaginative and clericalist, especially in a pontificate that has – from day one – stressed the need to be creative pastorally and has condemned clericalism.
Francis seems a bit lost right now. He has praised priests for finding creative ways to be near their people in this time of social distancing and self-quarantine. Yet, he has not been able to find any creative means to do so himself.
He is "caged in," as he said with visible frustration the first day he was forced to pray the Angelus in the papal study of Apostolic Palace, rather than at the window overlooking St. Peter's Square. The pontificate of proximity, as some have called it, is also in lockdown.
Trying to break out
The 83-year-old pope is feeling the constraints. So he's started giving interviews over the telephone and via video calls. This is not being creative. And, quite frankly, it doesn't seem to be terribly helpful.
Francis can address the world every single morning from his chapel at Santa Marta and twice on Wednesday. That's the day he also offers his weekly catechesis via TV and live-streaming now that the general audiences are suspended.
Since Ash Wednesday, his only escape from the Vatican was a recent visit to two Roman churches where he prayed before religious icons that are reputed to have almost magical, miraculous powers.
Before an image of the Virgin Mary and a "miraculous" crucifix, the Jesuit pope asked God to stop the coronavirus. That's what he said this week in one of those new interviews.
That may be soothing for some Catholics and for the superstitious. But it is not helping anyone find creative ways to profitably spend our forced liturgical fast.
The pope must not shoulder his alone
On the contrary, these types of gestures reinforce the idea that the burden is on the pope to carry the rest of us through this desert. He is the super-bishop, high priest and holy man who intercedes, in a solitary act, for everyone else.
After he stood at the window and blessed a completely deserted St. Peter's Square following his caged-in Angelus, one writer marveled that Francis was like a new Moses! Except there was no Aaron or Hur to help support his weary arms. He was alone.
But, in fact, the pope is not alone. There are more than a billion other Catholics on this earth who stand with him. They, too, can pray.
He should not be expected to single-handedly devise the methods to do that, especially during this unprecedented situation in which much of the global Church finds itself right now.
Francis has said on different occasions (first of all, in Evangelii gaudium) that the pope should not be expected "to offer a definitive or complete word on every question which affects the Church and the world" or "to take the place of local bishops" in dealing with situations at the local level.
The shepherd amidst the flock
He's also said there's something terribly out of balance when Catholics are concerned "more about law than about grace, more about the Church than about Christ, more about the pope than about God's word."
Catholics need to think about this and be imaginative in finding ways to make sure the liturgical and sacramental lockdown doesn't lead them to merely "watching" the Mass on TV or the internet. Or worse, that it doesn't lead to a temporary time-out from prayer or their regular "religious observance."
We're being challenged to seek out fresh springs and green pastures in this desert in which we've suddenly been thrust. We should not demand nor expect our pastors, including the pope, to know the way any better than us at this moment.
As Pope Francis has said many times, the shepherd leads the flock, but mostly by walking in the midst of the sheep. However, sometimes he must follow behind to keep those in the rear from wandering off.
And it is in those moments he realizes that his sheep have a natural instinct to find the greenest fields.
Catholics need to follow their instincts and search for the spiritual nourishment that their shepherds, at least for now, cannot provide.
Bigger Than Personal Moral Failure
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
Contemplation helps us discern what is truly important in
the largest, most spacious frame of reality and to know what is ours to do in
the face of “evil” and injustice. As a confessor, I know for a fact that many
people beat their breasts about trivial things while not spotting the real
evils that are likely poisoning their hearts and minds and countries. I have
often said that hearing most (though not all!) Catholic confessions is like
being stoned to death with marshmallows. We trained people to feel guilty about
certain “sins” but allowed them to neglect the evils that are all around us and
ignored.
Early Catholic moral theology taught that there were three
major sources of evil: the world, the flesh, and the devil. My moral theology
professor always added emphatically: “In that order!” Yet, up to now, most
Christians have placed almost all of our attention on the secondary “flesh”
level. We have had little education in or recognition of what Paul meant by
“the principalities of the world” and even less understanding of what he meant
by “the ruler who dominates the very air” (Ephesians 6:12). The world and the
devil basically got off scot-free for most of Christian history while
individual humans carried the majority of the blame. Just look at poor Eve! The
implications have been massively destructive, both for the individual and for
society, leading to many twentieth-century catastrophes that often took place
in Christian countries.
When we are made to feel individually responsible for “the
sin of the world” (John 1:29), we become overwhelmed by too-muchness, which
will paralyze us and keep us from working to improve things that we can
improve, further increasing our shame. It is a vicious cycle, one that most of
us are probably familiar with. I believe contemplation is one of the only
things that can free us from it. Contemplation draws us deeper into the mystery
that we are a part of the problem, but not all of it, and that our actions are
essential to solving it, though they may not seem to be doing anything at all.
Perhaps this is what it means to “act in good faith!”
Both Jesus and Paul passed on to their disciples a collective
and historical understanding of the nature of sin and evil, against which
individuals still had to resist but in which they were usually complicit. Jesus
and the prophets judged the city, nation, or group of people first, then the
individual. This is no longer the starting point for many people, which leaves
us morally impotent. We do not reproach our towns, our own religion, or our
nation, though Jesus did so regularly (Matthew 11:20-24; Luke 10:10-16).
My hope is that this recognition of Jesus’ and Paul’s
emphasis on the collective nature of evil will increase both personal
responsibility and human solidarity, instead of wasting time on feeling bad
about ourselves, which helps nobody.
Prayer for
Our Community:
O Great Love, thank you for living and loving in us and
through us. May all that we do flow from our deep connection with you and all
beings. Help us become a community that vulnerably shares each other’s burdens
and the weight of glory. Listen to our hearts’ longings for the healing of our
world. [Please add your own intentions.] . . . Knowing you are hearing us
better than we are speaking, we offer these prayers in all the holy names of
God, amen.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, What Do We Do with Evil? (CAC
Publishing: December 2019) 18, 21, 22-23.
An Alternative Expression Of Love And Trust
This article is taken from the archive of Fr Ron Rolheiser OMI. You can find this article and many others by clicking here
More tortuous than all else is the human heart, beyond remedy; who can understand it. The Prophet, Jeremiah wrote those words more than 25 hundred years ago and anyone who struggles with the complexities of love and human relationships will soon enough know of what he speaks.
Who indeed can understand the human heart, given some of the curious and cruel ways we sometimes have of expressing love. For instance, Nadia Bolz-Weber shares something we all have a propensity for: “Inevitably, when I can’t harm the people who harmed me, I just end up harming the people who love me.” How true. When we’ve been hurt most every instinct in us screams for retaliation; but, most times, it’s not possible, nor safe, to retaliate against the persons who hurt us. Or, perhaps we aren’t even clear as to who hurt us. So, needing to lash out at someone, we lash out where it’s safe to do so, namely, at those whom we trust will absorb it, at those with whom we feel secure enough to do this. We lash out at them because we know they won’t retaliate. Simply put, sometimes we need to be really angry at someone and since we are unable to vent that anger on the person or persons responsible for it we vent on someone whom we unconsciously trust will safely accept it.
If you’re a loving parent, a faithful spouse, a trusted friend, a true counsellor, a good minister, or even just someone who with integrity officially represents a moral agency or a church it can be good to know this. Otherwise it’s too easy to misread some of the anger and recrimination that will come your way and take it too-personally and not for what it really is. When someone whom you’ve loved is angry at you it’s hard to recognize and accept that you’re probably the object of that anger even though you aren’t the cause of it, but rather are the one safe place where this person can lash out without fear of retaliation and have his or her bitterness absorbed. If you don’t grasp the peculiar dynamics of love that are at play here you will inevitably take this too-personally, be torn up inside, lament its injustice, and struggle to carry it with the love that’s unconsciously being asked for.
But this can be very hard to accept, even when we understand why it’s happening. This kind of love demands an almost inhuman strength. For example, as Christians we have a special admiration for Jesus’ mother as we imagine what she must have felt as she stood beneath the cross, watching her son, goodness and innocence itself, suffer a brute, violent injustice. Not to lessen in any way the pain that she would have been feeling then, standing helplessly as she did in that awful injustice, she did have the consolation of knowing that her son loved her deeply. Her pain would have been excruciating, as would be the pain of any mother in that situation, but her pain had a certain (dare I use the phrase) “cleanliness” about it. She was free to fully and openly empathize with her son, knowing that his love was giving her permission to feel what she felt.
But many is the loving mother, loving father, a faithful spouse, or trusted friend whose heart is breaking at the anger and accusation being directed at them by someone they’ve loved and to whom they’ve been faithful. How can they not feel accused, guilty, and responsible for the bitter crucifixion they’re experiencing? Their pain will not feel “clean”. In effect, what they’re feeling is more what Jesus felt as he was being crucified rather than what his mother felt as she witnessed it. They’re experiencing what St. Paul refers to in his Second Letter to the Corinthians when he writes that, though innocent himself, Jesus became sin. That single expression, unless properly read, can be one of the most horrifying lines in scripture. Yet, understood within the dynamics of love, it powerfully highlights what love really means beyond fairytales. Real love is the capacity to absorb injustice with understanding, empathy, and with only the other’s good in mind.
Of course, sometimes the anger directed at us from persons we love is justified and speaks of our betrayal, our sin, and our breaking of trust. Sometimes the angry accusations directed at us validly accuse us of our own sin. In that case, what we’re asked to absorb has a very different meaning. As well, we need to recognize that we also do this to others. When we’re hurt and unable to direct our anger and accusations against those who hurt us, then, as Nadia Bolz-Weber so honestly shares, we often end up harming the people who love us most.
Love has many modalities, some warm, kind, and affectionate, some accusatory, bitter, and angry. Yes, sometimes we have strange, anomalous ways of expressing our love and trust. Who can understand our tortuous hearts!
Never Waste A Crisis
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
Sudden crises have a way of clarifying long-running debates. The essential nature of whatever is at stake tends to become obvious when we are forced to confront it without the haze of extraneous distractions or details. This moment in time is no different. As the current outbreak of the COVID-19 virus sweeps across the country, dioceses and parishes are left wondering how to minister to their communities when physical gatherings are prohibited.
In the past, I have used this blog to work through one of the most intense ongoing debates we have had internally among our leadership team: the role of online services. What does it mean to have an online “campus”? Is it even church? Does it “count?”
This debate is especially fraught in our Catholic context, which understands the Sacrifice of the Mass and accompanying Holy Communion as the Real Presence of Christ. To partake of this presence and the benefits it brings, including union with Christ and nourishment for the soul, a literal, real presence is obviously required. Any online service that proposes a virtual presence would be, by reason, impossible.
And yet Mass has been broadcast on radio and television since their inception (the very first radio broadcast was, in fact, a Mass from the Vatican engineered by Marconi, the inventor of radio transmission). Clearly the Church has seen the value in church experiences that are not live and in-person events. Surely it can be conceded that “hearing” Mass, offering prayer, worshiping through music, and listening to the Scriptures are all inherently of value even if Communion is not received. In fact, many people go to Mass all the time and choose to partake in a spiritual communion for various reasons.
The debate actually concerns whether broadcasting church online serves as a “front door”, a “side door” or a “back” door to church commitment. Will people grow as disciples, or are they just coasting along online, or is it an easy way out, encouraging people to give up on church altogether. In other words, will online broadcasts introduce new people to Mass at church, supplement weekly worship, or make it irrelevant and obsolete?
As Carey Nieuwhof notes in a blog post (here), online as a ‘back-door’ has been shrinking in the experience of most churches. These consumer-oriented and disengaged churchgoers were already on the way out – online church just speeds up the process and makes it more efficient, less messy. Meanwhile, an online campus as a “front” door for newcomers is a growing experience according to Nieuwhof’s research. If the broadcast is a quality one, if your broadcast is interactive with viewers, if everything is done with the unchurched in mind, the online experience can serve as an effective ongoing invitation.
It is true that some number of online viewers are just coasting along with little or no commitment. But given that most “regulars” at your church are only twice a month attendees in person, the online experience can keep them engaged too, which is going to translate into more engagement and greater commitment.
All that said, over the last year we have resolved our internal discussion and confirmed our online experience as a “campus” of our church, and the one with the greatest potential for growth. In fact, in that time it has grown at a far greater rate than attendance at our Ridgely Road campus.
This weekend we are hoping to take it to a whole new level. In view of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are inviting and encouraging all our parishioners to join us online instead of Ridgely Road. We will be broadcasting all our weekend Masses, including for the first time ever our Saturday evening Mass. While we deeply regret the advent of this crisis, we can definitely use it to advance what we see as our best opportunity moving forward. No matter where you are or what happens, our church can be on … online.
The Virtue Of Asceticism
Giving up chocolate? Deleting your Facebook account? We all choose to mark Lent in different ways and more often than not focus on abstaining from something we enjoy, but is this always good for us? Nicholas Austin SJ explores how our attempts at an ascetic way of life for forty days each year can go wrong if our motivations are not rooted in the wisdom of the Christian tradition. How can we rediscover the virtue of asceticism? Nicholas Austin SJ teaches Ethics at Heythrop College, University of London.
This article is taken from the ThinkingFaith.org website where you can find a wide range of articles by clicking here
So what have you decided to give up for Lent? We often we hear that the important thing is not to give something up, but to do something positive. But it’s strange, isn’t it, that the feeling still sticks that Lent is really about giving up stuff? Giving up chocolate, giving up alcohol, giving up desserts, giving up cigarettes, giving up TV, giving up meat on Fridays…. For better or worse, we tend to ask ourselves not ‘What am I going to do, in a positive way, for Lent?’ but ‘What am I going to give up?’ So why are we so fixated on fasting, abstaining, giving stuff up?
The way of asceticism
‘There are only two philosophies of life,’ Fulton J. Sheen once said, ‘one is first the feast and then the headache; the other is first the fast and then the feast.’ Today, more than ever, the time is ripe for a recovery and renewal of this second ‘philosophy,’ the way of asceticism.
At a surface level, asceticism (the constellation of the practices of voluntary self-denial such as fasting from food) does not hold much attraction for us today. In the film version of The Da Vinci Code, the crazy and murderous albino monk, Silas is depicted whipping himself and wearing a chain wrapped around his leg that he tightens so as to draw his own blood. What such a picture conveys is fanaticism, self-hatred and a religious practice divorced from all that is holy, healthy and good.
Yet there are numerous signs in our culture today that, at a deeper level, there is a desire for a freeing asceticism, if only we knew how to practise it. In the era of retail therapy and consumerism, we hear about people who have discovered the benefits of downsizing, de-cluttering and material simplicity. Caught in the incessant and hectic pace of modern life, we yearn for a way to step off the conveyor belt of busy-ness and find some space just to be, to be with others, to be with God. Drowning in an infinite sea of calories, we buy into a multi-billion pound yet apparently ineffective diet industry, with its promises to ‘naturally’ cleanse the toxins from our bodies, ‘juice fasting’ and a thousand varieties of quasi-ascetical practices. Aware of our propensity to unintentional overuse of the internet and our other communication gadgets, we yearn for the freedom that comes from being ‘unplugged,’ but can’t quite bring ourselves to pull the plug, even for a few hours. Is there, then, a way to recover from the Christian tradition the wisdom for an authentic practice of asceticism that can lead to the freedom and prayerfulness that, now more than ever, we yearn for?
Three distortions
The first thing to notice is that the Christian tradition is quite aware that fasting and abstinence can go wrong in a number of fairly predictable ways. I shall note three prominent distortions to which asceticism is especially susceptible, and the remedies that the tradition prescribes.
1. The distortion of excess
The first kind of danger to which asceticism is prone is that of excess. Fasting for long periods, for example, can lead to self-inflation and pride at one’s own achievements, and end up being counter-productive. As almost anyone who has every tried dieting knows, excessive fasting is quickly followed by the binge. At its extremes, it can even be damaging to one’s health, as it was for Saint Ignatius of Loyola shortly after his conversion. Later, as he grew in discernment and maturity, he realised that such heroic fasting was not what God desires.
The traditional corrective to excessive fasting is the doctrine of the ‘mean.’ The mean is the middle-way between too much and too little. A helpful analogy is a musical instrument: to keep it in tune, the strings should be neither too taut nor too relaxed, but in the mean. Saint Thomas Aquinas points out that even fasting is a matter of the mean: one should not fast to such an extent that one damages one’s health, or becomes too weak to perform the tasks of one’s occupation, for that would be to go to excess. Following the Stoic philosophers, he recommends the gradual approach: start small, approach the mean bit by bit. It is better to be patient, to be gentle, rather than attempt the spectacular, and risk the equally spectacular crash.
Today, we are so far towards the other extreme that excess in fasting is hardly our primary danger. Thomas makes a challenging statement that may surprise us today, but is worthy of our serious consideration: fasting, he says, is not merely a church law, but a requirement of human nature itself. In other words, an adult human being cannot hope to find the right balance in life, can’t hope to find the mean, unless by a regular practice of fasting. Otherwise, our desires for things that are good in themselves overrun their bounds and end up enslaving us.
Finding the mean in asceticism today, the mid-point between excess and laxity, is a task that will require attentiveness to the wisdom of the tradition as well as an exercise of the Christian imagination. The new asceticism today will not involve just fasting from food, but from any aspect of modern life in which compulsion starts to take over and we lose our freedom, our balance. If I buy stuff as a means of feeling better, perhaps I need to fast from shopping; if I find myself obsessively checking Facebook and Twitter, or checking my texts or emails, perhaps I need to fast from that; and so on. In any case, what we need is a creative fidelity to the traditional practices of fasting and abstinence, aware that the asceticism of ages past needs to be recovered but also adapted to a new age of consumerism, internet and environmental degradation.
2. The distortion of dualism
The second way that asceticism can be distorted is more subtle, and therefore more insidious. In Catholic spirituality, those seeking progress in the spiritual life were often encouraged to ‘mortify’ their flesh, literally put it to death. Of course, the ‘flesh’ here refers not to the body itself, but to our sinful nature. Nevertheless, the impression unintentionally conveyed, at least sometimes, was that the spiritual life means rejecting all that is of the body. In other words, there is the risk of a dualism that sees the soul as good, and the body and the material world as evil.
Such a dualism is of course strongly discordant with some of the basic tenets of the Christian faith, the doctrines of Creation, Incarnation and Resurrection. We believe that, at the creation, God was able to look at the world he had created and see that it was ‘very good’ (Genesis 1:31). We believe that in Jesus Christ, God became flesh and so sanctified the human body. We believe that, on the last day, the body as well as the soul will be taken up into Christ’s resurrection. There is no place within our faith, then, for a rejection of the body and the material world as impure.
The risk, then, is that our ascetical practices unconsciously become infected by a disdain for our bodies, our passions, our sexuality, which should be seen as a precious gift from God. The point of an authentically Christian asceticism is not to free the soul from the body, nor even to repress the body and its impulses, but to raise these to a truly spiritual level, to integrate them into the spiritual journey towards God.
3. The distortion of empty religiosity
In order to identify the third and final distortion of asceticism, we need to attend to the compelling words of the prophet Isaiah (58:5-6):
Is that what you call a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord?
Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free and break every yoke?
Here the prophet attacks an empty religiosity that attempts to curry favour with God without attending to the basic duty of justice towards the poor. Empty religiosity, by focusing exclusively on external religious practice, is an escape from the real world: the power of religious practice to open the heart to a transformation leading to a deeper love of God and neighbour is lost.
Yet we should not misread Isaiah’s critique as an attack on the practice of fasting as such. Isaiah was speaking in a time when ascetical practices were taken for granted, part of the fabric of everyday life. He called people to realise that their religious practices had no meaning unless there was a union between them and the way they treated others. Today, we are often tempted in a different way, to assume that true religion is simply about how we treat others, and that we no longer need a spirituality incarnated in concrete religious practices such as fasting. In this regard, we may recall the memorable criticism by the anthropologist, Mary Douglas of the view that exterior practice has nothing to do with true spirituality or authentic religion:
For it is a mistake to suppose that there can be religion which is all interior, with no rules, no liturgy, no external signs of inward states. As with society, so with religion, external form is the condition of its existence...
(Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo [New York/Washington: Praeger, 1966], p.62.)
What the prophets call us to is not a rejection of ascetical practice, but an authentic fasting that involves us body and soul. Then fasting will become, not an escape from the real world, but a way of coming closer to those who practise, in the words of Gandhi, an ‘eternal, compulsory fast,’ simply because they do not have enough to eat.
Why fast?
As we have seen, if we are to engage in a healthy and holy asceticism today, we need to attend the wisdom that we find within our tradition, that can help us to avoid the pitfalls of excess, of dualism and of empty religiosity. Equally importantly, the tradition teaches us to avoid over-corrections that lead to a disembodied spirituality or a too relaxed approach. But what, ultimately, are the reasons for asceticism? What is the ultimate point?
Most obviously, fasting can help us to find a proper authority over ourselves. Today we have a thousand ways of making ourselves feel good: I know, I’ll eat something nice, or have a drink, or surf the internet, or check whether a friend has texted me, or turn on the TV, or listen to my iPod, or go clothes shopping, or buy something from Amazon, or play a computer game. All of these things can be good, but if we continually use them to make ourselves feel better, we can become slaves to the things we enjoy. When we don’t have them, we crave them. When we lack them, we feel depressed. When we realise we shouldn’t overdo it, we can’t help ourselves. So in Lent, when we give stuff up, we exercise authority over it, instead of letting it control us. We try to unchain ourselves. We try to become free.
But there’s a deeper reason to fast. ‘Filled with the Holy Spirit, Jesus returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the desert for forty days.’ (Luke 4:1) Recently my class of university students read the autobiography of Dorothy Day, the social activist and found of the Catholic Worker Movement. Some people consider her a modern-day saint. The book tells of how, as an adult, she became an atheist, but then was gradually led back to prayer and to God, so that she converted to Catholicism, and committed her life to working for the poor and for social justice. But she entitles the book, The Long Loneliness. And she describes how, at times, she experienced a terrible loneliness in her life. She longed to be with people, with those she loved, and felt the pain of separation and grief. But despite the pain of loneliness she experienced, it’s as though she realised her loneliness was not all negative. In that experience of being lonely, she longed to be with the poor and she longed to know God.
So I asked my students once they had read the book, ‘Can you relate to that experience of loneliness? Do you ever spend time alone?’ And the responses were striking. One student confessed that those parts of the book about loneliness terrified her. Another student said that she spends virtually no time alone, and when she is alone, she has some electronic device to turn to: her mobile phone, or the computer – checking Facebook or email. Another said he had begun to learn to deliberately make time without his computer or phone, so that he could have time to reflect or think. And another said the only time he really got to be alone was when he went for a run, but that such time was precious to him precisely because it was his only time to think.
The fact is that it is difficult to withdraw into the desert with Jesus today. We live in an age of distraction, where we have a thousand different ways of filling up that void of loneliness. And to some extent, that means we’re missing out. A recent report in the United States surveyed the use of electronic devices by children aged 8 to 18. It wanted to know how much children are plugged-in to an iPod or a television or the internet or a mobile phone and so on: how much time a child spent exposed to the media. A few years ago it was over 6 hours a day; today, the American child spends, on average, 7 hours and 28 minutes a day plugged in to some electronic device. That’s over 50 hours a week.
‘Filled with the Holy Spirit, Jesus returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the desert for forty days.’ And, during his public ministry, Jesus deliberately, repeatedly, persistently, withdrew at times from the crowds in order to be alone. Especially when things were most busy and demanding, he developed the asceticism of alone time. He spent time alone, in lonely places, in order to spend time with God.
And so I think this Lent is an invitation for us to be led by the Holy Spirit into the desert, to accompany our Lord as he withdraws into a lonely place. This Lent is a time for us to unplug a little bit, to cultivate that interiority, to use an old-fashioned but valuable word. Above all, this Lent is a time for us not to be afraid of choosing to be alone, but to trust that, even in our loneliness, indeed especially there, the Spirit of Jesus is with us, drawing us to the Father.
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