Mersey Leven Catholic Parish
OUR VISION
Parish Priest: Fr Mike Delaney (until 11th Jan)
Mob: 0417 279 437
Email: mike.delaney@aohtas.org.au
Administrator: Fr Jaison Kuzhiyil (from 11th Jan)
Mob: 0401 829 686
Email: jaisonjoseph16@yahoo.in
Assistant Priest: Fr Steven Smith
Mob: 0411 522 630
Email: steven.smith@aohtas.org.au
Priest in Residence: Fr Phil McCormack
Mob: 0437 521 257
Email: 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 Email: merseyleven@aohtas.org.au
Secretary: Annie Davies Finance Officer: Anne Fisher
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
SUNDAY MASS ONLINE: Please go to the following link on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MLCP1Mon 4th Jan NO MASSTues 5th Jan Devonport 9:30amWed 6th Jan Ulverstone 9:30am Thurs 7th Jan Devonport 1:00pm - Funeral MassFri 8th Jan Ulverstone 9:30am Sat 9th Jan Devonport 6:00pm Ulverstone 6:00pmSun 10th Jan Devonport 10:00am ... Baptism of the Lord: Livestreamed Ulverstone 10:00am
If you are looking for Sunday Mass readings or Daily Mass readings, Universalis has the readings as well as the various Hours of the Divine Office - https://universalis.com/mass.htm
Your prayers are asked for the sick: Dot Prior, Regina Locket, Allan McIntyre, Loretta Visser, Aidan Ravaillion, David Ockwell, Judy Redgrove, Sam Eiler, & ...
Let us pray for those who have died recently:Gladys Mulcahy, Norman Archery, Frances Robinson, Erin Kyriazis, Sr Annette Condon, Mary Bosworth, Fr Frank Young, Ann Radford, Marianne Riek
Let us pray for those whose anniversary occurs about this time: 30th December, 2020 – 5th January, 2021Thelma Batt, Barbara George, Rob Belanger, Pearl Sheridan, William Cousins, Bill Kruk, Ian Stubbs, Tori Enniss, Nicola Tenaglia, Roy Beechey, Cavell Robertson, Joshua Delaney, Elizabeth Delaney, Tess Landers, Alfred Harrison, Virginia Miller, Nancy Bramich, Janelle Payne
May the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen
PREGO REFLECTION ON TODAY’S GOSPELAs I come to prayer today, I notice that the feast of the Epiphany also marks the end of the main Christmas period. I may wish to reflect on what has happened over the last twelve days … both the good moments, for which I give thanks … and also the more difficult ones.In what ways have I been able to see the ‘light’ and ‘glory’ of the Lord?When I’ve ‘lifted my eyes and looked round’, who have I seen coming towards me? Maybe someone in my family, or an unexpected stranger asking for my help...?I ponder how it has felt to bring my gifts ... chosen in the hope that those receiving them might truly understand that ‘it can be Christmas every day, because Christmas means love’.If I can, I give thanks to the Lord for his unfailing presence and loving support during this Christmastide.
Weekly Ramblings
No Ramblings this week, final posting will be in next week’s Bulletin. You can got to Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/MLCP1) or YouTube – search Mersey Leven Catholic Parish – for my Friday Ramblings.
Take care and stay safe when travelling.
SINULOG FESTIVAL 2021The Feast of Sr Sto. Nino, the Holy Child Jesus, will be celebrated on 17th January with Mass at Our Lady of Lourdes at 10am followed by a luncheon at the Parish Hall. As Sinulog Festival is a Parish event, all parishioners are encouraged to join the occasion. Please bring a plate of food to share.
Novena to Sr Sto Nino will run for nine days, starting 8th January until 16th January prior to the Feast Day. Details of the Novena will be posted on Church noticeboards and on FaceBook. A copy of the schedule is available on request.
Signs of the Times
Dysfunctional Fantasists And Clever Manipulators
American opposition to Pope Francis in the post-Trump era - Massimo Faggioli, Rome, December 22, 2020. This article is from the La-Croix International website - you can access the site here but complete full access is via paid subscription
"Any decent Church would've burned you bastards years ago," says Bartholomew "Barley" Scott Blair in The Russia House, scripted by Tom Stoppard and based on the 1989 novel by John le Carré.
Blair, a British writer, is expressing his contempt for the zealous MI6 agents who see no difference between the old Soviet Union and the Russia that Blair is trying to find.
Fortunately, the Catholic Church no longer burns heretics. But there has been a good deal of subversive attempts in the past few years to undermine the authority and legitimacy of Pope Francis.
Now that Donald Trump's presidency is coming to an end, it is easier to see what happened in the last five years on the transatlantic axis between the USA and the Vatican.
A theological-political opposition to Francis went fully political and partisan, aligning itself to the Trump presidency and eventually losing any sense of reality.
Shifting alliances in a new religious ecosystemOnce again, the recently deceased British author of espionage novels, John le Carré (1931-2020), has something to say to Catholics who are trying to understand this new religious ecosystem, where allegiances and loyalties are shifting rapidly and the old institutional ethos is hard to find in the ecclesial personalities making the news.
Christopher Tayler of the London Review of Books recently wrote a short blog post in memoriam of le Carré and found much truth in the novel The Looking Glass War (1965), not just on the Cold War, but also on Great Britain today.
"That novel is about a group of ageing, dysfunctional fantasists, obsessed with the glories of the Second World War, who launch a doomed operation against a European target on the basis of misunderstandings, wishful thinking and internal political squabbles," he notes.
"Everybody dies or comes to a sudden chilling realization that, of the operation's two nominal leaders, one is completely detached from reality, and the other is a clever manipulator – though not as clever as he thinks he is – whose studied eccentricity conceals a frightening inner emptiness. Their target is a non-existent East German rocket site rather than access to the Single Market, but otherwise it's a Cold War classic that also stands up as a state-of-the-nation novel in December 2020," Tayler concludes.
Dysfunctional fantasists and clever manipulators with a frightening inner emptiness... This can be applied not only to Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his ally Jacob Rees-Mogg (Leader of the House of Commons and Lord President of the Council since 2019, a wealthy social conservative, and proud Catholic).
The Trump-Viganò liaison dangereuseIt can also be applied to the Catholic Church, particularly in the United States.
Donald Trump and the former papal nuncio to Washington, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, have entered a dangerous relationship that became public several times over the last year.
The archbishop addressed the president with a series of public messages during the 2020 election campaign. Trump returned the favor by praising Viganò and trying to legitimize him.
This liaison dangereuse continued well into the post-November 3rd transition period during the Trump campaign's attempts to undermine the legitimacy of the election through legal challenges and public rallies with the defeated president's supporters.
At a rally in Washington on December 12, Viganò made a video appearance. There were also number of Catholic priests who were physically present at the gathering and one of them addressed the Trump supporters from a podium, delivering something like a political exorcism of Joe Biden's electoral victory.
US bishops and the crisis of authorityThe list of ecclesial figures who are standing by Trump, goes well beyond Viganò. It is too long and embarrassing to compile here. Their political and theological attempt has failed, but the damage has been done and will have long-lasting effects.
The hierarchical elites of the Catholic Church in the United States were already in a crisis of authority. It has now become a much more serious crisis of legitimacy.
In a sense, the bishops have already been substituted in their role. Conservative Catholics now look to the conservative justices of the Supreme Court as their moral leaders, while progressive Catholics are now looking to Joe Biden.
But clearly this is just an interlude.
As George Smiley interrogates and turns Grigoriev, the commercial attaché of the Soviet Embassy in Bern, the now trapped collaborator of Smiley's archenemy bursts out with something that could be applied to Viganò and the cabal of Trumpian America: "Conspiracy has replaced religion. It is our mystical substitute!"
Catholics vs. CatholicsDuring this year of the pandemic, Francis' Catholic enemies — and not just Viganò — had already proudly embraced a number of conspiracy theories.
There was the manifesto last May — signed by Viganò and three cardinals — that expressed a neo-Christendom view of the relations between Church and State.
That manifesto — which was also signed by Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas — warned of "the hidden intentions of supranational bodies" and "subtle forms of dictatorship, presumably worse than those our society has seen rise and fall in the recent past.
"These attempts have recently come home — that is, to America. If one looks at the video of the pro-Trump rally of December 12 and the Catholic priests who were there, it is painfully clear that conspiracy theories have indeed replaced religion.
And they are conspiracy theories that accompany and legitimize the use of violence in the street of the nation's capital.
Pope Francis is an old priest who knows how much out of step with the real Church these ideologues are. The serious problem is that these conspiracy theories among Catholics hostile to him are the mere reflection of a vast conspiracy mentality that has infiltrated political institutions.
The use of conspiracy theories by Catholics against fellow Catholics is something new, and there is not much the pope can do about it. He can do even less to save our politics.
Storydancing
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
I asked a theologian friend “What comes to your mind when I say the word ‘incarnation’?” Without hesitating, he responded, “Dance.” Dance is an art that allows all of our body to express itself beyond boundaries. Sacred dance, ritual dance, and many other forms of dance allow individuals and communities to experience the grace and joy of being incarnated into a body. You don’t have to be trained or even skillful to experience this; you simply have to be willing to move beyond your comfort zone. Today’s practice invites you to explore telling your story through movement. Trauma therapist Dr. Jamie Marich writes:A dynamic practice can be simply challenging yourself to look deeply into your heart and tell your story to the dance floor, a process I’ve come to call storydancing. This can be the story of your whole life or the story of what you’re living through right now. . . . You may feel called to use this practice for the purpose of transformation and manifestation, allowing the dance to help create a new ending, or usher in a new chapter. . . .
Perhaps you’ve already explored dancing with your breath, your heart, your mind, your body, and your concept of spirit. Notice what’s happening within you. I now invite you to allow all the elements to work together and create your story.- Tell your story to the earth below you, the space around you.- Your space is your canvas, your body is the paintbrush. Allow your story to becreated in your space. The colors and the elements are being sent to you right now through your breath, through your spirit.- Paint your story, create your story, dance your story in this space!- You have options—it may feel organic to simply dance the story up to this present moment. If you believe that old story lines prevent you from experiencing the joy of the present moment, perhaps just notice those different story lines that pop up as you dance. Practice the challenge of noticing them, letting them go, and then returning to the present moment. If you feel inspired to move your story from this present moment and let the dance help you create a desired ending or a new, desired chapter in the journey, keep going with that process.
Dancing the element of story in personal practice is much like writing a journal, songwriting, or creating visual art. As many musicians and artists will tell you, we often create just for ourselves, for practice, for exploration, even if we never share the finished product. So, think about your dancing practice as a way to dance what you might normally write in your journal.
Reference:Jamie Marich, PhD., Dancing Mindfulness: A Creative Path to Healing & Transformation (Skylights Paths Publishing: 2016), 114‒115, 117.
For Further Study:Diarmuid Ó Murchú, Incarnation: A New Evolutionary Threshold (Orbis Books: 2017).Ronald Rolheiser and Richard Rohr, Adult Christianity and How to Get There (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2004), CD, MP3 download.Richard Rohr, Essential Teachings on Love, ed. Joelle Chase and Judy Traeger (Orbis Books: 2018).Richard Rohr, Franciscan Mysticism: I AM That Which I Am Seeking (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2012), CD, MP3 download.Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe (Convergent Books: 2019).Mirabai Starr, Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce and Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics (Sounds True: 2019).Howard Thurman, The Mood of Christmas and Other Celebrations (Friends United Press: 1985, ©1973).
My Top Ten Books For 2020
When St. Augustine said that “concerning taste there can be no dispute”, he was only partially right. Admittedly, taste always has a subjective aspect; but there’s always an objective component as well: objectively, a cheap soda is not a fine wine, millions of musical compositions are not Mozart, and the picture that your kindergarten child drew for your birthday is not a Van Gogh.
With that being said as an apologia, I admit that my selection of these ten books has a strongly subjective factor. These are simply the books that spoke most deeply to me this past year. Perhaps they won’t do the same for you. Nonetheless, I assure you that none of them is a cheap soda or a crayon picture a child drew for your birthday.
Which ten books spoke to me most deeply this past year?
Clare Carlisle, Philosopher of the Heart, The Restless Life of Soren Kierkegaard. If you’ve never read a good introduction to the life and work of Soren Kierkegaard, this is your book. It’s a unique combination of scholarship, clear writing, criticism of, and sympathy for Kierkegaard.
Michael J. Buckley, What Do You Seek? The Questions of Jesus as Challenge and Promise. Among the books I read this year, this book challenged me the most personally. Buckley, who died in 2019, shines a light into your soul and shows where the both the challenge and promise of Jesus lie.
Frederick Buechner, The Magnificent Defeat. First published in 1966, this book only found me this year. An ordained Presbyterian minister, Buechner is theologian, poet, philosopher, novelist, and essayist and always worth the read, particularly this book. Some rare insights.
Mark Wallace, When God was a Bird – Christianity, Animism, and the Re-Enchantment of the World. As Christians we believe that God wrote two books: the Bible and the world of nature. As Christians, we have both books; animists and pagans have just the one book, the book of nature. Wallace submits that it’s time (both for a fuller understanding of our own faith and for a healthier relationship to the natural world) for us as Christians to take the book of nature more seriously and be less afraid of animism. His insights will stretch you but keep you solid doctrinally.
Gerhard Lohfink, Prayer Takes Us Home, The Theology and Practice of Christian Prayer. Gerhard Lohfink is a German biblical scholar and always worth reading. This is his fourth book in English and, like his others, it as a rare combination of scholarship, personal faith, and good clear writing.
Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog. This is a novel written in 2006 that’s full of insight, wit, and surprise. Not for you if you’re looking for action. This is staring at a work of art, but asking yourself repeatedly, how could its creator be that clever?
Marilynne Robinson, Jack. Time magazine lists her as one of the 100 most influential people in America and that’s true, certainly for my own life. Marilynne Robinson is a highly acclaimed novelist and a deeply insightful religious writer. This book, Jack, will demand a little patience on your part. Don’t give up on it because nothing moves in the first 50 pages. In the end, the book will move you.
Helen Prejean, River of Fire, My Spiritual Journey. The author of Dead Man Walking shares her autobiography. This is the conversion story of an exceptional woman who, it would seem, didn’t need a conversion. Candid, honest, deep.
Lyn Cowan, Portrait of the Blue Lady, The Character of Melancholy. Another book that was written sixteen years ago but only found me this year. It’s a book on melancholy written by a brilliant Jungian and mythologist. Here’s a taste: “Melancholy has even lost its name: melancholy is now ‘depression’, clinicalized, pathologized, and undifferentiated from the blue ‘melancholy’ formerly recognized by poets, philosophers, blues singers and doctors alike, now experienced as a ‘treatable illness’ rather than a difficult, often painful affliction of the soul that is not an illness and doesn’t want treatment.” For Cowan, melancholy is your inroad to befriending the deeper parts of your soul.
Ira Byock, The Four Things that Matter Most. First published in 2004, this is a very popular book that deserves to be popular. Byock gives his whole thesis in the book’s opening sentence. The four most important things you will ever say are: Please forgive me. I forgive you. Thank you. I love you. These are words people tend to utter on their deathbeds. However, as Byock urges, it is best to start saying them long before our loved ones gather round our deathbed. The saddest words we say? “It might have been!”
Beyond these ten books, I also highly recommend Pope Francis’ new Encyclical, Fratelli Tutti.
These are the ten books that spoke deeply to me this year. I can’t guarantee they will do that for you. But I can guarantee that none of them is a cheap soda!
Exploring Fratelli Tutti
James Hanvey SJ, the Society of Jesus’s Secretary for the Service of the Faith, recently spoke at length about Pope Francis’ latest encyclical to Jan Regner SJ, Editor of the Czech Jesuit review, Jezuité. As Thinking Faith reflects this Advent on our Sunday scriptures in the light of Fratelli tutti, we are pleased to be able to publish their interview. In this first instalment, Fr Hanvey reflects on Fratelli tutti in the context of Pope Francis’ other teachings, especially Laudato si’.James Hanvey SJ is Secretary of the Service of the Faith for the Society of Jesus. He was speaking to Jan Regner SJ, Editor of Jezuité, the Czech Jesuit cultural review, in which this interview will also be published.This article is taken from the ThinkingFaith.org website where you can find a wide range of articles by clicking here
1. Freedom, joy and friendshipThere is a remarkable continuity and coherence of thought in all of Pope Francis’ writing and speaking. Although it is often written in a direct and ‘homely’ style, that should not distract us from its freshness, profundity and, in many ways, its prophetic voice. In Laudato si’, there is an extraordinary powerful and evocative imaginative connection drawn between the cry of the poor and the cry of the earth. That opens up a new way of seeing and ‘hearing’ the ecological systems of our common home.
The world is not an infinite and inferior resource to be instrumentalised for our own ends. The creation and manipulation of desires by our economic and information systems is endless. They operate with the relentless logic of our consumerist way of life. They require the endless generation of desire that, in fact, despite giving the impression of freedom of choice and self-expression, imprisons us. In order to do so, we are made prisoners of a sort of ‘ground-hog’ or Beckett-like logic: everything is offered on the basis that it will satisfy our desires but, by the same logic, it must always ensure that our desires are never satisfied. We must always be taught to want something more: a world of ‘hyper desire’, which only exists by generating fantasy and illusion. In this sense, as Jean Baudrillard might observe, we are given a ‘simulacrum’ which has become a sort of deception. While this exhausts the human subject and the world in which we live, it also creates something deeper than frustration: it creates a vast emptiness in the unsatisfied soul. It is almost as if the natural transcendence of being human, that Augustinian ‘inquietude’, has been turned inward and become an infinite interior abyss. This is the quiet ghost of nihilism that stalks our post-modern world. We are exiled in a world that is constantly made to disappoint us because our relationship to it – and to each other – has been made into one of pure utility. At best, satisfaction is transient; it is deliberately so, for we must always be left with wanting something more or something else. Even wanting to ‘be someone’ in our cultures demands an endless manufacturing of the self. The short-term nature of desire or its transience is built in, a ‘throw-away culture’ in which everything – and I mean everything – becomes disposable because desire always has to have a new object.
This is quite different from the ‘natural transience’ of being finite. That tends to work in the reverse: it makes us value and cherish, to ‘love that well which thou must leave ere long’, as Shakespeare beautifully captures it in Sonnet 73. Looked at in this way, our whole social and economic system has a sort of toxicity, which affects the delicate balances of our planet’s ecosystems. Now at this level, I think we can see that Fratelli tutti is a further reflection on Laudato si’: it casts light on the different forms of our social and international ‘toxicities’. Yet what I like about both encyclicals is that neither rests simply with a negative analysis; that would be easy and would eventually be a counsel of despair, which simply reinforces the nihilism, especially in its most destructive and radical form when it becomes a condition of the soul. However, like all of Francis’ writings, they offer positive remedies which at first may seem utopian but are, in fact, very practical. They begin with small steps and changes and then move into the larger picture. In other words, far from being ‘letters of despair’, they remind us that we have a freedom to change and to bring about the good; it is not too far beyond us, although it will require a sort moral vision and purpose. And, of course, both writings are filled with joy, which is the hallmark of Francis’ faith and teaching: the joy of knowing Christ. For many in Europe, faith has become tired or something that meets with indifference – at most, a sort of memory that is renewed on occasions like the great festivals of Christmas or Easter, marking certain transitional moments of our lives.
But Francis reminds us that faith is a source of life and joy and possibility for the whole of our lives; it calls us to a new level of relationality and opens our hearts and our minds to the depth of all that is. Faith, then, does not limit the horizons of our knowing or living or freedom, but expands them. It not only bestows upon us a responsibility for the world in which we live and create – the world who is my neighbour – but it gives us joy in the work of serving this world and all the life that it contains. There is a joy in Christian life, which comes from knowing that we participate in the restoration and sanctification of the world which Christ has redeemed. Can there really be any greater honour or purpose or meaning than this?
Both Laudato si’ and Fratelli tutti ask us to rediscover what it might be to live in a world at peace with others and also with all life; to free ourselves from the falsehoods and systems which abuse and use us and our common home. They maintain that there is another way, not an easy way, or a simple way, but one that we can take if we have the courage and the desire to live in a life-giving and life-sustaining way: a new integral ecology of life and spirit. There is a ‘conversion’ that is asked of us, which is actually a recovery of our freedom to choose to break out of the prisons into which economic and social systems have put us and to live in a common home.
We now possess undreamed-of power, especially through our capacities for genetic engineering, so that we are no longer the passive subjects of evolution and development. We are now more than we have ever been, the active agents; practically all created things are our subjects. This is something frightening if it is not accompanied by a new moral and spiritual vision that finds expression in a new ethical practice. This is urgent. So much destructive change is already upon us. What is needed is a new political will to seek the good of the whole planet and all its life-forms; to use our powers with a view to the common good of the whole of creation. Indeed, we must recover and revive our soul for, without it, humanity itself becomes reduced to utility: empty and disposable, depending on the fashion or on the power elites of a given time and place.
The key idea in Laudato si’ is that of koinonia, or communio: it is fellowship or inter-relationality. In one sense, the whole of creation is a koinonia of life, interdependence and inter-relationality, but it is more than this. As used in the New Testament, this koinonia takes on a new reality: the life of the Holy Spirit who ‘makes all things new’ in Christ. This moves us beyond a natural dependency and inter-relatedness to something much deeper: a loving of the other, not because of need or obligation, but because of love itself – an enjoyment or delight in the other and their good. This is a deep and continuous conversion of the Christian life, but it is also the way to salvation for our world.
Imagine a world which is transformed in this koinonia, where we are all conscious that I cannot be ‘I’ without ‘you’ and ‘we’. We already glimpse this when we are moved in sympathy and empathy by the suffering or the joy of others. We have seen it in so many ways, such as the extraordinary and often heroic generosity of people in the pandemic. In our vulnerabilities, we discover again our community of gratuity: a glimpse of a new sort of society.
Now, Fratelli tutti is also asking us to use our imagination to see this different way of being a community or society. If, in Laudato si’, we have the sense of a whole community of creation, this is developed in Fratelli tutti at the level of human society and is uniquely personal. ‘Fraternal friendship’ cannot really be made an abstract notion because, in a genuine ‘friendship’, we recognise the face of the other and we appreciate them for who they are. At its basic level, it is the prior decision to treat all whom I meet with openness and respect. I am already disposed to them, even before I come to know them personally. In doing this, I think I am living my own humanity in its fullest. It has a remarkably hopeful sense of who we are, what we can do, and what we can be together. The parable of the Good Samaritan, which frames Fratelli tutti, shows us that, in being human – in not being blind or deaf to the suffering and need of the other, even if they are our enemy or from a different class or group – we can forge something new. We can break out of the prisons of our prejudices and our social determinisms to assert and recover our freedom and our humanity. If we lived in a society where the Good Samaritan was the norm and not the exception, imagine how secure and creative that society would be. Although Fratelli tutti does envisage an open world, with permeable borders, it also has a deep sense of the local in terms of place, time and community. It understands that, to grow internationally, we also need to have roots that continue to nourish us and give us identity. So, the local and the development of the local is also critical but, again, it is at its best when it is not isolated but, rather, occurs in relation to the whole. At the same time, the whole cannot overwhelm or diminish the local. There is something very true here – both at a human as well as at a political level – but it also means that there is a pedagogy that we all need to undergo. I wonder if the Church does not have something to offer. As Catholics, we certainly belong to our local communities, but we also have a profound sense of belonging, too, to a universal Church, in time as well as space.
Fratelli tutti has some practical ways of practising this ‘social friendship’ and, in many ways, you could see them as expanding the corporal and spiritual works of mercy beyond the immediate circle to that of our national and international concerns: the welcoming of the stranger, giving shelter to the homeless (both those on our streets and those who have been deprived of their country and forcibly displaced), feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, giving sustenance to the poor in giving them the means to live by creating economic systems of just wealth distribution and employment, and providing adequate welfare support for those whose circumstances condemn them to poverty. There are also those ‘works’ that nourish and feed the soul. As you can see, all these very basic and beautiful works of care are works of life. They are also works that must have transformative political and economic consequences. The Church cannot adequately defend the right to life if it does not also defend and promote just economic, social and religious means to sustain lives.
There are many ways in which Fratelli tutti develops and explores its key theme of ‘social fraternity’, that real personal concern and care for the other and their good, which we have already noticed at the heart of Laudato si’. Two that certainly impressed me were the need for a new type of politics and the re-ordering of the internet to be an instrument of human development and liberation, rather than a ‘web’ of dark fantasy, untruth and surveillance. I think we are all conscious of the way in which political discourse has been debased and polarised, placing democracy itself in jeopardy. However, I think, perhaps, we have come to take democracy for granted. It is easy for it to become manipulated by different power-groups and interests for their own gain. So, in this respect, I think Fratelli tutti is an important intervention, coming now in the middle of a pandemic. Although Covid-19 has tested all our systems and communities, exposing our fragilities, along with the urgencies of climate change, it also calls us to wake up and begin to change, rebuild and renew our systems with a new vision and a new set of values. We must not forget that Fratelli tutti is also a development of the 2019 Declaration on Human Fraternity, which Pope Francis signed in partnership with the Grand Imam. I think, in time, this will also be seen as a prophetic statement, not only for what it says but also for the sort of inter-religious co-operation it models. Not only does the declaration affirm basic rights (especially the rights of women and children) but it also emphasises the concern that both Christianity and Islam have for the environment. There is indeed a common faith in the dignity, value and ultimate destiny of the person and of humanity itself.
Both Laudato si’ and Fratelli tutti are impressive Christian blueprints for societies in which everyone can live, whatever their faith, nationality or politics. Francis is not afraid to name our darknesses, but he always lets in the light. He always helps us to see ourselves and each other with a deeper richer humanity, compassion, imagination and courage. And, of course, it is not by accident that they both take their titles from St Francis of Assisi and the new Christian humanism which he inspired.
2. Politics and the common goodIt is interesting that Fratelli tutti devotes an important section to this and also to a critique of neo-liberalism, economically and politically (§154). In this, it stands within the great tradition of Catholic Social Thought. The Church does not advocate one political or economic model, but it does set out the principles that should guide all models. The basic one is that the common good, the lasting human good, is the end to which all political thought is ordered. This will also include special attention to those who are deliberately or inadvertently excluded; a humane society will also seek to protect and care for the vulnerable and powerless. One of the most remarkable aspects of the Old Testament is God’s concern for the poor, for justice and the obligations of the elite not to govern only for themselves or to exploit the poor and the powerless, but the reverse: to provide for them and defend them. Only in this way will society flourish. Not only does the Old Testament present a remarkable vision of God, but also of the society that God wants for us. Of course, this is actually performed in the New Testament by Jesus’s actions, and especially in the Beatitudes. The resurrected Christ is the guarantor of a resurrected humanity. In this context, the Church has a mission to alert us to the dangers of ‘false prophets’ and movements. We know in Europe what this means because we have lived with the consequences for so many generations and the price has been too high. In times of great transition, when our societies feel under threat and life appears even more precarious than usual, it is always tempting to allow ourselves to be seduced by these ‘false prophets’ or want to return to the captivity of Egypt. The Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggemann, reminds us that Pharaoh is an image of all the powers that would seek to enslave us. The experience of Covid-19 has also shown us that we cannot stand on our own. We need an international community; we need the talents of all our peoples and our friends; and we also need systems that will ensure a just distribution of vaccines and of any financial aid that is necessary to sustain economic life and order. We have seen that ideologies fade before such a universal threat and that change is possible when we have both the will and the imagination to make it happen. Yet, as we have seen, Fratelli tutti also recognises the need for the local, indeed, the restoration of the civic sphere to national life. This distribution of power and responsibility, with a proper understanding of the Catholic social doctrine of subsidiarity, can actually re-balance our systems and help to remove the fears that ideologies manufacture and exploit. Of course, as Fratelli tutti also recognises, we need a new sort of politics and political discourse that respects its people enough to value truth, to recognise the facts, and to engage in rational arguments which are open to critique and judgement in pursuit of solutions to the urgent social, human and ecological challenges that we face. We all know the complexities of the circumstances and the challenges we face; we are mature enough to recognise that there is no easy solution, but we need governments and leaders who can mobilise the generosity, creativity and gifts of the whole community if we are to create a better home for all.
I think, though, we should not dismiss ‘populism’ without first trying to understand it. For me, it somehow contains a cry of pain and despair, which politicians have used without ever addressing. There is certainly an anger and a fear of people who themselves feel left behind and marginalised. It is one of the great gifts of Pope Francis that he knows how to ‘listen’ – not just at a superficial level, but to the language of the heart and of the soul. This is a deep, open, humble and respectful act. I wonder what our politics would be like if we practised it first without rushing to translate into our own categories, statistics and theories? In every protester, there is a cry and, in every vote, there is hope. I would like to know first what these are before rushing to either judgement or solution.
If we are to accept the thesis of writers like John Micklethwait and Adrian Woolridge in their book, The Wake Up Call, the pandemic has not only exposed the fragilities of the West, but it heralds a shift of power to the East, especially China and other economies in that region. We have seen the recent ASEAN trade pact which will account for 30% of the global economy and have a market potential of 2.2 billion people: an expansion, while most Western economies will experience contraction. I think this will generate stresses and restructuring within our countries. That puts our democratic systems under pressure and, for this reason, if no other, we will need to avoid ideological extremes and the false oppositions they create. It is time to rethink not only our discourse but what we expect from our democracies in terms of their moral purpose and search for the common good.
3. Seeing with God’s eyesTo some extent, this links with my response to the previous question. There is more than one way of looking at the world and its complex truths. We not only need the power of both a well-formed and informed critical reason, but we also need our intuitions, affective dimension, imagination and, of course, our spiritual powers. We need to educate and form all of these and I think that is what happens not only in a good education but especially in our spiritual and devotional lives. One of the effects of prayer is to expand our heart and our minds. It gives us new eyes for seeing the world and for seeing God’s presence and work within it. In the Spiritual Exercises, before we are invited to join Christ in his mission, there is a sort of pedagogy, a school in which we come to see the world from God’s perspective, in all its complexity and need. This is the world to which the Father sends the Son and it is the world in which the creative, healing and gathering work of the Holy Spirit is always present. But God’s way of looking at our world – Jesus’s way of looking at and being in our world – is not the methodological neutrality of the scientist or the detachment of someone who is interested, maybe even concerned, but has no essential investment in it. Instead, God looks upon the world with the penetrating eyes of truth and love. God sees through our defences and our masks. God sees us and God’s look is one of compassion, mercy, joy and delight in us, but it is also one in which there is suffering and, in all these moments, God is drawn ever more deeply into our world. Contrary to what we might expect, God does not abandon or reject us.
For all the different elements in Fratelli tutti, and sometimes we would have to admit that it can be a bit long, it always invites us to look at our world through the eyes of Christ. Of course, Christ never erases or makes those who are poor, lost or marginalised disappear. For him, they are never an embarrassment or an inconvenience. As such, with Fratelli tutti, if we read it as a contemplation on our lives, relations, politics, longings and hopes, then I think we will experience it not so much as a piece of writing but as a personal address, a prayer and a pleading. You can hear the heartfelt prayer at §35, especially in the repeated Spanish, ‘Ojalá.’ I think this is all very Ignatian and, of course, that way of ‘looking’ with the heart and the intellect is also the necessary prelude to any discernment for action.
I think there are eight characteristics of Francis’ papacy that are so evident, whatever the circumstances:1) Christ – especially Christ in his humility, mercy, inclusiveness of the outsiders and love of the poor. From these Christological emphases comes his own pastoral and teaching emphases;2) mercy and compassion;3) the focus on the poor and those on the periphery;4) the commitment to renewal and reform – especially with regards to abuse and the recovery of the vision of Vatican II;5) Francis’ pastoral reality, to which he is open and attentive. This is the way in which he provides a safe and loving space for all men and women, whoever they are. Much like the father in the parable of the prodigal son, he always welcomes the son home. The son knows he is secure in the father’s love. And it is a love that faces the realities of the situation;6) patience and discernment;7) humility, which comes from his own sense of failure, but also from his knowledge that he is only a servant of Christ; and8) I think he is a pope who is genuinely open to the Holy Spirit and attentive to the Spirit’s promptings, even when that can make things long and difficult – this is the measure of Francis’ freedom and fidelity.
I believe the time of the Covid pandemic can help Christians to live our faith in a more authentic way. Of course, for many, it will also be a time in which our faith is tested and questioned, a time of anxiety and loss. But it is in such moments that we discover that, no matter how profound our philosophies, there are no answers to the mysteries of suffering and the strange unpredictable contingencies of our lives. There are not answers, there is only God and all our questions ultimately lead to the person of Christ, crucified and risen, who is with us until the end of time. At our baptism, we are given a candle and the Church asks us to keep that light burning, for it will light our way through the world and bring us home to Christ. It is his light that burns in us through the gift of the Holy Spirit. But it is not just a light for ourselves. It is a light which we also carry for others, that they may not stumble or, if they do or if they get lost, then they can find their way again by the light that our lives and our faith provide.
As I suggested above, there are always those works of love and care that are needed, especially at this time. Such acts, no matter how small, are witnesses that the darkness will never triumph, and the light will never be put out. Those works, however, spring from the life of faith nourished in prayer and in the sacraments. I think that, during this time, many people have discovered prayer again and maybe even found new ways of praying. A number of our retreat houses have moved their work and their programmes online, so even more people can now access them. Many have also discovered that they really like attending Mass virtually in other countries or other parishes and towns. Although these can never be a substitute for our actual presence, nevertheless, we are discovering the richness and extensiveness of our Catholic Church. There is a real generosity and heroism which has come to the surface and that, I think, is itself a grace. Perhaps, too, whether it is online, or it is just in the daily routines of prayer and living, we touch again the reality of the community of faith. We are held in this community, both seen and unseen, here and now, and also gathered into the presence of God. In faith, we are never alone.
4. Finding Christ in the worldI think Christians are always both [dwellers and seekers]. We ‘dwell’ as members of the Church – a Church that is not bound by space or time. We ‘dwell’ in the liturgy and in the sacraments and these not only make the other ‘dwellers’ present to us, but they also open the world itself as the place in which we are rooted. And, of course, we are not only ‘dwellers’ but we are also ‘indwelt’, for Christ dwells in us and gives us his Spirit ‘who makes his home in us.’
I think that there are two forms of this ‘inquietude’: the first is that searching of love itself. Love itself makes us ‘seekers’. Faith not only seeks understanding; it seeks the one who is the light and the life of that understanding. It seeks to love more the Love that is beyond understanding. The more we come to love and know Christ, the more we will always want to know and love. His love is infinite, and we will never exhaust it, but it is a wonderful and joyous seeking. Normally, we are seekers because we feel that we have lost something or that there is something we do not have that we wish to find. This ‘seeking’ of our faith in love is exactly the reverse: in finding Christ and in being found by him, we are summoned to always go deeper into the life that is God, and we seek that life through the way that Christ is for us.
The second ‘inquietude’ is the restless heart and mind which has not found anything or feels that it has lost something that it once had or should have had. This is a tragic way and perhaps it sometimes ends in cynicism and despair. Often, it will follow so many things but, in the end, they will always disappoint. Sometimes, the secularised world wants to see this sort of seeking as a noble freedom. It is idealised in the poem Ulysses by Alfred Tennyson: ‘To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.’ You can hear echoes of it in Star Trek: ‘To boldly go where no man has gone before’! Now, there is something noble in this quest to measure the frontiers of our universe and master knowledge of it, but perhaps the secret is disclosed – ‘to master’ – so is it really a quest for knowledge or for power? Ultimately, of course, even the noblest quest must come to dwell in the house of death. So, I think we need to be conscious that we are not deceived by the myths of the secular and especially the way in which it constructs its own grandiose self-legitimating narratives.
Our contemporary culture, whatever it may say about itself, is not a God-free zone. God cannot be excluded because we prefer his absence and think that this makes us more liberated and progressive. All such myths of the imperial self soon end as artefacts in the museums of past cultures. There is something about being human which also makes us ‘seekers’ in the deepest sense and to lose that or suppress it is to diminish our own humanity and, indeed, the infinite depth of the multi-dimensional world God has created for us. The challenge for the Church is to become a dwelling place of seekers, to be a ‘seeking’ Church: to go into our culture and to find those who are lost or confused seekers or maybe even those who have given up. Secular culture is a new moment for searching and we know the promise of Christ: ‘seek and you will find.’
I am reminded of a Hasidic story. A man rushes home to tell his wife that the great rabbi has said that the Messiah is coming. He asks his wife how they should prepare to welcome him when he comes. All she says is that they must prepare by becoming better Jews first.
I think it is the same for the Society of Jesus. We have such wonderful works and apostolates to offer in the service of the Church, our culture and, indeed, the world. But the most precious thing of all is ourselves, our faith in Christ and our knowledge, love and dedication to God and our neighbour. If Christ is alive for us, he will be alive for all whom we serve and to whom we desire to reach out. Our works are only a means to this end. They should not become a substitute for this. Christ has chosen us and our Society to be his companions and to ‘labour in the vineyard of the Lord.’ This gives us a great freedom and, throughout its history, the Society has shown itself to be courageous, creative and resilient in its service.
I think we need to be alert to the ‘enemy of our human nature’ that will always seek to make us preoccupied with our lack of resources or our low numbers. Our resources will always outstrip our needs and our desires. But that is also part of God’s way of employing us – it is the deeper reality of our poverty which means that we totally reliant upon God and those whom God sends.
Our one mission is to love Christ and to see him in our world, in the faces of those around us, in both the sceptics and the seekers, in the distracted and the disinterested, and especially in those who seek him alongside us. For me, the founding contemplation of the Society is the contemplation of the nativity in the Spiritual Exercises. There, Ignatius asks us to place ourselves in the presence of Christ newly born. We are present before the new-born and vulnerable Christ-child as ‘a poor unworthy servant’ but completely attentive to see how we might be of some small service to him and his mother. Christ makes himself known here in the humility of his fragility and need and we are present to him in our own poverty and gratitude. These seem to me to be fundamental dispositions of the Society of Jesus and the graces that we have to accomplish the mission we have received from Christ and his Church. This is the deep affective school of the heart in which every Jesuit lives and is called to the service and sacrifice of love.
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: Ulverstone - Fridays (10am - 10:30am), Devonport - Saturday (5:15pm– 5.45pm)
Eucharistic Adoration - Devonport: No Adoration for the month of January, 2021
Prayer Group: Charismatic Renewal – In Recess until February, 2021
SUNDAY MASS ONLINE:
Please go to the following link on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MLCP1
Mon 4th Jan NO MASS
Tues 5th Jan Devonport 9:30am
Wed 6th Jan Ulverstone 9:30am
Thurs 7th Jan Devonport 1:00pm - Funeral Mass
Fri 8th Jan Ulverstone 9:30am
Sat 9th Jan Devonport 6:00pm
Ulverstone 6:00pm
Sun 10th Jan Devonport 10:00am ... Baptism of the Lord: Livestreamed
Ulverstone 10:00am
If you are looking for Sunday Mass readings or Daily Mass readings, Universalis has the readings as well as the various Hours of the Divine Office - https://universalis.com/mass.htm
Dot Prior, Regina Locket, Allan McIntyre, Loretta Visser, Aidan Ravaillion, David Ockwell, Judy Redgrove, Sam Eiler, & ...
Let us pray for those who have died recently:
Gladys Mulcahy, Norman Archery, Frances Robinson, Erin Kyriazis, Sr Annette Condon, Mary Bosworth, Fr Frank Young, Ann Radford, Marianne Riek
Let us pray for those whose anniversary occurs about this time: 30th December, 2020 – 5th January, 2021
Thelma Batt, Barbara George, Rob Belanger, Pearl Sheridan, William Cousins, Bill Kruk, Ian Stubbs, Tori Enniss, Nicola Tenaglia, Roy Beechey, Cavell Robertson, Joshua Delaney, Elizabeth Delaney, Tess Landers, Alfred Harrison, Virginia Miller, Nancy Bramich, Janelle Payne
May the souls of the faithful departed,
through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen
PREGO REFLECTION ON TODAY’S GOSPEL
As I come to prayer today, I notice that the feast of the Epiphany also marks the end of the main Christmas period.
I may wish to reflect on what has happened over the last twelve days … both the good moments, for which I give thanks … and also the more difficult ones.
In what ways have I been able to see the ‘light’ and ‘glory’ of the Lord?
When I’ve ‘lifted my eyes and looked round’, who have I seen coming towards me?
Maybe someone in my family, or an unexpected stranger asking for my help...?
I ponder how it has felt to bring my gifts ... chosen in the hope that those receiving them might truly understand that ‘it can be Christmas every day, because Christmas means love’.
If I can, I give thanks to the Lord for his unfailing presence and loving support during this Christmastide.
Weekly Ramblings
No Ramblings this week, final posting will be in next week’s Bulletin. You can got to Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/MLCP1) or YouTube – search Mersey Leven Catholic Parish – for my Friday Ramblings.
Take care and stay safe when travelling.
SINULOG FESTIVAL 2021
The Feast of Sr Sto. Nino, the Holy Child Jesus, will be celebrated on 17th January with Mass at Our Lady of Lourdes at 10am followed by a luncheon at the Parish Hall. As Sinulog Festival is a Parish event, all parishioners are encouraged to join the occasion. Please bring a plate of food to share.
Novena to Sr Sto Nino will run for nine days, starting 8th January until 16th January prior to the Feast Day. Details of the Novena will be posted on Church noticeboards and on FaceBook. A copy of the schedule is available on request.
Signs of the Times
Dysfunctional Fantasists And Clever Manipulators
American opposition to Pope Francis in the post-Trump era - Massimo Faggioli, Rome, December 22, 2020.
This article is from the La-Croix International website - you can access the site here but complete full access is via paid subscription
"Any decent Church would've burned you bastards years ago," says Bartholomew "Barley" Scott Blair in The Russia House, scripted by Tom Stoppard and based on the 1989 novel by John le Carré.
Blair, a British writer, is expressing his contempt for the zealous MI6 agents who see no difference between the old Soviet Union and the Russia that Blair is trying to find.
Fortunately, the Catholic Church no longer burns heretics. But there has been a good deal of subversive attempts in the past few years to undermine the authority and legitimacy of Pope Francis.
Now that Donald Trump's presidency is coming to an end, it is easier to see what happened in the last five years on the transatlantic axis between the USA and the Vatican.
A theological-political opposition to Francis went fully political and partisan, aligning itself to the Trump presidency and eventually losing any sense of reality.
Shifting alliances in a new religious ecosystem
Once again, the recently deceased British author of espionage novels, John le Carré (1931-2020), has something to say to Catholics who are trying to understand this new religious ecosystem, where allegiances and loyalties are shifting rapidly and the old institutional ethos is hard to find in the ecclesial personalities making the news.
Christopher Tayler of the London Review of Books recently wrote a short blog post in memoriam of le Carré and found much truth in the novel The Looking Glass War (1965), not just on the Cold War, but also on Great Britain today.
"That novel is about a group of ageing, dysfunctional fantasists, obsessed with the glories of the Second World War, who launch a doomed operation against a European target on the basis of misunderstandings, wishful thinking and internal political squabbles," he notes.
"Everybody dies or comes to a sudden chilling realization that, of the operation's two nominal leaders, one is completely detached from reality, and the other is a clever manipulator – though not as clever as he thinks he is – whose studied eccentricity conceals a frightening inner emptiness. Their target is a non-existent East German rocket site rather than access to the Single Market, but otherwise it's a Cold War classic that also stands up as a state-of-the-nation novel in December 2020," Tayler concludes.
Dysfunctional fantasists and clever manipulators with a frightening inner emptiness... This can be applied not only to Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his ally Jacob Rees-Mogg (Leader of the House of Commons and Lord President of the Council since 2019, a wealthy social conservative, and proud Catholic).
The Trump-Viganò liaison dangereuse
It can also be applied to the Catholic Church, particularly in the United States.
Donald Trump and the former papal nuncio to Washington, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, have entered a dangerous relationship that became public several times over the last year.
The archbishop addressed the president with a series of public messages during the 2020 election campaign. Trump returned the favor by praising Viganò and trying to legitimize him.
This liaison dangereuse continued well into the post-November 3rd transition period during the Trump campaign's attempts to undermine the legitimacy of the election through legal challenges and public rallies with the defeated president's supporters.
At a rally in Washington on December 12, Viganò made a video appearance. There were also number of Catholic priests who were physically present at the gathering and one of them addressed the Trump supporters from a podium, delivering something like a political exorcism of Joe Biden's electoral victory.
US bishops and the crisis of authority
The list of ecclesial figures who are standing by Trump, goes well beyond Viganò. It is too long and embarrassing to compile here. Their political and theological attempt has failed, but the damage has been done and will have long-lasting effects.
The hierarchical elites of the Catholic Church in the United States were already in a crisis of authority. It has now become a much more serious crisis of legitimacy.
In a sense, the bishops have already been substituted in their role. Conservative Catholics now look to the conservative justices of the Supreme Court as their moral leaders, while progressive Catholics are now looking to Joe Biden.
But clearly this is just an interlude.
As George Smiley interrogates and turns Grigoriev, the commercial attaché of the Soviet Embassy in Bern, the now trapped collaborator of Smiley's archenemy bursts out with something that could be applied to Viganò and the cabal of Trumpian America: "Conspiracy has replaced religion. It is our mystical substitute!"
Catholics vs. Catholics
During this year of the pandemic, Francis' Catholic enemies — and not just Viganò — had already proudly embraced a number of conspiracy theories.
There was the manifesto last May — signed by Viganò and three cardinals — that expressed a neo-Christendom view of the relations between Church and State.
That manifesto — which was also signed by Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas — warned of "the hidden intentions of supranational bodies" and "subtle forms of dictatorship, presumably worse than those our society has seen rise and fall in the recent past.
"These attempts have recently come home — that is, to America. If one looks at the video of the pro-Trump rally of December 12 and the Catholic priests who were there, it is painfully clear that conspiracy theories have indeed replaced religion.
And they are conspiracy theories that accompany and legitimize the use of violence in the street of the nation's capital.
Pope Francis is an old priest who knows how much out of step with the real Church these ideologues are. The serious problem is that these conspiracy theories among Catholics hostile to him are the mere reflection of a vast conspiracy mentality that has infiltrated political institutions.
The use of conspiracy theories by Catholics against fellow Catholics is something new, and there is not much the pope can do about it. He can do even less to save our politics.
Storydancing
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
I asked a theologian friend “What comes to your mind when I say the word ‘incarnation’?” Without hesitating, he responded, “Dance.” Dance is an art that allows all of our body to express itself beyond boundaries. Sacred dance, ritual dance, and many other forms of dance allow individuals and communities to experience the grace and joy of being incarnated into a body. You don’t have to be trained or even skillful to experience this; you simply have to be willing to move beyond your comfort zone. Today’s practice invites you to explore telling your story through movement. Trauma therapist Dr. Jamie Marich writes:
A dynamic practice can be simply challenging yourself to look deeply into your heart and tell your story to the dance floor, a process I’ve come to call storydancing. This can be the story of your whole life or the story of what you’re living through right now. . . . You may feel called to use this practice for the purpose of transformation and manifestation, allowing the dance to help create a new ending, or usher in a new chapter. . . .
Perhaps you’ve already explored dancing with your breath, your heart, your mind, your body, and your concept of spirit. Notice what’s happening within you. I now invite you to allow all the elements to work together and create your story.
- Tell your story to the earth below you, the space around you.
- Your space is your canvas, your body is the paintbrush. Allow your story to be
created in your space. The colors and the elements are being sent to you right now through your breath, through your spirit.
- Paint your story, create your story, dance your story in this space!
- You have options—it may feel organic to simply dance the story up to this present moment. If you believe that old story lines prevent you from experiencing the joy of the present moment, perhaps just notice those different story lines that pop up as you dance. Practice the challenge of noticing them, letting them go, and then returning to the present moment. If you feel inspired to move your story from this present moment and let the dance help you create a desired ending or a new, desired chapter in the journey, keep going with that process.
Dancing the element of story in personal practice is much like writing a journal, songwriting, or creating visual art. As many musicians and artists will tell you, we often create just for ourselves, for practice, for exploration, even if we never share the finished product. So, think about your dancing practice as a way to dance what you might normally write in your journal.
Reference:
Jamie Marich, PhD., Dancing Mindfulness: A Creative Path to Healing & Transformation (Skylights Paths Publishing: 2016), 114‒115, 117.
For Further Study:
Diarmuid Ó Murchú, Incarnation: A New Evolutionary Threshold (Orbis Books: 2017).
Ronald Rolheiser and Richard Rohr, Adult Christianity and How to Get There (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2004), CD, MP3 download.
Richard Rohr, Essential Teachings on Love, ed. Joelle Chase and Judy Traeger (Orbis Books: 2018).
Richard Rohr, Franciscan Mysticism: I AM That Which I Am Seeking (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2012), CD, MP3 download.
Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe (Convergent Books: 2019).
Mirabai Starr, Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce and Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics (Sounds True: 2019).
Howard Thurman, The Mood of Christmas and Other Celebrations (Friends United Press: 1985, ©1973).
My Top Ten Books For 2020
When St. Augustine said that “concerning taste there can be no dispute”, he was only partially right. Admittedly, taste always has a subjective aspect; but there’s always an objective component as well: objectively, a cheap soda is not a fine wine, millions of musical compositions are not Mozart, and the picture that your kindergarten child drew for your birthday is not a Van Gogh.
With that being said as an apologia, I admit that my selection of these ten books has a strongly subjective factor. These are simply the books that spoke most deeply to me this past year. Perhaps they won’t do the same for you. Nonetheless, I assure you that none of them is a cheap soda or a crayon picture a child drew for your birthday.
Which ten books spoke to me most deeply this past year?
Clare Carlisle, Philosopher of the Heart, The Restless Life of Soren Kierkegaard. If you’ve never read a good introduction to the life and work of Soren Kierkegaard, this is your book. It’s a unique combination of scholarship, clear writing, criticism of, and sympathy for Kierkegaard.
Michael J. Buckley, What Do You Seek? The Questions of Jesus as Challenge and Promise. Among the books I read this year, this book challenged me the most personally. Buckley, who died in 2019, shines a light into your soul and shows where the both the challenge and promise of Jesus lie.
Frederick Buechner, The Magnificent Defeat. First published in 1966, this book only found me this year. An ordained Presbyterian minister, Buechner is theologian, poet, philosopher, novelist, and essayist and always worth the read, particularly this book. Some rare insights.
Mark Wallace, When God was a Bird – Christianity, Animism, and the Re-Enchantment of the World. As Christians we believe that God wrote two books: the Bible and the world of nature. As Christians, we have both books; animists and pagans have just the one book, the book of nature. Wallace submits that it’s time (both for a fuller understanding of our own faith and for a healthier relationship to the natural world) for us as Christians to take the book of nature more seriously and be less afraid of animism. His insights will stretch you but keep you solid doctrinally.
Gerhard Lohfink, Prayer Takes Us Home, The Theology and Practice of Christian Prayer. Gerhard Lohfink is a German biblical scholar and always worth reading. This is his fourth book in English and, like his others, it as a rare combination of scholarship, personal faith, and good clear writing.
Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog. This is a novel written in 2006 that’s full of insight, wit, and surprise. Not for you if you’re looking for action. This is staring at a work of art, but asking yourself repeatedly, how could its creator be that clever?
Marilynne Robinson, Jack. Time magazine lists her as one of the 100 most influential people in America and that’s true, certainly for my own life. Marilynne Robinson is a highly acclaimed novelist and a deeply insightful religious writer. This book, Jack, will demand a little patience on your part. Don’t give up on it because nothing moves in the first 50 pages. In the end, the book will move you.
Helen Prejean, River of Fire, My Spiritual Journey. The author of Dead Man Walking shares her autobiography. This is the conversion story of an exceptional woman who, it would seem, didn’t need a conversion. Candid, honest, deep.
Lyn Cowan, Portrait of the Blue Lady, The Character of Melancholy. Another book that was written sixteen years ago but only found me this year. It’s a book on melancholy written by a brilliant Jungian and mythologist. Here’s a taste: “Melancholy has even lost its name: melancholy is now ‘depression’, clinicalized, pathologized, and undifferentiated from the blue ‘melancholy’ formerly recognized by poets, philosophers, blues singers and doctors alike, now experienced as a ‘treatable illness’ rather than a difficult, often painful affliction of the soul that is not an illness and doesn’t want treatment.” For Cowan, melancholy is your inroad to befriending the deeper parts of your soul.
Ira Byock, The Four Things that Matter Most. First published in 2004, this is a very popular book that deserves to be popular. Byock gives his whole thesis in the book’s opening sentence. The four most important things you will ever say are: Please forgive me. I forgive you. Thank you. I love you. These are words people tend to utter on their deathbeds. However, as Byock urges, it is best to start saying them long before our loved ones gather round our deathbed. The saddest words we say? “It might have been!”
Beyond these ten books, I also highly recommend Pope Francis’ new Encyclical, Fratelli Tutti.
These are the ten books that spoke deeply to me this year. I can’t guarantee they will do that for you. But I can guarantee that none of them is a cheap soda!
Exploring Fratelli Tutti
James Hanvey SJ, the Society of Jesus’s Secretary for the Service of the Faith, recently spoke at length about Pope Francis’ latest encyclical to Jan Regner SJ, Editor of the Czech Jesuit review, Jezuité. As Thinking Faith reflects this Advent on our Sunday scriptures in the light of Fratelli tutti, we are pleased to be able to publish their interview. In this first instalment, Fr Hanvey reflects on Fratelli tutti in the context of Pope Francis’ other teachings, especially Laudato si’.
James Hanvey SJ is Secretary of the Service of the Faith for the Society of Jesus. He was speaking to Jan Regner SJ, Editor of Jezuité, the Czech Jesuit cultural review, in which this interview will also be published.
This article is taken from the ThinkingFaith.org website where you can find a wide range of articles by clicking here
1. Freedom, joy and friendship
There is a remarkable continuity and coherence of thought in all of Pope Francis’ writing and speaking. Although it is often written in a direct and ‘homely’ style, that should not distract us from its freshness, profundity and, in many ways, its prophetic voice. In Laudato si’, there is an extraordinary powerful and evocative imaginative connection drawn between the cry of the poor and the cry of the earth. That opens up a new way of seeing and ‘hearing’ the ecological systems of our common home.
The world is not an infinite and inferior resource to be instrumentalised for our own ends. The creation and manipulation of desires by our economic and information systems is endless. They operate with the relentless logic of our consumerist way of life. They require the endless generation of desire that, in fact, despite giving the impression of freedom of choice and self-expression, imprisons us. In order to do so, we are made prisoners of a sort of ‘ground-hog’ or Beckett-like logic: everything is offered on the basis that it will satisfy our desires but, by the same logic, it must always ensure that our desires are never satisfied. We must always be taught to want something more: a world of ‘hyper desire’, which only exists by generating fantasy and illusion. In this sense, as Jean Baudrillard might observe, we are given a ‘simulacrum’ which has become a sort of deception. While this exhausts the human subject and the world in which we live, it also creates something deeper than frustration: it creates a vast emptiness in the unsatisfied soul. It is almost as if the natural transcendence of being human, that Augustinian ‘inquietude’, has been turned inward and become an infinite interior abyss. This is the quiet ghost of nihilism that stalks our post-modern world. We are exiled in a world that is constantly made to disappoint us because our relationship to it – and to each other – has been made into one of pure utility. At best, satisfaction is transient; it is deliberately so, for we must always be left with wanting something more or something else. Even wanting to ‘be someone’ in our cultures demands an endless manufacturing of the self. The short-term nature of desire or its transience is built in, a ‘throw-away culture’ in which everything – and I mean everything – becomes disposable because desire always has to have a new object.
This is quite different from the ‘natural transience’ of being finite. That tends to work in the reverse: it makes us value and cherish, to ‘love that well which thou must leave ere long’, as Shakespeare beautifully captures it in Sonnet 73. Looked at in this way, our whole social and economic system has a sort of toxicity, which affects the delicate balances of our planet’s ecosystems. Now at this level, I think we can see that Fratelli tutti is a further reflection on Laudato si’: it casts light on the different forms of our social and international ‘toxicities’. Yet what I like about both encyclicals is that neither rests simply with a negative analysis; that would be easy and would eventually be a counsel of despair, which simply reinforces the nihilism, especially in its most destructive and radical form when it becomes a condition of the soul. However, like all of Francis’ writings, they offer positive remedies which at first may seem utopian but are, in fact, very practical. They begin with small steps and changes and then move into the larger picture. In other words, far from being ‘letters of despair’, they remind us that we have a freedom to change and to bring about the good; it is not too far beyond us, although it will require a sort moral vision and purpose. And, of course, both writings are filled with joy, which is the hallmark of Francis’ faith and teaching: the joy of knowing Christ. For many in Europe, faith has become tired or something that meets with indifference – at most, a sort of memory that is renewed on occasions like the great festivals of Christmas or Easter, marking certain transitional moments of our lives.
But Francis reminds us that faith is a source of life and joy and possibility for the whole of our lives; it calls us to a new level of relationality and opens our hearts and our minds to the depth of all that is. Faith, then, does not limit the horizons of our knowing or living or freedom, but expands them. It not only bestows upon us a responsibility for the world in which we live and create – the world who is my neighbour – but it gives us joy in the work of serving this world and all the life that it contains. There is a joy in Christian life, which comes from knowing that we participate in the restoration and sanctification of the world which Christ has redeemed. Can there really be any greater honour or purpose or meaning than this?
Both Laudato si’ and Fratelli tutti ask us to rediscover what it might be to live in a world at peace with others and also with all life; to free ourselves from the falsehoods and systems which abuse and use us and our common home. They maintain that there is another way, not an easy way, or a simple way, but one that we can take if we have the courage and the desire to live in a life-giving and life-sustaining way: a new integral ecology of life and spirit. There is a ‘conversion’ that is asked of us, which is actually a recovery of our freedom to choose to break out of the prisons into which economic and social systems have put us and to live in a common home.
We now possess undreamed-of power, especially through our capacities for genetic engineering, so that we are no longer the passive subjects of evolution and development. We are now more than we have ever been, the active agents; practically all created things are our subjects. This is something frightening if it is not accompanied by a new moral and spiritual vision that finds expression in a new ethical practice. This is urgent. So much destructive change is already upon us. What is needed is a new political will to seek the good of the whole planet and all its life-forms; to use our powers with a view to the common good of the whole of creation. Indeed, we must recover and revive our soul for, without it, humanity itself becomes reduced to utility: empty and disposable, depending on the fashion or on the power elites of a given time and place.
The key idea in Laudato si’ is that of koinonia, or communio: it is fellowship or inter-relationality. In one sense, the whole of creation is a koinonia of life, interdependence and inter-relationality, but it is more than this. As used in the New Testament, this koinonia takes on a new reality: the life of the Holy Spirit who ‘makes all things new’ in Christ. This moves us beyond a natural dependency and inter-relatedness to something much deeper: a loving of the other, not because of need or obligation, but because of love itself – an enjoyment or delight in the other and their good. This is a deep and continuous conversion of the Christian life, but it is also the way to salvation for our world.
Imagine a world which is transformed in this koinonia, where we are all conscious that I cannot be ‘I’ without ‘you’ and ‘we’. We already glimpse this when we are moved in sympathy and empathy by the suffering or the joy of others. We have seen it in so many ways, such as the extraordinary and often heroic generosity of people in the pandemic. In our vulnerabilities, we discover again our community of gratuity: a glimpse of a new sort of society.
Now, Fratelli tutti is also asking us to use our imagination to see this different way of being a community or society. If, in Laudato si’, we have the sense of a whole community of creation, this is developed in Fratelli tutti at the level of human society and is uniquely personal. ‘Fraternal friendship’ cannot really be made an abstract notion because, in a genuine ‘friendship’, we recognise the face of the other and we appreciate them for who they are. At its basic level, it is the prior decision to treat all whom I meet with openness and respect. I am already disposed to them, even before I come to know them personally. In doing this, I think I am living my own humanity in its fullest. It has a remarkably hopeful sense of who we are, what we can do, and what we can be together. The parable of the Good Samaritan, which frames Fratelli tutti, shows us that, in being human – in not being blind or deaf to the suffering and need of the other, even if they are our enemy or from a different class or group – we can forge something new. We can break out of the prisons of our prejudices and our social determinisms to assert and recover our freedom and our humanity. If we lived in a society where the Good Samaritan was the norm and not the exception, imagine how secure and creative that society would be. Although Fratelli tutti does envisage an open world, with permeable borders, it also has a deep sense of the local in terms of place, time and community. It understands that, to grow internationally, we also need to have roots that continue to nourish us and give us identity. So, the local and the development of the local is also critical but, again, it is at its best when it is not isolated but, rather, occurs in relation to the whole. At the same time, the whole cannot overwhelm or diminish the local. There is something very true here – both at a human as well as at a political level – but it also means that there is a pedagogy that we all need to undergo. I wonder if the Church does not have something to offer. As Catholics, we certainly belong to our local communities, but we also have a profound sense of belonging, too, to a universal Church, in time as well as space.
Fratelli tutti has some practical ways of practising this ‘social friendship’ and, in many ways, you could see them as expanding the corporal and spiritual works of mercy beyond the immediate circle to that of our national and international concerns: the welcoming of the stranger, giving shelter to the homeless (both those on our streets and those who have been deprived of their country and forcibly displaced), feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, giving sustenance to the poor in giving them the means to live by creating economic systems of just wealth distribution and employment, and providing adequate welfare support for those whose circumstances condemn them to poverty. There are also those ‘works’ that nourish and feed the soul. As you can see, all these very basic and beautiful works of care are works of life. They are also works that must have transformative political and economic consequences. The Church cannot adequately defend the right to life if it does not also defend and promote just economic, social and religious means to sustain lives.
There are many ways in which Fratelli tutti develops and explores its key theme of ‘social fraternity’, that real personal concern and care for the other and their good, which we have already noticed at the heart of Laudato si’. Two that certainly impressed me were the need for a new type of politics and the re-ordering of the internet to be an instrument of human development and liberation, rather than a ‘web’ of dark fantasy, untruth and surveillance. I think we are all conscious of the way in which political discourse has been debased and polarised, placing democracy itself in jeopardy. However, I think, perhaps, we have come to take democracy for granted. It is easy for it to become manipulated by different power-groups and interests for their own gain. So, in this respect, I think Fratelli tutti is an important intervention, coming now in the middle of a pandemic. Although Covid-19 has tested all our systems and communities, exposing our fragilities, along with the urgencies of climate change, it also calls us to wake up and begin to change, rebuild and renew our systems with a new vision and a new set of values. We must not forget that Fratelli tutti is also a development of the 2019 Declaration on Human Fraternity, which Pope Francis signed in partnership with the Grand Imam. I think, in time, this will also be seen as a prophetic statement, not only for what it says but also for the sort of inter-religious co-operation it models. Not only does the declaration affirm basic rights (especially the rights of women and children) but it also emphasises the concern that both Christianity and Islam have for the environment. There is indeed a common faith in the dignity, value and ultimate destiny of the person and of humanity itself.
Both Laudato si’ and Fratelli tutti are impressive Christian blueprints for societies in which everyone can live, whatever their faith, nationality or politics. Francis is not afraid to name our darknesses, but he always lets in the light. He always helps us to see ourselves and each other with a deeper richer humanity, compassion, imagination and courage. And, of course, it is not by accident that they both take their titles from St Francis of Assisi and the new Christian humanism which he inspired.
2. Politics and the common good
It is interesting that Fratelli tutti devotes an important section to this and also to a critique of neo-liberalism, economically and politically (§154). In this, it stands within the great tradition of Catholic Social Thought. The Church does not advocate one political or economic model, but it does set out the principles that should guide all models. The basic one is that the common good, the lasting human good, is the end to which all political thought is ordered. This will also include special attention to those who are deliberately or inadvertently excluded; a humane society will also seek to protect and care for the vulnerable and powerless. One of the most remarkable aspects of the Old Testament is God’s concern for the poor, for justice and the obligations of the elite not to govern only for themselves or to exploit the poor and the powerless, but the reverse: to provide for them and defend them. Only in this way will society flourish. Not only does the Old Testament present a remarkable vision of God, but also of the society that God wants for us. Of course, this is actually performed in the New Testament by Jesus’s actions, and especially in the Beatitudes. The resurrected Christ is the guarantor of a resurrected humanity. In this context, the Church has a mission to alert us to the dangers of ‘false prophets’ and movements. We know in Europe what this means because we have lived with the consequences for so many generations and the price has been too high. In times of great transition, when our societies feel under threat and life appears even more precarious than usual, it is always tempting to allow ourselves to be seduced by these ‘false prophets’ or want to return to the captivity of Egypt. The Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggemann, reminds us that Pharaoh is an image of all the powers that would seek to enslave us. The experience of Covid-19 has also shown us that we cannot stand on our own. We need an international community; we need the talents of all our peoples and our friends; and we also need systems that will ensure a just distribution of vaccines and of any financial aid that is necessary to sustain economic life and order. We have seen that ideologies fade before such a universal threat and that change is possible when we have both the will and the imagination to make it happen. Yet, as we have seen, Fratelli tutti also recognises the need for the local, indeed, the restoration of the civic sphere to national life. This distribution of power and responsibility, with a proper understanding of the Catholic social doctrine of subsidiarity, can actually re-balance our systems and help to remove the fears that ideologies manufacture and exploit. Of course, as Fratelli tutti also recognises, we need a new sort of politics and political discourse that respects its people enough to value truth, to recognise the facts, and to engage in rational arguments which are open to critique and judgement in pursuit of solutions to the urgent social, human and ecological challenges that we face. We all know the complexities of the circumstances and the challenges we face; we are mature enough to recognise that there is no easy solution, but we need governments and leaders who can mobilise the generosity, creativity and gifts of the whole community if we are to create a better home for all.
I think, though, we should not dismiss ‘populism’ without first trying to understand it. For me, it somehow contains a cry of pain and despair, which politicians have used without ever addressing. There is certainly an anger and a fear of people who themselves feel left behind and marginalised. It is one of the great gifts of Pope Francis that he knows how to ‘listen’ – not just at a superficial level, but to the language of the heart and of the soul. This is a deep, open, humble and respectful act. I wonder what our politics would be like if we practised it first without rushing to translate into our own categories, statistics and theories? In every protester, there is a cry and, in every vote, there is hope. I would like to know first what these are before rushing to either judgement or solution.
If we are to accept the thesis of writers like John Micklethwait and Adrian Woolridge in their book, The Wake Up Call, the pandemic has not only exposed the fragilities of the West, but it heralds a shift of power to the East, especially China and other economies in that region. We have seen the recent ASEAN trade pact which will account for 30% of the global economy and have a market potential of 2.2 billion people: an expansion, while most Western economies will experience contraction. I think this will generate stresses and restructuring within our countries. That puts our democratic systems under pressure and, for this reason, if no other, we will need to avoid ideological extremes and the false oppositions they create. It is time to rethink not only our discourse but what we expect from our democracies in terms of their moral purpose and search for the common good.
3. Seeing with God’s eyes
To some extent, this links with my response to the previous question. There is more than one way of looking at the world and its complex truths. We not only need the power of both a well-formed and informed critical reason, but we also need our intuitions, affective dimension, imagination and, of course, our spiritual powers. We need to educate and form all of these and I think that is what happens not only in a good education but especially in our spiritual and devotional lives. One of the effects of prayer is to expand our heart and our minds. It gives us new eyes for seeing the world and for seeing God’s presence and work within it. In the Spiritual Exercises, before we are invited to join Christ in his mission, there is a sort of pedagogy, a school in which we come to see the world from God’s perspective, in all its complexity and need. This is the world to which the Father sends the Son and it is the world in which the creative, healing and gathering work of the Holy Spirit is always present. But God’s way of looking at our world – Jesus’s way of looking at and being in our world – is not the methodological neutrality of the scientist or the detachment of someone who is interested, maybe even concerned, but has no essential investment in it. Instead, God looks upon the world with the penetrating eyes of truth and love. God sees through our defences and our masks. God sees us and God’s look is one of compassion, mercy, joy and delight in us, but it is also one in which there is suffering and, in all these moments, God is drawn ever more deeply into our world. Contrary to what we might expect, God does not abandon or reject us.
For all the different elements in Fratelli tutti, and sometimes we would have to admit that it can be a bit long, it always invites us to look at our world through the eyes of Christ. Of course, Christ never erases or makes those who are poor, lost or marginalised disappear. For him, they are never an embarrassment or an inconvenience. As such, with Fratelli tutti, if we read it as a contemplation on our lives, relations, politics, longings and hopes, then I think we will experience it not so much as a piece of writing but as a personal address, a prayer and a pleading. You can hear the heartfelt prayer at §35, especially in the repeated Spanish, ‘Ojalá.’ I think this is all very Ignatian and, of course, that way of ‘looking’ with the heart and the intellect is also the necessary prelude to any discernment for action.
I think there are eight characteristics of Francis’ papacy that are so evident, whatever the circumstances:
1) Christ – especially Christ in his humility, mercy, inclusiveness of the outsiders and love of the poor. From these Christological emphases comes his own pastoral and teaching emphases;
2) mercy and compassion;
3) the focus on the poor and those on the periphery;
4) the commitment to renewal and reform – especially with regards to abuse and the recovery of the vision of Vatican II;
5) Francis’ pastoral reality, to which he is open and attentive. This is the way in which he provides a safe and loving space for all men and women, whoever they are. Much like the father in the parable of the prodigal son, he always welcomes the son home. The son knows he is secure in the father’s love. And it is a love that faces the realities of the situation;
6) patience and discernment;
7) humility, which comes from his own sense of failure, but also from his knowledge that he is only a servant of Christ; and
8) I think he is a pope who is genuinely open to the Holy Spirit and attentive to the Spirit’s promptings, even when that can make things long and difficult – this is the measure of Francis’ freedom and fidelity.
I believe the time of the Covid pandemic can help Christians to live our faith in a more authentic way. Of course, for many, it will also be a time in which our faith is tested and questioned, a time of anxiety and loss. But it is in such moments that we discover that, no matter how profound our philosophies, there are no answers to the mysteries of suffering and the strange unpredictable contingencies of our lives. There are not answers, there is only God and all our questions ultimately lead to the person of Christ, crucified and risen, who is with us until the end of time. At our baptism, we are given a candle and the Church asks us to keep that light burning, for it will light our way through the world and bring us home to Christ. It is his light that burns in us through the gift of the Holy Spirit. But it is not just a light for ourselves. It is a light which we also carry for others, that they may not stumble or, if they do or if they get lost, then they can find their way again by the light that our lives and our faith provide.
As I suggested above, there are always those works of love and care that are needed, especially at this time. Such acts, no matter how small, are witnesses that the darkness will never triumph, and the light will never be put out. Those works, however, spring from the life of faith nourished in prayer and in the sacraments. I think that, during this time, many people have discovered prayer again and maybe even found new ways of praying. A number of our retreat houses have moved their work and their programmes online, so even more people can now access them. Many have also discovered that they really like attending Mass virtually in other countries or other parishes and towns. Although these can never be a substitute for our actual presence, nevertheless, we are discovering the richness and extensiveness of our Catholic Church. There is a real generosity and heroism which has come to the surface and that, I think, is itself a grace. Perhaps, too, whether it is online, or it is just in the daily routines of prayer and living, we touch again the reality of the community of faith. We are held in this community, both seen and unseen, here and now, and also gathered into the presence of God. In faith, we are never alone.
4. Finding Christ in the world
I think Christians are always both [dwellers and seekers]. We ‘dwell’ as members of the Church – a Church that is not bound by space or time. We ‘dwell’ in the liturgy and in the sacraments and these not only make the other ‘dwellers’ present to us, but they also open the world itself as the place in which we are rooted. And, of course, we are not only ‘dwellers’ but we are also ‘indwelt’, for Christ dwells in us and gives us his Spirit ‘who makes his home in us.’
I think that there are two forms of this ‘inquietude’: the first is that searching of love itself. Love itself makes us ‘seekers’. Faith not only seeks understanding; it seeks the one who is the light and the life of that understanding. It seeks to love more the Love that is beyond understanding. The more we come to love and know Christ, the more we will always want to know and love. His love is infinite, and we will never exhaust it, but it is a wonderful and joyous seeking. Normally, we are seekers because we feel that we have lost something or that there is something we do not have that we wish to find. This ‘seeking’ of our faith in love is exactly the reverse: in finding Christ and in being found by him, we are summoned to always go deeper into the life that is God, and we seek that life through the way that Christ is for us.
The second ‘inquietude’ is the restless heart and mind which has not found anything or feels that it has lost something that it once had or should have had. This is a tragic way and perhaps it sometimes ends in cynicism and despair. Often, it will follow so many things but, in the end, they will always disappoint. Sometimes, the secularised world wants to see this sort of seeking as a noble freedom. It is idealised in the poem Ulysses by Alfred Tennyson: ‘To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.’ You can hear echoes of it in Star Trek: ‘To boldly go where no man has gone before’! Now, there is something noble in this quest to measure the frontiers of our universe and master knowledge of it, but perhaps the secret is disclosed – ‘to master’ – so is it really a quest for knowledge or for power? Ultimately, of course, even the noblest quest must come to dwell in the house of death. So, I think we need to be conscious that we are not deceived by the myths of the secular and especially the way in which it constructs its own grandiose self-legitimating narratives.
Our contemporary culture, whatever it may say about itself, is not a God-free zone. God cannot be excluded because we prefer his absence and think that this makes us more liberated and progressive. All such myths of the imperial self soon end as artefacts in the museums of past cultures. There is something about being human which also makes us ‘seekers’ in the deepest sense and to lose that or suppress it is to diminish our own humanity and, indeed, the infinite depth of the multi-dimensional world God has created for us. The challenge for the Church is to become a dwelling place of seekers, to be a ‘seeking’ Church: to go into our culture and to find those who are lost or confused seekers or maybe even those who have given up. Secular culture is a new moment for searching and we know the promise of Christ: ‘seek and you will find.’
I am reminded of a Hasidic story. A man rushes home to tell his wife that the great rabbi has said that the Messiah is coming. He asks his wife how they should prepare to welcome him when he comes. All she says is that they must prepare by becoming better Jews first.
I think it is the same for the Society of Jesus. We have such wonderful works and apostolates to offer in the service of the Church, our culture and, indeed, the world. But the most precious thing of all is ourselves, our faith in Christ and our knowledge, love and dedication to God and our neighbour. If Christ is alive for us, he will be alive for all whom we serve and to whom we desire to reach out. Our works are only a means to this end. They should not become a substitute for this. Christ has chosen us and our Society to be his companions and to ‘labour in the vineyard of the Lord.’ This gives us a great freedom and, throughout its history, the Society has shown itself to be courageous, creative and resilient in its service.
I think we need to be alert to the ‘enemy of our human nature’ that will always seek to make us preoccupied with our lack of resources or our low numbers. Our resources will always outstrip our needs and our desires. But that is also part of God’s way of employing us – it is the deeper reality of our poverty which means that we totally reliant upon God and those whom God sends.
Our one mission is to love Christ and to see him in our world, in the faces of those around us, in both the sceptics and the seekers, in the distracted and the disinterested, and especially in those who seek him alongside us. For me, the founding contemplation of the Society is the contemplation of the nativity in the Spiritual Exercises. There, Ignatius asks us to place ourselves in the presence of Christ newly born. We are present before the new-born and vulnerable Christ-child as ‘a poor unworthy servant’ but completely attentive to see how we might be of some small service to him and his mother. Christ makes himself known here in the humility of his fragility and need and we are present to him in our own poverty and gratitude. These seem to me to be fundamental dispositions of the Society of Jesus and the graces that we have to accomplish the mission we have received from Christ and his Church. This is the deep affective school of the heart in which every Jesuit lives and is called to the service and sacrifice of love.
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