It Ain't Me

June 31, 2014:  The Visitation

Luke 1:39-57

In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, "Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord."  And Mary said,

"My soul magnifies the Lord,

and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,

for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.

Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;

for the Mighty One has done great things for me,

and holy is his name.

His mercy is for those who fear him

from generation to generation.

He has shown strength with his arm;

he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.

He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,

and lifted up the lowly;

he has filled the hungry with good things,

and sent the rich away empty.

He has helped his servant Israel,

in remembrance of his mercy,

according to the promise he made to our ancestors,

to Abraham and to his descendants forever."

And Mary remained with her about three months and then returned to her home. Now the time came for Elizabeth to give birth, and she bore a son. 
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Ah!  Humility.  The mother of all virtues.  But in an increasingly narcissistic and prideful culture sometimes difficult to cultivate.  

A man received a promotion to the position of Vice President of the company he worked for. The promotion went to his head, and for weeks on end he bragged to anyone and everyone that he was now VP. His bragging came to an abrupt halt when his wife, so embarrassed by his behavior, said, “Listen Bob, it’s not that big a deal. These days everyone’s a vice president. Why they even have a vice president of peas down at the supermarket!”  Somewhat deflated, Bob rang the local supermarket to find out if this was true. “Can I speak to the Vice President of peas please?” he asked, to which the reply came: “of fresh or frozen?”  That's humbling.  

In today's  celebration of the visitation of Mary of her cousin Elizabeth,  we find a tremendous amount of humility.  First, we see Elizabeth's humility in the presence of Mary and the unborn Jesus.  Rather than focusing on herself, she gushes over Mary with humble deference and praise.

In turn, Mary, rather than boasting in her status, humbly gives all the credit to God, where it belongs.  It's as if she's saying, "It ain't me!  It's him!"  He looks with favor.  He has mercy.   He's the one that has done great things for me.  He keeps his promises.  He, he, he--not, me, me, me.

Mary's attitude is instructive for us.  When it comes to the subject of Christian humility, many people do not have a clue what it is all about. Misconceptions about its meaning can cause great difficulties, and even stand in the way of leading a fully Christian life.

Humility does not mean thinking badly of yourself, or trying to hide your accomplishments. Rather than being connected to the word humiliate, it is connected to the word humble. If you know a person who boasts and brags about his successes, or acts as if he were better than other people, you already have a view of what you should not do. Not only is such a person an annoyance to deal with, he is basing his beliefs and his behavior on self-importance.

In contrast, the person who is humble gives credit where it is due. Self-importance is not a part of his manner. The Christian who practices humility begins by acknowledging God as the source of all that is good in his life. If he gains a success, he knows he would not have accomplished it without God. If the person experiences something positive, he is aware God is the source of the wonderful blessing. His awareness of God extends to knowing he would not even exist otherwise. In other words, the humble Christian knows who is really responsible for everything good, and does not try to claim credit for it.

Rule of St. Benedict: Prologue pt. III

Prologue (continued)

Let us arise, then, at last,
for the Scripture stirs us up, saying,
"Now is the hour for us to rise from sleep" (Rom. 18:11).
Let us open our eyes to the deifying light,
let us hear with attentive ears
the warning which the divine voice cries daily to us,
"Today if you hear His voice,
harden not your hearts" (Ps. 94:8).
And again,
"Whoever has ears to hear,
hear what the Spirit says to the churches" (Matt. 11-15; Apoc. 2:7).
And what does He say?
"Come, My children, listen to Me;
I will teach you the fear of the Lord" (Ps. 33:12).
"Run while you have the light of life,
lest the darkness of death overtake you" (John 12:35).

REFLECTION

Check out the similarities of this section, at the beginning of the
Holy Rule, and the readings of early Lent, which stress that "now is
the acceptable time." It brings to mind St. Benedict's later chapter
which says that the monastic life ought always to have some semblance
of Lent.

That perpetual Lent chapter is the source of a lot of grumbling about
austerity from one camp and cheering about it from another. Both may
have missed a salient point. Perhaps the greatest element of
perpetual Lent has less to do with austerity- even the monastic fast
did not last all year. What are perpetually in style are repentance,
wakefulness and self-examination.

Monastic life withers in either smugness or a rut. What St. Benedict
wants us to do is always to try and stay at that serious moment of
taking inventory that many of us feel at Lent's beginning. We need to
always be checking what needs to be cleaned up and we need to be
prepared, even a bit eager, to start working on it. This is why a
daily examination of conscience is so necessary. Compline, the
traditional liturgical place for such examens, is a very apt place
for same. As we prepare for sleep, which prefigures death, we prepare
also for death, by examining our faults and asking forgiveness.

The Holy Rule, like Lent, is by no means the gateway to an easier
life, but to a holier one. As we actually grow in holiness much of it
will become easier, more natural to us. But until that time, it is a
struggle and, in unconquered areas, it remains something of a
struggle for all of our lives. What's hard about that struggle isn't
fasting or penance, but changing ourselves. Austere practices are
just a means to that end, not ends in themselves.

The whole idea of Lent and the Holy Rule is lasting change for the
better. Lent is a seasonal construct to get us to begin anew, the
Holy Rule says that beginning anew must be a daily thing. Lent is an
attempt to get us to do for forty days what we ought to have been
doing all year. The Holy Rule is a way to do what we ought to do all
year, every day.

Love and prayers,
Jerome, OSB
http://www.stmarysmonastery.org
Petersham, MA

Ascension: We Rise, Even As We Stay (A While)

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The Ascension:  June 29, 2014

Today is we celebrate the Ascension, an in-between sort of day before Pentecost that we don’t spend much time thinking about. It is the day that we remember that Jesus, forty days after the Easter Resurrection, returned to heaven to be with God. 

In the Scriptures, again and again we read of periods of forty days, or forty years: it rained forty days and forty nights in the deluges, Moses fasted 40 days and 40 nights on Sinai; Eliah walked forty days and forty nights in the power of the food given him by the angel; Jesus fasted forty days before His public life, and after His resurrection, during a period of forty days He often appeared with His disciples and dined with them.

​

Forty is a symbol of a period of preparation or formation. Our whole life on earth, from the day on which we rose from the dead with Christ in baptism is like the forty days before our Lord’s ascension. It is a period of preparation for our ascension, a period of formation in the divine life until we will receive its final fullness, when we too are taken up in glory.  In the meantime, we are in the process of theosis, our own process of becoming more like Christ.  Or, as St. Athanasius put it, "God became man so that man might become a god."  Even in the Eucharistic liturgy we pray, "By the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity."

Just as the glorious Jesus frequently dined with His disciples after His resurrection, so He dines with us throughout our forty days of preparation for heaven, nourishing us with His own body in the Holy Eucharist, forming in us His divine life, which at last will be fully manifest even in our bodies at His second coming. In the strength of that food, like Elias we walk forty days and forty nights to the heavenly city.

We are no longer merely earthly humans.  We are living the heavenly life of the resurrection, waiting for its fullness when we are taken up with Jesus. We have no permanent city here, where “we are in the world.” In fact, this heavenly life is already so real in us, that St. Paul writes: “By reason of His very great love wherewith he has loved us, God, even when we were dead by reason of our sins, has brought us to life together with Christ, and raised us up together and seated us together in heaven in Christ Jesus.” (Eph. 2:5-6)

Teacup Browsing

• Letting scripture interrupt you.

• The aesthetics of Gerardus van der Leeuw:  

"The dance reflects the movement of God, which also moves us upon the earth. The drama presupposes the holy play between God and man. Verbal art is the hymn of praise in which the Eternal and his works are represented. Architecture reveals to us the lines of the well-built city of God’s creation. Music is the echo of the eternal Gloria."

•  Pope Francis:  "Mandatory celibacy [for priests] not dogma; open to change" important since  US faces a shortage of priests:

"Nationally, one in five Catholic parishes does not have a resident priest.  America’s Catholic population is rising by 1 percent annually, but seminary enrollment is flat. An inadequate supply of priests already has forced hundreds of parishes to close or consolidate.

• President celebrates Memorial Day with troops...makes major faux pas.

• Church of England votes in favor of women bishops.

• Episcopal Church to host forum on civil discourse in America. 

• Rolheiser on Saying Goodbye.

• AUSTIN, Texas — A political mailer was sent to hundreds of thousands of Republican voters recently, calling on them to elect what it called “Tea Party Champions” in Tuesday’s Republican runoff elections. But many Tea Party leaders in the state have never heard of the group that put out the glossy ad.

• Church sign of the week:

Spiritual Training

Tuesday May may 27, 2014


6 If you put these instructions before the brothers and sisters, you will be a good servant of Christ Jesus, nourished on the words of the faith and of the sound teaching that you have followed. 7 Have nothing to do with profane myths and old wives’ tales. Train yourself in godliness, 8 for, while physical training is of some value, godliness is valuable in every way, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come. 9 The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance. 10 For to this end we toil and struggle, because we have our hope set on the living God, who is the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe.      --1Tim. 4-6-10

___________________________

"Train yourself in godliness."

Sure.  But what is godliness?  In their commentary on 1st Timothy,  R. Kent Hughes and Bryan Chapell describe it this way:

For Paul godliness is no static, stained-glass word. It is active—kinetic obedience that springs from a reverent awe of God. It is the Isaiah-like action that has a man, awestruck by God, rise from his face saying, “Here am I! Send me” (Isaiah 6:8). Awe—then action! Godliness is not piety as we generally think of it—upturned eyes and folded hands. Godliness cannot be cloistered. The godly among us are those people whose reverent worship of God flows into obedience throughout the week. Only God-struck doers of the Word can rightly be termed godly.

That makes absolute biblical and historical sense.  It also takes absolute hard work and commitment.  In the same way that successful athletes must train (and the rest of us diet and exercise), and the way  that serious academics study, and the way professionals commit to life-long learning--we too must train ourselves in Godliness.  It has nothing to do with piety but rather with disciplining ourselves to   Seek God through a commitment to prayer and worship, to allowing ourselves to be awe-fully inspired by his presence in our lives and then translating our experiences of him into loving Action.  

Four pillars are crucial here:

1.  An commitment to daily times of prayer and meditation.
2.  A commitment to study and contemplation of the things of God.
3.  A sense of community "because we have our hope set on the living God, who is the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe."
4.  Facing our baptismal responsibility to active ministry on behalf of the church and the world.

Lots of sets and reps will ensure--not perfection--but certain growth in spiritual fitness.

Teacup Browsing

• Seven (important) misconceptions about Christianity.

• An open view of Romans 8:28.

• Il Papa reins in lavish living, is concerned with global warming, the environment and international diplomacy. Bravo!

• Far right and Euroskeptics win big in European parliamentary elections.

• Here's a positive, technology privacy development.

• Religion and the upcoming World Cup.

• Holding on to resentments?  Check out Bishop Desmond Tutu's Forgiveness Challenge.

• More from Canada's Character Community.

• In vino veritas? And more.  But wait, there's even more.

• Take a Yale Old Testament course, for free.

• The problem with religious illiteracy:  "Nearly two-thirds of Americans say they believe that the Bible holds the answer to all or most of life’s basic questions. Yet only one-third know that Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount, and 10 percent think that Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife."

• The curse (or at least one curse) of the internet age.

• Funny Onion poll.

Who's the Real Fan?

Sixth Sunday of Easter

John 14:15-21

John 14:15-21

Jesus said to his disciples, "If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.

"I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them."

---

What does it take to be a "real baseball fan?" Some would say a "real fan" regularly watches tv broadcasts of the games; they try to attend their team's games as often as possible, maybe they even have season tickets. Even when they are not at the games they wear their team's jersey and cap; at the games, some go as far as painting their faces in the team's colors.  A "real fan" rushes to the internet, or daily sports pages, to see how their team did the day before and to check the batting averages of their favorite players.  Some even name their pets after their team --  "Come here Dodger!" "Roll over Ranger!" Would the above qualify as the marks of a "real fan?"

Let's apply that opening question to our faith. What would qualify a person as a "real Christian?"  What daily practices would they have to observe?  What basic knowledge must they have?  These questions, and others like them, would make interesting discussion topics for an information class or a gathering of new members. Of course, there are basic criteria and beliefs we Christians must have.  But there is one hallmark that each Christian must have to be a "real Christian" and Jesus names it for us in today's gospel.  "If you love me, you will keep my commandments."

There is our faith neatly summarized by Jesus so that anyone can use it and be guided by it. What's a "real Christian?"  It's someone who loves Jesus and how he taught us to live in the world and  are willing to put what he taught us into practice.

Jesus is admired by many people who never come and join us for worship.  We know them well, some are our family members and friends.  They admire Jesus, even celebrate the major events of his life on Christmas and Easter.  But admiring someone is not the same as loving them and adapting our lives to reflect that love. And the "adaption" Jesus asks of us is total:  that we keep his commandments. From his example and words we have come to know that his "commandments" are commandments of love.

Jesus isn't speaking about how we feel towards others.  How could he command us to "feel" love for another?  How could we maintain such a feeling for those we barely know; people not in our family?  It's a life time effort to act lovingly towards those we do feel love for, so how could we possibly have and convey those feelings toward others who are strangers?  Even enemies? Jesus' teaching is not merely about liking a person.  Rather, he wants us to make an act of our will and do what is for another's good.  It's not about liking everyone because, I don't know about you, I don't!

How can we mere humans, who have a mental list of those we love, those we like, and those we dislike, ever live up to Jesus' commandment of love?  We already know the answer to that: on our own, we can't. But Jesus makes some promises to us today that make what he asks of us possible.

In John's gospel Pentecost occurs when the resurrected Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit into the community of believers locked away behind closed doors (20: 19-23). The Spirit Jesus promises and gives will provide the powers the disciples need to continue Jesus' ministry, particularly the mission to love the world as Jesus loved it. The Spirit will come from God at Jesus' request ("I will ask the Father") and will replace him as "another Advocate."  This Advocate, Jesus' "alter ego," will do what Jesus did for his disciples -- be their companion, comfort and help them.  Jesus is soon to depart, but the Spirit he sends back will never leave us on our own, "I will not leave you orphans."

Worry

Thursday May 22, 2014

"So do not worryabout tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own."  Matthew 6:34
____________________

One of the most emotionally, mentally, physically and spiritually draining and exhausting aspects of human existence is worry.  What is it that we worry about?  It can all be boiled down to this:  fear of  losing what we have, and not getting what we want.  There are several things to keep in mind as we worry about worry:

1.  That vast amount of things that we worry about are things that are not going to happen, thus, we worry unnecessarily.

2.  We worry about events based upon illogical mental constructs.  Question your automatic thoughts and ask yourself, is my worry logical?  Is my worry based on illogical premises?  Is there some some flaw in my reasoning?  Can I suspend judgement until I have more concrete facts?  

3.  Worry often involves inordinate attachments:  fear of losing what we have or not getting what we want.  Check: what am I inordinately attached to?

4.  The opposite of worry is trust; trust in God's providence and his faithfulness in answering prayer and his providential care for our needs.  Am I in such a communicative relationship with God in such a way that I commit my daily life to his care?

5.  We need to check our emotions.  Emotions are important.  They make us human and inform our intellect.  But, if we reason with our emotions rather than our intellect we fall into the an emotional reasoning that does not serve us or our relationships well.

6.  Maintaining an attitude of gratitude works as a counter-balance to worry.  Worry is an inordinate obsession with difficulty or troubles, or worse, potential difficulties or troubles.  Focusing on God's manifold blessings displaced unhealthy worry.

7.  Worriers need a place to deposit their negative thoughts. Keep a small memo pad handy, and whenever you feel yourself starting to worry about something, open it and do a “brain dump”.  Call it your 5 minutes of worry, then walk away.

8.  Sometimes forcing yourself to think of the worst thing can be the best thing for an anxious brain. If you find yourself trapped in “what-ifs,” a common state of mind for people with chronic anxiety, face your fears head-on: "What's the worst that could happen and can I and God deal with it?"

9. Worry puts the focus on us rather than on loving God and neighbor.   When we focus mostly on ourselves it breeds egoism which in turn begets even more self-centered worry.

10.  Live in the present with mindfulness.  Remember, today is the tomorrow we worried about yesterday. 

11.  Focus on solutions rather than problems.

Teacup Browsing

• "Happy" and then unhappy in Tehran.  ( I liked the video)

• Rolheiser on living in the Spirit.

• Cardinal publicly suspected of  embezzlement,  the Vatican self-reporting on the rise of "suspicious" financial transactions and corrective measures at the Vatican Bank.  Maybe there will be structural change in Rome.  Way to go Papa Frank!

• An excellent article on biblical theologian N.T. Wright.

• A research team builds computer models to test the amazing scientific theories of a 13th century theologian.

• And (sadly) on the other hand....

• Outrageous remark of the week?  The winner is....Florida congressman Charles Van Zant.

• Aquinas and the Open View.

• 5 reasons Christians can be so mean to each other.

• Two ways not to quit your job.  In Klingon or like this.

• The Bieber gospel.

• The 15 strangest book titles.

• How do you say oops! in French?

If you liked this post, comment and share.

At Your Service?

Wednesday May 21, 2014

Matthew 6:19-24

19 "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. 20 But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. 22 "The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. 23 But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness! 24 "No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money."

______________

"You cannot serve God and money."

Money is a necessary but neutral commodity.  It's value is not only relative to the frequent sways of the markets and economy, but also relative to how much we invest ourselves in it.  Money can be used for good or evil, for blessing and cursing.  However, when money ceases to serve us (and us in service to the Kingdom) and we begin to serve it, it becomes not only a usurping idol but a jailer of the most despotic and despicable kind.  Rightly did Jesus say that the love of money--not money itself--is the root of all evil.  The love of money cripples our moral compasses.

In our society, loving money is very easy to fall into. We’re constantly bombarded with messages trying to make us unsatisfied.  What are our motivations for wanting more and more? Security, luxuries, status? Are any of these worldly things worth closing ourselves off to a relationship with God who loves us?  If you are generous and cheerful about giving; if you don't hoard your wealth or possessions;  if you try to live simply without excessively accumulating "stuff"; if you're not inordinately worried about money; and if you actively give to those less financially fortunate, you probably have a healthy relationship to money.    However, if the inverse of these are true, one has to ask, "Who is serving who."

There Will Be Rules

"Some who had come down from Judea were instructing the brothers, 'Unless you are circumcised according to the Mosaic practice, you cannot be saved.'"  ACTS 15:1

_________


Throughout St. Paul's ministry he came up against what he calls "judaizers" in his epistles.  A Judiazer taught that, in order for a Christian to truly be right with God, he must conform to the Mosaic Law. Circumcision, especially, was promoted as necessary for salvation.  There were rules that had to be followed, actions to be done, words that had to be said, foods that couldn't be eaten and hygienic practices that needed to be observed.  Then and only then, could one be right with God. 

At the first Council of Jerusalem described in the 15th chapter of Acts, the apostles concluded that since salvation is through faith in Christ--a condition not requiring observance of the customary Law of the Old Testament--Gentiles (and ultimately Jewish Christians as well) weren’t bound to keep Jewish customs as a prerequisite for membership in the Church (Gal 5:6).  In retrospect, we too acknowledge that the Judaizers were wrong in requiring these accoutrements.  

Yet in practice, there are some in the church who are veritable Judaizers requiring thoughts, words, deeds and conditions--apart from God's grace--in order to exhibit a proper relationship with God.  In one church that I was at, a fight broke out in the parking lot over one parishioner's Obama bumper sticker!  Apparently, according to one of the protagonists, one cannot be Christian and Democrat.

When we exclude others from the Kingdom with exclusions that Christ did not include, we exclude on the basis of our own biases, prejudices and a self-righteousness that, if we are frank, we cannot ourselves live up to.  This is precisely why Jesus called some of the Pharissees 'hypocrites.' Ultimately, while doctrine of course matters,  the real essentials” of Christianity are love, justice, mercy, and virtue, not man made rules that have nothing to do with the good news or the overwhelmingly outrageous love and mercy of God in Christ.

Teacup Browsing

• The fantastic rock-cut underground churches of Lalibela.

• Rolheiser on hell (that's on not in).

• Interfaith minded Pope Francis to bring two friends from Argentina during his visit to the Holy Land: a Rabbi and an Imam.  He also rejected any armored cars for the trip wanting to be "as close to people as possible."

• Speaking of apparent changes ahead for the Roman Catholic Church, the Secretary-General of the Italian Bishops' Conference calls for an "Italian Church is that it is able to listen without any taboo to the arguments in favour of married priests, the Eucharist for the divorced, and homosexuality."

• Statistics 101.  I still like the Miami Heat because, well, the humidity.  After their Sunday loss, Any correlation will do.

• But Houston knows how to recruit the best players.

• ...and Alaskans know how to self-medicate.

• Speaking of Florida, an attempt at civil discourse.

• No.  Millennials are not less Godly.  "Yes, be concerned that young people are leaving the church, but be more concerned why. In many cases it isn’t because they reject Christ; it’s because they never found him at church either from the pulpit or the pews."

• Quote of the Week:  "Jesus said he would be with us always. If he is with us always, we should be alert to the possibility of resurrection all around us—resurrection in all its manifestations, even in the most ordinary things."  -Br. Mark Brown, Society of St. John the Evangelist 

• And they'll know we are Christians by our...kitsch?  See more.

• Six heretics.  This is funny and serious at the same time.

• The Week's best political cartoons.

WWJD?

Fifth Sunday of Easter

Acts 7:55-60

Filled with the Holy Spirit, Stephen gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. "Look," he said, "I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!" But they covered their ears, and with a loud shout all rushed together against him. Then they dragged him out of the city and began to stone him; and the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul. While they were stoning Stephen, he prayed, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit." Then he knelt down and cried out in a loud voice, "Lord, do not hold this sin against them." When he had said this, he died.

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The WWJD fad has passed; I have written about it before.  There is one camp that says that that is not the most helpful question.  They say that asking "What would Jesus have me do? is the better question.  I have grown to believe that that is akin to splitting hairs with a butter knife.  Reflecting on what Jesus might do in any given situation seems to me a pertinent and instructive question for moral decision-making, and it is persuasive for the question, "What would Jesus have me do?"  Of course, we don't have exhaustive knowledge of Jesus' experience in every situation, but there is sufficient teaching and action on his part to serve as a guide for contemporary times.  The proto-martyr Stephen seemed to think so.

When taken out of the city after preaching Christ to the Sanhedrin, he begins to be stoned.  What went through his mind at that very moment?  Perhaps it was "WWJD?" because we see him, in the thick of the pelting and in imitation of Jesus on the cross, praying, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit," and, "Lord do not hold this sin against them."

While in the western world we are not likely to suffer stoning, we all have had the experience of mild to severe persecution by others.  When that happens, are we able to entrust our care to the benevolent love of God?  Can we, as Jesus both taught and practiced, pray for those who persecute us?  

This week, spend some time in the prayer for your enemy, in these days of high emotion and hot temper. Have the courage to present your adversary to God and trust that God knows our hearts — all of our hearts — and that Christ is, as we have always maintained, the Lord of history. Nothing can happen, in the church or in the world, that is beyond the mercy of God to heal. Nothing is beyond the power of God to turn what happens in human affairs to possibility and good.

Rule of St. Benedict Prologue II

Prologue (Pt. II)

Let us arise, then, at last,
for the Scripture stirs us up, saying,
"Now is the hour for us to rise from sleep" (Rom. 18:11).
Let us open our eyes to the deifying light,
let us hear with attentive ears
the warning which the divine voice cries daily to us,
"Today if you hear His voice,
harden not your hearts" (Ps. 94:8).
And again,
"Whoever has ears to hear,
hear what the Spirit says to the churches" (Matt. 11-15; Apoc. 2:7).
And what does He say?
"Come, My children, listen to Me;
I will teach you the fear of the Lord" (Ps. 33:12).
"Run while you have the light of life,
lest the darkness of death overtake you" (John 12:35).

REFLECTION

Check out the similarities of this section, at the beginning of the
Holy Rule, and the readings of early Lent, which stress that "now is
the acceptable time." It brings to mind St. Benedict's later chapter
which says that the monastic life ought always to have some semblance
of Lent.

That perpetual Lent chapter is the source of a lot of grumbling about
austerity from one camp and cheering about it from another. Both may
have missed a salient point. Perhaps the greatest element of
perpetual Lent has less to do with austerity- even the monastic fast
did not last all year. What are perpetually in style are repentance,
wakefulness
and self-examination.

Monastic life withers in either smugness or a rut. What St. Benedict
wants us to do is always to try and stay at that serious moment of
taking inventory that many of us feel at Lent's beginning. We need to
always be checking what needs to be cleaned up and we need to be
prepared, even a bit eager, to start working on it. This is why a
daily examination of conscience is so necessary. Compline, the
traditional liturgical place for such examens, is a very apt place
for same. As we prepare for sleep, which prefigures death, we prepare
also for death, by examining our faults and asking forgiveness.

The Holy Rule, like Lent, is by no means the gateway to an easier
life, but to a holier one. As we actually grow in holiness much of it
will become easier, more natural to us. But until that time, it is a
struggle and, in unconquered areas, it remains something of a
struggle for all of our lives. What's hard about that struggle isn't
fasting or penance, but changing ourselves. Austere practices are
just a means to that end, not ends in themselves.

The whole idea of Lent and the Holy Rule is lasting change for the
better. Lent is a seasonal construct to get us to begin anew, the
Holy Rule says that beginning anew must be a daily thing. Lent is an
attempt to get us to do for forty days what we ought to have been
doing all year. The Holy Rule is a way to do what we ought to do all
year, every day.

Love and prayers,
Jerome, OSB
http://www.stmarysmonastery.org
Petersham, MA

Teacup Browsing

• The most common spoken languages other than English or Spanish (in the US).

• The myth of "clean kills." 

• Ron Rolheiser on private integrity.

• Matt Malone, S.J., interviews  one of my favorite theologians) Cardinal Walter Kasper about his book Mercy: The Essence of the Gospel and the Key to Christian Life.  Kasper has been in the news lately for conveying the need for greater mercy for divorced and remarried Roman Catholics.  See also the interview with Commonweal.

• Jesus rocks...rock.

• Perhaps the ugliest church in the world.

• That's odd.  Roma vying for "Miss Gypsy?"   Would that be the Gypsy Queens?  

• What to  Pope Francis, Malala Yousafzai, Edward Snowden and Russian President Vladimir Putin have in common?  You may be shocked.

• Emergent worship in Austin, TX.  Speaking of which will be in The Weird for a couple of days.

• A modern pope gets old school about the devil.

• Newly released on DVD is a biopic of Rich Mullins.  Haven't seen it yet but hearing good things. This weekend maybe.

• The sometimes maddening federal bureaucracy fails a veteran.

•  Pike ills, TN has a crack solution.

• Top low IQ criminal....

• ...and cleanly politicians

The Triplex Bonum

In the ancient  Camaldolese strain of Benedictine spirituality there is an emphasis on what is called the triplex bonum, or the three-fold good, which can be informative and even prescriptive for a contemporary Christian spirituality.

The first good is community:

"Living together as brothers and sisters is the first good. It is founded on personal relationships, through understanding, mutual acceptance, dialogue, and service." (1).  In short, cohesiveness and unity.   Mutual acceptance means that we recognize and accept differences in order to find points of unity;  dialogue, means that we talk to and listen to each other engaging in mutual communication in order to achieve dialogue, and service means that regardless of differences, we are always in the service of love towards the other.  The primacy of love, which can only happen in the context of community, especially in the family and the church, (love must always have another object) is always the overarching rule for residency in the kingdom of God.


The second good  is solitude:  

Silence and solitude is essential to human, and especially, Christian flourishing.  We may certainly hear God's voice when we are with others. Perhaps something hits you in a sermon or a friend says just the right thing at the right time, and you know it's meant for you.   However, personal time in solitude for communion with God and reflection on what we say and hear from him is essential to our spiritual life and on the other two goods of Camaldolese Benedictine spirituality: community and evangelical witness.  It is only through the filter of our personal time reflecting with God that we are capable of absorbing God through others and through encountering God in the scriptures, liturgy and personal experience.  

Part of the sequnda bonum of solitude is silence.  It is in silence before God that we allow our egos to be redirected by God.  As one writer confessed, "When I became a Christian I was taught to faithfully take my prayer list to God daily. I got pretty good at this, but eventually noticed that I was doing all the talking. I was giving my list to God the way I would give a list of orders to a customer-care person, never allowing him to get a word in edgewise."  Egocentricity in personal prayer carries over into egocentric living.  As Thomas Merton opined, “When society is made up of men who know no interior solitude it can no longer be held together by love."


The third good is evangelical witness:

"The chief characteristic of the third good consists in unconditional love or total self-giving" (2)  in imitation of Christ' total self-emptying (kenosis) in the service of others and the common good.  Encounters with God in solitude and community drive us to sacrificial, personal and communal witness to and for the Kingdom.  For no small reason was Christ's final command to, "Go into all the world...and make disciples."  One of the greatest paradoxes of the Christian faith is that you can only keep what you give away.  

Community, solitude and evangelistic outreach seems to be the method that Jesus embraced as well.  Community, first in the Holy Family, in the more expansive Jewish worship community, in his initial band of rag-tag followers and in his redemptive embrace of all.  Solitude in his frequent habit of departing to the desert or mountain to pray and evangelical witness in his every moment of human contact in which he revealed and connected others to God.


















1.  https://sites.google.com/site/trinityprioryinternational/who-we-are/-camaldolese-benedictines

The Good Shepherd Sunday: A View from the Field

Fourth Sunday of Easter 2014

Psalm 23 

Dominus regit me

1

The LORD is my shepherd; *
I shall not be in want.

2

He makes me lie down in green pastures *
and leads me beside still wat

3

He revives my soul *
and guides me along right pathways for his Name's sake.

4

Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I shall fear no evil; *
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

5

You spread a table before me in the presence of those

who trouble me; *
you have anointed my head with oil,
and my cup is running over.

6

Surely your goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days

of my life, *
and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.

_______________

Reflection

Some years back, I saw an entirely enthralling film titled Memento in which the main character (played by Guy Pearce) is out on a quest to find his wife's killer.  The only problem is that in the home invasion during which his wife was killed, he suffered a head injury that does not allow him to make new memories:  everything he experiences in the present, including clues, will be forgotten in just a few moments.  So, he develops a series of techniques and strategies for hanging on to his experiences, for example, by immediately tattooing notes on his body.

The genius of this movie is the way it is shot.  The movie plays from end to beginning with replays that  makes one question all of one's assumptions about what is going on in the film.  In short, it makes you think like the main character thinks as you watch the film.

Today, the Fourth Sunday of Easter is typically called Good Shepherd Sunday and the readings reflect both the metaphorical description of  the sheep and the shepherd.  But what about the view from  field?  What do the sheep have to say?  Because of their genre (poetry and songs of praise) the Psalms are able to, much like the film Memento, evoke a response, not from a traditional angle of vision, but from the angle of the speaker and in the case of The 23rd psalm, from the angle of the sheep, a sort of view from the field.

Go ahead, take an experimental moment  and read Psalm 23 again slowly, as if your were reading the words of the actual sheep describing her relationship with the shepherd.  Then, compare and contrast your own knowledge of God with that of the sheep.  How is your experience the same?  Different?

The sheep says, The Lord is my shepherd.  Am I being shepherded or lorded by something or someone other than God?  

The sheep allows itself, turns itself over to the master to be led to still waters.  In the sometimes frantic experience of contemporary life are we allowing ourselves to be led by Jesus into prayerful moments of calming intimacy with him.  Is our daily life punctuated by prayer pauses?

In the face of potential adversity (the valley of the shadow of death) the sheep puts complete confidence in his loving shepherd.  Can we face adversity in confident faith in an all-powerful and ever-loving gracious God?  

The sheep recognized the shepherd's crook not as an object of discipline but as a tool ensuring its safety; as a comforting pastoral tool, not a rod of punishment.  What is our view of God and how does that operative view bring us closer to him an others?

Contrary to popular belief, sheep are pretty smart.

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Teacup Browsing

• Rep. Barbara Mikulski and others mobilizing against  Boko Haram's kidnappings. A profile on Boko Haram's leader.

• California Chrome won the Kentucky Derby (I confess I don't "get" horse racing) but I'm still placing my bets on the man (church sign) riding the donkey.

• Funny anecdote of the week:  "Early in his career he worked for a radio station, and one of the shows featured sermons by a particular preacher. The sermons were recorded on vinyl records that Dan Rather would place on a turntable of a record player. He would position the needle at the beginning of the sermon, then leave the studio and drive to a local diner. One day as he was sitting there sipping some coffee the owner of the diner came over and said there’s a phone call for you. When Dan picked up the phone his boss yelled Get back to the studio! Right now! Dan jumped in his car, turned on the radio and to his horror heard: 'Go to hell… Go to hell… Go to hell…', The needle had gotten stuck and it kept repeating till he got back to the studio. I don’t think he ever left the studio again while a record was playing."

• Big (beard) brother.

• A new way of being church?  The British fxC phenomena.  More.

• Kevin Durante gives mother touching tribute after winning MVP.

• More U.S. Latinos (the fastest growing demographic of all Christian denominations)  shift and drift outside the Catholic Church.  Mas from Pew Research.

• The most stunning stained glass windows in the world.

• Huffpo on wisdom.

• Joke of the week (I've told this before):  A country preacher decided to skip services one Sunday and head to the hills to do some bear hunting. As he rounded the corner on a perilous twist in the trail, he and a bear collided, sending him and his rifle tumbling down the mountainside. Before he knew it, his rifle went one way and he went the other, landing on a rock and breaking both legs. That was the good news.  The bad news was the ferocious bear was charging at him from a distance, and he couldn't move. "Oh, Lord," the preacher prayed, "I'm so sorry for skipping services today to come out here and hunt. Please forgive me and grant me just one wish: Please make a Christian out of that bear that's coming at me. Please, Lord!" That very instant the bear skidded to a halt,fell to its knees, clasped its paws together and began to pray aloud right at the preacher's feet: "Dear God, bless this food I am about to receive . . ."

• May be moving back to the weird  this summer.  Ora pro nobis!

• Whether one is laughing at oneself or (respectfully) at others one (me) can do worse than The Colbert Report or The Daily Show.  Aw, come on, lighten up!

• Ahhh!  Okay...off to take the perfect nap.

Open Provocation

Thursday May 8, 2014

"And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds."  Hebrews 10:24

Reflection

Surprise, surprise.  When I was a young child I wasn't always well behaved.  At times, when I became overly rambunctious, my mother would give me the look and say, "Don't provoke me!"  When I would sometimes argue with my brother or sisters and I knew that I was to blame, I would sometimes use the excuse, "yeah but he/she provoked me!"  These days we hear in the news how Russia is "provoking" the world community through its incursion into the Crimean peninsula.  The word provoke carries with it many negative connotations.  But we can also "provoke one another to love and good deeds."

We provoke others to love and good deeds when we first provoke ourselves to kindness and charity in our thoughts, word and deeds.  Mother Teresa who provoked love and goodness throughout her life once said, “I believe in person to person. Every person is Christ for me, and since there is only one Jesus, that person is the one person in the world at that moment. I see Christ in every person I touch, it is as simple as that.”  When we become negatively reactive, we incite others to return in kind.  But when we view, treat and receive others as an alter Christus, another Christ, we engender or provoke the best in us and in them.  It's a challenge that we face everyday.

Perhaps today we can resolve to try to live in open provocation of love and goodness in all whom we encounter. And, when we fail, we can provoke God's boundless mercy and forgiveness by remembering to forgive others as well.  Whatever happens in the heart is the beginning of a revolution. Go ahead; openly provoke!