The Contemplative Calendar

Revisiting the Creed: A good start to the Year of Faith

2012-02-01T21:51:00.002Z

In preparation for the upcoming 'Year of Faith,' Fr. Andrew Pinsent has been delivering a wonderful series of short homilies on the Creed over at Totus2us.com. I'd just like to draw your attention to this fabulous series---whether you're a 'cradle Catholic,' a convert, or just someone up for some good thinking, this series helps get us back to the fundamentals. You can find the Creed podcast here:

http://www.totus2us.com/podcasts/sunday-evangelium/

This excerpt comes from the latest installment, given on the first article of the Creed, 'I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth.'

_{"Regardless of the success or otherwise of all impersonal substitutes for God, a deeper problem remains. We are ourselves personal beings, and so it is unsatisfactory to propose that whatever created the cosmos is sub-personal. More specifically there is a natural desire not only to know that there is a God, but to know God, to be able to relate to God in a first to second person way, as an 'I' to a 'you'. On this point therefore the denial of a personal God therefore creates unusual dangers for humanity. If God, the Father Almighty, the true God, is denied or rejected, then there is an incompleteness in us, like a house that is left empty. And the problem with leaving a house empty is that it can be occupied by squatters or parasites. To give an example, the lesson of recent centuries is that in those places where Christianity was suppressed, those countries were not left in a state of spiritual neutrality, but tended to end up worshiping something else, often accompanied with a reign of terror."}

What is prayer?

2012-01-28T23:39:00.001Z

For me, prayer is not asking God for things I want,
Prayer is asking God that I may want what He wants.

Since Faith is not the belief that God is there in good times,
and absent in the bad,
So prayer is a communion, neither good nor bad,
But simply the upturned glance, the heartfelt utterance,
'Share this with me.'

Since we were created for sharing,
The Creator who comes among us,
Who speaks to us and stoops down to us,
Is not only the Saviour, the Lamb led to the slaughter;
He is the Sharer, in all things that we are.

Prayer is the place that we share
All things that we are;
Prayer is the knowledge above all
That God's will is love.

For Faith is not the subjective experience
Of a God who is this or that;
But Faith is the knowledge
Of that beyond our experience,
The objective, the absolute: that God alone IS.

In this knowledge, love works
Whether in suffering or in joy,
Because suffering is the springboard to God
In darkness we yearn, and we learn
To desire the true light.
And joy is the necessity for God,
The desire to share
All that we are.

Song of the Soul

2012-01-27T02:09:00.003Z

'Song of the soul that rejoices in knowing God through faith'

by St. John of the Cross

For I know well the spring that flows and runs,

although it is night.

That eternal spring is hidden,

for I know well where it has its rise,

although it is night.

I do not know its origin, nor has it one

but I know that every origin has come from it,

although it is night.

I know that nothing else is so beautiful,

and that the heavens and the earth drink there,

although it is night.

I know well that it is bottomless

and no one is able to cross it,

although it is night.

Its clarity is never darkened,

and I know that every light has come from it,

although it is night.

I know well the stream that flows from this spring

is mighty in compass and power,

although it is night.

I know the stream proceeding from these two,

that neither of them in fact precedes it,

although it is night.

This eternal spring is hidden

in this living bread for our life's sake,

although it is night.

It is here calling out to creatures;

and they satisfy their thirst,

although in darkness

because it is night.

The living spring I long for,

I see in this bread of life,

although it is night.

Hope for ex-Picnikers!

2012-01-26T20:02:00.001Z

Rose, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

Okay, this is a side-note for interested parties---this blog is not about photography, but I do make use of my photography here, much of which has been processed using Picnik. This post is for all the other soon-to-be ex-Picnikers out there. Google has decided to shut down the online photo editor, Picnik, in order to drag us kicking and screaming into using Google+ for all our social networking, photo-editing, sitting-perpetually-in-front-of-a-screen-rather-than-talking-to-the-person-next-to-you needs. I've been using Picnik for a few years and am quite disappointed this service will soon be unavailable. Through a lot of experimentation, I've found the effects and editing techniques that really work for me on Picnik...so now I have to start all over again on something else.

I've been looking around and the best thing I've found so far is Pixlr Express, which is specifically recommended for users of Picnik. About a year ago, a friend very kindly gave me a version of Photoshop she was no longer using...but it was just too complex...or too technical for me, and I never got the hang of it. I liked the 'one-stop editing' and 'push-button effects' Picnik offered. Pixlr Express is the closest thing to this. Of course it takes time & experimentation to find what works for you and what works for each individual composition, but I'm happy with the results so far. Although it doesn't offer the same 'amenities' as Picnik, it has lots of great tools of its own. This rose was textured with Pixlr's tie-dye effect. I love it!

Check out Pixlr Express at pixlr.com/express/

Heaven & Earth

2012-01-26T14:28:00.001Z

Most Amazing High Definition Image of Earth - Blue Marble 2012, a photo by NASA Goddard Photo and Video on Flickr.

Sometimes, life on planet earth just seems too hard to take anymore. I usually feel this way when I find that yet-another-bug-in-the-kitchen I have to dispatch, and suddenly I'm struck by what a messy place we live in. If one were a 'nice person', one would think it was possible to get through this life without coming up against the anger, the dissolution, the people who don't like you, and the people you don't understand. But, in fact, I think we could all agree that Jesus was a 'nice person' (in the most authentic sense of the phrase), and there's probably no figure in world history that has been the object of more resentment, hatred, and misunderstandings than Jesus of Nazareth.

This morning I came across this beautiful high-definition picture of the Earth that comes from NASA. From this angle, the earth is a perfect sphere, a beautiful harmony of life and colour. But from our angle, it can also be just a bug-infested mess where we're all progressively tearing each other apart. Why do we do this?

My mother recently passed along this excerpt from St. Paul to me...in fact I received it on the same day we were celebrating the feast of his conversion:

"For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another."

- Galatians 5:13-15

Paul's words here reminded me of somethingI had recently heard from Pauline scholar Fr. Jerome Murphy O'Connor: that for St. Paul, a Eucharist shared between members who did not love or know each other, was not a true, valid Eucharist. For the body of Christ to truly be the body of Christ, our 'Amen' must be twofold: we must believe we are really receiving the true Body of Our Lord, but, as St. Augustine said, we must also believe that we are becoming the true Body of Christ. For St. Paul, there is no other way to do that than by fraternal charity and cohesion.

Perhaps it's just the extreme reaction of a zealou man---filled with all the zeal of a convert---who spent his life battling against the divisions he was surrounded by. What would he think of Christians today?

And what about the world beyond Christianity---the divisions that plague us, amidst our families, communities and nations? Authentic unity doesn't simply arise from a desire for cohesion. In fact, the desire for a quiet life, for the appearance of cohesion, can often lead to the repressed turbulence that will sooner or later break forth in thunder.

We are troubled and afraid that love will make us 'slaves'; but in the same verse as St. Paul instructs us to become 'slaves to one another through love,' he also warns us 'not to be consumed by one another.' The key phrase is through love. We are not being told to be slaves to one another. Love, in Biblical and figurative terms, is often spoken of as 'a divine fire'; a fire that consumes but does not burn. We are not being asked to allow ourselves to be consumed by other people, but by the fire of divine love. This is an instruction towards prayerfulness and authentic holiness in our approach to others. Selflessness here is, perhaps, more a desire for the wellbeing of the other, than an abandonment of the self.

In the Our Father, we pray for God's kingdom to come: that is, for His will be to done, 'on earth as it is in heaven.' Looking again at the picture of the earth above, we might wonder whether that blue and green sphere would look much different from the great distance of space if it was a picture of an earth upon which the Kingdom of God was already fulfilled. It's my opinion that it's not the earth that would look different---but we ourselves.

Yes, we are co-heirs with Christ, we have received a royal appointment in this Kingdom. But the God who hands to us this dignity does not simply want co-heirs, He wants co-workers. The Kingdom of God first arrived in the person of Christ; but it cannot be fulfilled until we all live as a perosnal Christ to one another. That is,until the Eucharist is truly accomplished in each one of us, and we can say, 'it is not I who live, but Christ who lives in me.'

Damascus

2012-01-25T23:53:00.001Z

Damascus, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

How softly do you reach for me,
The sounding silence of your voice
Betrays your gentle grasp
Upon the shoulder of the wanderer.
Here I am, we say
You and I,
Both at once are speaking
Listening, I receive
The Spirit that you breathe;
I know You, not as a stranger
But from the deep within
I know You, because you are inside of me.
I live with You, not as a stranger
But from the deep within
I live with You, because you dwell inside of me,
There in the deep within.
You know me, not from afar
But from the deep within
You know me, because my home is
Deep within Your heart.
Living, breathing,
Mutual indwelling
Your design so sweetly traced
Its circuit through creation
Mutely, infusing and imparting
This one consoling knowledge
No need for fear in the midst
Of an Unknown which is Love.
The same Being is
The end to which I live
The Horizon towards which I turn
The miles of my short steps.

Inspired by some words a friend passed on to me, on this feast of the conversion of St. Paul:
'Yo te conozco, porque estás dentro de mí'

Family rules

2012-01-25T03:17:00.001Z

In Catholic teaching, the family is known as the 'Domestic Church.' It is the seminary, the school, the training ground for love. It's the place where we help each other to prepare for heaven. It's the place where we work to bring the Kingdom of God to earth...just as the words of the Our Father say.

At 38 weeks (as of today), my husband and I are expecting our first child to arrive any day...or any week...or whenever...now. God has invited us to be co-creators with Him, to create our own family. So, during the past eight months, we have thought extra hard about what family means and what kind of family we want to be. Part of our thought process has been to come up with a few 'family rules,' the guiding principles that define the kind of home we create and the relationships we foster within that home. There's not many yet, but as they've met with a positive response so far (from my mom!), I'd like to share them here...and in the comments below, feel free to share your own 'family rules.'

Our Family Rules

1. Everyone has a right to be heard, and a responsibility to listen.

2. Love is Truth and Truth is Love (so be truthfully loving, and lovingly truthful!)

3. Openness is the key to honesty. Honesty is the key to trust. Trust is the key to love.

4. Act as if God were in this house with us---because He is.

Do you have any 'family rules' to share?

A disturbing piece of news

2012-01-22T20:50:00.002Z

When I was in elementary school, I was always getting bad reports sent home to my parents about my performance in the area of current events. 'Erin needs to pay more attention to current events.' Well, I haven't changed. I'm still not good at math (my other least favourite subject) and I'm not very interested in the worldly arena of politics, the gossip and the personalities that come and go, the black-and-white idealism that fails to accept with charity the reality of our humanity at its rawest need. BUT, sometimes you do have to pay attention.

My main source for news is Vatican Radio, and perusing the headlines today, I noticed something I felt the need to share. I don't like to make this blog a political space; it is, after all, meant to be just what the title says it is, Contemplative. However, this bit of news is about much more than just politics; it's about human life, or should I say---human lives, our culture's view of man and his existence and its meaning.

The article is below:

US Bishops: HHS regulations "literally unconscionable"

The administration of US President Barack Obama Obama on Friday announced that non-profit employers – including the Catholic Church – will have one year to comply with new regulations that order almost every employer and insurer in the country to provide sterilization and contraceptives, including some abortion-inducing drugs, in their health plans. The US Bishops have condemned the new rules, and are say they are committed to working with all US citizens to reform the law and change the rules.

Below, please find the full text of the communiqué from the Press Office of the USCCB, followed by audio of USCCB president, Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan of New York.

*********************************************************************

The Catholic bishops of the United States called “literally unconscionable” a decision by the Obama Administration to continue to demand that sterilization, abortifacients and contraception be included in virtually all health plans. Today's announcement means that this mandate and its very narrow exemption will not change at all; instead there will only be a delay in enforcement against some employers.

“In effect, the president is saying we have a year to figure out how to violate our consciences,” said Cardinal-designate Timothy M. Dolan, archbishop of New York and president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

The cardinal-designate continued, “To force American citizens to choose between violating their consciences and forgoing their healthcare is literally unconscionable.It is as much an attack on access to health care as on religious freedom. Historically this represents a challenge and a compromise of our religious liberty."

The HHS rule requires that sterilization and contraception – including controversial abortifacients – be included among “preventive services” coverage in almost every healthcare plan available to Americans. “The government should not force Americans to act as if pregnancy is a disease to be prevented at all costs,” added Cardinal-designate Dolan.

At issue, the U.S. bishops and other religious leaders insist, is the survival of a cornerstone constitutionally protected freedom that ensures respect for the conscience of Catholics and all other Americans.

“This is nothing less than a direct attack on religion and First Amendment rights,” said Franciscan Sister Jane Marie Klein, chairperson of the board at Franciscan Alliance, Inc., a system of 13 Catholic hospitals. “I have hundreds of employees who will be upset and confused by this edict. I cannot understand it at all.”

Daughter of Charity Sister Carol Keehan, president and chief executive officer of the Catholic Health Association of the United States, voiced disappointment with the decision. Catholic hospitals serve one out of six people who seek hospital care annually.

“This was a missed opportunity to be clear on appropriate conscience protection,” Sister Keehan said.

Cardinal-designate Dolan urged that the HHS mandate be overturned.

“The Obama administration has now drawn an unprecedented line in the sand,” he said. “The Catholic bishops are committed to working with our fellow Americans to reform the law and change this unjust regulation. We will continue to study all the implications of this troubling decision.”

A Description of God

2012-01-21T21:33:00.001Z

A Description of God, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

Wisdom,
A simple Child,
born in a lowly place.

Love, perched high on giddy heights
Speaking with philosophers
Answering their questions,
Dismissing all their nonsense.

Light, in darkness shining,
Radiant and warm
A candle held
To the great Beyond.

Silence, celestial
Far greater than the volume
Of space and time
All that does and might exist.

The glow, the fire
That burns in Solitude
Captured here,
In the cloister of my heart.

When the soul does not feel God

2012-01-21T17:07:00.003Z

"The will often feels enkindled or tenderly moved or captivated without knowing how or understanding anything more particularly than before, since God is ordaining love in it; as the bride declares in the Song of Songs: The king brought me into the wine cellar and set in order charity in me [Sg 2:4].

There is no reason to fear idleness of the will in this situation. If the will stops making acts of love on its own and, in regard to particular knowledge, God makes them in it, inebriating it secretly with infused love either by means of the knowledge of contemplation or without it, as we just said, these acts are more delightful and meritorious than the acts the soul makes on its own, just as God, who moves it and infuses this love, is much better.

God infuses this love in the will when it is empty and detached from other particular, earthly or heavenly pleasures and affections. Take care then, to empty the will of its affections and detach it from them. If it does not retrogress through the desire for some satisfaction or pleasure, it advances, even though it experiences nothing particular in God by ascending above all things to him. Although it does not enjoy God very particularly and distinctly, nor love him in so clear an act, it does enjoy him obscurely and secretly in that general infusion more than it does all particular things, for it then sees clearly that nothing satisfies it as much as that solitary quietude...

One, therefore, should not be disturbed, for the will makes progress if it cannot dwell on the satisfactions and pleasures of particular acts. For by not turning back in the embrace of something sensible, it goes forward to the inaccessible, which is God; and so it is no wonder if it does not feel him."

~St. John of the Cross

Solitude

2012-01-21T16:58:00.001Z

Solitude, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

"She lived in solitude,
and now in solitude has built her nest;
and in solitude he guides her
he alone, who also bears
in solitude the wound of love."

~St. John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle

A little lift from St. John of the Cross (Hace tal obra el amor)

2012-01-18T21:36:00.003Z

It would take a lifetime or more to unpack the spiritual treasures that are the writings and teachings of St. John of the Cross. Every now and then I like to thumb through my anthology of his works, not pretending to truly study, but doing nothing more than just let my glance fall on whatever especially delights me at that particular moment...here's what delighted me today:

#55 of the 'Sayings of Light and Love':

"Since God is inaccessible, be careful not to concern yourself with all that your faculties can comprehend or your senses feel, so that you do not become satisfied with less and lose the lightness of soul suitable for going to him."

And from one of his poems, an especially good description of the spiritual life:

"After I have known it

love works so in me

that whether things go well or badly

love turns them to one sweetness

transforming the soul in itself.

And so in its delighting flame

which I am feeling within me,

swiftly, with nothing spared,

I am wholly being consumed."

(and for Spanish readers, I'm sure it's better in the original:)

Hace tal obra el amor

despues que le conoci,

que, si hay bien o mal en mi

todo lo hace de un sabor,

y al alma transforma en si;

y asi, en su llama sabrosa,

la cual en mi estoy sintiendo,

apriesa, sin quedar cosa,

todo me voy consumiendo.

A Pathway to God

2012-01-17T20:41:00.000Z

I was recently asked to contribute to a wonderful new, Spirit-inspired venture called 'Faith-filled Photographers.' It's a website that explores the connections betwee faith and the creative pursuits, especially photography and writing. My own reflection, which considers creativity as one of the 'Pathways to God' come under this week's theme of 'Let there be Light.'

Check it out!

http://www.sienafallsmedia.com/fp/2012/01/17/pathwaystogod/

Stephen B. Whatley the Praying Artist - Signs, Wonders, and Miracles

2012-01-17T15:52:00.000Z

Below you'll find the online version of an excellent article from Catholic Life magazine featuring the work of Stephen B. Whatley, a Catholic convert and expressionist painter.

Stephen B. Whatley the Praying Artist - Signs, Wonders, and Miracles

Sharing Epiphanies

2012-01-14T00:06:00.001Z

Without Noise, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

The Spirit is so busy in every nook and corner of our world, it's hard to keep track of the beautiful work He does. There's a great new website called "Faith-Filled Photographers" which contains many spiritual gems, and explores the connection between faith and creaitivity.

Behind the site are two prolific Catholic women, Cheryl and Jessica. (Jessica has just had her eighth child, a boy, we're so happy to welcome this newborn life to the world!).

Today the site featured a poem & picture by me, under the theme of "Sharing Epiphanies." Sharing my epiphanies is what I like to do here, and I'm honoured to be sharing epiphanies with Cheryl and Jessica, too. Hopefully a perusal of the site will inspire you with epiphanies of your own...

check it out here:

http://www.sienafallsmedia.com/fp/2012/01/13/sharing-epiphanies/

The Self-Examination Dare

2012-01-13T23:55:00.001Z

Remember that game we played as children, 'Truth or Dare'? I almost always chose 'truth' because it seemed so much easier and less anxiety-ridden than the physical risks that often accompanied 'dare.' However, if we were to play again as adults, would we still find 'truth' as easy? Isn't the truth the greatest thing we can dare? To put it in other words, isn't living truthfully the daredevil's life, the narrow gate that requires so much courage to enter in at?

Today I came across a little gem from the wonderful, amazing Poor Clare sisters at Ty Mam Duw in North Wales. It's a little tongue-in-cheek spur to self-examination. I dare you to examine which points on this list may be requiring your inward attention...I know I'm guilty of at least a few.

"Out of Our Togetherness"
How to be miserable!

A Ten Point Scheme for Self-Hindrance! or

How to try the Patience of the Lord and your Friends or

What to Avoid if you Want to Live with Humans

1. Sulk - this is highly successful and guaranteed to achieve lasting results.

2. Grab - make sure that, always and in every place, you come first.

3. Scowl - there is nothing to smile about, and you should let everyone know it.

4. Assert yourself - it is the very least you owe to yourself.

5. Do not complain, all you have to do is say, "I don't want to be difficult, but..."

This will always get the point over.

6. Argue - other people always need enlightenment.

7. Be sentimental - it will prove that you are a beautiful person who thinks with the heart.

8. Pick your food - slimmers must eat, no matter how many people may starve.

9. Worry - this is one of the most genteel and widely accepted methods of avoiding responsibility.

10. Never forget! - keep an ineradicable charge sheet of your neighbours failings printed on the inside of your eyelids. And whatever good they may do, do not hold it against them

An Expectant Mother's Prayer

2012-01-09T17:25:00.003Z

Lord, you are "the Eternal Love, ever into new loves unfolding."

Help me to unfold this new love with you.

Give me your peace so that I may give peace.

Give me your wisdom so that I may give guidance.

Give me your tenderness so that I may nurture.

Give me your love so that I may give love.

You came to us as a baby. Come also to me in this baby, in whom You are the breath of life.

Amen.

Love's triune nature

2012-01-07T22:14:00.001Z

"Wherever there is love, there is a trinity: a lover, the beloved, and a fountain of love."

~St. Augustine (354-430)

Three Lights Converging

2012-01-07T14:23:00.002Z

An Epiphany reflection by Fr. Anthony Meredith that I really loved, featured in this week's Farm Street newsletter:

THE THREE WISE MEN

On January 6, twelve days after Christ’s birth in the stable at Bethlehem we keep the feast of the Epiphany, known in some parts of the world as the Three Kings. It forms a remarkable and instructive contrast with the arrival of the shepherds we heard of on Christmas night: [Luke 2; 15-20] “So they hurried and found Mary and Joseph and the baby lying in the manger.” On the feast of the Epiphany, Mary and the baby are still there, but worship is offered not by 'certain poor shepherds' but by three wise men from the east, the three kings, to which tradition since the 6th century has attached the names of Melchior, Gaspar and Balthasar.

Three things stand out about them, which serve to distinguish them from the first worshippers of the infant king. They were Gentiles, not Jews, they were wise and they were generous with their gifts of gold, incense and myrrh.

The whole beautiful incident helps us to focus our attention on the simple but important fact that the gospel came initially not to foreigners, but to Jews, not to the wise of this world, but to the simple - a truth Saint Paul frequently reinforces, above all in the opening chapters of the first letter to the Corinthians, and not to the wealthy and powerful, but to the poor.

The poverty of the first disciples and hearers of the word is a truth brought home to us above all by Saint Luke with his version of the Beatitudes, 'Blessed are the poor' [Luke 6, 20] and the parable of Dives and Lazarus at Luke 16, 19. The wise men use their light of their intelligences to follow the light of the star and discover as a reward the Light of the World. The three lights work in harmony and this is surely how it should be.

Sadly, however, as certain modern writers, like certain modern atheists remind us, it is not a necessary connection. Many followers of their minds look upon the world and with the help of their own intelligence come to very different conclusions from the discovery the Magi made. This may lead many to the conclusion that far from being a divinely inspired gift, the human mind can lead us astray and as a result of this experience come to the unfortunate conclusion that the mind is at best a dangerous ally.

The wise men are there to recall us to the fact that the gift of intelligence is indeed a divine gift and image of God within us. Most of us need to believe first and then use our minds to explore the dimensions and implications of our beliefs, a truth Saint Anselm insists upon with the words; 'Believe that you may understand'. We should not be afraid of our minds but use them to grow in a deeper understanding of our faith."

Fr Anthony Meredith SJ

A West Country Ruin

2012-01-04T20:07:00.001Z

A West Country Ruin, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

This little poem was originally composed as a remembrance of a tiny church in the county of Devonshire, England---'Dean Prior Church.' You can find it just off the A38 that runs between Plymouth and Totnes.

The long road dissected dangerously
With motor speeding from town to city
Careless of this deteriorating patchwork,
This heirloom quilt
Of green velvet, woven with glancing jewels
We call it 'England.'

The long road was careless,
It passed the old church by
Without an Ave, or a thought
Cast on the worn and empty Tabernacle.
The sapling bough had branched
Into a mighty oak
Since last a knee was bent there,
Or hand clasped in fervent prayer;
The stone tower, silent; its bells, dumb.
Their music had once echoed from hill to hill
Called farmer and squire in rows to fill
The holy house; yes, its bells once sung
As if the Kingdom of God were surely come.

Pictured: Muchelney Abbey, Somerset Levels.

All we know

2012-01-04T00:02:00.000Z

"That love is all there is, is all we know of love."

~Emily Dickinson

The Romance of God

2012-01-02T16:31:00.001Z

I've currently been revisiting some of the works of the Romantic poets, with whom I spent many long mornings and intimate afternoons during my years living in England. I've now realized what a huge part of my conversion they were; in fact I often wonder whether it could all have happened without them. God has a different way of speaking to each of us about Himself. It was through the 'cosmic Christ', the singular presence whom Wordsworth spoke of as 'dwelling in the light of setting suns...and the living air...and in the mind of man' that God called to me.

I recently discovered a little treasure from Robert Browning, whose spiritual side I wasn't really aware of before. Coming from his poem, 'Christmas Eve and Easter-Day,' Browning describes his Christmas Eve experience at 'Mount Zion', a fundamentalist Protestant chapel. His dissatisfaction with its narrowed, loveless view of God and man leads him straight out the door, breaking into poetic discourse on the nature of God. It describes with great beauty the experience of conversion that I myself have known:

"After how many modes, this Christmas-Eve,

Does the self-same weary thing take place?

The same endeavour to make you believe,

And with much the same effect, no more:

Each method abundantly convincing,

As I say, to those convinced before,

But scarce to be swallowed without wincing

By the not-as-yet-convinced. For me,

I have my own church equally:

And in this church my faith sprang first!

(I said, as I reached the rising ground,

And the wind began again, with a burst

Of rain in my face, and a glad rebound

From the heart beneath, God speeding me,

I entered his church-door, nature leading me)

--In youth I looked to these very skies,

And probing their immensities,

I found God there, his visible power;

Yet felt in my heart, amid all its sense

Of the power, an equal evidence

That his love, there too, was the nobler dower.

For the loving worm within its clod,

Were diviner than a loveless god

Amid his worlds, I will dare to say

You know what I mean: God's all, man's nought:

But also, God, whose pleasure brought

Man into being, stands away

As it were a handbreadth off, to give

Room for the newly-made to live,

And look at him from a place apart,

And use his gifts of brain and heart,

Given, indeed, but to keep for ever.

Who speaks of man, then, must not sever

Man's very elements from man,

Saying, "But all is God's"---whose plan

Was to create man and then leave him

Able, his own word saith, to grieve him

But able to glorify him too,

As a mere machine could never do...

...But love is the ever-springing fountain

Man may enlarge or narrow his bed

For the water's play, but the water-head---

How can he multiply or reduce it?

As easy create it, as cause it to cease;

He may profit by it, or abuse it,

But 'tis not a thing to bear increase

As power does: be love less or more

In the heart of man, he keeps it shut

Or opes it wide, as he pleases, but

Love's sum remains what it was before.

So gazing up, in my youth, at love

As seen through power, ever above

All modes which make it manifest

My soul brought all to a single test---

That he, the Eternal First and Last,

Who, in his power, had so surpassed

All man conceives of what is might,--

Whose wisdom, too, showed infinite,

Would prove infinitely good;

Would never, (my soul understood,)

With power to work all love desires

Bestow e'en less than man requires;

That he who endlessly was teaching,

Above my spirit's utmost reaching,

What love can do to leaf or stone,

(So that to master this alone,

This done to stone or leaf for me

I must go on learning endlessly)

Would never need that I, in turn,

Should point him out defect unheeded,

And show that God had yet to learn

What the meanest human creature needed,

---Not life, to wit, for a few short years,

Tracking his way through doubts and fears,

While the stupid earth on which I stay

Suffers no change, but passive adds

Its myriad years to myriads,

Though I, he gave it to, decay,

Seeing death come and choose about me,

And my dearest ones depart without me.

No! love which, on earth, amid all the shows of it

Has ever been the sole good of life in it,

The love, ever growing there, spite of the strife in it

Shall arise, made perfect, from death's repose of it.

And I shall behold thee, face to face,

O God, and in thy light retrace

How in all I loved here, still wast thou!

Whom pressing to, then, as I fain would now,

I shall find as able to satiate

The love, thy gift, as my spirit's wonder

Thou art able to quicken and sublimate,

With this sky of thine, that I now walk under,

And glory in thee for, as I gaze

Thus, thus! Oh, let men keep their ways

Of seeking thee in a narrow shrine---

Be this my way! And this is mine!"

Man of Sorrows

2012-01-01T03:46:00.001Z

Man of Sorrows, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

The Man of Sorrows
A carpenter from Nazareth
Sandal-shod wanderer
The one Alone
At night and on dark mountains
He has worked miracles
Redemption, Revelation
Flowing through Him
Is the River of Life
The Eternal Spirit
Fountain of Love
In Whom is all Being
Creation is His face.

Picture taken at Hill of Crosses, Lithuania

Death and the Higher Reality

2012-01-01T03:14:00.001Z

After a bad fall on Thursday, I was terribly frightened about the condition of my unborn child. Of course, falling is common among pregant women---our bodies are hard to manage and our hormones are busy softening up our ligaments so that we're supple enough to take all the changes in our weight distribution. But falling is scary for women who feel responsible for each and every little action, knowing that what happens to us, happens to our children too.

Of course, nature has been well planned, and my child was quite safe (probably pretty cosy!) in her cushioned 'sac.' A doctor's check-up on Friday revealed a healthy heart beating at 154 BPM and she's been moving lots since then!

On the same day, I heard about the precarious situation of a little boy in ICU---a little boy from a family that had already lost one child to cancer. Today, I received the news that this little boy had passed to his eternal rest, to join his sister, a 'victim' of cancer. This word is often tossed around, 'victim.' But often the cancer sufferers don't see themselves as the victims; in fact, this little girl had prayed her way through cancer. "The only time I don't feel pain is when I'm praying the rosary," she said. These are the words of someone taking control of their suffering and using it to positive effect.

As an expectant mother---and if you're a mother, you'll probably be thinking this, too---it's terrible to imagine experiencing the death of your child. We feel them move within, we watch them grow and flourish. We hear that little heart beating. We can't stand to think of them being cut off---or us being cut off from them.

If my little girl were already here, and able to speak with me, I'd like to tell her how much I worry about her. I would also want to tell her that the best we can do is to love our children in a conscientious manner, and then entrust them to God. Whether on earth or in heaven, we will always be their mothers; God has given us the vocation of loving them.

A friend who is a mother recently remarked to me that death---especially something like the death of a child---usually has one of two effects on people: it either turns them away from God, or draws them right to Him. Death is an unique experience to all of us, but there are some general reactions common to every person. We're angry, and for some people, God is the object of their anger. God ought to have saved this person. God ought not to have let this happen. All the while, the fact that every person wil inevitably die at some point is forgotten. It's always too soon, and never deserved. It's not a rational reaction, but it certainly is a natural one.

Or, there are those who immediately submerse themselves in God---a submersion that either blankets the fears or doubts that death arouses, or engulfs grief in the consolations of faith.

Reflecting on my own experience of death, I am not able to relate to either of these two reactions. However, bereavement was for me a conversion experience. When I lost my father at the age of thirteen, I felt my world had collapsed. It really had. The things I had believed in---my family, my parents' marriage, the father whom I idolised---all seemed destroyed. There was nothing to hold on to. Submersed in an atheistic view of life since my childhood, I had no awareness of God. So there was no god to get angry with. I was angry with my mother, my father, with lots of other people around me instead.

Anger passed. As Phillip Larkin once wrote, what remained was love. I never thought of turning to God for consolation anymore than I thought of being angry with him. God was not an option. And yet, God was the reality emanating from my experience. What I experienced was the transcendence of love; love was not only what remained, but what had always been, and what carried on---beyond death, yes, but even beyond life itself. Love bonded us together in a way that death could not undo; love bequeathed to us transcendence. In short, I realised that love was the greater reality. It was greater than death, because it outlasted it. It was greater than life, because it gave life its meaning. It was eternal, and gave us eternal life. It was the higher reality, a reality in which we 'lived and moved and had our being.' It was this higher reality that we call 'God.'

So the experience of grief, loss and suffering was for me the gateway into God. It started me on the quest for that love which connected us, which existed outside of us and yet was also the life within us. I quested after its source and its end. At the beginning and end, I found Him whom I have heard called 'the Alone.' The one who is outside of existence, the one who is existence itself. The Love who is, the Love who gives life.

Such love as this did not create death. Without getting into the intricacies of Christian theology concerning the Fall, it is enough to say death is a force that entered into the world through us. It is the natural equivalent of the supernatural reality we call 'evil.' As human beings are both natural and supernatural creatures---a unity of body and soul---we might say that both these forces hold sway over their inherent domains in the human person. But like evil, death is an unpowerful, though undeniable, force. Our existence is bound up in the use of our freedom, the greatest dignity we possess. While we cannot control death anymore than we can control the weather, we can choose how we meet it. We can choose anger or conversion.

Please pray for the Strauss family, who have just lost their son, Anthony.

And your prayers would also be appreciated as I recover from this fall, and as we look forward to the imminent arrival of our little girl, Marianna, who's due to arrive in early February. We're grateful for your prayers!

The Christmas Story

2011-12-26T11:26:00.001Z

"A woman who loves"~Christmas Novena Day 9

2011-12-24T03:00:00.000Z

Day 9 of Totus2us.com's Christmas Novena, with readings from Pope Benedict's encyclical, "God is Love."

"Outstanding among the saints is Mary, Mother of the Lord and mirror of all holiness. In the Gospel of Luke we find her engaged in a service of charity to her cousin Elizabeth, with whom she remained for “about three months” (1:56) so as to assist her in the final phase of her pregnancy. “Magnificat anima mea Dominum”, she says on the occasion of that visit, “My soul magnifies the Lord” (Lk 1:46). In these words she expresses her whole programme of life: not setting herself at the centre, but leaving space for God, who is encountered both in prayer and in service of neighbour — only then does goodness enter the world. Mary's greatness consists in the fact that she wants to magnify God, not herself. She is lowly: her only desire is to be the handmaid of the Lord. She knows that she will only contribute to the salvation of the world if, rather than carrying out her own projects, she places herself completely at the disposal of God's initiatives. Mary is a woman of hope: only because she believes in God's promises and awaits the salvation of Israel, can the angel visit her and call her to the decisive service of these promises. Mary is a woman of faith: “Blessed are you who believed”, Elizabeth says to her. The Magnificat —a portrait, so to speak, of her soul — is entirely woven from threads of Holy Scripture, threads drawn from the Word of God. Here we see how completely at home Mary is with the Word of God, with ease she moves in and out of it. She speaks and thinks with the Word of God; the Word of God becomes her word, and her word issues from the Word of God. Here we see how her thoughts are attuned to the thoughts of God, how her will is one with the will of God. Since Mary is completely imbued with the Word of God, she is able to become the Mother of the Word Incarnate. Finally, Mary is a woman who loves. How could it be otherwise? As a believer who in faith thinks with God's thoughts and wills with God's will, she cannot fail to be a woman who loves. We sense this in her quiet gestures, as recounted by the infancy narratives in the Gospel. We see it in the delicacy with which she recognizes the need of the spouses at Cana and makes it known to Jesus. We see it in the humility with which she recedes into the background during Jesus' public life, knowing that the Son must establish a new family and that the Mother's hour will come only with the Cross, which will be Jesus' true hour. When the disciples flee, Mary will remain beneath the Cross; later, at the hour of Pentecost, it will be they who gather around her as they wait for the Holy Spirit.

The lives of the saints are not limited to their earthly biographies but also include their being and working in God after death. In the saints one thing becomes clear: those who draw near to God do not withdraw from men, but rather become truly close to them. In no one do we see this more clearly than in Mary. The words addressed by the crucified Lord to his disciple — to John and through him to all disciples of Jesus: “Behold, your mother!” (Jn 19:27) — are fulfilled anew in every generation. Mary has truly become the Mother of all believers. Men and women of every time and place have recourse to her motherly kindness and her virginal purity and grace, in all their needs and aspirations, their joys and sorrows, their moments of loneliness and their common endeavours. They constantly experience the gift of her goodness and the unfailing love which she pours out from the depths of her heart. The testimonials of gratitude, offered to her from every continent and culture, are a recognition of that pure love which is not self- seeking but simply benevolent. At the same time, the devotion of the faithful shows an infallible intuition of how such love is possible: it becomes so as a result of the most intimate union with God, through which the soul is totally pervaded by him—a condition which enables those who have drunk from the fountain of God's love to become in their turn a fountain from which “flow rivers of living water” (Jn 7:38). Mary, Virgin and Mother, shows us what love is and whence it draws its origin and its constantly renewed power. To her we entrust the Church and her mission in the service of love:

Holy Mary, Mother of God,

you have given the world its true light,

Jesus, your Son – the Son of God.

You abandoned yourself completely to God's call

and thus became a wellspring

of the goodness which flows forth from him.

Show us Jesus. Lead us to him.

Teach us to know and love him,

so that we too can become capable of true love

and be fountains of living water

in the midst of a thirsting world."

"Love is the light"~Christmas Novena Day 8

2011-12-23T13:24:00.001Z

Day 8 of Totus2us.com's Christmas Novena, with readings from Pope Benedict's "God is Love."

"It is time to reaffirm the importance of prayer in the face of the activism and the growing secularism of many Christians engaged in charitable work. Clearly, the Christian who prays does not claim to be able to change God's plans or correct what he has foreseen. Rather, he seeks an encounter with the Father of Jesus Christ, asking God to be present with the consolation of the Spirit to him and his work. A personal relationship with God and an abandonment to his will can prevent man from being demeaned and save him from falling prey to the teaching of fanaticism and terrorism. An authentically religious attitude prevents man from presuming to judge God, accusing him of allowing poverty and failing to have compassion for his creatures. When people claim to build a case against God in defence of man, on whom can they depend when human activity proves powerless?

Certainly Job could complain before God about the presence of incomprehensible and apparently unjustified suffering in the world. In his pain he cried out: “Oh, that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his seat! ... I would learn what he would answer me, and understand what he would say to me. Would he contend with me in the greatness of his power? ... Therefore I am terrified at his presence; when I consider, I am in dread of him. God has made my heart faint; the Almighty has terrified me” (23:3, 5-6, 15-16). Often we cannot understand why God refrains from intervening. Yet he does not prevent us from crying out, like Jesus on the Cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mt 27:46). We should continue asking this question in prayerful dialogue before his face: “Lord, holy and true, how long will it be?” (Rev 6:10). It is Saint Augustine who gives us faith's answer to our sufferings: “Si comprehendis, non est Deus” — ”if you understand him, he is not God.” Our protest is not meant to challenge God, or to suggest that error, weakness or indifference can be found in him. For the believer, it is impossible to imagine that God is powerless or that “perhaps he is asleep.” Instead, our crying out is, as it was for Jesus on the Cross, the deepest and most radical way of affirming our faith in his sovereign power. Even in their bewilderment and failure to understand the world around them, Christians continue to believe in the “goodness and loving kindness of God” (Tit 3:4). Immersed like everyone else in the dramatic complexity of historical events, they remain unshakably certain that God is our Father and loves us, even when his silence remains incomprehensible.

Faith, hope and charity go together. Hope is practised through the virtue of patience, which continues to do good even in the face of apparent failure, and through the virtue of humility, which accepts God's mystery and trusts him even at times of darkness. Faith tells us that God has given his Son for our sakes and gives us the victorious certainty that it is really true: God is love! It thus transforms our impatience and our doubts into the sure hope that God holds the world in his hands and that, as the dramatic imagery of the end of the Book of Revelation points out, in spite of all darkness he ultimately triumphs in glory. Faith, which sees the love of God revealed in the pierced heart of Jesus on the Cross, gives rise to love. Love is the light — and in the end, the only light — that can always illuminate a world grown dim and give us the courage needed to keep living and working. Love is possible, and we are able to practise it because we are created in the image of God. To experience love and in this way to cause the light of God to enter into the world — this is the invitation I would like to extend with the present encyclical."

Let us pray:

Holy Mary, Mother of God,

you have given the world its true light,

Jesus, your Son – the Son of God.

You abandoned yourself completely to God's call and thus became a wellspring of the goodness which flows forth from him.

Show us Jesus. Lead us to him.

Teach us to know and love him,

so that we too can become capable of true love

and be fountains of living water in the midst of a thirsting world.

"I must be personally present in my gift"~Christmas Novena Day 7

2011-12-23T13:12:00.001Z

Day 7 of Totus2us.com's Christmas Novena, with readings from Pope Benedict's "God is Love."

"Interior openness to the Catholic dimension of the Church cannot fail to dispose charity workers to work in harmony with other organizations in serving various forms of need, but in a way that respects what is distinctive about the service which Christ requested of his disciples. Saint Paul, in his hymn to charity, teaches us that it is always more than activity alone: “If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but do not have love, I gain nothing.” This hymn must be the Magna Carta of all ecclesial service; it sums up all the reflections on love which I have offered throughout this encyclical letter. Practical activity will always be insufficient, unless it visibly expresses a love for man, a love nourished by an encounter with Christ. My deep personal sharing in the needs and sufferings of others becomes a sharing of my very self with them: if my gift is not to prove a source of humiliation, I must give to others not only something that is my own, but my very self; I must be personally present in my gift.

This proper way of serving others also leads to humility. The one who serves does not consider himself superior to the one served, however miserable his situation at the moment may be. Christ took the lowest place in the world — the Cross — and by this radical humility he redeemed us and constantly comes to our aid. Those who are in a position to help others will realize that in doing so they themselves receive help; being able to help others is no merit or achievement of their own. This duty is a grace. The more we do for others, the more we understand and can appropriate the words of Christ: “We are useless servants” (Lk 17:10). We recognize that we are not acting on the basis of any superiority or greater personal efficiency, but because the Lord has graciously enabled us to do so. There are times when the burden of need and our own limitations might tempt us to become discouraged. But precisely then we are helped by the knowledge that, in the end, we are only instruments in the Lord's hands; and this knowledge frees us from the presumption of thinking that we alone are personally responsible for building a better world. In all humility we will do what we can, and in all humility we will entrust the rest to the Lord. It is God who governs the world, not we. We offer him our service only to the extent that we can, and for as long as he grants us the strength. To do all we can with what strength we have, however, is the task which keeps the good servant of Jesus Christ always at work: “The love of Christ urges us on” (2 Cor 5:14).

When we consider the immensity of others' needs, we can, on the one hand, be driven towards an ideology that would aim at doing what God's governance of the world apparently cannot: fully resolving every problem. Or we can be tempted to give in to inertia, since it would seem that in any event nothing can be accomplished. At such times, a living relationship with Christ is decisive if we are to keep on the right path, without falling into an arrogant contempt for man, something not only unconstructive but actually destructive, or surrendering to a resignation which would prevent us from being guided by love in the service of others. Prayer, as a means of drawing ever new strength from Christ, is concretely and urgently needed. People who pray are not wasting their time, even though the situation appears desperate and seems to call for action alone. Piety does not undermine the struggle against the poverty of our neighbours, however extreme. In the example of Blessed Teresa of Calcutta we have a clear illustration of the fact that time devoted to God in prayer not only does not detract from effective and loving service to our neighbour but is in fact the inexhaustible source of that service. In her letter for Lent 1996, Blessed Teresa wrote to her lay co-workers: “We need this deep connection with God in our daily life. How can we obtain it? By prayer.”"

Let us pray:

Holy Mary, Mother of God,

you have given the world its true light,

Jesus, your Son – the Son of God.

You abandoned yourself completely to God's call and thus became a wellspring of the goodness which flows forth from him.

Show us Jesus. Lead us to him.

Teach us to know and love him,

so that we too can become capable of true love

and be fountains of living water in the midst of a thirsting world.

"If you see charity, you see the Trinity"~Christmas Novena Day 6

2011-12-21T16:19:00.000Z

Day 6 of Totus2us.com's Christmas Novena, with readings from Pope Benedict's encyclical, "God is Love."

"“If you see charity, you see the Trinity”, wrote Saint Augustine. In the foregoing reflections, we have been able to focus our attention on the Pierced one, recognizing the plan of the Father who, moved by love, sent his only-begotten Son into the world to redeem man. By dying on the Cross — as Saint John tells us — Jesus “gave up his Spirit” (Jn 19:30), anticipating the gift of the Holy Spirit that he would make after his Resurrection. This was to fulfil the promise of “rivers of living water” that would flow out of the hearts of believers, through the outpouring of the Spirit. The Spirit, in fact, is that interior power which harmonizes their hearts with Christ's heart and moves them to love their brethren as Christ loved them, when he bent down to wash the feet of the disciples and above all when he gave his life for us.

The Spirit is also the energy which transforms the heart of the ecclesial community, so that it becomes a witness before the world to the love of the Father, who wishes to make humanity a single family in his Son. The entire activity of the Church is an expression of a love that seeks the integral good of man: it seeks his evangelization through Word and Sacrament, an undertaking that is often heroic in the way it is acted out in history; and it seeks to promote man in the various arenas of life and human activity. Love is therefore the service that the Church carries out in order to attend constantly to man's sufferings and his needs, including material needs. ...

The Church's deepest nature is expressed in her three-fold responsibility: of proclaiming the word of God (kerygma-martyria), celebrating the sacraments (leitourgia), and exercising the ministry of charity (diakonia). These duties presuppose each other and are inseparable. For the Church, charity is not a kind of welfare activity which could equally well be left to others, but is a part of her nature, an indispensable expression of her very being.

The Church is God's family in the world. In this family no one ought to go without the necessities of life. Yet at the same time caritas-agape extends beyond the frontiers of the Church. The parable of the Good Samaritan remains as a standard which imposes universal love towards the needy whom we encounter “by chance”, whoever they may be. Without in any way detracting from this commandment of universal love, the Church also has a specific responsibility: within the ecclesial family no member should suffer through being in need. The teaching of the Letter to the Galatians is emphatic: “So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all, and especially to those who are of the household of faith” (6:10). ....

Love — caritas — will always prove necessary, even in the most just society. There is no ordering of the State so just that it can eliminate the need for a service of love. Whoever wants to eliminate love is preparing to eliminate man as such. There will always be suffering which cries out for consolation and help. There will always be loneliness. There will always be situations of material need where help in the form of concrete love of neighbour is indispensable. The State which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing the very thing which the suffering person — every person — needs: namely, loving personal concern. We do not need a State which regulates and controls everything, but a State which, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, generously acknowledges and supports initiatives arising from the different social forces and combines spontaneity with closeness to those in need. The Church is one of those living forces: she is alive with the love enkindled by the Spirit of Christ. This love does not simply offer people material help, but refreshment and care for their souls, something which often is even more necessary than material support. In the end, the claim that just social structures would make works of charity superfluous masks a materialist conception of man: the mistaken notion that man can live “by bread alone” (Mt 4:4) — a conviction that demeans man and ultimately disregards all that is specifically human. ...

...Following the example given in the parable of the Good Samaritan, Christian charity is first of all the simple response to immediate needs and specific situations: feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, caring for and healing the sick, visiting those in prison, etc. The Church's charitable organizations, beginning with those of Caritas (at diocesan, national and international levels), ought to do everything in their power to provide the resources and above all the personnel needed for this work. Individuals who care for those in need must first be professionally competent: they should be properly trained in what to do and how to do it, and committed to continuing care. Yet, while professional competence is a primary, fundamental requirement, it is not of itself sufficient. We are dealing with human beings, and human beings always need something more than technically proper care. They need humanity. They need heartfelt concern. Those who work for the Church's charitable organizations must be distinguished by the fact that they do not merely meet the needs of the moment, but they dedicate themselves to others with heartfelt concern, enabling them to experience the richness of their humanity. Consequently, in addition to their necessary professional training, these charity workers need a “formation of the heart”: they need to be led to that encounter with God in Christ which awakens their love and opens their spirits to others. As a result, love of neighbour will no longer be for them a commandment imposed, so to speak, from without, but a consequence deriving from their faith, a faith which becomes active through love.

Christian charitable activity must be independent of parties and ideologies. It is not a means of changing the world ideologically, and it is not at the service of worldly stratagems, but it is a way of making present here and now the love which man always needs. The modern age, particularly from the nineteenth century on, has been dominated by various versions of a philosophy of progress whose most radical form is Marxism. Part of Marxist strategy is the theory of impoverishment: in a situation of unjust power, it is claimed, anyone who engages in charitable initiatives is actually serving that unjust system, making it appear at least to some extent tolerable. This in turn slows down a potential revolution and thus blocks the struggle for a better world. Seen in this way, charity is rejected and attacked as a means of preserving the status quo. What we have here, though, is really an inhuman philosophy. People of the present are sacrificed to the moloch of the future — a future whose effective realization is at best doubtful. One does not make the world more human by refusing to act humanely here and now. We contribute to a better world only by personally doing good now, with full commitment and wherever we have the opportunity, independently of partisan strategies and programmes. The Christian's programme — the programme of the Good Samaritan, the programme of Jesus — is “a heart which sees”. This heart sees where love is needed and acts accordingly. Obviously when charitable activity is carried out by the Church as a communitarian initiative, the spontaneity of individuals must be combined with planning, foresight and cooperation with other similar institutions.

Charity, furthermore, cannot be used as a means of engaging in what is nowadays considered proselytism. Love is free; it is not practised as a way of achieving other ends. But this does not mean that charitable activity must somehow leave God and Christ aside. For it is always concerned with the whole man. Often the deepest cause of suffering is the very absence of God. Those who practise charity in the Church's name will never seek to impose the Church's faith upon others. They realize that a pure and generous love is the best witness to the God in whom we believe and by whom we are driven to love. A Christian knows when it is time to speak of God and when it is better to say nothing and to let love alone speak. He knows that God is love and that God's presence is felt at the very time when the only thing we do is to love. He knows — to return to the questions raised earlier — that disdain for love is disdain for God and man alike; it is an attempt to do without God. Consequently, the best defence of God and man consists precisely in love. It is the responsibility of the Church's charitable organizations to reinforce this awareness in their members, so that by their activity — as well as their words, their silence, their example — they may be credible witnesses to Christ.""

Let us pray:

Holy Mary, Mother of God,

you have given the world its true light,

Jesus, your Son – the Son of God.

You abandoned yourself completely to God's call and thus became a wellspring of the goodness which flows forth from him.

Show us Jesus. Lead us to him.

Teach us to know and love him,

so that we too can become capable of true love

and be fountains of living water in the midst of a thirsting world.

The priesthood of women

2011-12-20T16:39:00.005Z

In Catholic teaching, the home is the 'Domestic Church.' It's that place on earth where our preparation for heaven begins and ends. We can think about the Holy Family at home in Nazareth together and clearly see the value of homemaking. I know many young people, including ourselves, who are reluctant to bring children into this world because it's a dirty, rotten place to be sometimes. There are so many dangers and so many tragedies. This world is full of people tearing each other apart. And for many would-be parents, this means giving up on the potentiality of parenthood---giving up, that is, on the possibility of changing the reality we live in.

However, as we wait to welcome our little girl into this world, I'm thinking about what 'reality' really means. There is the 'reality' outside the home, the one that we need to be equally safe from and informed about. If we're not informed about what the world is really like and what's out there, how can we confront it? How can we be positive instruments for change if we're too sheltered to even face the reality of our world?

However, as a parent thinks about all the potential worlds their child might have arrived into, and feels a bit depressed that of all those potential realities, it's this tainted one an innocent child must become apart of, I want to add that there is an even more important dimension of a child's reality than what they meet outside in the world. It's the reality they live inside the home. This is the one place on earth where you, as a parent, can create exactly the kind of world you like for your child to be born into. You can think about it as a church: 'if I were to build a church, what would it look like? what would the spiritual atmosphere be?' Or you can think about it as a monastic cloister, a place where one breathes fresh, invigorating spiritual air of quiet, peace, and a unity in our way of life and togetherness.

The reality that children live at home will teach them that there is another way to live, a choice to make about who we are and the lives we choose to live. Love is the reality that we want our children to opt for, and just like Nazareth, every home can be a seminary of love.

The homemaker is perched somewhere in between religious life and the ordinary reality. Because we are the shepherds of this little flock assigned to us, our 'domestic church.' This is the priesthood of women. Blessed Mother Teresa said that if there were peace in every home, there would be peace in the world.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.

"God becomes our joy"~Christmas Novena Day 5

2011-12-20T13:24:00.004Z

"God's will is no longer for me an alien will, something imposed on me from without by the commandments, but it is now my own will, based on the realization that God is in fact more deeply present to me than I am to myself. Then self- abandonment to God increases and God becomes our joy."

Day 5 of Totus2us.com's Christmas Novena, with readings from Pope Benedict's encyclical, 'God is Love.'

"Having reflected on the nature of love and its meaning in biblical faith, we are left with two questions concerning our own attitude: can we love God without seeing him? And can love be commanded? Against the double commandment of love these questions raise a double objection. No one has ever seen God, so how could we love him? Moreover, love cannot be commanded; it is ultimately a feeling that is either there or not, nor can it be produced by the will. Scripture seems to reinforce the first objection when it states: “If anyone says, ‘I love God,' and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen” (1 Jn 4:20). But this text hardly excludes the love of God as something impossible. On the contrary, the whole context of the passage quoted from the First Letter of John shows that such love is explicitly demanded. The unbreakable bond between love of God and love of neighbour is emphasized. One is so closely connected to the other that to say that we love God becomes a lie if we are closed to our neighbour or hate him altogether. Saint John's words should rather be interpreted to mean that love of neighbour is a path that leads to the encounter with God, and that closing our eyes to our neighbour also blinds us to God.

True, no one has ever seen God as he is. And yet God is not totally invisible to us; he does not remain completely inaccessible. God loved us first, says the Letter of John quoted above, and this love of God has appeared in our midst. He has become visible in as much as he “has sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him” (1 Jn 4:9). God has made himself visible: in Jesus we are able to see the Father. Indeed, God is visible in a number of ways. In the love-story recounted by the Bible, he comes towards us, he seeks to win our hearts, all the way to the Last Supper, to the piercing of his heart on the Cross, to his appearances after the Resurrection and to the great deeds by which, through the activity of the Apostles, he guided the nascent Church along its path. Nor has the Lord been absent from subsequent Church history: he encounters us ever anew, in the men and women who reflect his presence, in his word, in the sacraments, and especially in the Eucharist. In the Church's Liturgy, in her prayer, in the living community of believers, we experience the love of God, we perceive his presence and we thus learn to recognize that presence in our daily lives. He has loved us first and he continues to do so; we too, then, can respond with love. God does not demand of us a feeling which we ourselves are incapable of producing. He loves us, he makes us see and experience his love, and since he has “loved us first”, love can also blossom as a response within us.

In the gradual unfolding of this encounter, it is clearly revealed that love is not merely a sentiment. Sentiments come and go. A sentiment can be a marvellous first spark, but it is not the fullness of love. Earlier we spoke of the process of purification and maturation by which eros comes fully into its own, becomes love in the full meaning of the word. It is characteristic of mature love that it calls into play all man's potentialities; it engages the whole man, so to speak. Contact with the visible manifestations of God's love can awaken within us a feeling of joy born of the experience of being loved. But this encounter also engages our will and our intellect. Acknowledgment of the living God is one path towards love, and the “yes” of our will to his will unites our intellect, will and sentiments in the all- embracing act of love. But this process is always open-ended; love is never “finished” and complete; throughout life, it changes and matures, and thus remains faithful to itself. Idem velle atque idem nolle — to want the same thing, and to reject the same thing — was recognized by antiquity as the authentic content of love: the one becomes similar to the other, and this leads to a community of will and thought. The love-story between God and man consists in the very fact that this communion of will increases in a communion of thought and sentiment, and thus our will and God's will increasingly coincide: God's will is no longer for me an alien will, something imposed on me from without by the commandments, but it is now my own will, based on the realization that God is in fact more deeply present to me than I am to myself. Then self- abandonment to God increases and God becomes our joy.

Love of neighbour is thus shown to be possible in the way proclaimed by the Bible, by Jesus. It consists in the very fact that, in God and with God, I love even the person whom I do not like or even know. This can only take place on the basis of an intimate encounter with God, an encounter which has become a communion of will, even affecting my feelings. Then I learn to look on this other person not simply with my eyes and my feelings, but from the perspective of Jesus Christ. His friend is my friend. Going beyond exterior appearances, I perceive in others an interior desire for a sign of love, of concern. This I can offer them not only through the organizations intended for such purposes, accepting it perhaps as a political necessity. Seeing with the eyes of Christ, I can give to others much more than their outward necessities; I can give them the look of love which they crave. Here we see the necessary interplay between love of God and love of neighbour which the First Letter of John speaks of with such insistence. If I have no contact whatsoever with God in my life, then I cannot see in the other anything more than the other, and I am incapable of seeing in him the image of God. But if in my life I fail completely to heed others, solely out of a desire to be “devout” and to perform my “religious duties”, then my relationship with God will also grow arid. It becomes merely “proper”, but loveless. Only my readiness to encounter my neighbour and to show him love makes me sensitive to God as well. Only if I serve my neighbour can my eyes be opened to what God does for me and how much he loves me. The saints — consider the example of Blessed Teresa of Calcutta — constantly renewed their capacity for love of neighbour from their encounter with the Eucharistic Lord, and conversely this encounter acquired its real- ism and depth in their service to others. Love of God and love of neighbour are thus inseparable, they form a single commandment. But both live from the love of God who has loved us first. No longer is it a question, then, of a “commandment” imposed from without and calling for the impossible, but rather of a freely-bestowed experience of love from within, a love which by its very nature must then be shared with others. Love grows through love. Love is “divine” because it comes from God and unites us to God; through this unifying process it makes us a “we” which transcends our divisions and makes us one, until in the end God is “all in all” (1 Cor 15:28)."

Let us pray:

Holy Mary, Mother of God,

you have given the world its true light,

Jesus, your Son – the Son of God.

You abandoned yourself completely to God's call and thus became a wellspring of the goodness which flows forth from him.

Show us Jesus. Lead us to him.

Teach us to know and love him,

so that we too can become capable of true love

and be fountains of living water in the midst of a thirsting world.

"In Jesus we find God"~Christmas Novena Day 4

2011-12-19T13:44:00.000Z

"Love of God and love of neighbour have become one: in the least of the brethren we find Jesus himself, and in Jesus we find God."

Day 4 of Totus2us.com's Christmas Novena, with readings from Pope Benedict's 'Deus Caritas Est'

"... "The real novelty of the New Testament lies not so much in new ideas as in the figure of Christ himself, who gives flesh and blood to those concepts — an unprecedented realism. In the Old Testament, the novelty of the Bible did not consist merely in abstract notions but in God's unpredictable and in some sense unprecedented activity. This divine activity now takes on dramatic form when, in Jesus Christ, it is God himself who goes in search of the “stray sheep”, a suffering and lost humanity. When Jesus speaks in his parables of the shepherd who goes after the lost sheep, of the woman who looks for the lost coin, of the father who goes to meet and embrace his prodigal son, these are no mere words: they constitute an explanation of his very being and activity. His death on the Cross is the culmination of that turning of God against himself in which he gives himself in order to raise man up and save him. This is love in its most radical form. By contemplating the pierced side of Christ, we can understand the starting-point of this Encyclical Letter: “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8). It is there that this truth can be contemplated. It is from there that our definition of love must begin. In this contemplation the Christian discovers the path along which his life and love must move.

Jesus gave this act of oblation an enduring presence through his institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper. He anticipated his death and resurrection by giving his disciples, in the bread and wine, his very self, his body and blood as the new manna. The ancient world had dimly perceived that man's real food — what truly nourishes him as man — is ultimately the Logos, eternal wisdom: this same Logos now truly becomes food for us — as love. The Eucharist draws us into Jesus' act of self-oblation. More than just statically receiving the incarnate Logos, we enter into the very dynamic of his self-giving. The imagery of marriage between God and Israel is now realized in a way previously inconceivable: it had meant standing in God's presence, but now it becomes union with God through sharing in Jesus' self-gift, sharing in his body and blood. The sacramental “mysticism”, grounded in God's condescension towards us, operates at a radically different level and lifts us to far greater heights than anything that any human mystical elevation could ever accomplish.

Here we need to consider yet another aspect: this sacramental “mysticism” is social in character, for in sacramental communion I become one with the Lord, like all the other communicants. As Saint Paul says, “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Cor 10:17). Union with Christ is also union with all those to whom he gives himself. I cannot possess Christ just for myself; I can belong to him only in union with all those who have become, or who will become, his own. Communion draws me out of myself towards him, and thus also towards unity with all Christians. We become “one body”, completely joined in a single existence. Love of God and love of neighbour are now truly united: God incarnate draws us all to himself. We can thus understand how agape also became a term for the Eucharist: there God's own agape comes to us bodily, in order to continue his work in us and through us. Only by keeping in mind this Christological and sacramental basis can we correctly understand Jesus' teaching on love. The transition which he makes from the Law and the Prophets to the twofold commandment of love of God and of neighbour, and his grounding the whole life of faith on this central precept, is not simply a matter of morality — something that could exist apart from and alongside faith in Christ and its sacramental re-actualization. Faith, worship and ethos are interwoven as a single reality which takes shape in our encounter with God's agape. Here the usual contraposition between worship and ethics simply falls apart. “Worship” itself, Eucharistic communion, includes the reality both of being loved and of loving others in turn. A Eucharist which does not pass over into the concrete practice of love is intrinsically fragmented. Conversely, as we shall have to consider in greater detail below, the “commandment” of love is only possible because it is more than a requirement. Love can be “commanded” because it has first been given.

This principle is the starting-point for understanding the great parables of Jesus. The rich man begs from his place of torment that his brothers be informed about what happens to those who simply ignore the poor man in need. Jesus takes up this cry for help as a warning to help us return to the right path. The parable of the Good Samaritan offers two particularly important clarifications. Until that time, the concept of “neighbour” was understood as referring essentially to one's countrymen and to foreigners who had settled in the land of Israel; in other words, to the closely-knit community of a single country or people. This limit is now abolished. Anyone who needs me, and whom I can help, is my neighbour. The concept of “neighbour” is now universalized, yet it remains concrete. Despite being extended to all mankind, it is not reduced to a generic, abstract and undemanding expression of love, but calls for my own practical commitment here and now. The Church has the duty to interpret ever anew this relationship between near and far with regard to the actual daily life of her members. Lastly, we should especially mention the great parable of the Last Judgement, in which love becomes the criterion for the definitive decision about a human life's worth or lack thereof. Jesus identifies himself with those in need, with the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick and those in prison. “As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me” (Mt 25:40). Love of God and love of neighbour have become one: in the least of the brethren we find Jesus himself, and in Jesus we find God.""

Let us pray:

Holy Mary, Mother of God,

you have given the world its true light,

Jesus, your Son – the Son of God.

You abandoned yourself completely to God's call and thus became a wellspring of the goodness which flows forth from him.

Show us Jesus. Lead us to him.

Teach us to know and love him,

so that we too can become capable of true love

and be fountains of living water in the midst of a thirsting world.

Beneath the Christmas Tree

2011-12-19T13:36:00.000Z

On the secular side of the festivities, there's nothing that feels more like Christmas for me than Mikhail Baryshnikov and Gelsey Kirkland dancing this pas de deux from the Nutcracker. My mother and I used to stay up every year watching this version of the Nutcracker by ABT when I was a little girl---and I hope to do the same with my little girl, too.

"Space for the Uncontained God"

2011-12-18T14:59:00.001Z

Evening, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

A reflection for this week from SacredSpace.ie:

"We are entering the last week of Advent, a week commonly filled with frantic plans to be attended to before Christmas Day. St. Columcille can help us to find a quiet space amid all our busyness and to listen for God’s annunciation to us. ‘Sometimes in a lonely cell, in the presence of my God, I stand and listen. In the silence of my heart, I can hear God’s will when I listen. For I am but a servant, guided by my king when I listen.
Denise Levertov’s poem ‘Annunciation’ begins with the words ‘Hail, Space for the Uncontained God’. Mary is asked to be just this – a space for God. Like us she had her dreams, but the Uncontained God draws her into a far greater dream for herself and all of us. She is caught in a dilemma. She must choose between her little personal dream and the expansive dream of God. Despite her well-founded fears, she trusts God will be ever present. The place of fear becomes the birthing place of Love. In Levertov’s words: ‘Consent,courage unparallelled, opened her utterly.’ Can I allow the untamable, unexpected God of surprises to cross my threshold space? As I journey through this week, can I find room to receive and respond to the message of the Uncontained God? Someone wisely said: ‘Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God.'"

"A lover with all the passion of a true love"~Christmas Novena Day 3

2011-12-18T14:46:00.001Z

"God is the absolute and ultimate source of all being; but this universal principle of creation — the Logos, primordial reason — is at the same time a lover with all the passion of a true love."

Day 3 of Totus2us.com's Christmas Novena, with readings from 'Deus Caritas Est' by Pope Benedict XVI.

"The world of the Bible presents us with a new image of God. In surrounding cultures, the image of God and of the gods ultimately remained unclear and contradictory. In the development of biblical faith, however, the content of the prayer fundamental to Israel, the Shema, became increasingly clear and unequivocal: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord” (Dt 6:4). There is only one God, the Creator of heaven and earth, who is thus the God of all. Two facts are significant about this statement: all other gods are not God, and the universe in which we live has its source in God and was created by him. Certainly, the notion of creation is found elsewhere, yet only here does it become absolutely clear that it is not one god among many, but the one true God himself who is the source of all that exists; the whole world comes into existence by the power of his creative Word. Consequently, his creation is dear to him, for it was willed by him and “made” by him. The second important element now emerges: this God loves man. The divine power that Aristotle at the height of Greek philosophy sought to grasp through reflection, is indeed for every being an object of desire and of love — and as the object of love this divinity moves the world — but in itself it lacks nothing and does not love: it is solely the object of love. The one God in whom Israel believes, on the other hand, loves with a personal love. His love, moreover, is an elective love: among all the nations he chooses Israel and loves her — but he does so precisely with a view to healing the whole human race. God loves, and his love may certainly be called eros, yet it is also totally agape.

The Prophets, particularly Hosea and Ezekiel, described God's passion for his people using boldly erotic images. God's relationship with Israel is described using the metaphors of betrothal and marriage; idolatry is thus adultery and prostitution. Here we find a specific reference — as we have seen — to the fertility cults and their abuse of eros, but also a description of the relationship of fidelity between Israel and her God. The history of the love-relationship between God and Israel consists, at the deepest level, in the fact that he gives her the Torah, thereby opening Israel's eyes to man's true nature and showing her the path leading to true humanism. It consists in the fact that man, through a life of fidelity to the one God, comes to experience himself as loved by God, and discovers joy in truth and in righteousness — a joy in God which becomes his essential happiness: “Whom do I have in heaven but you? And there is nothing upon earth that I desire besides you ... for me it is good to be near God” (Ps 73 [72]:25, 28).

We have seen that God's eros for man is also totally agape. This is not only because it is bestowed in a completely gratuitous manner, without any previous merit, but also because it is love which forgives. Hosea above all shows us that this agape dimension of God's love for man goes far beyond the aspect of gratuity. Israel has committed “adultery” and has broken the covenant; God should judge and repudiate her. It is precisely at this point that God is revealed to be God and not man: “How can I give you up, O Ephraim! How can I hand you over, O Israel! ... My heart recoils within me, my compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my fierce anger, I will not again destroy Ephraim; for I am God and not man, the Holy One in your midst” (Hos 11:8-9). God's passionate love for his people — for humanity — is at the same time a forgiving love. It is so great that it turns God against himself, his love against his justice. Here Christians can see a dim prefigurement of the mystery of the Cross: so great is God's love for man that by becoming man he follows him even into death, and so reconciles justice and love. The philosophical dimension to be noted in this biblical vision, and its importance from the standpoint of the history of religions, lies in the fact that on the one hand we find ourselves before a strictly metaphysical image of God: God is the absolute and ultimate source of all being; but this universal principle of creation — the Logos, primordial reason — is at the same time a lover with all the passion of a true love. Eros is thus supremely ennobled, yet at the same time it is so purified as to become one with agape. We can thus see how the reception of the Song of Songs in the canon of sacred Scripture was soon explained by the idea that these love songs ultimately describe God's relation to man and man's relation to God. Thus the Song of Songs became, both in Christian and Jewish literature, a source of mystical knowledge and experience, an expression of the essence of biblical faith: that man can indeed enter into union with God — his primordial aspiration. But this union is no mere fusion, a sinking in the nameless ocean of the Divine; it is a unity which creates love, a unity in which both God and man remain themselves and yet become fully one. As Saint Paul says: “He who is united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him” (1 Cor 6:17)."

Let us pray:

Holy Mary, Mother of God,

you have given the world its true light,

Jesus, your Son – the Son of God.

You abandoned yourself completely to God's call and thus became a wellspring of the goodness which flows forth from him.

Show us Jesus. Lead us to him.

Teach us to know and love him,

so that we too can become capable of true love

and be fountains of living water in the midst of a thirsting world.

"Love Embraces the Whole of Existence"~Christmas Novena Day 2

2011-12-18T14:31:00.000Z

"Love embraces the whole of existence...Love looks to the eternal."

Day 2 of Totus2us.com's Christmas Novena, with readings from 'Deus Caritas Est' by Pope Benedict XVI:

". ..“What does this path of ascent and purification entail? How might love be experienced so that it can fully realize its human and divine promise? Here we can find a first, important indication in the Song of Songs, an Old Testament book well known to the mystics. According to the interpretation generally held today, the poems contained in this book were originally love-songs, perhaps intended for a Jewish wedding feast and meant to exalt conjugal love. In this context it is highly instructive to note that in the course of the book two different Hebrew words are used to indicate “love”. First there is the word dodim, a plural form suggesting a love that is still insecure, indeterminate and searching. This comes to be replaced by the word ahabà, which the Greek version of the Old Testament translates with the similar-sounding agape, which, as we have seen, becomes the typical expression for the biblical notion of love. By contrast with an indeterminate, “searching” love, this word expresses the experience of a love which involves a real discovery of the other, moving beyond the selfish character that prevailed earlier. Love now becomes concern and care for the other. No longer is it self-seeking, a sinking in the intoxication of happiness; instead it seeks the good of the beloved: it becomes renunciation and it is ready, and even willing, for sacrifice.

It is part of love's growth towards higher levels and inward purification that it now seeks to become definitive, and it does so in a twofold sense: both in the sense of exclusivity (this particular person alone) and in the sense of being “for ever”. Love embraces the whole of existence in each of its dimensions, including the dimension of time. It could hardly be otherwise, since its promise looks towards its definitive goal: love looks to the eternal. Love is indeed “ecstasy”, not in the sense of a moment of intoxication, but rather as a journey, an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving, and thus towards authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God: “Whoever seeks to gain his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will preserve it” (Lk 17:33), as Jesus says throughout the Gospels. In these words, Jesus portrays his own path, which leads through the Cross to the Resurrection: the path of the grain of wheat that falls to the ground and dies, and in this way bears much fruit. Starting from the depths of his own sacrifice and of the love that reaches fulfilment therein, he also portrays in these words the essence of love and indeed of human life itself.

... Eros and agape — ascending love and descending love — can never be completely separated. The more the two, in their different aspects, find a proper unity in the one reality of love, the more the true nature of love in general is realized. Even if eros is at first mainly covetous and ascending, a fascination for the great promise of happiness, in drawing near to the other, it is less and less concerned with itself, increasingly seeks the happiness of the other, is concerned more and more with the beloved, bestows itself and wants to “be there for” the other. The element of agape thus enters into this love, for otherwise eros is impoverished and even loses its own nature. On the other hand, man cannot live by oblative, descending love alone. He cannot always give, he must also receive. Anyone who wishes to give love must also receive love as a gift. Certainly, as the Lord tells us, one can become a source from which rivers of living water flow. Yet to become such a source, one must constantly drink anew from the original source, which is Jesus Christ, from whose pierced heart flows the love of God.

In the account of Jacob's ladder, the Fathers of the Church saw this inseparable connection between ascending and descending love, between eros which seeks God and agape which passes on the gift received, symbolized in various ways. In that biblical passage we read how the Patriarch Jacob saw in a dream, above the stone which was his pillow, a ladder reaching up to heaven, on which the angels of God were ascending and descending. A particularly striking interpretation of this vision is presented by Pope Gregory the Great in his Pastoral Rule. He tells us that the good pastor must be rooted in contemplation. Only in this way will he be able to take upon himself the needs of others and make them his own...""

Let us pray:

Holy Mary, Mother of God,

you have given the world its true light,

Jesus, your Son – the Son of God.

You abandoned yourself completely to God's call and thus became a wellspring of the goodness which flows forth from him.

Show us Jesus. Lead us to him.

Teach us to know and love him,

so that we too can become capable of true love

and be fountains of living water in the midst of a thirsting world.

"Love Promises Infinity"~Christmas Novena Day 1

2011-12-18T14:20:00.003Z

I'm a little behind with posting this (today is actually day 3 of the novena, if you'd like yours to culminate on Christmas Eve!), but in case you would like to read and pray along with Totus2us.com's 'Christmas Novena', the reading and prayer for each day will be posted here.

The readings are taken from Pope Benedict XVI's encyclical, 'Deus Caritas Est,' God is Love.

May this novena help to prepare us for the Feast of Love!

Day 1~Love Promises Infinity

"“God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him” (1 Jn 4:16). These words from the First Letter of John express with remarkable clarity the heart of the Christian faith: the Christian image of God and the resulting image of mankind and its destiny. In the same verse, Saint John also offers a kind of summary of the Christian life: “We have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us”.

We have come to believe in God's love: in these words the Christian can express the fundamental decision of his life. Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction. Saint John's Gospel describes that event in these words: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should ... have eternal life” (3:16). In acknowledging the centrality of love, Christian faith has retained the core of Israel's faith, while at the same time giving it new depth and breadth. The pious Jew prayed daily the words of the Book of Deuteronomy which expressed the heart of his existence: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your might” (6:4-5). Jesus united into a single precept this commandment of love for God and the commandment of love for neighbour found in the Book of Leviticus: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself” (19:18). Since God has first loved us, love is now no longer a mere “command”; it is the response to the gift of love with which God draws near to us.

...there is a certain relationship between love and the Divine: love promises infinity, eternity - a reality far greater and totally other than our everyday existence. Yet we have also seen that the way to attain this goal is not simply by submitting to instinct. Purification and growth in maturity are called for; and these also pass through the path of renunciation. Far from rejecting or “poisoning” eros, they heal it and restore its true grandeur.

This is due first and foremost to the fact that man is a being made up of body and soul. Man is truly himself when his body and soul are intimately united; the challenge of eros can be said to be truly overcome when this unification is achieved. Should he aspire to be pure spirit and to reject the flesh as pertaining to his animal nature alone, then spirit and body would both lose their dignity. On the other hand, should he deny the spirit and consider matter, the body, as the only reality, he would likewise lose his greatness.. ..Yet it is neither the spirit alone nor the body alone that loves: it is man, the person, a unified creature composed of body and soul, who loves. Only when both dimensions are truly united, does man attain his full stature. Only thus is love - eros - able to mature and attain its authentic grandeur."

Let us pray:

Holy Mary, Mother of God,

you have given the world its true light,

Jesus, your Son – the Son of God.

You abandoned yourself completely to God's call and thus became a wellspring of the goodness which flows forth from him.

Show us Jesus. Lead us to him.

Teach us to know and love him,

so that we too can become capable of true love

and be fountains of living water in the midst of a thirsting world.

Deus Caritas Est~Christmas Novena

2011-12-17T16:48:00.001Z

Waiting to Be Embraced, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

A wonderful way to prepare for the 'feast of Love,' which is Christmas, is the novena that's available on Totus2us.com right now. Each day features a little reading from 'Deus Caritas Est' (God is Love), my very favourite of Pope Benedict's wonderful encyclicals.

The encyclical reveals how both 'agape' (descending, self-giving love) and 'eros' make up the one reality of Divine Love, the reality in which we are made to participate.

Ruth Davies has done an excellent job with these readings. Hope you enjoy them too:

http://www.totus2us.com/podcasts/novenas/novena-for-christmas-god-is-love/

Into new loves

2011-12-15T23:53:00.001Z

Shade, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

The poet Dante described God as 'the Eternal Love, ever into new loves unfolding.' Pregnancy has certainly disclosed this revelation about God to me, as the Eternal Love has directly involved me in this 'unfolding.' Pregnancy may not leave a woman with her former energy for reading, prayer or contemplation. But she has a new kind of knowledge she can bring to the table, the knowledge concerning the intrinsic value of existence.

I often now feel the reality of St. Therese's comparison of herself to the great saints as 'the distance between a grain of sand and a mountain.' Sometimes I feel this distance between myself and God, as though God were too big for one so small and so simple as me. Yet I am a love of the Eternal Love, creating with Him a new love.

I feel closer to Mary than ever. She is the woman of prayer, content, simple, serene. All these things she hands on to me as the essentials of our existence. Prayer is essential because it connects our love to the Eternal Love; we ought to be content with ourselves, with our existence, because we are living miracles. She's simple, because we are all small creatures who are at our closest to God when we realise and accept our smallness. Serenity means being in tune with these fundamental truths.

Everyone I see is a baby in the womb now. Everything is measured up to the work it takes, on the part of God and the mother, to bring a person into this world. Driving down the street, it's difficult to see so many unhappy faces and rather depressing fast food joints. We don't seem to be building a world that justifies the miraculousness of our existence.

I hope to remind each person reading this what a miracle they are. There's nothing else to do here but to love and be loved. It is enough.

A special day for the unborn

2011-12-12T11:58:00.001Z

Our Lady of Guadalupe, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

Our Lady of Guadalupe reminds us that we are all children of the same Father, the one true God, who loves us and adopts us into His life no matter who we are or where we come from!

Our Lady of Guadalupe is also patroness of the unborn...I'd like to ask her to say a special prayer for our own unborn child, Marianna Grace, and for all the "holy innocents" in the womb...each a special and unique revelation of the high God.

A special blessing for this day can be given by family members to any babies in the home...or to each other. Crossing the forehead of the other person, we say,

"May God be as good to you as He was to Juan Diego!"

Love is God Himself

2011-12-11T19:31:00.001Z

The Unexpected God, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

"Our Teresa preferred love to all the other divine attributes; to her, love was seen in all the rest of God s perfections. I feel sure that she meant by this, that Love, if I may venture to say so, is more than a divine attribute: Love is God Himself, since Saint John said “God is love”. Therefore, if God and Love are one, it is not difficult to prove that we can expect nothing from God but gentleness, affection, mercy, devotion, kindness, and compassion; we may feel sure that we have naught to fear from His severity or His justice unless we commit the sin against the Holy Ghost which cannot be forgiven, and that sin is to despise and reject Love. The faithful children of God should never harbour a dread of divine chastisement and judgment, which are only meant for those who are His enemies."

--Mother Isabel of the Sacred Heart, Carmelite.

365/365: The journey

2011-12-10T23:03:00.003Z

~day 365: the journey~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

It’s been the best year yet. The most wonderful things of course were God’s unexpected wonders; the bends in the road we didn’t plan, the changes we didn’t expect, the quiet miracles He was working all along the way. I’m closing this 365 project on the eve of Gaudete Sunday---and I think that’s appropriate. It’s time to rejoice! And we’ve never had more reason to do so.

Advent is the time of reflecting on the past, and waiting for the future. As we progress through this Advent, we’re waiting on this brightening dawn called Marianna Grace, the herald of the coming of Christ into our lives in a renewed and more-joyous-than-ever way. We don’t know what to expect, but with the coming year it will be as with the last---the unexpected parts were the best, because they were the parts that really belonged to God, the things He planned that came to fruition, the graces He gave.

During Advent, I’m trying to focus on whatever gives me authentic peace and joy in my life. My only recommendation to you would be to do the same…this season, just like life itself, is full of heartache and distraction. But when you find pure joy, and authentic peace, take it, and run with it---you’ll be running with God, towards God. This season, my joy is in baking cookies with mom, midnight mass at the monastery, and preparing for little Marianna to arrive. I believe there’s nothing God enjoys so much as togetherness---it’s what we’ve been created for, to enjoy the intimacy of togetherness with God and with one another. When God came into our world, He came into the heart of a family; He spent the majority of His life in a quiet and obscure family home, doing quiet things with an ordinary, small family. This is the pattern of joyful living that Our Lord has shown us; it may not be what the world calls ‘success’, but God calls it heaven.

To end, I’d like to close with a poem by Mary Fleeson…it’s about the journey that’s been, the journey that is, and the journey to come.

“Your breath I hear
As the wind
Whispering
Worship
Your peace I seek as I travel
Your face I see
As the Sun
Smiling
Solace
Your peace I seek as I travel
Your hand I feel
As the water
Cradling
Comfort
Your peace I seek as I travel.”

(Yes, and that's the wind whispering round me on a hilltop in Wales on our eighth wedding anniversary in April 2011---the best is still definitely yet to come!)

364/365: What friends love together

2011-12-10T23:03:00.001Z

~day 364: what friends love together~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

I've recently been blessed with a wonderful correspondent in my life, Fr. Francis Selman, who teaches Philosophy at Allen Hall Seminary in London.

Fr. Francis is amazing...he can summarise Aquinas neatly in ten minutes. I'd just like to share one particular quote from a recent letter of his that I really loved...

"Yes we are made for loe and truth: the mind to know the truth, and the heart to love a friend...What friends especially love together is the truth."

Is love ever enough without truth? Does love exist without truth? Are good relationships possible without an equal measure of each? What is Christianity, if not the believe that Love <IS the truth?

363/365: Maris Stella

2011-12-10T20:24:00.001Z

~day 363: maris stella~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

In Pope Benedict XVI's wonderful encyclical, Spe Salvi, the Holy Father discusses Mary as the model of Christian hope. Indeed, when we speak about the 'Immaculate Conception' we are talking about the redemption of Mary: not as a grace given to a 'chosen woman' so much as the pattern of the common Christian destiny. We are all called to the redemption such as Mary was the first to enjoy.

In this same encyclical, Pope Benedict discusses the meaning of Mary's age-old title of 'Star of the Sea' (O Maria, Maris Stella). Christ is the true Light, the goal of our human existence and the common destiny we journey towards. But along the turbulent and dark sea we sail, we are guided by the lights of others, who show us the way towards Christ. These are the people who witness to Christ, in whom we find His presence, and from whom radiates the brilliance of His Light. No single person better matches this description of Christian witness than Mary. She is the star that guides us across the crashing waves of this stormy sea.

If you look up the name 'Marianna' in a baby name dictionary, the meaning most commonly given is 'Star of the Sea.' We didn't actually know this when we chose to name our daughter Marianna...the name was chosen in honour of Our Lady and her mother, of the bond of mother and child, but now I'm thinking about a different reason for the choice, too.

When I first read this meaning of the name, it occured to me that our daughter, who will have both British and America citizenship, would likely be crossing the sea a good deal. She's a sign of the love that can unite from across the sea...indeed, from across any boundary, the love that comes from God.

But now I find a deeper meaning. There's so much about God I feel I never understood until I became pregnant...until I was allowed to become like a child myself, at times helpless, always in need of prayer, owning up to my need of Him, and watching life from the outside as well as from the inside. Marianna is my Star of the Sea, she is the one who witnesses to me Who God is, and all the glory of His love. She is the one who reminds me of what God feels for me, because in some way it's similar to what I feel for her. I'd like to stay small with this little being, grow with this little being, and cross this stormy sea hand-in-hand with her, led by the light of Christ which radiates in her.

Pictured: St. Non's Chapel, Pembrokeshire, Wales.

362/365: The beautiful life

2011-12-10T15:54:00.001Z

~day 362: the beautiful life~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

Marianna, we want to share with you
The beautiful life that we're called to
Birdsong and contemplation,
Joy and love that's true...
Christmas lights that twinkle dimly
In the recesses of my mind
I remember what childhood felt like...
The warmth and hope of that far time.
Renew it in yourself, dear one,
Remember and believe
That whatever may befall us
Together we'll love,
Together we'll grieve,
The real joy is our togetherness
And the God to Whom we cleave.

361/365: Clouds of Joy

2011-12-10T14:55:00.001Z

~day 361: clouds of joy~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

I'm beginning to finish off this 365 project by looking back and looking forward. Here's a snapshot of me in April at one of our special places...Powderham Castle in Devonshire, England.

We spent a lot of time here during the years we lived in Devon. The corner of the castle we loved the most was the beautiful family chapel which you can see (from the outside) at the left of this photo. It's Victorian and beautifully decorated, with a copy of the painting by Raphael, The Madonna of the Chair, which also hangs in Exeter Cathedral nearby. What I remember most about my first encounter with this chapel...which we happened upon first in our pre-Christian days...is the beautiful vaulted ceiling.

It's done with lovely timberwork in a sort of neo-Gothic motif, and running around the sides of the roof are painted the words, "The Lord is in this Holy Temple, Let All Earth Keep Silence Before Him." These words are reminiscent of those written in the ancient liturgy of St. James, "Let all mortal flesh keep silence."

I think that roof was partly responsible for my conversion. I know that on those late spring days when we'd follow the path through the rose garden and take refuge in the castle chapel, it was the silence of God we were withdrawing to. It was a beautiful Lord, though an unnamed Lord, that I was beginning to be aware of. I kept those words in my mind...for me, the 'Temple' didn't just mean that little chapel. It meant the whole world, the whole cosmos. It meant the south Devonshire moorlands I loved to spend my afternoons walking through...it meant the hedgerows budding with hawthorn and the woodlands whispering with ancient secrets...the 'Temple' was whereever God was, so the Temple was the chapel, nature, love...the Temple was also me. Let me keep silence before Him in me.

During Advent we tend to focus on one of two of Christ's comings. Either His first coming into our world as a baby at Christmas...that's what we'll celebrate particularly on Christmas Eve...or His last coming, or 'Advent', which we await with vague uncertainty and breathless expectation. Or do you really find yourself 'breathless expectant' when you think about Christ's second coming? We pray for it most every day, don't we? 'Thy Kingdom come.' And we pray for it at each mass too, don't we? However, it doesn't leave me in 'breathless expectation.' Even 'the Son of Man' Himself knows neither the day nor the hour. This seems a pretty good indication to me that it's probably something I shouldn't trouble myself too much about; it's something I should always entrust to God's hands.

I hope I'm not being caught in unreadiness though. It's the 'third' way of Christ's coming that really excites me, and this third way is the only way to live in true readiness. As for those people who are taken up (excuse the pun) with a fascination for 'the Rapture', I don't understand who it is they mean when they talk about Jesus Christ. The one they speak of seems so different from the One I know. For them, Christ seems to be a kingly judge on a judgement seat, 'coming on the clouds.' There is no reign of joy here, only a stern authority warning us that playtime is over, and that the good children whose rooms are clean will be rewarded with a lollipop. Where is the God of Love?

The God of Love is in His temple. The coming of Christ that leaves me breathless is the coming that is happening now, in this moment. When James writes "Let all mortal flesh keep silence," he also refers to the 'clouds' upon which Jesus comes...but these clouds are not awful and thunderous...these clouds are the clouds of incense that arise and waft through the Temple during the celebration of the Eucharist. Let all Earth keep silence now, before Him, as He comes, as He is coming. What leaves me breathless are the words, "Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word, and my soul shall be healed." My expectation is immediately fulfilled, Christ truly will enter into me, regardless of my worth or deserts; Christ truly will humble himself and love me, my soul truly shall be healed, by Love Himself.

The most exciting moment is the present one in which Christ is meeting us. So as this project nears its close and I look backwards and forwards, the best place I find myself is now, with Christ, as He comes on clouds of joy.

360/365: Mary, la luna

2011-12-09T13:58:00.001Z

~day 360: mary, la luna~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

Last night my mom came along with us to mass at the local parish church, as we celebrated the feast of the Immaculate Conception. On the way to church, I explained to my [Methodist] mom the meaning of the Immaculate Conception. What does the greeting mean, 'Hail, full of grace'? It doesn't mean that Mary is a great and gracious person. If you look in your catechism, you will find that grace is the gift of God, the gift of God's life, the gifts that allow us to participate in His life. To greet Mary as 'full of grace' is to greet her as the one 'highly favoured,' or we might say, 'supremely gifted.' In anticipation of her role as the mother of Jesus Christ, the Mother of God, she was the first among us to experience true redemption and intimate reconciliation with our Creator---the supreme gift we may receive from God. Her 'Immaculate Conception' was none other than the first fruits of Christ's cross.

I was so happy last night because it was the first time I've ever stood in a communion line with my mom! She came up for a blessing as we went to receive Holy Communion. The Marian focus of the mass had produced a great mix of people from the parish who usually remain marginalised from one another: the Hispanic/Latino community and the 'Anglo' community. It was so wonderful at last to experience a real 'catholicism' (universalism) in this particular parish. It reminded me of something my husband said once when asked to give a reflection on what Our Lady meant to him: 'Mary is the one who unites us.'

On this feast day there was also a full moon; we noticed it as we took a sunset walk together around the neighbourhood, and I mentioned to my mother and husband how the moon is a symbol always associated with Mary. 'Why's that?' asked mom. Scripturally speaking, it has to do with the symbolism of the book of Revelation and the 'woman with twelve stars round her head.' But I have another little theory of my own.

Mary, La Luna,
You light my path in darkness,
Shining, reflecting the light of the Son
No light of your own do you possess
But you radiate the truth of the One
Whom Himself is Truth,
Our Light and our Love
In Him do I hope,
But when darkness clouds Him from view
It's you that I find, shining above.

359/365: The Poetry of Grace

2011-12-07T23:56:00.001Z

~day 359: The Poetry of Grace~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

Celebrating the Immaculate Conception today, the gateway to the Incarnation, I'd like to offer this beautiful reflection from Fr. Tony Nye SJ, our spiritual father and a priest at Farm Street Church, London:

"You know, there is a poetry in our faith. Poetry can express truth and wisdom in a clear and memorable way. Poetry can feed our devotion and worship. Poetry has a beauty about it, and so has today’s feast, our patronal feast. The Holy Father has frequently emphasized the importance of beauty in worship and in our approach to our love of God and God’s love for us. Our church building is poetry in stone, such an aid to worship, just as music is, flowers and colour, fine language and liturgy. When people enter the main doors of our church for the first time they often gasp at how lovely and unexpected it is. When I look up at the roof I am grateful for so many who have played their part in restoring it and making it more beautiful twenty years ago. When I look at the reproduction of the Pugin figures on the altar and when I look at the roundels with the words of the Hail Mary in Latin extending from pillar to pillar, I admire what Fr. Michael Beattie achieved, with such creativity and taste. It all expresses the beauty of Our Lady, whose immaculate conception we celebrate as our patronal feast.

A great poet once preached in the pulpit and expressed the beauty of Our Lady’s motherhood. His period of preaching here was brief because his style of preaching was considered too radical for his congregation, just as his poetry was ahead of his time – but now considered some of the most powerful and the most Christian in the nineteenth century. You will know whom I am referring to, the Jesuit priest-poet, Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins. He wrote a poem that is appropriate to our understanding of this feast: The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe.

Just as light, sunshine, life, beauty come to us naturally through the air that surrounds us, so close to us we rarely notice it, so God’s grace comes to us through Mary, through the Incarnation, because she bore Christ our Lord:

‘we are wound
With mercy round and round
As if with air; the same
Is Mary ...’

Conceived free of original sin, nothing stood in the way of God’s love and grace in her. She is like the air in which the light of God’s love comes to us. This privilege was given to her before Christ’s birth but in respect of His birth, for the greater glory of God and our salvation.

‘This one work (she) has to do
Let all God’s glory through.’

Through her pure motherhood of Jesus, a stupendous gift of God, Mary is our mother. Her motherhood makes ‘new Nazareths in us’ (what a beautiful way of describing our vocation to bring Christ into the world around us, to make a home for him in our everyday
lives, as Mary did.)

‘And men are meant to share
Her life as life does air.’

Hopkins ends his poem with a prayer which can be our prayer too:

‘Be thou then, O thou dear
Mother, my atmosphere.
Stir in my ears, speak there
Of God’s love, O live air,
Of patience, penance, prayer.’"

Fr Tony Nye SJ

358/365: Belen

2011-12-07T17:52:00.001Z

~day 358: Belen~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

It was just last year that we received this beautiful, homemade Nativity set from dear friends in Spain.

How is the air quality in your home? A thought from one of our Spanish friends struck me...nowadays parents are hugely concerned about the quality of the food their children eat, the air they breathe, the organic threads they wear and all the potential allergies they might have. However, while these things are important, Jesus' words are ringing in my ear: 'man lives on more than bread alone.'

Why aren't we as concerned about the quality of the spiritual air our children breathe, the nourishment their minds and hearts receive, which is much more important---and much more easily tainted---than food and drink?

Every parent surely is concerned for their children to enjoy peace and wellness. But what does peace and wellness mean to you? And where can they be found? Catholic families are often extremely careful about filtering the media, books, and outside influences that may penetrate the home. The object isn't to shelter children from reality, but to raise children who want to change the reality they find themselves confronted with.

Advent and the Christmas season is a good time to purify ourselves. It's so important that the Christmas tree, though it's a beautiful thing that centers the family celebration, should always take second place to the Belen (Natvitiy). Through the Belen we proclaim the truth, 'God is Love' and we can try to make sure that this is the proclamation we live out in our home life...so that we can be strong enough to take that message out into the vast world.

Where I find Christ...

2011-12-06T20:43:00.001Z

Where I find Christ..., a gallery on Flickr.

...living in you.

This is a beautiful little gallery I'd like to share.

357/365: He runs into the valleys of our darkness

2011-12-06T16:05:00.001Z

~day 357: He runs into the valleys of our darkness~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

The common currency in human love is condition. Most of us love others based on various assumptions: I will love you if you please me, I will love you if you fulfill my needs, I will love if you can live up to my expectations, I will love you if you are without fault, I will love you if you are the person I want you to be.

I believe the reason so many people are terribly afraid of marriage is that in marriage we make a commitment to love another person without condition. We are so frightened of loving in this way. And yet, isn't that how we all want to be loved?

The two states of human love most reflective of divine Love, that is, God Himself, are marriage and parenthood. In the communion of marriage, we find the most revealing reflection of that intimate union with God for which we exist and for which we have been created. We can understand through this what He is pulling us toward. But in parenthood, we understand His love from the reverse side: we begin to have a notion of what our God feels for us, of the reality of His unconditional love. We are not loved because of what we are, but because we are.

In reflecting on today's Gospel, a revelation came to me. You might ask how I managed to be a Christian without realising this fundamental truth---the answer is, I don't know. It's a learning process. The truth is that Christ wants me and loves me no matter what. If I stray away from Him, He wants me. If I nestle close to Him, He wants me. If I am in the wrong, He wants me. If I am mean or lame or thick-headed, He wants me. If I am smart He wants me, if I am dumb He wants me.

This isn't an excuse to lay back and take it easy on myself. It's the divine revelation of truth, of the truth that is love. As St. Augustine writes, "The measure of love is love without measure." God has not measured me up against the measure of His love. How thankful I am for that.

St. Basil of Saleucia makes this commentary on today's Gospel (Matthew 18: 12-14):

"Let us consider Christ, our shepherd; let us look at his love for us and his gentleness in leading us to pasture. He delights in the sheep around him even as he seeks for the ones that stray. Hills and forests are no obstacle to him; he runs into the valley of darkness, down to where the lost sheep is to be found. When he finds it to be sick he does not cast it aside but heals it; taking it on his shoulders, he tends the weary sheep with his own weariness. His exhaustion makes him happy because he has found the lost sheep and this cures him of his suffering. «Which of you,» he says, «having a hundred sheep, if he loses one of them does not leave the ninety-nine others in the wilderness to go after the one that was lost until he finds it?»

The loss of a single sheep disturbs the happiness of the gathered flock but the joy of finding it again casts this sadness out: «When he finds it... he calls together his friends and neighbors and says to them, 'Rejoice with me because I have found my lost sheep'» (lk 15,5-6). This is the reason why Christ – who is this shepherd – said: «I am the good shepherd» (Jn 10,11). «The lost I will seek out, the strayed I will bring back, the injured I will bind up, the sick I will heal» (Ex 34,16)."

356/365: Bountiful Love

2011-12-05T19:14:00.001Z

~day 356: bountiful love~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

...In keeping with my last post, here's another token of the love and generosity of friends...a friend of mine gifted me with this beautiful bouquet of roses, some of which are actually baby washclothes, a bib and a beautiful summer outfit, all rolled up to look like fresh blooms!

My first feeling when I saw this gift was how much I didn't deserve it. We all wander through our lives---and either we have overexaggerated notions of what we deserve, or we wonder how we deserve anything at all...we must receive all we are given as a gift. I will take this bouquet of roses just like I take God's love---knowing that I've done nothing to 'deserve' it, but it's freely given in the hope of being freely received, for love's sake.

355/365: Petits-Fours

2011-12-05T19:09:00.001Z

~day 355: petits-fours~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

One of the special things at my baby shower were these petits-fours from Rhodes Bakery in Atlanta...amazingly delicious and so pretty...a special and very generous thought from my mom. So many people have been so generous to me...like love overflowing...

354/365: The greatest work you will ever do

2011-12-04T15:28:00.001Z

~day 354: The greatest work you will ever do~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

Yesterday was one of the best days of my life, and a day I've been dreaming about since I was little: my baby shower!!! The best part of this Christmas-themed event was that my mother and I shared it together.

One of her ideas for the shower was for everyone to write a piece of motherly advice on paper hearts...since our little girl is due to arrive around Valentine's Day, this will be a great decoration for her nursery and a keepsake for years to come.

The advice received was so fantastic, I thought I'd share it here:

From Aunt Diane:

Unconditional Love
Set Standards
Encourage Independence
Listen without Judging
Be a mother that a daughter or friend can talk to about anything
Encourage your daughter to be her best
Be a friend and a mother.

From Pilar in Spain:

"....Baby Marianna has a Spanish family waiting [for her] in expectation. Even though we are here, our hearts are with you..."

From Ruth in Spain:

"I'm going to give you a very special advice: your baby and you have a very special link, an only one link, so each moment that you have to do something for your baby, listen to your instinct and act as it tells you to act..."

From Ansley:

"My motherly advice to you---condensed to this heart---is to nurse, nurse, nurse your baby AND take care of yourself first. If you are well--ALL will be well!"

From Chris:

"My motherly advice to you: Be a mother that always gives guidance but, also be a friend. You want the type of relationship that has open communication lines. Your child should always feel comfortable talking to you about 'anything'. Teach her to love God, love herself, and love family."

From Becky:

"Children grow up very fast. Enjoy every moment with her. You can never have too many people to love a child. Let Grandmama spoil her all she wants to :)"

From Nancy:

"You can never hold a baby too much."

From Aunt Sandra:

"Have fun with your baby (and record all the cute things she does and says)!"

From Joan:

"Laugh, hug & play as much and as often as you can."

From Lenora:

"Don't spoil. Take time to read to them."

From Mom:

"Authentically live the values you want to instill in your children. P.S. You'll need God's help along the way!"

From Lisa:

"Discipline with a firm hand but always be gentle and loving!"

From Aunt Mitzi:

"Love unconditionally! Every child is gifted with unique gifts and graces. Encourage Marianna to use each of her talents to the glory of God! God's blessings on your precious daughter!"

From Patt:

"The greatest work you will ever do is within the walls of your own home."

353/365: We walk together

2011-12-04T15:10:00.001Z

~day 353: we walk together~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

Marianna,

Life is a road, we walk together.
Life is a conversation, we talk together.
Life is a joy, we share together.
Life is sorrow, we cry together.
Life is an embrace, we hold each other.
Love is seeing God's face, we love each other.

352/365: Gaudete

2011-11-30T21:41:00.001Z

~day 352: gaudete~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

The first time my mother's had a Christmas tree in years---and certainly the first time she's ever decorated in a colour scheme of pink & gold...it's amazing all the differences one little life can make, especially an unborn little life.

Marianna, you're already bringing so much joy. You colour everything with rose, it's as if this year, all the Sundays of Advent were 'Gaudete' for us. Because we are living in the Advent of our life, and we are rejoicing, as we wait for Christ to come, as we wait for you to born, and for Christ to be born in you.

351/365: The coming of the Light

2011-11-30T21:34:00.001Z

~day 351: the coming of the Light~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

Coming among us,
He lit up our darkness,
Illuminated our path
He Himself is Truth.
The World was made by Him,
and He came into the world,
Him, through whom
Are all things.
He came, opened His arms
An infant, dependent,
Longing to be Loved
Then He spent
Thirty years at home,
Quiet, with family,
Doing family things,
And died three years later
An obscure death
And He Himself, the Truth
Was, Is, and Ever shall be.

Mom & husband decorating Christmas tree.

350/365: Preparing for the baby shower

2011-11-30T21:25:00.001Z

~day 350: preparing for the baby shower~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

3 generations having the time of their lives...

349/365: First Sunday of Advent

2011-11-27T14:38:00.001Z

~day 349: first sunday of advent~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

We wait, we watch without repose
This purpling sky lit up with rose
But if plagued by questions of where and when,
Simply look where Jesus lives: within.
No sign could be simpler, our God already here
In Love foretelling His Kingdom near.

348/365: Mountain blossom

2011-11-27T00:49:00.001Z

~day 348: mountain blossom~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

I am convinced it is no sin to be fascinated by the simple beauties and ordinary joys of this life, for herein I meet Your gaze, the love brimming over in Your divine eyes.

347/365: How beautiful upon the mountains

2011-11-27T00:37:00.001Z

~day 347: how beautiful upon the mountains~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

The bare silhouette of a falling leaf
Against the setting sun,
How beautiful;
The spray of blossoms white, I remember
The hawthorn bough in spring,
How beautiful;
The willow warbler, woodland canticle
The nightingale in the hedegrow
Song of the summer,
How beautiful;
The mountains turfed with velvet green
Moss and dew, the path of our salvation
His feet have walked,
How beautiful;
How beautiful upon the mountains
Himself, His silhouette I see
How beautiful, Dark against the beaming sun
And ghostly pale in the fourth watch of the night
To me a sinner, He has stretched out His hand
A miracle, His touch, how beautiful,
How beautiful is the miracle of His Love.

An Attack of Wonder

2011-11-26T16:05:00.003Z

I just had to repost this reflection from Thinking Faith: The Online Journal of the British Jesuits:

"Long before he became a Catholic in 1922, G.K. Chesterton was well known as a debater and defender of the possibility of Christian faith. Using paradox and comedy, he mixed journalism and philosophy, poetry and short stories, often with the hope of waking people up from their lazy assumptions about reality. Michael Paul Gallagher SJ offers an imaginary monologue in the voice of Chesterton that adapts his phrases and ideas, and tries to capture aspects of his vision which can help us revive our language of religious wonder for Advent.

You can be sitting quietly in a chair and suffer an attack of wonder, simply because you are alive. One moment everything seems boringly ordinary and the next it is suddenly and rapturously extraordinary. One moment you are sitting there with your daily but undramatic nihilism, where nothing seems very special, and the next a chink in your armour lets in a flood of novelty. You break out of the tiny theatre in which your own familiar plot is being played. This is the blessing of the sunrise of wonder. Indeed my main worry about people is that they might stay prisoners, stuck within all that seeming boredom. I wonder about their not wondering enough. You don’t have to be some special Alice to discover wonderland. You are in it all the time. It only needs ordinary imagination to see it.

So the first fruit of an attack of wonder is the birth of gratitude, even of humility. All the saints in their different ways lived a bottomless abyss of thanks. And then they made their lives into divine poetry, a poetry that opens to an infinite ocean. I exist, I am alive, what a shock, but more so, what a gift. I am given to myself. Life is given to me. Obviously I did not create myself. In the darkest time of my life, as a young art student, I plunged deeper and deeper into spiritual suicide by imagining that I had to construct my own life alone. I was tempted to think that there was nothing but thought. I lived with logical completeness and spiritual contraction, thinking that there was nothing but me and my thoughts. There was no foundation but me. And this terrifying flight from common sense led my young self, as it has led many before and since, to a nightmare of self without any God.

But let us not rush into God. God is used to waiting and it is good for us to wait too, to rest first in the awakening of wonder and its fruits. So here are some of my beatitudes. Blessed are those who expect little for they shall be gloriously surprised. Blessed are those stuck in the mists of pessimism, because they might receive a revelation of joy. Blessed are those who learn lightness of heart because they will find a waterfall of unmerited freedom. Blessed are those who get in touch again with childhood, because the world will become miraculous for them. The opposite of all these graces is a life that remains dry, pragmatic and negative. But fear not, we are made for a bigger story.

Yes, the attack of wonder is only the beginning of a huge adventure. The strangeness of romance hits you in the midst of the predictable daily world. When that surprise strikes you, you begin to see as if for the first time things that you have known all along, including yourself and your paths of possibility. You remember what you had forgotten. You realise there has to be more than this. You awaken to a refreshed future, to calls and promises, and not just for little you, but for this whole world.

With my fit of wonder I become more self-embracing with a kind of awe. Because like Hopkins: ‘What I do is me, for that I came’. That sense of uniqueness will open another door, to my non-aloneness and my finiteness. I was a painter and all my life I loved frames and limits, because it is here in the smallness that we learn to enjoy the hugeness. Happiness explodes not from anything in particular but from glimpsing everything in particular. Perhaps astonishment is our most ancient instinct. We are astonished at the world and yet at home in it and we need to choose to nourish the vision, to live from that glimpse of glory.

What starts as wonder or poetry gives birth to gratitude in quest for a giver, and that in turn carries us towards a love-story, a divine love-story. All the higher optimists travel this road. They fall in love with the universe and then look for a deeper source of it all. If there is a story, there must be a story-teller. And so they are propelled towards God as the origin and companion of their joy. Such a view of the universe is the most practical thing a person can have.

Of course we do terrible things to God. Woe unto those who keep a God like they keep a special hat: they don’t believe in God but only in A God. Unless God can be experienced as joy, lasting joy in spite of all shadows, our God is too small. The only credible God invades our imagination with amazement, not always intense but like a quiet background music of existence, an ultimate harmony that you can trust. You walk along the roads of your life thinking that you might meet God at any turn of the path. God’s radiance is not just around the corner but in everything now. You need to ask for a certain receptiveness to see like a child again. Indeed romance is deeper than so-called reality.

All of this is ordinary ecstasy. Not something special in a sense that only a privileged few belong to the club. This club is existence. It belongs to all of us. The ordinary is splendid when you wake up from your dullness and discover a mysticism that has kept us sane from the beginning of the world. But it is not just a gift for you alone. We are here to make a difference. We need simply faith, hope and love to rescue us. And thank God they are not our doing. They release us from our doings into the doings of God. They flourish where human resources fail, as in earthquake or eclipse. Faith is faith because it is able to survive our moods. With such a gift we need not run from the cry of history around us, but see that pained world as worth transforming, with God’s help and for God’s glory.

Of course the explosive reality at the core of Christianity is that God did not leave us alone to face this call. You need not rely on an inner light when there is such an outer light. The coming of Christ, when you let it in, continues to shock us, as indeed it should. The Logos of the universe enters the human stage through an ordinary birth. And this is a drama, a story such as no poet imagined, a truth such as no philosopher conceived. It tells the greatest romance of love. This Child came to change the world from the inside. The Three Magi were right to go home by a different way, when they realised that this child burst open the narrowness of all their philosophy and all their desiring. And at the end there is only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist. But even here the Roman centurion also went home surely with a different vision: he had seen someone dying who took him beyond all his imagining. And then two days later the disciples glimpsed another wonder, whereby the world had died during the night and joy had come to stay. Why has this story illumined millions of lives? Because this is not a God of colourless, cosmic control but a God of Love. And this fits the lock of our human hearts and questions. Faced with Risen Love our responses unite childlike simplicity and never-ending complexity, the wonder of silence and the wonder of many words trying to do justice and make sense. And for me the Church is the great attempt in history to change the world from the inside, through awakening desire and will and ultimately love.

In short my life has been a mystery-story, blessed with gratitude in spite of sorrow and with joy in spite of sin. Existence has remained such a strangeness opening me to the only One who can work such a miracle. So I have tried to live a simple religion of gratitude, but this gratitude needed a theology to ground it. It needed a tradition to go beyond a vague sense of purpose and presence. And so I found my own mystical, imaginative hunches confirmed in Christianity and Catholicism. The Church dared to go down with me into the depths of myself, healing my self-hurts with absolution and restoring me to joy, a joy that stays in touch with reality and with responsibility. Here in Christ is God’s answer to the riddle of the universe, the perfect fit for the human heart, swinging as it does like a pendulum between guilt and glory.

‘The less a man thinks of himself, the more he thinks of his good luck and of all the gifts of God.’[1] I am a large man, but thank God I have felt happily too small for life, for the life that wells up into eternity. ‘I have experienced the mere excitement of existence in places that would commonly be called as dull as ditchwater. And, by the way, is ditchwater dull? Naturalists with microscopes have told me that it teems with quiet fun."

Michael Paul Gallagher SJ is Professor of Fundamental Theology at the Gregorian University in Rome.

346/365: Playmate

2011-11-26T16:05:00.001Z

~day 346: playmate~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

Yesterday I hung this homemade picture of Jesus in the 'playroom' we are preparing for our little one. It's really a symbol of what I hope for her: I'd like her to know Jesus as a friend, as a household face, as a playmate who shares in the joy of "ordinary" things.

I'm rather surprised at myself, at all the misapprahensions and preconceptions that have been broken down in me about motherhood. I was a little scared, thinking that, like my own father, I'd be a parent concerned with academic excellence, superior intellect, the grade of college one gets into and how far our achievement can take us. These things seem so paltry, and so unnecessary.

Of course, I want my daughter to be the best she can be...but what that really means to me, is reaching 'the fullness of herself,' the fullness of the person God intended her to be. I don't find myself worrying about her future except in one respect: love.

I was once asked to give a reflection on my patron saint, Therese of Lisieux. One of the things that I said about her was that, "she was in love with God, because she was in love with love." This sums up, for me, everything I could desire for my child.

In addition to this, I'd just like to let Marianna know...hoping she'll read this someday...that I'm not hoping or wishing for anything in particular with regards to you. What I want you to know, is that you already are everything I could wish for.

November 26, 2011

345/365: Trust

2011-11-26T15:52:00.001Z

~day 345: trust~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

Lord, when I have trouble entrusting myself and all my concerns to you, let me remember:
Father, you entrusted your Son to Mary and Joseph.
You have entrusted Yourself completely to us.
You have made our hearts your altar of repose.
Because You, Lord, have made the first move, we can now respond,
With the confidence to trust,
And the prerogative to Love.

Pictured: Our Lady of Fatima in Farm Street Church, London, England.

344/365: Thanksgiving

2011-11-25T15:24:00.001Z

~day 344: thanksgiving~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

In Thanksgiving for good health, new life, a new member of the Catholic family AND this deliciously nummy chocolate chip pie that my mother made especially for me...

Seeking to understand Revelation---an excellent talk by Sr Cathy Jones!

2011-11-23T22:43:00.001Z

Faith Matters- He will come again, Sr Cathy Jones from Catholic Westminster on Vimeo.

343/365: Choosing Friends

2011-11-22T16:39:00.001Z

~day 343: choosing friends~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

This post is dedicated to a couple of people I know...I hope they'll realise how much I meant this for them as they read through.

When teenagers are just beginning to try to find themselves, they often block off their life into chunks, compartmentalising separate areas of their identity, or even wanting to deny parts of the past or present. This is a way of only including in our self-image the things that we are confident about; the worst problem of adolescence is not being anxious about others seeing you as you really are, but being unable to see and accept yourself as the whole person, complete with who you are and all your experiences.

With maturity, we gain liberation and real perspective. We can finally accept and love ourselves when we have learned to live with the 'whole' self, the victories and the mistakes. Whether or not we have strong wills or strong personalities---perhaps we have never been a strong person---a strong conscience will be our treasure. If we can look back and see that we have gone beyond what was merely inculcated in us, that we have made good choices in accordance with the dictates of our conscience, we will be able to accept the ourselves and the bad choices we sometimes made a little more readily---our choices will reveal to us who we have been and who we really are. Happy those for whom this is not a subject of regret.

Thinking about the 'choices' you have made in marriage, friendships, and other relationships, as well as the trajectory of these choices in your life, reflect on the passage from St. John's Gospel when Jesus says, 'I call you friends,' and 'You did not choose me, I chose you.' Can there be any other words a human being would more like to hear than 'I choose you'? The most immediate need in a newborn baby is for love and acceptance in the arms of its mother. And throughout our lives, we need to know that we are 'chosen'....the people we choose, and the people who choose us, will shape who we are and become one of the most fundamental definitions of our identity.

In families, we long to be loved beyond a 'love by default.' But sometimes in families, it is a 'love by default', a love that doesn't choose but simply patiently endures all, that God is calling us to. Love does not always entail liking or even being able to live in unity. Love does involve striving for unity, as much as is possible. We should remember that the Ten Commandments do not say, 'Thou shalt like people,' or 'Thou shalt make others happy.' The Ten Commandments demand that 'Thou shalt not lie,' and 'Thou shalt honour.'

As we reach our 30s and beyond, it will be useful for us to look at ourselves and the choices surrounding us. Who have I chosen in this life, and who has chosen me? The authentic relationships you have shared by mutual choice with others will be the most revealing definition about who you really are. To foster a family of your own is also a choice, to choose marriage, to choose children, to choose the love, openness, acceptance, and communicative intimacy that ought to bond a family together, is what can take us beyond our 'default position' and really bring us into the abundance of our vocation. Whether familial or otherwise, authentic and loving relationships abide in truth, and this will be the measuring stick of love. Unconditional love becomes not simply a default position, but the choice to accept another person in their totality---a love that is not possible without an equal measure of honesty and openness.

What is it to know the depth of God's love for us? It is to know that His love is not a default position. He does not refract love back onto himself, 'I'm a pretty loving guy, so I love you.' He does not love us out of biological necessity. 'Father' is not the sum of His nature, which is all in all, and beyond all; 'Father' is the name He chooses to apply to Himself, 'Father' is the relationship He chooses to have with us. 'Friend' is His word of choice when addressing us. If we are to know the depth of God's love, we must return to this phrase again and again, 'I chose you.' As we reflect on these words, we realize that even God's identity (although not His unchangeable nature), somewhat like our own, is defined by the relationships He chooses to propogate, the love that comes by choice rather than default. To live in Heaven is to live in the perpetual intimacy of this absolute love, to be loved as we are, free to see Him as He is.

342/365: The light on the horizon

2011-11-20T21:04:00.001Z

~day 342: the light on the horizon~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

The approach of new parenthood often feels like walking towards a very dimly lit horizon. No one can say what lies ahead, in that vast stretch of stormy sea. The light of the setting sun is like the love that is our destiny: it calls us onwards, to walk through a period of night in order to reach the dawn.

The unknown is really what we are here to plunge ourselves into. It is only in the darkness of the unknown that we find our true refuge in the Light of the World. Our union with God and one another will not be wrought in peaceful security, but in abandonment to the love and the life that the Lord pours out upon us.

Providentially, the Poor Clare nuns of Ty Mam Duw in North Wales have really been there for us lately in their daily reflections, entitled ‘Knock at the Heart of Jesus.’ Every day seems to speak directly, quietly and humbly to a little need of ours. Here’s today’s:

"Dear Little Hearts,

There is not a person alive who would trust a surgeon to perform an operation without prior training,noone would put their financial matters in the hands of one who called himself an accountant but had had no training.And yet the most responsible job in the whole world is undertaken by two people with no training whatsoever and that is the rearing of a child.

Little wonder as two people gaze in total awe at their newly born child, they are filled with not a little trepidation.Nothing has prepared them for the overwhelming responsibility that now lies in their hands .Quite rightly they are aware of the enormity of the task that lies ahead.But if God sent this little child ,so will he also send the courage for them to embark on the greatest adventure of their lives.

How many couples awaiting the birth of their first child are heard to make the statement ,our lives are not going to change the baby will fit in with us.NOT SO life will never ever be quite the same again .Life will evolve around the child not the other way around .But not in the sense that it will be full of restrictions on the contrary will be enriched beyond anything they could have imagined.

A new beginning ,a new purpose to their life ,to guide and protect this little being that God has entrusted to them.A little being that fills their hearts with a pride and a love the likes of which they have never felt before.

There will be times when they are afraid ,when they feel unsure and unworthy of the task God has asked of them but they do not have to make this journey into parenthood without him ,he is there to guide and reassure.And the overwhelming love they have for their child will generate all the necessary courage to face what their God has asked of them."

341/365: Peace and Security

2011-11-19T18:26:00.001Z

~day 341: peace and security~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

"Concerning times and seasons, brothers, you have no need for anything to be written to you.
For you yourselves know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief at night.
When people are saying, "Peace and security," then sudden disaster comes upon them, like labor pains upon a pregnant woman,and they will not escape."

~Thessalonians 5:1-4

Peace and security---what do they mean? I have known some people that based their entire life on two false premises: "money will give me security, and security will bring me happiness." Money has never brought mankind security, and the economic history of the past ten years throughout the Western market is proof enough of that. Security does not bring happiness because there is no such thing as the 'security' that humankind longs for. Happiness is not an escape from fear and anxiety. True peace lives happily in the authentic experience of our human reality. We understand suffering, fear, and doubt are somehow intrinsic and inevitable; and yet there is no darkness that has not been searched out and transformed by the Light. The abundant life will not be lived out in peace and security of the kind man seeks; abundance will be found in the transformative fruitfulness that comes with experiencing everything as a gift.

Here is a formula I have learned, a formula for peace, and therefore for true happiness:

Surrender to the unknown,
And surrender to the One Who knows.

340/365: Grace's gift

2011-11-18T22:52:00.001Z

~day 340: Grace's gift~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

There's a good deal of thinking, learning, doubting, trusting, and loving to do during pregnancy. One hardly realises the expanse one is stepping out into, sure that God's love accompanies us as we walk towards the unknown but radiant horizon. It's important now to pause and think: what is the real goal of parenthood?

Most people would say, quite rightly, that the goal of parenthood is actually to come to the point where you let your child go---that is, the aim of being a parent is to reach that stage where you no longer need to be one, or at least, not in the same way or capacity. The child who so much needs your guidance, nurturing, and support, is also a free human being, one day destined to act and live as a free person---'free' in the sense that God has set all of us free. Only the most loving Father would gift His children with so much independence and liberty, regardless of the consequences to Himself and even to the children themselves. Love is not possible without freedom and neither is life.

I think the purpose of parenthood goes even deeper. God has created each one of us as a gift to Himself; as Fr. Jim Brand said recently on Vatican Radio, God is infinitely more excited about having us in heaven with Him than we could ever be about reaching heaven. God's enjoyment of us is proportionate to His love for us. And we are also created to be a gift to others, to the whole communion of creation. We are a gift to ourselves, to life itself.

So Mary and Joseph, the supreme example we have of parents---what was their job? To raise Jesus so that He could go out into the world and be Jesus, for all of us. Mary and Joseph have played their part in giving the gift of Jesus to every single human being. The trajectory of our child's life as a gift to others is something we may never grasp.

One of the reasons we've chosen 'Grace' as a middle name for our little girl, is because it reminds us of this sacred purpose, this divine gift of parenthood. 'Grace' is the name of the mother of the priest who baptised us, who will (God willing!) baptise our little girl, and who continues, as our spiritual director, to play such a huge and fatherly role in our lives. When I hear the name Grace, I'm instantly reminded of what my job is as a mother. Grace's son, Fr. Tony, has become a gift to God and a gift in the lives of countless people. I am in awe of what Grace has given to the world through her son. Recalling last week's Gospel, I think of the parable of the talents and realise this is its meaning....Grace was given 5,000 talents, and she has returned to God 10,000. God shares His wealth out with all of us. His true wealth is the love that flows through every one of us.

I hope we can give just as much through the new life growing inside of me...God has given us so much, may we keep passing on the gift.

339/365: Thy will be done

2011-11-18T22:36:00.001Z

~day 339: Thy will be done~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

Learning to say this---to pray this---to mean this and love this, is one of the hardest and most profitable things we can do. Yet, in consenting to God's will, and yielding up the plans we had made, the comfort we thought ourselves assured of, we gain the most radiant and abundant life available to us---the life that Love, in its wisdom, has desired for us.

338/365: The Temple

2011-11-18T01:43:00.001Z

~day 338: the Temple~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

"Our Lord himself teaches us what to do if our interior self is to become a house of prayer since the human person is, in truth, a temple dedicated to God. First of all we have to expel the merchants, that is to say the images and representations of created goods, and everything that gives us satisfaction in worldly things and pleasure in our own will. Then we are to wash the temple with our tears to make it clean. Not every temple is holy just because it is a habitable dwelling...; God alone makes it holy.

The temple we are talking about here is God's delightful temple in which God is proclaimed in truth when... we have made it clean. How could God choose to make his home in a soul before it has given even the slightest thought to God? Isn't it often cluttered up with too many other things?"

~John Tauler

Pictured: In the Cathedral of Almudena, Madrid.

Heaven and Hell

2011-11-16T21:35:00.001Z

Part of the Faith Matters lecture series, this is an excellent talk broadly dedicated to the theme of judgement and the life of eternity.

337/365: Nov. 16 (the Ginkgo Tree)

2011-11-16T21:34:00.001Z

~day 337: nov. 16 (the ginkgo tree), a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

At the last moment of my life
I want to find
Your hand reaching out to mine.

November is the month of prayer for the faithful departed. Confidence in God's mercy and faithfulness means we can be faithful to; faithful to the love that endures eternally, as we pray for loved ones now departed. Please add your prayers, and any names special to you, to my prayers:

For James Allan Wright
For Arline Lumpkin
For J.'s grandmother
For Marjorie Whatley
and for all the names written in the Books of the Dead in parishes throughout the world,
and for those names written on our own hearts.

336/365: A radiant reality

2011-11-15T19:49:00.001Z

~day 336: a radiant reality~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

A dream for 2013.

So much can happen in a year, as I've seen since beginning this project...

...and all that does happen, when seen in the light of eternity, shines radiantly.

335/365: Trust

2011-11-15T19:37:00.001Z

~day 335: trust~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

Jesus, I Trust in You.

In thanksgiving for the grace to surrender,
and Your peace received.

334/365: Hope

2011-11-12T17:14:00.001Z

~day 334: Hope~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

My God, your unity lies in the fact that you alone ARE. All that is finds its root and its germination in your loving action. You are love, and love must ever expand, but can never contract. Love, you alone of all things exist; yet you give rise to all else, that your love may be shared in perpetuated life.

The Trinity you have revealed to us does not detract from your unity; it is a secret knowledge of yourself and your inner life. To speak of God as Unity is to declare what clearly IS and alone must be; but to speak of God as Trinity is to live, not as a slave distant from his omnipotent master, but as a friend who sits in the place of honour at the Lord's table. To speak of the Trinity is to nestle at God's hearthside, to live His life from within, to become an inhabitant of His heart. This is our hope; we hope in you to bring us to this everlasting habitation.

How to be a good mother

2011-11-11T17:00:00.001Z

Of course it's something I've been thinking about lately, with our first baby due in February. At home we have a wonderful book called 'The Catholic Family Handbook.' It was written in the 50s by a priest...yes, the 50s, when things were starting to get weird in the world but not near as wacky as they are today.

This is an excerpt from the chapter on motherhood. I love it---we can probably all recognise the faults detailed here in mothers that we've known, but recognising them in ourselves is a harder, yet very necessary, thing to do.

"You can make your greatest contribution to your family as the heart of your home — not its head. From you, your children should learn to love others and to give of themselves unstintingly in the spirit of sacrifice. Never underestimate the importance of your role. For upon you depends the emotional growth of your children, and such growth will better prepare them to live happy and holy lives than any amount of intellectual training they may receive.

Most of us know persons who have received the finest educations which universities can bestow, who yet lead miserable lives because they have never achieved a capacity to love. On the other hand, we also know of men and women whose intellectual achievements are below normal but whose lives are filled with happiness because their mothers showed them how to love other human beings. It follows that in helping your child to satisfy his basic emotional needs to love and be loved, you give something as necessary as food for his full development. So do not be beguiled by aspirations for a worldly career or by the desire to prove yourself as intelligent as men or as capable in affairs of the world as they. The father must always remain a public figure. The mother is the domestic figure par excellence. In teaching your child the meaning of unselfish love you will achieve a greater good than almost any other accomplishment of which human beings are capable.

You are the most important person your child will ever know. Your relationship with him will transcend, in depth of feeling, any other relationship he probably will ever have — even the one with his marriage partner. As noted above, from you he will learn what true love really is. From the tenderness you show and the security you give, you will develop his attitudes toward other human beings which will always remain with him.

However, his dependence on you begins to wane soon after birth — and continues to wane for the rest of your life. In his first years, naturally, he will rely upon you almost entirely — not only for food, but also to help him perform his most elementary acts. But soon he learns to walk and to do other things for himself; when he goes to school he can dress himself; when he reaches adolescence and strives for the freedom that adults know, he will try to throw off his dependence so violently that you may fear that you have lost all hold upon him.

Your job is to help him reach this state of full and complete independence in a gradual fashion. And your success as a mother will depend to a great extent upon the amount of emancipation you permit him as he steps progressively toward adulthood. Therefore you should try to judge realistically when your child truly needs your help and when he does not.

If you can reach the happy medium wherein you do for your child only what he cannot do for himself, you will avoid dominating him or overindulging him. The dominant mother makes all decisions for Johnny and treats him as though he had no mind of his own; the overindulgent mother will never permit her Mary to be frustrated in any wish, or to be forbidden any pleasure her little heart desires. The overindulgent mother may do without the shoes she needs to buy a doll for her Annie; she may stop what she is doing to help Johnny find the comic book he has misplaced; she may eat the leftovers in the refrigerator while she gives the freshly prepared food to her children.

The overindulgent mother is a common character in literature. Probably every American woman has seen movies and television programs, and has read stories in magazines and newspapers, in which these defects were pointed out. Yet every new generation of mothers seems to practice the same extreme of behavior. Some excuse themselves by saying that they want to give their children every advantage in life. Such an intention is laudable, perhaps, but the method is impractical. If you want to do the best for your child, let him develop so that he can face life on his own feet. Overindulging him denies him his right to develop his own resources and thus defeats the purpose of your mission as a mother.

Someone once remarked in jest that as part of her education for motherhood, every woman should visit the psychiatric ward of an army hospital. If you could see the countless examples of mental disorders caused largely by the failure of mothers to sever the apron strings to their child, you could easily understand why — for the sake of your child's emotional self — you must make it a primary aim to help him to develop as an independent person.

Priests and psychiatrists often see problems from different angles, yet they display striking agreement in pinpointing other kinds of maternal conduct which do great harm to the child. Their advice might be summarized as follows:

Don't be an autocrat who always knows best. Your child may have his own way of doing things, which may seem to be inefficient or time-consuming. Have patience and let him do things his way, thus giving him the opportunity to learn by trial and error.

Don't be a martyr. Naturally, you must make sacrifices. But do not go to such extremes that your child feels guilty when you deny yourself something which rightfully should be yours, in order to give him what rightfully should not be his. A typical martyr worked at night in a laundry to pay her son's way through college. Before his graduation, he asked her not to appear at the ceremony — he said she would be dressed so poorly that he would be embarrassed.

Don't think you have the perfect child. Some mothers, when their child receives low grades, appear at school to determine, not what is wrong with him, but what is wrong with the teachers. When such a mother learns that her son has been punished for disobedience, she descends upon the school officials and demands an apology. By her actions she undermines the child's respect for all authority — including her own. You will probably be on safe ground, until your child is canonized at St. Peter's, if you conclude that he has the same human faults and weaknesses that you see in your neighbors' children.

Don't use a sickbed as your throne. The "whining" mother feigns illness to attract sympathy and to force her children to do as she wills. Who would deny the last wish of a dying person? In this vein she often gets what she wants — for a while. The usual, final result, however, is that her children lose both sympathy and respect for her.

Don't be a "glamour girl." Motherhood is not a task for a woman who thinks that ordinary housework — preparing meals, making beds, washing clothes — is beneath her. Of course, mothers should strive to maintain a pleasing appearance, but they should also realize that they are most attractive when they are fulfilling the duties of their noble vocation. You would embarrass your family if you insisted on acting and dressing like a teen-ager; and, if you adopted a demeaning attitude toward household tasks, you would teach your children that motherhood and its responsibilities are unworthy of respect."

Catholic Family Handbook, The by Rev. George A. Kelly, Random House, Inc., New York, 1959

333/365: Something for Marianna

2011-11-10T18:29:00.001Z

~day 333: something for marianna~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

I made this today. It will be hung in the nursery near our little girl's crib. We can't wait to see you, our little Marianna!

Like a rose showered down
From the heavenly garden,
We have caught you, soft pink petals
Gathered up in our arms
We enfold you,
As the Father has enfolded us
In the arms of His Son.
And we adore Him,
Whose prayer of love you are.
Sweet little one,
The life within me
Moving; I wonder
At humanity’s carelessness,
How we discount the miracle of life!
My unborn child, in knowing you
I wonder,
How anyone might not believe
In one God, over all abiding,
In earth, in sky, in thyself, residing.

332/365: Evening Serenade

2011-11-08T19:53:00.001Z

~day 332: evening serenade~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

White mantle of the cuckoo-flower
With pale violet tinged
Draping the border of the lake
Song of the blackbird, trilling
Wafting through the snowy drifts
Of hawthorns, newly-blown
Their blossoms, a shroud of prayer
A promise: while evening closes round
In silver tracery
The sky shot through with fire
Prelude to the starry dawn
Thrill to the notes of this love-song
Canticle of creation,
Serenading and alluring
The lost and lonely soul.

331/365: To Live in God

2011-11-08T19:34:00.001Z

~day 331: to live in God~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

"The worst mistake we can make is to live in a state of constant suspicion that anything good that happens to us must be bad, or an illusion. Such distrust effectively chokes off the action of God as long as we persist in it. To live in God is to enjoy, as a normal state, love, joy, peace, patience, strength and trust."

~Gerard W. Hughes, 'God of Surprises'

'Love Expanding'...what devotion to the saints really means

2011-11-07T22:44:00.002Z

This was such an excellent lecture given by Fr. Stephen Wang and layperson Hannah Vaughan-Spruce, part of the 'Faith Matters' lecture series going on within the diocese of Westminster this autumn. Makes me homesick for London! Watch out for Fr. John Edwards SJ, he's up tomorrow, Tuesday November 8th, to give his lecture on 'Praying for the Dead.' He's a wonderful priest and spiritual director to a friend...

Faith Matters: For All the Saints, Fr Stpehen Wang and Hannah Vaughan-Spruce from Catholic Westminster on Vimeo.

330/365: The Lord is my shepherd

2011-11-06T21:35:00.001Z

~day 330: the Lord is my shepherd~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

The Lord is my shepherd.

Each breath I take is His own good gift.

Each sign of life, an exultation.

With His mystery He allures me,

In my simplicity He sustains me.

His Love is my patrimony,

Himself, my homeland,

The whisper on the breeze,

The canticle of my life.

Singing of His mercies

How glad I am to be human;

A creature of awareness,

A small thing, but well considered.

Special thanks to my mom, who suggested I get out and take some photos today. This is the lovely red tree that greets us in the morning.

329/365: Pilgrims of truth

2011-11-03T16:04:00.001Z

~day 329: pilgrims of truth~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

I've really enjoyed reading about the recent meeting in Assisi between the Pope and religious, cultural and scientific leaders from around the world. The meeting resurrects the spirit of Blessed John Paul II's gathering held in Assisi 25 years ago. The theme is still the same: how can we work together towards the common goal of peace? What is authentic unity and how can it be achieved?

I particularly enjoyed an article by Michael Barnes SJ at the British Jesuit's online journal, Thinking Faith. In discussing the Pope's reflection on this meeting between unbelievers and believers, Barnes writes:

"At the beginning of his address the pope appears to endorse Hans Küng’s oft-quoted mantra: ‘no peace among the nations without peace among the religions’. But very quickly he moves from the grand theme of violence and religion to something less obvious and, in the context of interreligious dialogue, more subtle: ‘a change in the spiritual climate’. Anti-religion, the strident voice of ‘militant atheism’ is posing a spiritual challenge which is every bit as dangerous as the corruption of religion by religiously justified terrorism. Today’s event, the pope says, is shared with post-modern intellectuals like Julia Kristeva who raise serious questions for believers and dogmatic unbelievers alike.

'They are ‘pilgrims of truth, pilgrims of peace’. They ask questions of both sides. They take away from militant atheists the false certainty by which these claim to know that there is no God and they invite them to leave polemics aside and to become seekers who do not give up hope in the existence of truth and in the possibility and necessity of living by it.

But they also challenge the followers of religions not to consider God as their own property, as if he belonged to them, in such a way that they feel vindicated in using force against others. These people are seeking the truth, they are seeking the true God, whose image is frequently concealed in the religions because of the ways in which they are often practised. Their inability to find God is partly the responsibility of believers with a limited or even falsified image of God. So all their struggling and questioning is in part an appeal to believers to purify their faith, so that God, the true God, becomes accessible.'

It’s almost as if believers need thoughtful unbelievers in order to be honest in their faith. This riskier dialogue, based round a common commitment to human dignity and the claims of peace and justice over against ‘every form of destructive force’, reflects one of Pope Benedict’s priorities. Occasionally he expresses himself with an unexpected sharpness. On his recent trip to Germany, he shocked many listeners when he declared that agnostics who struggle with the question of God are closer to the kingdom of God than ‘routine Catholics’ whose hearts are untouched by faith."

This was an affirmation to me of my Catholic vocation: to be a seeker after Christ, a 'pilgrim of truth.' For me, faith is the beginning of dialogue, faith is that commitment in Christ to plunge ever deeper into the abyss that is God.

The heart of every man is the premier instrument upon which the canticle of God may be sung. There's so much we have to learn from one another.

Picture: From the Shrine of the North American Martyrs in Midland, Ontario, Canada.

This post is dedicated to James Allan Wright, a pilgrim of truth. Please pray for his soul.

Pilgrims of Truth

2011-11-03T15:38:00.001Z

An excellent article reposted from Thinking Faith: The online journal of the British Jesuits.

"Symbol and Reality – repetition with a difference

Michael Barnes SJ

On Thursday 27 October Pope Benedict returned to Assisi to mark the 25th anniversary of one of the most remarkable events of his predecessor’s pontificate – a day of prayerful reflection for peace together with fellow Christians and members of other religious traditions. Michael Barnes SJ describes the way in which the visit highlights a continuity between the papacies of Benedict XVI and John Paul II, while the shift in focus of this event is indicative of their differences.

When Pope John Paul II met with leaders and representatives of faith communities in Assisi just 25 years ago the reactions were mixed. The sight of Catholic and Orthodox Christians, Muslims and Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists, all standing in a semi-circle in the basilica dedicated to St Francis caught the imagination of the time. ‘We come together to pray’, ran the pope’s carefully phrased justification, ‘but not to pray together’. And indeed the event was notable not for any common act of worship, still less shared prayer formula, but for the profound silence of the moment – people of faith, differing enormously in their understanding of the nature of divine reality and human flourishing, yet joined together by their common humanity and concern for the peace of the world.

Yet there were also those who found the event difficult to take. The faith leaders may not have ‘prayed together’ but they certainly prayed. During the day different groups met in venues scattered through the town. An animist lit a ritual fire; a tribal chief invited spirits into a bowl of water; a Native American brought down a blessing with a movement of his eagle feathers. For a brief span, Assisi was a media paradise, filled with smoke and smells, reverberating to the sound of drums and tambourines, and peopled with exotic holy men in multi-coloured robes. There was an excess of symbolism; almost too much to take in. Small wonder that some critics were left with the impression that Christian and non-Christian elements were being mixed together indiscriminately.

Cardinal Ratzinger was not there. It would appear that, as prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he was concerned that the occasion might give rise to the charge of relativism. Were not Catholic claims to teach the truth about God revealed in Christ being compromised by an event which appeared to place all religions and cultures on the same level? Yet 25 years later, as Pope Benedict XVI, he called another such gathering. 27 October 2011 was advertised as a day of reflection, dialogue and prayer for peace and justice. With the theme, ‘Pilgrims of truth, pilgrims of peace’, and including Catholics, Christians from different ecclesial communities and representatives of the world’s religious traditions, it took the form of a common journey, starting out from Rome and spending the day in the home of St Francis, the great apostle of peace – and also, it must be added, a worthy patron of interreligious dialogue. The message was simple: every human being is a pilgrim in search of truth and goodness.

If the then Cardinal Ratzinger was bothered by the messages given off by the initial enterprise, why repeat the process – and what, if anything, does this one symbolise? In the first place, of course, popes are always anxious to keep continuity with their predecessors. Thus Benedict’s first public journey was to Poland. Since then he has sought to reaffirm the ecumenical and interreligious outreach of John Paul, but to give it his own stamp. Just as the visit to Auschwitz by a German pope had its own poignancy and special message, so his return to Assisi has its own nuances – some foreseen, others no doubt awaiting the dissection of professional Vatican-watchers.

Three points stand out from Thursday’s event. Most obviously, there was no public prayer. Instead the participants gathered at the end of the day for a moment of silence and testimonials to peace. A second shift was the programme itself; papal speeches and various responses highlighted believers' common responsibility to build a society based on truth. A third was that the participation was broadened beyond representatives of Christian communities and the principal religious traditions to include figures from the world of culture and science – people who, while not professing to be religious, regard themselves as seekers of truth and are concerned for the cause of justice and peace in the world.

It is this shift in context which deserves some attention. At the beginning of his address the pope appears to endorse Hans Küng’s oft-quoted mantra: ‘no peace among the nations without peace among the religions’. But very quickly he moves from the grand theme of violence and religion to something less obvious and, in the context of interreligious dialogue, more subtle: ‘a change in the spiritual climate’. Anti-religion, the strident voice of ‘militant atheism’ is posing a spiritual challenge which is every bit as dangerous as the corruption of religion by religiously justified terrorism. Today’s event, the pope says, is shared with post-modern intellectuals like Julia Kristeva who raise serious questions for believers and dogmatic unbelievers alike.

They are ‘pilgrims of truth, pilgrims of peace’. They ask questions of both sides. They take away from militant atheists the false certainty by which these claim to know that there is no God and they invite them to leave polemics aside and to become seekers who do not give up hope in the existence of truth and in the possibility and necessity of living by it.

But they also challenge the followers of religions not to consider God as their own property, as if he belonged to them, in such a way that they feel vindicated in using force against others. These people are seeking the truth, they are seeking the true God, whose image is frequently concealed in the religions because of the ways in which they are often practised. Their inability to find God is partly the responsibility of believers with a limited or even falsified image of God. So all their struggling and questioning is in part an appeal to believers to purify their faith, so that God, the true God, becomes accessible.[1]

It’s almost as if believers need thoughtful unbelievers in order to be honest in their faith. This riskier dialogue, based round a common commitment to human dignity and the claims of peace and justice over against ‘every form of destructive force’, reflects one of Pope Benedict’s priorities. Occasionally he expresses himself with an unexpected sharpness. On his recent trip to Germany, he shocked many listeners when he declared that agnostics who struggle with the question of God are closer to the kingdom of God than ‘routine Catholics’ whose hearts are untouched by faith.

Some, of course, will be disappointed that the dialogue between people of faith takes something of a back seat, that the opportunity for the witness of prayerful reflection – albeit in the ameliorated from of ‘coming together to pray’ – has given way to a more theological debate about the meaning of religion itself. Has not the powerful symbolism of 1986 given way to yet more routine speechifying which might just as easily, and more appropriately, have taken place in a philosophy of religion seminar?

Not exactly. Symbols are there not to provide some comforting spiritual penumbra which will isolate us from reality but to provoke thought and to take us back to reality with a more informed understanding of the world as it truly exists, The 1986 event was ground-breaking; only John Paul had the spiritual authority to make it possible. The symbolism he inspired lives on, a testimony to the power of ritual and prayer to witness to an inner truth and to shape outer, and more public, consciousness. Without that initial impetus, similar events in which people from different traditions come together to listen to each other in silence and to support each other in faith, might never have happened.

But it was also an event suited to that particular moment. In 1986, the focus was on world peace; John Paul called for a global truce that day and many governments in conflict areas publicly supported his request. As with many other events he made a mark. Benedict's agenda is different, in part at least because the context for dialogue has changed. For him peace-building is about more than negotiations between parties in conflict; it also involves a ‘constant struggle against evil’: religion, like any human construct, is open to corruption. Perhaps more importantly: for Benedict interreligious dialogue is about more than an improving exchange between like-minded individuals. It has a much more ecclesial, and therefore missionary, focus. Like a more distant predecessor, Paul VI in his amazing first encyclical, Ecclesiam Suam, he is concerned to enunciate the theological truth behind God’s own ‘dialogue of salvation’ with humankind. ‘No peace between the nations without peace between the religions’, opined Hans Küng. Papa Ratzinger, his old colleague from years back, might well retort: ‘No peace without the truth which only honest and sustained dialogue can sustain.’

Michael Barnes SJ lectures in the Theology of Religions at Heythrop College, University of London. He is the author of Theology and the Dialogue of Religions (CUP, 2002).

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1] Address of His Holiness Benedict XVI at the Meeting for Peace in Assisi, 27 October 2011, http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2011/october/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20111027_assisi_en.html

328/365: Unbounded love

2011-11-02T13:26:00.001Z

~day 328: unbounded love~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

Dear Daddy,

I hope you have found, since death, the affirmation of life, and your confirmaton in love. May eternity for you be a 'yes' to God...and a sharing in the foreverness of love.

"Through the Lord's unbounded love
We hope to meet realms above."

~From your daughter and granddaughter, who love you so much.

Today is the feast of All Souls. We join our prayers to yours as we pray for the dead, for those we love. We are praying for:

James Allan Wright,
Tony Brierley,
Albertha Elizabeth Longhurst,
Allan Wright,
Aynsleigh,
Manuela,
Hearn Lumpkin,
Mrs. Whatley,
and for all whom we hope are now unnamed saints.

327/365: On wings of love

2011-11-02T13:10:00.001Z

~day 327: on wings of love~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

Yesterday at mass for the solemnity of All Saints, I shut my eyes tight when the time for the second reading came. It was from 1 John, and I love John so much; he is the romantic poet of Scripture. I usually close my eyes at mass, even covering them with my hands, because I find it so useful to get rid of all sensory stimulation in order to absorb the words and their meaning.

But I was surprised; as the reading was read, I found it difficult to disover its meaning. I was left puzzled and confused, anxious to dig deeper. Here were the verses that eluded me:

See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called the children of God. Yet so we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.
Beloved, we are God's children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed. We do know that when it is revealed we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.

Later at the dinner table, I asked my mother and husband to share their thoughts with me on this particular passage. My mother said, with usual succintness, that it had to do with the 'perfection of love' in us. I knew she was right, but I was not satisfied. I wanted the larger picture explained. Then I turned to my husband, and he offered this thought:

"You know when you are young, and your parents are only mother and father to you; then you grow older, and you learn to see them as they are, as people, with their peculiar love and motivations, with their humanity. You know longer see only 'father' or 'mother' but you see and know them as the whole person. The passage is about the maturity of what it is to see God face-to-face."

This was that kernel of wisdom I'd been searching for. My mind immediately retraced its ponderings back to an earlier moment in the day, when I had been with my mother in the kitchen, and suddenly realised that I liked her much better now than I did when I was a child. Why? I loved her then, and I loved her now. But there was a fullness in our relationship not possible before; as a child, I saw her as 'mother.' 'Mother' was almost like a curtain that hid the rest of the person from me. I could only know her in that role, not able to see her deeper self, her love, anxieties, joys, and downfalls. But now I knew and could enjoy the whole person, as mother, and as herself.

I soon discovered, from my husband's first thought, the meaning of the passage. God has called us into a divine adoption. His love has created us, and as we are created from love, so from love we are drawn up, by Him, into His life. Our true destiny is a deeper intimacy with God than we can imagine. Our true destiny is not only to call Him Father, but Friend, Lover, Brother, All-in-All. If we can 'see Him as He is,' then it means we have been brought to see as God sees. In vision, there is not only the action of the eye, but the perception of the mind. So we shall know God not from outside, but from within the mind of God.

It is as Father that God has called out in love to us. But I have often troubled over this word, 'Father,' as I know others have, too. If our own relationships with our fathers have been at all troubled or disappointing, it can make for us a stumbling block on the way to our loving God. But what I do understand is that that Other---which lives beyond, exists beyond, loves beyond, all that there is, has made us and called us into a divine adoption, in which He asks not to be 'other' or 'distant' to us, but close as a Father is close to His children.

So, as St. John says, for now, as His children, we can be sure of His love. But in our childhood, we cannot imagine the destiny of our maturity. What is it that God shall ask us to call Him when we have grown into saints, that is, the companions and confidantes of His intimate life? Children love their Father, and are loved by Him. But they cannot reach the deeper levels of intimacy with such an one. God always will be our Father, but St. John is disclosing that there is a deeper love, a secret intimacy, still in wait for us.

And this is what it means to be a saint: to know this intimacy, and to live in it, in such a way that is only possible in heaven. Sainthood is the common destiny of humanity, and hopefully it is a path that we are all stumbling along. Mother Teresa was once asked, 'what is a saint?' And she answered, in her simple way, 'A saint is someone who lives with other saints.'

If this is true, then my way to sainthood must has been expedited, since I find myself surrounded by many saints. Some share their dinner at the earthly table with me, and some are saving a seat for me at the heavenly banquet. One special sister in heaven delights me with rosebud bouquets, and a winged protector is at my side in darkness. I chose this picture because it expresses the divine love I already live in, which alone can draw me up to God. A year or so ago, my husband and I attended mass at this Carmelite church in Vilnius, Lithuania, and we were gratified to find St. Therese beneath the protecting wings of St. Michael; Therese being my confirmation saint, and Michael my husband's.

I live beneath the protection of these two saints, but also of a third; at least I know him as a saint, a 'seed' of a saint that will flower in heaven. It's my husband, with whom I share a love that shall be my ladder to heaven.

Thank God for him, and for all the saints.

"Divine Jesus, listen to my prayer.
By my love I want to make you rejoice.
You know well, I want to please you alone.
Deign to grant my most ardent desire.
I accept the trials of this sad exile
To delight you and to console your heart.
But change all my works into your love,
O my Spouse, my Beloved Saviour."

~St. Therese of Lisieux

St. Therese, pray for us.
St. Michael, pray for us.
Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity, pray for us.
St. Mary Magdalene, pray for us.
St. James, pray for us.
St. Anthony, pray for us.
St. Ignatius of Loyola, pray for us.
St. John of the Cross, pray for us.
St. Thomas Aquinas, pray for us.
St. Francis of Assisi, pray for us.
Little St. Aynsleigh, pray for us.
St. Anne, pray for us.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us.

A bit of good news...(a long time in coming!)...

2011-10-30T14:03:00.002Z

Reposted from the Diocese of Westminster's Site:

Archbishop of Westminster's statement on the Royal Succession

"Following the announcement on the Royal Succession by the Prime Minister, David Cameron, at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Summit in Perth, Australia, The Most Reverend Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster and President of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales said:

“I welcome the decision of Her Majesty's Government to give heirs to the throne the freedom to marry a Catholic without being removed from the line of succession. This will eliminate a point of unjust discrimination against Catholics and will be welcomed not only by Catholics but far more widely.”

“At the same time I fully recognise the importance of the position of the Established Church [Church of England] in protecting and fostering the role of faith in our society today.”

326/365: Hallowed love

2011-10-30T13:16:00.001Z

~day 326: hallowed love~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

Just like a basilica built atop the ruins of a pagan temple, many of our Christian feasts have come to claim whatever was true in the observances of the pagan world, and turn it to Christ. After all, without the revelation of Christ, there’s still a good deal man can know about God---through reason, through the natural law, through the primordial human experience of love, and through the observance of Creation. Christ is not so much the key to knowing about God, as He is the sure way to knowing God.

Easter is celebrated when the earth is resurrected from its wintry death; life, hope, and flowers live again, seeming to sing a canticle of unbounded love that forms the backdrop to the Resurrection. The Yule celebrations of the Germanic peoples, as well as the Romans’ ‘Feast of Light’ were proofs that man knew a light must shine in darkness if the world is to be saved. At Christmas, we celebrate light in darkness, the birth of light into a dark world.

And at Halloween, what do we celebrate? It’s rather difficult for me to understand why people see fit to spend large amounts of money on fake cobwebs, Styrofoam tombstones, and blow-up Frankensteins. Can someone explain to me please, how this makes sense in the context of a culture that sees death as taboo?

I remember life in England circling round the churchyard. Every community was made up of this---the village green, the churchyard, the church, the school, and the public house. In some villages, you can probably see all these things from a single point of vision. That means that every stage of life is present to us; we’re not blocking anything out from our reality.

In the USA, manicured cemeteries are carefully hidden from roadside view or often made to look like parks. They are usually empty, with perhaps a single visitor. In England, I knew churchyard ‘regulars,’ who every day went to tend the gardens growing on their loved ones graves. For many people, this is a happy retirement hobby. Churchyard graves are often full of life, lilac, and lavender. Is Halloween simply the one time when Americans feel it’s okay not to block out death from their scope of vision? Is a youth-obsessed society only comfortable with death when it’s dressed up in disguise and comes bearing candy?

So: back to the original question. What do we celebrate at Halloween? The ancient Celts believed that the thinning air of autumn allowed an actual ‘thinning of the veil’ between the world of the living and the spirit-world of the dead. Of course, in Celtic belief, both the worlds of the living and the dead were populated by many spirits, both good and malicious. The important thing about the spirits of the dead was that they were frightening, howling, disembodied souls that often did not know why or wherefore they wandered…or perhaps, had unfinished business…or perhaps, were under the power of evil…or perhaps, nursed some vendetta against the living. What the Celts did recognize was that all things within Creation hold an intense spiritual Presence within themselves, and also that there certainly is a connection between the living and the dead. However, for our ancestors, this connection was frightening---and in order to protect themselves on this night when the dead might roam the earth, bonfires were lit for light might protect from the darkness, and people disguised themselves or went mumming, hoping to deceive the evil spirits and preclude their attack.

The Christian world approached this festival by recognizing what was good and true in it: it is good and right to celebrate the very real connection between the living and the dead. In fact, as Christians, we can take it a step farther, and remember that God is the ‘God of the living,’ and that in Christ ‘everything continues in being.’ Christ is not only our subsistence, but He is our hold on life, and He is our direct connection to those who have passed from this earth.

All Hallows is really the feast of the ‘communion of saints.’ On All Saints (Hallows) day, we affirm our belief that God has banished our fear of evil and death by proclaiming His love both on earth and from heaven; we ask for the prayers of the saints in heaven who live with God, sure of His love, and indelibly connected to us in the one Body of Christ. On the next day, we pray for those we love who have died; we pray that they will be saints in heaven, and that the love we still share with them will be like a ladder that helps us climb the heavenwards way, too.

So, overall, what we are celebrating is the triumph of God’s love, of life over death, of good over evil, of hope over fear. But most of all, my favourite thing about these two feasts is that the celebrate eternal Love. ‘Man’s eternity passes through love,’ wrote Blessed Pope John Paul II. I have experienced this first hand---it was the experience of death that really initiated me into life. I have experienced that whatever we, as human beings, possess of transcendence, it is the gift of love.

Love is the one transcendent reality, in which we participate, which links us together in an eternal chain…no matter what side of life or death we are on.
I know dressing up is fun, and candy is even better. But whatever we do, let us do it for love’s sake.

Amen.

The original treat for All Hallows Eve (check out this recipe!)

2011-10-29T00:10:00.000+01:00

Catholic Cuisine: Soul Cakes: The Original Halloween "Treat": The following recipe was submitted by Lisa, from Catholic Missionary Family . Thank you Lisa! During the Middle Ages in England, on the n...

325/365: At the well

2011-10-27T23:41:00.001+01:00

~day 325: at the well~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

As a convert, I've never taken it for granted that Scripture was God's foremost revelation. No one told me this was so, and no one told me what exactly Scripture was supposed to be. Scripture's salvific truth is there for us to experience---take it or leave it. I find it so surprising that many Christians take Scripture to be the word-for-word dictate of a distant God. Scripture---to my understanding---is that first plunge we take into the abyss of God. It transmits to us in an objective and public sense what it is already known on the most intimate and personal level. It's only when we realise this personal dimension of Scripture that its revelation can really take any hold on us.

I am currently learning a new approach to reading Scripture. Rather than asking, what did that say? What did that mean?, I simply notice what phrase(s) have immediately impacted me. At which word did my heart stir? This is not a method of interpreting Scripture---quite the opposite. It is an entry into a personal encounter with God that allows me to peel back layers of my own consciousness, and find God there, more deeply present, as I make the descent. You can find more about this method in Gerard W. Hughes' "God of Surprises."

Another way of ruminating on Scripture and experiencing it personally is to pray it 'imaginitively'. I didn't realise I was already doing this, until I read it about in the same book mentioned above. You choose a passage---particularly a Gospel passage---and imagine yourself into the scene, in as much detail as possible, and without analysing anything. Where we meet Christ, how we meet Christ, whether we approach Him or prefer distance, whether we imagine Him gruff and majestic, or tender and warm to the touch, speaks volumes---not about Christ Himself, but about our own inner life, and the sometimes self-projected image of God we have conjured up.

The Gospel scene I always end up back at is the well. This is where Christ meets me---or perhaps where I meet Him. I take the place of the Samaritan woman. My way to enter into prayer is to enter this scene of dialogue. Dialogue is the context in which I feel most comfortable. Christ's thirst isn't just for my questions, my adoration, my time, my love, or my faith---it's simply for me. He can take the bafflement, confusion, doubt, tiredness, resentment, and constant questioning, along with the fervour, love, and enthusiastic adoration. All these can be accepted on one condition: engagement. This is, I believe, what really quenches Christ's thirst: our engagement with Him. It's why God came among us, to engage with us, to engage us with Him. Not everything needs to be settled, answered, perfect at once. But our engagement leads us down the road to reconciliation and intimate union with our God. When we commit to be engaged, we find that our perpetual thirst is also quenched. Yet the journey has just begun, not ended.

Currently, representatives of many different religions are meeting in Assisi for a day of reflection and dialogue together with Pope Benedict XVI. I like this word, 'reflection.' Praying together is not always easy, when it comes to crossing interreligious lines. To pray together, we really need to agree on the context of prayer---why we pray and who we're praying to. But reflection, in such a context, becomes dialogue---with each other, yes, but more so with God. I like the fact that anyone can show up at the well. We all feel thirst---it is the human condition. But we don't all recognise ourselves as needing healing, or needing a saviour. We can't always imagine ourselves into such Gospel scenes, at least not until we recognise the need within us. But every one of us is thirsty for engagement; and Christ's thirst for that always exceeds ours.

The many different religions that exist today seem somehow to be part of the journey we're making. Catholic truth is the polar star of my life; and yet, I'm not depressed, nor am I anxious that not everyone's a Catholic yet. I am anxious that everyone should be stepping out on the path to God. But I believe Christian evangelisation has gone far wrong; we're not preaching words---not with words, not our words, not words of Scripture. We are preaching the Word. And you don't need to speak to preach that Word. That Word is written on every human heart, and it's only on the most intimate and intrapersonal level that true conversion can really take place. God's native language is silence; why is it then that so many choose such a wordy, noisy path of evangelisation?

I love something Pope Benedict XVI said when he announced the formation of this peaceful meeting in Assisi. "Anyone who is on the path to God will transmit peace." Here we have the key to true evangelisation---not only its method, but its purpose.

It gives us a yard stick for discerning the true 'path to God;' against which we can also measure ourselves. Are you on the path to God?

324/365: Miracle

2011-10-24T17:03:00.001+01:00

~day 324: Miracle~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

A remembrance of all the miracles happening in my life...

"O Son of God, do a miracle for me
And change my heart.
Your having taken flesh to redeem me
Was more difficult than to transform my wickedness.

It is You who made the sun bright,
Together with the ice.
You, who create the rivers
And the salmon all along the river.

Although, as children of Eve,
We ill-deserve the birdflocks
and the salmon.

It was the immortal One on the cross
Who made both salmon and birds
It is He who makes the flower and the sloes
Grow thro' the surface of the blackthorn
And the nut-flower on the other trees.
Besides this, what miracle is greater?"

~15th century Irish poet.

What has the Church given the world?

2011-10-24T15:51:00.001+01:00

My soul gazes, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

A brief article by Fr. Andrew Pinsent that summarizes his further work, 'Lumen,' available from CTS. Fr. Andrew can also be heard at Totus2us.com giving the Sunday Evangelium homilies. He is a former particle phyisicist and works at the Ian Ramsey Centre in Oxford. This article is reposted from Catholic Herald.co.uk.

"Introduction

At a recent debate, broadcast worldwide by the BBC, over 87 per cent of the audience rejected the notion that the Catholic Church is a force for good in the world. Although the defenders of the Church were confronted by two masters of rhetoric, there is little doubt that the vote reflected a shift in attitudes towards Christianity in general and the Catholic faith in particular. To put this shift in blunt terms, whereas we were regarded recently as nice but naïve, today we are increasingly regarded as evil. As a result, teaching the faith and defending Christian ethics has become much more difficult.

To address this challenge at its root, I believe it is vital that we remind ourselves of the extent to which the Catholic faith is a force for good in the world. Jesus said: “You will know them by their fruits,” and even some outside the Church appreciate her fruitfulness. In 2007, for example, an atheist businessman, Robert Wilson, gave $22.5 million (£13.5 million) to Catholic education in New York, arguing that, “without the Roman Catholic Church, there would be no western civilisation.”

Inspired by Wilson’s insight, I have been working recently with Fr Marcus Holden, parish priest of Ramsgate and a tutor at Maryvale, to collate the extraordinary contributions of Catholic culture and Catholic minds. The following sections provide some samples of this work, which should be invaluable to anyone who is faced with the question: “What has the Church ever done for us?”

For a more complete account of the fruitfulness of the Catholic faith in these and many other fields, see Lumen: The Catholic Gift to Civilisation, published January 2011 by the Catholic Truth Society.

Fr Andrew Pinsent is a priest of the diocese of Arundel and Brighton and Research Director of the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion at Oxford University. He was formerly a particle physicist at CERN. He is co-founder, with Fr Marcus Holden, of the Evangelium Project, which is dedicated to improving the quality of Catholic education. See www.evangelium.co.uk.

1. Light and the cosmos

The Opus Maius (1267) of the Franciscan Roger Bacon (d 1292), written at the request of Pope Clement IV, largely initiated the tradition of optics in the Latin world. The first spectacles were invented in Italy around 1300, an application of lenses that developed later into telescopes and microscopes.

While many people think of Galileo (d 1642) being persecuted, they tend to forget the peculiar circumstances of these events, or the fact that he died in his bed and his daughter became a nun.

The Gregorian Calendar (1582), now used worldwide, is a fruit of work by Catholic astronomers, as is the development of astrophysics by the spectroscopy of Fr Angelo Secchi (d 1878).

Most remarkably, the most important theory of modern cosmology, the Big Bang, was invented by a Catholic priest, Fr Georges Lemaître (d 1966, pictured), a historical fact that is almost never mentioned by the BBC or in popular science books.

2. Earth and nature

Catholic civilisation has made a remarkable contribution to the scientific investigation and mapping of the earth, producing great explorers such as Marco Polo (d 1324), Prince Henry the Navigator (d 1460), Bartolomeu Dias (d 1500), Christopher Columbus (d 1506) and Ferdinand Magellan
(d 1521). Far from believing that the world was flat (a black legend invented in the 19th century), the Catholic world produced the first modern scientific map: Diogo Ribeiro’s Padrón Real (1527). Fr Nicolas Steno (d 1686) was the founder of stratigraphy, the interpretation of rock strata which is one of the principles of geology.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (d 1829), a French Catholic, developed the first theory of evolution, including the notion of the transmutation of species and a genealogical tree. The Augustinian monk Gregor Mendel (d 1884, pictured) founded the science of genetics based on the meticulous study of the inherited characteristics of some 29,000 pea plants.

3. Philosophy and theology

Catholicism regards philosophy as intrinsically good and was largely responsible for founding theology, the application of reason to what has been revealed supernaturally. Great Catholic philosophers include St Augustine (d 430), St Thomas Aquinas (d 1274), St Anselm (d 1109), Blessed Duns Scotus (d 1308), Suárez (d 1617) and Blaise Pascal (d 1662). Recent figures include St Edith Stein (d 1942, pictured), Elizabeth Anscombe (d 2001) and Alasdair MacIntyre. On the basis that God is a God of reason and love, Catholics have defended the irreducibility of the human person to matter, the principle that created beings can be genuine causes of their own actions, free will, the role of the virtues in happiness, objective good and evil, natural law and the principle of non-contradiction. These principles have had an incalculable influence on intellectual life and culture.

4. Education and the university system

Perhaps the greatest single contribution to education to emerge from Catholic civilisation was the development of the university system. Early Catholic universities include Bologna (1088); Paris (c 1150); Oxford (1167, pictured); Salerno (1173); Vicenza (1204); Cambridge (1209); Salamanca (1218-1219); Padua (1222); Naples (1224) and Vercelli (1228). By the middle of the 15th-century (more than 70 years before the Reformation), there were over 50 universities in Europe.

Many of these universities, such as Oxford, still show signs of their Catholic foundation, such as quadrangles modelled on monastic cloisters, gothic architecture and numerous chapels. Starting from the sixth-century Catholic Europe also developed what were later called grammar schools and, in the 15th century, produced the movable type printing press system, with incalculable benefits for education. Today, it has been estimated that Church schools educate more than 50 million students worldwide.

5. Art and architecture

Faith in the Incarnation, the Word made Flesh and the Sacrifice of the Mass have been the founding principles of extraordinary Catholic contributions to art and architecture. These contributions include: the great basilicas of ancient Rome; the work of Giotto (d 1337), who initiated a realism in painting the Franciscan Stations of the Cross, which helped to inspire three-dimensional art and drama; the invention of one-point linear perspective by Brunelleschi (d 1446) and the great works of the High Renaissance. The latter include the works of Blessed Fra Angelico (d 1455), today the patron saint of art, and the unrivalled work of Leonardo da Vinci (d 1519), Raphael (d 1520), Caravaggio (d 1610, pictured), Michelangelo (d 1564) and Bernini (d 1680). Many of the works of these artists, such as the Sistine Chapel ceiling, are considered among the greatest works of art of all time. Catholic civilisation also founded entire genres, such as Byzantine, Romanesque, Gothic, High Renaissance and Baroque architecture. The Cristo Redentor statue in Brazil and the Sagrada Familia basilica in Barcelona show that the faith continues to be an inspiration for highly original art and architecture.

6. Law and jurisprudence

The reforms of Pope Gregory VII (d 1085, pictured) gave impetus to forming the laws of the Church and states of Europe. The subsequent application of philosophy to law, together with the great works of monks like the 12th-century Gratian, produced the first complete, systematic bodies of law, in which all parts are viewed as interacting to form a whole. This revolution also led to the founding of law schools, starting in Bologna (1088), from which the legal profession emerged, and concepts such as “corporate personality”, the legal basis of a wide range of bodies today such as universities, corporations and trust funds. Legal principles such as “good faith”, reciprocity of rights, equality before the law, international law, trial by jury, habeas corpus and the obligation to prove an offence beyond a reasonable doubt are all fruits of Catholic civilisation and jurisprudence.

7. Language

The centrality of Greek and Latin to Catholicism has greatly facilitated popular literacy, since true alphabets are far easier to learn than the symbols of logographic languages, such as Chinese. Spread by Catholic missions and exploration, the Latin alphabet is now the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world. Catholics also developed the Armenian, Georgian and Cyrillic alphabets and standard scripts, such as Carolingian minuscule from the ninth to 12th centuries, and Gothic miniscule (from the 12th). Catholicism also provided the cultural framework for the Divina Commedia (Divine Comedy), the Cantar de Mio Cid (“The Song of my Lord”) and La Chanson de Roland (The Song of Roland), vernacular works that greatly influenced the development of Italian, Spanish and French respectively. The Catholic Hymn of Cædmon in the seventh century is arguably the oldest extant text of Old English. Valentin Haüy (d 1822), brother of the Abbé Haüy (the priest who invented crystallography), founded the first school for the blind. The most famous student of this school, Louis Braille (d 1852), developed the worldwide system of writing for the blind that today bears his name.

8. Music

Catholic civilisation virtually invented the western musical tradition, drawing on Jewish antecedents in early liturgical music. Monophonic Gregorian chant developed from the sixth century. Methods for recording chant led to the invention of musical notion (staff notation), of incalculable benefit for the recording of music, and the ut-re-mi (“do-re-mi”) mnemonic device of Guido of Arezzo (d 1003). From the 10th century cathedral schools developed polyphonic music, extended later to as many as 40 voices (Tallis, Spem in Alium) and even 60 voices (Striggio, Missa Sopra Ecco).

Musical genres that largely or wholly originated with Catholic civilisation include the hymn, the oratorio and the opera. Haydn (d 1809), a devout Catholic, strongly shaped the development of the symphony and string quartet. Church patronage and liturgical forms shaped many works by Monteverdi (d 1643), Vivaldi (d 1741), Mozart (d 1791, pictured) and Beethoven (d 1827). The great Symphony No 8 of Mahler (d 1911) takes as its principal theme the ancient hymn of Pentecost, Veni creator spiritus.

9. The status of women

Contrary to popular prejudice, extraordinary and influential women have been one of the hallmarks of Catholic civilisation. The faith has honoured many women saints, including recent Doctors of the Church, and nurtured great nuns, such as St Hilda (d 680, pictured) (after whom St Hilda’s College, Oxford, is named) and Blessed Hildegard von Bingen (d 1179), abbess and polymath. Pioneering Catholic women in political life include Empress Matilda (d 1167), Eleanor of Aquitaine (d 1204) and the first Queen of England, Mary Tudor (d 1558).

Catholic civilisation also produced many of the first women scientists and professors: Trotula of Salerno in the 11th century, Dorotea Bucca (d 1436), who held a chair in medicine at the University of Bologna, Elena Lucrezia Piscopia (d 1684), the first woman to receive a Doctor of Philosophy degree (1678) and Maria Agnesi (d 1799), the first woman to become professor of mathematics, who was appointed by Pope Benedict XIV as early as 1750."

"The secret of true happiness"

2011-10-24T15:47:00.001+01:00

~day 276: philosophy and faith~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

This article, written by Fr. Christopher Jamison OSB, is reposted here from CatholicHerald.co.uk:

"Fr Michael died well. As a Benedictine monk, he’d led a life of great dedication to the people he served, combined with a traditional piety that gave him a firm foundation. He died surrounded by his brethren and fortified by the rites of the Church. His was a happy death.

Yet the phrase “a happy death” is for most people today a contradiction in terms. For the Church, it is the most desirable conclusion to a good life. The Catholic tradition has for centuries encouraged us to pray for that grace and the Roman Missal has a set of prayers “for the grace of a happy death”. What we are praying for is that at the hour of our death we may be reconciled with God and at peace with our neighbour, strengthened by the sacraments of the Church to pass into everlasting life. In addition to that, each of us will have a particular desire for the time of our death: that an estranged relative might be reconciled or that our country might have made peace with its enemies. Taking all of these together is the happy death for which we pray.

We know that in general we must pray as if everything depended on God and work as if everything depended on us. A happy death, however, seems an exception to this because we cannot control our death. People can, however, take steps to make death happy by means of what project managers call “back-planning”. Starting at the end point (the ideal state at the time of death) people need to ask: in order to be in that state, what needs to be done the day before, the week before, the month before and so on, right up until the present moment. Then people can discover what they need to do today in order to prepare for a happy death.

This vision is at odds with many contemporary understandings of happiness. The most common assumption about happiness is that it is the same as pleasure; so being happy means feeling good. This is an exhausting approach to happiness because, in order to be this kind of happy person, feel-good chemicals must be kept pumping through the body morning, noon and night either by natural means, like exercise, or by unnatural means, like narcotics.

On this definition, since not feeling great means you’re unhappy, most people are unhappy every time they wake up in the morning. That is clearly not the case, and we can conclude that not feeling great is not the same as being unhappy. So if feeling good is not the answer to the question “What is happiness?” then where can we find the answer?

The ancient Greeks certainly had a better answer than the contemporary assumption that it’s all about feeling good. And they expressed it much more clearly too. Plato concluded that the contemplation of truth, goodness and beauty was the height of happiness and there are plenty of signs that people today secretly agree with him even if they don’t come out with it so clearly. For example, art exhibitions and concerts, where people flock to appreciate beauty, have never been so popular.

People’s admiration for the generosity of those serving the sick and homeless shows that our appreciation of goodness is as high as ever. The telling of the truth has emerged as a key feature in reconciling warring communities in once-divided countries like South Africa. Plato’s view of happiness is alive and well, even though people don’t always recognise it.

Plato’s greatest pupil was Aristotle and he took his master’s ideas a step further. He said that happiness consists not simply in contemplating the good but in doing good. He saw the importance of teaching people to be virtuous. Like many modern thinkers, he saw the child as having a tendency to behave selfishly unless taught to behave well. He wanted people to be taught to act virtuously because virtuous living made both individuals and societies happy.

Today, people express their outrage at the vices of our leaders in politics and in business; the lack of virtue makes people very unhappy. They know instinctively that virtue makes us all happy, even if they don’t express it that way. Aristotle, too, is alive and well in contemporary society.

This approach to happiness is not dependent on religious faith yet all the major faith communities support it. Christian faith absorbed this view as it spread through the world and the grace of Christ offered a way of restoring hope to those who had fallen from this ideal. The Christian community is a community that offers practical steps to live out this view of happiness. The Church’s contemplative tradition shows us how to pray so that we can contemplate the truth, the goodness and the beauty of the Blessed Trinity. The Catholic moral tradition teaches us how to live virtuously and how to find forgiveness when we fail. The Church is a school of living happily, not a school of feeling good.

So is the Church against feeling good? Of course not. The monastic tradition to which I belong is particularly appreciative of feeling good: after all, it was Dom Perignon, a Benedictine monk, who invented champagne. But monks know that feeling good is a bonus, like champagne. It is not the purpose of life. The banking crisis showed how life goes wrong when the bonus becomes the purpose: greed takes over.

People should enjoy feeling good as a bonus that can accompany contemplation and good living; but sometimes persevering in prayer and doing the right thing will be painful. In those times of suffering, we can hang on to deep happiness rather than thinking: “I must give up because I’m not feeling good.”

Once, after I had explained this in a talk, a recently widowed middle-aged woman came to me in tears; she thanked me for explaining what she had felt since her husband died. Her pain at the loss seemed overwhelming but through prayer and loving interaction with so many concerned people she had experienced deep consolation too. In the midst of pain, she could still contemplate the good and do good. She had never understood before how she could be experiencing both such grief and such consolation. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

Back-planning from our death bed will include making sure we give time every day to what matters: the classic virtues of justice and courage, prudence and temperance; the theological virtues of faith, hope and love; daily prayer and regular participation in the sacraments. This is the happiness that we are celebrating in this year’s Day for Life. It is a happiness that all can find in riches and in poverty, in sickness and in health, in death and in life. To adapt the words of Our Lord: happiness I give you, my happiness I give you, not as the world gives it. On the Day for Life the Church reminds each person that this gift is theirs to receive."

Fr Christopher Jamison OSB is director of the National Office for Vocation of the Catholic Church in England and Wales and author of Finding Happiness: Monastic Steps for a Fulfilling Life (Weidenfeld & Nicolson). This year’s Day for Life is on July 31

Written almost 20 years before 9/11

2011-10-23T15:06:00.005+01:00

The following selection is from one of the greatest spiritual books I've ever read, "God of Surprises" by Gerald W. Hughes. This comes from a chapter that deals with the nature of true repentance---the title of this post refers especially to the words highlighted in italics.

"Fear of meaninglessness is an invitation:

We misread our fear of meaninglessness. It is not a threat of annihilation, but an invitation to face truth. The facts are kind and God is in the facts. The fear of our own meaninglessness is saying to us: 'Your defences are ultimately useless. You are wrong in judging your worth by the strength of your useless defences. God alone is your rock, your refuge, and your strength. Acknowledge that truth and you will come to know your real worth, for you are precious in God's eyes and God loves you. God is calling you to share God's own life.'

Sin is our refusal to accept this invitation; we prefer our own security. We are like Lazarus in our tombs. God calls us out to life. We reply, 'Thank you, but I prefer to stay where I am.'

From within the ring of our own defences against God, we can look with disapproval at those within other security rings which may threaten us. We do this as individuals, as groups, and as nations. If we are religiously inclined, we may bring God within our defence ring, declaring atheist and evil any who may threaten our security. In God's name we threaten to annihilate any who endanger our defences, and God becomes the jusitification of our thefts, our violence and our murder, which we now call the preservation of our freedom and sovereignty, the upkeep of law and order, and patriotism. We become selective in our morality, foster an individualist morality which does not look beyond the perimeter of its own defence lines, and we become increasingly convinced of our own self-righteousness."

323/365: The Gospel of Life

2011-10-22T16:12:00.001+01:00

~day 323: the Gospel of Life~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

Today, as my dear friend Ruth keeps reminding us all via Totus2us.com, is the first feast day of Blessed John Paul II! One of his most celebrated encyclicals was Evangelium Vitae, or 'The Gospel of Life.' Marriage, family and the divine unity of love and life were at the heart of Blessed John Paul II's pontificate, and this was the encyclical that really summed up his theology of love, life and the body.

As we eagerly anticipate the birth of our first child, my husband and I truly feel we are living the 'Gospel of Life,' which translated once again, could mean, 'the Good News of Life.' My favourite quote from JPII is one that really sums up what religion, life, and existence are all about. He said, 'Man's eternity passes through love.' Love is the source of life; we have been loved into being, love is what makes us and keeps us alive. Love is the end to which we live. What is eternal life really for, if not to share love always?

And even more fundamentally, what is eternal life? Does it just mean living forever? What does real living really mean? These questions are at the heart of our Christianity. Ask yourself: 'Am I interested in living forever, or in loving forever?' Remember that for God, there's no distinction between living and loving. The Gospel of Life is the Gospel of Love.

322/365: Mothers & Daughters: The School for Ecumenism

2011-10-17T23:47:00.001+01:00

~day 322: mothers & daughters---the school for ecumenism~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

Marianna, this picture is for you! The flowers reminded us so much of you.

Today I'm still on the subject of mothers and children, and what they can teach us about interreligious dialogue.

Jesus said: 'Love one another, as I have loved you.'

How does Jesus love us? He Himself explains: 'As the Father has loved me, I have loved you.'

And elsewhere in Scripture, the Lord says that even should a mother forget the child of her womb, God will not forget us.

So God's love is both paternal and maternal, and then it goes beyond both---extending onto an infinite horizon that we can barely grasp.

As I mentioned in my blog yesterday, it was my Methodist mom who recently suggested rosary prayer as the solution to a problem I was facing. This suggestion came from her out of love. As a Protestant, she may not be personally comfortable with Marian devotions---but when she sees the comfort and peace something like the rosary gives to the child she loves, it's easy for her to recognise its value.

I'm not suggesting that all religious practices can simply be reduced to whatever makes us feel good. What I am proposing is that if we all loved one another as mothers love their children---as Jesus has loved us---then maybe we wouldn't get so caught up in the dissensions and differences.

There are groups of people that assure you the rosary is a devilish practice, at best unneccsary, at worst, blasphemous. And there are other groups of people that assure you your salvation depends on daily rosary prayer---yes, that's the full five decades.

Well, I suggest these boundaries might topple if love were to force them down. If we could each love each other as my mother loves me, then we would have the ability to realise what is authentically good in the different practices and the divergent understandings. That is to say, love recognises love; love is the elemental truth, and whatever is authentically loving always contains at least a ray of truth.

Salvation doesn't depend on the rosary; salvation depends on love. And there's certainly room in love for the rosary and all its beautiful meditations.

This is especially pertinent as it's October, the month of the Holy Rosary.

Have a think, and ask yourself: are there things you're negative about, that you might look at differently, if you looked from the inside, rather than the outside? Have you been quick to judge others, without really understanding their motivations?

321/365: Some motherly advice

2011-10-16T16:14:00.001+01:00

~day 321: some motherly advice~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

When I find myself in times of trouble/
Mother Mary comes to me/
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be

And in my hour of darkness/
She is standing right in front of me/
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be

Has anyone else out there ever been surprised when your mom gave you some advice, and it actually turned out that she really did know what was best for you???

I certainly have been. The occurence has been rare in my life, since most of the time, my mother and I are enjoying our differences, rather than our similarities, just trying to keep getting to know each other and accepting one another in love.

But once in awhile, my mother knows just what I need, like no one else does, and this is an especially pertinent revelation for me, as I become a mother myself.

Lately I've been experiencing one of the typical symptoms of mid-pregnancy: terrible and very vivid nightmares. I'm plagued by these every night, so much so that I end up avoiding sleep purposely. Dreams like these are a subconscious way of dealing with anxieties revolving around pregnancy, motherhood, and the big life changes that creating a new family entails. A new mother's need is to protect the relationships that are important to her, to foster a home where Nazareth-like love and simplicity dwells, and to feel that her child is 'cloistered' within her. These fundamental desires can often seem difficult to accomplish as the mother deals with her own fears and anxieties, questioning whether she can deal with certain negative influences in her life, how she can protect her family from them, or whether the way she was raised will directly influence her style of parenting. We all emulate what our parents did well, but we also react against the things we felt hurt by---and this usually results in another, albeit novel, parenting mistake being made.

A mind racing with anxious thoughts like these isn't a peaceful one. Sometimes Mary's motherhood seems so far off, so difficult to attain as a pattern of life for ourselves. Then my mom stepped in with some advice.

'How about some rosary prayer before you go to sleep?'

You might think this is run-of-the-mill advice from your typical Catholic mom. But that's just it. My mom isn't Catholic. My mom is Methodist, raised by a Southern Baptist mother and grandparents, and she even went through a long period of agnosticism while I was growing up. Praying the rosary is not the first suggestion I'd expect to come from her.

But this is where true motherhood is at its best. As my mom has watched me progress through the pregnancy, she has observed how healing and transformative a simple prayer like 'Hail Mary' can be. The 'Hail Mary' is fundamentally Christological, but in a way that the Our Father can never be. 'Hail Mary' allows us to fully realize Christ's humanity, as well as our own; Hail Mary reminds us that Mary, who is small and simple with us, is also clothed in radiance---not by her own brilliance, but by God's love, a love that is no less available to us. As new mothers, there's something we can appreciate about that moment when the angel approaches Mary and greets her, announcing the great thing that will be done to her. We can understand something of that, because in some small way, it has happened to us, too.

Now my husband recites a decade of the rosary with me each night before the lights are turned out. Since beginning this practice, my nights may not have been totally nightmare-free, but they are certainly more peaceful and restful. There is something reassuring to a mother in knowing that she is also a child---especially a child of Mary.

As a convert, I often find myself stuttering over terms like 'the Blessed Virgin' and 'Our Lady.' I know these are good names for Mary, but they don't feel quite like home for me. For me, the simplest way to address Mary is 'mother.' This is not part of a formula, it's the word that instinctively leaves my lips in those moments of smallness, of anxiety, of humanity. After all, you can call Mary 'Queen,' 'Blessed Lady', 'Holy Virgin,' and you can certainly name her 'Theotokos' (the most astute theological pronunciation). But in her essence, she's 'mommy,' and the experience of being able to call her, the mother of Jesus, this---is a simple but rooted experience of the love of God.

I've never stopped calling my mom 'Mommy,' and any mother will probably tell you---that beyond being called blessed, holy, or any other sanctified epithet, to be called 'mommy' is most exalted of all.

320/365: Good friends

2011-10-15T17:20:00.001+01:00

~day 320: good friends~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

Today is the feast of St. Teresa of Avila, and her approach to God can be summed up in one word: friendship. At a time when prayer within the Catholic tradition had become intensely formulaic, Teresa revolutionised spirituality by her teaching that prayer is an entry into intimacy with God, a communion in friendship that takes a spontaneous, natural, and instinctive approach.

Another aspect of friendship that was important to Teresa was the friendship of the Church---that is, the friendship of those who form the Body of Christ. Living in the 16th century, she was intensely miserable at what she saw happening within and outside of the Church during the period of the Reformation. She said:

"My one wish was and still is that, as Christ has so many enemies and so few friends, his few friends should be good ones."

If we ask ourselves what it really means to be good friends, and who the true friends of Christ really are, it certainly gives us food for self-examination in our own lives. How do our relationships with one another, our ecumenical friendships, help us to cross our own self-erected boundaries and know Christ better?

Prayer isn't easy, and Teresa found it difficult for about 20 years, even leaving off for a year and a half from prayer totally. She found her attempts at prayer discouraging. When she reached her 40s, the years of struggle began to bear fruit. Her insight into prayer was gifted with a mystical element. She wrote:

"In my opinion, if I had understood as I do now that in this little palace of my soul dwelt so great a King, I would not have left Him alone so often. I would have remained with Him at times and striven more so as not to be so unclean. But what a marvelous thing, that He who would fill a thousand worlds and many more with His grandeur would enclose Himself in something so small! In fact, since He is Lord He is free to do what He wants, and since He loves us He adapts Himself to our size.

So that the soul won't be disturbed in the beginning by seeing that it is too small to have something so great within itself, the Lord doesn't give it this knowledge until He enlarges it little by little and it has the capacity to receive what He will place within it. For this reason I say He is free to do what He wants since He has the power to make this palace a large one. The whole point is that we should give ourselves to Him with complete determination, and we should empty the soul in such a way that He can store things there or take them away as though it were His own property. And since His Majesty has the rights of ownership, let us not oppose Him. And since He doesn't force our will, He takes what we give Him; but He doesn't give Himself completely until we give ourselves completely.

This fact is certain; and because it is so important, I bring it to your minds so often. He never works in the soul as He does when it is totally His without any obstacle, nor do I see how He could. He is the friend of all good order. Now, then, if we fill the palace with lowly people and trifles, how will there be room for the Lord with His court? He does enough by remaining just a little while in the midst of so much confusion."

To learn more about St. Teresa of Avila, one of three women Doctors of the Church, click here:

www.totus2us.com/vocation/saints/st-teresa-of-jesus/

This stained glass window is located in the shrine church built on the spot of St. Teresa's birthplace and childhood home, in Avila, Spain.

319/365: Elemental bliss

2011-10-15T15:42:00.001+01:00

~day 319: elemental bliss~, a photo by theroamincatholic on Flickr.

Elemental,
I breathe You in:
Not awaiting some after-thought of this life
No happier day than this
When the foretaste of Your sweet love
Is in my mouth.

What heaven is there?
But to live in love
Where Love lives;
with those we love.

What heaven is there?
But the intimate knowing,
Indwelling, inbreathing
The mutual loving
Of my God and me.

Through Him we are connected,
In Him we have being
With Him we are feasting
Already on this
Heavenly banquet
That He spreads before us,
A taste of real life
I'm living in bliss.