CONDITIONS FOR EMPATHIC Presence
July 9, 2012
Our
potential for spiritual presence is the source of attentive and
compassionate presence in our everyday field of life. We can
grow in empathic presence to others to the degree that we
diminish the obstacles and nurture the conditions for spiritual
presence. In the previous reflection we discussed some
obstacles to spiritual presence. In this reflection we consider
some conditions for empathic presence that we experience in our
daily lives.
Relativizing Relaxation
We must learn to
balance the stresses of everyday life with formative pauses.
Our immersion in daily realities can distort (unbalance) our
healthy appraisal of their meaning in our life. Physical
exercise, pleasure reading of good literature, relaxation with
friends, movie-going -- these and other sources of personal
replenishment restore our deeper good sense and
judgment about what is meaningful and valuable in life .
Giving Thought – Meditative Reflection – to What
is Happening in Our Lives
We often live
without thinking about what is happening in our lives, as if
surface appearances tell all. The deeper structure of
life is revealed to us in reflection. Through the
generosity of thinking we overcome much of our anxiety
‒ life is not only the threat or
the disaster we often imagine it to be. The world, the
situation we find ourselves in, and even the people in it, are
perhaps more giving that we realize.
Generosity –
thinking – i.e., giving our thought to what calls out to us to
be thought about, considered, “cared” about – leads us toward
greater appreciation and gratitude for what is given. The right
kind of thinking, which is generous in nature, heals spiritual
blindness.
Etty Hillesum,
for example, in her extraordinary journal, remarkably did not
lose sight of the sources of goodness in her field, even in the
most trying and threatening circumstances. She kept her
awareness of the “more” open at all times. For this to happen,
thinking must be open and generous.
Opportunity Thinking
We often feel
trapped by the ordinary. We may feel that because of the
ordinary we don’t even have a life. Does having a life
mean to have something? Or does it mean to have life
within us?
Free and flexible
dispositions enable us to make the most of our opportunities.
Therese of Lisieux was probably a spiritual genius in this
regard. She viewed everyday circumstances as opportunities to
put love into practice. This might be the very essence of
“being present”: the willingness (determination) to overcome
all obstacles to doing what we can – to being present as we
uniquely can be – in this situation, at this time.
What greater
testament to the power of the Holy Spirit! To freely incarnate
the inspiration of the spirit in our life as we find it now.
And thus to be the distinctively human person we are – and are
called to be in – our ordinary ground. Truly, this capacity is
the very essence of the good news!
OBSTACLES TO EMPATHIC Presence
June 25, 2012
Our
potential for spiritual presence is the source of attentive and
compassionate presence in our everyday field of life. We can
grow in empathic presence to others to the degree that we
diminish the obstacles and nurture the conditions for spiritual
presence. In this reflection we consider some of the obstacles
to empathic presence that we experience in our daily lives.
READ MORE...
Pre-Transcendent and Transcendent Presence (Part
Two)
June 18, 2012
Our
potential for distinctively human presence is realized within
the transcendent horizon of our personality. As we have seen,
it can be expressed in three modes of self-transcendence:
-
Self-presence: Self-awareness and
self-knowledge. It includes our pre-transcendent levels but
is more about being in touch with “what we are going
through” in the depths of our being, and with increasing
contact with our deeper spiritual identity vs. the
functional, or already-known, aspects of our identity. St.
Teresa of Avila emphasizes this mode of presence in
describing prayer as inclusive of “what we are going
through.”
READ MORE...
Pre-Transcendent and Transcendent Presence (Part
One)
March 19, 2012
Although we haven’t distinguished – up to this point in our
reflections on presence – between transcendent and
pre-transcendent levels of human presence, it may be useful to
do. As “embodied spirit” our presence is manifested
materially (physically) as well as in distinctively human
capacities, such as thinking, imagining, and self-transcendence
(we “go beyond” ourselves in fundamental ways). That our
spiritual life is embodied means that it does not function
independently of the reality that we are “in the world” with
bodies.
READ MORE...
A Lesson in Presence
by Susan Muto*
March 5, 2012
People often say that no matter how old or frail their parents
become, they still have lessons to teach them. I would
have to agree. Despite the diminishment of time awareness
Alzheimer's inflicts upon a person – erasing the past and
forfeiting a felt understanding of the future – this condition
enables caregivers and care receivers to experience in a
profound way the present moment. In a sense it makes the here
and now more precious than what used to be or what may yet come
to pass.
READ MORE...
Centering Prayer: Dealing with Distractions
February 27, 2012
A
main facilitating condition for growth in spiritual presence is
the practice of non-discursive meditation. We pray
non-discursively when we sit quietly before God without relying
on words or images or ideas to guide our activity.
Distractions are a
common complaint among those who strive to practice this form of
prayer. Why is this so? Because in fact it is nearly impossible
for us to "stop" the normal flow of thoughts. The intellect
produces thoughts and images; this is natural. St. Teresa of Avila
noted that the constant activity of thoughts was like having a
mad-woman in the house. She affirmed that it was possible
nonetheless, even in the midst of clamor, to be deeply united with
God in the depths of one’s soul.
READ MORE...
Ash Wednesday: Thoughts for the Start of Lent
February 22, 2012
Lent
is thought of as a time of giving something up, or as a period
in which a series of “don’ts” prevails: we give up something we
like or avoid specified behavior for the period of 40 days, with
the hope of reforming ourselves. In the tradition, this
approach is considered to be at best a first step to true
repentance. Jeremy Taylor, the 17th century cleric, spoke of
two kinds of repentance:
The first is mere sorrow for what is past, an
ineffective trouble, producing nothing good. . . To this
repentance pardon is nowhere promised in scripture. But there
is a repentance which is called “conversion,” or “amendment of
life,” a repentance productive of holy fruits, such as the
Baptist and our blessed Savior preached.
READ MORE...
Reforming
OBSTACLES TO PRESENCE (Part Four)
February 13, 2012
In
The Valley of the Shadow of Death, James Kugel writes
of his experience of being diagnosed with what was believed to
be a terminal cancer. As
he left the Doctor’s office, Kugel says he experienced a
striking difference in his state of mind.
. . . the background music suddenly stopped.
It had always been there, the music of daily life that’s
constantly going, the music of infinite time and possibilities;
and now suddenly it was gone, replaced by nothing, just silence.
There you are, one little person, sitting in the late
summer sun, with only a few things left to do.
READ MORE...
Reforming
OBSTACLES TO PRESENCE (Part Three)
February 6, 2012
In
The Bible As It Was, scripture scholar James L. Kugel
points out that the Sages have long wrestled with a problem
arising from the very first verse of the Book of Genesis.
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the
earth.” Elsewhere in the
scriptures, however, we have learned of something that preceded
God’s creation of the world, and so occurred before what Genesis
says is the beginning.
In Proverbs 8:22 we read:
“The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the
first of his acts of long ago.
Ages ago I was set up, at first, before the beginning of
the earth.” And we hear
in Wisdom 9:9: “With you
is wisdom, she who knows your works and was present when you
made the world.” Before
the beginning of the heavens and the the earth God created
wisdom, a wisdom that is present as God creates the universe, so
that all of creation is an expression of Divine wisdom.
In our preceding reflections we noted that presence to
God is awareness of being loved and cared for; that self
presence is presence to all other dimensions of reality; and
that our presence can reflect to others the Mystery of the
Presence to us. To be
fully present to Reality, then, is to be present to the Divine
Wisdom that is its source.
Our presence to this Divine Wisdom changes our way of
being, our most basic dispositions
READ MORE...
Reforming
OBSTACLES TO PRESENCE (Part Two)
January 30, 2012
The
habits we have formed to keep the world at a distance are
depreciative ones which inhibit our appreciative presence and
our trusting abandonment to the Mystery that creates us.
This being the case, one way we can work to decrease the
hold of those depreciative habits inhibiting our presence is to
practice appreciation.
The conversion of our depreciative way of seeing and
experiencing the world to a more appreciative one requires of us
a reckoning with our painful experiences of loss.
How can we come to appreciate the world and God when our
experience of life constantly confronts us with contingency and
limit, with the loss of those who are dearest to us, and finally
with our own diminishment and death?
The only way is to learn how to remain present to, and
then appropriate and trust our experiences of loss, loneliness,
and disappointment and the painful feelings which these
experiences evoke in us.
READ MORE...
Reforming
OBSTACLES TO PRESENCE (Part One)
January 16, 2012
In
the last reflection we noted that we ourselves may be obstacles
to spiritual presence.
The “self” that hinders our full presence to reality is
an accumulation of experiences that lead us to develop
depreciative habits and dispositions.
Depreciative habits and dispositions inhibit our capacity
for simple appreciation.
For example, when we step back in gentle reflection on
our relationships with others, we can begin to appraise the
quality of our presence to them in our ordinary moment to moment
encounters. Such
reflection may reveal to us how “cautious” we are in relating to
others; that is how we limit our presence to what feels to be a
safe distance from the life and experience of others.
We may then recognize how busy we are under the surface
of our “meeting” to keep the encounter with the other safely
controlled. Caution
is valid to some degree to protect what is most vulnerable and
unique in us. But
we are concerned here with the effect on our presence
of being overly cautious, of moving away from the unique life
and experience of others when we could be moving more in tune
with them. Our
reflection might also indicate that we tend to move toward the
other too much, losing ourselves by fusing (and confusing) our
identity with theirs.
Or, we might discover that we limit our presence by most
often moving against others, aggressively trying to control or
manipulate others into the
service of our project or agenda.
As we become, again through gentle reflection, aware of
the ways we delimit our true presence to others, we may ask
ourselves to imagine what it would be like to be present to
others in a different way, how we would behave and experience
our lives if we allowed ourselves to be more fully present to
self, others, and God.
READ MORE...
OBSTACLES TO PRESENCE (Part Two)
January 9, 2012
We
have pointed out that it is we ourselves who are the greatest
obstacle to a deeper and fuller presence to ourselves, others,
and God. There are as many strategies of evasion of personal
presence as there are persons. It is important that we become
aware of what it is in us, under the differing circumstances of
our lives, that prompts us to cling to, act out of, or seek
compensatory behaviors at the expense of the ultimately more
satisfying response of simply being present .
READ MORE...
OBSTACLES TO PRESENCE (Part One)
January 2, 2012
We
have all had experiences of being present in simple
appreciation. What gets in the way of a more lasting experience
of spiritual presence in our lives? Why does it get disrupted?
We ourselves, of course, are the chief obstacle to deeper
presence. Beyond certain cultural impediments to the
transcendent, certain functional orientations and fixations, and
the difficulties and distractions that arise in our day-to-day
living, the facticities of our own formation require the most
attention. This and the following reflection will briefly
outline the factors we might consider in attempting to
understand the broad range of obstacles that impinge upon and
impede our desire for satisfying human presence.
READ MORE...
SPIRITUAL PRESENCE: ATTITUDES FOR INCARNATION (Part
Three)
December 26, 2011
We have spoken of three dimensions of human presence: we can be
present to the Mystery of Formation that we call God (that is to
be open and present to the Mystery that is always and already
present to us); we can be self-present (aware and attentive to
the mystery of our own being and of the dynamics of our own
presence); and we can be present to others, reflecting to others
the presence of the Mystery to us. In the passage above, van
Kaam affirms our potential to presence to whatever is emerging
in our field of formation in our moment-to-moment existence.
Everything “points” to the Mystery. We could say, as
Shakespeare wrote, that “there are tongues in trees, books in
running brooks, sermons in stones.” Everything speaks! Every
manifestation of reality is revelatory. It all depends on our
simple presence and receptivity .
READ MORE...
Spiritual Presence: Attitudes for Incarnation (Part
Two)
December
19, 2011
We concluded the previous reflection by enumerating three
aspects of personal presence. These three fundamental aspects
of human presence are articulated as follows by Adrian van Kaam:
1) We are a potency for presence to the Mystery of God, which
means that we can abide in recollection of the presence of the
Mystery to us. Although we are not directly present to God, we
are a capacity to open ourselves up to and to become aware of
the dimension of sacred reality. Through prayerful attention
and God’s grace some people develop an abiding sense of the
transcendent dimension of reality, and of God’s personal love
and care for them.
READ MORE...
Spiritual Presence: Attitudes for Incarnation (Part
One)
December
12, 2011
To more fully understand presence we must engage in what is for
us a very difficult practice: to opt more for being than for
doing. St. Thomas Aquinas states this priority succinctly:
“The most marvelous thing of all things a being can do is: to
be.” Of course “doing” is also a part of life, and the point of
being cannot be to eliminate activity and involvement from
life. Rather, what we must learn is the gentle art of
being-with whatever we are doing.
READ MORE...
LIVING IN PRESENCE (Part Three)
December 5, 2011
The
tendency to project oneself into the future and to be weighed
down by the past obscures our relationship to the present.
Memory, a vast storehouse of images, memories and experiences,
is active in every moment of life. Without the aid of memory we
would be in serious trouble, having to learn from scratch every
time we set out to do something. The downside of memory is that
the past can invade and crowd out the present. We also lose our
connection to the present when we become overly caught up in our
concerns for the future.
READ MORE...
LIVING IN PRESENCE (Part Two)
November 28, 2011
The
present moment properly understood is not a mathematical or
infinitesimal moment. There are some who like to point out that
inhabiting the present moment is impossible since, before we can
truly be aware of it, that particular moment has already passed.
Technically speaking, this is true. Pierre Hadot explains that
when we speak of living in the present what we refer to is not
the mathematical moment but the duration in which an action
takes place. This can be the duration of a sentence one utters,
the movement that one executes, or the melody one hears. (P.
Hadot, The Present Alone is Our Happiness, 163) The
claim here is that it is the quality of our involvement in an
activity that constitutes our presence to it. We are living in
the moment when we are fully engaged with a person, thing or
event. “Live fully today,”
we are told by Saints Gregory and Therese: liberated from
past and future, strive to be-with whatever your current
activity is.
READ MORE...
LIVING IN PRESENCE (Part One)
November 21, 2011
Living
in the
present would
seem to
be the
simplest of
things.
It
is certainly
the most
natural: it
is where
our bodies
always find
themselves,
even if
our minds
and spirits
do not always
follow.
If the
present moment
is a
sacrament, why
don't we
experience it
as such?
If the
present moment
is in
fact always
a point
of contact
with Eternity,
why do
we not
experience our
lives as
constantly immersed
in divine
reality?
Being
present turns
out to
be a
challenge for
us.
The
present and
its
possibilities often
escape us.
Is it because
we ourselves
are distant
and
unavailable?
Why
should this
be so?
READ MORE...
Ordinary Life:
A Source of Reflection
July 25, 2011
We
spend much of our lives in anticipation of the extraordinary,
yearning for something that will alter our circumstances and result
in greater happiness, wealth, fame or success.
What we expected our life to be may be very different from
the existence we find ourselves struggling to accept from day to
day. We may wonder what
happened: Did my true
life direction get mysteriously derailed at some point?
Can I really claim the
current state of affairs as “my life”?
What should I be doing – what can I do? – to transform my
life to make it correspond more faithfully to my deepest
aspirations?
READ MORE...
The Ordinary: Gateway to Spiritual Living
July 4, 2011
As
we age we spend much more time looking back and remembering
moments of our lives.
Recently as I was doing that, I was struck by how, for the most
part, the most vivid and significant memories are of the most
ordinary moments.
Recently while reading something, I was taken back to sitting on
my Mother’s knee and memorizing with her help the Ten
Commandments for Sunday school.
As I kept confusing the order of the ninth and tenth
commandments, my Mother would continually remind me:
“First the wife, then the goods.”
Although my Grandmother
died when I was six, I can still remember a constant brief
dialogue between us that would give her great delight.
She would ask me: “Do you think I’m as fat as Kate
Smith?” I would then
always respond, “Yes”, and she would unfailingly laugh with good
humor and love. Later
in life, I remember running and playing in a light snowfall with
a friend. I remember
sitting at the seashore in Marblehead with my Mother and looking
out over the sun drenched ocean to the islands beyond.
And when I think of times of travel, I’m often amazed
that the most memorable aspects of trips to distant places are
the ordinary moments of walking in the evening on a beach or
through a city or town, eating a pastry at a bakery in Paris,
watching the families on a Sunday afternoon in a park in Rome,
and seeing children walk to school hand-in-hand in Western
Kenya. Even when having
traveled at significant distances from home, it is the ordinary
experiences of everyday life that stand out.
READ MORE...
Prayer and Peace
June 27, 2011
“Our
hearts are restless,” Augustine tells us.
The restlessness at the heart of human life
is a spiritual condition marked by innate yearning for
“more.” We are not
satisfied; we are not whole; we are not
at home.
When Augustine adds, “until our hearts rest in You,” he
reminds us that God alone is our peace and that we will come to
know peace only to the extent that we can bring our human heart
and spirit to rest in God.
READ MORE...
Peace: A Spiritual Longing (part
2)
June 13, 2011
The
true significance of peace comes into view when we examine the
nature of our suffering consciousness.
The French Christian philosopher Louis Lavell offers a
useful description of suffering in his book Evil and
Suffering (1963).
When we are happy we experience “a harmony between us and
the world which tends to dissolve consciousness.”
At such times we participate effortlessly in the world;
or, as Lavelle puts it, “we exist in communicating with the
world.” Suffering
changes all that. It
is a threat to our union with the world.
“Even in its most elementary form, (suffering) is an
evocation of death.
(Through suffering) Death already reveals itself in life.”
(59-60) The threat
of suffering affects our state of mind and thus the peace and
harmony we seek to inhabit.
READ MORE...
Peace: A Spiritual Longing
June 1, 2011
The
enduring formation traditions of humanity speak with one voice
about the desire and need for peace as a condition for living a
spiritual life. They inspire us to pursue peace in the various
articulations they present to our minds and hearts. They remind
us of our deepest longings, alluring us with the possibility of
true and lasting peace in this life.
Thich Nhat Hanh
for example offers the following understanding of peace from his
Buddhist spiritual tradition:
Peace is all around us –
in the world and in nature –
and within us –
in our bodies, and our spirits.
Once we learn to touch this peace,
we will be healed and transformed.
It is not a matter of faith;
It is a matter of practice.
READ MORE...
The Way of Peace
May 23, 2011
Receiving
the gift of transcendent peace requires of us that we become
more intimate with ourselves, with the world, with others, and
with God. We do
this first of all by deepening our attunement to or consonance
with our founding life form.
A very paradoxical phenomenon of human life is that in
the course of our lives we often more consistently move away
from, rather than towards, our deepest originality.
This dissociation from our true originality and coercive
attempt to re-create ourselves requires an act of suppression or
repression of our founding life form.
This profound self-alienation makes reminders and
intimations of our founding life form, our own deepest identity,
a source of anxiety and fear to us, a disturber of our peace.
READ MORE...
“Peace I Leave with You”: The Gift of Transcendent Peace
May 16, 2011
At
the heart of the teaching of all of the world’s spiritual
traditions is the call to peace. The longer we live the
more we realize how elusive this call is.
Experience teaches us that the peace that is the absence
of conflict seems impossible to attain through the efforts of
our executive or managing wills.
Outer harmony is only possible out of an experience of
inner harmony, and this inner harmony is something that we
cannot willfully impose, but rather that we must receive as a
gift. Thus, it may be that the path to peace is one that
requires of each of us a renewal of mind and heart, a
willingness, as Zachariah said upon the birth of his son John
the Baptist, to receive “the tender mercy of our God,/ With
which the Sunrise from on high will visit us,/ To shine on those
who sit in darkness and the shadow of death,/ To guide our feet
into the way of peace.” (Luke 1: 77-79)
“The way of peace” is a way on which we must be guided;
that is, true peace is a transcendent gift.
READ MORE...
The Presence within Us
May 9, 2011
In
the story of the Road to Emmaus Jesus effectively tells his
disciples that he is present to them
spiritually and that
he is to be found not physically in external reality but in
their own hearts and daily lived experience.
A famous Buddhist saying goes a step further, instructing
believers: “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.”
This is on one level an injunction against falling prey to
false gods or prophets.
The deeper meaning relates to the word “buddha”, which is derived
from a smaller word bud:
“to awaken.” Awakening
is an interior event, not a physical entity we might encounter in
the physical world. Our
awakening is a spiritual potential residing within us.
READ MORE...
Eastertide Reflection
Opening the Scriptures of Our Lives
May 2, 2011
In
Blue Arabesque: A Search for
the Sublime Patricia Hample observes that the ancient and great
enterprise of the imagination known as religion is magnetized by
travel. “Even defined by
it,” she writes,
Islam marks its
start from migration — the original great march from Medina to Mecca.
This hajj, repeated as a form of religious confirmation every
year, is one of the five pillars of Islam.
Not to mention the forty years of desert wandering that
established Judaism, and the homeless meandering of Jesus: “Foxes
have their holes and the birds or the air have nests, but the Son of
man has nowhere to lay his head.”
Pilgrimage, which is a form of tourism, reaffirms humanity’s
most ancient metaphor—that life is a journey.
We must keep moving, it seems.
The imagination is not a domestic animal.
It roams . . . (40)
We might think
that Easter puts an end to all that, at least in our spiritual
tradition. With the dying
and rising of Christ, is there any need to keep searching?
What happens on the road to Emmaus suggests a different
outcome.
READ MORE...
Holy Week Reflection
Life Beyond Measure
April 19, 2011
As
we enter this year’s celebration of Holy Week, followed by
Easter, we hear again the familiar narrative of the Passion and
Death of Jesus. The
words and images are so familiar to us, the product of life-long
and by now embedded interpretations.
Depending on the current form our life has taken, those
interpretations can be consoling or depressing, hopeful or
infuriating. What they
may, unfortunately, have ceased to be is mysterious and
confounding. The power
of the Word, and of the words we read and hear this week that
mediate the Word, is a power to break open our lives and our
consciousness, to lay waste our expectations, and to expand our
worlds and deepen our presence to the Real.
But more often than not, we fall asleep as the Disciples
in Gethsemane, overcome by the drowsiness and common sense of
our embedded understandings and repetitious interpretations.
READ MORE...
Fifth Sunday of Lent Reflection
Reflections on The Woman at the Well BY ADRIAN VAN KAAM
(conclusion)
April 11, 2011
The
woman at the well is moved by the essential spiritual
disposition of gratitude. What
she expresses in words and gestures is her thankfulness for
receiving the incomparable gift of God's grace.
What she has secretly longed for all her life is suddenly
and surprisingly offered to her by a stranger seated at the
well. She responds to
this gift by doing her part to lead others to the Lord.
READ MORE...
Fourth Sunday of Lent Reflection
Reflections on The Woman at the Well BY ADRIAN VAN KAAM
(continued)
April 4, 2011
Jesus
realizes that patience can overcome resistance. The text says
that “his divine interior speaks mysteriously to her interior,
touching her with his grace and drawing her to himself.” (p. 31)
What this suggests is that there are varying levels of
interaction going on in the encounter.
This is to be expected.
A conversation has to
start someplace. We
usually begin on a level of social commonplaces. “How are you?”
“I am fine, thank you.” I may not be fine at all, but those are
the words that come out of my mouth.
If my speaking partner is
really interested in me and can get beyond the social amenities,
my responses may become more personal, and more interior.
READ MORE...
Third Sunday of Lent Reflection
Reflections on The Woman at the Well BY ADRIAN VAN KAAM
March 28, 2011
St.
John’s gospel reminds us that God is spirit and that we are
called to worship in spirit and in truth.
(Jn.4:24)
Worshiping in spirit and truth is an expression of our belief in
a spiritual basis of life.
It reflects our willingness to be guided by life
directives that are spiritual in nature.
We cannot live the life of the spirit unless we allow
ourselves to be addressed by the Spirit.
The spiritual directives awakening our minds and hearts
remind us first of all that we are spirit.
They call us to release the dynamic longing deep within
us to live a life according to the spirit and its inspirations.
These directives make it possible for us to give
spiritual form to our lives.
They touch and transform our hearts, enabling us to seek
and give expression to our hidden but authentic transcendent
identity in Christ.
READ MORE...
Second Sunday of Lent Reflection
Jesus Alone
March 21, 2011
The
Gospel for the Second Sunday of Lent is Matthew’s account of the
Transfiguration of Jesus.
Jesus takes Peter, James, and John with him up a high
mountain and there they witness Jesus speaking with Moses and
Elijah and then as he is “transfigured before them; his face
shone like the sun and his clothes became white as light.”
(Mt. 17, 2) It is
for Peter, James, and John a lifting of the veil that separates
their ordinary life of discipleship with Jesus from an
extraordinary moment of awareness of the Divine Mystery that
lies beyond. At first
Peter desires to build three tents in order to hold onto and
contain this deeper awareness, but that desire is quickly
replaced by fear as the Divine voice announces Jesus’ identity
from the shadow of a bright cloud.
The initial awakening to Mystery that is manifest in the
gathering of these messengers of God evokes a desire for
possession and domestication in the disciples.
But the awe-full manifestation of Divinity itself is
threatening and fearful.
“When the disciples heard this, they fell prostrate and were
very much afraid.” (Mt. 17, 6)
It is when “Jesus alone” touches the disciples that they
are able to get up and continue their ordinary lives, present to
the Mystery in the human way of faith, hope, and love.
READ MORE...
First Sunday of
Lent Reflection
finding Our Joy in the Lord
March 14, 2011
Isaiah’s
call to keep the sabbath, to keep a time when we are free from
our own affairs, may sound a bit quaint to us as we enter the
second decade of the 21st century.
Thanks to the increasing capacities of our own
technology, our work and its demands are now always with us.
For many of us it is quite rare to have an evening, or a
conversation with friends, or a meal with our families during
which we are not also “plying our trade” and “attending to our
own affairs.”
Keeping a whole day free from these things is now, for many if
not most of us, unimaginable.
Could it perhaps be that, for this very reason, the
summons of Isaiah that we hear in the liturgy of the Saturday
after Ash Wednesday has a particular relevance for us this Lent?
READ MORE...
From Resentment to Gratitude
by Beverly Stott, RSM
January 31, 2011
A half an hour had passed since the time
of setting out on our journey and already the last of suburbia
has sunk behind us out of sight.
Now as the car speedometer needle inexorably rises to
country speed limits, the countryside stretches out unimpeded on
each side of us. The
silver grey road lies like a new ribbon ahead of us across the
grassed paddocks.
The molten gold of the rising gun is streaking out from the rim
of the low hills to the East.
The tension of rising early, packing the car, and making
sure that we have all that is necessary for a journey into areas
that are infrequently inhabited begins to slip from my shoulders
and my spirit expands as surely as the horizons open out before
us. I wonder anew
why it is so long since I have been back to these scenes of my
childhood. My
lifting heart and delighted eyes tell me that this is where I
belong. I claim once
again my birthright and a feeling like the beginnings of
gratitude swells within me as I think of the providence which
allowed that I should have been born to parents who had belonged
to farming communities all their lives and who had bequeathed to
me this rich heritage of a living sensitivity to the closeness
of soil, grass, and trees, a living sensitivity to our
vulnerability in the face of wind, rain, and sunshine.
READ MORE...
I Am With You Always
by Eileen Young
January 14, 2011
To
hear someone say they will be with you is powerful.
A young child’s fear on the first day of school is calmed
by a parent’s promise to be right there with them at the end of
the school day. When we
are afraid the presence of another is comforting.
To be accompanied is thus a human need, since one is so
often alone. The promise
to “be with” may be sincere, but hardly without limits.
READ MORE...
Fourth Sunday of Advent Reflection
Dreaming the Divine Will
December 20, 2010
When Joseph awoke, he did
as the angel of the Lord had commanded him...
Matthew 1:24
For
three weeks now we have preparing for the Lord’s coming.
Beyond the historical remembrance of the birth of Jesus
that is to be soon celebrated, we have been reminded of the
Lord’s continuing desire to be born in our souls and, as
Emmanuel, to be close to our world.
Whatever is happening to us, around us, and within us
this last week of Advent, wherever we find ourselves in our
Christmas preparations and in our expectations and apprehensions
for what the coming days hold for us, the
Divine Child continues to be born, continues to come to
us all to save us.
READ MORE...
Third Sunday of Advent Reflection
SADNESS AND
Repentance
December 13, 2010
In
today’s reading from Isaiah35 we read the promise to those who are
suffering in exile:
“Those whom the Lord has ransomed will return/ and enter Zion
singing,/ crowned with everlasting joy;/ they will meet with joy and
gladness,/ sorrow and mourning will flee.”
How do these words, addressed to a people in mourning for
their land and homes, apply to us?
What is the sadness that keeps
us from feeling the joy
and hope of the Lord’s presence?
READ MORE...
Second Sunday of Advent Reflection
Repentance and Just Judgment
December 6, 2010
Today’s
liturgy speaks to us of judgment.
In both readings from Isaiah
11:1-10 and Matthew 3:1-12 we hear of One who is coming who
will judge in the Spirit of the Lord.
This judgment will be very different from our usual ways of
judging. As Isaiah tells us:
Not by appearance shall he judge,
nor by hearsay shall he decide,
but he shall judge the poor with justice,
and decide aright for the land’s afflicted.
Both in Isaiah’s time and in our own, judgment
is made in service to the established “social order,” that is, in
Isaiah’s terms, by “appearance” and “hearsay.”
In this type of judgment, the powerful and the powerless are
judged by very different standards.
In the present day United States, for example, support for
the unemployed is seen by many as a drain on common resources, while
the most wealthy are considered, by many, entitled to reduced
taxation; the perennial underclass constitutes a disproportionate
percentage of the prison population; healthcare and minimal security
in old age are considered entitlements while tax incentives for
corporations and unbridled defense spending are considered
necessities.
READ MORE...
the Dance of Formation
December
2, 2010
Dancing
is a recurrent theme in the mystical literature of spirituality,
expressing the notion that human life is created to flow in
harmony with God’s will and purpose for our time on this earth.
Heaven and earth need not be separated.
On the spiritual level of our mind and will we are
innately disposed to experience consonance in the midst of
dissonance and to receive graciously the gift of healing union
even in adverse and fragmentary circumstances of everyday
reality. When our
human vision is transformed by the power of transcendent
insight, we begin to apprehend the wholeness of things, the
oft-referred to “music of the spheres,” which John of the Cross
spoke of as “silent music.”
READ MORE...
first Sunday of Advent Reflection
November 29, 2010
With
the first Sunday of Advent a new Church year begins.
The year just passed, as all years, has been a year of joy
and suffering, peace and struggle, love and conflict.
It has been a time of growth and new beginnings and of
diminishment and death.
It has brought many blessings, but it has also taken its toll.
For most of us our day to day lives of work, habit and
routine have, to varying degrees, worn us down and tired us out.
On this day, the words of St. Paul to the Romans call us to
remember the transcendent Reality underneath our daily somnolence.
“It is the hour now for you to awake from sleep” (Romans
13:11)
READ MORE...
Speech and Authority
November 15, 2010
In
the introduction to
Anatheism: Returning to God
After God, Richard
Kearney relates the story of how his teacher, the great
philosopher Paul Ricoeur, would begin each seminar.
According to Kearney, Ricoeur would begin on the first
day of the seminar by asking each of his students: “d’ou parlez
vous?” “Where do you
speak from?” The
question is a most significant one; for all of us, in fact,
speak from many different places.
Often our speech is pre-reflective, an unconscious
reaction to what we have heard, or to what is happening to us.
At such moments our words are pretty much expressions of
feelings or habit.
Often, even in speech that is more reflective, our words are
based on cultural conditioning, common sense understanding or
conformist interpretation.
The people of Jesus’ time, as those subjected to much
religious preaching today, recognized that “the doctors of the
law” taught what they had learned but often had not personally
and uniquely assimilated.
As in much of today’s preaching, the words were not words
of “spirit and life” but rather the repetition of a learned
theology, doctrine, or mandate.
READ MORE...
Meditation and the Emergence
of Joy
November 8, 2010
Joy
is an abiding theme in the scriptures, and a promise of good things
to come. Isaiah 51:11 prophesies
. . . Everlasting joy shall be upon their head;
they shall obtain gladness and joy;
and sorrow and mourning shall flee away
The author of Acts declares (2:28)
You have made known to me the ways of life;
you shall make me full of joy with your presence.
and goes on to say in 14:17
. . . he provides you with plenty of food and fills
your hearts with joy.
READ MORE...
Making Peace with Pathos: The Call of November
November 1, 2010
This week marks the beginning of November. If, as T. S. Eliot asserts, “April is the cruelest month,”
then surely November must be the saddest. For those of us who
inhabit the northern hemisphere, November marks the loss of the
promise of spring and the fullness and then harvest of summer and
early autumn. The splendid
colors and unique sunlight of October give way to the starkness and
encroaching darkness that come in the early days of November.
To look out over the residue of a once flourishing garden and
the “bare ruined choirs” of the recently resplendent maples, elms,
and oaks is to experience the reality of loss and the certainty of
death.
READ MORE...
Happiness, Happenstance, and Human Flourishing
October 25, 2010
Darrin
M. McMahon, the Florida State University professor and author of
Happiness, A History,
observes in a recent “Yes! Magazine” essay that “Happiness has
increasingly been thought to be more about getting little infusions
of pleasure, about feeling
good rather than being
good, less about living the well-lived life than about experiencing
the well-felt moment.” In
fact, he notes, the origins of the word tell a different story.
Indo-European languages reveal shared cognates for the words
“happiness” and “luck”. The
Old English hap is
happiness and chance; the
Old French heur means
good fortune as well as happiness; and the German
Gluck to this day means
happiness and chance. This
suggests to McMahon that for ancient peoples happiness was not in
our control; it was in the hands of God or the gods, dictated by
Fate, Fortune or Chance. In
a word, happiness was what happened to us–happenstance!
Ultimately, our happiness depended on the wheel of fortune
and how things turned out for us.
As the Chorus painfully reminds us at the conclusion of
“Oedipus Rex”, we should not presume our happiness or to know how
fate will deal with us until we have reached the end of our life:
People of Thebes, my countrymen, look on Oedipus.
He solved the famous riddle with his brilliance,
he rose to power, a man beyond all power.
Who could behold his greatness without envy?
Now what a black sea of terror has overwhelmed him!
Now as we keep our watch and wait the final day,
count no man happy till he dies, free of pain at last.
READ MORE...
I
once asked a close friend why he never wore a wrist watch. He
responded that he did not want to be looking frequently at the
time as if time were the most significant factor in his life. As
I reflected on his attitude, I slowly became aware of the
dominating influence of time in my own life. How frequently my
life and its activities are controlled “by the clock,” and how
often I experience time as a tyrannical slave driver. As I
reflected on my friend’s response, I began to wonder why “Father
Time” wasn't gentler, a friend and ally, a brother or sister.
Why, instead of a tyrant, wasn’t “time" a beautiful gift, an
opportunity?
This
is a story about an important person that changed my life. Her
name is Molly. She helped me to accept the change in my life.
Molly also helped me not to be afraid of change in the future.
Change is difficult, but it is more difficult when you fight
against it. She helped me to look forward to change as it
changes me. She did all this without knowing it.
Within
the next few weeks, we shall participate in an increasingly rare
event in our time: a
perpetual profession of religious vows.
So rare has this act become, in fact, that it is
impossible to avoid the question of whether or not such a public
commitment remains meaningful in our age.
The question is not confined to religious commitment.
Despite all the attention and controversy in our time to
the vows of marriage, the truth is that more than half of all
marriages end in divorce.
When we step aside from the issues surrounding who has or
has not the right to be legally married and enjoy its social
benefits, we are left with a deeper question:
What is the meaning of the life-long vow of
responsibility and commitment to the other person?
I take you for my lawful husband/wife, to have and to hold, from
this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer,
in sickness and in health, until death do us part.
Does committing oneself to another or to a group “until death”
continue to have meaning for us today?
Let
nothing frighten you.
God alone is changeless.
Patience attains the goal.
God alone fills every need.
This short prayer-poem of Teresa of Avila expresses several of
the Saint’s abiding convictions about the pursuit of a life of
prayer. To enter
into prayer we must leave many things behind.
The route mapped out in
The Interior Castle
is especially lengthy and calls for extensive detachment from
the distractions of everyday life.
Teresa frequently mentions business affairs, for example,
as an obstacle to peace and prayer.
And then there are the habits of mind that keep us from
taking the risks of growing in prayer: concerns about the level
of our functioning and productivity; apprehensions about what
others may say regarding the changes they detect in our
involvements with them; and the host of anxieties that beset us
whenever we clear a space to enter within.
The
social fabric of our country appears in our time to be fragile.
From multiple manifestations of increased xenophobia, to
cultural and religious fragmentation, to hostile and vile
political discourse, we seem increasingly unable to communicate
with and trust each other to the minimal degree required for
civil discourse and shared civic responsibility. To some degree
all of these symptoms appear related to a loss in the
foundational disposition of trust, or what the spiritual
tradition calls faith; without a basic level of trust, human
society, much less human community, is not possible. In order
to have trust or faith in each other we must be able to believe
in the truth of what the other says to us; we must inhabit a
culture of truthfulness in speech and responsibility for our
words. The measure of responsible speech is not its efficacy
but its honesty, its responsibility to those being addressed and
to the Truth. In our time it often seems that the value of
speech is measured more by its manipulative success and
financial effectiveness than by its veracity; for the most part
there is no accountability or responsibility to the truth even
for those whose voices dominate our airways and our public
discourse day after day. What difference might it make in our
common life, if our public leaders, our journalists, and our
media personalities of all political persuasions were held
accountable for the truthfulness of their assertions?
Self-actualization is a term that gained currency in our culture
about half a century ago. At first blush the concept appears
benign enough: it appears to do no more than to reflect our
innate drive to achieve our full potential, to bring to fruition
our unique capacity for human flourishing, Hence the dictionary
definition: the realization or fulfillment of one’s talents
and potentialities, esp. considered as a drive or need in
everyone. (The New Oxford American Dictionary)
The self-actualizing tendency would seem to be ideally
suited for life in societies structured around competition.
Here, though, a different picture begins to emerge. Is the
so-called self-actualizer pursuing a path of inborn
possibilities, or is s/he unwittingly bending to cultural
imperatives that lead to loneliness and isolation? The
“promise” of self-actualization is slippery indeed, if in fact
the search for one’s direction in life culminates in the
exclusion of other people and the refusal of the mystery as it
manifests itself in all dimensions and spheres of one’s
existence.
Psalm 8 is a prayer-poem with which most of us can readily
identify. It is a psalm of praise and a profound recognition of
the Sovereignty of God, based on a mode of presence that the
greatness of creation, including the Psalmist’s own being,
evokes. Its theme is grounded in the truth of who God is and
who we. The experience of that relationship gives rise to the
primordial human disposition of awe and the reverence which
accompanies it. According to Fr. Adrian van Kaam:
Reverence is the flower of spiritualization. Its source is the
sacred fascination people experience in the presence of what
transcends them. Everything worthy of a person’s dedication
receives meaning from its relatedness to that mystery which
overwhelms well-disposed people in moments of silent
contemplation and pure receptivity. Unrelated to this mystery,
experiences lose their radiance and fail to evoke reverence. (Fundamental
Formation, pp. 159-60)
I’d
like to begin with a story that a friend of ours, a Director of
Novices of his religious community, would often tell. A novice
of his once said to him, and I’m sure it was more than one who
did this, “I don’t get anything out of praying the psalms.”
Since the novice had been in the community for some time the
Director knew him well. And so his response to him was: “I
think you have difficulty with the psalms because you have
difficulty receiving anything that is given to you.” The Novice
Director here was pointing to a lack, one I think we can all
recognize to some degree in ourselves, of what Fr. Adrian van
Kaam calls “transcendent openness.” The depth of our encounter
with the Psalms, and thus of their meaningfulness to us, depends
on the level of our transcendent openness, our capacity in the
moment to attune to, receive, and respond to new disclosures of
the Spirit to us.
One
of the obvious things about our world is that it is hurting.
Wherever we turn we are confronted with a suffering and
incomplete humanity. We may be especially surprised by the
capacity of individuals and groups of persons or nations to
inflict violence on others. And when we consider the already
realized potential for evil and injustice, we may choose to look
away, to try to forget the world with its overwhelming needs,
and to evade our personal responsibility to minister to that
world.
In the passage from the works of Oswald Chambers that is quoted
for June 19 in My Utmost for His Highest, we read:
“If I am devoted to the cause of humanity only, I will soon be
exhausted and come to the place where my love will falter; but
if I love Jesus Christ personally and passionately, I can serve
humanity though human beings treat me as a doormat.”
The longer one lives the more one identifies with the experience
of Linus in Charles Schultz’s famous comic strip Peanuts:
“I love mankind; it’s people I can’t stand.” The truth of
the matter is that for all our attempts to love our neighbor as
ourselves, to love not only our friends but also our enemies,
there are many times when we don’t like the people around us
very much. There is little doubt that for most of us the
attempt to love others who often seem to us to be careless,
mindless, selfish, arrogant, and on and on is, at best,
exhausting, if not impossible. Recently, as I
entered the security line at an airport for an eagerly
anticipated trip home both stressed and tired from a daylong
meeting, I found myself increasingly frustrated and agitated by
the perceived incompetencies of the security personnel and the
slowness and inattention of my fellow travelers. Later, on
the plane, I sat next to a young woman who proceeded to take off
her shoes, cross her legs, and dangle her bare foot in front of
me for much of, thankfully, only an hour or so flight. By
the time I arrived home, I was very tired and significantly
agitated and angry. And all this from relatively minor, if
not perhaps totally subjective, affronts. Commonplace
experiences such as these are potent reminders of how difficult
it is to practice the spiritual directives that call us to
revere and love the other.
The conflicting tendencies toward resentment and gratitude are
often at war with each other in the human heart. Even when the
mind knows it should be grateful, resentful feelings tug and
pull away from rational response. Blind urges conspire and
tempt one to trust in power rather than presence to remedy and
heal the aching soul. For millennia the developed spiritual
systems of humanity have understood the dynamics at play within
this psychological-spiritual polarity. Resentment is a
corrosive attitude which threatens our well-being, destroys
reason and diminishes our capacity for enjoyment. Gratitude is
more like an inborn readiness to receive with open hands what is
given in one’s reality. Resentment, the interloper,
refuses; gratitude accepts.
The first reading for the liturgy of Pentecost Sunday from the
Acts of the Apostles (Acts 2: 1-11) relates in vivid and highly
allusive scriptural imagery the gift of the Spirit. It is, as
in the creation account of the first chapter of Genesis, in the
power of a mighty wind that the Spirit of God is manifest. As
in Genesis the creative Spirit of God brings light out of
darkness and order out of chaos, so in Acts the arrival of
Spirit brings inner light and clarity to the darkness and
confusion in those who find themselves living the experience of
Jesus’ absence. The second allusion is to the story of the
Tower of Babel in Genesis 11:1-9. In the Scriptural account of
the fulfillment of Jesus’ promise, the action of Spirit involves
the reversal of God’s punishment at Babylon. The story of the
Tower of Babel is, at its core, a reiteration of the story of
the Fall. In this mythic account, the dispersion of peoples,
our inability to understand each other, is due to our refusal to
accept the reality of our shared humanity and the limits of our
being human. As Adam and Eve fell prey to the temptation to “be
as gods,” the people of Babylon similarly succumb to what Adrian
van Kaam calls “inverted awe,” that is, they become awe-filled
at their own capacities, specifically, their “technological”
capacities. They attempt to reach the heavens by building a
tower, to claim by force what can only be received. As a
punishment, the Lord says to his divine cohort: “Come, let us go
down there and confuse their speech, so that they will not
understand what they say to one another.” (Gen. 11:7) In the
second chapter of Acts, God’s Spirit comes down and reverses the
punishment of Babel: “Why, they are all Galileans, are they
not, these who are speaking? How is it then that we hear them,
each in our own native language?” (vs. 7-8) We who receive the
Spirit of God, given through Jesus, are restored to the depths
of our common humanity and thus to our kinship as children of
God. With our disposition of awe restored to its proper Divine
object and by that restoration our capacity to recognize and to
live the will of God, we again speak the same language.
