Spiritual Reading

Knights of Saint Columba
Half day of recollection

Introduction to the First Input

The poster says: seeking God within and without and that is exactly what I would like to talk about. I would like to approach it from a Franciscan angle because that is really all I know about, and I would like to call in the help of a great Franciscan saint, Bonaventure, who knew everything about seeking God in a busy life. It is not a study morning, it is a morning of recollection, stepping aside and re-collecting ourselves again in the light of what really matters to us. The plan is to have a fairly short input and some talking together time, and then to repeat the process. Then maybe over lunch you would like to pool some of your thoughts, ideas, questions – I said I would come to lunch too the only condition is that I be allowed to say I don’t know the answer!

Some background – In 1255, two years after the death of St Clare, Bonaventure, a contented academic, was called from a dazzling university career to be head of the Franciscan Order. Francis had been dead some 30 years and there were still men alive who remembered him. The Order was torn apart with arguments about who they were and what their task in the Church might be, they also had their very own heretical fringe and were also locked in a major conflict with the secular clergy who considered that the friars were introducing a new model of the Church, different from the parish model which they all knew. The papacy was on the brink of closing the Order down because there were so many quarrels going on around them and among them and the friars themselves were not entirely blameless. When the new General, Bonaventure, looked at the Order, he saw ten abuses and wrote them a letter suggesting how they could be corrected. Two years later, nothing had changed except that Bonaventure was exhausted and disillusioned. It was his first encounter with quarrelsome human beings, so far all he had known was the rigorous logic of academic debate and he was worn out with so many passionate arguments.[1] So he took time out and went to the mountain in North Italy where Francis had received the stigmata. He was desperate for peace and quiet!

He stayed on the mountain for forty days and nights, seeking peace and wisdom and learning from the example of Francis how to come to that peace and wisdom. He realised that neither head nor heart alone are enough and that we find our way to God when head and heart work together. In our heart we need really to long for God, to have ‘groans of prayer’[2] as he said, but we also need to turn our minds towards the light of God so that we can be enlightened.[3] God, he saw, helps us by giving us two mirrors to look into, one is the mirror of the outside world, and the other is the mirror of the inside world, the mirror of our own soul. He is also a realist, so he adds that unless these two mirrors are clean and polished, we won’t see much! [4]

So this morning I would like to say a little about each of these mirrors, the mirror of our inside world, and the mirror of our outside world. Anything I say is only a starting point. The polishing of your mirror is yours to do, both the inside and the outside mirrors, and for both we need to bring head and heart together. In this way, when we look at the mirror of the outside world, for instance, we see with the eyes of the body and also with the eyes of the mind. When we look at the interior world, we see with the eye of insight and also with the eye of understanding. It is no good being clear and honest about our faults and completely unaware of their roots and hidden agendas. In the same way it is no good being sentimental about animals without a sound theology to understand their place in the scheme of things. So Bonaventure advises us to mull things over slowly because we do not cleanse our mirrors by the conclusions we come to but by the process of reflecting itself. Conclusions, in this context, are less important than the work of reflection.

And so we arrive at our starting point for this morning!

Finding God within

I doubt if there have been many people who have thought about the meaning of Scripture as much as Francis did. At the very end of his life, when he was blind, a novice offered to read the Bible to him, but Francis said gently that there was no need because he knew it by heart. He gave hours of time to it, and was constantly asking: what does it mean? What does it mean that the Word became flesh? What does it mean that we are made in the image and likeness of God? Francis knew, as we do, that our Lord, Jesus Christ, is the image of the invisible God made flesh for us. He, the Lord of glory, became our brother. Slowly Francis began to  understand that Jesus is the true image and likeness of God which we become by following in his footprints. We are very much unfinished business, the work of art is still not completed. We are not yet fully in the image and likeness of God and it is more than likely that the unfinished bits are what take all our attention.

Francis was a poet, a mystic, and his thinking was always in intuitive leaps of insight. Bonaventure was also a mystic but a highly-trained theologian as well, so all his thoughts had a beginning, a middle and an end. Thirty years after Francis, when Bonaventure was in this time of personal crisis, he too went to that holy mountain and like Francis he pondered on the words of Genesis, that we are made in the image and likeness of God.

In response to this, Bonaventure looked at himself and his friars and had to admit that all was not well. He could see, he said, that we are like people so bent over that we cannot raise our heads to look at the light.[5] But in the beginning it was not so, we were created just and wise, upright in both senses, so that we could look up into the light and see God. As individuals and as a race, we began upright, lost it and became like people who are bent over and unable to stand upright before God. And these are the words of we use, aren’t they? We say a person is upright, or a person is bent. We all know what it means.

So Bonaventure asked where is the image of God is us? Are we so bent (in both senses) that we are no longer able to find it? What can I do to work my way back on track? And he answered himself by remembering the facts we know about God, that God is eternal, is true and is good. These are the names of God, Being, Truth, Goodness. The eternal Being of God is reflected, he says, in our memory because by our memory we share in the eternal now  of God, we not only live in the present, also in the past, as well as in the future – we remember that something will happen next week. This eternity of memory is an image of God the Father, Bonaventure taught, it is the part of ourselves where we contact the eternal now of God. Then in our Understanding, we reflect the One who said: I am the Truth. Our understanding always reaches out towards the Truth, this is innate in us, not something we learn though sadly we can unlearn it. But when our minds reach out for the Truth, the Son of God is reflected in our humanity. When we know the truth and can see it in the wider context, then we can makes decisions, deliberate, judge and desire the Good, and this is the Holy Spirit reflected within us. Bonaventure says that this is so whenever we use these three gifts, it does not matter what we use them on. He even suggests that because we are using them all the time in daily life, we are in fact praying always as St Paul told us to, because to work with God is to be in communion with God which is prayer.

Examples: Good – remember Tsunami, perception of needs, decision to help

            Less good – remember code of safe, how to use, pinch the money!

This is why sin is so horrible, because it uses the being of God against God, Memory, Understanding and Will turned in the wrong direction. But turned in the right direction, they are like the three Magi, leading us to the simplicity of the Child Jesus. They give us a sense of eternity, a sense of truth and a sense of what is good. This Memory-Understanding-Will cycle is at work all the time because, as Bonaventure teaches us, it is a fundamental pattern derived from the Trinity itself. The problems arise when we get stuck on any one. So the weakness, you might say, of old age, is to be stuck on memory. Teenagers are stuck on Intellect – they think they know it all. Small children are stuck on Will, the ferocious determination of a baby.

This pattern is at work in everything we do. Think of the celebration of Mass, which starts with the liturgy of the Word, the remembering of the story so far, and then to the understanding, where the Word becomes bread, and so to the Will where we seek the supreme Good in Communion. Memory begins a process which leads to understanding and commitment.

It is interesting that the three great psychological systems of our time each focus on one of these three. Freud took memory as his starting point, thinking that if the memories can be recovered and healed, then the person can go forward. Victor Frankl from his experiences in the concentration camp, realised that we need meaning, our lives have to be about something or someone, they have to have a purpose, so he built a psychological theory based on our search for meaning. The third one, Roberto Assagioli, took the will as the basis of his psychotherapy: everything comes down ot our fundamental choices, our options. What do we really desire? Why have we made the choices that we have, and what were the desires that led us to do this? Understand that, he said, and you begin to heal.

It has also been said that this pattern holds for the great religions too. The strength of Judaism is memory, they never forget that Yahweh gave them the land of Israel and the covenant. Their strength is that they are faithful to this but their weakness is that they are ruthless to any who stand in its way. The strength and weakness of Christianity is perhaps intellect – think of the great theological systems of the Middle Ages, all the great thinkers of Christianity from Augustine down to our present Pope. Put that beside some of the extreme things like the Inquistion, the religious wars of 17^th century Europe, the forcible baptism of the Spanish Jews at sword point, pogroms and ghettos and we see at once how, when the balance gets out of sync it is because one of the three, Memory, Understanding and Will, becomes dominant instead of sharing and giving. Within the Trinity there is no dominance, only love and total self-giving.

This is the one simple thought I would like to leave you with this morning: that our Memory, Understanding and Will, the three powers of the soul (Catechism) are reflect, as in a mirror, the inner working of the Trinity: everything comes from the Father, it spreads out through the Logos, the Word, and leads us to desire the Good.

So in the reflection period, ask yourself: where am I stuck? What stops memory, understanding and will working together as a unit in my life? Don’t come back and say I have a bad memory or I was never an academic, because that is not what we are talking about. We are talking about functioning as a human being who, unlike the animals, has a sense of the passage of time, past, present and future; as a human being who understands or seeks to understand the inner meaning of events; as a human being who makes choices and decisions and then acts on them. In God, the Trinity there are no blocks and the energy continually flows in a generous sharing between the Three. Is this true of me, or am I stuck in the past, stuck in being right, stuck in having my own way? And the solution, as always with God, is more not less, whichever is the dominant member of your personal Trinity needs to be balanced, not by diminishing what is strong but by bringing the other two into play more. So the thought for the day is: what do I need to strengthen or develop so that the inner flow of the Trinity can better reflect God to the world? Because we must never lose sight of the fact that the Church is sent on a mission to the world, bearing Good News. If we are called into the Church, then all our growth and development must be in order to promote the mission of the Church.

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[1] Intinerarium Prol. 2.

[2] Itin. Prol. 3.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Itin. Prol. 4.

[5] Itin. 1, 6.

The Mirror of the external world

We left off by making a connection between the reflection of the Trinity in our own being, and the mission of the Church in the world. St Mark’s Gospel takes it further and ends with something else which we have not always taken on board: Go, Jesus said to the apostles, and preach the Good News to all creation. What is the Good News for creation? The desperate condition of our planet shows that we human beings have not always been bearers of Good News to creation but instead have understood stewardship exploited it almost beyond the endurance of generous Mother Earth. Francis, we know well, we sensitively in touch with the created world but sensitive does not mean sentimental. Francis’ problems about eating meat were ascetic and nothing to do with animal rights! But he knew that we have one Father, so we are all members of one family and so very theologically but quite unsentimentally, he could speak about Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Brother Rabbit and Sister Lark.

Bonaventure adds and enriches these insights because he was convinced that the created universe was made in order to act as a ladder for us on our journey to God. He says:

We are so created that the material universe itself is a ladder by which we may ascend to God.[1]

So we and creation are so constructed as to be part of each other’s journey. The universe is filled with footprints of God which we can follow and in the process of following these footprints through creation, we learn to see God in the created universe. ‘We are so created that the material universe is a ladder. Climbing this ladder and following these footprints changes us. We begin to realise that this ladder is not simply our own garden, it is the whole universe. At Brenda’s funeral on Thursday Sean mentioned her appreciation of Brian Cox’s programmes about the mystery of the universe – isn’t this the same impulse, that the whole universe is a ladder and the ladder leads to God? Francis had his great insight about the universal fatherhood of God, but this was almost his swan song, it took him his life-time to reach that insight. But we stand on the shoulders of giants, and Bonaventure took up where Francis left off. Bonaventure saw that in any beauty, we see footprints, traces, of the All-Beautiful One. In power we see footprints or traces of the All-Powerful One. Everything in creation reflects some aspect of God. Every created being tells us something unique about God. And we are created to be part of this. Anthony de Mello said: you cease to be an exile when you discover that creation is your home. The tree worships God by celebrating itself, and if you are open it will share that celebration with you. Angela of Foligno, a very early Franciscan writer, said that the whole world is pregnant with God, or in the words of Hopkins, The world is charged with the glory of God. Bonaventure said firmly that creation worships and praises God better than we do because it does so simply by being itself, as God intended.

But we all know that creation is not all pretty kittens and cuddly puppies. Some of the kittens are tiger kittens! Some of the forces in the universe lead not to sentimentality but to the tsunami, to earthquakes, mud slides, extreme and terrible conditions. These too speak a truth about God to us. It seems that however puzzling, violence has some place in God’s scheme of things, it must reflect some truth about the Being of the One who is Good. Everything that is, speaks to us of God, and this cannot be true only of the bits we like. We have to look the other squarely in the eye and make what sense of it we can. At the same time, the former truth holds, that everything which is created is both a ladder to God for us and a revelation of God to us. We may never understand, even Brian Cox may not get it all sorted out though he can clearly do the sums, but insight will come, not from accumulated knowledge but from learning contemplative seeing. This is what Bonaventure learnt in those dark times on the mountain. That particular mountain, which I have been privileged to visit, is harsh, steep and with sheer rock faces. People who are careless have died on that mountain. On the flank is a terrible crevasse about 100 feet deep, really a clef tin the rock, which was said to have been made at the time of the Crucifixion, and was certainly the result of an earthquake of some magnitude. So Bonaventure was not in a cushy place but was confronted with violence in nature as well as its extreme beauty. He seems to have been there in Lent so probably experienced harsh weather and the wonderful beginnings of Spring and new life. He touched the rhythm of things. In the Middle Ages they were much closer to natural rhythms than we are today but probably this bright young academic suddenly saddled with worries and insoluble problems and a whole bunch of intractable men, was as alienated as any of his time. On the unprotected mountain, he rediscovered the vast tenderness of God and also the fierce intensity of God’s love. He saw that the created universe was made as a setting for the Incarnate Word, but he also saw that the created universe is itself a revelation of God’s Word. Our task in it is one of praise and blessing. To evil in this world, Francis’ response was always to bring blessing, to to speak well, to undo the evil word with a good word, bene-dicere – to bless or to speak well as against male-dicere – to curse or to speak ill. This was always Francis’ response to evil in the world. He said in his Rule: let us speak well, act well and praise God.

For the discussion time, remembering how Bonaventure was desperate for peace, let us ask ourselves where peace is lacking in my life at this moment? Then secondly, how much time do I give in my life to a contemplative seeing of creation?

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[1] Itin.1, 2.

EASTER WEEK

EASTER

The Gospel is beyond and bigger than any one religion, and that’s why some, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, speak about “religion-less Christianity.” It is what the Native religions call summer, fall, winter, spring. It is what Aboriginal people and the mystics call darkness and light. It is what the Eastern religions call yin and yang or the “wheel of fate and fortune.” It is simply the pattern that defines everything. Death and resurrection are the mystery of faith.



You don’t have to be Christian to live that pattern trustfully, and many do it better than us. Many Christians spend their whole life avoiding all downs while bothering to shout the ritual acclamation at every Eucharist: “Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again!”


There is no other pattern: all dies, all is transformed, and this cycle will never stop. Hospice workers say that many people put off this consoling surrender till the last days, hours, and even minutes of life, and then die peacefully and even happily. The essential meaning of being a religious person is to surrender and love it all ahead of time. We do not have to wait for “enlightenment at gunpoint”!


    Richare Rohr  Adapted from Great Themes of St. Paul: Life as Participation (CD)


Starter prayer:   He has risen! Alleluia!





We did not do the Gospel any favor, nor cooperate with God’s plan and intention, by making Jesus the sole example of resurrection, or that the resurrection was to prove that Jesus was good or Jesus was God. Jesus is a corporate personality, a stand-in for all of us, the Archetype of Life, history summed up in one glorious moment. (See 1 Corinthians 15:20-22 if you think this is just my idea!) Thus we can live in hope of the same resurrection for everything that has been tortured, dismissed, abused, denied, or cut short. Resurrection is God’s pattern for everything. Grace is everywhere.

          Richard Rohr -Adapted from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p. 151, day 161

Starter prayer:   He has risen! Alleluia

Easter Sunday

The Jewish Sabbath is over and three women arrive to anoint Jesus on this first day of the week just as the sun is rising. As the women walk toward the tomb they are saying, “Who will roll away the stone?” (Mark 16:3). We still have the same human question: “Who will roll away the stone of our various blockages and our blindness?”


The Risen Jesus is the lasting image and eternal icon of what God is going to do everywhere for everybody in all of time. God’s exact job description is this, according to St. Paul: I am the God “who turns death into life and calls into being what does not yet exist” (Romans 4:17). Starting in Genesis, Yahweh is always creating something out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo), which becomes the bedrock meaning of grace. Jesus stands forever as God’s promise, guarantee, and lifetime warranty of what God has always been about and will forever do: turn crucifixions into resurrections! What else would give us hope?


For me, that is what it means to “believe in Jesus” (see 1 Corinthians 15:20-23). We, like the women in the Gospel, are still asking, “Who will roll away the stone?” The first thing we need to recognize is that the stone is surely there, but notice also the moment of their arrival. They came “just as the sun was rising” (Mark 16:2). I think the text is telling us that it is divine light that allows us to both see—and then see beyond—the very same stone.


  Richard Rohr  Adapted from classes given in Albuquerque on Mark’s Gospel


Starter prayer:      He has risen! Alleluia! 

HOLY WEEK 2011

Holy Saturday

Limen is the Latin word for threshold. A “liminal space” is the crucial in-between time—when everything actually happens and yet nothing appears to be happening. It is the waiting period when the cake bakes, the movement is made, the transformation takes place. One cannot just jump from Friday to Sunday in this case, there must be Saturday! This, of course, was always the holy day for the Jewish tradition. The Sabbath rest was the pivotal day for the Jews, and even the dead body of Jesus rests on Saturday, waiting for God to do whatever God plans to do. It is our great act of trust and surrender, both together. A new “creation ex nihilo” is about to happen, but first it must be desired. . . .


Remember, hope is not some vague belief that “all will work out well,” but biblical hope is the certainty that things finally have a victorious meaning no matter how they turn out. We learned that from Jesus, which gives us now the courage to live our lives forward from here. Maybe that is the full purpose of Lent.


Richare Rohr   From Wondrous Encounters: Scripture for Lent, pp. 141-143

 Starter prayer:   Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.
(Luke 23:46).

Good Friday
     Today the primary human problem, the core issue that defeats human history, is both revealed and resolved. It is indeed a “good” Friday. The central issue at work is the human inclination to kill others, in any multitude of ways, instead of dying ourselves—to our own illusions, pretenses, narcissism, and self-defeating behaviors. Jesus dies “for” us not in the sense of “in place of” but “in solidarity with.” The first is merely a heavenly transaction of sorts; the second is a transformation of our very soul and the trajectory of history.
     The soul needed one it could “gaze upon” long enough to know that it was we who were doing the “piercing” (John 19:37) and we who were being pierced in doing it. Jesus’ body is a standing icon of what humanity is doing and what God suffers “with,” “in,” and “through” us. It is an icon of utter divine solidarity with our pain and our problems. . . .It is our central transformative image for the soul. . . .Don’t lessen its meaning by making it into a mechanical transaction whereby Jesus pays some “price” to God or the devil. The only price paid is to the intransigent human soul—so it can see!
      On the cross, the veil between the Holy and the unholy is “torn from top to bottom” (Matthew 27:51), the “curtain of his body” becomes a “living opening” (Hebrews 10:20) through which we all can now walk into the Holy of Holies, which on different levels is both our own soul and the very heart of God.
     Nothing changed in heaven on Good Friday, but everything potentially changed on Earth. Some learned how to see and to trust the contract between God and humanity. God has always and forever loved what God created, “it was always good, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). It was we who could not love and see the omnipresent goodness.


              Richard Rohr   From Wondrous Encounters: Scripture for Lent, pp. 137-139


Starter prayer:  Father, into your hands  I commit my spirit.  (Luke 23:46).

Holy Thursday

The sacrificial instinct is the deep recognition that something always has to die for something bigger to be born. We started with human sacrifice (Abraham and Isaac), we moved to animal sacrifice (the ritual killing of the Passover lamb described in Exodus 12), and we gradually get closer to what really has to be sacrificed—our own beloved ego—as protected and beloved as a little household lamb! We will all find endless disguises and excuses to avoid letting go of what really needs to die. And it is not other humans (firstborn sons of Egyptians), animals (lambs or goats), or even “meat on Friday” that God wants or needs. It is always our false self that has to be let go, which is going to die anyway.


By becoming the symbolic Passover Lamb, plus the foot-washing servant in tonight’s Gospel, Jesus makes the movement to the human and the personal very clear and quite concrete. It is always “we,” in our youth, in our beauty, in our power and over-protectedness that must be handed over. Otherwise, we will never grow up, big enough to “eat” of the Mystery of God and Love. It really is about “passing over” to the next level of faith and life. And that never happens without some kind of “dying to the previous levels.”


This is an honest and central day of very good ritual that gathers all the absolutely essential but often avoided messages—necessary suffering, real sharing, divine intimacy, and loving servanthood.


Richare Rohr     From Wondrous Encounters: Scripture for Lent, pp. 134-135


Starter prayer:  Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.    (Luke 23:46).


Wednesday of Holy Week

I thank you for becoming weak, Lord Jesus,

so I don’t have to be strong.

I thank you for being willing to be considered

imperfect and strange,

so I do not have to be perfect and normal.

I thank you, Jesus, for being willing to be disapproved of,

so I do not have to try so hard to be approved and liked.

I thank you for being considered a failure,

so I do not have to give my life trying to pretend I’m a success.

I thank you for being wrong

by the standards of religion and state,

so I do not have to be right anywhere, even in my own mind.

Richard Rohr From Hope Against Darkness, p. 38

Starter prayer:    Father, into your hands I commit my spirit. (Luke 23:46).

Tuesday of Holy Week

I thank you, Lord Jesus, for becoming a human being

so I do not have to pretend or try to be God.

I thank you, Lord Jesus, for becoming finite and limited

so I do not have to pretend that I am infinite and limitless.

I thank you, crucified God, for becoming mortal

so I do not have to try to make myself immortal.

I thank you, Lord Jesus, for becoming inferior

so I do not have to pretend that I am superior to anyone.

I thank you for being crucified outside the walls,

for being expelled and excluded like the sinners and outcasts,

so you can meet me where I feel that I am,

always outside the walls of worthiness.

          Richard Rohr - From Hope Against Darkness, p. 38

Starter prayer:      Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.

(Luke 23:46).

Monday of Holy Week

You alone, Lord Jesus, refused to be crucifier, even at the cost of being crucified. You never play the victim, you never ask for vengeance, but you only breathe forgiveness. While we, on this fearful earth, murder, mistrust, attack and hate. Now I see that it is not you that humanity hates; we hate ourselves, but mistakenly kill you.

I must stop crucifying your blessed flesh on this earth and in my brothers and sisters, and in every form of life, whether innocent or guilty, worthy or unworthy. We are all your blessed Body, and you have always loved me precisely in my unworthiness. How can I not do the same to others?

Richard Rohr  From Hope Against Darkness, p. 38

Starter prayer:   Father, into your hands .I commit my spirit.  (Luke 23:46).

PALM SUNDAY

      On this Palm Sunday, picture yourself before the crucified Jesus and recognize that he became what we are all afraid of and what we all deny: nakedness, exposure, vulnerability and failure. He became “sin” (Romans 8:3) to free us from repeating that sin (ignorant killing of anything— thinking it will solve our problem), Jesus became the cosmic Scapegoat who reveals our very worst and our very best to those who will gaze on the Crucified long enough. Jesus became what humanity hates—to tell us to stop hating, to love that which we fear, and how wrong we can be about who is good and who is bad.

Jesus became the pleading image of what humans do to creation—so we could see it in stark outline, with the curtain of denial and illusion withdrawn. God in Jesus became the crucified so we would stop crucifying. He became the crucified, who refused to crucify back, and thus stopped the universal pattern of death. As Sebastian Moore said many years ago, “the crucified Jesus is no stranger,” he is no stranger to anyone who has lived and loved, no stranger to the universal experience of suffering, despair, and loneliness. In that, he saves us.
                            Richard Rohr  From Hope Against Darkness, p. 37

Starter prayer:  Father, into your hands   I commit my spirit.

Holy Week began on Palm Sunday.  Francis always had the suffering Christ in his heart, and he shares the way he identified with Him in the psalms he composed on the Passion.  Here is one for us to ponder on in these solemn days:

All my enemies were conjuring evil thoughts against me;

they took counsel together.

and they repaid me evil for good

and hatred for my love.

what they should have loved me for

became a cause to slander me;

but I prayed.

"My holy Father, King of heaven and earth, be not far from me,

for tribulation is near and there is no one to help me.

Let my enemies turn back, the day I call on you."

I knew then that you are my God.

My friends and companions drew near and stood against me;

my neighbours stayed far from me.

You kept my friends far from me,

they made me their abomination;

I was handed over and was not able to escape.

Holy Father, keep not your aid far from me;

my God, see to my assistance!

Make haste to help me,

Lord God of my salvation!