Tenison Woods and MacKillop Centre News: August 2015

Sunday, August 30, 2015

Be opened!

Then he looked up to heaven and groaned, and said to him,"Ephphatha!"-- that is, "Be opened!" -- And immediately the man's ears were opened, his speech impediment was removed, and he spoke plainly.

Mark 7:34 - 35

For a Catholic in the pre-Vatican II church, miracles were part of the stuff of life, as were novenas, mysteries of the rosary, stations of the cross, miraculous medals, scapulas, daily Mass, fasting. As a pious young boy I prayed for miracles from Marcellin Champagnat, Peter Chanel, Bernadette Soubirous, Gemma Galgani, Maria Goretti, Martin de Porres, Therese Martin, Francis Xavier, Ignatius Loyola, Francis Bernadone. With sufficient faith and devotion a miracle could be wrought and attributed to the intercession of Our Lady or one of saints.

The miracles of the New Testament are divided into the miracles that witness to Jesus (eg the Incarnation); healing miracles, nature miracles, exorcisms and resurrections. The miracle stories have a purpose in scripture, most often they are a response in faith – itself the transformative moment for the audience, the person seeking healing. There is an enormous amount of scholarship that investigates the historicity of the miracle stories, but I suspect that much energy is wasted in seeking objective proof as to whether or not they happened. Of more significant interest is the subjective proof. What happened to the audience? What happened to the person healed? What does the story say to you and me?

You and I know that gazing into the face of your newborn child is nothing short of a miracle, walking into the sunset with your loved one hand in hand, entering St Peter’s Basilica for the first time. The miracle happens to you. There is a gentle but beautiful moment when we recognize the preciousness of life, the fragility of who we are, the brilliance of the world in which we live.

The scriptures use a rich variety of words that we translate as ‘miracle’, but which are somewhat nuanced. For example signs, wonders, great deeds, works (of God), amazement – and this makes sense of the small and great miracles that surround us. Seeing these everyday miracles is a perceptive, subjective experience. On the other hand the church has an elaborate bureaucracy and procedures for establishing whether a miracle has taken place – and whether or not it is attributable to the intercession of a saint.

In healing the deaf man with a speech impediment, Jesus orders those who witnessed the miracle to tell no one. But quite contrarily, The more he ordered them not to, the more they proclaimed it (Mark 7:36). Because miracles transform those who have faith, as in the church today, they must be acclaimed. If we cannot see them, then Jesus’ message to us is: "Ephphatha!"-- "Be opened!"

Peter Douglas

HEAD OF SCHOOL SERVICES, NORTH

Condolences

Our prayer, support and condolences go to the family of Tahlia Ketchell, to her fellow students at St Patrick's College, her teachers and their colleagues. Tahlia, a Year 7 student at the College passed away after a very short illness.

It’s the thoughts that count by Daniel O’Leary

From The Tablet

Recent research by Microsoft suggests that the average human attention span now stands at eight seconds. That is less, apparently, than that of a goldfish. This is astonishing. Can the quality and depth of our thinking have been so deeply affected by the incessant distractions of modern life?

Our minds are precarious and vulnerable. Whenever we suffer pain, something in our consciousness is always quick to identify with that pain and we relay it over and over again, so that the stress we experience is magnified and intensified.

The American Franciscan writer, Richard Rohr, believes that “almost all humans have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder of the mind, which is why many people become fearful, suspicious, wrapped around their negative commentaries”. In other words, we are all inclined to become prisoners of our own thought patterns.

But while the way we think has the potential to wreck our contentment, our thoughts also have an extraordinary capacity for transforming our lives for the better. It is not by stopping our thinking that we are set free; it is by thinking differently.

In Eternal Echoes the poet and philosopher John O’Donohue considers “the crippling effect of our dried-out thoughts in the cul-de-sac of our minds … Rather than having to travel always along predetermined tracks of thought, you must begin to realise the possibility of thinking in new directions and in different rhythms. You see that thinking has something eternal in it … where we are most intimately connected with divinity. Thought is the place of revelation.”

Albert Einstein wrote: “The world we have created is a product of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.” If we cannot always shape something to our liking, we can at least shape the way we think about it. We may not be able to escape the painful vicissitudes of life, but we can experience them differently.

How do we set about shifting the patterns of our settled ways of thinking? Much of our suffering is unavoidable, a necessary fact of existence. Yet how we think about it is a choice. And when we change our habitual way of looking at things, the life we look at changes too. Unless we grasp this, we will remain victimised and diminished by our unanchored and uncharted thinking. Realising this is a moment of redemption.

We are defined by how we think. As within, so without. We cannot think fear and counsel courage; think dark and talk light; think crooked and walk straight. To be authentic, to stay integrated, is something that must be chosen. Seized.

The main cause of stress is not the situation itself, not the things that are happening, but the way in which we think about them. We see things not as they are – objective, impersonal, neutral – but as we are: vulnerable, unsure, fragile. We mistake our fearful exaggerations for reality itself. This ingrained habit of piling past fears and failures on to current alarms and disappointments, real or imaginary, accounts for most of the distress we experience.

As Hamlet reminded us: “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” There are hidden laws that order the patterns of the mind. One of these is called “the law of attraction”. There is an extraordinary power in our persistent thinking about something we wish to have, that draws the imagined situation into our experience – for good or ill. This “law” will tend to give you what your thoughts are focused on. What you regularly, passionately think about, you are likely to bring about. You are desiring, imagining, creating a future state and attracting that reality to you. Your quality of life is often the fruit of your thinking.

There is a story about two monks. The older one was making life impossible for the community’s newest member, ridiculing him relentlessly. As a last resort the young monk went away to meditate on the words of St Paul, “Be transformed by the renewing of your minds …” (Romans 12:2). On his return he was, as he expected, immediately subjected to a hail of abuse. “And after all your time away from the community”, the older man spat out, “and all the money you spent, I still don’t see you are any different.” The younger man paused, made space for a few breaths, slowly pushed back his cowl, turned to his accuser, smiled and calmly said: “Maybe so, but I see you differently now.”

Christians recognise a spiritual dimension to the stilling and balancing of the troubled mind. It requires discipline to harmonise our thoughts with the flow of grace, to surrender to the timing and tuning of the Holy Spirit deep within. Every day we need deep-time, kairos-time, when thought patterns are reconfigured, a lost perspective is restored, and we connect with our true mind. The Trappist monk Thomas Keating wrote of “the divine therapy of contemplation”.

From the start, grace is woven into our grey matter. But it needs daily care. Pope Francis enjoys quoting St Paul: “Fill your mind with whatever is true, everything that is noble, all that we love and honour … Guard it, replacing your idle thoughts by living inside the mind of Christ.”

With its capacity for goodness, truth and beauty, the human mind is potentially divine. Its longing for fulfilment is God’s longing incarnate. But if left uncared for, the mind can become destructive. It may lead us to the threshold of enlightenment or of despair, to heaven or to hell. Too many people live their later years trapped in regret, victimhood, bitterness.

The Microsoft research indicates an alarming volatility in our thinking. Stripped of its spiritual essence, of space and nourishment, the mind will struggle to be still. But when our thinking moves to the blessed rhythms of its true nature, it deepens and flourishes. It finds its harmony.

And that is a peace that spreads. W.B. Yeats wrote: “We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.”

Fr Daniel O’Leary’s website is www.djoleary.com

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Sunday, August 23, 2015

All that is good

It is all that is good, everything that is perfect, which is given us from above;

it comes down from the Father of all light

(James 1:17)

My granddaughter Rose is perfect. She is perfectly gorgeous; perfectly delightful; perfectly cute. Along with my children and two grandsons, Toni and I have been extraordinarily blessed and privileged. At the back of my mind is a very strong desire to ensure that my descendants know what amazing gifts they have been to my life, but also to ensure that they have access to the stories about my life, and in particular my life with them. I want them to know me.

I have a great interest in our family’s genealogy. It provides the links to the stories that make me who I am. I want to make sense of the way we do things in our family, and why we do those things. But I want them also to know that while they are important to our family, they’re not immutable or unchangeable. They are traditions. Not institutions!

As we return to Mark’s Gospel (Mark 7:1 – 23) this Sunday we are challenged by Jesus’ accusation against the scribes and Pharisees who were demanding to know why the disciples were not following the Jewish rules of washing before eating: You put aside the commandment of God to cling to human traditions. The point being, that when we put tradition before the commandment to love we are well off the mark. There are certainly some things that we do that have their origin in plain old-fashioned common sense, but which over time have lost their significance.

The distinction between respecting those who pass down tradition (the elders, as Mark calls them) and the tradition itself must be differentiated. Rejection of a tradition, does not mean rejecting those who hold fast to them. We live in a world of constant and rapid change: the Gospel does not prevent us from accepting the multitude of challenges that await us, but we must not allow the diminishment of human respect.

Every generation will endure and will then succeed in this struggle.

I still have living uncles, aunts and great-aunts who have stories I have yet to hear, explanations for the way we do things in our family, that have yet to be expressed in words. Most of us have a family member who embodies what it means to be a member of our family, a grandparent, great-grandparent. Treasure them, love them and respect them. But do tell your stories, write them down, share them.

Peter Douglas

HEAD OF SCHOOL SERVICES, NORTH

Address on the Six Pillars of the Examined Life

By Parker Palmer

… In 2015, Naropa University awarded its first-ever honorary degree of Doctor of Contemplative Education to author, educator, and Center for Courage & Renewal founder Parker Palmer – one of the most luminous and hope-giving minds of our time, whose beautiful writings on inner wholeness and the art of letting your soul speak spring from a spirit of embodied poetics. In May of 2015, he took the podium before the university's graduating class and delivered one of the greatest commencement addresses of all time – a beam of shimmering wisdom illuminating the six pillars of a meaningful human existence, experience-tested and honestly earned in the course of a long life fully lived.

In his first piece of advice, Palmer calls for living with wholeheartedness, inherent to which – as Seth Godin has memorably argued – is an active surrender to vulnerability. Echoing Donald Barthelme's exquisite case for the art of not-knowing, he urges:

Be reckless when it comes to affairs of the heart.

“What I really mean ... is be passionate, fall madly in love with life. Be passionate about some part of the natural and/or human worlds and take risks on its behalf, no matter how vulnerable they make you. No one ever died saying, “I’m sure glad for the self-centred, self-serving and self-protective life I lived.”

Offer yourself to the world – your energies, your gifts, your visions, your heart – with open-hearted generosity. But understand that when you live that way you will soon learn how little you know and how easy it is to fail.

To grow in love and service, you – I, all of us – must value ignorance as much as knowledge and failure as much as success... Clinging to what you already know and do well is the path to an unlived life. So, cultivate beginner’s mind, walk straight into your not-knowing, and take the risk of failing and falling again and again, then getting up again and again to learn – that’s the path to a life lived large, in service of love, truth, and justice.

Palmer's second point of counsel speaks to the difficult art of living with opposing truths and channels his longtime advocacy for inner wholeness:

“As you integrate ignorance and failure into your knowledge and success, do the same with all the alien parts of yourself. Take everything that’s bright and beautiful in you and introduce it to the shadow side of yourself. Let your altruism meet your egotism, let your generosity meet your greed, let your joy meet your grief. Everyone has a shadow... But when you are able to say, “I am all of the above, my shadow as well as my light,” the shadow’s power is put in service of the good. Wholeness is the goal, but wholeness does not mean perfection, it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of your life.

As a person who ... has made three deep dives into depression along the way, I do not speak lightly of this. I simply know that it is true.

As you acknowledge and embrace all that you are, you give yourself a gift that will benefit the rest of us as well. Our world is in desperate need of leaders who live what Socrates called “an examined life.” In critical areas like politics, religion, business, and the mass media, too many leaders refuse to name and claim their shadows because they don’t want to look weak. With shadows that go unexamined and unchecked, they use power heedlessly in ways that harm countless people and undermine public trust in our major institutions.

In his third piece of advice, Palmer calls for extending this courtesy to others and treating their shadowy otherness with the same kindness that we do our own:

“As you welcome whatever you find alien within yourself, extend that same welcome to whatever you find alien in the outer world. I don’t know any virtue more important these days than hospitality to the stranger, to those we perceive as “other” than us.

In a sentiment that calls to mind Margaret Mead and James Baldwin's timeless, immeasurably timely conversation on race and difference, Palmer adds:

The old majority in this society, people who look like me, is on its way out. By 2045 the majority of Americans will be people of color ... Many in the old majority fear that fact, and their fear, shamelessly manipulated by too many politicians, is bringing us down. The renewal this nation needs will not come from people who are afraid of otherness in race, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation.

His fourth piece of advice pierces the heart of something I myself worry about daily as I witness the great tasks of human culture reduced to small-minded lists and unimaginative standards that measure all the wrong metrics of "productivity" and "progress." Palmer urges:

“Take on big jobs worth doing – jobs like the spread of love, peace, and justice. That means refusing to be seduced by our cultural obsession with being effective as measured by short-term results. We all want our work to make a difference – but if we take on the big jobs and our only measure of success is next quarter’s bottom line, we’ll end up disappointed, dropping out, and in despair.

Our heroes take on impossible jobs and stay with them for the long haul because they live by a standard that trumps effectiveness. The name of that standard, I think, is faithfulness – faithfulness to your gifts, faithfulness to your perception of the needs of the world, and faithfulness to offering your gifts to whatever needs are within your reach.

The tighter we cling to the norm of effectiveness the smaller the tasks we’ll take on, because they are the only ones that get short-term results... Care about being effective, of course, but care even more about being faithful ... to your calling, and to the true needs of those entrusted to your care.

You won’t get the big jobs done in your lifetime, but if at the end of the day you can say, “I was faithful,” I think you’ll be okay.

In his fifth point of counsel, Palmer echoes Tolstoy's letters to Gandhi on why we hurt each other and offers:

“Since suffering as well as joy comes with being human, I urge you to remember this: Violence is what happens when we don’t know what else to do with our suffering.

Violence is what happens when we don’t know what else to do with our suffering.

Sometimes we aim that violence at ourselves, as in overwork that leads to burnout or worse, or in the many forms of substance abuse; sometimes we aim that violence at other people – racism, sexism, and homophobia often come from people trying to relieve their suffering by claiming superiority over others.

The good news is that suffering can be transformed into something that brings life, not death. It happens every day. I’m 76 years old, I now know many people who’ve suffered the loss of the dearest person in their lives. At first they go into deep grief, certain that their lives will never again be worth living. But then they slowly awaken to the fact that not in spite of their loss, but because of it, they’ve become bigger, more compassionate people, with more capacity of heart to take in other people’s sorrows and joys. These are broken-hearted people, but their hearts have been broken open, rather than broken apart.

So, every day, exercise your heart by taking in life’s little pains and joys – that kind of exercise will make your heart supple, the way a runner makes a muscle supple, so that when it breaks, (and it surely will,) it will break not into a fragment grenade, but into a greater capacity for love.

In his sixth and final piece of wisdom, Palmer quotes the immortal words of Saint Benedict – “daily, keep your death before your eyes” – and, echoing Rilke's view of mortality, counsels:

“If you hold a healthy awareness of your own mortality, your eyes will be opened to the grandeur and glory of life, and that will evoke all of the virtues I’ve named, as well as those I haven’t, such as hope, generosity, and gratitude. If the unexamined life is not worth living, it’s equally true that the unlived life is not worth examining.