Tenison Woods and MacKillop Centre News: It's how well you live

May the Lord be generous in increasing your love and make you love one another and the whole human race as much as we love you. And may he so confirm your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless in the sight of our God and Father when our Lord Jesus Christ comes with all his saints.

Finally, brothers, we urge you and appeal to you in the Lord Jesus to make more and more progress in the kind of life that you are meant to live: the life that God wants, as you learnt from us, and as you are already living it. You have not forgotten the instructions we gave you on the authority of the Lord Jesus.

1 Thessalonians 4:1 - 2

Well, today I turned 61. Nothing special in that - although my grandmother Maggie died aged 56, my father died at 48, my elder brother Richard at 59, younger brother Brett at 30. Each of these were faithful, loving gifts from God but whose lives were far too short by 21^st century standards. It is an oft-stated truism, the aphorism attributed to Tim Ferriss, It's not how long you live, it’s how well you live. A life poorly lived is soon forgotten – except when it continues to spawn hurt or evil in succeeding generations.

Paul, on the other hand, lends us clear advice: we urge you and appeal to you in the Lord Jesus to make more and more progress in the kind of life that you are meant to live: the life that God wants, as you learnt from us, and as you are already living it. When we live with the instructions we have been given, the measure for life is our love for others. And true, that includes our family and friends, but it also means our neighbours, workmates, those we randomly encounter, those that drive us crazy.

But when we can – and do – live our lives well we make real the kingdom that Jesus builds in and through us. Our actions augur, like the actions of John Baptist, the arrival of the one who will save us, set us free from our selfishness, free to love, free to seek nothing less than the transformation of my whole being into the truest image of myself. This is the possibility that Advent offers us.

When I think of the lives of Maggie, Angus, Richard and Brett – I see rich and deep lives, full of love, selflessness, compassion – beyond their nuclear and extended families – and they consequently have contributed enormously to the world we all inhabit. So yes, it is true - It's not how long you live, it’s how well you live.

Peter Douglas

HEAD OF SCHOOL SERVICES, NORTH

A Vital Spiritual Experience

by Richard Rohr

The Twelve Step program helps people see that addiction is an illness which requires understanding and spiritual healing--much more than a moral failure which deserves condemnation. This is a gigantic breakthrough. Pope Francis gets this when he says that the church should be "a field hospital on the edge of the battlefield." Neither the healing of addiction nor the overcoming of sin will happen by mere willpower, by just gritting your teeth and doing it. According to Bill W., a "vital spiritual experience" is necessary for addicts to wake up and begin the process of recovery. Paralleling the teaching of Jesus, Bill saw that it is only vulnerability, surrender, and powerlessness that keep us open to ongoing healing and love from God, not grandiosity. This is also how human love relationships work: in a dance of mutual honesty and vulnerability, grace and forgiveness.

I am convinced that what we now call addiction is what the Gospels illustrated with stories of demonic possession. Our modern sensibilities are rather embarrassed by these frequent stories in the Gospels, but in this light they now make sense. Once you understand the nature of addiction--an inability to do what is in your own best interest--the language of "the devil made me do it" is actually fairly accurate. Such "demons" must indeed be "exorcised" by a positive encounter with a much more powerful Source. Jesus enters the situation, and the demons are both exposed and disempowered. In moments of sincere divine communion, your addictions show themselves to be false and temporary solutions to your very real loneliness and emptiness.

Most addictions are not substance addictions (alcohol, drugs, food, consumer objects, etc.), but process addictions (patterns of thinking and reacting). Spiritual traditions at their higher levels discovered that the primary addiction for all humans is addiction to our own way of thinking. That should be obvious. Contemplation teaches you how to observe your small mind and, frankly, to see how inadequate it is to the task in front of you. As Eckhart Tolle now says, 98% of human thought is "repetitive and useless." How humiliating is that? When you see how self-serving, how petty, how narcissistic, and how compulsive your thinking is, you realize that you, too, are trapped and unfree. You might even call it "possessed."

Some time ago I counselled a young father who was very discouraged with himself. He could not stop being irritated at others, biting off people's heads, resenting every little thing. In desperation and anguish he said, "How can I change this? I don't know how to be different!" He sounded like Paul: "What a wretched man I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?" (Romans 7:24). Then I asked him if he was that way with his two little children, and without any hesitation he said, "No, not at all; hardly ever."

You see the point, I am sure. The only way to be delivered from our "body of death" as Paul calls it (Romans 7:24), or what Tolle calls the "pain body," is to find oneself inside of a "body of resurrection" (1 Corinthians 15:20ff, Romans 6:4). In other words, experience of a deeper love entanglement absorbs all our negativity and nameless dread of life and the future. Paul's code phrase for this positive, realigned place is en Cristo, which is to live by choice and embodiment within the force field of the Risen Christ.

You see, the only cure for possession is repossession--by Something Greater. Until we have found our own ground and connection to the Whole, we are unsettled, grouchy, and on the edge of falling apart. That man's children help him realign; that is what a "vital spiritual experience" does for all of us. Afterward, you know you rightly belong in this world, and that you are being held by some Larger Force. For some seemingly illogical reason life then feels okay and even good and right and purposeful. This is what it feels like to be "saved."