Tenison Woods and MacKillop Centre News: Mary of the Cross

St Mary of the Cross MacKillop

In 1998, an icon encased in silver was installed in Hamilton's Christ Church Anglican Church to celebrate and prepare for the canonisation of Blessed Mary MacKillop. It is believed to be the first time that a representation of Mary MacKillop has been placed in any Anglican Church throughout the world.

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With so many witnesses in a great cloud on every side of us, we too, then, should throw off everything that hinders us, especially the sin that clings so easily, and keep running steadily in the race we have started. Let us not lose sight of Jesus, who leads us in our faith and brings it to perfection: for the sake of the joy which was still in the future, he endured the cross, disregarding the shamefulness of it, and from now on has taken his place at the right of God’s throne.

Hebrews 12:1 - 3

When Mary MacKillop visited my home town from March to May 1902, my grandmother, Marguerite, was all of 4 years old. It is not beyond imagination that Mary, who was in town for the healing, hot baths, may have attended Mass at the same time as my infant grandmother and her parents. My grandmother died six months after I was born, and yet she is but one link to this same Mary MacKillop whose 107^th anniversary of death we remember tomorrow.

Across this country are people, places, words and dreams that connect us to this daughter of Australia. Certainly a handsome woman, but no beauty, of ordinary, humble Scottish stock. Home educated, strong and persistent, Mary’s story is anything but ordinary. Her zeal, matched only by her faith, saw her congregation of the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart grow from zero to 130 sisters between 1867 and 1871, from one barn school in Penola to 40. She and her sisters ministered to women in poverty and distress, took in orphans, taught, visited the sick.

Nothing was easy. Mary’s rule of life caused conflict with her bishop. He excommunicated her and attempted to disband the sisters. In seeking Roman approval for her rule, she and her mentor, Father Julian Tenison Woods, had a falling out after Mary agreed to a number of changes.

There are other saintly Australians whose lives have enriched our folklore, our spirituality and even our nationhood: Maude O’Connell, founder of the Family Care Sisters; Catherine Gaffney (from Deloraine, Tasmania) who was a founding member of the Sisters of Perpetual Adoration; Caroline and Archibald Chisholm – ‘The emigrant’s friends’; John Bede Polding, visionary bishop of Sydney and founder of the Good Samaritan Sisters; Ken Barker, who established and still leads the Missionaries of God’s Love within the Disciples of Jesus Covenant Community. There are thousands and thousands of others, perhaps less luminous, less famous, and each of us has been touched in some small or large way by one of them.

Mary MacKillop, like people of faith everywhere, listened to and responded to Paul’s letter to the Ephesians (5:1 - 2):

Try, then, to imitate God, as children of his that he loves, and follow Christ by loving as he loved you, giving himself up in our place as a fragrant offering and a sacrifice to God.

If this became our rule of life, what a difference we could make too. We would only be following the path laid down by many who have gone before us – my grandmother Maggie included.

Happy feast day, Mary.

Peter Douglas

HEAD OF SCHOOL SERVICES, NORTH

THE KENOSIS OF GOD

by Ron Rolheiser

In a presentation at a symposium on “Being Missionaries to our own Children”, Michael Downey posed this question: How do we speak of God inside a culture that’s pathologically distracted, distrusts religious language and church institutions, and yet carries its own moral energy and virtue?

That’s a key question today, when so many of our own children, siblings, and friends no longer go to church and are challenging our religious beliefs. They certainly fit Downey’s description: Distracted, distrustful of religious language and church institutions, yet carrying a lot of moral energy in their own way. Where do we go with that?

Downey’s answer? Among other things, he suggests that we need an image of God and of Jesus that can show what God does in these situations. What image of Jesus might be helpful here?

There are, as we know, many images of Christ, both in scripture and in our church traditions. Christ is presented variously as “shepherd”, “king”, “teacher”, “miracle-worker”, “healer”, “bread of life”, “sacrificial lamb”, “lover”, among other things. Different ages have tended, for their own reasons, to pick up more on one of these than the others. What might be a fruitful image of Christ for our culture, one within which so many of our own children no longer walk the path of explicit faith with us?

Downey’s suggestion: The image of Christ as the kenosis of God; Jesus as divine self-abandonment; God as emptying himself in the incarnation. What does this mean?

Scripture tells us that, in Christ, God offers a love so pure, so self- effacing, so understanding of our weaknesses, so self-sacrificing, so “self-emptying”, that it’s offered without any demand, however veiled, that it be recognized, met, and reciprocated in kind. In the incarnation, God, like a good mother or father, is more concerned that his children are steered in the right direction than that he, himself, be explicitly recognized and acknowledged for who he is and thanked for it. God, like any parent, takes a huge risk in having children. To have children is to leave yourself painfully vulnerable. It’s also to be called upon for an understanding, a patience, and a self-dethroning that, literally, can empty you of self. That’s as true of God as of any mother or father.

What are the qualities of this “self-emptying”?

To “self-empty” in the way Jesus is described as doing means being present without demanding that your presence be recognized and its importance acknowledged; it means giving without demanding that your generosity be reciprocated; it means being invitational rather than threatening, healthily solicitous rather than nagging or coercive; it means being vulnerable and helpless, unable to protect yourself against the pain of being taken for granted or rejected; it means living in a great patience that doesn’t demand intervention, divine or human, when things don’t unfold according to your will; it means letting God be God and others be themselves without either having to submit to your wishes or your timetable. Not an easy thing at all, that’s why we’ve sung Jesus’ praises for two thousand years for doing it, but that’s the invitation.

We need a theology of God and an image of Christ that can give us an horizon and some hope as we struggle to be missionaries in the toughest mission field of all today, our own culture with its own innate virtue and its own innate inattentiveness to God and church. Downey’s suggestion that we take as our horizon God’s “self-emptying” in Jesus is, I believe, a very good one. Properly understood, that image can show us where and how to stand in faith inside a culture that likes to think it’s outgrown faith.

At that same symposium, a social-worker from Quebec, Vivian Labrie, in her keynote address, made this statement: “I believe that God is mature enough that he doesn’t demand to be always the centre of our conscious attention.” While that statement needs some nuance, it is, in its own way, a commentary on the famous Christological hymn in Philippians (2:6-11) which describes Jesus’ “self-emptying” in the incarnation.

When a mother or father sits down at table with the family, she or he doesn’t need, want, nor expect, to be the centre of attention, a prerogative a healthy adult generally cedes to the kids. What he or she does need and want is that the family be happy, respect each other, respect the ethos and aesthetics that the family values, and that everyone is essentially on the right track in his or her life so that each family member knows what’s ultimately sacred, moral, and important, even if a given member doesn’t, at this particular moment, recognize or credit the family for what he or she has been given to prepare him or her for life and happiness.

This is even more true of God, whose love, understanding, patience are beyond our own and who, like any good parent, doesn’t demand to be always the centre of our conscious attention.