The Way

Posted on November 5, 2011 by pat

Water Reflects a Palm Tree as We Reflect the Divine within Us

Chaucer’s pilgrims gathered and went to Canterbury, burial place of Thomas Becket. They told their stories, some quite bawdy, along the way to the shrine.

Traditionally, pilgrims from all religious backgrounds gather for travel to holy places. Muslims have the Hajj. Christians have Rome and Jerusalem.

Irish pilgrims may be the best known as they sailed forth in their currachs to distant places. An island off the western coast of Ireland served as a monastery for centuries as monks endured austere life on this North Atlantic crag. Skellig Michael is today a place of pilgrimage.

The Way, staring Martin Sheen and directed by his son, Emilio Estavez, presents us with a modern pilgrimage to the Cathedral of Santiago Compostela. It is a 500 hundred mile pilgrimage from southwestern France across northern Spain to the traditional burial site of the Apostle James. I say “traditional” because on our pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the Holy Land and Palestine, I asked our tour guide, “Is this the upper room of the last supper.” He replied, “This is the traditional site.” Continue reading →

God Alone

Posted on October 27, 2011 by pat

St. Gabriels’ Episcopal Church has a Taizé service every Wednesday night. Candles blaze away on tables in the front of the 125 year old church. The musicians line the back of the church to accompany the participants on the chants.

For those who are unfamiliar with Taizé, here is a brief introduction:

The Taizé Community is an ecumenical monastic order in Taizé, Saône-et-Loire, Burgundy, France. It is composed of about 100 brothers who come from Protestant, Orthodox and Catholic traditions. The brothers come from about 30 countries across the world.^[1] The monastic order has a strong devotion to peace and justice through prayer and meditation. It was founded in 1940 by Brother Roger Schutz, a Protestant.^[2]

The community has become one of the world’s most important sites of Christian pilgrimage. Over 100,000 young people from around the world make pilgrimages to Taizé each year for prayer, Bible study, sharing, and communal work. Through the community’s ecumenical outlook, they are encouraged to live in the spirit of kindness, simplicity and reconciliation. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiz%C3%A9_Community) Continue reading →

Nothing Can Separate Us from the Love of God

Posted on October 27, 2011 by pat

God takes care of the flowers

It is Christ Jesus who died, rather, was raised,

who also is at the right hand of God,

who indeed intercedes for us.

What will separate us from the love of Christ?

Will anguish, or distress, or persecution, or famine,

or nakedness, or peril, or the sword?

Will economic crises, or the sex abuse scandal, or the TEA Party,

or overwhelming federal deficits, or the cold-hearted budget cutting in Washington,

or hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis, or threats of terrorism?

As it is written:

For your sake we are being slain all the day;

we are looked upon as sheep to be slaughtered.

Why? Because we stand up for kingdom values

over against greed and self-seeking. Because we defer to the

common good and go beyond personal gain, exploitation,

and self-interest.

Because we profess your Name, at which every knee shall bow.

Because we live by your values—peace, justice,

love, mercy, compassion and forgiveness.

No, in all these things we conquer overwhelmingly

through him who loved us. God takes care of the birds

of the air and the flowers of the field and the withering grass.

We swim daily in the currents of Trinitarian Love outpoured

in the cosmos and in our hearts.

God alone takes care of us.

Because of this care I am convinced that neither death, nor life,

nor angels, nor principalities,

nor present things, nor future things,

nor powers, nor height, nor depth,

nor any other creature will be able to separate us

from the love of God incarnate in us in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Contemplative Prayer

Posted on October 26, 2011 by pat

A Deer Praises God by Being A Deer

In Romans 8 Paul addresses the issue of prayer:

The Spirit comes to the aid of our weakness;

for we do not know how to pray as we ought,

but the Spirit himself intercedes with inexpressible groanings.

And the one who searches hearts

knows what is the intention of the Spirit,

because he intercedes for the holy ones

according to God’s will.

What is prayer? Is prayer incessant babbling? Is prayer our human effort to conform God’s will to our way, our wants and needs?

Prayer is none of the above. Jesus told us not to babble like the pagans. In the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus taught us that prayer is about doing God’s will and not our will.

In fact, Jesus told us to go into our rooms and to pray to our Heavenly Parent in secret. There is a silent inexpressible dimension to prayer. In centering prayer, we enter into God’s language—silence. Silence is the ground of our relationship to God. Continue reading →

Northern Lights–The Living One

Posted on October 25, 2011 by pat

Look at these pictures of the Northern Lights –the Creator is still flaring forth in magnificent wonder http://news.yahoo.com/photos/spectacular-northern-lights-1319549381-slideshow/northern-lights-photo-1319550993.html

Greed and the Current Economic Crisis and Occupy Wall Street

Posted on October 22, 2011 by pat

Merton and Thich Nhat Hanh

[I published this article in the Merton Seasonal, Winter 2009. I am posting it here because it gives background information from the scriptures and Thomas Merton on greed and economics and speaks directly to informing Christian conscience with regard to the Occupy Wall Street movement.]

We have been in a shattering worldwide economic crisis for the past several years. When people discuss the root causes of the crisis, the word most often heard is greed. I saw a book in a bookstore in Ireland this summer. The title of the book was The Banksters. Obviously bankers and Wall Street are bearing the brunt of blame for the crisis. It is commonly agreed that irregularities in the housing industry played a large role in precipitating the crisis. Generous loans with skyrocketing adjustable rates mortgages (ARMs), bankers extending credit where credit was not due, financial institutions bundling and selling this potentially bad paper, and prospective homeowners who wanted more house than they knew they could afford created the perfect storm, a cycle of greed. Continue reading →

True Self and False Self-Flesh and Spirit

Posted on October 22, 2011 by pat

A Butterfly pleases God by being a butterfly.

Paul is at times difficult to understand. Part of Thomas Merton’s genius was his ability to translate Paul into terms more understandable to twentieth century people. Thus, Merton speaks of the false self—the flesh—and this avoids all the dangers of confusing Pau’s fleshl with a Platonian hatred of the body. The false self is as the following indicates so clearly “hostility toward God and the things of God.” When we dwell in the power of the Spirit, we live from our true self which is concerned with “life and peace.” Here, eirene—peace in Greek—echoes shalom which is life, peace, wholeness and well-being. Our true self lives in and for “God Alone” which is inscribed over a portal at the Monastery of Gethsemane. The Spirit—capital “S”—dwelling in us brings us into our true self formed in the image of the God who creates us. I have re-translated part of Romans 8 using the false self and true self. Continue reading →

The Sword Is Here

Posted on October 20, 2011 by pat

The Daily Commute

Do you think that I have come to establish peace on the earth?
No, I tell you, but rather division.
From now on a household of five will be divided,
three against two and two against three;
a father will be divided against his son
and a son against his father,
a mother against her daughter
and a daughter against her mother,
a mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law
and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.” (Lk 12:51-3)

Luke, writing probably somewhere around 50 years after the crucifixion and resurrection, describes the situation in his early church community—division and strife. Luke could just as well be describing the church and the world in which it is situated today. Strife in Congress over just budgets and deficit ceilings. Strife in city parks around the world because of the rampant greed of multinationals—symbolic of Wall Street GREED. Continue reading →

Jesus Speaks to Occupy Wall Street

Posted on October 17, 2011 by pat

Jesus today addresses the Occupy Wall Street protestors around the world. He says:

Then he said to the crowd,
“Take care to guard against all greed,
for though one may be rich,
one’s life does not consist of possessions.” (Lk 12:14)

Using the words written by Rabbi Lerner, Jesus spells it our for us:

We want to replace a society based on selfishness and materialism with a society based on caring for each other and caring for the planet. We want a new bottom line so that institutions, corporations, government policies, and even personal behavior is judged rational or productive or efficient not only by how much money or power gets generated, but also by how much love and kindness, generosity and caring, environmental and ethical behavior, and how much we are able to respond to the universe with awe, wonder and radical amazement the grandeur and mystery of all Being. To take the first steps, we want to eliminate ban all money from elections except that supplied by government on an equal basis to all major candidates, require free and equal time for the candidates and prohibit buying other time or space, and require corporations to get a new corporate charter once every five years which they can only get if they can prove a satisfactory history of environmental and social responsibility to a jury of ordinary citizens. We call this the Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the US Constitution (ESRA). We want to replace the mistaken notion that homeland security can be achieve through a strategy of world domination by our corporations suppoted by the US military and intelligence services with a strategy of generosity and caring for others in the world that will start by launching a Global Marshall Plan that dedicates 1-2% of our GMP ever year for the next twenty to once and for all eliminate global poverty homelessnes, hunger, inadequate education and inadequate health care–knowing that this, not an expanded militarr, is what will give us security. And we want a NEW New Deal that provides a job for everyone who wants to work, jobs that rebuild our environment and our infrastructre, and jobs that allow us to take better care of educating our youth and caring for the aged. That’s what we are for! And you can read more about them at www.spiritualprogressives.org

Jesus continues:

These are Gospel values which we must proclaim to empire. We must shout from the parks and the rooftops, “Jesus is Lord.” Do not build barns for your surplus because you cannot take it with you.

Simplify. Simplify. Simplify.

Posted on October 11, 2011 by pat

In the first chapter of Paul’s Letter to the Romans which he probably wrote from Corinth, Paul castigates those who have failed to recognize God in creation. They instead have gone off to worship idols and wallow in their sin. Their salvation is in the Gospel—Christ crucified like a common criminal and resurrected to new life.

People are sometimes unaware that, besides The Seven Storey Mountain, Merton published another book in 1948—The Spirit of Simplicity: Characteristic of the Cistercian Order. Scholars agree that Merton was the author. For him, in his early experience of Cistercian monasticism, simplicity was quite simple. Summing up the teaching of St. Bernard and the Little Exordium, Merton says:

[S]implicity consisted in getting rid of everything that did not help the monk arrive at union with God by the shortest possible way.

And the shortest possible way to arrive at union with God, who is Love, is by loving Him, in himself, and in our breather. (iii) Continue reading →

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Category Archives: Peace and Justice