Happy Thanksgiving

A Prayer for Veterans Day

We ask for blessings on all those who have served their country in the armed forces.

We ask for healing for the veterans who have been wounded, in body and soul, in conflicts around the globe.

We pray especially for the young men and women, in the thousands, 

who are coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan with injured bodies and traumatized spirits.

Bring solace to them, O Lord; may we pray for them when they cannot pray.

Have mercy on all the veterans from World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Bring peace to their hearts and peace to the regions they fought in.

Bless all the soldiers who served in non-combative posts.

May their calling to service continue in their lives in many positive ways.

Give us all the creative vision to see a world which, grown weary with fighting,

Moves to affirming the life of all and so moves beyond war.

Hear our prayer, O Spirit of Peace, hear our prayer.

Psychic Numbing in the Information Age

“Bombarding the Senses” 

[an excerpt from the book-length essay, Compassion, by Henri Nouwen, Donald McNeill, and Douglas Morrison] --

One of the most tragic events of our time is that we know more than ever before about the pains and sufferings of the world and yet are less and less able to respond to them. Radio, television, and newspapers allow us to follow from day to day—even from hour to hour—what is happening in the world. We hear about terrorism, armed conflicts and wars, assassinations, earthquakes, droughts and floods, famines and epidemics, concentration camps and torture chambers, and countless other forms of human suffering close to home or far away. Not only do we hear about them but also we are daily presented with pictures of starving babies, dying soldiers, burning houses, flooded villages, and wrecked cars. The news seems to have become an almost ceaseless litany of human suffering. The question is, do these highly sophisticated forms of communication and this increasing amount of information lead to a deeper solidarity and a greater compassion? It is very doubtful.

Can we really expect a compassionate response from the millions of individuals who read the paper during breakfast, listen to the radio on the way to work, and watch television after returning home tired from their work in offices or factories? Can we reasonably expect compassion from the many isolated individuals who are constantly being reminded in the privacy of their homes or cars of the vast extent of human suffering?

There appears to be a general assumption that it is good for people to be exposed to the pain and suffering of the world. Not only do newspapers and news broadcasts seem to act on this assumption but also most organizations whose main concern is to help suffering people. Charitable institutions often send letters describing the miserable conditions in different parts of the world and enclose photographs of people whose humanity is hardly recognizable. In so doing, they hope to motivate the receiver to send money for relief projects.

We might ask, however, whether mass communication, directed to millions of people who experience themselves as small, insignificant, powerless individuals does not in fact do more harm than good. When there is no community that can mediate between world needs and personal responses, the burden of the world can only be a crushing burden. When the pains of the world are presented to people who are already overwhelmed by the problems in their small circle of family or friends, how can we hope for a creative response? What we can expect is the opposite of compassion: numbness and anger.

Massive exposure to human misery often leads to psychic numbness. Our minds cannot tolerate being constantly reminded of things which interfere with what we are doing at the moment. When we have to open our store in the morning, go about our business, prepare our classes, to talk to our fellow workers, we cannot be filled with the collective misery of the world. If we let the full content of newscasts enter into our innermost selves, we would become so overwhelmed by the absurdities of existence that we would become paralyzed. If we try to absorb all that is reported by the paper, radio, or television and all that bombards us on computers and cell phones, we would never get any work done. Our continued effectiveness requires a mental filtering system by which we can moderate the impact of the daily news.

But there is more. Exposure to human misery on a mass scale can lead not only to psychic numbness but also to hostility. This might seem strange, but when we look more closely at the human response to disturbing information, we realize that confrontation with human pain often creates anger instead of care, irritation instead of sympathy, and even fury instead of compassion. Human suffering, which comes to us in a way and on a scale that makes identification practically impossible, frequently evokes strong negative feelings. Often, some of the lowest human drives are brought into the open by a confrontation with miserable-looking people. In the most horrendous way, this was the case in the Nazi, Vietnamese, and Chilean concentration camps, where torture and cruelty seemed easier the worse the prisoners looked. When we are no longer able to recognize suffering persons as fellow human beings, their pain evokes more pain and disgust than compassion. It is therefore no wonder that the diary of Anne Frank did more for the understanding of human misery than many of the films showing long lines of hungry faces, dark buildings with ominous chimneys, and heaps of naked, emaciated human corpses. Anne Frank we can understand; piles of human flesh only make us sick.

How can we account for this psychic numbness and anger? Numbness and anger are the reactions of the person who says, “When I can’t do anything about it anyhow, why do you bother me with it!” Confronted with human pain and at the same time reminded of our powerlessness, we feel offended to the very core of our being and fall back on our defenses of numbness and anger. If compassion means entering into solidarity with human beings who are suffering, then the increasing presentation of human suffering by the news media does not serve to evoke compassion. Those who know most about what goes on in the world – those who devote much attention to computers, newspapers, radio, and television – are not necessarily the most compassionate people.

Responding compassionately to what the media present to us is made even more difficult by its “neutrality.” The evening news offers a good example. Whatever the news correspondent announces – war, murder, floods, the weather, and the football scores – is reported with the same ritualized tone of voice and facial expression. Moreover, there is an almost liturgical order to the litany of events: first the great news items about national and international conflicts, then the more homey accidents, then the stock market and the weather, then a short word of “wisdom,” and finally something light or funny. All of this is regularly interrupted by smiling people urging us to buy products of dubious necessity. The whole “service” is so distant and aloof that the most obvious response is to invest no more energy in it that in brushing your teeth before going to bed.

Therefore, the question is, how can we see the suffering in our world and be moved to compassion as Jesus was moved when he saw a great crowd of people without food (Mt 14:14)? This question has become very urgent at a time when we see so much and are moved by so little.

--Henri Nouwen, Donald McNeill, and Douglas Morrison, Compassion. New York: Doubleday -- Image Books, 2005 (Original copyright: 1982). p 50 - 53.

Embodied Spaciousness: Autumn Retreat at Prince of Peace Abbey

During the final three days of October 2010, New Mexico Contemplative Outreach coordinator and retreat leader Susan Rush invited the forty-four of us gathered at Prince of Peace Abbey to step more deeply into a level of awareness that could be described as “embodied spaciousness.” As Susan explained, there is a way in which the combination of contemplative silence and responsive wakefulness can “morph into presence,” an open-hearted condition in which we "put on the mind of Christ" and welcome our bodies into the "homeland of God." While Centering Prayer is primarily a practice of letting go and consenting to God’s presence and action within, Susan maintains that outside of the periods of prayer we can also “partner with God” -- that is, actively cooperate with the Divine -- to bring about a "fuller yes and a deeper surrendering" to Presence. As co-creators with God, our greatest call is to “be who we are,” to embrace our own particular, unique way of living the contemplative presence. Teachers of spiritual and meditative disciplines are rightly criticized when they encourage the cultivation of disembodied or dissociated states of consciousness that split Spirit off from body and/or mind. But for today's contemplative Christianity, Susan pointed out, spirituality is neither body-denying nor body-indulging, but incarnational: fully human and fully divine. Spirit, body, and mind, interwoven and fully present in this homeland of God, on earth as it is in heaven.

The retreat offered many opportunities to rest, awaken, commune, and “pray with God.” In between our periods of Centering Prayer, Susan gave a few contemplative pointers – brief quotes and accessible teachings from the likes of John Cassian, Meister Eckhart, Thomas Merton, Thomas Keating, among others. She also taught us some wonderful chants. Chants – brief repeated prayers set to simple melodies – bring in the resonance of tones and voices, and the hum in the heart is delightfully grounding and liberating. (I have heard it said that chanting is like praying twice.) The meals in silence, along with the option to attend the Abbey’s daily Mass and the monastic prayers of the hours, helped to create a rhythm of prayer, silence, song, and movement that was both restful and invigorating.

One level of reflection that I especially appreciated was the contemplative awareness walk that Susan invited us to do mid-way through the retreat on our own. I – and many of you as well, I'm sure – enjoy walks in nature during silent retreats, and there is a kind of relaxed alertness and clarity that can emerge after repeated periods of contemplative prayer that allows one to slow down, sink in, and savor the simple beauty of each moment. Here is where I recognize the truth in Fr, Keating’s assertion that “God is giving himself to you in every cup of water, in every sorrow and in every joy.” As a preface to our contemplative awareness walk, Susan noted the three levels of contemplation as described in Keating’s book The Word Made Flesh: 1) The ability to see God in all things, 2) The ability to see all things as God’s gift, and 3) The ability to see God giving God’s self in all things. With this in mind, Susan encouraged us to walk with a deeply receptive attitude, not actively looking for any particular thing, but rather allowing ourselves to be drawn to something along our path. To let God find us through all things.

This had already begun for me at the silent breakfast earlier that morning, when I noticed small tasty details of the moment – Evie M's “Be Present” T-shirt, Kathy A's drinking coffee out of a mug that said “Best Dad” (these are the monks’ mugs? I chuckled to myself), the cranberries in the cookies, the giggles induced by the loudness of me scootching my chair, and Marlene R's salting and peppering of her cantaloupe. God’s spicy sweetness.

Later that afternoon, on my walk, divinity beckons to me through the rich abundance of the living and dying things that populate autumn in southern California. A trail carpeted with dead leaves and chips of bark, with new grasses poking through. Spiderwebs glinting in the sun. Flies and gnats hovering near my ears, as if I am a flower full of the nectar they crave. Sand -- frisky dirt? -- sparkling beside the plain wooden crosses that mark the graves of past Benedictine monks. Life and death all tangled up together, birth and loss and resurrection singing out a wild and holy harmony.

The day has been warm, but a hint of crispness arises as the shadows deepen in the crevices of the hills. I think of the trajectory of my life, of various energies and agendas that have been dying away even as new yearnings sprout and flower. A brisk breeze is blowing, causing the trees to bow and bend, making the leaves tremble and shimmer. There is that wonderful line from a Gwendolyn Brooks poem: Conduct your blooming in the noise and whip of the whirlwind. I linger in the crackling of wind-blown leaves and the shining radiance of the ocean in the distance. Cosmic applause, I say to myself. And divine ovation. God beholding God in all things.

Then I sit for a time inside the little gazebo along the Abbey path known as the Way of the Cross. An editor and writer by profession, I cannot help but be drawn to the various graffiti carvings in the wooden beams. Wow: retreat graffiti? I wonder. God in all things? But it is true: next to “Terry was here” and “Tim loves Debbie forever” is etched the divine anthem: I AM. 

--Written for an upcoming edition of CONSD News, the newsletter of Contemplative Outreach of North San Diego

The Dreaded Visitation of the Blessed Blob

            Early on, you developed this fear of miracles. You grew afraid, for example, of the first fifteen minutes of the movie The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima. . .

It all begins with those three Portuguese children, who have been sent out after Sunday Mass to take their family’s sheep to the Cova de Iria, a pasture just west of the village of Fatima. It is a cool spring morning early in the twentieth century. The boy, Francesco, plays a fife while the two girls jump rope. Hundreds of miles away a great war rages, but here at the Cova, new mountain grasses are drenched in sunlight. Before eating lunch, the children decide to recite the rosary. Lucia, the oldest girl, begins: In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I believe in God the Father Almighty—

             

            No, let’s do it the short way, says Francesco.

            And wait for the echoes! adds Jacinta, his younger sister.

            And in unison, the children shout across the valley: Hail Mary!

            Hail Mary! the hills answer.

            The children smile at each other, then shout again: Hail Mary!

            This time, a thunderous boom responds.

            What’s that? asks Francesco.

            There must be a storm coming, says Lucia, who looks questioningly up at the sky.

            How could it be, with the sky so bright?

            I don’t know, says Lucia, but we better head for home.

            Arcs of light flash over the near hills as the children hurry down the trail, egging the sheep on with small sticks. The two girls, however, slow down when they find themselves surrounded by a luminous mist. Francesco is right behind them, but sees no mist. What are you looking at? he asks.

            Inside the fog, next to a small oak, the vague outline of a robed woman appears. Lucia and Jacinta turn sharply away, all raw fear, burying their faces in their hands.

            What’s the matter? blurts Francesco. What was it? What did you see?

            Look! says Lucia, pointing blindly toward the oak. Over there!

            I don’t see anything, Francesco protests.

            But in a rich and honeyed voice, accompanied by enraptured flutes and harps, the robed figure speaks: Don’t be afraid; I won’t hurt you. Come here to me, won’t you?

            The two girls slowly uncover their eyes and turn around to face the vision. Come closer, the female voice requests. There, that’s better. You’re not frightened now, are you?

            Perhaps Lucia and Jacinta can lose their fear as they fall under this radiant woman’s otherworldly spell. Perhaps these girls’ faces can light up from within as Lucia quietly asks where does Your Excellency come from? But for you, a modern girl of eight, the whole scenario of an arc of lightning wrapping you in luminous mist and speaking to you in your very own language gave you the bone-deep heebee-jeebees. Watching The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima convinced you to never be caught out in the pastoral wilderness with a rosary in your pocket. For who knew what could happen if an Ethereal Excellency chose you as Her confidante?

           

The movie's answer to that question is not reassuring. For one thing -- once you get past the initial apparitional freak-out-- Francesco is still flabbergasted. Who are you talking to, Lucia? he asks.

            A Lady.

            I don’t see her. Where is she?

            Here, on the little tree. Don’t you hear Her?

            The youngest girl, Jacinta, has the solution to her brother’s dilemma. She says to say the rosary, Francesco. He quickly kneels down, kisses his rosary, and prays.

            What is Her Radiance’s beef? you wonder. Is She peeved at Francesco because earlier he had wanted to recited an abbreviated rosary? Is She playing some strange cosmic peek-a-boo? Does She dislike little Iberian boys? Or is Francesco really the lucky one, the one who will not have to endure the fate of actually seeing Her?

            As it turns out, he is not to be so lucky. Lucia, I can see Her now! he exclaims. I can see Her plain!

            All of them kneeling now, the faces of the children silently ask the question from which there is no turning back: What is it that You want of us?

            Do you wish to offer yourself to God, to endure all the suffering He may please to send you, and to ask for the conversion of sinners? Leave it to an apparition to read your mind and to answer your question with a series of questions. Yet perhaps Her Luminescence is actually being gracious, and polite. Now, the children, if they so desire, have a choice, an exit, a way out of the wild history looming ahead of them. But—youthful mystics that they are—tall Lucia, brave Jacinta, and semi-pious Francesco answer in the affirmative.

            Then you will have much to suffer, the Lady warns. May the grace of God be your comfort. . .

           

            Much to suffer! Be your comfort! A rosary became a dangerous possession in your eight-year-old world—material that could give you away, like a bleeding wound in shark-filled waters. For who knows that some Mother of God isn’t out there right now, scanning the horizon, looking in meadows and valleys and backyards for unattended children with rosaries on their persons? 

            You decided to take no chances. You usually kept your rosary inside its little plastic snap-shut case, the one that said My First Rosary, next to the small radio in your bedroom. After your exposure to the first fifteen minutes of The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima, you put the whole package inside a small cedar-lined box from a curio store in Yellowstone National Park. You locked the box and stowed the key away underneath the largest stone in the far reaches of your back yard—a safe but relatively unapproachable place. For some time, you avoided the tree-filled paradise of the back yard. You learned to keep your curtains closed during thunderstorms, lest an aberrant stroke of lightning morph into the Mother of God. But suppressing miracles, you came to see, would require the utmost vigilance and practice.

            One major obstacle was your next-door neighbor-friend Pearl. With her family, she often attended the storefront Baptist church four blocks north of the street you both lived on. A Bible story devotee, her favorite thing to talk about on a drowsy afternoon when you both would sit in your room and get yourselves into a morbidly philosophical mood was the Beast of the Revelation. “He’s gonna be horrible,” she would remind you. “He’s gonna have six heads and eighteen feet with goat’s hooves, and he’s gonna have big black oily wings, and fangs, and claws, and he’s gonna have antennas and antlers and thousands of eyes.”

            “Whoa,” you would say with awe. “That’s gonna be scary.”

            This one autumn afternoon, though, after you and Pearl had gone through the above routine, she looked around your room questioningly and asked, “Where’d you put your rosary?”

            You felt the hair on the back of your neck.

            “Don’t you keep it here, right next to the radio?”

            “Oh, yeah. I guess I put it away somewhere else.”

            “I want to see it.”

            “What for?” 

            “I just want to look at it for a second.”

            “I’m not sure where I put it,” you lied. It was actually right in front of your noses, inside that locked Yellowstone cedar chest on top of your windowsill.

            “I saw one on TV yesterday,” she told you. “I was wondering if it was like yours.”

            If you had had your wits about you, you would not have let her continue with this line of discussion. But you had been caught somewhat off-guard. “So what were they saying about rosaries on TV?”

            “Somebody’s rosary turned into gold, somewhere in Egypt. The Virgin Mary is appearing right before these people’s eyes, on the roof of this church. And people are praying with their rosaries and their rosaries are turning into gold.”

            “Oh, sure,” you said, rolling your eyes. You tried to be nonchalant, waving her information away with a favorite saying of your brother’s: “You’re just messing with my mind.”

            “No, I’m not! Really. It was on the news. Maybe it’s in the paper, too! Ask your mom.”

            This was the autumn of 1969, and it had been at least a year since you had seen the first fifteen minutes of The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima. Now your fear of Her Radiance returned full force, and you stared dumbfoundedly at Pearl. Is my friend also some strange and sneaky minion of God? you wondered.

            “Why don’t we get your rosary and pray with it and see if it turns to gold?” Pearl’s theory, it turned out, was that certain alchemical vibrations had enveloped the planet—because of the Mother of God’s appearance—and that all rosaries all over the world could potentially turn into gold. But you knew better than to let her trick you into getting that rosary out. It was bad enough that people were actually seeing Her, right at those very moments, a bubble of holy light on a rooftop of a Coptic Church in Zeitoun, Egypt. It was bad enough that this wasn’t just some movie about some century-old vision. Alleged vision. No, this was actually on the news, along with the moon landing and the Vietnam War, so, of course, it was actually real. The Mother of God had come light-years closer to appearing before your very eyes! And who was to say that She wouldn’t grow weary of Egypt? America was full of meadows and pasturelands and vales. . .

           

Although you made a full-blown project out of avoiding all news for several days—no television, no scanning the evening paper for Peanuts or Marmaduke cartoons—you still managed to run smack into an actual photo of the Mother of God on top of that Coptic Church. Madeleine Tolbert, the nine-year-old nun-in-training whose gym locker was next to yours, had a laminated newspaper photo of the Mother of God taped to the front of her three-ring binder. Walking next to Madeleine after physical education class one day, your eyes wandered and landed on the cover of that binder. An amorphous blob of light floated right above the bell tower of a church. You couldn’t tell what it was at first and squinted your eyes at it, puzzled. Madeleine saw you looking and chirped, “It’s the Blessed Virgin! She’s been appearing at a church in the Holy Land!” Just like the people who rubberneck as they pass horrible accidents on the highway, you could not tear your eyes away. 

That giant glowing amoeba of light etched itself solidly into your memory and began making appearances in your dreams. . . Are you ready to suffer? asked the Blessed Blob as She floated above your bathtub filled to the brim with golden rosaries. Will you convert my sinners? the Virgin Marshmallow whispered as She oozed from underneath your bed . . . 

            You were bad off! You even grew afraid of closing your eyes after looking at a bright light because the afterglow images on the insides of your eyelids too closely resembled the Mother of God. You wondered if you should simply pray for all the information, all the strangeness, and all the fear to just stop, but then recalled that it was praying that had brought it all on for the children of Fatima—praying too much or even praying too little, like poor little Francesco who had wanted to recite the short version of the rosary. Existence was certainly too odd, too marvelous, and too unpredictable for scaredy-cat Catholic girls like you. You took to sleeping with your family’s blind German Shepherd, Sargeant, as a way to ground yourself, to ward off all the lurking Mothers of God. With Sargeant’s help, you wove yourself an earthly refuge before drifting into dreamland. And how well you learned to concentrate on the muddy, smelly, and most unheavenly things in the world: roly-poly bugs, belly-button lint, pork rinds seasoned with hot pepper sauce, and the way your older brother could make farting noises with his hand cupped up inside his underarm.

 [This is part of my yet-to-be-completed work tentatively titled All the Lurking Mothers of God. Which has been writing itself seemingly forever. And ever.]

           

           

           

           

With that Moon Language

Admit something:

Everyone you see, you say to them,

       "Love me."

Of course you do not do this out loud;

       Otherwise,

Someone would call the cops.

Still though, think about this,

This great pull to connect.

Why not become the one

Who lives with a full moon in each eye

That is always saying

With that sweet moon 

      Language

What every other eye in this world

      Is dying to

      Hear.

     --Hafez

Equally Blessed

EQUALLY BLESSED UNITES
CATHOLIC VOICES FOR MARRIAGE EQUALITY, JUSTICE

WASHINGTON, DC., Four longstanding Catholic organizations announced today that they have formed Equally Blessed, a coalition of faithful Catholics who support full equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people both in the church and in civil society.

"As Catholics, we believe that all human beings are beloved children of God," said Francis DeBernardo, executive director of New Ways Ministry, an Equally Blessed member. "We are called to do our part in bringing about justice in the church and the world, and Equally Blessed will allow us to do that together."

The coalition also includes Call To Action, DignityUSA and Fortunate Families. Together the four groups have spent a combined 112 years working on behalf of LGBT people and their families.

"Equally Blessed proclaims what most U.S. Catholics already believe," said Marianne Duddy-Burke, executive director of DignityUSA. "The laws of our land and the policies of our church should mandate fairness, justice and equality for all."

Leaders of Equally Blessed said they decided to work together in the wake of several recent civil and church situations that demonstrate the need for a faithful pro-equality Catholic voice:

·      The Knights of Columbus have mounted an expensive campaign to oppose gay marriage in Minnesota, where it has become a gubernatorial campaign issue.
·      Catholic dioceses spent extensively to overturn legalized same-sex marriage in Maine last year.
·      In the Archdiocese of Denver last spring, Archbishop Charles Chaput sanctioned the expulsion of a lesbian couple's daughter from a Catholic school.
·      In Washington DC, Archbishop Donald Wuerl has recently withheld health benefits from the spouses of newly-hired heterosexual employees so that he could legally withhold such benefits from the spouses of gay or lesbian employees.

"A growing community of faithful Catholics believes that everyone, including LGBT people, are affirmed and welcomed in our church, and these unjust actions do not speak for us," said Nicole Sotelo, coordinator of Call To Action's JustChurch program. "We are called to follow the teachings of Jesus who welcomed everyone and challenged religious leaders when they fell short of that ideal."

"In the wake of these injustices, we particularly urge straight Catholic allies to raise their voices against discrimination that targets our children, our friends, and our communities," said Mary Ellen Lopata, co-founder of Fortunate Families, a ministry for Catholic parents with LGBT children. "The Gospel compels us to spread its message of love for all the children of God."


Equally Blessed is a coalition of faithful Catholics who support full equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people both in the church and in civil society. Equally Blessed includes four organizations that have spent a combined 112 years working on behalf of LGBT people and their families:  Call To Action, DignityUSA, Fortunate Families, and New Ways Ministry.