tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32473138466075623582024-03-19T06:47:26.649-04:00Crazy Catholic QuestionsLisa Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03295170165895704660noreply@blogger.comBlogger189125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3247313846607562358.post-22561147266618919542020-04-16T19:09:00.001-04:002020-04-18T07:22:16.883-04:00The Benefits of Being a "Good Enough" ParentAcross the globe, parents are settling into the idea that the current coronavirus outbreak will require many to take over for teachers and child care providers into the foreseeable future. On top of that our Facebook feeds are urging us to work with our children to be sure they are busy being productive and using this time to do extra things like learn a new language, watch free opera at the Met on-line and perform complex science experiments at home. Many parents are picking up these new “homeschooling duties” while also caring for aging parents, trying to secure groceries safely, filing for unemployment or working from home, and managing our own anxiety. I can’t even imagine the complexity and stress of being a healthcare or grocery worker right now. <br />
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I encourage every parent to google “the benefits of boredom for children” and I want to make the case for setting our aim to simply be “good enough” parents during this odd and delicate time for our families.<br />
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<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkUzv7GzPrzGD1xr24Ir2OC9tAoLAE2qSQqsWNKNuGYmOMJ57ID5N0gEowz81LuZtY-0jyUsw_aIuShDaaQfQiW6FEIpiegbMEV3Chkj3jU1A1gHOlS4gzaPE_FKWIPUphJPo37nL1VnQg/s1600/Donald-W-Winnicott.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="color: #bb2188; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-decoration-line: none;"><img border="0" height="227" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkUzv7GzPrzGD1xr24Ir2OC9tAoLAE2qSQqsWNKNuGYmOMJ57ID5N0gEowz81LuZtY-0jyUsw_aIuShDaaQfQiW6FEIpiegbMEV3Chkj3jU1A1gHOlS4gzaPE_FKWIPUphJPo37nL1VnQg/s320/Donald-W-Winnicott.jpg" style="background: transparent; border: none; box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1) 0px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative;" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 10.56px;">“It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.”<br />
― D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality</td></tr>
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My daughters are ages 17, 14 & 10. At the last set of teacher conferences, a good number of their teachers said, in almost identical language, that my girls are very “self-advocating.” At first I wasn’t sure how to take in this information. It felt a bit like a back-handed compliment. When I shared my bewilderment about the teachers’ comments with a friend, she recommended I read up on the work of pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott who researched thousands of mothers and their children back in the 50’s and came to realize that children actually benefit when their mothers “fail” them in manageable ways (not major failures of course, such as abuse or neglect). He was the first to proclaim the benefits of being a “good enough” parent in the long-term growth and well-being of our children.<br />
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When our babies are infants, we do our best to respond to their every need. As soon as they cry, we rush to snuggle, change or feed them – offering immediate comfort. Our response at this age is crucial in teaching our children that they are safe and will be cared for. But, of course, this level of attentiveness cannot be sustained, nor should it be according to Dr. Winnicott’s study. In fact, he said the best thing we can do is slowly become “good enough” parents. In other words; our children actually need us to fail in tolerable ways on a regular basis so they learn to live in an imperfect world.<br />
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He states that every time we don’t hear them call us right away, are unable to give them our full attention, or feed them a dinner they don’t particularly enjoy, we are preparing them to accept and function in a world that will quite regularly frustrate and disappoint. Our children learn, through our “failures” that the world doesn’t revolve around them, that life isn’t always fair, that they won’t always get their way. But they also learn that despite life’s inevitable disappointments and conflicts, they will still be okay.<br />
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Even if it were somehow possible to be the “perfect” parent (whatever that might look like), the end result would be a fragile child who is unable to cope with even the slightest disappointment. The gift of the “good enough” parent is that perfection is never offered as an option, rather our children learn to accept, expect and rise above the challenging experiences of anger, boredom and sadness. Resilience is the great gift of the “good enough” parent.<br />
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Are our children safe, fed, clothed and loved? Are we getting it right most of the time? If yes, then we need to be gentle with ourselves and trust that each time we disappoint and they get through it, Dr. Winnicott’s research tells us they will be a little bit stronger for it. I like Dr. Winnicott. In fact, I’d like to hug him and have him over for dinner. <br />
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Send your "Crazy Catholic Questions" Lisa Brown at dre@ctredeemer.org or read past columns at: <a href="http://crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com/">http://crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com</a> Lisa Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03295170165895704660noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3247313846607562358.post-15578771536160723912020-03-15T15:43:00.002-04:002020-09-04T09:15:26.087-04:00How can I lead my family in prayer at home during this quarantine?<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiP5GB8Fr296_tZT7mTM84AWjUaax4BvO0ai_ZjRvIhUMx4RHf7i6xzHQHTiB6GCTNKHfIGeC2Z1kQfY4zKupW0Lpne0mFFAWU_2hzAp5r53DX2ftRaWAcBPQyrAEy_DhF_CIANbg9APbP4/s1600/Audrey+home+church.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiP5GB8Fr296_tZT7mTM84AWjUaax4BvO0ai_ZjRvIhUMx4RHf7i6xzHQHTiB6GCTNKHfIGeC2Z1kQfY4zKupW0Lpne0mFFAWU_2hzAp5r53DX2ftRaWAcBPQyrAEy_DhF_CIANbg9APbP4/s320/Audrey+home+church.jpg" width="320" /></a>Dear Christ the Redeemer Faith Families,<br />
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We hope you are all faring well and staying healthy on this sunny Sunday! We certainly missed gathering together for Mass and Faith Formation this weekend, but we would like to offer you a couple ways in which you can keep the Sabbath holy and pray with your family at home.<br />
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First, Fr. Joe and Mari put together this BEAUTIFUL Mass podcast that you can listen to in whole or in part at this link: <a href="https://www.buzzsprout.com/931729/3006958">https://www.buzzsprout.com/931729/3006958</a> (Next week we might even be live streaming! So stay tuned!)<br />
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Another option is what my family likes to call "<a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dWtYMvYN59WXmC6JDxQEDVr5fBstSmYk/view?usp=drivesdk" target="_blank">Home Church</a>." When we have one or more children sick at home I will usually tip-toe out of the house early in the morning to enjoy a blissfully peaceful Mass with no children in tow and will bring back consecrated hosts for my little home bound sickies - but "officially" blessed bread is not a necessity to share this beautiful family prayer when you are all stuck at home.<br />
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Below is a link to a little printable communion service we put together to assist in praying our ancient sacred prayer together in your home. We encourage you to let your CHILDREN lead the prayer! It's such a joy to hear them speak the familiar words we hear at Mass each week. You may also find the link on our website at <a href="http://www.ctredeemer.org/">www.ctredeemer.org</a><br />
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So, let us know how this works for you. You are invited to post photos of your family praying together and creative ways you are keeping the sabbath on our Facebook page at <a href="https://www.facebook.com/ChristTheRedeemer.LakeOrion/">https://www.facebook.com/ChristTheRedeemer.LakeOrion/</a><br />
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Wishing you health, peace and joy!<br />
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Lisa Brown and our Office of Family Ministry Staff: Gabriela, Leah, Ann, Michele, Karen, Lisa & Jason<br />
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<b>Here is link to the printable HOME CHURCH file: <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dWtYMvYN59WXmC6JDxQEDVr5fBstSmYk/view?usp=sharing">https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dWtYMvYN59WXmC6JDxQEDVr5fBstSmYk/view?usp=sharing</a></b>Lisa Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03295170165895704660noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3247313846607562358.post-43732199752024561392020-01-25T18:17:00.000-05:002020-01-27T13:14:12.481-05:00#180: The Ribbon Lesson<br />
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An atrium story… <br />
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A few Sunday’s back I had one of the most meaningful and overwhelmingly beautiful days of ministry I think I've ever experienced. I spent the morning in the atrium with 15 children. At the end of our 2-hour, contemplative, screen-free session, one of our 4th grade boys asked incredulously "That was two hours?!? It felt like 5 minutes!" This is not the first time I've heard this...and it is true. The time spent communing with God and one another in this sacred space does really fly by! <br />
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What really touched me was what happened right at the end of our session. I gathered the children around our prayer table for closing prayer, we sang "Shepherd me O God" with some petition prayer and silence peppered in. Then I dismissed the children and one-by-one they all went to meet their parents at the door to go home. All but one little girl, about 8-years-old, who hung back and scooched up next to me around the prayer table, tapped me on my knee and said in a whisper "My brother, in my momma's belly. His heart stopped and he died." <br />
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I responded, of course, with how sorry I was that this had happened to her family. I asked how her momma was doing and she said "she cries a lot" and I nodded, and said "yes, it is a hard thing go through for sure." A little silence was shared and then I asked her if she remembered our ribbon lesson from last year (called “La Fettuccia” in its original language of Italian) and she nodded in the affirmative. Then I said "So, whether we live just a few weeks in our momma's belly or 100 years, each of us live for just a whiff of time. In the blink of an eye, all of us - very soon – will be swept up in God's loving arms, just like your brother and we will all be together again…and then who knows what goodness God has planned for us!?! I bet your brother already knows this wonderful place, don’t you think?" I could literally see the burden lift off this little one who had truly heard the “good news” as her face broke into a wide grin. Then she nodded, gave me a quick hug and bounced out of the room. It was quite a moment. <br />
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This experience reminded me of the little anecdote about paleontologist, mystic and Jesuit priest Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In Teilhard’s view, the unfolding, evolving Universe is both a physical and a spiritual event that emphasizes the great patience of God, not unlike our ribbon lesson in the atrium based on his theology attempts to make somewhat concrete for the children. One time, back in the early 1950’s, Tielhard was being interviewed by a very anxious reporter who asked him with great fear and trepidation “But, what if we destroy ourselves with the Atomic bomb!?!?” And Tielhard calmly responded, having a sense of the vast history and mystery of the universe and the indomitable nature of life, “Well, that certainly would set us back a few million years.”<br />
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May we all be filled with such humility in the face of the great mystery of creation of which we are a part and have confidence in the important role each of us play, as co-creators with our loving God, to that day, not long off, when God will be “All in all.” <br />
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Send your CCQ to Lisa Brown at <a href="mailto:dre@ctredeemer.org">dre@ctredeemer.org</a> or read past columns at <a href="http://www.crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com/">www.crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com</a>. </div>
Lisa Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03295170165895704660noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3247313846607562358.post-48685828274191690812019-10-24T00:44:00.002-04:002019-10-24T00:49:03.189-04:00#179: Universal Christ<b>Any insights from the new weekly Silent Hour and book discussion of Richard Rohr’s Universal Christ?</b><br />
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Indeed! In fact, outside of Eucharist, speaking for myself, I can’t remember a more personally transformative program we have held for the adults of our parish since my tenure began in 2014. The silence has been SUCH a grace and the book discussion downright riveting! Below is an excerpt from Rohr’s book that we discussed at length this past Tuesday. If you find it as consoling as we did, consider yourself very welcome and invited to join in! We will have read up to chapter 9 come Tuesday, Oct. 29. I suspect that we will continue into November. Silent hour begins in the Disciples room at 11AM (arrive any time you like) and the book discussion starts at Noon.<br />
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From Rohr’s Universal Christ, emphasis his:<br />
If any thought feels too harsh, shaming of diminishing of yourself or others, it is not likely the voice of God. That is simply your voice. Why do humans so often presume the exact opposite –that shaming voices are always from God, and grace voices are always the imagination? That is a self-defeating path. Yet, as a confessor and a spiritual director, I can confirm that that broken logic is the general norm.<b><i> If something comes toward you with grace and can pass through you and toward others with grace, you can trust it as the voice of God</i></b>…<br />
<a name='more'></a>One recent holy man who came to visit me put it this way, <b><i>“We must listen to what supports us. We must listen to what is encouraging us. We must listen to what is urging us. We must listen to what is alive in us.” </i></b>I personally was so trained not to trust those voices that I think I often did not hear the voice of God speaking to me, or what Ab Lincoln called the “better angels of our nature.” Yes, a narcissistic person can and will misuse such advice, but a genuine God lover will flourish inside such a dialogue. That is the risk that God takes-and we must take-for the sake of a fruitful love relationship with God. It takes so much courage and humility to trust the voice of God within. Mary fully personifies such trust in her momentous and free “Let It Be” to the Archangel Gabriel (Luke 1:38) and she was an uneducated teenage Jewish girl.<br />
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Most Christians have been taught to hate or confess our sin before we’ve even recognized its true shape. But if you nurture hatred toward yourself, it won’t be long before it shows itself as hatred towards others. This is garden-variety Christianity, I am afraid, but it comes at a huge cost to history. <b><i>Unless religion leads us on a path to both depth and honesty, much religion is actually quite dangerous to the soul and to society. In fact, “fast-food religion” and the so called prosperity gospel are some of the very best ways to actually avoid God – while talking about religion almost nonstop. </i></b>We must learn how to recognize the positive flow and to distinguish it from the negative resistance within ourselves…If a voice comes from accusation and leads to accusation, it is quite simply the voice of the “Accuser,” which is the literal meaning of the biblical word “Satan.” Shaming, accusing, or blaming is simply not how God talks. It is how we talk. God is supremely nonviolent, and I have learned that from the saints and mystics that I have read and met and heard about. That many holy people cannot be wrong.Lisa Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03295170165895704660noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3247313846607562358.post-73866034798461388312019-10-12T00:39:00.000-04:002019-10-24T00:41:13.635-04:00#178: Fundamentalism<b>I have a friend who attends a “non-denominational” Christian church who says that Catholics don’t believe in the literal, infallible and inerrant truth of the Bible. Is this true?</b><br />
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Well, your friend is both right and wrong. It sounds like your pal supports a fundamentalist approach to our scriptures which declares verbal inerrancy, infallibility, and literal truth of the Bible in every detail. In this the words of the Bible are believed to be plain and simple: their meaning is self-evident and does not need to be interpreted. All that is required is that it be read in faith, with prayer for the guidance of the Holy Spirit. <br />
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Now, if we take this to mean that anyone asking for an accurate interpretation will be given one without any research necessary, then the multiplicity of interpretations, even among fundamentalists themselves, should give people a gnawing sense that the Holy Spirit is not doing its job very effectively. <br />
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We run into all sorts of problems when we read the Bible literally, that is, without trying to interpret its meaning. Noted Catholic Scripture scholar Fr. Eugene Laverdiere once said “Fundamentalism is not a particular interpretation of the Bible, but rather the lack of any interpretation.” <br />
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As Catholics we do not adhere to the literal truth of all the words in the Bible, because we don’t believe that all of them were meant to be understood literally. There are several literary forms other than chronological, scientific history represented in the bible: prose, poetry, religious history, prophesy, apocalyptic, fiction, myth, etc. and in each case we must know this literary genre to understand the meaning correctly, just as we would do with any other piece of literature. There are people who spend their whole lives researching whether or not a man can live three days in the belly of the whale, entirely missing the profound spiritual truth found in the allegorical story about Jonah. <br />
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The church states that the Bible is "humankind's experience of God" written down. We recognize that there was a long, complex process from the original inspiration to the written words found in the Bible today and if we are going to discover the meaning of our ancient sacred texts we need to be as informed as possible of their context, literary form, and the author’s historical situation and original intention. <br />
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Our tradition states that: <br />
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· Revelation is first and foremost God revealing God’s self in human history, and we understand Jesus to be the high point of this revelation of God to human beings. <br />
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· Only secondarily is revelation to be understood as the written expression of and witness to God's revealing of God’s self (aka the Bible). <br />
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In other words, our faith is in a LIVING God not slavish adherence to words on a page. <br />
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So, in short, we DO believe scripture to be the "inspired" and “inerrant” revelation of God to which human beings have given expression and witnessed to in words. Scripture is not apart from tradition but rather a privileged moment within our tradition, for truly it is the Church which gave us the Bible, and not the Bible which gave us the Church. <br />
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Our Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation from 1965 reads, "Since God speaks in sacred scripture through men in human fashion, the interpreter of sacred scripture, in order to see clearly what God wanted to communicate to us, should carefully investigate what meaning the sacred writers really intended, and what God wanted to manifest by means of their words.” <br />
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The bible may indeed hold all truths, but not everything in the bible is “literally true” in our modern understanding of the word.</div>
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Lisa Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03295170165895704660noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3247313846607562358.post-223498950594117002019-09-28T09:07:00.000-04:002019-09-20T07:27:05.817-04:00#177: Exclusion<b>Why do some priests at funeral and wedding Masses announce that only Catholics in ‘good standing’ can receive Communion? Sounds pretty judgmental and unchristian to me.</b><br />
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The religious leaders of Jesus’ day were a tad preoccupied with issues of "purity." The scribe’s advice to maintain purity was to avoid anything unclean. The scribes set and maintained boundaries. John Shea says “Jesus boldly crosses this boundary of clean and unclean. This boundary had become a division, and the division had lead to exclusion. Jesus represents God’s loving outreach to those whom society, in the name of holiness, had pushed away and whom Jesus, in the name of holiness, draws in.” Jesus is teaching us that the path of love sometimes requires that we cross boundaries.<br />
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The prohibition on meal sharing with the unclean was a particularly deep seated religious, social and cultural boundary and yet Diarmuid O'murchu says “For Jesus, there seems to be no doubt about the fact that the table always had to be open. Nobody, for any reason, was to be excluded. All are brought in till the banquet hall is full. Prostitutes, sinners, tax-collectors, the outcasts and marginalized of every type were welcome. Not merely were they the beneficiaries of some new bold hospitality, but they were the ones who had the primary right to be at table with Jesus. There is no moralizing or hints of getting all these wayward people to change their lifestyles. And it’s not some kind of patronizing reassurance or comforting gesture, for those who are oppressed either. Jesus’ countercultural and subversive agenda is to heal and empower the oppressed. All of which justifies the observation made by some scripture scholars: that Jesus was crucified because of how he ate.”<br />
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So many people have shared with me over the past 5 years how amazed and touched they were when Fr. Joe caught them after Mass and asked why they were not receiving Eucharist and then after listening to their various reasons encouraged them to come to the table and eat. I told Fr. Joe how remarkable I thought this practice was and he, of course, being the walking encyclopedia he is, had the name and verse of the encyclical that supports this pastoral practice right at his fingertips. Here is it, Pope John Paul II’s encyclical entitled Ut Unum Sint reads: <br />
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“It is a source of joy to note that Catholic ministers are able, in certain particular cases, to administer the Sacraments of the Eucharist, Penance and Anointing of the Sick to Christians who are not in full communion with the Catholic Church but who greatly desire to receive these sacraments, freely request them and manifest the faith which the Catholic Church professes with regard to these sacraments.” A source of joy indeed…. <br />
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This brilliant piece by Fr. Tom Lumpkin expertly sums up our hopes for our communion here at CTR.<br />
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“We extend a special welcome to those who are single, married, divorced, gay, filthy rich, dirt poor, y no habla ingles. We extend a special welcome to those who are crying newborns, skinny as a rail, or could afford to lose a few pounds. We welcome you if you can sing like Andrea Bocelli or can’t carry a note in a bucket. You’re welcome here if you’re just browsing,” or just got out of jail. We don’t care if you are more Catholic than the Pope or haven’t been to church since little Joey’s baptism. We welcome soccer moms, NASCAR dads, starving artists, tree-huggers, latte-sippers, vegetarians, junk food eaters. We welcome those who are in recovery or are still addicted. We welcome you if you’re having problems, or you’re down in the dumps, or you don’t like ‘organized religion,” we’ve been there too. If you blew all your money at the dog track, you’re welcome here. We welcome those who are inked, pierced or both. We offer a special welcome to those who could use a prayer right now, had religion shoved down their throat as a kid, or got lost in traffic and wound up here by mistake. We welcome tourists, seekers, doubters, bleeding hearts, and YOU!”<br />
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Send your "Crazy Catholic Questions" to Lisa Brown at dre@ctredeemer.org or read past columns at: crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com.</div>
Lisa Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03295170165895704660noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3247313846607562358.post-92068294463959166492019-09-18T09:11:00.000-04:002019-09-20T07:26:23.455-04:00#178: Wealth<b>Why do we talk about money so often in church? </b><br />
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The manager in our parable today knows that his job loss will lead to starvation. If something doesn’t change, he is going to die. So, he sizes up his situation and wastes no time executing his sly plan for survival. <br />
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While he still has power to make deals with his master’s money, he calls each of the debtors in for a one-on-one meeting. He has each of them acknowledge how much they owe and then has them altar the numbers. It is the manager’s idea, but the debtors change the amount owed in their own handwriting. Now they are partners in crime. The manager has taught them how to cook the books, but they have gone there willingly. When he’s fired, they will welcome him into their homes because if not, he will ‘out them’ to the master. <br />
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And Jesus says “his master commended that dishonest manager for acting shrewdly.” And we all say “Whaa?” <br />
<a name='more'></a>I hear this as a kind of begrudging admiration, like the Scotland yard investigator who puffs thoughtfully on his pipe at the scene of the crime and says “Well, you gotta give it to him, the crook really knew what he was doing.” Anyway you spin it, despite the manager’s questionable ethics, it does appear that Jesus is praising him for acting prudently. <br />
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And perhaps we can relate. The manager is probably worried about feeding his kids and paying the mortgage. Think about the incredible lengths we would all go to ensure that our children are fed and housed (I know I would do some pretty shady things). But Jesus is really talking about our spiritual survival; pointing out how we tend to be very determined and shrewd in the ways of the world but are not as single-minded and wise when it comes to protecting our spirit. <br />
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Jesus is always talking about the dangers of money. Our relationship with wealth is without question one of (if not THE) most predominant subjects found in our scriptures. It is a profoundly spiritual matter. Our teachings plainly say “God intended the earth and everything in it for ALL human beings, so goods must flow fairly to ALL.” It is unjust for any person (or nation) to store up surplus goods solely for private use when others lack the bare necessities for life.” And yet, we have an entire industry of storage units for our excess. <br />
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Every year 15 million children die of starvation. This effects us because we are all connected. We aren’t able to find happiness or peace because we shouldn’t be able to. We should feel restless in our cozy beds at night when there are 65 million refugees fleeing war right now who have nothing; no home, no safety, no hope for their children. <br />
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Those of us who make $34K a year or more are part of a very elite economic class, the wealthiest of the wealthy, the top 1% of humanity’s 7 billion people - and our excess is making us sick and shallow. Jesus’ words today may not sound like good news, but they are; hard, direct words of good news-because social justice is a non-negotiable for spiritual health. <br />
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But it’s hard because we have lots of fear about of not having enough. I literally begin to sweat when I think about my kids’ college tuition coming up this fall. And don’t we all shutter when we hear on the news about the poor old woman who eats cat food or dies alone from heat exhaustion because she can’t afford air conditioning? This is scary stuff. Yet Jesus says "do not be afraid or have anxiety. Do not worry about your life, what you will eat...it is God’s good pleasure to give us all that we need.” <br />
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Dishonest wealth doesn’t necessarily mean that we gained it dishonestly, it simply means that our wealth LIES to us; it promises what it can never deliver. Wealth can never provide us with true happiness, but it parades as the ultimate safety. We are squandering our time and talent running after a false god. <br />
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The Prophet Malachi says “Return to me. Don’t rob me of your tithe. Don’t keep me at a distance. Bring me the first fruits of your labor; a full 10% of your earnings so that there may be food in my house. Put me to the test. Try and surpass me in generosity!” Tithing isn’t about money. It’s ridiculous to think God needs our money. ALL things belong to God. All that we have and own is just on lend for a few years. Tithing is about TRUST. Trust that our truth wealth lies in right relationship; what we are designed for by our loving creator. <br />
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“Many years ago a man named Blonden strung a tightrope across Niagara Falls and walked across the raging waters pushing a wheelbarrow. A crowd gathered as he successfully made his way back to his starting place. He asked “Who here believes I can cross over again,?“ The exhilarated crowd began shouting, “We believe, we believe!” Blonden turned to one of the men in the crowd who was cheering the loudest, looked him straight in the eye and said, “Ok, then….get in. “ <br />
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Send your CCQ to Lisa Brown at <a href="mailto:dre@ctredeemer.org">dre@ctredeemer.org</a> or read past columns at <a href="http://www.crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com/">www.crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com</a>.Lisa Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03295170165895704660noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3247313846607562358.post-87335282318321076982019-09-14T08:55:00.000-04:002019-09-16T10:14:18.550-04:00Reflection on the lost sheep/coin, Luke 15:1-32 (Audio & Text)<br />
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To LISTEN to this reflection on Luke 15: 1-32 as it was delivered at Mass, please follow this link: <a href="http://www.ctredeemer.org/september-15-2019/">http://www.ctredeemer.org/september-15-2019/</a></div>
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The parables we hear today speak to our deep longing for a sense of wholeness and belonging. By God’s design, all of creation is connected in ways that we couldn’t even begin to understand. <br />
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Just like a bee is drawn to pollen and a flower turns towards the sun and soaks up the rain, so too we are created by God for relationship. So when we are fragmented or alienated from one another, we suffer and wither. <br />
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And yet, a stark division begins this Gospel reading. The tax collectors and sinners on one side - and the Scribes and the Pharisees on the other. Per usual, Jesus doesn’t wag a finger at the sinners, but rather addresses these parables to the religious authorities, who are criticizing Jesus’ choice of dining partners. <br />
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One of the keystones of Jesus’ ministry was to eat with those who were labeled by society as unclean. Those who, for the most part, disregarded religion because they were considered outcasts. <br />
<a name='more'></a>So they ignored the law, the commandments, and all the purity rituals altogether; the very pillars of the Jewish tradition. <br />
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And the significance of meal sharing during Jesus’ time, was very different than it is today too. To break bread with someone was an invitation to intimacy. It was a gesture that said “I want to know you and be your close friend.” <br />
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So, it’s no surprise that the Scribes and Pharisees take issue with Jesus’ very deliberate act of eating with these “so called” sinners. SO deliberate and intentional in fact, that many scholars claim that Jesus was crucified specifically because of how he dined. <br />
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If we look at the parables, they are quite similar. Both the main characters lose, search and find what has been lost and then invite their friends and neighbors to celebrate their good fortune. And both highlight how God does the difficult work of seeking and then compares the joy of finding what was lost to the delight felt in heaven over just one sinner who repents. (Reid) <br />
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But what Jesus MEANS, and what his first century audience HEARS, and what WE understand as sin and repentance maybe all very different things. <br />
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Knowing his first audience very well, namely the scribes and Pharisees, perhaps Jesus chooses the image of the shepherd because he knows that they all are steeped in the holy scriptures of their people. Which means they were very familiar with the book of Ezekiel, who wrote while the Jewish people were separated and suffering in exile. Their land had been overrun and they were forcibly removed from their homes and taken to Babylon, held in captivity for decades. Throughout history, perhaps more than any other, the Jewish people know the great pain of separated from one another – the anguish of alienation – and so Jesus is trying to soften their hearts by tapping into this experience. <br />
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In this holy book, that the temple authorities probably have memorized, the prophet Ezekiel passionately shakes his fist at God and prays “Look God, look at this! Your sheep are scattered, vulnerable and lost. Your name is defamed.” Basically he is saying that God’s reputation is shot because His sheep are scattered all over the earth. So Ezekiel challenges God “Unite your people, bring them home, so that YOUR name will be Hallowed, or made Holy again.” <br />
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So too, each week when we pray “hallowed be thy name” it’s not simply an expression of reverence, but rather a plea for God to show His stuff! To bring about such a dramatic change in restoring our wholeness, that all of humankind will take notice. We are imploring God to remove our divisions and restore our oneness – to make us one again…to make us whole… (Dale Bruner) <br />
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Just as Jesus prayed “Father, may they all be one…may they all be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” Jesus knows that our journey to God, our path to the kingdom is a group effort, with not a single expendable person. We are one people of God and our own individual failings – places where we need others to fill the gaps and forgive us – serve as effective reminders that this point is not lost on us. God doesn’t love us despite our faults and failings, but rather in and through them is bringing about the Kingdom of God. <br />
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We all struggle with imperfection, but this is not some kind of design error on God’s part, but rather is a gift; a reminder of our oneness - that we need one another. That is why we ALL celebrate when just one of us is lost and then found, because truly it is PART OF OURSELVES that was lost; an essential part of the body of Christ that has been restored so we can continue moving together towards the fullness of creation – a time when “God will be all and all” and we will be whole once again. <br />
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For Jesus, SIN means alienation - alienation from our best selves,– from the community who loves and needs us, and from God – who we often distance ourselves from because we envision Him as an over-scrupulous, exacting, harsh judge up in the sky taking notes on our every misstep. <br />
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Jesus is trying to teach us that sin isn't about individually following rules and regulations to the letter, but rather doing something loving with our life and resisting any action that threatens this wholeness. Anything that keeps us at a distance or makes us become lost or separated. And he is saying this to the Scribes and Pharisees who are standing right next to the ones who are being actively alienated from the community! <br />
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So Sin is not a lack of perfection which is related to our personal performance, but rather a lack of inclusiveness and acceptance that Jesus knew the religious authorities were wrongly attributing to God. <br />
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In short, “Jesus was a man of reconciliation in a world that had accepted, and even gloried in division, in proclaiming who was an insider and who was an outsider, the clean and the unclean. He was struggling to bring together people that others were struggling to keep apart.” <br />
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So what is Jesus proposing with these parables? What does repentance look like for him? <br />
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To our modern ears, we usually think repentance means to have a deep regret or remorse about our sin or wrongdoing and then to undertake some punishing hard-work in order to make amends. But our modern English take on our ancient texts often misses the mark – and doesn’t really capture the fullness of meaning communicated in the original language. <br />
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The word repentance in its original Greek, the word Metanoia, simply means to change our mind...to change the way we understand or think about something… <br />
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Dr. Barbara Reid says that the joy of repentance in these parables doesn’t coming from us shamefully beating our breasts and entering into some harsh acts of atonement, or even to apologize to God for our misconduct; this isn’t what God is asking of us at all. Rather, with these parables, Jesus is simply inviting us to change our mind… <br />
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He is trying to teach us about God and convince us that God is not AT ALL demanding any kind of harsh repentance or even a request for forgiveness. It’s automatically given. God simply wouldn’t be God if He were as small and exacting as we are sometimes. <br />
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Rather, it is God’s joy to bring us home and restore wholeness to us and our community – this is the true fulfillment of his dream for us. (something that seems quite lost on the religious leaders Jesus is speaking to) <br />
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God in God self is mercy and there will be nothing but rejoicing on God‘s part if we change our mind and believe fully – grabbing the truth with both hands - that God loves and forgives us without boundary or breaking point. Without conditions or demands, so that we all may be whole – together in mind in spirit once again. This is the nature of true repentance. <br />
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Jesus hoping that everyone in earshot – the religious teachers and the sinners – will come to a true repentance – a deep understanding of our need to repent about how we think about and portray God - and the great extent that God will go to, to show us just how much he loves and values us and how critical each and every one of us is to the wholeness that is the defining feature of the kingdom. <br />
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And if we go astray, God will go to the ends of the earth to find us, pick us up and bring us home. <br />
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John Shea writes “God desires unity and rejoices more when a wholeness is approached by the inclusion of what was formerly excluded than when an incompleteness, even when it is a righteous incompleteness, remains even one short.” <br />
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So true repentance begins with God searching for us when we are lost and offering us the free gift of forgiveness and restoration to the community. (Reid) <br />
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And for us it means being able to “change our mind” to truly believe in this kind of God and have the courage to accept acceptance…. and then, living out of this grace, offer OUR love and forgiveness as freely as we have received it. </div>
Lisa Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03295170165895704660noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3247313846607562358.post-6917488370217484182019-09-07T00:43:00.000-04:002019-09-16T10:33:55.027-04:00#176 - Tradition<b>Why am I here today?</b><br />
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I’m Lisa Brown, the Director of Religious Education here at CTR. Part of my job is writing this little column where someone submits a question and I do my best to respond. I made-up this particular question because I suspect many of us are asking it quietly to ourselves at this prickly juncture in our Catholic history.<br />
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I’ve only been given 600 words, so let’s cut to the chase - it’s been a rough year for us Catholics. Well, maybe we should say a rough 17 or 70 years given the sexual abuse crisis? Or a rough 1000 years since the Crusades? Well, dang, let’s just call it. We Christians have been a train wreck from day one. So why are we still here?<br />
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The late Irish poet John O’Donohue, says “Tradition is to the community what memory is to the individual…it’s a huge naïveté for anyone to believe that a religion, understood as the collective wisdom and the lived spirit experience of a people, is an empty mass. It’s a huge resource! Tradition, like memory, has huge dark passages - within the Christian tradition there are dark zones of complete horror - but there are also zones of great light and immense wells of refreshment and healing.”<br />
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This speaks to me. My rose-colored glasses are long gone, but my love for our resilient Catholic family hasn’t waned. We just keep showing up and searching for God in this mess and there is something deeply endearing about this indomitable level of hope; something I find safe and lovely. Yes, we Catholics have a seemingly bottomless font of dysfunction, but what family doesn’t? To leave would be just trading one family’s problems for another. I intimately know MY family’s problems; our language, customs, faults and factions, and I feel that in terms of bringing about change, this awareness is an extremely valuable tool.<br />
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We believe that God speaks to us in nature. Dr. Margaret Wheatley writes “in nature, change never happens as a result of top down, strategic plans, or from the command of any single individual. Rather, change happens with little, spontaneous and irregular actions that spring up simultaneously in many different areas; large-scale change comes through small unpredictable beginnings. If we could sit on a mountainside for many decades, we would see a tree here or there sprout up, and then more and more, until we had a forest. But we would be hard-pressed to find the blueprint. Our human behavior is part of this complex and delicate creation, but, we have constructed unnatural mega-systems that don’t work. They are crumbling around us, and we are the casualties—stressed-out, disconnected from each other, moving too fast.” So what are we to do? <br />
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Our own tradition points the way according to Dr. Brian Flanagan. In 13th century Europe, clergy and the big monasteries were seen by the people of God as deeply corrupt; caught up in wealth and power; distracted from the simple way of life of Jesus. A strong clamor for reform emerged. Out of this conflict, small groups of people working together to live more like the early followers of Jesus began to emerge, and the communities that embraced this kind of simple life of sharing and poverty - such as the Franciscans - exploded in size! St. Francis goes from practicing with just a few of his friends to having over 40,000 friars within about 60 years.<br />
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These little groups didn’t spend time directly confronting the institution, rather they found cracks in the older form of “doing church” that wasn’t working anymore and found creative ways to live with authenticity in those cracks and to grow something new. Being deeply rooted in our tradition made it possible for these little networks of people who shared a common vision of what was possible to innovate with integrity. I believe our little atriums for our children ages 3-12 to be one such little sprout. <br />
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Interested in hearing more? Contact Lisa Brown at dre@ctredeemer.org or read past columns at <a href="http://www.crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com/">www.crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com</a></div>
Lisa Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03295170165895704660noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3247313846607562358.post-61589320050133664062019-05-04T12:27:00.000-04:002019-09-16T10:34:03.664-04:00#175 - Mystery<!--[if !mso]>
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<br />
<b>Is it true that the “tree” that grows from the mustard seed is actually considered more of a weed in the region where Jesus lived? </b><br />
<b><br /></b>
It’s this kind of unexpected tidbit that makes me fall even deeper in love with Jesus and his style of teaching. No matter how learned we are, there are still surprises such as this; things that invite us to ponder each parable anew and reexamine what we “think” we know about the great mystery we call God.<br />
<br />
In the atrium with the children we describe parables as “short stories Jesus told that hold a mystery.” They are not mysterious because Jesus is trying to conceal something from us or keep the Kingdom of God hidden from us, but rather it is because the mystery of God is so big and beyond our understanding, the closest we can come with our little brains to understanding is through metaphors, or parables. <br />
<br />
The first thing that parables teach us is that “mystery” is not something different than our everyday lives; rather it is the real meaning – the secret truth – the hidden seed at the very heart of our lives. There is no “right” or “wrong” way to interpret a parable because each holds a surplus of meaning that we can never exhaust; a mystery not in the sense of a puzzle or problem to be solved but rather as the sometimes-elusive depth of life where meaning dwells. <br />
<br />
Tis true that the mustard seed isn’t highly prized. It is used to flavor food and some parts of the plant are thought to have medicinal properties, but it is also considered something of nuisance. <br />
<a name='more'></a>Some translations call it a tree, but it’s actually more of a shrub. It can grow up to 12’ feet high and its stems can be quite thick, but it’s just your run-of-the-mill bush. And yes, some even regarded it as a weed and advise not to dare plant it in your garden lest it crowd out all the other plants and literally take over. <br />
<br />
In the atrium, we encourage the children to touch and examine the grain-of-sand-sized mustard seeds we have from the holy land and invite them to ponder - what did Jesus mean when he said the Kingdom of God is like this small, insignificant, relatively unimportant seed? And the children say… <br />
<br />
Maybe Jesus chose this teeny-tiny seed to say that in God’s creation even something as small as the head of a pin has amazing power within it; it may start small and hidden but then grows to be surprisingly big! And though we know that plants need water, sun & time to grow, we cannot control or cause the growth ourselves. Only God has that kind of power. So, it does not help the sower to be anxious about it. <br />
<br />
Maybe we can hear encouragement in Jesus’ words, saying to us that our little mustard seed efforts to love are not in vain. If we remain hopeful and patient, the day will come when the results of the kingdom's silent, steady growth will be quite impressive. Even if the seeds we plant today look rather wimpy. <br />
<br />
Mother Teresa said, “What I do - you cannot do; but what you do - I cannot do. <br />
But we can all do small things, with great love, and together we can do something wonderful.” <br />
<br />
So, perhaps the good news for us today is that despite our current discouragements - if we continue to plant small seeds with great love and have faith that God will provide the nourishment for growth, maybe that is enough. We may never see the enormous and powerful plant that grows, but if we do our best to be thoughtful and intentional about doing something loving with our lives, the kingdom will come…slow but sure…it will come. <br />
<br />
Send your "Crazy Catholic Questions" Lisa Brown at dre@ctredeemer.org or read past columns at: <a href="http://crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com/">http://crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com</a>. Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3247313846607562358.post-65754025662968507442019-04-30T12:25:00.001-04:002019-09-16T10:34:13.795-04:00#174 - The God I Don’t Believe In – by Juan Arias<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<b>The God I Don’t Believe In </b><br />
(edited for space) – by Juan Arias<br />
<br />
No, I shall never believe in: <br />
<br />
The God who catches us by surprise in a sin of weakness, the God who condemns material things, the God incapable of giving an answer to the grave problems of a sincere and honest person who cries in tears: “I can’t!” <br />
<br />
<div>
The God who loves pain, the God who sterilizes our reason, the God who is a magician and sorcerer, the God who makes himself feared, the God who does not allow us to talk familiarly to him, the grandfather-God whom one can twist around one’s little finger, the God who makes himself the monopoly of a church, a race, a culture or a caste, the lottery-god whom one can find only by chance, the judge-God who can give a verdict only with a rule book in his hands, the God incapable of smiling at many of our awkward mistakes, the God who “sends” people to hell, the God who always demands 100 percent in examinations.<br />
<br />
The God who can be fully explained by a philosophy, the God adored by those who are capable of condemning a person to death, the God incapable of loving what many people despise, the God incapable of forgiving what many condemn, the God incapable of redeeming the wretched, the God incapable of understanding that children will always get themselves dirty and be forgetful, the God who prevents us from growing and conquering, transforming and overcoming.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
The God who does not accept a seat at our human festivities, the God whom only the mature, the wise, or the comfortably situated can understand, the God who is not feared by the rich at whose doors lie the hungry and the wretched, the God capable of being accepted and understood by those who do not love, the God who is adored by those who go to mass and yet go on stealing and calumniating, the aseptic God thought up by so many theologians and canonists in their ivory towers, the God who isn’t able to find anything of his goodness, his essence, where love exists, the God who condemns all sex, the God who says “You will pay for that!” <br />
<br />
The God who sometimes regrets giving us free will, the God who prefers injustice to disorder, the God who says and feels nothing about the agonizing problems of suffering humanity, the God who stifles earthly reform and gives only hope for the future life, the God who pleases those who are always saying, ”Everything is fine,” the God who is preached by those who believe that hell is crowded and heaven is almost empty, the God who regards war as good, the God who put law before conscience, the God who would form a static, immovable Church, incapable of being purified, perfected and developed.<br />
<br />
The God of those who have stock answers for everything, the God who would deny us the freedom to sin, the God who has no forgiveness for some sins, the God who prefers the rich and the powerful, the God who “causes” cancer or “makes” a woman sterile, the God to whom one can pray only on one’s knees, whom one can find only in a church, the God who accepts and endorses everything we say about him, the God who does not save those who have not known him but who have desired and searched for him, the God who “carries off” to hell the child after his first sin, the God who does not go out to meet the person who had abandoned him, the God incapable of making all things new, the God who does not have a different, personal, individual word for each person, the God who has never wept for humankind, the God who prefers purity to love, the God who embraces politics, the God in whom there are no mysteries, who is no greater than we are, the God who is not love, the God incapable of captivating our hearts, the God in whom I cannot hope against all hope.<br />
<br />
Yes, my God is the other God”.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3247313846607562358.post-5607315728602510552019-04-27T12:27:00.000-04:002019-09-16T10:34:23.006-04:00#173 - Mysticism<b>What is a mystic? </b><br />
Many bemoan the drop in attendance and involvement in all main-line churches over the past several decades, including Catholics. In fact our “fallen-away” number is the biggest of the bunch. Many parents worry whether their children will ever “come back” or “make it to heaven.” Perhaps there might be another way of looking at things? <br />
<br />
Back in the early 60’s Fr. Karl Rahner said that “The Christian of the future will be a mystic or nothing at all” – a mystic being someone who has had an experience of spiritual union or direct communion with God. In 1962 pollsters found that 22% of Americans claimed to have had a “mystical experience” of God. In 1976 that number had risen to 31% of our U.S. population. The most recent poll reported a whopping 48% who said that they had this kind of encounter with the divine. Diana Butler Bass believes that these numbers indicate that “American faith has undergone a profound and extensive reorientation away from externalized religion towards internalized spiritual experience.” Is this a good? Bad? I don’t know. <br />
<br />
What if the trend we are observing is “the first stirrings of a new spiritual awakening, a vast interreligious movement toward individual, social and cultural transformation? Have we lived the majority of our lives in the context of this awakening, struggling towards new understandings of God, how we should act ethically and politically, and who we are deep in our souls? What if <we are> playing a significant role in forming the contours of a new kind of faith beyond conventional religious boundaries? Is America living in the wake of a revival gone awry or a spiritual awakening that is finally taking concrete - albeit unexpected - shape?” (Bass)<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
I certainly don’t know the answer, but I do know that I am solidly in that 48% and that my first “mystical experience” changed the course of my entire life. <br />
<br />
I was always a good student, but rather directionless. After changing my major 2 or 3 times, I finally graduated college with a BFA degree and a negligible amount of talent. I had no idea what to do next. Moving back in with family was not an option, and career wise, I felt no great desire or pull in any direction. So, I prayed the famous prayer “Help!” <br />
<br />
Through a series of small miracles, I landed a job at Chrysler in their photography department and arrived at 7AM sharp on my first day of work, eager to join the ranks of corporate America. I was promptly shown the completely darkroom (We’re talking pre-digital age. I’m old.) where I was to spend the next two years - 8 hours a day, 5 days a week - alone, in the dark doing very repetitious, mind-numbing work. By 7:05AM I was thinking “I’m going to go mad!” <br />
<br />
Now, I know you won’t believe this, but I’m a bit of a “people person”; a talker from a long-line of talkers. So I always like to point out the great lengths God had to go to get me to shut up for a minute! <br />
<br />
To stay the insanity, I bought a Walkman (remember those? Apparently you’re old too) and borrowed a bunch of books on tape to listen to in the dark. One of those books was the New Testament and my life was never to be the same. <br />
<br />
I was powerfully and profoundly wooed in that darkness. There is nothing I pray for more than that my children would have an experience of God’s love and acceptance such as this at some point in their lives. It changes everything. <br />
<br />
So, maybe instead of wringing our hands nervously over the future of our church and the salvation of our youth, we can relax a bit, and trust a bit more. I suspect God is up to something with this 48% AND I think it’s entirely possible that we have NO idea how much is possible! <br />
<br />
Send your "Crazy Catholic Questions" Lisa Brown at dre@ctredeemer.org or read past columns at: <a href="http://crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com/">http://crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com</a>.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3247313846607562358.post-61264635380549610832019-04-11T13:48:00.000-04:002019-09-16T10:34:31.655-04:00#172 - Why am I here?<b>Why am I here today?</b><br />
<br />
I’m Lisa Brown, the Director of Religious Education here at CTR. Part of my job is writing this little column where someone submits a question and I do my best to respond. I made-up this particular question because I suspect many of us are asking it quietly to ourselves at this prickly juncture in our Catholic history.<br />
<br />
I’ve only been given 600 words, so let’s cut to the chase - it’s been a rough year for us Catholics. Well, maybe we should say a rough 17 or 70 years given the sexual abuse crisis? Or a rough 1000 years since the Crusades? Well, dang, let’s just call it. We Christians have been a train wreck from day one. So why are we still here?<br />
<br />
The late Irish poet John O’Donohue, says “Tradition is to the community what memory is to the individual…it’s a huge naïveté for anyone to believe that a religion, understood as the collective wisdom and the lived spirit experience of a people, is an empty mass. It’s a huge resource! Tradition, like memory, has huge dark passages - within the Christian tradition there are dark zones of complete horror - but there are also zones of great light and immense wells of refreshment and healing.”<br />
<br />
This speaks to me. My rose-colored glasses are long gone, but my love for our resilient Catholic family hasn’t waned. We just keep showing up and searching for God in this mess and there is something deeply endearing about this indomitable level of hope; something I find safe and lovely. Yes, we Catholics have a seemingly bottomless font of dysfunction, but what family doesn’t? To leave would be just trading one family’s problems for another. I intimately know MY family’s problems; our language, customs, faults and factions, and I feel that in terms of bringing about change, this awareness is an extremely valuable tool.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
We believe that God speaks to us in nature. Dr. Margaret Wheatley writes “in nature, change never happens as a result of top down, strategic plans, or from the command of any single individual. Rather, change happens with little, spontaneous and irregular actions that spring up simultaneously in many different areas; large-scale change comes through small unpredictable beginnings. If we could sit on a mountainside for many decades, we would see a tree here or there sprout up, and then more and more, until we had a forest. But we would be hard-pressed to find the blueprint. Our human behavior is part of this complex and delicate creation, but, we have constructed unnatural mega-systems that don’t work. They are crumbling around us, and we are the casualties—stressed-out, disconnected from each other, moving too fast.” So what are we to do? <br />
<br />
Our own tradition points the way according to Dr. Brian Flanagan. In 13th century Europe, clergy and the big monasteries were seen by the people of God as deeply corrupt; caught up in wealth and power; distracted from the simple way of life of Jesus. A strong clamor for reform emerged. Out of this conflict, small groups of people working together to live more like the early followers of Jesus began to emerge, and the communities that embraced this kind of simple life of sharing and poverty - such as the Franciscans - exploded in size! St. Francis goes from practicing with just a few of his friends to having over 40,000 friars within about 60 years.<br />
<br />
These little groups didn’t spend time directly confronting the institution, rather they found cracks in the older form of “doing church” that wasn’t working anymore and found creative ways to live with authenticity in those cracks and to grow something new. Being deeply rooted in our tradition made it possible for these little networks of people who shared a common vision of what was possible to innovate with integrity. I believe our little atriums for our children ages 3-12 to be one such little sprout. Interested in hearing more? Contact Lisa Brown at dre@ctredeemer.org or read past columns at <a href="http://www.crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com/">www.crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com</a>.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3247313846607562358.post-37199729554851178372019-04-10T12:28:00.000-04:002019-09-16T10:34:40.036-04:00#171 - Tragedy<b>Where is God when tragedy strikes?</b><br />
<div>
I don’t know about you, but I just cringe when in the face of grave human tragedy and suffering I hear someone say “This was God’s will” and/or “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle.” Really? Because it sure seems that some people get a crushing helping of grief on occasion.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/u/1/blogger.g?blogID=3247313846607562358"></a><a href="https://www.blogger.com/u/1/blogger.g?blogID=3247313846607562358"></a><a href="https://www.blogger.com/u/1/blogger.g?blogID=3247313846607562358"></a>Two generations ago, we Catholics had an answer to suffering. We used to advise one another to ‘offer our suffering up to God, for the good of others, for the souls in purgatory or in amends for our own sinfulness.’ This stock answer, which has slowly faded out of use, strikes many of us as quaint and even somewhat cruel at times. But, perhaps there is some deeper truth to be mined in this traditional response.<br />
<br />
The heart of the good news that Jesus came to share with us is not "God loves us, and has a wonderful plan for our lives." Rather, the first and primary claim of the gospel is "God is here." The cross tells us that God’s answer to suffering is not to avoid it, or deny it, or blame it on human waywardness, but rather to be with us in it even when we don’t feel God’s presence. Our faith offers no one an escape from suffering. On the contrary, being a loving, compassionate person in this world practically assures suffering, because we are open and vulnerable. What the gospel does promise is that God will be with us so that we do not have to walk through our suffering alone. <br />
<br />
The mystery of God’s life with us is that the very moment of catastrophe is, in truth, the moment of liberation. Jesus redeemed suffering by entering into it with us - loving us right up until the end, even as we put him to death. He gave us a demonstration of the only force with the power to bring about change; that of unconditional, self-giving love and we, as his disciples, are called to follow him in this demonstration to one another, and to the world.<br />
<br />
This is not to say that we should seek or endure suffering without a fight. Jesus was always healing people, easing the their isolation, working tirelessly to cure their ills - which tells us that the problem of pain is a matter for action; God works to fight suffering, therefore so should we, using every means at our disposal – prayer, medicine, social action, relief work, and so on. It is right to hate loneliness and poverty. The image of the suffering God we see on the cross is the image of a protesting God.<br />
<br />
So, maybe our tradition isn’t so far off the mark after all. To ‘offer it up” is to somehow connect our suffering to the suffering of Christ; to acknowledge that we are all in this together and to be receptive to the unity and purification that can be worked in us through our pain if we do not give in to bitterness. Though never ‘good’, our suffering can have value; it can actually draw us closer to God and one another. <br />
<br />
Although we may never find an adequate explanation for human suffering on this side of the grave, we do catch glimpses of the kingdom when we support each other in our suffering. But, in the end, suffering remains a mystery. In his movie “Hannah & Her Sisters” Woody Allen plays an atheist son of a Jewish family who in an argument asks, “If there is a God, why are there Nazis?” His father replies, “How should I know? I don’t even know how the can opener works.” Mysteries abound.<br />
<br />
Send your "Crazy Catholic Questions" Lisa Brown at dre@ctredeemer.org or read past columns at: <a href="http://crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com/">http://crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com</a>.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3247313846607562358.post-64852376901728640352019-03-30T12:24:00.000-04:002019-09-16T10:35:02.122-04:00#170 - No meat? Why?<a href="https://www.blogger.com/u/1/blogger.g?blogID=3247313846607562358" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><a href="https://www.blogger.com/u/1/blogger.g?blogID=3247313846607562358" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><a href="https://www.blogger.com/u/1/blogger.g?blogID=3247313846607562358" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><br />
<b>Why do we not eat meat on Fridays?</b><br />
<br />
In the first century when Jesus lived, people only cooked up “the fatted calf” and ate meat from land animals on days of celebration. Fish was considered a common, everyday food, therefore was not included in the fast. Catholics abstain from meat on the Fridays during Lent to pay homage to and to share in some small way in the suffering that Jesus experienced on the cross on Good Friday; definitively not a day of celebration but rather a day of sorrow. A day when we allow ourselves to feel the full weight of the sadness we all hold about the world we have fashioned in which it is dangerous – and sometimes even fatal – to live as a compassionate, loving human being. Fasting is an essential element of virtually every religion, because we all know the apathy that grows from excess. Fasting is designed to “wake us up” from the numbness that comfort often brings with it – that makes us indifferent to the suffering of others. We fast in an effort to change our world by changing ourselves; to restore and atone for our broken relationships; to keep us mindful of our calling to love as Jesus loved, without counting the cost. Fasting is designed to remind us, when faced with the choice, to make the loving decision. Isn’t that beautiful?<br />
<br />
Yes. Yes it is. So beautiful. That makes it all the more humiliating to admit that I spectacularly fail every Lent! Not just a little gaffe here and there. Nope. Not I. I’m more of the “go big or go home” variety of Lenten loser.<br />
<br />
One of my goals this Lent was to fast from “being late.” My husband and daughters are always razzing me – saying I have a “bad relationship with time.” They say I’m not very adept at accurately calculating the amount of time that it takes to drive somewhere, pick up a few things from the grocery store, finish up my work and make it home for dinner, etc. I’m always late. Late for doctors visits, late to pick up the kids, late to send in registration forms (even for the programs that I oversee here at the church! More often than not, I’M the delinquent parent paying the late fee!). I always think I can do that “one more thing” and still make it in time…but I never do. So, I announced to my family on Ash Wednesday that I was determined to arrive to all my appointments 15 minutes early and use that extra time for prayer. <br />
<br />
ON Ash Wednesday I was late for three appointments. I only had three appointments that day. We are halfway through Lent and my relationship with time is not showing any signs of redemption. Last night I overheard my family snickering with great delight over my abject failure. Please someone…anyone…tell me you can relate?!!?<br />
<br />
So now what? Well, we love and serve a God of mercy, miracles, and second-chances, right? So, I’ve decided to be gentle with myself and simply start again. Because, as St. Paul writes “God’s grace is sufficient…God’s power is made perfect in weakness.” If we are called to love as God loves (even ourselves), then we also must believe that God loves us not despite our faults and failures, but rather in and through them God is bringing about the kingdom. That is the message Jesus died to tell us. So, we resume our efforts to draw nearer to God, to invite a sincere metanoia by doing things differently; never losing hope that our struggles to change our behavior, whether we succeed or fail, facilitate a change of heart - not because of our toil and labor but rather because of who God is for us; our tireless cheerleader whose grace abounds everytime! (BTW, I submitted this article a day late. Sigh.)<br />
<br />
Send your Crazy Catholic Question to Lisa Brown at dre@ctredeemer.org or read past columns at <a href="http://www.crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com/">www.crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3247313846607562358.post-90481641623088755272019-03-16T12:23:00.000-04:002019-10-18T09:09:46.285-04:00#169 - Where is everybody?<b>So many of my friends, family and neighbors don’t attend Mass anymore. Finding Godparents and/or Confirmation Sponsors is a struggle because I know so few genuinely “practicing” Catholics. Any thoughts?</b><br />
<br />
In a recent PEW research study, Americans who rarely or never attend religious services were asked “Why?” Only 28% of U.S. Adults said they don’t attend because they don’t believe in God. Another 37% responded that “they practice their faith in different ways” and 23% said “they haven’t found a church they like yet.” So, close to 60% of believers who don’t attend church cite the main reason to be that they have difficulty finding God here among us. That should give us pause or at least be fodder for some conversation.<br />
<br />
Perhaps we can learn something from the creators of the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd. <br />
<br />
Dr. Sofia Cavelletti and Gianna Gobbi would sometimes spend weeks and weeks developing lessons and building the special “works” (manipulatives/figures/diaramas, etc.) to accompany them. After introducing the new lesson and “work” in the atrium, they would observe the children’s response. If the children did not gravitate towards the new piece during their self-directed time in the atrium, Sofia & Gianna would remove it; they decided what “works” to keep in the atrium by watching what brought the children joy. <br />
<br />
I would have never believed that children could so enjoy catechism (as it was called in the old timey days) but I have witnessed it with my own eyes and ears, and frankly, it’s a damned miracle. I serve as a catechist on Tuesday afternoons in our screen-free, quiet space of the atrium where our children are invited to commune with God and ponder the mysteries of our faith with their friends. Last week one of the 4th grade boys asked me, with great joy in his voice, at the end of our two-hour session, “When do we get to come back? I love it here.” <br />
<br />
My own 9-years-old is genuinely disappointed if she misses an atrium session due to illness or snow days and even my 14-year-old, a self-possessed and intense contrarian who is actively searching for ways to disagree with me on just about everything these days, requested (with no prodding from me) to be enrolled in the CGS catechist formation classes. Now, if anyone’s kids should be “all Jesus-ed out” it should be mine, and yet my teenager freely chose to give up one full Saturday every month this year, 9AM-5PM, so she could train to be a lead catechist in our atrium. Don’t tell her this, but I never in a million years thought she would hang with it! In fact, I gave her every out and didn’t pay the whopping $400 tuition until the 4th class thinking she was going to drop out. But, she loves it. LOVES it. Forever the skeptic, here I sit, scratching my head in amazement.<br />
<br />
So maybe we would do well in asking what brings our adults joy? Celtic spirituality speaks of “thin places” in our world where the distance between heaven and the earth is worn thin; places that we return to often to experience what is sacred. For a myriad of reasons, the institutional church seems to be a rather “thick” place for many people right now. So, what is feeding them? Where are they finding joy and nourishment in their spiritual lives? If they aren’t coming to church on Sunday, how are they keeping the Sabbath holy? <br />
<br />
I think the advice from Sofia & Gianna would be for us to become keen scientists – observing and listening to what brings people joy. What will we find out? What will we respond? I really don’t know. But if we continue on the road we are on, we are sure to get where we are going. “The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The leader adjusts the sails.” (Maxwell). <br />
<br />
Send your Crazy Catholic Question to Lisa Brown at dre@ctredeemer.org or read past columns at <a href="http://www.crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com/">www.crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3247313846607562358.post-42241481170896756902019-03-09T12:20:00.000-05:002019-09-16T10:35:21.926-04:00#168 - Pillars of Lent<b>Why are Prayer, Fasting, & Almsgiving considered the 3 pillars of Lent?</b><br />
<br />
I witnessed a miracle last week. My kids and I watched an episode of “Tidying up with Marie Kondo.” The central mantra of her best-selling book, show and method of tidying is “Keep only what brings you joy.” Half way through the show my kids left the TV screen (a miracle in and of itself) and went upstairs and thinned out their bursting stuffed animal bins, deciding to keep only a handful. This was done completely unsolicited by me and with a genuine sense of eagerness and joy. I kept rubbing my eyes and asking my husband if I was dreaming. <br />
<br />
Author Tom Beaudoin states that Jesus preached what he calls an “economic spirituality,” which means that as Christians there has to be an integration of who we are with how we spend and share our resources; In short, what we buy is an important part of how we live out our faith as believers. <br />
<br />
The few times when Jesus allows himself to be pushed up against a wall to answer direct questions about our salvation and eternal life; when Jesus talks explicitly about God’s final judgment on our lives (aka, who is going to heaven and who is going to hell) when he talks about what is most important in the final analysis – what does Jesus talk about?<br />
<br />
He doesn’t talk about who you are sleeping with. He doesn’t talk about if you gave proper respect to a pastor, a bishop or pope. He doesn’t talk about scripture being inerrant. He doesn’t ask if you are a member of a church or any institution. He doesn’t ask if you knew Jesus as your personal Lord and savior. He doesn’t ask if you did the rituals correctly. What does he talk about? How we share our resources. Clearly, Jesus made this the ultimate sign of faithfulness to God. This kind of prayerful giving is what Jesus says is at the very center of our Christian way of life. Our fasting and giving alms is the prayer that helps us make the needs of others our own, especially the needy of our world - not because Jesus is scolding us but rather because sharing with others is the heart of the good news that sets us free and brings us joy. <br />
<br />
So, I suspect that the joy my children “caught” while listening to Marie Kondo’s mantra is a part of the deep spiritual truth that Jesus was trying to teach us; that living simply so that other’s may simply live is an essential part of how we build the of the Kingdom of God – and that true security and joy is not found in what we have but in what we can do without. And yet…<br />
<br />
· 6 million children under the age of 5 die every year as a result of hunger.<br />
<br />
· 1.2 billion people on this planet live on less than $1 per day.<br />
<br />
· Each day more than 30,000 children die from preventable and treatable causes such as diarrhea, respiratory infections, measles or malaria.<br />
<br />
· 1.1 billion people lack access to clean water; 4 billion live without decent sanitation. <br />
<br />
· 3 million children die each year from water born diseases.<br />
<br />
We’ve all heard the saying “God comforts us in our affliction, and afflicts us in our comfort.” Well, in light of these statistics, I feel afflicted by the two televisions I have in my home, the food that goes to waste in the refrigerator and the surplus of clothing, toys and stuff that we spend countless hours organizing and cleaning. Perhaps Lent is about feeling this affliction and having a sincere metanoia – a returning to God; a return to the giving and simplicity that will restore our joy – and this is good news, not suffering. It’s being saved not punished. Lent simply invites us to make space for the joy of the Gospel. <br />
<br />
Send your Crazy Catholic Question to Lisa Brown at dre@ctredeemer.org or read past columns at <a href="http://www.crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com/">www.crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3247313846607562358.post-79038270975348598692019-02-23T18:48:00.000-05:002019-09-10T00:29:58.292-04:00Crazy Catholic Question #167 - Oneness<b><br /></b>
<b>I heard you are offering a class on “Our Catholic Approach and Understanding of the Bible” on Monday night, March 4th at 7PM. Is there really a “Catholic” approach or is this just a manufactured division between denominations? For goodness sake, can’t we even agree on the Bible?!?</b><br />
<br />
I hear you. I really do. Ever since I was a little girl, I have had an abiding desire to foster a sincere “oneness” with our Protestant brothers and sisters. I regularly take my three daughters to St. John Episcopal church to hear some rockin’ female preaching, my spiritual director of 13 years is also Episcopal. Three of my very favorite authors, who have changed me in countless, monumental ways are: Baptist, born-again Anne Lamott, ELCA Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber and Quaker Parker Palmer, to name just a few of the biggies. <br />
<br />
I have many Protestant friends and even close family members (like my Mom!) who deeply revere and study the bible regularly and I would love nothing more than to find unfailing common ground with them about the meaning of our shared sacred texts. I pray, along with most of you I’m sure, in the words that Jesus gave us “Father, that all may be one.” And surely there are MANY places of SIGNIFICANT agreement to be celebrated! Which will be part of our discussion on the 4th.<br />
<br />
However! However. however. I cannot simply make myself “NOT believe” some of the things I believe (that are distinctively “Catholic” in nature) simply because I desire unity. And, frankly, I don’t think we do ourselves or our Protestant pals any favors by glossing over our theological differences. Conflict CAN be a route to deeper truth. Uncomfortable? Absolutely, but also tried and true. So I say, rather than avoid these difficult conversations, let’s get a good handle on what we DO believe so that we can enter into true dialogue (not argument rooted in defensiveness or insecurity, but rather mutual transformative dialogue) with those who think differently than us. Sometimes this is actually the PROCESS of discovering what we actually do believe, right? How many of you in conversation with other Christians have had that feeling like “Hmmm…I don’t buy that…I don’t think that is what Jesus meant,” etc. That is part of our shared discovery of truth, no?<br />
<br />
Sometimes it is only by pulling away what we are certain we DON’T believe that we come to discover and arrive at those truths which we hold most dear; the “via negativa” so to speak. Like Michelangelo once said “The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.” <br />
<br />
Sometimes our “Catholic common sense” only kicks in when we are in the heat of prickly dialogue with those who disagree with us and we are stumbling around, trying to find the right words to communicate exactly where the difference lies, right? Well, I say let’s poke around that place of dissimilarity and become articulate. We simply MUST model this practice of peaceful, prayerful, loving dialogue as a route to uncovering truth. It will serve our children well. <br />
<br />
Our four-step process is to: Gather – Share (listen and talk. Give and take.)– Dialogue – and be transformed. That is the original program. Everybody wins if we stick to the original program. <br />
<br />
It seems our most acute theological differences come to the fore when we discuss two topics: namely 1) the Bible and 2) Redemption (aka HOW we are saved by the cross of Christ). So, those are the topics we are going to address: <br />
<br />
1. Our Catholic Approach and Understanding of THE BIBLE on Monday, March 4th at 7PM and <br />
2. HOW ARE WE SAVED BY THE CROSS on Thursday, April 11th at 7PM. <br />
<br />
ALL are welcome! Send your Crazy Catholic Question to Lisa Brown at dre@ctredeemer.org or read past columns at <a href="http://www.crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com/">www.crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3247313846607562358.post-29449503527545250322019-02-16T09:35:00.000-05:002019-09-10T00:30:08.409-04:00Crazy Catholic Question #166 - Bible<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<b>I have a friend who attends a “non-denominational” Christian church who says that Catholics don’t believe in the literal, infallible and inerrant truth of the Bible. Is this true?</b><br />
<br />
Well, your friend is both right and wrong. It sounds like your pal supports a fundamentalist approach to our scriptures which declares verbal inerrancy, infallibility, and literal truth of the Bible in every detail. In this the words of the Bible are believed to be plain and simple: their meaning is self-evident and does not need to be interpreted. All that is required is that it be read in faith, with prayer for the guidance of the Holy Spirit. <br />
<br />
Now, if we take this to mean that anyone asking for an accurate interpretation will be given one without any research necessary, then the multiplicity of interpretations, even among fundamentalists themselves, should give people a gnawing sense that the Holy Spirit is not doing its job very effectively. <br />
<br />
We run into all sorts of problems when we read the Bible literally, that is, without trying to interpret its meaning. Noted Catholic Scripture scholar Fr. Eugene Laverdiere once said “Fundamentalism is not a particular interpretation of the Bible, but rather the lack of any interpretation.” <br />
<br />
As Catholics understand the bible as more of a library than a single book and we do not adhere to the literal truth of all the books in our sacred library, because not all were written to be understood that way. Just as in any library, we find several different genres of writing, so too in the bible. <br />
<br />
The church states that the Bible is "humankind's experience of God" written down. We recognize that there was a long, complex process from the original inspiration to the written words found in the Bible today and if we are going to discover the meaning of our ancient sacred texts we need to be as informed as possible of their context, literary form, and the author’s historical situation, style of writing and original intention. <br />
<br />
The church states that:<br />
<br />
Revelation is first and foremost God revealing God’s self in human history, and Jesus is the high point of this revelation of God to human beings. <br />
<br />
Only secondarily is revelation to be understood as the written expression of and witness to God's revealing of God’s self. <br />
<br />
In other words, our faith is in a living God not slavish adherence to words on a page.<br />
<br />
So, in short, we DO believe scripture to be the "inspired" and “inerrant” revelation of God to which human beings have given expression and witnessed to in words. Scripture is not apart from tradition but rather a privileged moment WITHIN our tradition, for truly it is the Church which gave us the Bible, and not the Bible which gave us the Church.<br />
<br />
The bible may indeed hold all truths, but not everything in the bible is “literally true” in our modern understanding of the word.<br />
<br />
If this topic interests you, please consider yourself invited to attend (and maybe even bring your protestant pals!) a little class I’m giving on:<br />
<br />
Our Catholic Approach and Understanding of Sacred Scripture<br />
<br />
Monday, March 4th at 7PM in Bethany. <br />
<br />
All are invited. It is free, as is childcare. Hope to see you there!<br />
<br />
Send your Crazy Catholic Question to Lisa Brown at dre@ctredeemer.org or read past columns at <a href="http://www.crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com/">www.crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3247313846607562358.post-65451324980139271822019-02-02T09:33:00.000-05:002019-09-10T00:30:17.610-04:00Crazy Catholic Question #165 - Big Bang & Evolution<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<b>Do Catholics believe in the “big bang” and evolution?</b><br />
YES! A resounding YES! Catholics DO in fact support the best suppositions held by our most intelligent scientists regarding the development of our species and our universe. In short, Catholics do not quarrel with fossils or astronomers. In fact, we have our very own Vatican Observatory that is dedicated to the most cutting-edge astronomical research and education! <br />
<br />
We readily admit that what we solidly know about our origins is a pittance. “Our brains are too small to grasp fully the expansiveness, diversity, and surprise of the universe, never mind what lies beyond its furthest edges. It is as if reality is a bazillion-volt charge and our brains are sixty-watt bulbs.” (Garrido, Redeeming Conflict). But the little we DO know indicates that the notion that our world was created in seven, 24-hour, literal “days” is simply nonsensical and ridiculously egocentric. We Catholics fully embrace “mystery” but, we don’t deny the reality of fossils for goodness sake! Our current reigning scientific theories may not be “the complete” truth, but they undoubtedly point us in the right direction for further discovery. <br />
<br />
I went to my kid’s public school last week to introduce a secular version of the La Fettuccia/Ribbon lesson. While the kids were at recess I was chatting with my daughter teacher, explaining how the 50 yards of grosgrain ribbon is designed to represent the span of time since the Big Bang and how in order for the lesson to remain relatively “concrete” we tell the children that each ridge represents only 1000 years, but if the ribbon were to accurately represent the 14 billion years plus that our universe has been expanding, each ridge would actually represent closer to 100,000 years! I laughed light-heartedly with awe and amazement and said “even the metaphor needs to be ‘dumbed down’ for us because 100,000 years for each ridge is too much for our little brains to even imagine!”<br />
<br />
In response, Viv’s teacher said “Yes, but if one takes biblical truth into consideration; namely that God created the world in seven days, that would make our earth much younger” and then she looked at me like I was on her team on this issue. I honestly was so dumbstruck I was speechless for a moment (and those that know me well, know also how difficult it is to render me genuinely wordless). <br />
<br />
One of the main reasons young people are leaving organized religion is because of the cognitive dissonance between bad religion and good science. Now, you might say “But we believe in a man who was raised from the dead!” I know. That seems rather far-fetched, right? True. I’m not entirely sure what Jesus’ resurrection “looked like” – no epistemologically humble person would propose to know such a thing. Without question, we do profess some crazy stuff - BUT we don’t dispute fossils folks. We don’t dismiss our best scientists.<br />
<br />
Regarding the resurrection, I have no idea what happened in that upper room, but it’s for darn sure something happened, because the people in that room were changed. Before this weird and wild upper room encounter with the Risen Christ the disciples were all tucked away, huddled in fear. But after this upper room experience they all go out and boldly preach the good news until almost every one of them met with a martyr’s death. I don’t understand martyrs either, but I find them very convincing. <br />
<br />
Look. God has blessed us with the gift of reason. We would be foolish to neglect or ignore this gift. There is no conflict whatsoever between good theology and our admittedly limited understanding of Science. As with all of life, the more we learn, the less we know. If this wasn’t so, then God would not be worthy to be called God. <br />
<br />
Send your Crazy Catholic Question to Lisa Brown at dre@ctredeemer.org or read past columns at <a href="http://www.crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com/">www.crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3247313846607562358.post-18856463742121432052019-01-19T09:30:00.000-05:002019-09-10T00:30:27.106-04:00Crazy Catholic Question #164 - Healing<!--[if !mso]>
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<br />
<b>Why are some people healed and others not?</b><br />
This past week a majority of our daily gospel readings feature Jesus healing people, which begs this CCQ question, right? We all know people who suffer chronic pain, pray fervently, and yet no relief comes and others who are healed. This disparity reminds me of this excerpt from Fr. James Martin’s book<u> Jesus: A Pilgrimage</u>:<br />
<br />
“I’m writing these lines in the middle of a painful bout with carpal-tunnel syndrome, something that I’ve had for the past 20 years…the onset came suddenly during my studies to become a Jesuit. Within the space of a few days, I developed stabbing pains in my hands and arms, and for the next two months could barely turn a doorknob or hold a pencil without feeling like someone was plunging a knife into my wrists.<br />
<br />
At the beginning of this minor medical saga, many doctors found the condition a diagnostic challenge. After a year of visiting a variety of hospitals, clinics and physical therapists, it was determined that I had either ‘repetitive strain injury,’ ‘carpal tunnel syndrome’ or an ‘autonomic nerve disorder.’ ‘Or some combo,’ said one doctor with a shrug ‘surgery wouldn’t work and the symptoms probably wouldn’t subside.’<br />
<br />
These days I deal with this persistent problem, as do many who live with far more serious chronic illnesses: by managing it…This decades-long struggle is an entrée to the world of sadness, discouragement and even the despair that attends illness…What can compare to a person’s desperate desire to be healed from a serious illness or the unquenchable thirst for the end of physical pain?’<br />
<br />
A few years ago I might have said that God is equally present to each of us, but it seems that God somehow moves closer to those who need help. Perhaps we are more open to God’s presence in our lives when we are more vulnerable; with our defenses down God can more easily break into our lives. One friend, at the beginning of her cancer treatment, reported a palpable sense of God’s presence, which manifested as a sudden onset of calm. She said she found it helpful to return to that “place” in herself where God had given her calm, and try to “live from” there. Rather than move towards discouragement over her illness, she would return to the calm that she felt was a gift from God.<br />
<br />
There is, however, another place for the sick person. There are times when the suffering person feels that nothing can change, that all is hopeless, that the pain will never end, that a “normal way of life” is no longer possible. Even though I have not suffered from a terminal illness or a life-threatening condition, I do know that dark place. I have spent time there.<br />
<br />
Jesus asks the paralytic ‘Do you want to be made well?’ Jesus might be saying to him, ‘Are you ready to let go of your identity as ‘the paralyzed man’? ‘Have you given up hope or do you still have faith?’<br />
<div>
<a href="https://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3247313846607562358" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><br />
God asks the same question to those who may have given up in other areas. A broken marriage, a miserable work environment, and overwhelming financial difficulties, can lead us to despair. We can experience a spiritual paralysis that needs to be healed. But buried deep down under the despair is hope.<br />
<br />
Hope is like the Pool of Bethesda. For years it was covered by dirt, gravel and trash - thought to be lost – or a myth. But it was always there, waiting to be uncovered, waiting to be restored, waiting to be seen again. It took work, but it was found. This is how God comes to us—asking if we still want healing, if we still believe, if we still have faith. Even while we dwell in despair, God excavates our hope and asks us, ‘Do you want to be made whole?’”<br />
<br />
Send your Crazy Catholic Question to Lisa Brown at dre@ctredeemer.org or read past columns at <a href="http://www.crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com/">www.crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com</a></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3247313846607562358.post-31153139547029222802019-01-12T09:29:00.000-05:002019-09-10T00:30:38.857-04:00Crazy Catholic Question #163 - Polarized<!--[if !mso]>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "garamond"; font-size: 12.0pt;">A lot of people are
shouting at each other these days: the left versus the right, conservative
Christians versus progressive Christians, fundamentalists versus scientists,
gays versus anti-gays, Israelis versus Palestinians, Republicans versus
Democrats. Why are things so polarized?<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond"; font-size: 12.0pt;">A dear
friend of mine, Bruce Tallman, who also is an author and spiritual director
attended a symposium<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>entitled
"Becoming Agents of Evolutionary Change," at King’s University
College in London and wrote about the enlightening explanation to this question
he heard there. Bruce writes “Carter Phipps, one of the keynote speakers and
the author of <u>Evolutionaries: Unlocking the Spiritual and Cultural
Potential of Science’s Greatest Idea</u>, explained that there are
currently three major world views clashing with each other: the traditional,
the modern, and the postmodern. All three have their own strengths and
pathologies.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The
traditional world view was dominant in medieval times. The healthy side of it
was that it promoted respect for legitimate authority and hierarchy and
produced stable, cohesive societies where everyone agreed on shared moral
values. The carriers of truth in this world view were the priests. Its
pathology was that its leaders could become authoritarian rather than
authoritative, it devolved into theocracy, and the stability became rigid and
blocked free thought, inquiry, and progress. The traditional world view today
is characterized by conservative religion and politics.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The
modern world view began in the 1500s with the Protestant Reformation which then
led to free inquiry, reason, science, and economic materialism in the form of
capitalism. Modernism has been dominant for the past 150 years and has brought
us the goods of medicine, democracy, and meritocracy, that is, your status is
not based on inherited bloodlines, anyone can excel. The carriers of truth here
were the scientists. The pathology is that healthy competition was replaced by
greed resulting in major wars and the destruction of the planet’s resources,
and science led to the development of atomic bombs. Modernism also was
male-dominated and left out women and the poor.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "garamond"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The
postmodern world view began to emerge in the 1960s. It emphasizes
environmentalism, pluralism, and inclusivism and so engages in struggles for
the rights of women, blacks, homosexuals, and aboriginals. It is concerned with
the psychological healing and development of the self. There is also a growing
awareness of a need to turn from materialism to spirituality, but not religion,
thus many people are "spiritual but not religious." The carrier of
truth here is the individual - everyone creates their own truth. The pathology
is that postmodernism is anti-hierarchical to a fault - everyone has an equal
voice so nothing gets done, as with Occupy Wall Street. It can also be
anti-intellectual and narcissistic, due to an overemphasis on the subjective
self.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond"; font-size: 12.0pt;">One
world view develops as a corrective to a previous world view and so the
traditionalists, modernists, and postmodernists focus on the pathology of the
other. When the alternate world views challenge each other’s values, each feels
their very identity is being attacked and thus we have great polarization and
shouting.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The
solution is to focus on the legitimate values in each of the world views and
let the pathology go. In other words, we need to learn to not see those with
opposing viewpoints as utterly wrong and evil, to recognize that we are all
trying to do what we think is right, to seek out and keep the good in the
other’s view of the world, and learn how to dialogue and listen respectfully to
each other.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "garamond"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Send your Crazy Catholic Question to Lisa Brown
at </span><a href="mailto:dre@ctredeemer.org"><span style="color: black; font-family: "garamond"; font-size: 12.0pt;">dre@ctredeemer.org</span></a><span style="color: black; font-family: "garamond"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> or read
past columns at </span><span style="color: black; font-family: "garamond"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><a href="http://www.crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com/">www.crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com</a></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3247313846607562358.post-2859896293758010042019-01-05T09:27:00.000-05:002019-09-10T00:30:49.176-04:00Crazy Catholic Question #162 - Pope's Delay<!--[if !mso]>
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</w:wrap></v:imagedata></v:shape><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "garamond"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Why did the Vatican delay our U.S. Bishops on voting in
new measures to hold our leaders accountable for the church cover-up of sex
abuse?<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Based on what I’ve gathered from different sources,
primarily a televised interview with Dr. Richard Gaillardetz of Boston College,
I think there is no doubt that the Vatican’s “final-hour” heavy-handed halt of
the U.S. Bishops vote was, as Gaillardetz puts it, “a public relations gaffe of
the highest order.” Nothing terribly new in this ineptness I’m afraid; God has
been in need of a new PR manager for quite some time now…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Gaillardetz suggests there may be more going on in the
Vatican’s request to table the issue for a few months than meets the eye,
because in February something rather </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "garamond"; font-size: 12.0pt;">remarkable and unprecedented is going to happen: Pope
Francis has called all of the presidents of all the bishops’ conferences
throughout the world to come to Rome for a meeting to discuss this sexual
abuse issue…and this issue alone. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "garamond"; font-size: 12.0pt;">This delay of our U.S. Bishops vote may indicate that Pope
Francis doesn’t want a few ad hoc decisions made by individual conferences
because “he sees this is as a global problem that requires a global solution.” This
would explain why Pope Francis recommended that the U.S. Bishops “go on
retreat” in November instead of holding a formal meeting in the first place. He
wants to make sure that before any one group comes up with particular solutions
for their own country, ALL our bishops throughout the world are on the same
page. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "garamond"; font-size: 12.0pt;">If this is the case, then we can ask - If we wanted to
gather all our family members to discuss an incredibly serious and persistent problem
and wanted to make it feasible for everyone to attend without undue hardship,
how far out would we have to set this meeting? One month? Two? After the
holidays? Even some of our little parish teams of just 10 people can’t find a
meeting date between now and February that agrees with everyone’s calendars–
let alone Bishops from all over the globe!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "garamond"; font-size: 12.0pt;">So, rather than viewing this delay as “Vatican-foot
dragging,” perhaps Pope Francis is simply being respectful of the bishops’ time
and providing </span><span style="font-family: "garamond"; font-size: 12.0pt;">ample
notice so that all are able to attend. </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "garamond"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Maybe Archbishop Vigneron, who said in his Advent letter
that he "was surprised and concerned” by the Holy See’s delay, would be
comforted by this perspective.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "garamond"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Gaillardetz suspects that we are going to see some significant
action in the wake of this meeting in February, and I pray he is right. Rather
than just dealing with the fallout of the crisis (which was what the U.S.
Bishops agenda addressed) I hope that the bishops will dialogue about its root
causes – namely, clericalism, which Gaillardetz defines as “anything that
treats the clergy as a privileged group that should be treated with deference
or grants them particular power and suggests that they are immune from
accountability.” In order to effectively address this evil of clericalism,
Gaillardetz believes we have to take a comprehensive look at our at seminary
education and the way in which titles and honorifics are bestowed, among many
other practices that encourage our all-male leadership to think they are
special and set apart in some way. The Pope may indeed be staking his entire
legacy on his strong conviction that the real problem in our church is not
homosexuality as some have suggested (and which every rational mental health
professional has dismissed as attacking a straw man), but rather clerical privilege.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "garamond"; font-size: 12.0pt;">So, let’s all pray for (as my 9-year-old calls them) “the boys
in the funny hats” in Rome, shall we? That the Spirit of God show itself mightily
at this February gathering and grace our leaders with some clarity on what
steps to take to keep our most treasured gift from God safe: our children.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "garamond"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Send your Crazy Catholic Question to Lisa Brown
at </span><a href="mailto:dre@ctredeemer.org"><span style="color: black; font-family: "garamond"; font-size: 12.0pt;">dre@ctredeemer.org</span></a><span style="color: black; font-family: "garamond"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> or read
past columns at </span><span style="color: black; font-family: "garamond"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><a href="http://www.crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com/">www.crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com</a></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3247313846607562358.post-91517136459373376382018-12-29T09:26:00.000-05:002019-09-10T00:30:57.533-04:00Crazy Catholic Question #161 - Holy Family<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "garamond";">On this Feast of the Holy Family, my
family feels anything but. That is all. Care to comment?<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "garamond";">My sister
gave me a Christmas card this year that said (front) “Tis the season, full of
good friends, cozy fires, delicious treats, heartburn, bankruptcy, and bursts
of extreme anger. (inside) Let’s get through this together.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "garamond";">The holidays
are indeed “upon us,” as we often say and sometimes they can feel pretty heavy.
Especially when are face-to-face with our slightly more distant relatives who
often hold religious or political views different than our own. Did someone say
holiday cheer? Yes, some more please!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "garamond";">Most of us
think of Mary, Jesus and Joseph when we think of a “Holy” family, especially
during this Christmas season, as is appropriate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is unlikely that in the wake of this week
of non-stop holiday gatherings, still a bit weary from this intense season of
interaction, that “holy” would be the first word to roll off our tongues when
talking about our families.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "garamond";">Our families are much too messy, dysfunctional and quirky to be
truly thought of as “holy” yet our tradition invites us to take a deeper look. Many
of our family gatherings mimic this scene (my own little riff on a piece from
Rolheiser). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "garamond";">The family is home for Christmas, but your spouse is in a sulk,
you are fighting tiredness and anger, the little ones are hopped up on red pop
and tearing around the house breaking things, your teenager is restless, doesn’t
want to be there and you are afraid her eyes might stay permanently rolled back
into her head if she is forced to stay. Your Uncle Joe persists in telling
loud, off color jokes despite your begging him not to. His wife, Aunt Betty,
embarassed, is knitting a sweater for her cat, ferociously. Everyone else is
either watching reality television or are lost in their devices and too lazy or
selfish to help you prepare the dinner. Old wounds raise their ugly heads and
new wounds are created, reminders of past stupidities and infidelities are peppered
into the awkward conversations throughout the day, but, somehow, after all the
dishes are done and the house is quiet, you know that something sacred has
happened. Despite everything that has been wrong and still is wrong, we were
together – and God was present in that togetherness.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "garamond";">Buckminster
Fuller once said, “God is a verb, not a noun”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>‘God is not, first of all, a formula, a dogma, a creedal statement or a
set of ethical standards that demand our assent. Rather, God is the love, the
glue that is in between each of us and holds us together. God is the verb, the
action between us and those we love, the bond of relationship.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All that connects us...<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "garamond";">1 John 4:16
reads “God is love and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in
them.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My guess is that this kind of love – the very
“stuff of God” -<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>is not the easy,
perfect, idyllic kind of love we see in Hallmark movies and romance novels, but
rather is the hearty variety of love that keeps a couple married for decades
and families together through sickness, financial troubles and other of life’s
woes…the kind of love that kept Jesus loving and forgiving us even when we spat
in his face. Perhaps we are not far from the truth if this scripture were to read
“God is community, family, parish, friendship, hospitality, forgiveness and
whoever abides in these, abides in God..and God in them.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "garamond";">The very last
sentence that Thomas Merton spoke in this world, according to the testimony of
one of his closest companions, was “What we are asked to do today is not so
much to speak about Christ as to let him live in us so that people may find him
by feeling how he lives in us.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "garamond";">Send your
Crazy Catholic Question to Lisa Brown at </span><a href="mailto:dre@ctredeemer.org"><span style="color: black; font-family: "garamond";">dre@ctredeemer.org</span></a><span style="color: black; font-family: "garamond";"> or read past columns at </span><span style="color: black; font-family: "garamond";"><a href="http://www.crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com/">www.crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com</a></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3247313846607562358.post-9939348852895444222018-12-22T09:25:00.000-05:002019-12-31T16:14:42.648-05:00Crazy Catholic Question #160 - Fire and Incarnation<!--[if !mso]>
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</w:wrap></v:imagedata></v:shape><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "garamond"; font-size: 11.5pt;">I know that we celebrate “the incarnation”
each year at Christmas, but what does that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">mean</i>?<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "garamond"; font-size: 11.5pt;">From time to time, we all experience BIG
events in our lives that change things - that change everything. We might call
them “Before-and-After” moments, such as: before the illness, after graduation,
after Mom died or before we had children. These moments are game changers that
make us reevaluate everything we have known up to this point through the lens
of this one, new, big life event.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "garamond"; font-size: 11.5pt;">One of my own most significant Before/After
life events is what my family simply calls “the fire.” We had a defective dryer
that sparked a fire in our home and in the blink of an eye we found ourselves
in a hotel room at 3AM, two days before Christmas, smelling of smoke without a
change of clothes, a toothbrush or a single wrapped gift for our girls - at the
time ages 8, 5, & 1 years old. We left our soot-covered, flooded house in
such haste that our eldest daughter had only one boot on her feet.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "garamond"; font-size: 11.5pt;">Like a mighty rushing wind our church family
blew in at this time of crisis and gave us hope. The Christmas gifts for the
kids poured in. Endless bags of clothes. All the cards, emails, prayers and
kind words were an outpouring of the Holy Spirit that genuinely healed us. Within
24 hours we had a decorated tree and a hotel room full of wrapped presents for
the girls to open on Christmas morning.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "garamond"; font-size: 11.5pt;">Our church community (made up of many people I
didn’t even know personally) did for us what no one person, no one family,
could have ever done. What no insurance company could ever provide. Every word,
every gift, every hug embodied God for us. Embodied love for us. For me, this
experience is not only Before/After “the fire” but also Before/After I realized
the significance of “being church” - a great moment of clarity of the
tremendous power that we – as a collective – hold and wield as the body of
Christ incarnate; the generous, restorative presence of God (as the song goes,
♫ Christ has no body now but yours ♫). My kids may not know the creed quite
yet, but they will never forget that experience of church, and for that I am
deeply grateful.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "garamond"; font-size: 11.5pt;">My Dad always used to say “Hang your hat
somewhere, daughter!” And I think it’s because, through his own experience of
church, he had learned that <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">our togetherness
is the greatest remedy for our suffering</b>. The early church did as a
collective what no one person or one family could do. They understood that a
non-negotiable, essential aspect of the gospel was insuring that everyone had their
most basic needs met, that church wasn’t a building or the magisterium (leaders,
bishops, etc.) or even a set of beliefs that you talked AT people - but rather church
is a community of believers who share a way of life rooted in the hope and
vision of Jesus. The church is simply people who believe that compassion can
change the world and who know that our togetherness, our kinship, is the best
medicine for all that fills us with fear. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "garamond"; font-size: 11.5pt;">So when Jesus said that he would be present
when 2 or 3 gathered, it was not because he was some kind of diva who needed a
minimum audience to show up (Bolz-Weber) Rather when 2 or 3 are gathered together in genuine
care for one another, Jesus is discovered in what happens among us. Jesus said others
will know we are his disciples not by how we love God but rather by the way we
love one another. God is not the object of love. God IS the love that exists among
us; “the stuff” that holds us together. Emmanuel. God with us. Incarnate.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "garamond"; font-size: 11.5pt;">Send your Crazy Catholic Question to Lisa
Brown at </span><a href="mailto:dre@ctredeemer.org"><span style="color: black; font-family: "garamond"; font-size: 11.5pt;">dre@ctredeemer.org</span></a><span style="color: black; font-family: "garamond"; font-size: 11.5pt;"> or read past columns
at </span><a href="http://www.crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com/"><span style="color: black; font-family: "garamond"; font-size: 11.5pt;">www.crazycatholicquestions.blogspot.com</span></a><span style="color: black; font-family: "garamond"; font-size: 11.5pt;">.</span></div>
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