Anthony de Mello, SJ

I was browsing through a bookstore tonight and came across a fascinating little book about reflections on love. Usually, if there’s a book I find interesting, I’ll go borrow it from the public library; however, this time I found myself purchasing the book, entitled The Way to Love. The author…

…grapples with the ultimate question of love. In thirty-one meditations, he implores his readers with his usual pithiness to break through illusion, the great obstacle to love. “Love springs from awareness,” [the author] insists, saying that it is only when we see others as they are that we can begin to really love. But not only must we seek to see others with clarity, we must examine ourselves without misconception. The task, however, is not easy. “The most painful act,” [the author] says, “is the act of seeing. But in that act of seeing that love is born.”

Who is the author of this intriguing book? It is Anthony de Mello, a catholic priest.

Here’s a sample of his writing style, excerpted from his website.

So if you stop to think, you would see that there’s nothing to be very proud of after all. What does this do to your relationship with people? What are you complaining about? A young man came to complain that his girlfriend had let him down, that she had played false. What are you complaining about? Did you expect any better? Expect the worst, you’re dealing with selfish people. You’re the idiot — you glorified her, didn’t you? You thought she was a princess, you thought people were nice. They’re not! They’re not nice. They’re as bad as you are — bad, you understand? They’re asleep like you. And what do you think they are going to seek? Their own self-interest, exactly like you. No difference. Can you imagine how liberating it is that you’ll never be disillusioned again, never be disappointed again? You’ll never feel let down again. Never feel rejected. Want to wake up? You want happiness? You want freedom? Here it is: Drop your false ideas. See through people. If you see through yourself, you will see through everyone. Then you will love them. Otherwise you spend the whole time grappling with your wrong notions of them, with your illusions that are constantly crashing against reality.

Read the rest of this article entitled Seeing People As They Are – And Not As I Wish Them To Be.

the New Age rant

The current popularity of yoga certainly has stimulated interest in contrasting New Age spirituality with Christianity. The following excerpts are taken from the Vatican’s official website, in an article entitled Jesus Christ the Bearer of Life: a Christian Reflection on the “New Age”.

_* Is God a being with whom we have a relationship or something to be used or a force to be harnessed?

The New Age concept of God is rather diffuse, whereas the Christian concept is a very clear one. The New Age god is an impersonal energy, really a particular extension or component of the cosmos; god in this sense is the life-force or soul of the world. Divinity is to be found in every being, in a gradation “from the lowest crystal of the mineral world up to and beyond the Galactic God himself, about Whom we can say nothing at all. This is not a man but a Great Consciousness”. In some “classic” New Age writings, it is clear that human beings are meant to think of themselves as gods: this is more fully developed in some people than in others. God is no longer to be sought beyond the world, but deep within myself. Even when “God” is something outside myself, it is there to be manipulated.

This is very different from the Christian understanding of God as the maker of heaven and earth and the source of all personal life. God is in himself personal, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, who created the universe in order to share the communion of his life with creaturely persons. “God, who ‘dwells in unapprochable light’, wants to communicate his own divine life to the men he freely created, in order to adopt them as his sons in his only-begotten Son. By revealing himself God wishes to make them capable of responding to him, and of knowing him, and of loving him far beyond their own natural capacity”. God is not identified with the Life-principle understood as the “Spirit” or “basic energy” of the cosmos, but is that love which is absolutely different from the world, and yet creatively present in everything, and leading human beings to salvation.

_* Do we invent truth or do we embrace it?

New Age truth is about good vibrations, cosmic correspondences, harmony and ecstasy, in general pleasant experiences. It is a matter of finding one’s own truth in accordance with the feel- good factor. Evaluating religion and ethical questions is obviously relative to one’s own feelings and experiences.

Jesus Christ is presented in Christian teaching as “The Way, the Truth and the Life” (Jn 14.6). His followers are asked to open their whole lives to him and to his values, in other words to an objective set of requirements which are part of an objective reality ultimately knowable by all.

_* Prayer and meditation: are we talking to ourselves or to God?

The tendency to confuse psychology and spirituality makes it hard not to insist that many of the meditation techniques now used are not prayer. They are often a good preparation for prayer, but no more, even if they lead to a more pleasant state of mind or bodily comfort. The experiences involved are genuinely intense, but to remain at this level is to remain alone, not yet in the presence of the other. The achievement of silence can confront us with emptiness, rather than the silence of contemplating the beloved. It is also true that techniques for going deeper into one’s own soul are ultimately an appeal to one’s own ability to reach the divine, or even to become divine: if they forget God’s search for the human heart they are still not Christian prayer. Even when it is seen as a link with the Universal Energy, “such an easy ‘relationship’ with God, where God’s function is seen as supplying all our needs, shows the selfishness at the heart of this New Age”.

New Age practices are not really prayer, in that they are generally a question of introspection or fusion with cosmic energy, as opposed to the double orientation of Christian prayer, which involves introspection but is essentially also a meeting with God. Far from being a merely human effort, Christian mysticism is essentially a dialogue which “implies an attitude of conversion, a flight from ‘self’ to the ‘you’ of God”.“The Christian, even when he is alone and prays in secret, he is conscious that he always prays for the good of the Church in union with Christ, in the Holy Spirit and together with all the saints”.

Live coverage of the US Papal visit!

http://www.ewtn.com/USPapalVisit08/watch/index.asp

Pope speaks about religious sister who was killed by Satanists

From the Catholic News Agency

Vatican City, Apr 9, 2008 / 10:28 am (CNA).- Today at the end of the general audience in St. Peter’s Square, Pope Benedict spoke to a group of nuns and lay people, who were present to honor the memory of Sr. Maria Laura Mainetti, a religious sister who was killed by Satanists.

That Italian sister, said the Holy Father, “with a total giving of self, sacrificed her life while praying for those who were attacking her”.

The murder of Sr. Maria Laura happened during the night of June 6-7, 2000 in the small town of Chiavenna, Italy. The sister was stabbed to death by three girls, two of whom were 17, while the third was 16.

Sister Maria Laura was well known in the small town she lived in for her social and charitable commitment to young dispossessed and poor people. Consequently, the three girls were able to draw her into an ambush by saying that a pregnant girl was in serious need of her help.

After luring Sr. Maria Laura to their ambush, the girls stabbed the sister to death as a sacrifice to Satan. As Sr. Maria Laura died, she found the strength to pray for her killers and forgive them.

Police investigators discovered the satanic plot and arrested the three girls 22 days after the sister’s murder.

The Congregation for the Causes of Saints recently recognized the death of the religious as martyrdom, thus opening the way to her beatification.

Pope on YouTube

Pope Benedict’s message to the USA before his visit to America

the will to act

One of the most memorable scenes from the 2005 movie Batman Begins showed a young Bruce Wayne training with his mentor. They had a conversation that went like this:

Mentor: Your parents death was not your fault, it was your father’s. Anger does not change the fact that your father failed to act.
Bruce: The man had a gun.
Mentor: Would that stop you?
Bruce: I’ve had training…
Mentor: Training is nothing, the will is everything… the will to act.

There are moments in life we all regret, where we know that if only we had had the will act, that then our lives may have turned out differently. One of my friends studying to become a priest told me last night that most everything that happens in life is God’s intent, but yet we still have free will. This somewhat puzzled me since how is it that God can intend for events to happen, yet we can still have influence on our own futures? I think one way of looking at it is like this: God is like a helicopter pilot that can see above a highway that winds through mountains. He can see where the cars are going, but the drivers in those cars can’t see what’s beyond the mountains obscuring the winding path.

From This Rock Magazine:

Q: If God knows today what I will do tomorrow, what happens to my free will?

A: Nothing at all. God’s foreknowledge of something isn’t the same as pre-ordaining it. In fact, it isn’t really foreknowledge. What we call God’s foreknowledge is merely knowledge of what is future for us. From the divine point of view, it’s knowledge of the present. Remember, unlike us, God is outside of time. His existence isn’t divvied up into compartments known as past, present, and future. He simply is. As a result, God sees what is past, present, and future for us as one grand Now and understands how it all fits together.

Think of it this way. You’re traveling through the mountains along winding roads. You don’t know what’s ahead. A helicopter flies overhead. From his vantage point, the pilot sees miles beyond you. He knows where you’ve been, where you are now, and where you’re going.

God is like the helicopter pilot. He sees the whole road of life, while we see only immediately ahead of us. His knowledge of where we’re ultimately headed in no way diminishes our freedom.

Here’s that scene from Batman Begins that I’m talking about.

more on why confession is a good thing

The following is an excerpt from Fr. John Speekman’s blog:

If we knew the doctor could not help us, or was going to scream abuse at us for getting sick, or was going to say, ‘Get out of my office, your disease disgusts me!’ would we bother going to see him? Would we bother telling him where it hurts? Of course not. It would be a waste of time. But when we trust the doctor we tell him everything:

• What’s the problem? I have this itch. How long have you had it? Two weeks. Where is it? Under my arm. Which arm? My left arm. Show me. Have you been in the garden recently? Yes, we’ve just moved in to a new house. Ah ha! I think you’ve been bitten by something. Try this for 7 days and come back if it doesn’t clear up and we’ll have a further look. Thank you, Doctor!

Now I will interrupt myself and ask you at this point: Can Jesus cure spider bites? Yes? Of course he can. So why does he send us to a doctor? Why all this messing around? Why can’t we just kneel down beside our bed, say a prayer of petition, and have Jesus cure our spider bite? Why does he send us to the doctor?

Why did Moses have to lead the people out of Egypt? Couldn’t God have done that himself?

Why did Moses have to stretch out his hand and hold the staff over the waters of the Red Sea before God parted the waters?

Why did he have to strike the rock with his staff before God let the water come out of the rock?

When Jesus cured the ten lepers why did he command them: Go and show yourselves to the priest?

The answer to all these questions is the same as the answer to the question – Why do we have to confess our sins to a priest?

We let the priest baptise us, confirm us, bring the Body and Blood of Jesus onto the altar at Mass and give it to us in Holy Communion, marry us, and anoint us, but many of us won’t let him forgive our sins. We invent weak excuses to justify our behaviour. How sad!

We all know that before we can be cured we have to identify the disease – and so it is for our soul.

Maybe for some this is the scariest part. Looking at what they have done – admitting that this is their sin.

• I’ve had an abortion, or maybe two or three … I’ve been unfaithful to my wife, my husband … I’ve slept with my boyfriend … I’ve committed homosexual acts … I’ve stolen money … I’ve sexually interfered with someone … I’ve had a vasectomy, or a tubal ligation, or I’m on the pill… I murdered someone’s good name … I refuse to forgive my mother, my father, or someone else … I’ve taken drugs … I’ve spent all our money on gambling …

Yes, it’s hard to admit our sins; let’s not pretend about this, we need a special grace, a special simple humility and trust.

why confession is a good thing

From the White Around the Collar blog:

Here is a clip from ER that shows that when it comes right down to it and someone is knocking on death’s door they really, really want to know that they are forgiven. No amount of pius platitudes or feel good religion can compare to hearing a priest say “I absolve you of your sins in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

Jews, Catholics, and Seinfeld

I just saw Seinfeld episode #140 “The Fatigues” where Elaine promotes the mail sorter to an executive position, and Kramer gets Frank Costanza to cook for a Jewish singles night. What was really interesting, and ironic, about the show was the scene at the Jewish singles night. If one looked carefully at what was adorning the walls of that scene, one would have noticed:

• a couple crucifixes (the cross with the human figure of Christ on it)
• a portrait of Pope John Paul II
• an image of the coat of arms of the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal benefit society

Those three items above are blatantly clear references to Catholicism, but at a Jewish event? Either the set decorators didn’t do enough research, or else they simply wanted to have a little fun! Clever.

Afterthought: I just realized part of the plot was Kramer choosing to have the Jewish singles night at Frank’s Knights of Columbus hall.  Oh well, if one didn’t know that, the irony of the whole thing is still quite interesting!

Ian Hunter: Easter and the triumph of hope over despair

From the National Post
22 March 2008
by Ian Hunter

Easter Sunday is the holiest day in the Christian calendar, representing the triumph of hope over despair, of life over death.

As it happens, two recent and unrelated events have called public attention to hope, hope being one of the three theological virtues — faith and love the other two.

First, U. S. Senator Barack Obama has made hope a central theme (along with “change”) of his campaign for the presidential nomination.
Second, Pope Benedict XVI made hope the subject of his most recent encyclical (Spe Salvi), released just before Christmas.

I think it is safe to predict that the Pope’s encyclical will be pondered long after Barack Obama’s campaign.

The Pope begins by reminding readers that the greatest Christian evangelist, St. Paul, told the Romans “you are saved by hope” (Romans 8:24). Hope is a gift from God, says the Pope, a trustworthy gift, a gift that enables men and women to survive in arduous, uncertain times.

Hope is a key word in Scripture — in fact, in scripture it is often used interchangeably with faith. So to have hope, or to have faith, is to have received a divine gift. St. Paul told the church at Ephesus that before their encounter with Christ they were “without hope,” or, as Pope Benedict expresses it “in a dark world facing a dark future.” But the light of Christ illuminates the darkness and assures that they have a future. Oh, true, much of that future remains hidden; “it is not that [Christians] know the details of what awaits them,” the Pope writes, “but they know in general terms that their life will not end in emptiness.”

To come to know God, says Pope Benedict, is to encounter hope. The earliest Christians — for the most part poor people, uneducated and oppressed — had nothing to hope for, apart from the resurrection of Jesus. What they had was the assurance, often received directly from the apostles who had been there and seen it, that the tomb that once contained the body of Jesus was empty. That was Christian hope, and armed with that hope this ragtag brigade turned the world upside down with a crazy allegiance to another King, an upside-down King, this Jesus, the carpenter’s son from Nazareth.

So for the early Christians hope was not a “not yet” kind of hope, rather an “already happened” hope. The Pope explains how the Catholic understanding of hope provides “even now something of the reality that we are waiting for, and this present reality constitutes for us a ‘proof’ of things that are still not seen.”

What is the “present reality” of Christian hope?

Well, God’s Church — universal, apostolic, tracing its origin to Christ’s own words and to its first Primate, Peter. And the Eucharist, by which we come to share in Christ’s body and blood. And the peace of Christ, not that peace which the politician on the campaign trail purports to offer, but rather a peace that passes understanding.

In the section of the encyclical entitled “The True Shape of Christian Hope,” Pope Benedict draws a distinction between the material and the ethical realms of life. In the material realm, he says, we observe “continuous progress towards an ever greater mastery of nature.” But no comparable mastery can occur in the ethical realm because “man’s freedom is always new and he must always make his decisions anew.” Therefore, “the moral well-being of the world can never be guaranteed”; man’s earthy hopes, and his freedoms, always remain fragile and conditional.

Senator Barack Obama holds out the prospect of hope to an American electorate that is cynical about politicians, dispirited by current prospects, and uncertain about the future. Pope Benedict, by contrast, offers a hope that Christians for two millennia have tested in their daily lives, however perilous or oppressive their personal circumstances might be.

The essence of Christian hope was best summed up in a few words when Jesus said: “In this world, you will have tribulation. Be of good cheer. I have overcome the world.”

Catholic Christians have double cause for rejoicing: in hope, and in having in Pope Benedict someone who can express that hope with such conviction, eloquence, and humility.

— Ian Hunter is Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Law at Western University.

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