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June 28th, 2011
We go as representatives of our local churches to share the gifts we
have. We are in solidarity with the church that sends us and have a
commitment to return and share the gifts and riches which we have
received. We see that we are part of a church which is a human
institution, struggling to respond to its mission, and ever in need
of growth and renewal. Spirit and Lifestyle
This passage of Spirit and Lifestyle is particularly fitting today. I
have returned from nine days in the Atlantic province of New
Brunswick. What took me there was first of all Edwina's retreat and
keynote lecture at the assembly of the Catholic Network for Women's
Equality in NB's capital city of Fredericton. CNWE is spread around
Canada with a few members from the USA and Europe. It's yahoo group
is very interactive. It felt good to put a face and real live person
to the names I recognized. The organization and hospitality was
marvelous - truly a wonderful reunion. And Edwina was wonderful! We
look forward to hearing from her again just two weeks from now at the
VMM Assembly.
The week before the CNWE meeting, I attended a Road Scholar
excursion (used to be called Elderhostel) in Saint Martins on the Bay
of Fundy. A wonderful group of 16 USA participants (TN, GA, NJ, CA,
NY, NC, CT, FL) and me, the token Canadian! We went back millions of
years in geological history in our exploration of the power of the
Fundy tides. The "small" book I had chosen to read during the long
flights, The Christian Future and the Fate of the Earth by Thomas
Berry, was just perfect for our wonderful earth adventure and for
Edwina's keynote address. Today, i give you a few lines from Thomas
Berry's "Christian Cosmology" published in Origins, September 26,
1985.
"To understand planet Earth and our intimate relationship with it, we
need to know the great story of Earth and of the universe that
brought it and ourselves into being.... This story provides the basis
for our sense of reality and value .... There is no moment of
transition from the material to the psychic or the spiritual. The
sequence of development is the progressive articulation of the more
spiritual and numinous aspects of the process.... Earth has a
privileged role as the planet whereon life is born with all those
special characteristics we find in Earth's living forms. The unity of
the Earth process is especially clear. It is bound together in such a
way that every geological, biological, and human component of the
Earth community is intimately present to every other component of
that community. Whatever happens to any member affects every other
member of the community. Here we can see how precious Earth is as the
only living planet that we know, how profoundly it reveals mysteries
of the divine, how carefully it should be tended, how great an evil
it is to damage its basic life systems, to ruin its beauty, to
plunder its resources. For these things to be done by Christians or
without significant Christian protest is a scandal of primary order
of magnitude....
"The human is by definition that being in whom the universe reflects
on and celebrates itself in conscious self-awareness.... humans
depend on the natural world for every aspect of their intellectual
insight, spiritual development, imaginative creativity, and emotional
sensitivity.... The ultimate created value cannot be found be found
in any one part of the universe, but only in the collective
whole.... The universe itself can be understood as the primary
revelation of the divine....
"This integral universe, then, constitutes the sacred community par
excellence and needs to be recognized as such in Christian thought.
This realization is the basic reasons for Christian concern for what
is outside itself. The Christian community needs both to assimilate
the rest of reality and to be assimilated by the rest of reality, by
the human community, the Earth community, and the universe community,
in accord with Saint Paul's expression of the divine being "all in
all" (1Corinthians 15:28).
Cecily
June 21, 2011
Our work entails human relationship, working and growing together to
build a more humane and loving world, filled with the Spirit of God
Who sends us. We are aware that through our service, we receive far
more than we are able to give. We realize that we are enriched by our
encounter with people of other cultures and beliefs. We come to
discover that we too are poor in many ways. Spirit and Lifestyle
I am off tomorrow morning to New Brunswick so I'm sending this
reflection early. An Edmonton writer, Stephen Berg, understands these
words. He writes: "Here it seems to me that responsibility to care
becomes a personal necessity, not only for my own well-being, but
also for the life, health and breath of those around me. And the
ripple is that every act of kindness reveals more of God. God is
where we extend a hand. ... Could it be that the reality of
overwhelming suffering is overcome, at least partially, by simple
acts of mercy? And could it be that here is where God dwells?
"If so, it turns out, Divine presence is our responsibility - God is
whispered among us by way of human hospitality and compassion. To
paraphrase Miester Eckhart, "Every gentle act gives birth to God and
expands God's being... in the shadowy light of our moving toward one
another, slowly, hope is restored, increasingly, humanity is healed -
God among us as mercy."
Cecily
June 14, 2011
What we have to offer is what we have been freely given. We live with
the people. We work with the people. We rejoice with the people. We
become part of the people. Our sharing becomes a journey we walk
together towards liberation, community and a reaching out together
for growth and fulfillment. We do not impose ourselves or our way of
doing things. We are available, rather, to go wherever we are invited
in the world, aware, at the same time, that we ourselves are
challenged to grow through receiving and learning from those to whom
we serve. Spirit and Lifestyle
Reread these words again. Not one of us is excluded from those
repeated "We." It doesn't matter who we are, where we live, how old
we are or how young, what languages we speak, what education we have.
It's an invitation, a challenge each of us receives with each new day
that we given.
Last Friday, I attended a noon time women ( men were invited but they
didn't show up) sharing at St. Stephen's College on the U of A
campus. It was a lunch time conversation with two courageous women:
Lorraine Muwuya from Zimbabwe and Eness Chiwaya from Zambia. It was
held by phone and by Skype and hosted by two Canadian women who were
visitors to these two communities last November.
Lorraine is 32, a mother of five - four biological and one adopted.
She and her two younger brothers were raised by their grandmother but
supported by their mother who worked in the city. When Lorraine's
mother died, she and her two brothers were literally abandoned to
the streets. Grandmother's sons threw them out - "there was no room
for us as our mother was no more." After a desperate time on the
streets, Lorraine pleaded with her grandmother who told her: "I have
a piece of land and no-one gives me orders - go and stay there."
Lorraine found a job on neighboring farms, worked in the fields
weeding and harvesting, enabling her to have food on the table for
herself and her brothers. After she married she became connected with
the Kufunda Learning Village and with a community of women who have a
dream to create a space where women champion each other; heal while
healing others; help other women; work together on more profound
issues where the sacredness of women is there and sensed.
The Canadian woman who visited Kufunda Learning Village was greeted
by Lorraine with the words: "I invite you to be here." Isn't that a
profound invitation? Isn't that the invitation God makes us each day?
"I invite you to be here." In Lorraine's Skype conversation she said
words I jotted: "Offer what you have, ask for what you need," a need
to "help live while I am alive" - I understood that to mean that
being "alive" is not as important as "living" and creating "living"
situations for others; "understanding who I am, trusting myself ...
change, reaching, courage, confidence, goals, believing."
Eness is older - 63 - an active elder in the local Mindolo
congregation. She walks 45 minutes to and from the church each
Sunday. Eness is a widow whose husband was killed in a mining
accident more than 24 years ago. At this time her oldest child was 15
years of age and her youngest was only one. She was left to raise her
seven children - 2 daughters and 5 sons, on her own. She made the 12-
hour trip to Tanzania every two or three weeks to purchase second-
hand clothes to sell. She continues to purchase second-hand clothes
to support 4 grandchildren who are double orphans. The children are
HIV-negative but their parents, Eness' two daughters and their
spouses, died of HIV. Two of her four sons are HIV positive. In 2002,
she took training as a Home Based Care Giver and now works with a
group of 30 or more workers who visit people ill at home, many with
TB and HIV. She belongs to a group of 10 grandmothers who would like
to start a second group of grandmothers who would work together and
support one another.
When asked over the phone where she gets her strength, Enness
replied: My strength comes from God. She wants to have her
grandchidren educated right through university. I kept hearing the
word "college" and thought it was like in Latin American settings
where "college" simply means private elementary or secondary
education. In Zambia, it means university and that is the goal of
Eness and these grandmothers.
"We" are called. "We" are invited. "We" are available.
Cecily
June 6, 2011
We are invited to be fully and actively involved in all areas of
human activity and development: education, medicine, agriculture,
craftwork and building. We are the carpenters, the catechists, the
nurses, the community builders, the doctors and the farmers. These
are the skills with which we have been blessed, the talents which we
have received. We are not to bury them, but to freely share them, so
that people might live with dignity and be helped to reach their full
human potential. It is not a matter of charity or good deeds. It is a
basic Christian obligation to justice. - Spirit and Lifestyle
On May 31, the feast of the Visitation of Mary (Luke 1.39-56) is
celebrated - it is a feast that has been part of the Roman liturgy
since the 8th century. It's a wonderful missionary feast so well
described in today's section of Spirit and Lifestyle. We give freely
what we have because these are gifts we have freely received and
sharing them is a basic Christian obligation to justice. The reading
from Luke contains Mary's song - the Magnificat - my soul magnifies
the Lord! A beautiful prayer used each day in divine office. When
Dawn and I were in Coban, the capital city of the department of Alta
Verapaz, we stayed with the Benedictine sisters. It was always
moving, at the end of the evening prayer, to stand and face the large
painting of Mary and sing her song.
On May 31, the liturgy contained a second reading as occurs on
special feasts. It is from Romans 12.9-16:
Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good;
love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing
honour. Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord.
Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer.
Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to
strangers. Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse
them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live
in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with
the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are.
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