He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly (Luke 1:52)

The world contains injustice. Some of it is very difficult to bear. People of faith cry out for some relief – for justice. The question can and should be put to each of us: ‘What are you doing to help?’ Our faith is not in a ‘magical God’ who ‘fixes everything’ but much closer to that described by Teresa of Avila, Doctor of the Church who said that we are ‘God’s heart and hands’.

Young people thirst for justice. Working with young people, as you do, you already know that. Our role is to remind young people that when they see injustice, they are not powerless. Using Cardijn’s ‘ see-judge-act’ tool (or something similar) like-minded people of faith can gather and reflect upon a situation in the light of the scriptures and Church teaching. Armed with this they can act as a force for good, doing their part to help this scripture passage become a reality.

Have a great week!
Patrick

Shared with permission from my friend and author, Brian Doyle

Do we take them for granted? Yes, we take them for granted. We nod to them in friendly fashion when we see them here and there, and then we forge ahead to the bank or the bakery, and we do not stop for a long moment to consider that this quiet woman swore to devote her entire life to light and love and mercy and epiphany and kindness and tenderness and the battle against arrogance and greed and cruelty and lies and violence. Probably she made that vow when she was all of eighteen or twenty or twenty-two, and she kept that vow ever since, in a world where vows are shattered so often that you can see the shards in the street like slush in the gutter.

These women are the objects of amusement and derision on stage and screen. They are quite often a cliché or a trope in current culture. They are quite often said to be collectively in precipitate decline. Every story about them, few as such stories are, mentions their average age of seventy or so, and their wan trickle of new recruits, and the fact that fifty years ago there were three times as many of them in America as there are today. No stories about them ever note that collectively they donated their creative and diligent labor to Catholic education for two hundred years without being paid a penny. No stories about them note that they arguably had a greater effect for good on millions of American Catholic children than priests and brothers and bishops and cardinals ever did.

For every one who is remembered as mean and testy and stern and quick to anger there are a hundred who were very much like aunts and grandmothers to children whose home lives were scarred and painful and dark and fearful and lonely. For every one pilloried on stage and screen there were a hundred who gently quietly tenderly showered attentiveness and witness and love and empathy on the children in her care. For every one remembered as hard and cold in class there were a hundred who served as nurses and cooks and managers of the shelter, the food bank, the clothing drive, the fundraiser, the fifth-grade basketball team, the wake and funeral of a fellow pilgrim on the road to light. They ran schools, they counseled those who asked the loan of their considerable wisdom, they ran hospitals and clinics and hospices, they wrote lovely books and columns and essays and poems and songs, they succored those who were ill and imprisoned and crushed by despair, they ran libraries and monasteries and companies and colleges and museums, they did uncountable other things small and huge that no one can account but the Chief Accountant, who must often look upon them with unimaginable tenderness and pride and gratitude.

Do we take them for granted? Yes, we do. We always have. By rights we ought to pause once a day at least, every one of us who speaks and sings Catholicism, and bow our heads, and in the silence of our hearts thank the fifty thousand American nuns brilliantly at work today, and the hundreds of thousands who worked so hard for love and light during their lives and then went home to the Love itself. They were and are extraordinary women. They are beacons and pillars and exemplars and walking enfleshed evidence of what we say we believe when we say that we are Catholic. If you say that you are Catholic then you believe that light will defeat darkness, hope defeat despair, love defeat the sneer of hate; and when your belief wavers, when you wonder if your faith is foolish, I might suggest that you do as I do, and seek out a nun, and gaze in wonder at a living promise, a woman who gave her whole life to the idea that Christ was absolutely right. And if you are like me you will then wander away refreshed and restored and once again filled with a wild and irrepressible faith.

Brian Doyle

You shall not covet your neighbour’s house; you shall not covet your neighbour’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbour. (Ex 20:17)

’The grass is always greener…’ seems to be a common human frailty. It also appears to be the central premise of much advertising! There are a number of forces at work in this passage. One is ‘it’s not yours’, so let it go. This passage encourages us not to objectify people – which is always a path of pain for all concerned. Another force at work is the way that the wanting has an effect on us – it consumes and diminishes us.

Young people can fall into the trap of wanting what others have, rather than having a sense of ‘enough’. Oscar Romero said it well: “Aspire not to have more, but to be more”. This is wise advice that we should share with the young people in our care.

Have a great week!
Patrick

You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour. (Ex 20:16)

While other commandments may not be broken, this one is being smashed, sadly. If this commandment was adhered to, it feels like there would be no political debate which descends into ‘ad hominem’ point-scoring. Much of what is written/said on social media whether it is ‘joking’ or not seems to play free with the truth whether it is about celebrities or others. In such a milieu, who can be taken at face value? If lying is de rigour, who is trustworthy?

This is an opportunity to promote empathy – do to others what you would have done to you. There is an expression: ’the person who throws mud loses ground’. It is important for the young people in our care to realise that running others down is likely to bounce back on them – ruining their reputation.

Have a great week!
Patrick

You shall not steal. (Ex 20:15)

There are few of us who would shoplift or rob a bank or be involved in taking someone else’s money through cyber-crime. One definition of stealing is ’to claim as yours what in fact belongs to someone else’. Do I use company supplies for personal use? Do I claim someone else’s idea as mine? I don’t think we should lose any sleep over one staple or one paper clip – neither should we be blasé.

A former principal of mine once said, ‘if you take care of the little things, the big things will take care of themselves’. In this case, young people need to be reminded that even if it’s 50 cents, it’s the principle behind it, not the amount, that is important. Plagiarism is a related issue. Taking someone else’s ideas as your own is cheating yourself out of learning as much as it is cheating the true author.

Have a great week…and term!
Patrick

Have you ever seen waves?

Really seen them?

On a bright clear morning

Walking our dogs with my soul mate

I was struck

By their layers

We know that waves come into the shore.

Seen that.

Get that.

But on this peaceful day

There were so many

Waves

Of different types and sizes.

Waves within waves within waves.

The prevailing swell

Would gather all this up

Rippling the surface

Of this panoply of waves

Like a blanket flows

When shaken to make a bed.

A physicist’s delight:

The waves would

Bounce and refract

Around obstructions.

Moving in four different directions

Including bouncing back out

From the shore.

There are so many layers

To God’s grandeur.

I was graced

To glimpse another

On this bright morning.

I don’t doubt

That my ability to see

Comes, in part,

From the wholeness

I feel

When I’m with my love

You shall not commit adultery. (Ex 20:14)

It is easy to sit in judgement on the actions of others. The phrase ‘it takes two to tango’ seems apt – thus there are causes and/or faults on both sides. There is a fine line between appreciating the human form – made in God’s image – and ‘remaining too long’ and that turning into lust. Adultery takes humans away from right relationships.

Since we are made in the image of our trinitarian God, we are made for relationship. Being a teenager can be difficult and, at times, somewhat overwhelming. Young people must be encouraged to think of themselves, including their sexual urges, as good – intended by God who loved them into life. Through our words and the witness of our lives we must provide examples to the young people in our care of right relationship – where we freely give ourselves in love to another and it is reciprocated. This is the place of wholeness – the place where love grows. It is in this context that we share all of ourselves and experience sacrament – since God is love.

Have a great week…and a great break (when you get it)!
Patrick

You shall not murder. (Ex 20:13)

On face value we each keep this commandment. How many of us are murderers? If we look more broadly at what a democratically elected government does in our name, the answer may not be as clear. Such thoughts open a potential moral minefield depending upon one’s jurisdiction. What of state-sanctioned abortion? Euthanasia? Capital punishment? What of the waging of war – especially far from the public eye? What of money taken away from foreign aid? We must each discern our answers to these and related questions.

Our role with young people is to help them reflect upon their actions – both individually and as a member of society. The principles of Catholic Social Teaching such as considering the common good, the dignity of the human person and the preferential option for the poor also support our discernment.

Have a great week!
Patrick

Well worth a look! From the Anglican Church of Gosford:

The holiest places for Christians are in Jerusalem. The holiest of all these places is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It is where the heart of Christianity beats.
Yet, few know that it is a Muslim who opens and closes the only door to this holiest of Christian sites.
In fact, it’s two Muslims from two different Jerusalem Palestinian clans who have been the custodians of the entrance to the Holy Sepulchre since the 12th century.
Every morning, at 4:30, one travels from his apartment outside the walls of the Old City to bring the cast-iron key to the church, just as his forebears did before him.
Once there, he entrusts the key to the other who knocks at the gate to call the priests and the pilgrims who spend the night praying inside. From inside the church, a wooden ladder is passed through a porthole to help him unlock the upper part of the enormous door.
Then, he unlocks the lower one before handing the precious key back to the first. The ritual is reversed every evening at 7:30, after hundreds of tourists and pilgrims have left the church.
Why the elaborate ritual? As often happens in Jerusalem, a city holy to several peoples and religions, there are different versions to explain why two Muslim families hold the key to the holiest site in Christendom.
After the Muslim conquest in 637, the Caliph Omar guaranteed to the Archbishop that the Christian places of worship would be protected and so entrusted the custodianship to a family who originated in Medina and who were related to the Prophet Muhammad. It happened again in 1187, after Saladin ended the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem.
He chose the family again to look after the peace between the different Eastern and Western Christian confessions, which were at odds over control of the Sepulchre.
So what does it mean to hold the key to the heart of another’s faith and what does it mean to have that key held for you.
These two Muslim families have for almost 1000 years been conscious of the privilege of serving the Christian community and the Christians have for that same millennium been conscious that their freedom to worship is held gently in the hands of another.
And so it is for us in this nation today, our freedom to pray or not to pray for that matter is held in the hands of others, hopefully in the gentle hands of honourable friends and caring neighbours. Our particular expression of secular democracy ensures our religious freedom and our religious freedom ensures our secular democracy.
We come together today as friends and neighbours from many faiths and from none to celebrate our human solidarity in our human diversity acknowledging that the key to our precious and fragile freedom lies in each others hands.
We continue to preserve this great privilege only by opening the door to each other.

“Young people are selfish!”

Cry

those who do not know.

On a cold August night

Young women

And older fellow travellers

Bedded down

On concrete

With a cardboard mattress.

A night’s discomfort

In solidarity

With those for whom

This is a permanent situation.

Watching this group sleep

There is a dignity

In their choice to be here.

What is society saying

About the dignity of those

Who have no choice?