Reflection on Farming and Marriage

Bishop Etienne of the (U.S.) Catholic Rural Life Conference makes some poignant remarks about farming, marriage & moving "from the finite to the infinite". I especially like his insight into farmers (and families) not imposing their own will, but "bowing to nature's genius". Enjoy! 

Fr. Matt

https://catholicrurallife.org/a-farmers-wedding/

Saint-Paulin

In 393, wealthy patrician Pontius Meropius Anicius decides to forsake his worldly possessions and devote the remainder of his Life to God.  Builder of hospitals and churches, the generous Pontius, eventually known as Bishop Paulinus of Nola, turns to poetry as a means of reaching inner peace.  His many writings on ornate prose have withstood the test of time and are still considered to be among the finest examples of early Christian literature.  Later canonized, Saint Paulinus, originally from Aquitaine, full-fledged Roman citizen and poet emeritus, was also an avid gardener.  Nobel, devout, cultured and a friend of the earth, he is a true inspiration, worthy of the cheese that bears his name.

Five Ways Jesus Dealt With Difficult People - reposted from the Cenale FAll 2016

How to accept the inconvenient, the incongruent and the bothersome

By Sister Theresa Aletheia Noble, F.S.P.
How should we deal with difficult people?
Some people in our lives may be difficult simply because they challenge us. Or they may be difficult because they are different. Or they may be difficult because we live with them (and close proximity amplifies foibles). Or they may be difficult because we are difficult and something about us just rubs them the wrong way.
Or they may just be difficult.
Regardless, by growing in holiness we can learn to accept the inconvenient, the incongruent and the bothersome (people and events) in our life not just as necessary nuisances but as gifts.
Seeing difficult people in such a positive light seems like a tall order. But we can start by learning to deal with other people in a Christ-like way.
Scripture teaches us some ways that Jesus dealt with difficult people:

1. Jesus Asks Questions: In Chapter 12 of Luke, Jesus is asked to settle a family dispute and basically responds: “Who do you think I am, Judge Judy?” (a loose translation). It is interesting to note that Jesus asks a lot of questions in Scripture. Jesus’ questions were sometimes rhetorical, or challenging, and at other times he was also seeking feedback. By using questions, Jesus emphasizes his openness to the other person.  It is funny, but we humans tend not to ask a lot of questions. We assume, we pontificate, we lecture, we observe, we interrupt and we judge. But we rarely make it a point to ask other people questions. In using questions frequently, I think Jesus is modeling the behaviour of a good communicator, one who cares about the other person enough to engage with them and challenge them. Even, and perhaps especially, when they are being difficult.
2. Jesus Is Never Cornered: In Chapter 6 of Luke, Jesus is taking a Sabbath stroll with his disciples and the Pharisees pop up out of nowhere and accuse them of breaking the Sabbath by picking grain. Jesus is unflustered. He is never scared of the people who try to slip him up or think the worst of him, because what other people think is not his focus.  Sometimes people corner us with their assumptions and judgments and we can begin to wonder if the way they see us is more objective than how we see ourselves. It is hard when we feel like others misunderstand us or do not take the time to get to know us before judging. But, like Jesus, we do not have to feel defined by the projections of other people. Our identity resides and is found in God, not in what other people try to push on us.
3. Jesus Knows When to Ignore: Remember that time when Jesus ticks off all of his former neighbours and friends in his hometown of Nazareth? They are so worked up that they decide to throw him off a cliff. Jesus, seeing that there is no reasoning with these people, walks through the crowd, ignores their rage, and “went on his way” (Luke 4).  Sometimes difficult people throw tantrums, speak harshly or treat us in an abusive way (this happens online all the time). This is the cue to disengage and walk away. Jesus knew how to keep his blood pressure in checkand his eyes on the prize. Of course, if we have to deal assertively with someone who does this in person, a face-to-face discussion might help. Later.
4. Jesus Is Not Defensive: In Chapter 10 of Mark, James and John say to Jesus: “We want you to do for us whatever we ask.” Wow. Talk about overstepping boundaries! But Jesus is not co-dependent, so neediness and boundary crossing is not threatening to him. He knows when to say no and when to say yes and does not beat himself up when he doesn’t make other people happy.  Sometimes people can demand more from us than what we can give them. They may try to sway us with guilt trips. Before we know it we find ourselves bending over backward trying to satisfy a needy or aggressive person (who is rarely satisfied!). But Jesus does not try to people please. Jesus does not need to protect himself from other people; God’s will is enough security. This is where his non-defensiveness comes from.
5. Jesus Is Flexible: In Matthew 15, a Canaanite woman demands that Jesus heal his daughter and Jesus says no. But then he is moved by the woman’s response of faith and heals her daughter. Jesus approaches others with an open mind. Even when he had preconceived notions, he allowed the Spirit to move him and go against his instincts.  When a difficult person approaches us, we may think, Oh great, here we go again, or I know how this will go, but Jesus kept an open mind when he was approached by others. You never know. The Spirit may move you, or the person who is normally difficult, to act in a different, unexpected way. Being closed to others closes us to the Holy Spirit who is working in us and in the other person.

Taken from Aleteia.org, February 2. 2016.

Article from The Tablet

You don't often get to cheer for the rational approach, but Clifford Longley makes the case for "[g]enuine political debate" conducted by competent representatives, as opposed to populist urgings. I wonder if we (i.e., Canada) as a nation didn't accept this uncritically when our political parties moved to a 'one member, one vote" model. It would be good to have representatives & leaders who lead, not just echo the loudest ravings of our society. Pray for all who make (and enforce) laws in our name! - Fr. Matt

Irrational Impulses are part and parcel of populist politics

We should be worried about the survival of parliamentary democracy, our best and possibly only protection against tyranny and arbitrary government. We should be worried that it is being subverted by populism and demagoguery, which flies on wings of emotion and the mass mobilisation of gut reactions, rather than on careful and intelligent argument tested in debate. History teaches that plebiscites are easily manipulated by anti-democratic forces, even though they usually do so in the name of democracy.

Take three examples: the EU referendum, the battle for control of the Labour Party, and the takeover of the US Republican Party by the populist demagogue Donald Trump. 
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New York Times article on Digital Adulthood - The Virtues of Reality

"New York times columnist Ross Douthat wonders about certain infantilizing effects of our digital age, and the religious response necessary to address those challenges."
Fr. Matt

SINCE the 1990s, we’ve seen two broad social changes that few observers would have expected to happen together.

First, youth culture has become less violent, less promiscuous and more responsible. American childhood is safer than ever before. Teenagers drink and smoke less than previous generations. The millennial generation has fewer sexual partners than its parents, and the teen birthrate has traced a two-decade decline. Violent crime — a young person’s temptation — fell for 25 years before the recent post-Ferguson homicide spike. Young people are half as likely to have been in a fight than a generation ago. Teen suicides, binge drinking, hard drug use — all are down.

But over the same period, adulthood has become less responsible, less obviously adult. For the first time in over a century, more 20-somethingslive with their parents than in any other arrangement. The marriage rate is way down, and despite a high out-of-wedlock birthrate American fertility just hit an all-time low. More and more prime-age workers are dropping out of the work force — men especially, and younger men more so than older men, though female work force participation has dipped as well.

You can tell different stories that synthesize these trends: strictly economic ones about the impact of the Great Recession, critical ones about the infantilizing effects of helicopter parenting, upbeat ones about how young people are forging new life paths.

But I want to advance a technology-driven hypothesis: This mix of youthful safety and adult immaturity may be a feature of life in a society increasingly shaped by the internet’s virtual realities.

It is easy to see how online culture would make adolescent life less dangerous. Pornography to take the edge off teenage sexual appetite. Video games instead of fisticuffs or contact sports as an outlet for hormonal aggression. (Once it was feared that porn and violent media would encourage real-world aggression; instead they seem to be replacing it.) Sexting and selfie-enabled masturbation as a safer alternative to hooking up. Online hangouts instead of keggers in the field. More texting and driving, but less driving — one of the most dangerous teen activities — overall.

The question is whether this substitution is habit-forming and soul-shaping, and whether it extends beyond dangerous teen behavior to include things essential to long-term human flourishing — marriage, work, family, all that old-fashioned “meatspace” stuff.

That’s certainly the impression left whenever journalists try to figure out why young people aren’t marrying, or dating, or in some cases even seeking sex. (From The Washington Post, earlier this month: “Noah Paterson, 18, likes to sit in front of several screens simultaneously … to shut it all down for a date or even a one-night stand seems like a waste.”) The same impression is left by research on younger men dropping out of the work force: Their leisure time is being filled to a large extent by gaming, and happiness studies suggest that they are pretty content with the trade-off.

The men in that research lack college degrees, which is particularly telling. It wasn’t so long ago that people worried about a digital divide, in which online access would be a luxury good that left the bottom half behind. But if anything, the virtual world looks more like an opiate for the masses. The poor spent more time online than the rich, and it’s the elite — the Silicon Valley elite, in some striking cases — that’s more likely to limit the uses of devices in their homes and schools, to draw distinctions between screen time and real time.

The keenest critics of how the internet shapes culture, writers like Sherry Turkle, are often hopeful that with time and experience we will learn better management strategies, which keep the virtual in its place before too many real goods are lost.

Such strategies may work for individuals and families. But the trends in the marketplace — ever-more-customized pornography, virtual realities that feel more and more immersive, devices and apps customized for addictive behavior — seem likely to overwhelm most attempts to enjoy the virtual only within limits.

My mother, Patricia Snow (yes, even columnists have mothers), in an essayfor First Things earlier this year, suggested that any effective resistance to virtual reality’s encroachments would need to be moral and religious, not just pragmatic and managerial. I never could induce her to read Frank Herbert’s “Dune,” but her argument made me think of the science-fiction novel’s “Butlerian jihad” — the religious rebellion against artificial intelligence that birthed Herbert’s imagined far-future society, which has advanced spacefaring technology but not a HAL or C-3PO in sight.

“Jihad” is a more fraught term these days than when Herbert’s novel first came out. But we have a pacifist community within our own society that’s organized around religious resistance to advanced technology — the Old Order Amish.

The future probably doesn’t belong to the Pennsylvania Dutch. But the Amish impulse is one to watch, as we reckon with virtual reality’s strange gift — a cup that tastes of progress, but might have poison waiting in the dregs.

Op-Ed Columnist The Virtues of Reality By ROSS DOUTHAT Online realms make us safer, but sometimes stunted.

Pope insists bodily resurrection is real, not a mere metaphor

VATICAN CITY - Christians are called to believe in the logic of the resurrection of the body and not succumb to heresies that reduce it to a mere spiritual experience, Pope Francis said.

When looking toward the future, the uncertainty about what happens after death often can lead to not understanding Christianity’s “logic of the future,” which proclaims that believers will rise again in body and soul like Jesus did, the pope said Sept. 16 during a morning Mass in the chapel of the Domus Sanctae Marthae.

“A spiritualistic piety, a nuanced piety is much easier; but to enter into the logic of the flesh of Christ, this is difficult. And this is the logic of the day after tomorrow. We will resurrect like the risen Christ, with our own flesh,” he said.

In his homily, the pope reflected on St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, in which the apostle admonishes some of the early Christian community for saying “there is no resurrection of the dead.”

“If there is no resurrection of the dead, then neither has Christ been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then empty, too, is our preaching; empty, too, your faith,” St. Paul wrote.

The pope said that, for some, it is difficult to understand and accept the “logic of the future” regarding what happens after death. The belief that, like Jesus, Christians will experience the resurrection of the body “is not easy.”

“Yesterday’s logic is easy, today’s logic is easy. Tomorrow’s logic is easy: We will all die. But the logic of the day after tomorrow, that is difficult,” he said.

Some Christians “are afraid of the flesh” and may fall prey to “a certain type of gnosticism” that reduces the resurrection to a purely spiritual experience; a belief that was “the first heresy” denounced by the apostle John, the pope explained.

Believing and having faith that Christ did not rise from the dead “as a ghost” but rather in flesh and blood is “the logic of the day after tomorrow that we find hard to understand,” he said.

While it is a sign of maturity to see the logic of the resurrection, Christians must also pray for the grace to understand it, Pope Francis added.

“You also need the great grace of the Holy Spirit to understand this logic of the day after tomorrow; after the transformation, when he will come and will carry us transformed above the clouds to be with him always. Let us ask the Lord for the grace of this faith.”

Wholeness and Love

Can we see our brokenness as a gift from God? Enjoy Fr. Richard Rohr’s reflection on wholeness vs. perfection and see if God isn’t calling us to grow through the broken parts of our lives.

Reposted from https://cac.org/category/daily-meditations/

Wholeness and Love

Friday, July 29, 2016

Perfection is not the elimination of imperfection. Divine perfection is the ability to recognize, forgive, and include imperfection--just as God does with all of us. Only in this way can we find the beautiful and hidden wholeness of God underneath the passing human show. I like the way David Benner explains this in CAC's journal Oneing. Benner writes:

Spare me perfection. Give me instead the wholeness that comes from embracing the full reality of who I am, just as I am. Paradoxically, it is this whole self that is most perfect. As it turns out, wholeness, not perfection, is the route to the actualization of our deepest humanity.

Inconsistencies, imperfections, and failures to live up to ideals are all part of what it means to be human. What seems to distinguish those who are most deeply and wholly human is not their perfection, but their courage in accepting their imperfections. Accepting themselves as they are, they then become able to accept others as they are.

The richness of being human lies precisely in our lack of perfection. This is the source of so much of our longing, and out of that longing emerges so much creativity, beauty, and goodness. With appropriate openness and humility, it is the cracks that let in the light. Once those cracks and flaws are embraced and accepted as part of the self, then, and only then, can the light flow out though them, into the lives of others and into the world. This is Henri Nouwen's "wounded healer"--one who mediates healing, not in spite of personal wounds, but precisely because of them. [1] It is our humanity, not our pseudo-perfection, that allows us to both receive and pass on what Christians call grace--the goodness that flows into our lives from beyond.

The harmonic of the universe is wholeness, not perfection; more specifically, it is wholeness that involves differentiation. . . . Living wholeness is participating in the dynamism of love that gathers everything together into greater unity and consciousness. It is to live with an openness of mind and heart, to encounter others, not as strangers, but as parts of one's self. When we enter into the heart of love in this way, we enter the field of relatedness and come to know our truest and deepest belonging and calling.

Wholeness and love are inseparable. Love leads to larger wholes and there is no true wholeness that is not built on love. In the words of Ilia Delio, "Our challenge today is to trust the power of love at the heart of life, to let ourselves be seized by love, to create and invent ways for love to evolve into a global wholeness of unity, compassion, justice, and peacemaking." [2] [3]

Gateway to Silence

When I am weak I am strong.

References:

[1] Henri J. M. Nouwen, The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society (Doubleday: 1972).

[2] Ilia Delio, The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution, and the Power of Love (Orbis Books: 2013), xxv.

[3] David G. Benner, "Perfection and the Harmonics of Wholeness," "Perfection," Oneing, Vol. 4, No. 1 (CAC: 2016), 61-63. This article was adapted from David G. Benner, Human Being and Becoming (Brazos Press: 2016).

Adapted from Richard Rohr, Yes, And . . . Daily Meditations (Franciscan Media: 2013), 374.