A New School Year

Classes start tomorrow at Catholic Theological Union.  It's my second year of graduate studies here.  I am half way through my course work for my research MA in Theology, with a major in Social Ethics and a minor in Spirituality.  I'm also earning a Certificate in Spirituality.

My classes this Semester are evenly split between ethics and spirituality.  Tomorrow morning at 8:30 AM the adventure begins with a seminar called Holocaust & Genocide: Ethical Reflections. Given everything going on in the world today and our sordid shared history of the past 50 years, this is sure to be a challenging class.  My professor is an expert on the Holocaust and has been deeply involved in Catholic-Jewish dialogue for many years.

Tomorrow night I'm starting Medical Ethics.  While I am studying social ethics, I also realize the importance of having a good grounding in reflection and practical application of our Catholic ethical and religious directives. My religious community also sponsors hospitals so this way I can be a resource. This is the same professor I had for sexual ethics last semester so I know it will be a great (if challenging) class.

Wednesday afternoon my class begins on Religious Life in the 21st Century: Creating Communities of Hope on a Global Scale.  Obviously the topic is one close to my heart.  We'll be reading the latest volume of the trilogy by Sandra Schneider, IHM as well as a variety of other thought provoking resources.  I know the professor and several of the students (all young nuns from Giving Voice) so this promises to be an excellent opportunity.

My last class is on Wednesday evenings.  It's a part of a public lecture series on the Spiritual Classics of the Early Church.  A group of CTU students will meet with the professor after the weekly lecture evenings for a more academic class.  We'll be looking at classic writings from early church and desert fathers and mothers and applying them to our spiritual lives today.

I'm also continuing my internship with the Bernardin Center, which involves research on themes of peacebuilding, conflict and reconciliation.

As you can see, it promises to be a very rich and challenging Semester! I feel very blessed that my CSJP community has missioned me for this time of studies and learning. I try to shine the light of our Charism and spirituality on everything I do!

I'm sure there will be insights and learnings that I'll want to share with my bloggy friends.  Please keep all students, teachers, and administrators in your prayers as a new school year begins!

Merton on Peace: Roots of Nonviolence

Recognizing that we were in a spiritual and moral crisis, Merton dug deep into his faith in Christ and the Christian community to discern an appropriate response.  One way he did this was through the formation of a virtual community of folks who were doing likewise.  He had hundreds of correspondents, including Dorothy Day, Erich Fromm and Ethel Kennedy.  He also became a chaplain of sorts to the peace movement, corresponding with people like Dan and Phil Berrigan and meeting with them when they came to visit (that's who he's sitting in circle with in the photo).

In fact, in 1964 he led a retreat on the "Spiritual Roots of Protest." As Gordon Zahn said in his introduction to Thomas Merton in Peace, it must have been a powerful retreat.  At least 5 of the attendees were later arrested for their "crimes" of resistance to the Vietnam War. But in his notes for the retreat, he makes clear that their time together was not intended to develop strategies of protest but to discern the call to resist within God's call.

“We are hoping to reflect together during these days on our common grounds for religious dissent and commitment in the face of the injustice and disorder of a world in which total war seems at times inevitable, in which few seek any but violent solutions to economic and social problems more critical and more vast than [the human person] has ever known before. 

"What we are seeking is not the formulation of a program, but a deepening of roots.  Roots in the ‘ground’ of all being, in God, through His word.  Standing in the presence of His word knowing that we are judged by it.  Bringing our inner motives into line with this judgement.” (Retreat, 1964, Spiritual Roots of Protest)

Merton also spent much time in prayer and contemplation on this question.  We are blessed to have the fruits in his writings.  Given the state of near total war that seemed to be overtaking the world, Merton saw this responsibility:  "The task of the Christian is to make the thought of peace once again seriously possible" (Breakthrough to Peace).  This task, ultimately, comes from Christ.

“Christ our Lord did not come to bring peace to the world as a kind of spiritual tranquilizer.  He brought to His disciples a vocation and a task, to struggle in the world of violence to establish His peace not only in their own hearts but in society itself.” (Peace: A Religious Responsibility)

He cautioned against a merely "spiritual witness." The call to the Christian in the face of such violence is active engagement, collaboration, and commitment in, with and for the world.

“A purely ‘spiritual’ witness is not enough.  . . . We must certainly bring the world to repentance, but we must engage with the rest of [humankind] in a collaborative work of social renewal, reconciliation, in a serious effort to bring about a peaceful world situation, in which [people] can work together to solve the enormous social problems posed by the technological and economic revolution of our time.”  (Christianity and Defense in the Nuclear Age)

He saw the need for loving action and sought a Christian path.

“There must be a new force, the power of love, the power of understanding and human compassion, the strength of selflessness and cooperation, and the creative dynamism of the will to live and to build, and the will to forgive.  The will for reconciliation.” (Preface to Vietnamese Translation of No Man is an Island)

“[I]t is necessary to go back to the sources and try to recover the true Christian meaning of the first and all-embracing commandment to love all men including our enemies.”  (Saint Maximus the Confessor on Nonviolence)

In the end, he articulates this loving and active Christian response to the spiritual and moral crisis as nonviolence.

“The religious basis of Christian nonviolence is then faith in Christ the Redeemer and obedience to his demand to love and manifest himself in us by a certain manner of acting in the world and in relation to other [people].”  (Blessed are the Meek: The Christian Roots of Nonviolence)

[This is the third post in a series.  Click on these links for the first and second posts.]

The Inseparability of Spirituality and Justice

I grew up with a very sacred text in my family.  Yes, we had a family bible, but being Catholics that wasn't read very often.  No, the sacred text I refer to is the Washington Post, the Francois family paper of record. We were a political family which placed a deep value on keeping abreast of world and national issues.  Dinner table conversations were often prompted by an article or editorial someone had read.  My Dad still reads most of the paper each day and as a result keeps his pulse on what is happening in the world from his assisted living appartment.

In my world of course, one of the biggest happenings of late has been the recent hullabaloo between the men who make up the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church and the women called to leadership of religious communities like my own.  Regular readers of the blog will know that I've not written much here about that situation here, mostly because I want to respect the process and place my trust in our leadership and the Holy Spirit.

The Church for the most part moves slowly, and women religious tend to make decisions through consultation, dialogue and consensus which is also a pretty slow process.  I keep waiting for the mainstream media to loose interest in this slow as molasses process.  It's not your typical conflict and doesn't readily meet the mold of our 24 hour news cycle.  And yet, I think there is also a certain level of fascination with a conflict where there are not quick flash points and he said she said accusations.  Yes, there are inevitably elements of that, which the media latches on to and broadcasts widely whenever it does happen, but I think for the most part people from the outside-looking-in sense the love that all involved have for the Church and the deep level of prayer and commitment to a resolution that is worthy of the followers of Christ.  How that plays out is different for the various players involved of course.

I continue to be impressed by the commitment to nonviolent engagement on the part of the Sisters in leadership. My guess is that those on the outside-looking-in are also intrigued by this rarity, as illustrated by last month's Fresh Air interview Sister Pat Farrell and today's profile of Sister Pat in the Francois family paper of record, aka the Washington Post.

Today's WaPo story focuses on Sister Pat's life of ministry with people who are poor and oppressed, much of it in a Latin American context.  Truly I think this does give her, and many women religious, a unique experience to draw upon.  The article highlights her experience in Chile, where she took over a ministry from Maryknoll Sister Ita Ford who was moving to a new ministry in El Salvador.  A few months later, Ita was of course one of the 4 church women who were tortured, raped and murded by death squads in El Salvador in 1980.

Sister Pat spent a few years in Chile, and then moved to work in a refugee camp in El Salvador.  This is where her story touches mine tangentially.  You see, she went to work in the refugee camp where some of our CSJP Sisters had been living in solidarity with refugees of the brutal civil war. Later, she moved to Suchitoto to minister with the people.  This is a town that I have visited and where two of our CSJP Sisters, Sister Susan Dewitt and Sister Margaret Jane Kling, live today.  Sister Susan runs our health care mission in El Salvador and Sister Margaret Jane, who had lived at the refugee camp, now teaches English to children and grandchildren of those she had known in the camp during the war.

When I was a novice, I had the opportunity to visit El Salvador in the company of two of our Sisters who were there during the war.  The visit moved me deeply and gave me great insights into the call of women religious today.  Countless times during our tour, we would drive by a police station or other sight that would prompt a humorous story of close misses, where our Sisters were arrested or threatened by the powers that be simply because they were standing with the oppressed people they lived and ministered to.  I hear echoes of those stories in the WaPo profile of Sister Pat.  "We had some scary moments with the military ..." she says.  Indeed.  I can't help but think how well this has prepared her to engage conflict nonviolently.  She had daily training for years on end in learning how to live with integrity in the face of oppression.

The current hullabloo is not about one person and by no means do I intend to compare it to a civil war.  But it is still part of the shared experience of women religious in the past half century.  Sharing is a key element here that I think outsiders might not quite understand.  In fact, given the unique shared leadership structure of LCWR, Sister Pat will still be involved in leading the group over the next year, but there will be a new President and a new woman elected next week who will become President after her.  

So while it's not about one person, it is about shared experience and approaches to life, ministry and faith.  Over the past 40 years, many women religious have lived  and ministered with people on the margins of society, whether that is with AIDS patients or homeless urban Native Americans, with children with multiple disabilities or families without health insurance. We have a saying in our community that wherever one of our Sisters is, we are all there.  So while I have not had these ministry experiences, my Sisters have, and this in turn has informed our shared experience of life as followers of Jesus who pay special attention to the "little ones."

Toward the end of the profile, Sister Pat is quoted as saying: "For me, that spirituality and the work of justice are entirely inseparable.  If either one is authentic, it leads to the other."

This rings so true to me and speaks of authentic experience.  In our CSJP Constitutions, we say:

Our history calls us to a special love
for those who are poor.
The weight of suffering and oppression
borne by so many people today ...
cries out to us for action.
Our response demands a firm commitment
to work for justice
in solidarity with our sisters and brothers. (21)

Our intimacy with God
unifies our prayer and activity
so that we are moved to action by prayer
while action urges us to pray.
In unity with the Church
and with all of creation
we give praise and thanks to the Giver of all gifts.
We open ourselves to the liberating power of God
whose Sprit in us leads to peace. (28).

Amen.  Please join me in praying for our Church, for the Bishops appointed by Rome to engage with LCWR, for the women in leadership who will meet in St Louis next week, and for all of God's people.  That we may learn to follow Jesus with integrity and love, open to the call and presence of the Holy Spirit, living the good news in service of God and all of God's people, especially the most vulnerable.

Jesus and Us

In the circles I run in, I sometimes hear conversations about two types of Christian spiritualities. Let's call one, "Jesus and me" and the other "Jesus and us." One might describe a "Jesus and Me" Christian as mostly concerned about their own salvation, personal prayers and devotions while the "Jesus and Us" Christian might be more concerned about the social teachings of the church, corporal works of mercy, action for justice, and communal prayer.

First off, I need to recognize that these are generalities at best, stereotypes at worst. In my own spiritual life, I have elements of both. For one thing, you can't really be a Christian without having some sort of relationship with Jesus Christ, and by definition that must be a personal relationship at a deep core level. But at the same time, I think one could argue that one can't be a Christian without having relationships with other people as well, especially the poor and vulnerable.

Enter today's first reading from the 1st letter of John:

Beloved, we love God because
he first loved us.
If anyone says, “I love God,”
but hates his brother, he is a liar;
for whoever does not love a brother whom he has seen
cannot love God whom he has not seen.
This is the commandment we have from him:
Whoever loves God must also love his brother.

Seems pretty clear ... if we love God, we must also love our brother and sister. And not just those who we share close blood relations with. Oh no, as Christians, if we claim to follow this Jesus guy, then we need to listen to what he says. And if we pay attention to what he says he is about, then maybe we can find clues about what we are called to do in our own lives. As a case in point, let's look at today's Gospel, one of my favorites:

He came to Nazareth, where he had grown up,
and went according to his custom
into the synagogue on the sabbath day.
He stood up to read and was handed a scroll of the prophet Isaiah.
He unrolled the scroll and found the passage where it was written:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring glad tidings to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.

Rolling up the scroll, he handed it back to the attendant and sat down,
and the eyes of all in the synagogue looked intently at him.
He said to them,
“Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.”
And all spoke highly of him
and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.

Woah ... this guy is serious. Who are our brothers and sisters? People who are poor, captives, the blind (literal and figurative I would say from Jesus' ministry), the oppressed. And what are we supposed to do? Look the other way? Ignore their suffering and continue on with our lives? No, if we follow Jesus then a key part of our spiritual lives includes bringing glad tidings to those who are poor, proclaiming liberty to captives, helping the blind recover their sight, and letting the oppressed go free. Big tasks that we can't begin to do on our own. Which perhaps is why we are called together as the body of Christ, to work in solidarity for justice, to love our God, to love our brother and sister as we love ourselves. Together ... Jesus and us.

different channels

As regular readers may remember, I'm taking the very slow path through a Masters degree in Pastoral Studies ... with one class a quarter it will take about five or six years to complete!

I'm taking my third class this quarter ... Theology in an Ecumenical Context. While Seattle University is Jesuit, the School of Theology & Ministry is ecumenical, with formal agreements with 10 protestant denominations. As a result, most of my classes have had a good mix of protestant and Catholic. Interestingly enough, that wasn't so true for this class, my ecumenical class, which actually has a majority of Catholics.

Each week from now till the end of the term, the different groups will be sharing about their ecclesial communities. Yesterday was the Catholics' turn. My group shared about our significant theological perspectives and our experience of God/spirituality.

When our group met to plan our presentation, one of our group pointed out that amongst the 6 of us, we had a Carmelite Sister, a Sister of St. Joseph of Peace, and a Dominican lay tertiary. We decided that the best way to share about Catholic spirituality was to do a panel discussion about our particular spiritualities. The other three folks also had great things to share: one shared about growing up in a Catholic charismatic movement, another being part of an African-American Catholic community, and another about the influence Benedictine spirituality has been in her life. It ended up being a really rich discussion that highlighted the wide variety of spiritual experiences in the Catholic Church.

Our presentation was followed by a question and answer period. One of the students, from the United Methodist tradition, shared that she was really struck by how many "different channels" we have in Roman Catholicism. When asked what she meant by that, it turns out she was talking about the different charisms of religious orders. If you feel called to a particular work or ministry or spirituality, chances are there's a group of people in the Catholic Church you can join. (And if not, that's how orders get started in the first place!). It was really interesting to look at Catholic spirituality and in particular the gifts religious life gives to the church from an outside perspective.

Next week we get to hear about the Episcopal and Lutheran churches. Looking forward to that (and glad my own presentation and paper are turned in!).