Received from the organization Call to Action via e-mail today -- MW

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An Open Letter to our Sisters and Brothers in Christ in the Anglican Tradition

We greet you in the name of the One who unites us all. We were disappointed with the Vatican's announcement of a stream-lined process for Anglican conversion to Roman Catholicism for individuals and dioceses who do not support women's and LGBT equality.

The Anglican tradition embodies a courageous history of seeking reform in the face of church injustice. In the last decades, you have built on that history and stood strongly in support of marginalized women, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in your faith tradition. We have watched and supported your struggles over the years to welcome all God's people equally to ministerial leadership. You should stand proud.

The majority of Catholics in the United States also hope for a day when we might be able to say that we, too, have heeded the gospel call for justice within our own church leadership. Studies show that 83% of U.S. Catholics believe that it is morally wrong to discriminate against homosexuals (Contemporary Catholic Trends Survey) and 61% of U.S. Catholics believe that women should be priests (National Catholic Reporter Survey). We know the numbers are similar and growing in many other countries around the globe. The kin-dom is at hand.

So while a few church officials cast lots for the allegiance of a small remnant of Christians who continue to favor discrimination, we know the majority of the faithful will continue to support all God's people equally.

We pray for a time when our church officials will also come to know the blessings that come from living, not as a divided community, but as one people united with God.

With peace,


Jim FitzGerald, Executive Director of Call To Action

 
Call To Action (CTA) is a Catholic movement working for equality and justice in the Church and society. An independent national organization of over 25,000 people and 50 local chapters, CTA believes that the Spirit of God is at work in the whole church, not just its appointed leaders.

Ahhhh, Eureka!

Today while wandering around YouTubeland, I stumbled across a treasure: a recording of the Taize chant-prayer-hymn, "Veni Creator Spiritus." It's a beautifully melodic prayer of need, yearning, and gratitude. Simply exquisite . . .  it never fails to send chills down my spine. So here it is. Savor and enjoy.

More information on Taize, including podcasts and muscial selections, is available here.

Truth be told: I wanted to be a dog when I grew up.

I'm in the middle of writing a semi-autobiographical novel right now, and I've incorporated this early career choice of mine in one of the chapters. The central character in the novel is a young girl who has developed a fear of apparitions of the Virgin Mary. She seeks ways to prevent the Virgin Mary from making any appearances before her eyes, and for a time she believes that becoming a dog might just do the trick.

If you're curious, below I've posted an excerpt from that chapter, which is written in the second person.

Woof woof,
Mary

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Chapter 1:  I walk down the street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I fall in. I am lost..... I am helpless. It is not my fault. It takes me forever to find a way out.

Chapter 2:  I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I pretend I do not see it. I fall in again. I cannot believe I am in the same place, but it is not my fault. It still takes a long time to get out.

Chapter 3:  I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I see it is there. I still fall in -- it is a habit. My eyes are open. I know where I am. It is my fault. I get out immediately.

Chapter 4:  I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I walk around it.

Chapter 5:  I walk down another street.

--Portia Nelson, "Autobiography in Five Short Chapters"

 Often it was the small, barely noticeable details, the sights and smells and sounds of existence, that carried me forth from day to day with lightness and gratitude while growing up on Agnes Avenue. I recall a brief time of sleeping in my parents' bed - it helped to quell the nightmares I had had since they'd first brought me home from St. Anthony's Infant Home. I would fall asleep in the wide bed, between my mother and father, and at some point early in the evening, my father would carry me back to my own room and gently tuck me in to my own bed. It became a cherished childhood ritual. I always pretended to remain asleep while my father carried me, because if I'd managed to fool him well enough, he seemed to cradle me with a deeper tenderness, taking his time, walking extra slowly, being extra quiet so as not to wake me. He would lay me in my bed with great care and gentleness, place the blanket over me softly, plant a small kiss my forehead, and tiptoe away. The care that he took with this near-nightly routine seemed to chase some of my nightmares away.

Later, when I became convinced that it was all right for me to fall asleep alone in my own bed, I found the sound of water rushing through the pipes in the house to be uniquely soothing. The bathroom with the big tub was just down the hall from my bedroom, and sometimes my father would take a late evening soak if he had had an extra long day at work. The whooshing sound that filled my room as the tub filled with water - I suppose it was a kind of white noise - sent me into a dreamy, happy state in which I knew no lasting harm would come to me. There was a sense of flowing with life, with the rush of the water, with the enveloping warmth that I knew was filling the tub. Perhaps it was another way of being carried. And perhaps it was my first taste of what I would later come to know as contemplation.

(Excerpted from a writing assignment I penned while reading Elizabeth Andrews' book "Writing the Sacred Journey: The Art and Practice of Spiritual Memoir")

Yesterday my husband, an agnostic, received this kindhearted letter from the pastor of my church. I'm touched by its graciousness. I admire the skillful way that Father Mike balances the demands of the institutional Church, the diversity of the congregants, the beckonings of the holy spirit, and his own conscience --

Dear Kirk:

Within our Faith Community of St. Thomas More, we are blessed to have a number of people whose spouse is not Catholic.

Some worship within their own Faith Tradition, others worship with their spouses and families here at St. Thomas More, and others, for a variety of reasons, may not be actively participating in any Faith Community.

This letter is simply meant to say that we are aware of your presence; and that we know, in varying degrees, you are in our midst and one with us. Know that we support you in your faith journey, and we are grateful for the support you extend to your spouse and your family.

This letter is also meant to be an invitation to you, if you so desire, to deepen your commitment to our Faith Community by becoming Catholic.

If you have an interest or desire to move in this direction, please contact .... our Faith Formation Director or me. We would be pleased to give you whatever information you may need in order to think about such a decision.

Please know that we love you as you are! In the spirit of Christian hospitality, though, we would be remiss if we did not, from time to time, extend a more formal invitation.

May these last days of summer be filled with great peace for you and yours!

Sincerely in Christ,
Rev. Michael Ratajczak
Pastor

A friend sent me a link to this video, which uses the opportunity of the July 21-22 solar eclipse for a guided meditation that embraces and balances masculine and feminine energies. I thought I'd share it here.

Now and again I meet people who think of meditation or contemplative prayer as an isolated act -- an individual practice that might discipline the mind, foster equanimity, or deepen one's relationship with God, but still: basically navel-gazing.

But people who have become more seasoned with these practices -- staying the course and returning despite bouts of boredom or dark nights or myriad other challenges -- often come to realize that it is actually the opposite of navel-gazing. Rather than an isolated focusing, contemplation is an opening to, an offering up, and a flowing with. Instead of strengthening personal concentration, contemplatives empty themselves, finding an inner spaciousness that can, with their permission, serve as a conduit for Spirit.

My Centering Prayer group has lately been reading Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening by Cynthia Bourgeault -- I believe it's my third time through this wonderful book, yet it still seems to be striking new ground in me. In the chapter entitled "Centering Prayer and Christian Life," Bourgeault talks about Centering Prayer as being part and parcel of perichoresis: the divine dance of Love that is always relational --  never an isolated act. She writes:

I have spoken so far of Centering Prayer as being rooted and grounded in kenosis, the self-emptying love of Christ understood as the core gesture of his life and the source of his sacramental power. But in Christian mystical theology, the word kenosis is used in another context as well: to describe the internal life of the Trinity. It speaks of the self-emtying love with which the Father spills into (or gives himself fully into) the Son, the Son into the Spirit, the Spirit into the Father. This complete intercirculation in love is called perichoresis. It's sort of like the buckets on a watermill; as they empty one into the other, the mill turns and the energy of love becomes manifest and accessible.

The same analogy I believe holds true for our life in God. What we experience in Centering Prayer as kenosis, or personal self-emptying, is always part and parcel of a greater perichoresis, one self-emptying spilling into another in the great watermill of love, through which God shows us his innermost nature and bestows this vital energy upon the world in a cascade of divine creativity.

"I am the vine; you are the branches; abide in me as I in you" (John 15: 3-4). The most profoundly beautiful imagery in the New Testament is communal; it speaks of this great intercirculation of love. So often we think of Centering Prayer -- or any form of meditation -- as alone, withdrawn, or focused on one's own personal development or special relationship with God, not shared with others (because we're under the impression that the only way to share with others is to talk). But in point of fact, whenever we participate in that act of kenosis, it is always as part and parcel of perichoresis. That is the essential Mystery, the beauty that Jesus lived and died and through which he rose again. There is no gesture more ultimately communal than kenosis, for it is the ultimate act of self-transcendence. As we participate in this gesture, no matter how isolated it first may feel, how divided and cut off from others, the deep truth we will eventually come to know is that any act of kenosis reconnects us, inevitably and instantly, to that great vine of love.

Thomas Merton learned this lesson through a long and difficult journey, perhaps the only way that this lesson is ever fully learned. When he entered the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemane in December 1941, the one thing he knew for certain was that he wanted out of "the world" and straight into God. As he took one last backward look before the monastery gate clanked shut behind him (he hoped forever), all he could see was a hopeless wasteland of sin, hypocrisy, noise, and illusion. Ahead lay a vast Himalayan silence ahd holiness. Or so he thought.

But the contemplative life is full of its own surprising plot twists. Once you give yourself fully to it, once you sign on the dotted line of kenosis, perichoresis is what you'll eventually get. Seventeen years later, that inexorable inner blueprint bore fruit in him in a completely unexpected way, when, on a routine shopping trip into town he was suddenly engulfed in a blinding epiphany of love. He describes the experience in an essay movingly entitled "A Member of the Human Race":

"In Louisville, at the Corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping  district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and that I was theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of a pure self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness."

Nor was this a fluke "mystical experience." What Merton saw in that moment stayed with him till the end of his life; it was a permanent transformation of his consciousness. This is the unitive seeing we are all called to: the secret of Jesus' great commandment to "love your neighbor as yourself." Not as much as yourself, as egoic consiousness always interprets, but as yourself: interchangeably One in that great vine of love which is the mystical body of Christ.

If you embrace a path that begins in kenosis, you will wind up in perichoresis; that's the wager. That's also the Church -- its vision and its path in a nutshell.

About two weeks before Valentine's day in 1990, I met Kirk, the man who was to become my husband. We were both washing clothes in our Friendly Neighborhood Laundromat.

I had maybe five loads of laundry to do, and the machines in my apartment complex weren't working. I also had a bunch of freshman English papers to grade, so had taken my five loads and pile of papers down the street, and settled in for an evening of work at the Fluff and Fold.

I ended up using a dryer next to a guy who seemed homeless to me - he was unshaven and wearing a jacket that looked like the remnants of a dog attack, funky brown polyester pants with the hem coming out of them ... (I wasn't looking so hot myself, adorned in shapeless dark pink sweatpants and faded alma mater T-shirt), and when he walked by me, trying to catch my eye to say hello, I was sure he was going to ask me for some change. I did have a dollar bill to spare and thought I would give that to him if he asked, as he had a woebegone and sweet vibe about him.

He asked me if I was in Amnesty International (which I was, and I still have no idea how he might have known) and we ended up talking about that for a bit. He turned out to be the local AI group's anti-death penalty coordinator. As we talked I noticed at one point that he was spending quarters to finish drying just one pair of socks. Man drying laundry, I laughed to myself.

He eventually finished with his socks and left.

Perhaps 15 minutes later, I had also finished and was hauling my clean laundry back to my car. Kirk had returned to the laundromat - I figured he had forgotten something - and he walked up to me with something in his hand. They were a pair of newly clean panties that had fallen out of my laundry basket onto the asphalt. "I think you dropped these," he said, holding them out to me. I was embarrassed because they were raggedy and skanky - so I shook my head, "No, those aren't mine," while wondering what kind of weird guy was this, picking up strange women's panties off the ground...

He asked me if we could meet again to talk. (I found out later that this was the reason he had returned to the laundromat). I was about to say no, because the panty thing was kind of freaking me out. So I looked into his eyes - and totally changed my mind. They radiated warmth and kindness.

So I agreed to meet him at a nearby restaurant the following week. We had a great time but I still wanted to meet him maybe once or twice more before I gave him my phone number. (And FYI: this was also before the time of widely-used internet and e-mail, etc.). A single girl's gotta protect that phone number, ya know ...

Valentine's Day, which was about a week after our restaurant date, was a busy day for me. I rushed out that morning, late to class, and found a dozen yellow roses propped up next to my car - the tire on the driver's side.

Kirk didn't have my phone number or address but he knew what my car looked like and that I lived a few blocks from the Fluff and Fold. So he had walked around the neighborhood with these roses until he found my car, and laid them there.

He was walking back to his place and was maybe a half block away when he turned around to see me picking up the roses. So he jogged back to my car, startling me as I stood there trying to figure out what to do with the roses. A part of me thought: you mean he put the roses there and waited for me to show up? I don't know about this guy.

Stalker? Or romantic warm-hearted dude?

I decided to give him my phone number.

                                               


(Originally posted in the Integral Pod)

In memorium for Odetta, who left this world last night, Dec. 2, at age 77. What a radiant presence, what a glorious voice! Sit here for a spell and lay your burden down in her song.

Glory Hallelujah,

Mary