Not sure if it is … but def taking a break.

Too much work and I want to concentrate on the journey.

Taken from Caritas in Veritate: Bishop Malcolm McMahon, the Chairman of the Catholic Education Service,”has promised that the Church will not investigate the private lives of applicants for the headships of Catholic schools.” The promise has been made in the light of the increasing difficulty encountered in the recruitment of candidates for headships whose lives fully correspond to the Church’s teaching, particularly as regards marriage.

But Bishop Malcolm McMahon told The Tablet that the backgrounds of potential school leaders were not the concern of the Church and it should be up to applicants themselves to decide whether they were able to live according to church teaching. “Their family life isn’t scrutinised,” said the bishop. “I’d be rather ashamed if the Church was doing that to people. But we do expect people in leadership in the Church to live out their Christian commitment as best they can.”

The backgrounds of potential school leaders, indeed of every living soul, is of immense concern to the Church since She is concerned about the salvation, not only of those who lead our schools, but of those whom they are charged to lead and teach. There needs to be some way of ensuring that our teachers are exemplary in their lives. Only in that way can they give example to the pupils and teach coherently what the Church teaches.’

Where I work is going to be inspected next week. No blogging, mea culpa!

Commentary by Philip Lawrence, OSB, Abbot of Christ in the Desert

The tools for good works are short statements of how we are to live our lives as Christians, and therefore as monks. There is nothing in these first 45 verses that the normal Christian should not strive to live–and if the normal Christian strives to live this way, then we monks must also strive. Verses 1 through 9 are simply the Ten Commandments seen in the eyes of the Gospel. Verse 10 begins to speak of renouncing our selves in order to follow Christ and this is the heart of the good works.

We come to the Monastery to follow Christ in the monastic way and we must renounce all other ways and all other gods. Verse 11 speaks of bodily discipline. This is not popular today because it brings to mind all kinds of physical penance of the past. Discipline your body, do not pamper yourself, but love fasting–all of this goes together in our tradition. Our tradition says that to be a Christian or a monk is very difficult and hard work and basically has nothing to do with how we feel about ourselves, but has to do with how we live. To attain the inner freedom that is necessary to love everyone else and to accomplish the will of God in all circumstances, bodily discipline is necessary. While most of us would not aspire to be weight-lifters, we can recognize easily that a weight-lifter cannot just start off pressing 500 pounds. Rather, the weight-lifter must train in order to be able to lift such a weight without bodily injury. The same is true of monastic life and of the spiritual life. We must do the small tasks first so that we can be able to live more deeply.

In some Zen centers, it is said that the novice Zen monk or Zen practitioner must first learn to close doors and to cook before there can be any thought of a deep spiritual life. The tools for good works are like that also: simple advice that is difficult to follow in our lives because we want to get on to that which feels good and makes us feel good about ourselves. Our approach must be simply to do the small and apparently easy things until we do them truly well.

Verses 14 through 19 are the corporal works of mercy. Verses 20 and 21 remind us that the wisdom of the Gospel is not in accord with the wisdom of the world. This is a necessary reminder today when there is such an impulse to try to make everyone happy by changing the teachings of the Church. We need to be aware in this context of the difference between the teachings of the Church as objective realities, and the pastoral approach that is so often necessary to help persons understand the teachings. The love of Christ that comes before all else keeps us from judging others and helps us find ways to speak of the Gospel that do not dilute its strength yet at the same time show forth its wisdom for our human lives. 

Verses 23 through 41 are again practical advice for a strong spiritual life that is lived in our actions. In verse 25 we have the admonition never to give a hollow greeting of peace. We must be cautious with this advice because in the present time we judge the hollowness of a thing by how we feel about it. This is certainly not the intention of the Rule. Rather, the Rule is asking us to choose the good of the other, even when I feel total animosity toward the other. As Christians we are not to follow our feelings–and yet we must acknowledge them. Thus, a person must be able to acknowledge the dislike of another person, even anger towards another person, and yet still choose in Christ to act in a manner that is truly a reflection of Christ’s love for us.

Verse 41 reminds us of the importance of placing our trust in God alone. Once again we encounter advice that is very simple and very difficult. We want to place all our hope in God, but often we do so only when there is no other possibility! We are invited to learn how to place this hope in God before we get to a situation when we have no other choice. 

We end this half of the Chapter on the Tools for Good Works with a recognition that all good comes from God and that all we have that is good comes from God. We are capable of doing evil and that comes from us, not from God. This should remind us of the tradition that we must always offer our sins to God, since that really is all we have to offer that is singularly our own. We offer our sins to God with the hope that God will transform our evil into good and transform us also into beings who do His will.

To live in fear of judgment day is only to be aware of the need for conversion in our lives. The reality of our lives–at least for most of us–is that we want to serve God, but have not yet begun to do so in a complete manner. We are still in the “active life” of purgation from our sinfulness, rather than in the “contemplative life” where our whole focus is simply on loving more.

We must strive to develop in ourselves a deep horror of offending God, a deep repulsion towards sinfulness, a sensitivity towards the awfulness and ugliness of sin in our lives. We do this not to denigrate ourselves, but to see reality as it truly is and to help us desire to change our ways and to love God more and more deeply.

May God help us all grow in the awareness of God’s love for us in Christ Jesus. May we come to live more and more fully in the power of the Holy Spirit so that we may give glory to God our Father.

“The soul receives the sweetest harmonies and numbers through the ears, and by these echoes is reminded and aroused to the divine music which may be heard by the more subtle and penetrating sense of mind. According to the followers of Plato, divine music is twofold. One kind, they say, exists entirely in the eternal mind of God. The second is in the motions and order of the heavens, by which the heavenly spheres and their orbits make a marvelous harmony. In both of these our soul took part before it was imprisoned in our bodies. But it uses the ears as messengers, as though they were chinks in this darkness. By the ears, as I have already said, the soul receives the echoes of that incomparable music, by which it is led back to the deep and silent memory of the harmony which it previously enjoyed. The whole soul then kindles with desire to fly back to its rightful home, so that it may enjoy that true music again”.

Somehow this struck a chord with me and I felt it was worth sharing this 500-year-old thought on the meaning of music.’

One of the Saints who made a big impression on me when I was a teenager was St Anthony. It was a real joy for me as a monk to study his life. I remember the class so clearly, we worked through his life line by line and then reading several commentaries. It was deeply fulfilling. The study of the Holy Rule of St Benedict and the Life of St Anthony are things I remember with great happiness and gratitude. Today we celebrate the feast of St Anthony, it seems appropriate to remember him here.

From the New Liturgical Movement: ‘today marks the feast of St. Antony of the Desert (A.D. 251 and 356), who has often been called the Father of Monasticism — though he was not necessarily the first Christian monk. He was one of the famed Egyptian Desert Fathers. (Those interested in the Desert Fathers may like to acquire a copy of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers published as part of the excellentCistercian Studies series.)

One of the most famous early lives of St. Antony, written around A.D. 360, was that attributed to another great saint, St. Athanasius; the Vita Antoni.

About St. Antony, Catholic Culture notes: “At age 18, the gospel text ‘If you wish to be perfect, go and sell all that you have and then follow me’ so moved him that he left everything behind and retired to an inaccessible place in the wilderness where he dedicated his life to God in manual work and continual prayer. In his old age, he imparted wisdom to his disciples and encouraged them to lead a monastic life.”

Some of this wisdom, short sayings attributed to Abba Antony, have come to us today. Here are just a few examples:

Abbe Pambo asked Abba Antony, “What ought I to do?” and the old man said to him, “Do not trust in your own righteousness, do not worry about the past, but control your tongue and your stomach.”

Abba Antony said, “Whoever hammers a lump of iron, first decides what he is going to make of it, a scythe, a sword, or an axe. Even so we ought to make up our minds what kind of virtue we want to forge, or else we labor in vain.”

Liturgically, the Feast of St. Antony of the Desert is celebrated in the Roman calendar on this day in both forms, as well as in the Byzantine liturgical calendar.’

‘As irrigators lead water where they want, as archers make their arrows straight, as carpenters carve wood, the wise shape their minds.’

The Buddha

From Zenit:

During his visit to the Jewish community of Rome this Sunday, Benedict XVI will honor the more than 1,000 victims of the Nazi deportation of 1943. The program of the Pope’s trip was reported today by Vatican Radio.

His first stop will be at the plaque that recalls the Oct. 16, 1943, raid ordered by SS commander Herbert Kappler of occupied Rome, at the request of Berlin. More than 1,000 Roman Jews were arrested and deported to Auschwitz. Only 16 people, among them one woman, were able to return. The Holy Father will place flowers before the plaque honoring those victims.

The next stop on the Pontiff’s program is to honor another victim of violence: a child who was killed in the 1982 terrorist attack on the synagogue. Stefano Tache, age 2, lost his life in that attack; 37 others were wounded.

Benedict XVI will be received at the foot of the stairs of the synagogue by Grand Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni. As they enter the synagogue, the choir will sing Psalm 126 and the Holy Father will greet civil authorities. After discourses from the presidents of Rome’s and Italy’s Jewish communities and the grand rabbi, the choir will intone Psalm 133. Then the Pope will give his address. Before he returns to the Vatican, the Pontiff will meet privately with the grand rabbi and will also visit the Jewish Museum.