Of your charity, please pray for the happy repose of the soul of Fr. Leo O'Connor, priest of the diocese of Christchurch for 60 years.
Saturday, October 6, 2012
Friday, October 5, 2012
newsletter 7 October
Weekly newsletter for the Catholic parishes of the Hurunui District and the Chatham Islands, available at this link:
Friday, September 28, 2012
newsletter 30 Sept.
Now uploaded, this week's parish newsletter for the Catholic parishes of the Hurunui and the Chatham Islands.
Friday, September 21, 2012
be the greatest
Coming to Mass each week is the ultimate confrontation with reality. We begin every celebration of the Mass, not by recalling our achievements and high-points, but by ‘acknowledging our sins, and so preparing ourselves to celebrate...’
Not too many decades ago people were encouraged to ignore their feelings. The child was praised for not crying at the death of a parent. A teenage boy was called ‘a baby’ if he cried when experiencing pain. In that ‘stiff-upper-lip’ society, feelings were ignored. The consequences of this ignorance have been tragic.
It is perhaps an inevitable result of such a stoic attitude that has seen the ‘feeling-pendulum’ react to the opposite pole. Now feelings are given the central place in all aspects of behaviour and decision-making. We hear ‘do it if it makes you feel good.’
Each of these extreme attitudes is a serious misunderstanding of the real purpose of feelings in the human design. Feelings are important. We ignore them at our peril. But feelings are also fickle and often misleading. Feelings are easily manipulated by our random wants and irrational fears. If a child’s family convince her that in order to live happily she needs to achieve academically and marry money, she will not feel great (at least initially) when she scores only pass grades and falls in love with one who earns only a satisfactory salary.
When at Mass the priest invites the people to ‘acknowledge our sins’, our mind (if we are healthy) is immediately flooded with feelings of failure. We wrestle with secret struggles and are burdened with the unreasonable (and unachievable) pressures that weigh upon us.
Very often these pressures are caused by our failure to meet the standards that we feel are required of us. Somehow we have come to believe that it is the attaining of these standards (with others and with God) that makes us lovable.
So we can understand the disciples in today’s gospel. While walking along they arguing about which of them is the greatest. When they reach the house Jesus asks them what they were arguing about along the road. They must have been embarrassed because the scripture makes a point of telling us that they responded to Jesus’ question with silence.
Then Jesus teaches them that the way to be great is to seek to be the vulnerable servant of all. Perhaps now they begin to understand what they had failed to appreciate in the opening verses of today’s reading: “The Son of Man is to be handed over to men and they will kill him, and three days after his death the Son of Man will rise." We know they didn’t get what Jesus was saying because we hear that “they did not understand the saying, and they were afraid to question him”.
It is no surprise that the disciples did not understand Jesus. In too many ways people 2000 years ago were pretty much like citizens of these early years of the twenty-first century. We (as our ancestors before us) have fallen victim to the false conviction that money and power, success and strength will bring us the happiness that we so desperately seek.
The pope notes this in his words to the young people of Lebanon during his visit there last weekend as he exhorts them to “Look for relationships of genuine, uplifting friendship. Find ways to give meaning and depth to your lives; fight superficiality and mindless consumption! You face another temptation, too: that of money, the tyrannical idol which blinds to the point of stifling the person at the heart”.
Jesus is giving us the inside knowledge that the world of advertising and consumerism is so desperate to hide from us: the method to achieving happiness is to seek to serve.
It is of the essence of human existence to seek to be great - even to be the greatest. But the greatest among us is not the one who appears to wield the most power, drive the fastest car, marries the movie (or sporting) star or lives in the biggest house in the ‘best’ street. Such worldly successes bring only fleeting and superficial satisfaction.
Yes, it is good and healthy to seek to be the greatest. But who is the greatest?
The greatest is the one who knows their need for Jesus most intimately. Jesus is not at all interested in how other people view me. The fact that I might achieve fame in the eyes of others, even through good works, is of no interest to the divine heart.
Human greatness is found in the one who humbly acknowledges their sin. This is because when I acknowledge my sin, I am revealing to God my capacity for His mercy and His love. I am giving God the space to take root in me and to overwhelm me. Such an experience is totally transformative. I now realise that all my efforts to satisfy the squeaks of my random feelings have failed. I need more. I need true greatness. I need the life that only God can give me. Now I am truly in touch with my reality. Now I am ready for God.
This is the life of the saint. And only when living as a saint is one able to experience true greatness.
weekly newsletter
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Friday, September 14, 2012
whose thinking?
“ You are not thinking as God does
but as human beings do ”
(Mk 8)
On Friday (14th), the Church celebrated the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. The readings of this Sunday's liturgy reinforce the feast’s emphasis on the centrality of the suffering of the Cross in the life of every Christian.
People of faith celebrate the feast each year knowing that the death of Jesus is the event that gives us hope. Jesus’ death and resurrection gives meaning to all human suffering. Therefore we are proud to make a crucifix visible in our homes.
It is important to remember that the cross was an instrument of torture and death for the ‘trouble-makers’ of the Roman Empire. The modern equivalent would be the electric chair in the United States, or the gallows in New Zealand before 1989.
So couldn’t the Church think up a more attractive title for the feast? ‘Exaltation’ of an instrument of torture? Well, yes, but this would be missing the point.
The Church is insisting that we stay in front of reality - whatever the reality is. And more often than we would like, it is suffering and death that motivates, occupies, and even pre-occupies us.
And this got me thinking about Baptism, this and the fact that it was the anniversary of my own baptism during the week.
On the Holy Land pilgrimage earlier in the year, at Emmaus (where the Community of the Beatitudes have a house and care for the site), we saw the excavation of a baptismal font from the early Christian centuries.
On first glance it looked a bit like a stone grave, dug in a cross-shape, with steps down one end and up the opposite side. It was almost two metres from end to end and a metre deep, to be filled with water.
Why did the first Christians design their baptismal places to resemble graves? Because...
“Baptism, the original and full sign of which is immersion, efficaciously signifies the descent into the tomb by the Christian who dies to sin with Christ in order to live a new life. "We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life." (Catechism of the Catholic Church par.628)
Fr. Timothy Radcliffe OP has titled his new book “Take the Plunge, Living Baptism and Confirmation”. In the opening pages he notes that about one-third of the world’s population is baptized. He continues:
“People are baptized for all sorts of reasons, perhaps because of a profound experience of conversion, or to pass on their faith to their children, but also just because it is expected, to please the grandparents, to get their children into a Christian school, or just as an excuse for a party or a new hat .... Yet Christians make the grandest claims for baptism. It is our sharing in Christ’s victory over death” (p.1)
Often when I baptise a baby, I want to begin the ceremony by asking the parents: ‘so you want me to baptise your baby; you want me to initiate this beautiful child into the life of Christ, a life of suffering, misunderstanding, betrayal and denial by friends, and death as a criminal...you really want me to initiate your child into this life?’
Now, before you get too anxious about my pastoral style, I can assure you that I have never asked this at a baptism!
But you get my point? When we baptise a child, (or an adult) we are in fact initiating this person into such a life. This does not mean that we are wishing suffering, misunderstanding, denial, betrayal and death on the child. But we are standing honestly before the reality that every human person who has ever lived, has suffered, has been betrayed and denied, has been misunderstood, and has (or will) experience death.
But you get my point? When we baptise a child, (or an adult) we are in fact initiating this person into such a life. This does not mean that we are wishing suffering, misunderstanding, denial, betrayal and death on the child. But we are standing honestly before the reality that every human person who has ever lived, has suffered, has been betrayed and denied, has been misunderstood, and has (or will) experience death.
This is the point. Without Christ, we are hope-less. Without Christ we flail about in a forest of tempting escapes under the guise of (apparent) ‘freedoms’. Without Christ there is no point to life.
But wIth Christ, every human circumstance, however tragic, has meaning and purpose.
We baptise a new Christian because life with Christ is the ONLY life that offers hope in the midst of pain, betrayal, isolation and fear. For the Christian, death is not a future fear. The Christian is one who (in Baptism) has already passed through death ‘that s/he might walk in the newness of life!’
We baptise a new Christian because life with Christ is the ONLY life that offers hope in the midst of pain, betrayal, isolation and fear. For the Christian, death is not a future fear. The Christian is one who (in Baptism) has already passed through death ‘that s/he might walk in the newness of life!’
If we don’t live in this certainty, then we habitually fall victim to “reaching out for the Infinite but in mistaken directions: in drugs, in a disorderly form of sexuality, in totalizing technologies, in success at every cost and even in deceptive forms of piety”. (ref. Pope Benedict in his message to the Rimini Meeting last month)
And this is where we are given an option. We are offered the choice between life and death. Another way of presenting this is to consider the challenge of Jesus in today’s gospel reading: we choose life when we cease thinking as the world thinks, and when we begin to think with the mind of God.
It is the wise person who wakes up to the reality that no thing can adequately answer the desires of the human heart. But there is some ONE, Jesus Christ ('God-with us'), who is eager to satisfy every human need. By our very nature (i.e. as a fundamental characteristic of our human design), humans are made to live as a relationship with Jesus Christ who is God.
In this life with Jesus we appreciate that 'human' thinking is fatally flawed. Advertising tells us that we will be happy with a bigger house, a faster car, a later-model partner, obedient children, more money, better health...the list is endless!
Each of these pleasures might provide momentary satisfaction. But then the yearning returns because, through our persistent and niggling neediness, God is teaching us to think not as humans think, but as God thinks.
Each of these pleasures might provide momentary satisfaction. But then the yearning returns because, through our persistent and niggling neediness, God is teaching us to think not as humans think, but as God thinks.
parish newsletter
You will find the weekly newsletter for the Catholic parishes of the Hurunui and the Chatham Islands by clicking on this link:
If you would like to be on the email list to receive the newsletter updates just send your email to
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