Saturday, April 18, 2009
Friday, April 17, 2009
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Monday, April 13, 2009
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Friday, April 10, 2009
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Benedictine Spirituality 3
Benedictine Spirituality: Prayer and The Psalmnody
Benedictine prayer is based on the psalms, the very prayers that Jesus used. Prayer is an unceasing act of presenting ourselves before the face of God and begging for insight and courage to go on. The Divine Office is the set of psalms, Scripture readings, and prayers that have been identified as the official prayer of the church.
To quote Sr. Joan Chittister in her commentary, “There are three dimensions of the treatment of prayer in the Rule of Benedict that deserve special attention. In the first place, it is presented immediately after the chapter on humility. In the second place, it is not a treatise on private prayer. In the third place, it is scriptural rather than personal. Prayer is, then, the natural response of people who know their place in the universe. It is not designed to be a psychological comfort zone though surely comfort it must. And lastly, it is an act of community and an act of awareness.” (p. 75)
Sr. Joan explains that what modern life sees as inhumanly rigorous in the application of hours of prayer throughout the day and night is more a reflection of how we choose to spend our time today. In a world without electricity, people naturally went to bed at sundown, about
For me in this time of Lent, I am more attuned to my own “soul work.” With many in our congregation, I set aside time for Lenten study, attend an extra service of Evening Prayer during the week, and reflect on the 40 days of preparation for Easter. I ponder the quality of my life and the values underlying decisions I make on spending my time, energy, and money. As I anticipate our return to the monastery in April to celebrate the Triduum and our Lord’s Resurrection with the Benedictine sisters, my impatience grows to resume time as measured by the hours of prayer.
Amazing Adventures 2
THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF
Or
An Old Man’s Musings on His Spiritual Journey
Chapter Two
“The Beat Goes On”
In Chapter One, I left off at the end of my first twelve years, intuitively sensing a guiding presence that, in my spiritual infancy, I didn’t recognize as the Holy Spirit. My everyday life continued, with the mundanity of school, family, friends and fairly regular attendance with Grandma May at St. Francis Catholic Church. Dad usually accepted the job of taxi driver so he could spend his time waiting for us at his beloved Elk’s Club next door. There he’d shoot the breeze with his friends in the bar as well as shoot a few games of pool and a few shots of Jim Beam. Heaven forbid that he’d ever consider going to Mass with us, despite my grandmother’s gentle urgings.
After graduation from
At that time
As a lowly freshman I found myself surrounded by a whole new world of guys with muscles who shaved and girls who hung onto them. I quickly began to learn the “pecking order” on campus and started looking for places to connect and fit in.
The athletic world wasn’t for me because I was a “90-pound weakling” and hated sports, much to my dad’s disgust. Dressing out in the boys’ locker room and having to endure the ordeal of gang showers was an ongoing test of my courage, and the only way I made it through was to hang with the other guys who had the same problem. After a few weeks of hazing, the upperclassmen got bored and left us alone. They were far more interested in who was dating whom and how hot so-and-so’s car was!
I found my place on the Freshman Student Council and spent four years selling Cinnamon Candied Apples from Dewar’s, the famous candy store nearby, run by the family of the most beautiful girl on campus, a fact agreed upon by every male in the school! Our goal was to raise funds for a Senior Gift to the school when we graduated and to fund the annual class dance in the spring.
Another place I found to belong was Newman Club, the Catholic student’s organization on campus. In those days there was much more religious tolerance on school campuses, and Newman Club was very popular for three main reasons. The first reason was that all the rich Italian farmer’s kids belonged, and the second was that our sponsor was the most beloved counselor on campus, Miss Emma Sandrini. The third big draw was that the meetings were held weekly in the evenings at Mrs. Jo Brown’s house. She was Miss Sandrini’s secretary in the attendance office. Not only was she like a mom to us, it was also good to have an “in” at the attendance office, just in case.
By now you’re probably wondering what happened to the Holy Spirit in this on-going spiritual journey! It’s only in retrospect that I realize that I was being carried, nurtured and protected by the Holy Spirit the whole time, mostly due to my association with all the rich, worldly Catholic farmer’s kids. We had lots of great social get-togethers, but we also had ongoing religious training from our local Franciscan priest, Fr. Byrne, a wonderful Irish priest from “ye auld sod.” We attended novenas and retreats and learned about the spiritual practices of the church as well as learning how to drink Dago red wine on the sly and get away with outrageous things without our parents or sponsors finding out. However, we learned much later that they knew all along, accepting it as just a part of growing up and figuring out what life was all about, because they’d done the same things!
This was also a very painful part of my life. I was quite gregarious in a group but painfully shy around girls, always filled with some unknown fear that I’d be rejected and ridiculed publicly if I acted on my now rapidly emerging, raging hormonal urges. So I yearned and longed for a girl friend and, although I had a long, ongoing relationship with my friend Charlotte, we never got past the dancing close and hand holding stages. It turns out she was just as shy as I was, and no matter how hard our mothers pushed us, we remained captives to our fear of rejection and never “did” anything, however innocent.
Another painful part of my high school years was being tarred with the “gay” brush. I belonged to a group of 8-10 guys and girls who hung out together all the time. We were in the same clubs, shared the same lunch and enjoyed each other’s company. It wasn’t until my senior year that I finally figured out why girls mostly steered clear of me. It seems that everyone on campus except me knew that Duane, my best friend since elementary school, and another friend Herbie were “queer.” I was so naïve about “them” that I never had a clue. They were just my friends! This revelation was devastating to my sense of self-worth and acceptance, and I’ve carried the scars of that experience with me all of my life. Was I, just because “everyone else” thought I was? I knew I wasn’t when I finally figured what they were talking about, but by then the damage was done.
Well, the Holy Spirit must have gulped a few times during the times of loving, caring and nurturing of this poor, little naïve kid who didn’t have a clue that even then he was a “beloved child of God” and totally precious in His sight.
Tune in next month for Chapter Three, “The College Years.”
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Benedictine Spirituality 2
Benedictine Spirituality 2: Humility
By Judith Dunham
Tom and I have continued our readings in the Rule of Benedict, which for the last month have centered on humility. Although contributed by a fifth century monastic, St. Benedict’s wisdom applies to our lives in the twenty-first cemtury. Sr. Joan Chittister, author of the commentary we are using, observes:
Each of us, monastic or not, deals with the same elements in life. We are all bound to the Gospel, under leadership of some kind, faced with the dictates of tradition or the cautions of experience and in need of direction. (p. 49)
Benedict grounds his admonitions in the Gospel, especially in Chapter 4 of the Rule. He writes, “First of all, ‘love God with your whole heart, your whole soul and all your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself’ (Matt. 22-37-39; Mark
While Benedict calls the monastic community to contemplation, nonviolence and peacemaking, St. Joan gives us modern examples of the Rule, It doesn’t talk about conflict resolution; it says, don’t begin the conflict. It doesn’t talk about communication barriers; it says, stay gentle even with those who are not gentle with you. It doesn’t talk about winning; it talks about loving. (p. 51)
The twelve rungs of humility outlined by St. Benedict are difficult to summarize and, taken out of context, lose much of their meaning. He spends s full chapter on humility, with much exposition. At its core, humility is centered on obedience to God as exemplified in Christ’s example. John Forman, a Benedictine Oblate, summarizes the twelve rungs as: 1) always keep the fear of God before [one’s] eyes; 2) the renunciation of self-will and desire; 3) submission to one’s superior in all obedience; 4) patience in enduring hardship with equanimity; 5) self-revelation and the acknowledgement of sinfulness; 6) contentment with the least; 7) the awareness of one’s own liabilities; 8) the avoidance of attention-seeking behavior; 9) the radical restraint of speech; 10) not ready and prompt to laugh; 11) being mild and speaking in a few reasonable words; and 12) embodiment.
Forman also contrasts humility with humiliation. He explains, “One key to differentiate life-giving humility from negating humility is the focus: Grace-given ‘humility’ acknowledges both the individual self and the Self that transcends each of us, while hostile ‘humility’ is entirely self-focused and, ultimately, consuming.” Through grace-given humility, “we discover the human dignity in understanding that we were called to live for God, and how to respond to that understanding so that we are a God-story worth telling.”
In commenting on rung six, Sr. Joan observes, “In a classless society status is snatched in normally harmless but corrosive little ways. We are a people who like embossed business cards and monogrammed leather briefcases and invitations to public events. We spend money we don’t have…We have lost a sense of ‘enoughness’…Benedict tells us to quit climbing. If we can learn to love life where we are, in what we have, then we will have room in our souls for what life alone does not have to offer.” (pp. 69-70)
Sr. Joan calls humility “the lost virtue of the twentieth century” in great need of rediscovery. She writes,
Benedict is telling us that true humility is simply a measure of the self that is taken without exaggerated approval or exaggerated guilt. Humility is the ability to know ourselves as God knows us and to know that it is the little we are that is precisely our claim on God. Humility is, then, the foundation for our relationship with God, our connectedness to others, our acceptance of ourselves, our way of using the goods of the earth and even our way of walking through the world, without arrogance, without domination, without scorn, without put-downs, without disdain, without self-centeredness. The more we know ourselves, the gentler we will be with others.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Amazing Adventures 1
THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF
Or
An Old Man’s Musings Concerning His Faith Journey
Chapter 1
My First Decade as a Beloved Child of God
Where to begin? My earliest recollections of church are of riding the city bus to Mass at St. Francis Catholic Church with my tiny Irish grandmother on Sundays in
St. Francis Church was a classic Gothic-style edifice built of red brick with two tall towers on each side, both topped with crosses. The inside was cool and rather dimly lighted with high vaulted ceilings, stained glass windows all around the perimeter, interspaced with the Stations of the Cross and brightly colored, larger-than-life-sized plaster statues of some of the more famous saints and religious figures of the Church.
The nave was divided in half, intersected by a wide main aisle which led up to the elevated chancel and the high altar at its center, directly below a huge stained glass window. This was pre-Vatican II, so the priest celebrated mass with his back to the congregation.
My most enduring memories are of the palpable holiness of the place…the solemnity, the hushed quiet, the echo of voices, both the priests’ and the choir and organ during High Mass and of the pomp and the richness of the vestments and ritual of the liturgy. Hand in hand with these were the “smells and bells,” the lingering odor of incense, frankincense and myrrh, I realized many years later, and the jangling of the bells by the altar boy during the Elevation of the Host.
I can still see and smell, in my minds eye, the bouquets of fresh flowers nestled at the feet of the holy statues and the brass stands holding votive candles, flickering and casting fantastic shadows as they reflected from their ruby-colored glass holders. Often times there were parishioners striking wooden matches to light a candle or two for their prayer intentions and then kneeling, heads bowed and hands clasped in prayer before the statue in the niche.
Another memory is the preparation for baptism, meeting several times with the priest, since I hadn’t been baptized as an infant. My baptism occurred on Palm Sunday with several other candidates, dressed in white shirts, ties, black pants and shoes. We were gathered around the baptismal font with our families, in my case, my proud grandmother, godparents, two Catholic friends of my family, my mom dad and little brother and, of course, the priest. I have no memory of the prayers or ritual, but I do remember leaning over the font as the priest poured the cold water over my head as he intoned the proper prayers.
An interesting note on my godparents…my godmother was a French Basque lady and my godfather was an Irishman, a long-time drinking buddy of my father’s. Both had been friends of my parents for years, were devoutly Catholic, and had watched me grow and mature since my birth.
Between the times of my baptism and confirmation some two years later, I attended regular weekly catechism class. Picture this clueless little country boy attending class in the sheep barn of one of the many Basque sheep growers in
One last recollection of this decade of my life is about preparing for Confirmation. We met for many Saturdays in a classroom of the old
The nun who was our teacher wore the brown Franciscan habit of old, was quite stern and always had the dreaded “cricket,” clicker in hand, used often to “keep us in line.” We learned and parroted back the answers to the Catechism questions until we had them down pat and letter perfect. The admonition from the nun that we didn’t wanted to be embarrassed by mistakes when the visiting bishop of the diocese presided at the celebration kept us in mortal fear.
Of that day’s ceremony, I remember very little except that our group made no mistakes in answering the bishop’s questions and he was very complimentary. The other recollection, still clear in my mind to this day, is of him sticking his thumb into a little silver container and then marking my forehead with the sign of the cross.
That all of this happened over sixty years ago and is still indelibly imprinted on my mind is pretty amazing to me. However, the real meaning of all of this only came to me recently as I finally understood the amazing power and grace of the Holy Spirit. Like the salt in the dough mentioned in Scripture, my life has always been guided and influenced by that Holy Presence and I have always, from the moment of my conception, been “a beloved child of God.”
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Benedictine Spirituality 1
Benedictine Spirituality
By Judith Dunham
As we have shared previously with the congregation, Tom and I planned to spend our winter break from school with the Benedictine sisters of Queen of Angels Monastery in
Tom and I returned with a renewed commitment to integrate some of the spiritual disciplines we experienced at
As part of our preparation, we are studying the Rule of Benedict. We had read it before our summer service, but now we are going slowly and using a daily commentary by Sister Joan Chittister, a Benedictine writer, to explore how the Rule can help us live our lives to “seek God daily through study, prayer, conversion of life, and works of charity, justice, and peace.”
We hope to share our continuing journey with the congregation, inviting others to sample some of the wisdom of St. Benedict and Sr. Joan through regular reflections in the Advent Adventures. In our first week of reading, here are two passages that struck me particularly. In the first, Sr. Joan is referring to the Prologue of the Rule:
The difference between Benedict and other spiritual masters of his time lay in the fact that Benedict believed that the spiritual life was not an exercise in spiritual gymnastics. It was to be nothing “harsh or burdensome.” And it was not a private process. It was to be done in community with others. It was to be a “school” dedicated to “the good of all concerned.” It was to be lived with “patience.”
The private preserves of the spiritual life are far from dead, however. It is so much easier to go to daily Mass and feel good about it than it is to serve soup at a soup kitchen. It is so much more comfortable to say bedtime prayers than it is to speak peace in a warring world. It is so much more satisfying to contribute to the building of a new church than it is to advocate welfare legislation. It is so much more heroic to fast than it is to be patient with a noisy neighbor. It is so much easier to give the handshake of peace in church than it is to speak gently in the family. And yet one without the other is surely fraud if life with God in community is truly of the essence of real spiritual growth. (p. 30)
The second passage is taken from the commentary on the reading for January 10:
The purpose of Benedictine spirituality is to gather equally committed adults for a journey through earthen darkness to the dazzling light that already flames in each of us, but in a hidden place left to each of us to find. (p. 38)
We invite you to share our journey of exploring Benedictine spirituality in the months to come.
Monday, January 5, 2009
A Benedictine Christmas
THE SOLEMNITY
By Tom Dunham
In the brilliant white silence of a snowy winter landscape, we recently celebrated a joyful yet solemn Christmas cycle filled with the timeless Holy Scriptures known since our childhoods, leading up to the joy of Christmas Day in its deepest spiritual sense.
Our return to Queen of Angels Benedictine Monastery in
Freshly cut fir trees began to appear in carefully selected spots, both inside and outside the monastery, and bit by bit decorations began to multiply, heralding the approaching Feast of Christmas. Ornaments and lights on trees, the Advent Wreath and candles in the dining room, beeswax and terracotta crèche scene figures here and there on tables that we passed daily, all called for us to stop and gaze at their beauty.
Greenery and Oregon holly on stairwell banisters as well as in the window sills and on the lectern and altar in the Chapel, poinsettias, red, cream and variegated, delivered en masse by a local grower, a hundred-year old wax doll baby Jesus made by one of the Sisters from the past in a small wooden cradle, nestled under a soft blanket, located under a stairwell in an daily traveled hallway, all appearing bit by bit and day by day added to the crescendo of the sense of anticipation of the coming of Christ into our midst.
And finally, the appearance in a corner of the upstairs chapel, the beautifully fresh pine-bough covered, rustic crèche with the colorfully painted figures of Mary, Joseph and the Shepherds, the Star of Bethlehem suspended above, nearly completed the decoration process. The anticipation of family visits scheduled for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day added a sense of humanity to the preparations.
Under-girding all of the above mentioned scenes of growing excitement was the quiet, measured, four times daily prayers, where we chanted the Psalmody and listened to the timelessly familiar scriptures concerning the Angel’s annunciation to Zechariah in the Temple and to Elizabeth and Mary. Having sung the Benedictus and Magnificat
As a quiet accompaniment to decorations, add the daily sharing among the sisters about the upcoming Kris Kringle Gift Exchange Party and the evening of carol singing led by the young Benedictine monks coming down the hill from Mt. Angel Abbey for their annual Christmas visit. The artful last touch was the placement of the ceramic figures of the Three Magi in the window sills at the far end of the chapel, waiting to be advanced gradually and daily toward the crèche only finally to arrive on the Day of Epiphany.
For the first time in my life I truly experienced the deepest solemnity and spiritual truths…..the true meaning of Christmas. My heart was filled to bursting with the joy and truth of the faith which, after all these years drew me into the Incarnation as a living member of the Body of Christ. The reality of the Word made Flesh became a tangible part of my being as tears of thanksgiving flooded my eyes and the Angel voices filled the air around me.
Christ is Born, Halleluiah!
Saturday, January 3, 2009
Thursday, January 1, 2009
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