Too Much Activity

We are in less danger by far from becoming contemplative than we are from activity.

Choose Your Presentation

The more formal the presentation, the less effective will it be.  People have no shortage of facts.

Less Formal

The more formal the presentation, the less effective it will be.  People have no shortage of facts.

No More C.C.D.

Someone was telling me the boys should be in C.C.D., but I decided "no."  They never liked it.  They never seemed better for having gone, only sadder.  I mentioned this and was told that was not as important as the discipline.  That is not a good enough reason.  In fact, it was more than that -- it was actually dumb but I thought it best not to say so.

Finish Being Children

People become adults when they finish being children, which for many would place puberty somewhere in the fifth decade, and they would still be ahead of others (including me, I sometimes fear).

Spending Time

If time were important, how you spend it might be a concern.

The Wrong Process

What is the name for a process focused on distinctions, on claiming characteristics or offering indictments better seen as observations of what is wrong, rather than factual statements of what ought to be?

Balancing Trust and Control

There is in many situations a need at some point to decide when trust should begin and control should decline.

Being Old

When, as younger people, we think of being old it is as young people.  We think we will have the same vitality, interests and capabilities; but that is not how it will be.  We will be old as old people, which is how it should be.

Selling Oneself

They were talking of their marketability as though uninvolved in themselves, as though there were no self -- only this product.  It seemed odd to hear, but apparently not to say.

Things With Meaning

Any number of things probably mean nothing at all, and those that have a meaning probably don't have an eternal one.

Underselling Catholic School Week

It was Catholic School Week and so it was the featured player at the liturgy.  It seemed hard for the speaker to find a way to claim to be better -- rather than as good as -- the public school.  It seemed like trying to justify one's being without offending others.  The problem is in justifying, which grows out of comparison.  The school needed to sell itself as school, as religious school; and there it began to stumble over clichés, bumping into amorphous sayings, and back-pedaling from anything people might be reluctant to hear.  Crashing on through phrases well worn by time and use, the speaker tried to say nothing while sounding like she had just what someone might want.  Having spent a suitable amount of time at it she gratefully sat down, no more grateful than were her hearers who -- too polite (or deadened) to scratch their heads and well past the point of yawning -- stood to mumble their belief.

Slow Down

Slow down.  Notice what you do.  See what is going on.  Spend hours instead of days.

Speak From Within Yourself

If you can respond from within yourself, there is no need for anxiety about how someone else might hear or see you.  How they might perceive what you say, or how they will understand who you are, is within them and so cannot reasonably be your concern.

Misunderstanding

There are a lot of people saying "have to" when that is not what they have to mean.

Awakening to Spirituality

Sometime around age 40 I began to have a sense of what spirituality might involve.  I had earlier known what Church might mean and I was well-versed in social action as its mission, but it took longer to understand about this more essential aspect of ourselves, and of God.

Beyond Salvation

He feels obliged to save the Church from its errors and meanness.  It is an impossible task, fueled mainly by anger; and because it relies on the Church acknowledging its error, it can never be complete.  It will never be saved in the way he would wish.

Faith in Being (Not Just Doing)

The aspect of God we most often see is his activity.  He is creating, gathering, leading, saving, renewing, interceding, and his love is always in movement, seeking and embracing.  The life of Jesus is seen mostly as mission, as his doing and acting, moving always toward Jerusalem and the redemptive act that will occur there.  The Spirit of God is also described as movement, as an active infusion or the power that derives or impels the Church.  We have from the very beginning the question of action being the complement to faith, the implementing (and so the validating) of belief being in what is done about it.

It is, of course, true.  But it is only one aspect.  In addition to what God may do -- what he is now doing and all he has so far accomplished -- there is his being.  Jesus too is an essential self apart from whatever he did, or now does.  He was the one who also prayed, and who went apart, the one whose silence is stolen by the crowd's demanding to hear.  He had required reflection not only as renewal so that he might go on doing, but also (and more so) so he could sustain himself in who he was, enhancing the bond of being he shared with his father.  The Spirit, apart from being the breath of the Church, is its soul, the ground of its being, the essence in which it rests.

Jesus' Doubt

At the wedding, Jesus said his time had not yet come.  Maybe he would have continued to say that had Mary not intervened.  Maybe he was reluctant to begin, unwilling to risk what seemed to be the power available to him.  Maybe they both knew that once it began, once it really was his time, there would be no turning back.  Maybe at that moment her faith exceeded his own.

Making Exceptions

No sooner had we determined than we started listing the exceptions to it.

Unbound

We are alone unto ourselves, which can sound either isolated or complete, since we are each an entirety, a unitary being; but aside from this uniqueness we can think of it as distinctness, a separateness that is not to be fled so much as it could be embraced.  Whatever bonds we share, we are all right not being bound as well.

Addicted to Action

We had thought that what was done -- be it social action, celebration of Eucharist, study or any number of acts -- was important, as though action were the only way of making things real, or of acknowledging how real they might be.  They had reality -- they were factual (or not) -- apart from us, and we became more real for our doing of them.  Perhaps the concern with doing, with action, only limited our capacity to provide a truer, if less substantive, sense of being.

It is perhaps our discomfort with what is most real that made us less satisfied with nothing to do.  Even meditation had to conclude with a resolution to do something, a putting into practice whatever had been the focus of meditation -- which had itself been framed as an activity.

The Holiness of People

He thinks there is a holiness apart from God that is no less sacred for being distinct.  It is the holiness of the person or object, the sanctity it has in itself, rather than what it may have in relation to, or in common with, anything else or anyone else, even God.

Ask The Questions

Why do you need an answer before daring to ask?  Why do you not let go without assurance of where (or if) you will come to rest?

A Point of Being

The darkness is not to be passed through as though its value were only in the ability to endure it.  The darkness is instead where you are to be, a point of being rather than one of pain.

Arrival

When others start thinking you are lost, it may mean you are beginning to arrive -- not at a location, or a place even in thought, but in nowhere:  where destination is no longer an issue.  It is not a passage through, or even passage.  It is not presence, either of good or even your own essence; and it moves beyond the point of paradox since that too is without a meaning lost for attempts to express it.

A Vision

While putting away the decorations, I had a sense this might be the last time I do this and if it is that would be all right.  It is not the first time the prospect of dying has visited, but it is never a frightening realization.  It does not intrude.

[Another Christmas has come and gone.  The decorations were brought out, hung and are back again in the attic.  So much, I suppose, for premonitions.]

Moment to Moment

We can think all time has been leading toward this moment.  It has, and in this moment there is some fruition, some finalizing of the process, but it goes beyond now as well.  There is a further culmination, one to which we will contribute by what we bring to this moment.