Framing the Story

The most difficult things as an artist was working on a project before it took shape. The framing of a house. The framing of a book. The most difficult thing was to remain excited over the project in the early stages. When all you had was a dream.

I think a lot about the story of Noah. Like how it was all coming along. God’s view of creation, that is. I thought of it this morning as I deleted my computer history. Did God simply want to delete a history, a lot like I could on a computer? Wanting to start again? Fresh.

What was God’s view of creation? Was it a lot like using the characters as in all those sequels in books and movies. The same character repeated over and over. Rabbitt Run, by Updike. Harry Potter. “Dirty Harry.” The Hardy Boys. “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
Sequels in the Good Book. Abraham and then Isaac. Sacrifice. A bizarre idea, to sacrifice the future, a son.

And now in the ongoing sequel, there was this human named Jesus. There in the desert. Scripture is nothing but the history of how people who went before us learned how to pray. Jesus in the desert. Praying. For 40 days. Like this season of Lent. A lot like Moses, except it had been 40 years.

Those who tried to look at the sun…it cannot be sustained for long. Or so it seemed on a morning after a 9 inch snowfall, on a bright bright February morning in Minnesota. On in Florida with the invasion of all these snowbirds. Concentration on the sun was not possible. You had to look elsewhere. And so the minister in his quest for God. He/she had to gaze elsewhere and not at God.

Formed in God’s image and likeness: The most difficult things as an artist was working at the beginning of an idea without yet a form. The difficulty for this human was in the motivation to continue.

A man from Roseville, Minnesota had solicited thoughts of a painting on the wall, entitled “Christ in the Wildness,” which was painted in 1929, from those who spent a weekend at the Jesuit Retreat House in DeMontreville. In the painting, Jesus of Nazareth is in the desert, in the wildness, surrounded by his humanity and little else. In the middle of nowhere. The man from Roseville had contemplated the artwork, wondering what the artist was trying to depict.

My interpretation was that of this Messiah thinking, a lot about the story of Noah. Wanting to start again. Fresh. Thinking about how all of this creation had been coming along. From the perspective of God. With that hostile force from Rome, trying to keep order. Wondering what to do 30 years after that census. And thinking about God’s view of creation.

“Christ in the Wildness.” With Christ thinking as an author, like the writer of the plot of the Good News. And because he was human, it was not easy. He suffered like a hematologist in search of answers on how to resolve the threat of death, in the blood. Jesus of Nazareth, like you and me, with a divine nature and contemplating how to change humanity. In the days when he was making a career change, from that of a carpenter, where he had been creating things out of wood. His career change to what had always been in this desert that of a prophet.

Christ, in the wildness, where he found himself in need of food. In need of drink. Alone. In prayer. And wondering of the answers to the questions. The same questions addressed everyday in the stories of the morning news: With whom? Where? When? How? Formulating a plan with help from above to explain the reasons why. Focused on the Truth, with his Jewish background.

Like the morning news. Just like any writer tried to focus on. Tying everything together. For all people who daily had a need for food, for drink. Each day.

There in the desert. Jesus. A lot like me. The most difficult things as an artist was working on a project before it took shape. Struggling like most young people, to tie everything that they had come to know together.

Blushing

To remember the excitement of it all. The excitement of youth. Blushing. Embarassments. Embarassed not at being an animal, but learning about it. At dirty jokes. Embarassed at my imperfections in an imperfect world.

To remember the excitement of it all. The excitement of youth. The ones involving hunger and thirst. Learning limits. Embarassed by my appetites. We were all embarassed by sexual appetities.

When some people forget those teen-age years. Embarassed to be passing into this stage of life. Embarassed by change. Embarassed by the attraction that had overcome me. Embarassed by the animal within.

Ash Wednesday. The excitement of God. Embarassed. By my sins. We all had them. Most wanted to ignore them.

In the western world, there had always been an embarasssment of sex. When I grew up. Outside of marriage. The excitement of sex was conveyed in the public proclamation. Whether it was the excitement of youth, the excitement of a life long commitment ….the embarassment was gone. Do you remember the embarassment when someon at the age of 15 asked if you had a girlfriend. No. Not me.

The excitement. The attraction. Distant. The sex part to others. But she was here every day, just distant. Union. When the goal was union. With just one.

Comfortable in a relationship. Around all the time.

Ash Wednesday. Foregiveness. Forgiveness over appetite. Never have so few people asked for forgivenes. From God. Of course never before have there been 6 billion plus people.

The difficulty in forgiveness. Forgiveness started with the one who was wronged. The one who was subject to one degree or other of unfaithfulness.

It was a season of the year to try and get some control again over appetities.

The Flow of the River

Heraclitus was a philosopher who preceded Socrates who wrote, “You cannot step twice into the same river.”

Dolan. There was a new archbishop named for New York City. The success of someone educated as Catholics is to be judged by an archbishop in the numbers who elect to marry in the church, who attend Sunday Mass, or who join the priest or sisterhood. Or so he was quoted in the New York Times.

Wedlock: What did it mean to this society? Any more. Mostly there was only talk of divorce and gay marriage in the news. Little news of the day by day life of wedlock.

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless wasteland. And darkness covered the abyss, while a mighty wind swept over the waters. Baptism. What did it mean any more? Another kind of wedlock. A formless wasteland. That well could be the first line in a story about the human faith struggle. Baptism. People who actually meant something. From the beginning. Being part of the real community here on earth. Whose times you shared. In the beginning. With gifts that actually had meaning. And then passing it on to your own kids, the people who meant everything.

To tell a lover that you love him/her. To be wedded. Wedlock. It has helped me tremendously.

Abraham. Isaac. Sacrifice. Really, learning how to pray. A bizarre idea, to sacrifice the future, a son. And so began Abraham’s dialogue with God, asking questions, seeking answers if he was doing the right thing. Questioning. Learning how to pray. God maybe wondering the same things, at the samw time. “How do these people pray to me? Or why?” It all seemed to be part of the learning process. For God. For mankind.

Wrestling with the Canons of the church. The baptized and the unbaptized remainder. Most of the 6 billion of the world were wrestling. The Christians. The Jews. Jacob, wrestling with the past. His own. The Canons. The one he would one day pass on. The conflict between the past and the present. Jacob wrestling in the night. Trying to remain honest to who he was. To his father? To himself? Jacob. And then physically afflicted, a lot like the Church of Rome.

The conflict in priesthood between the past and the present. That Psalm 46, “Be still. And know I am God.” Trying to find priests. Was the issue about a Catholic world, any world,, that was not listening?

Fr. Richard McBrien was a priest at Notre Dame who told a personal anecdote of a seminary professor of Ecclesiology during the time of Vatican II. That professor urged seminarians, “soon after John XXIII’s announcement, to pray that the council never be held. For him, and for many other Catholics, the Vatican Council of 1869-70 had rendered all future councils unnecessary, given that council’s reaffirmation of the dogma of papal primacy and its formulation of the new dogma of papal infallibility.”

The struggle in prayer was mostly in the failure to listen.

Baptism. With that 11th Commandment. “Go! Teach all nations. In the name of the Father. And of the Son. And of the Holy Spirit.

When you were at a graduation point, at the baccalaureate address, it was a time to find your own way. Ways that worked amidst the struggle of every young guy, trying to communicate something of significance. In that search, in the lack of movement, had a lethargy set in? A lot like in those stories in the Old Testament. With all of that focus on the line of David. Until Mary and the bloodline where she had come just kind of snuck up on everyone.

Heraclitus was a philosopher who believed “You cannot step twice into the same river. For other waters are continuously flowing on.”

To Be Needed & Wanted

“In an age when we can do almost anything, how do we decide what we ought to do?” In a time when we can do anything technologically, how do we decide morally what we never should do?” -Cardinal Joseph Bernardin

Fr. Jolly Vadakken “prefers to stay at home where he runs a Catholic resources center across the street from the diocesan pink cathedral in Irinjalakuda, he buzzes around the diocese on a motorcycle, often in his cassock, his cellphone ringing incessantly. He operates a suicide hot line (Kerala has one of the highest suicide rates in India), counsels couples, teaches courses in parenting, and runs a program that mediates local conflicts. He said that he feels “more vital” as a priest in his native India than he did in the United States or Europe, where, he pointed out, he was needed only for the sacraments (as in the Diocese of Rockville Centre, for example, where many of the Catholics are, as Costa put it, “accustomed to multiple Masses”). Tall and prepossessing, Fr. Jolly Vadakken is a spiritual giant. He had studied in Rome, has worked in parishes in Germany, Minneapolis, and Birmingham. Fluent in five languages, he had offers to work as a parish pastor in Italy and Atlanta. But he preferred to stay home. ‘In the other world, we are official priests.’ Vadakken said, ‘We are satisfied just doing the Mass and sacraments, everything on time, everything perfect. In India, however, the people come close to us. The work satisfaction is different. Our ministry is so much wanted here.’” -Laurie Goodstein in the New York Times on December 29, 2008

Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Avila, Therese of Lisieux, and John of the Cross had strong egos, were secure enough to be vulnerable, and never needed to protect themselves. These were the spiritual giants. “For so many of us, the bigger problem in our lives, including our spiritual lives, is precisely that our self-image is too weak to allow us to do anything really great. We struggle to be vulnerable, to not be paranoid and protect ourselves precisely because we aren’t secure enough inside. Precisely because we so often feel the need to protect ourselves, because we are weak and because our egos and our sense of self-worth are so shaky.” -Father Richard Benson

Under the burden of legalism, all morality is reduced to a burden. Charity, chastity and temperance become things we have to do rather than what we want to do. Authentic, mature morality is marked by a desire to develop habits of virtue. Moving to the ideal of unconditional love, when a healthy lifestyle becomes something we ‘WANT.’ Charity, chastity and temperance are what we want to live out, not what we do out of fear. Care of the soul was when moral choices move from ‘obligations’ to desires.” -Father Richard Benson

“ ‘In India, our ministry is so much wanted here,’ Vadakken said, ‘The people come close to us. The work satisfaction is different.’

“Would it not also have been appropriate to add the words ‘and needed’ after ‘WANTED’?” Fr. Richard McBrien wrote in the National Catholic Reported on January 26, 2009.

The crisis of religious vocation was about feeling needed and wanted, in a world where egos were too weak. The role of the priest in the United States is one of ritual. The modern parish priest was left to officiated at Mass. Priesthood had become a job that wore a man out, unless he was also wanted. And the people for the most part do not come close to the priest.

These priests and nuns today were the spiritual giants. Secure enough to be vulnerable. In the struggle to communicate something about the significance of life and in relationship. In prayer. When a life became a prayer. But there were not many spiritual giants any more walking amongst us. Look at the ego strength in a world with so little true appreciation shown. To a nun for a lifetime of apostolic work? We have given these people too little thanks and praise. Individually. Communally. By the hierarchy, but mostly by the masses, there was so little appreciation shown.

The Micro-managers

Rebuilding community. Once there was an ideal of nation building from within. With local people. Main Street businesses had been replaced by Wal-Mart. Best Buy. Starbucks. And that world was collasping. No one was buying stocks. And 50% of asset-backed corporate bonds were at risk. Big banks, big institutions were on the ropes. All those MBAs, teaching about micro managing.

In a sense, the Church of Rome seemed for a generation dominated by the bean counting. I think a lot of nations doth protest the micro-managing. Maybe that was why the Russian Orthodox have never wanted a part of the Vatican. Their fears of a spy network. Their fears that the bishops were not home grown. Fears of foreign control. There just was distrust of the stranger in Russia. And in China. There always had been in China. And a little less in Russia. Maybe due to the ice and cold.

In a sense there has been a religious fascism. There was some kind of an authoritarian ideology born during a period of social and political unrest, of the modern age. It was true in the world of politics and religions. Fascism is focused on solving the economic, political, and social problems which its supporters see as causing a decline or decadence. It was not just of the nationalsti kind. Fascists aim to create a single-party state, perhaps because the human condition is idealstically seeking a oneness with God and eahc other.
In the Catholic Church there has always been a religion led by …well, a dictator …. who seeks unity by requiring individuals to subordinate self-interest to the collective interest of the whole. Maybe the originators of the concept had used the religious model, with hopes of having some governmental success. Ideally, the Catholic Church was a single entity, undivided, led by the pope.

Luigi Barzini in his 1964 classic, The Italians, attempt to engage in an act of translation, so that the traveler can understand what the other party is trying to say. There is a certain sociology to Vatican City that long was dominated by Italian men. Vatican sociology was long based on loyalty and “connections.”

Archbishop Jean Jadot died at his residence in Belgium on January 21, 2009. He had served under Pope Paul VI as the apostolic delegate to the United States from 1973 to 1980, and has been called the architect of the U.S. “pastoral church.” He was responsible for the appointments of 103 new bishops and the assignments of 15 archbishops. I knew a few of his appointments along the way. Paul Dudley when he was a priest. John R. Roach when he was a monsignor. I shared a college campus with Francis George when he was a priest, before he was an archbishop. And I met a few priests whose episcopate soon developed by the time after Archbishop Jardot was called back to Europe. It is not an easy job being the apostolic delegate to a nation like the United States.

In the world torn in the strife between liberal and conservative constituencies, in politics, in religion, a man can be worn out. A man can create enemies.

Since 1984, Jadot had been in active retirement in Brussels. With the election of John Paul II, sentiment at the Vatican changed significantly and John Paul II happily accepted the resignation offered of a physically worn-out Jadot in 1980. Jadot was called to Rome, where he worked as pro-president of the Vatican Secretariat for Non-Christians for four years in obvious papal disfavor. Unlike his predecessors and his successor as apostolic delegate, Jadot was never named cardinal. John Dick was with Jadot on the day the announcement that Pio Laghi, his successor as apostolic delegate, was elevated from archbishop to cardinal in 1991. “Well,” Jadot said, “I had to be with my American friends today. It is not important to be a cardinal. What bothers me is that I know this is not about being a cardinal. It is a slap in my face.”

I believe there has been a loss of community over the last 20 years, because of the influence of the Pontifical Gregorian University. The bean counting. Who was liberal. Who was conservative. All of the bishops and archbishops these days seem to have spent some time at Gregorian University, in a Rome where the sociology was based upon loyalty and “connections.”

“Mentre baccio la Vostra pantofola sacra.” Was it why when John R. Roach retired we got an archbishop in Minneota from elsewhere? Was there more loyalty to people who had come out of Gregorian University, where they had learned some new MBA method of bean counting which seemed to be needed. Dispense another graduate from the Pontifical Gregorian University, whereas Archbishop Roach was home-grown in Prior Lake. Minnesota. Paul Dudley was from Northfield. Minnesota.

With a break from the Minnesota connection, there was a breakdown in community. All the archbishops were now from elsewhere. Combined with the previous pope, without any collegiality fostered with the bishops, the method of administration all seemed like that under a colonial system of bean-counting.

What about the thinking? There could be no priest shortage in a part of the world where the church was dying. There would be no need for priests when the people quit practicing. When everyone came out of one school, a staleness was bound to set in.

The mismanagement of the sexual abuse was just a spotlight over what the business world was going though. Holy men forced to deal with temporal matters, with no grasp of the law. Coming off as having an excessive rigidity, a firmness, with an old man’s obstinacy.

Thus the micro managers. A church run too much like Wal-Mart. Best Buy. Starbucks. Working under the neglect of an administrator’s duties. Yes that pope from Poland, no matter how holy, had a few flaws.

Of business. And of churches. All those MBAs. Main Street businesses had been replaced by management far away. Newspapers owned by people far away. With growing distrust by the locals of authentic care.

Rebuilding retirement accounts. When will the bad times all end? The sense of time was once best asked of those who lived though the Great Depression and the wars. The sense had always been worn on people’s faces. Those individual retirement accounts.

Retirement accounts. Self-funded. Alone. With the snake oil salesmen. In old age and in bad times.

Dwindling populations. What was what was supposed to happen in those kinds of economies is that people never got to retired. The West. With visas. Borders.

Then downward spirals. Government pensions replaced by private ones, until the markers, those industrial indexes, collapsed. When people never retire.

The micro-managing on Wall street. Globalization. We are watching a few giants fall this year.

These were political issues. Salvation was never supposed to be about who was liberal or who was conservative. It was all supposed to be about being human.

Dealing With Loss

Being drawn closer to God. Through the grieving process. That was the lesson learned upon the loss of a loved one. The community comes together to offer support. And over time, with reflection, I have learned how to find meaning in past events of my life. And along the way, I have found how to pray better.

The growing tension between elements of past and current identity. Over time. Who I was. Who I am now. Who I was growing into. Individually. Communally.

Loss did not come solely from death. Loss involved issues of health. All kinds of issues of health. In 1982 I lost the recreation place I had spent most of my life. Ten years later due to injury, I gave up my favorite recreational pursuit. Some people were learning about loss due to their own financial health in 2009. Loss and change.

There is growing tension in Europe these days between the elements of Christian and European identity, in this Europe in search of European Union. This amidst the tension within the Roman Catholic Church between the left and right, between the hierarchy and the people in the pews, between outside and inside interests. Maybe Catholic politicians, especially Democrats, felt the same tension in the United States. Thoughtful people who were both fully Catholic and representing constituencies which were not Catholic.

In Europe, Rocco Buttiglione was a lawyer who joined Silvio Berlusconi’s new government as the European Union Policy Minister. From 2005-06 he was Minister for Cultural Assets and Activities in Italy. He was nominated in 2004 for for the European Commission with a designated portfolio of Justice, Freedom and Security. During his hearing before the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice And Home Affairs, he was asked about his stance on homosexuality. As a Roman Catholic, Buttiglione reported believing homosexuality to be a sin. He was quoted, “The family exists in order to allow women to have children and to have the protection of a male who takes care of them.”

The Party of European Socialists, Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, and European Greens – European Free Alliance groups “expressed reservations” regarding his ability to take positive political action in the area of citizens’ rights, in particular as regards to combating discrimination, and threatened to reject the entire proposed Commission. The committee voted by 27-26 not to endorse Rocco Buttiglione’s nomination.

In subsequent comments Buttiglione remarked, “The new soft totalitarianism that is advancing on the left wants to have a state religion. It is an atheist, nihilistic religion –but it is a religion that is obligatory for all.”

Thus, the Europe that does not see many Catholics attending Mass. Thus the Church that Benedict reigns over has more than simple sterile ideological battles. John Allen, Jr. addresses the new realities of Europe in a column on February 13th and whether the Treaty of Lisbon will trigger the reign of the anti-Christ. See http://ncrcafe.org/node/2403

“Rocco Buttiglione episode is merely the best known example of a spreading ‘No Catholics Need Apply’ mentality in some secular circles. On the side of the Church, meanwhile, some worry that the Vatican sees things only in the most negative terms, and tends to view Catholics working to articulate the faith in Europe’s new cultural milieu — working, in other words, to find a new way of being Catholic on a changing continent, one marked by considerable religious and ethical pluralism — with suspicion, as if these pioneers somehow risk betraying the teaching and tradition of the Church.

“I have listened to these voices carefully, and as an American, my instinctive reply cannot help but be: ‘Welcome to our world.’

“What I mean is this: With allowances for the obvious historical differences, all of the above could have been said, and certainly was said, of Catholicism in the United States at various points in our history. During the 19th century, our own elite makers of culture — who were not secularists, but rather Protestants — also hung out ‘No Catholics Need Apply’ signs, and generally abhorred Catholicism as a foreign presence in America’s body politic. At the same time, those American Catholics who attempted to craft a form of Catholicism that could be at home in the competitive religious marketplace of the United States, one that could do justice to the country’s multi-faith and democratic ethos, were viewed with deep suspicion in Rome.

“In the mischievous corner of my soul thus takes delight in the current predicament of European Catholicism, because we American Catholics, for once, can play the senior partner in a conversation with our European brothers and sisters.

“Here’s the good news: In the short space of a century, the standing of American Catholicism, both in Rome and among our fellow citizens, has improved considerably. Consider that in 1899, Pope Leo XIII essentially invented a heresy called ‘Americanism’ in order to condemn those Catholics in the United States who defended our form of separation of church and state, indirectly suggesting that we ought to be more ‘European.’ In 2008, meanwhile, Pope Benedict XVI traveled to our shores to deliver a tribute to the American approach to church/state relations, arguing that in the United States the ‘wall of separation’ between church and state means freedom for religion, while laïcité in Europe often means freedom from religion. In effect, Benedict expressed a certain longing that Europe should be more like us!

“Of course, I am not suggesting that European Catholicism should look across the Atlantic to find a model for its own way forward. Our histories and cultures are too different to simply transplant strategies from one continent to the other; and in any event, there are important aspects of American Catholicism that are still very much a work in progress. Rather, my point is that, from a historical point of view, a new culture is emerging in Europe today, with new legal and political institutions and a new set of values, and it is hardly surprising that Catholicism is struggling to adapt. If there is a lesson to be learned from the path that American Catholicism has walked over the last century, it is that efforts to express the faith in a new world often initially generate tumult and alarm, but can eventually come to be seen as a gift to the universal Church.

“Before Catholicism can foster the, or of the broader human family, we must first do a better job of being unified among ourselves. The new questions being asked in the 21st century are extraordinarily complex, and there is obviously more than one Catholic opinion about how we ought to respond. If we fall back into the familiar patterns which have characterized our internal life in the 50 years since the Second Vatican Council — of fractures between left and right, between ad intra interests and ad extra, between the hierarchy and the base, between the avant-garde and the defenders of tradition, between what Jacques Maritain once rather colorfully termed the ‘Sheep of Panurge’ and the ‘Ruminators of the Holy Alliance’ — we run the risk of paralysis, of serious new fractures and new heartache, which will make it impossible to articulate a compelling response to this changing world.”

It is said that the art treasures in the Vatican cost so much to maintain and restore that the art amounts to a net drain on the Vatican budget.

Through power, through change, through a loss of power, through the grieving process. Being drawn closer to God.

Best Supporting Actor

It was Academy Awards month. Movies. Video stores. Academy Awards. We have lived through an age when video has replaced the written word as a media of significant communicating.

Academy Awards. The movies of 2008. Stories with relevance.

Stories with relevance. “Last week the Federal Reserve released the results of the latest Survey of Consumer Finances, Paul Krugman wrote today. The bottom line of this a triennial report on the assets and liabilities of American households “is that there has been basically no wealth creation at all since the turn of the millennium: The net worth of the average U.S. household, adjusted for inflation, is lower now than it was in 2001.”

“At one level this should come as no surprise. For most of the last decade America was a nation of borrowers and spenders, not savers. The personal savings rate dropped from 9 percent in the 1980s to 5 percent in the 1990s, to just 0.6 percent from 2005 to 2007, and household debt grew much faster than personal income.”

How did this all affect you? Market manipulators. Those stock brokers. Wanting money to manipulate.

How did this all affect you? Falling incomes. Now in a failing economy. If you did not know, it was worse overseas. In Latvia. In Ireland. With the banks of Austria and England.

In the crises of these times, what was the message in the most recent creations? If God is going to continue to influence our times, on a conscious level. In the 1930s, as the great American economist Irving Fisher pointed out, “attempts to sell assets and pay off debt deepen the plunge in asset prices, further reducing net worth. Attempts to save more translate into a collapse of consumer demand, deepening the economic slump, Krugman wrote. When they realize they have too much debt, the things people and companies do tend to be self-defeating. When everyone tries to do them all at the same time.

And we are in deep trouble. Deeper trouble than most people realize even now, Paul Krugman wrote.

Academy Awards. A feast when you realize that famine is real.

Real stories. Remember the year 2000 problem? It was only supposed to involve our computers. Not out net worth. Wanting to run away and start over. The New Millennium.

It has been quite a decade. With hanging chads. With September 11, 2001. And now all this.

Life. When you realize you are gonna die. Foxholes. People finding religion in foxholes. God as the main actor in creation. God now cast on too many days, in His humble role as a supporting actor. Or God simply now a part of my audience. Aware of me. And me of Him. His past was an actor, the main player. And now as some kind of Producer and Director, for some of us. The actors needed to pay more attention?

Libraries

Shalimar. The woman in front of me wore Shalimar. A soft scent that invaded my row. It was what my grandmother always wore. It was very difficult to pray today without thinking about the excitement of my grandmother. She died 22 almost years ago.

When friendship was combined with love, in a relationship. A guy with his dad. A girl with her mom.

Libraries. I shared a passion with my dad. For a sport. When he died his library was dispersed. Sold off. It was a great library. None of the books were offered to me. Or to anyone within the family.

It was a subtle statement. I think I have found the explanation. A lot of the reason has to involve his widow. The times that she grew up in. On how she communicates. Her father died about the time she graduated high school. The war had just ended. There were 9 younger brothers and sisters. Her older brother was in the seminary. And suddenly the family was poor. She had responsibilities that 18-year-olds in American never had today. The world must not make a lot of sense to a woman suddenly cast into such a world. I had never done the math until now. She married at the age of 23. There was a lot of family pressure in the five years before. To just survive.

I am not sure how her family survived. But they did. She did not seem to know much about the events that she lived through at the time. At least as a high school girl. She never thought she was poor. Until her father died.

It was interesting to watch a woman who grew up in the depression. And the aftershocks which still linger. Those subtle statements of hers. The times that she grew up in.

A library sold off. It was not for the money. I think I have found the explanation. A lot of the reason has to involve this widow. On how she communicates her own health issues to all of her children. It was reflected in her honesty about health issues. Until she could not continue as is.

I think I had the explanation with a book I had presnted a few years later. A memoir. It goes still unread. Except at least 2 of her brothers have taken it home to read. The explanation deals with her relationship with her sons. It seems good on the surface. Or very good. But that relationship had to be a lot like what I have written about relationships of males with females. Within the Catholic Church. When guys get too smart. When women did not have the same opportunity. When women don’t have time to read. But it was not just about the time to read. It was about power. There were subtle signs. That had meaning.

It was interesting to watch a woman who grew up in the depression. To see her fears. Her avoidance, of current events. On whatever financial resources she had left. She clearly did not understand it. Nor was she looking for advice. Not from her sons.

Her husband would be going nuts over all this. He had lived through the age of male chivalry. His wife had never worked outside the home. Today some think that those who believed in such chivalry were all pigs.

It was reflected in her honesty about health issues. Read about the grief cycle in the classic by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. Until she could not continue as is. Denial. Avoidance. It did not just involve those afflicted with cancer. All the clues were written about. It was the physical. The financial.

Until she could not continue as is. There was a lot of grief in living relationships. In financial ones these days.

That woman who wore Shalimar seemed a lot easier to figure out. Though I saw her son struggle with a few of these same issues.

Life’s Stories

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless wasteland. And darkness covered the abyss, while a mighty wind swept over the waters.

A formless wasteland. That well could be the first line in a story about any human’s faith struggle. Like most people, I struggle to grow in my faith. Being part of the real community here on earth has helped me tremendously.

I was picking out a book for a 3-year old. I considered buying a book about the stories of the Bible. I found myself wondering about the author who was a complete stranger, interpreting the stories. Somewhere in the formation process you entrusted to a stranger the passing on the meaning of these stories.

We have lived through an age when video has replaced the written word as a media of significant communicating. Movies. Video stores. Academy Awards.

It was Academy Awards month. And an audience was esential. An essential necessary part, if an actor, was to have some kind of following. Press releases. Interested people. Some kind of an audience was esential if life was to have meaning.

Academy Awards. The movies of 2008. Stories with relevance. Stories with relevance, or just false substitutes in the modern age? Where Broadway was slowly dying due to the cost, what was the Academy doing to preserve the story-telling role? And what would the economic downturn do to the movie industry?

Passing along the stories. For all of the 3-year olds of the world.

Evening came, and morning followed—that first day. And the day after.

Visitations

Have you ever heard a public speaker, a priest, who only looked at one side of his audience?

The Vatican’s Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life had issued a decree on December 22, 2008 that it will begin an Apostolic Visitation or comprehensive study undertaken in order to look into the quality of institutes of women religious in the United States and the life of the members of these religious institutes. The action was initiated by the Congregation’s prefect, Slovenian Cardinal Franc Rodé, C.M. The Leadership Conference of Women Religious, the nation’s largest association of Catholic women religious communities, said it was informed of the study in a bulletin on January 30, 2009. Contemplative sisters, who have distinctly different lifestyles, are excluded from the study.

“Speaking on background, leaders among American women’s congregations who travel regularly to Rome to meet with Vatican officials — including Cardinal Franc Rodé, Prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, the office that ordered the visitation — say that not once in these conversations did Rodé or anyone else offer a hint that a visitation might be in the works.” –from the National Catholic Reporter on February 6, 2009

In 2006, the Vatican organized a visitation of seminaries which house men in formation. Recently the Vatican issued its final report which seemed to suggest concern about formation for religious. In the “general conclusions” in section II, it was stated:
“It was also noted that, in some academic centers run by religious, there is a certain reticence, on the part of both students and teachers, to discuss the priestly ministry. Instead, there is a preference for discussing simply ‘ministry’ — in the broad sense, including also the various apostolates of the laity — in part, perhaps, as a mistaken attempt not to offend those who judge the reservation of the Sacrament of Orders to men alone as discriminatory.”

Findings will show most nuns are elderly, most orders are quickly falling apart, most orders have very few resources for growth, and young women avoid joining or leave because they get a hard time from the hierarchy when anything they do even hints at feminism.

It is hard to be supportive of this church that continues to collect money for corporal works of mercy but this year did not even bother to raise money for the infirm aged nuns, ignoring the burden of all the retired Sisters in need of health care. It has been reported that by 2023, religious orders may face more than $20 billion in unfunded retirement liabilities. What kind of leadership would ignore their own?

The old monarch of the papal states, the pope in Vatican City, had no accountability to his people. There never had been a Magna Carta, despite the political and religious scandals which occurred between 1300 and 1600. The recent sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church showed that from the Pope on down, there was a failure to respond when archbishops could not police their own force, in Canada, in Ireland, in the United States, and who knows where else at the end of the 20th Century? The management of the church by John Paul II was compelled by secular courts to change. Otherwise, it seems fair to say that failure to respond to sexual abuse by priests would have continued.

So what really had changed in Rome? The institution that needed the threat of a secular court to change.

The humonguous financial cost to funds, which should have gone to corporal works of mercy to take care of retired nuns, or to educate the next generation in what is a very academic religion. Little attention week in and week out is addressed to this priesthood issue in the changing world. And this comprehensive study, this review of the sisters announced just before the annual World Day for Religious which the Church observes on February 2nd, is to be a look into the quality of institutes of women religious in the United States. This study undertaken seems to hope to return the Catholic world to another age. But the world had changed.

At a 2008 conference at Stonehill College, Cardinal Franc Rodé said that some orders of nuns seemed to have “simply acquiesced to the disappearance of religious life,” while others had distanced themselves from the life of the Catholic Church.

The nuns had quit trying? Was it just the nuns who had trouble passing on the tradition, of sharing the accumulation of wealth, of culture? The power structure had changed very little over the years. My 69-year old aunt is a former nun, educated after high school with a class of 46 nuns. Of her 46 classmates, only 6 had remained nuns their entire life. The nuns HAD quit trying. A long time ago. This limited statistics would seem to suggest a polarization of woman which has continued. Papal authority seemed to be based upon power rather than authentic love. Have they simply acquiesced to the status quo? To the male leadership in the Roman Catholic Church who had never listened in their lifetime? Women who had never felt accepted as equal, a basic quest of all people.

In the political world, leaders were expected not only to address hunger but to do something about a problem. And these were long ongoing problems. In the real world, if leaders did not do an adequate job, they were replaced.

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger had been quoted in the years before he was elected pope that the Church of Rome was to big, and was in need of being pruned back. In a sense, this was a leader who seemed to be asking what it meant to be Catholic, in a view of the politics within the Church. And he seemed to only be interested in preaching to one side of the church.

Old men often had hearing problems but in the modern age this deficit could be tackled. But the elderly had to admit that they had a problem. Dealing with loss. Dealing with change.

http://ncronline.org/blogs/where-i-stand/if-they-really-mean-it-its-about-time