Jesuit Collaborative

For now, it seems that some fasting is the best way to remind myself of the millions who are hungry and to purify my heart and mind for a decision that does not exclude them

Each family system has several categories of rules. Shaming rules consciously shame the other members. Children receive the major brunt of the shame. Power is a cover-up for shame.

1. Control - The major defense strategy that controls all interactions, feelings, and personal behavior at all times.

2. Perfectionism - Always being right in all you do. The perfectionist imposes a measurement by which no one ever measures up. Fear and avoidance of the negative is the organizing principle of life.

3. Blame - Blame when things do not work out as planned. It maintains balance in a dysfunctional system when control has broken down.

4. Denial of Freedoms - It tells you that you should no perceive, think, feel, desire or imagine in that way you do.

5. No-Talk Rule - It prohibits the full expression of any feeling, need or want. Family members hide their true feelings, needs or wants.

6. No Mistakes - Mistakes reveal the flawed vulnerable self. To acknowledge one's mistake is to open oneself to scrutiny. Cover up your own mistakes and if someone else makes a mistake, shame her.

7. Unreliability - Never trust anyone and you can't be disappointed.

John Bradshaw - Healing the Shame that Binds You

The possibility of toxic shame begins with our source relationships. If our primary caregivers are shame-based, they will act shameless and pass their shame onto us. There is no way to teach self-value if one does not value oneself.

It is multigenerational - passed onto one generation to the next. Shame-based people find others like them and get married. As a couple each carries the shame from his or her own family system. Their marriage will be grounded in their shame-core. The major result of this is a lack of intimacy. It is difficult to let someone get close to you if you feel defective and flawed as a human being. Shame-based couples maintain non-intimacy through poor communication, nonproductive circular fighting, games, manipulation, vying for control, withdrawal, blaming and confluence. Confluence is the agreement never to disagree. It creates pseudo-intimacy.

When a child is bor into these shame-based parents, the deck is stacked from the beginning. The job of parents is to model. Modeling includes how to be a man or woman; how to relate intimately to another person; how to acknowledge and express emotions; how to fight fairly; how to have physical, emotional, and intellectual boundaries; how to communicate; how to cope and survive life's unending problems; how to be self-disciplined; how to love oneself and another. Shame-based parents cannot do any of these. They simply do not know how.

John Bradshaw

I have something to say to you. How can we go on with this? I didn't sleep last night and I think you would have suffered from insomnia as well had you seen what I saw. I was arriving at St. Ignatius late last night when a man stopped me. He was standing there in shirtsleeves in the freezing drizzle. He was think as a rail and shaking with fever. The lamplight was sufficient to show me that his tonsils were inflamed. He had no place to sleep and he asked me for the price of a bed in a hostel. There are hundreds of men lik this in Santiago and they are all our brother, and that is no metaphor. Each one of these men is Christ, and what have we done for them? What has the Catholic Church in Chile done for these sons of hers who walk the streets in the rain and sleep in doorways in the cold nights of winter, their bodies found frozen in the early dawn. This sort of things is happening in a Christian country. Tonight a beggar may die in the doorway of any one of your houses. What stupid oxen we Catholics are, how lost in our dreaming, how untouched by the need for social solidarity! We are held back by the possibility of difficulties, obstacles, and scandals.

“We saw its glory,” says the ancient hymn. Not “I,” but “we.” It is a song of community. The soul and God are in love like planet and sun, but the family of humanity is perfused by an intergalactic radiance of grace, a power so immense and dynamic, a Word spoken and so cosmically expanded that time and form, space and substance become simultaneously meaningless and filled with burning glory. At intersections of paths through space that only God can chart, we are drawn together in systems of shared histories, we form covenants, and we become traditions, churches, communities of faith. Here our energies coalesce, and grace pours through the spaciousness of our communal solitude, through our intimacy and interdependence, and, with exponential brilliance, through the sacramental gatherings of true community.

March 7, 2010

Vivid biblical scenes are put before us in today’s liturgy. We begin with Moses standing before God in the form of a burning, unconsumed bush inviting him to bring word to the Hebrews that the God of his religious tradition is with him and hears the suffering cries of the people. The God of the Living is with them. Paul then warns us against the sin of presumption by explaining that we have historical lesson to teach us about our appropriate dependence upon God. Jesus uses two illustrations of calamities that fell upon people as a way of unlinking their feelings of deserved punishment with the source of sin in light of accidents and natural disasters. God does not punish people for their wrongdoings by sending bad events to happen to them. Accidents are merely accidents.

But we have to be patient with the work of God and do our part- not doing more or any less. Realizing what we are called to do and doing it best gives great satisfaction. As we look at the image of the parable of the fig tree, we see that our efforts can be valuable even when it does not appear that way to us. Though it appears that the fig tree is barren and useless, we are to give it that extra bit of care and nourishment because it may bear fruit in the future. Stay the course a little longer. Persevere. We are all too quick to give up on our projects because they seem futile and pointless. We can never know what is happening below the surface until some fruit or new life arises.

Today’s message reminds me of Oscar Romero’s poem when he writes: “We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own.” It is always helpful for us to remember that the work or ministry we are doing is first and foremost a mission from God. It is God’s project in which we are asked to do our part, however big or small a role it may be. Do it well and fully. Our God who is always with us will be there working alongside us.

Quote for the Week

From the Evening prayer at St. Joseph’s Abbey, Spencer, Massachusetts:

“Lord Jesus Christ, grant us your peace, and when the trials of earth shall cease, grant us the morning light of grace, the radiant splendor of your face.”

Themes for this Week’s Masses

First Reading: We get many Old Testament readings designed to match the Gospel themes but do not tell a continuous story in the customary fashion. We start this week with 2 Kings and the story of Namaan, the Syrian leper, who was cleansed by the prophet Elisha rather than the many Israelite lepers. God works outside our boundaries. Then we turn to Daniel’s dreams as he asks the Lord to receive him and his associates with humble hearts. In Deuteronomy the people are exhorted to keep the commandments as a way of completing God’s work, but Jeremiah reminds us that the people will seldom listen to God’s voice. Hosea reminds us that God does not want our sacrifices, but our love.

Gospel: Jesus shows that he mirrors the miracles of the prophets Elijah and Elisha in healing people, except that his mission is broader than focusing only on the Jews. He describes the type of behavior needed for discipleship: it means deeply forgiving one’s brother and sister and keeping and preaching about the commandments. As he talks about the work of his disciples, he lets people decide whether they want to be a part of it. He tells them that whoever is not with him is against him, that the love of God is the most important action in the world, and that inclusion in the kingdom may be surprising as a dreaded tax collector makes it into the kingdom while a Pharisee does not.

Saints of the Week

Monday: John of God is a major saint to the Spanish for his tireless work with the neediest people of Granada. He drew others to his type of ministry as he cared for sick and the poor in remarkable ways. His order has been entrusted to the medical and dental care of the Bishop of Rome

Tuesday: Frances of Rome is an Italian saint who petitioned her wealthy parents to become a nun; instead they arranged a marriage for her that turned out to be happy. During a plague, she lost two of her six children. This sensitized her to the plight of the sick and the needy. She began a confraternity to assist the poor.

This Week in Jesuit History

• Mar 7, 1581. The Fifth General Congregation of the Society bound the professors of the Society to adhere to the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas.
• Mar 8, 1773. At Centi, in the diocese of Bologna, Cardinal Malvezzi paid a surprise visit to the Jesuit house, demanding to inspect their accounting books.
• Mar 9, 1764. In France, all Jesuits who refused to abjure the Society were ordered by Parliament to leave the realm within a month. Out of 4,000 members only five priests, two scholastics, and eight brothers took the required oath; the others were driven into exile.
• Mar 10, 1615. The martyrdom in Glasgow, Scotland, of St John Ogilvie.
• Mar 11, 1848. In Naples, Italy, during the 1848 revolution, 114 Jesuits, after much suffering, were put into carts and driven ignominiously out of the city and the kingdom.
• Mar 12, 1622. Pope Gregory XV canonized Sts Ignatius, Francis Xavier, Teresa of Avila, and Philip Neri.
• Mar 13, 1568. John Segura and five companions set sail from Spain for Florida, a fertile field of martyrs. (Nine Jesuits were killed there between 1566 and 1571.)

Stations of the Cross

Catholics have a tradition of praying the Stations of the Cross, particularly on Fridays in Lent. We walk the spiritual road with Jesus through Scripture-based Stations that depict the last moments of the life of Jesus. We reflect more deeply on particular moments in Christ's Passion: at prayer in the Garden of the Gethsemane, during Peter's denial, through his trial and judgment, ending with his death and entombment. At the end of each station, we add our prayers to God asking for strength, wisdom, courage, patience, and mercy to imitate His Son as we make the journey through Lent to the great Paschal celebration.

“We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.”

Chile

We pray for the people of Chile who suffer from the devastating 8.8 earthquake that hit the middle of their country. Jesuits from the Maryland province have a long-standing relationship with the Jesuits in Chile. Please continue your prayers for the people as they strive to rebuild their country. Please be generous to the local church and social service agencies that will provide needed services.

The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola

Twelve Jesuits in Australia (including me) and seven in California who are at their last stage of formation (tertianship) are praying through an intense 30-day program of prayer called the Spiritual Exercises. These are a series of prayer exercises designed to bring a person deeper into his or her relationship with God. They are not only for Catholics. Retreatants move through four movements of prayer that allow them to notice the ways they may unknowingly block some aspect in their relationship with God. God works gently with a person to help him or her uncover those disordered attachments so that God can draw a person into closer friendship. It is a period of prayer that is usually full of surprises. Please pray for those of us who are making this long retreat this month.

Note:

I am now on long retreat and may not be able to send out the weekly email, but I will update my blog regularly. Access predmore.blogspot.com for weekly and daily updates or predmoresj.blogspot.com for my tertian program news.

To search for prayer and Jesuit resources, in the blog search field type in the keywords: poem, prayer, song, spirituality, Jesuit, constitutions, photos, or specific phrases.

What did Ignatius envisage as the Jesuit priesthood? A prophetic priesthood, one which was concerned to speak out the word of God in any way that it could be heard, assimilated, and incarnated within the social life of human beings, a priesthood which spoke with the religious experiences of human beings and - as did the prophets of the Old Testament - coupled this care for authentic belief with a concern for those in social misery: the ministry of the word, the ministries of interiority, the ministry to social misery. This is not an arbitrary collection of concerns. The preaching of the word very naturally tends to the ministries of interiority by which the word can be heard, and this tends very naturally to the ministries of justice through which it can be lived and shared with others in the historical living out of human life.... A Jesuit priest is ordained because he gives himself over to this call, because he is consecrated by the Church for this mission of the Church - a service of the word that gathers into its unity all the moments of his life.

Often we do not sense the constancy of God’s grace-giving love. In many situations God may seem unloving or even completely absent. Sometimes this is because we are blinded by our attachment; we are so preoccupied – our attention is so kidnapped by our compulsions – that we tune out the background of God’s love. I am convinced that our brain cells do habituate the constant reality of God’s love.

Many other reasons exist for our lack of appreciation of God’s constant love. Sometimes the activity of grace so transcends our understanding that it becomes essentially invisible to us. We cannot notice God’s loving presence because it is too numinous, too elusively mystical to be perceived. There are also occasions when we cannot appreciate grace because we really do not want to. And sometimes God actively hides grace from us. But of all the possible explanations for our lack of awareness of grace, there is no possibility of God being indifferent, or falling in love with someone else instead of us, or pouting because of some insult, or being otherwise elsewhere attached.

The immanent God in us becomes wounded with us, suffers, struggles, hopes, and creates with us, shares every drop of our anger and sadness and joy. The reality of God is so intimate as to be experientially inseparable from our own hearts. But that very same God is at once transcendent, the creating, sustaining, and redeeming Power over and above all things. We should not be dismayed that God’s being surpasses understanding, for it is precisely through this mystery that God incarnate can both lovingly share our condition and powerfully deliver us from it. It is through this mystery that grace remains absolute, permanent, and victorious.

Acting shameless embodies several behaviors that serve to alter the feeling of shame and to interpersonally transfer one's toxic shame to another. (Please note that these characteristics are only being described in a situation when a person is affected by toxic shame.):

Perfectionism: This flows from the boundariless core of toxic shame as it has no sense of limits. One never knows how much is good enough. This person was taught that he or she is valued for only doing. When parental acceptance and love is dependent upon performance - perfectionism is created. The performance is always related to what is outside self. The child is taught to strive onward. Never is there a place for rest or for inner joy and satisfaction.

Striving for Power and Control: Power is a form of control and control is a grandiose disorder of the will. Control insures that no one can ever shame us again. It involves controlling our thoughts, expressions, feelings and actions and it is involved in controlling other people's thoughts, feeling and actions. Control is the ultmate villian in destroying intimacy. We cannot share freely unless we are unequal.

Rage: Rage is a defense. It keeps others away or it transfers the blame to others. This person becomes bitter and sarcastic.

Arrogance: Arrogance offensively exaggerates one's importance. The victim of arrogance believes he or she is inadequate because of the lack of knowledge, experience or power.

Criticism and Blame: If I feel put down and humiliated, I can reduce this feeling but blaming and criticizing someone else. A parent telling a child that he or she never thinks of anyone else allows the child to interpret his or her self-worth as being bad.

Judgmentalism and Moralizing: These are off-shoots of perfectionism that seek a victory over the spiritual competition. Condemning another as bad or sinful is a way to feel righteous.

Contempt: One becomes intensely conscious of another person who is experienced as disgusting. In contempt, the self of the other ins completely rejected.

Patronizing: To patronize is to support, protect or champion someone who is unequal in benefits, knowledge or power, but has not asked you for your support. This is a subtle transfer of shame that usually hides contempt and passive aggressive anger.

Caretaking and Helping: Helpers are always helping themselves. A person who feels flawed and defective feels powerless and helpless. This person feels better about his or herself by taking care of others. Caretaking is an activity that often distracts one from one's feeling of inadequacy.

People-pleasing and Being Nice: The goal of a nice person is one's own image and not the other person. Being nice can manipulate people and situations by avoiding any real emotional contact and intimacy. By avoiding intimacy, this person insures that noone will see him or herself as one truly is.

Envy: Envy is the discomfort at the excellence or good fortune of another. Envy can bring about the other's belittlement and may assert itself in self-assertiveness, admiration or greed.

John Bradshaw

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and
blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of the sow.

by Galway Kinnell

Ennio Morricone conducts "Gabriel's Oboe" from the soundtrack "The Mission" at the U.N. in 2007. Click on the link below to listen.

Ennio Morricone "The Mission"

May it please the supreme and divine Goodness
to give us all abundant grace
ever to know his most holy will
and perfectly to fulfill it.

God’s love is more constant than human love can be. Human loving has its pure moments, and parental love especially can express a likeness of God in its deep steadiness. But however solid it may be, human love is always prey to selfishness and distractions bred by attachment. Even in the best of situations, human love is bound to become intermingled with attachment. When this happens, we can feel possessive of our loved ones or jealous or even vengeful if they do not meet our expectations. We can see our loved ones as extensions of ourselves, wanting them to make good impressions on other people so we ourselves will look good. We can want them to live out our fantasies, conform to our desires, meet our needs, provide us with security and worth. The degree to which we can feel or express authentic love is always conditional upon such attachments.

It is not so with God’s love. God goes on loving us regardless of who we are or what we do. This does not mean God is like a permissive parent who makes excuses and ignores the consequences of a child’s behavior. Such permissiveness is more cowardly than loving, because it devalues the child’s capacity for dignity and responsibility. In God’s constantly respectful love, the consequences of our actions are very real, and they can be horrible, and we are responsible. The freedom that God preserves in us has a double edge. On the one hand, it mean’s God’s love and empowerment are always with us. On the other, it means there is no authentic escape from the truth of our own choices.

Christian definition of sexuality

Sexuality is a beautiful, good, extremely powerful, sacred energy, given us by God and experienced in every cell of our being as an irrepressible urge to overcome our incompleteness, to move towards unity and consummation with that which is beyond us. It is also the pulse to celebrate, to give and to receive delight, to find our way back to the Garden of Eden where we can be naked, shameless, and without worry and work as we make love in the moonlight.

Utimately, though, all these hungers, in their full maturity, culminate in one thing: they want to make us co-creators with God…… mothers and fathers, artisans and creators, big brothers and big sisters, nurses and healers, teachers and consolers, farmers and producers, administrators and community builders – co-responsible with God for the planet, standing with God and smiling at and blessing the world. What does sexuality in its full bloom look like?

• When you see a young mother, so beaming with delight at her own child that, for that moment, all selfishness within her has given way to the sheer joy of seeing her child happy, you are seeing sexuality in its mature bloom.
• When you see a grandfather so proud of his grandson, who has just received his diploma, that, for that moment, his spirit is only compassion, altruism, and joy, you are seeing sexuality in its mature bloom.
• When you see an artist, after long frustration, look with such satisfaction on a work she has just completed that everything else for the moment is blotted out, you are seeing sexuality in its mature bloom.
• When you see a young man, cold and wet, but happy to have been of service, standing on a dock where he has just carried the unconscious body of a child he has just saved from drowning, you are seeing sexuality in its mature bloom.
• When you see someone throw back his or her head in genuine laughter, caught off-guard by the surprise of joy itself, you are seeing sexuality in its mature bloom.
• When you are seeing an elderly nun who, never having slept with a man, been married, or given birth to a child, has through years of selfless service become a person whose very compassion gives her a mischievous smile, you are seeing sexuality in its mature bloom.
• When you see a community gathered around a grave, making peace with tragedy and consoling each other so that life can go on, you are seeing sexuality in its mature bloom.
• When you see an elderly husband and wife who after nearly half a century of marriage have made peace with each other’s humanity that now they can quietly share a bowl of soup, content just to know that the other is there, you are seeing sexuality in its mature bloom.
• When you see a table, surrounded by a family, laughing, arguing, and sharing life with each other, you are seeing sexuality in its mature bloom.
• When you see a Mother Teresa dress the wounds of a street-person in Calcutta or an Oscar Romero give his life in defense of the poor, you are seeing sexuality in its mature bloom.
• When you see any person – man, woman, or child – who in a moment of service, affection, love, friendship, creativity, joy, or compassion, is, for that moment, so caught up in what is beyond him or her that for that instant his or her separateness from others is overcome, you are seeing sexuality in its mature bloom.
• When you see God, having just created the earth or just seen Jesus baptized in the Jordan River, look down on what has just happened and say, ‘It is good. In this I take delight,’ you are seeing sexuality in its mature bloom.

Sexuality is not simply about finding a lover or even finding a friend. It is about overcoming separateness by giving life and blessing it. Thus, in its maturity, sexuality is about giving oneself over to community, friendship, family, service, creativity, humor, delight, and martyrdom so that, with God, we can help bring life to the world.

The ancient Greek philosophers gave us the word eros. For them, however, it meant much more than it does for us today. Generally today we understand it to mean mainly sexual attraction. For the ancient Greeks, eros was a reality with six interpenetrating dimensions: It referred, at one and the same time, to ludens (love’s playfulness, teasing and humor); erotic attraction (sexual attractiveness and the desire to have sex); mania (obsessiveness, falling in love, romance); pragma (sensible arrangement in view of family life, home, and community); philia (friendship); and agape (altruism, selflessness, sacrifice). Unlike us, the ancient Greeks did not ask one aspect of love to carry all the others.

Sexuality is an all-encompassing energy inside of us. In one sense, it is identifiable with the principle of life itself. It is the drive for love, communion, community, friendship, family, affection, wholeness, consummation, creativity, self-perpetuation, immortality, joy, delight, humor, and self-transcendence. It is not good to be alone. When God said this about Adam at the dawn of creation, God meant it about every man, woman, child, animal, insect, plant, atom, and molecule in the universe. Sex is the energy inside of us that works incessantly against our being alone.

Genitality, having sex, is only one aspect of that larger reality of sexuality, albeit a very important one. Genitality is particularized, physical consummation, a certain privileged constellation of many of the energies that are contained within our wider erotic energies in one bodily encounter with another person.

To search for prayer and Jesuit resources, in the blog search field type in the keywords: poem, prayer, song, spirituality, Jesuit, constitutions, photos, or specific phrases.

February 28, 2010

Have you ever seen a person return from a particularly consoling annual spiritual retreat with a special glow about her? It reminds me of that famous quote from Thomas Merton when he exclaims, “There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.” The whole essence of the person seems to be transfigured. In Luke’s account of the Transfiguration, Jesus goes up to the mountain to pray with Peter, John and James and his “faced changed in appearance and his clothing became dazzling white,” and from “ a cloud came a voice that said: This is my chosen Son, listen to him.”

While the prayer experience of Jesus was certainly remarkable, we can take out of it that God, the Father, validated him as his own, intimately-loved, chosen Son, especially as Jesus will soon set his face toward Jerusalem where he knows he must endure a deadly fate. Moses, who represents the beloved Law of the Elect, and Elijah, the miracle-working prophet, appear with Jesus representing the fullness of the Jewish faith. Jesus is given special privilege before the Torah and the Prophets as God’s unique revealer whose mission will be consummated in Jerusalem, the Holy City. With God’s personal revelation to Jesus and his closest friends, Jesus will have the confirmation and courage to enter more deeply into God’s will.

While we will not experience the Transfiguration event as Jesus did, God can transform our lives so that we shine like the dazzling sun. Notice that this just did not happen to Jesus. It was a moment of supreme confirmation by his loving Father after spending time in prayer. We need to take greater time in prayer just to be with God so that we can build a more intimate friendship based on mutual care and affection. When we are confirmed by God, our whole being changes and we become more faithful and confident in the providence of God. We learn to listen to the familiar voice that we depend upon and crave. Our whole being radiates God’s favor and like Abram in the first reading, we enjoy divine blessings now and for the ages to come.

Quote for the Week

From Philippians 3, an excerpt from today’s second reading:

“Brothers and sisters: Our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we also await a savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. He will change our lowly body to conform with his glorified body by the power that enables him also to bring all things into subjection to himself.

Therefore, my brothers and sisters, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, in this way stand firm for the Lord.”

Themes for this Week’s Masses

First Reading: The church turns to Daniel this week who yells out that he and the people have sinned, been wicked, and have turned against God and we immediately turn to Isaiah who exhort the people to learn to do what is good and to make justice your aim. We are then reminded of Jeremiah’s fate when he did good works – the people turned against him and his righteousness. Cursed is the one who trusts in humans, but blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord. This is illustrated in Genesis when Joseph’s death is plotted by his brothers because he was a dreamer of innocence. When we place our trust in God, our sins are wiped away from God’s consciousness.

Gospel: Jesus tells his friends to be merciful like his Father. Stop judging. Stop condemning. Forgiveness brings a multitude of blessings. Pay attention to the good teachings of the Pharisees, but know that they are hypocritical in their actions. As we have seen in numerous O.T. stories, the righteous are condemned. Jesus tells his friends that the Son of Man will be put to death. The moving story of Lazarus and Dives shows that the poor and the disenfranchised will be comforted for the afflictions they suffered in this life. The righteous, even God’s heir, will be done in by jealous people. The mercy of the Father is highlighted in the story of the prodigal son and his brother.

Saints of the Week

Wednesday: The Philadelphia-born Katherine Drexel is the second American-born U.S. saint and she was canonized in 2000. Katherine formed the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament and served the Native Americans and African Americans in the U.S. West and Southwest. She became a vocal advocate for racial justice.

Thursday: Casimir was a 15th century prince of Lithuania and Poland. He was offered the throne of Hungary and after an unsuccessful attempt returned to Poland. He was known for his prudence and justice and is named the patron saint of all youth.

This Week in Jesuit History

• Feb 28, 1957. The Jesuit Volunteer Corps began.
• Mar 1, 1549. At Gandia, the opening of a college of the Society founded by St Francis Borgia.
• Mar 2, 1606. The martyrdom in the Tower of London of St Nicholas Owen, a brother nicknamed "Little John." For 26 years he constructed hiding places for priests in homes throughout England. Despite severe torture he never revealed the location of these safe places.
• Mar 3, 1595. Clement VIII raised Fr. Robert Bellarmine to the Cardinalate, saying that the Church had not his equal in learning.
• Mar 4, 1873. At Rome, the government officials presented themselves at the Professed House of the Gesu for the purpose of appropriating the greater part of the building.
• Mar 5, 1887. At Rome, the obsequies of Fr. Beckx who died on the previous day. He was 91 years of age and had governed the Society as General for 34 years. He is buried at San Lorenzo in Campo Verano.
• Mar 6, 1643. Arnauld, the Jansenist, published his famous tract against Frequent Communion. Fifteen French bishops gave it their approval, whereas the Jesuit fathers at once exposed the dangers in it.

Novena of Grace in Honor of Francis Xavier

Jesuits and their colleagues worldwide pray a Novena of Grace in honor of Francis Xavier, one of the founding Jesuits who was missioned to the Far East and the Indies. This nine-day period of prayer was instituted in gratitude for the canonization of Xavier and Ignatius of Loyola in 1622. The prayer runs from March 4th to March 12th. The Novena is imbedded below.


Lord God, our Father, we honor the memory of the Apostle of the East, St. Francis Xavier. The remembrance of the favors with which You blessed him during life and of his glory after death, fills us with joy; and we unite with him in offering to You our sincere tribute of thanksgiving and of grace.

We ask You to grant us, through his powerful intercession, the inestimable blessings of living and dying in the state of grace. We also ask You to grant us the favors we seek in this novena.

(Pause for personal petitions)

But if what we ask is not for the glory of God and the good of our souls, grant us, we pray, what is more conducive to both. We ask this through Christ our Lord.
Amen.

Closing Prayer

Almighty God, by the preaching of St. Francis Xavier You won many peoples to Yourself. Give his zeal for the faith to all who believe in You, that Your Church may rejoice to see the virtue and number of the faithful increase throughout the world. Grant this through our Lord Jesus Christ, Your Son, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen.

Note:

During my tertianship program there might be times when I cannot send out the weekly email list, but I will update my blog regularly. Access predmore.blogspot.com for weekly and daily updates or predmoresj.blogspot.com for my tertian program news.

The ancient Greek philosophers gave us the word eros. For them, however, it meant much more than it does for us today. Generally today we understand it to mean mainly sexual attraction. For the ancient Greeks, eros was a reality with six interpenetrating dimensions: It referred, at one and the same time, to ludens (love’s playfulness, teasing and humor); erotic attraction (sexual attractiveness and the desire to have sex); mania (obsessiveness, falling in love, romance); pragma (sensible arrangement in view of family life, home, and community); philia (friendship); and agape (altruism, selflessness, sacrifice). Unlike us, the ancient Greeks did not ask one aspect of love to carry all the others.

Sexuality is an all-encompassing energy inside of us. In one sense, it is identifiable with the principle of life itself. It is the drive for love, communion, community, friendship, family, affection, wholeness, consummation, creativity, self-perpetuation, immortality, joy, delight, humor, and self-transcendence. It is not good to be alone. When God said this about Adam at the dawn of creation, God meant it about every man, woman, child, animal, insect, plant, atom, and molecule in the universe. Sex is the energy inside of us that works incessantly against our being alone.

Genitality, having sex, is only one aspect of that larger reality of sexuality, albeit a very important one. Genitality is particularized, physical consummation, a certain privileged constellation of many of the energies that are contained within our wider erotic energies in one bodily encounter with another person.

Grace is the expression of God’s active love. God’s love is the root of grace; grace itself is the dynamic flowering of this love; and the good things that result in life are the fruit of this divine process. Grace appears in many ways. Theologians speak of it as a love so abundant, so selfless, so endlessly overflowing as to surpass description. Jesus spoke of God as being our intimate, loving parent, and he wished for us to receive God’s love like little children.

It is very difficult to understand a mother’s love; she loves her baby, finally, just because he is her baby. God’s love for us may be something like this. We are God’s children, so we are simply loved. Ideally, an infant does not earn her parents’ love; they love the baby first. Because of this preexisting love, the parents care for their child. God “graces” us in similar ways. There is grace in the simple gift of our existence, in the opportunity to live consciously and appreciatively in this world, and in the goodness of our nature. There is grace in the natural steadiness of life, in the simple things God gives us. God spontaneously gives us beauty and breath and touches of love, just as parents give their children food and warmth naturally, almost automatically. And there is grace in the steady self-giving of God that protects our freedom and keeps us yearning.

The Greek philosophers used to say that we are fired into life with a madness that comes from the gods and that this energy is the root of all love, hate, creativity, joy and sadness. A Christian should agree with that, then add that God put that great power, sexuality, within us so that, ultimately, we might also create life and, like God, look upon what we have helped create, overflow with a joy that breaks the very casings of our selfishness, and say: ‘It is good; indeed, it is very good.’ A mature sexuality is when a person looks at what he or she has helped create, swells in a delight that breaks the prison of his or her selfishness, and feels as God feels when God looks at creation.

For this reason sexuality lies at the center of the spiritual life. A healthy sexuality is the single most powerful vehicle there is to lead us to selflessness and joy, just as an unhealthy sexuality helps constellate selfishness and unhappiness as does nothing else. We will be happy in this life, depending upon whether or not we have a healthy sexuality. One of the fundamental tasks of spirituality, therefore, is to help us to understand and channel our sexuality correctly. This, however, is no easy task. Sexuality is such a powerful fire that it is not always easy to channel it in life-giving ways. Its very power – and it is the most powerful force on the planet – makes it a force not just for formidable love, life, and blessing but also for the worst hate, death, and destruction imaginable. Sex is responsible for lots of murders and suicides. It is the most powerful of all fires, the best of all fires, the most dangerous of all fires, and the fire which ultimately lies at the base of everything including the spiritual life.

Let us not forget that deserts are gardens of courtship as well as fields of battle… The battle of the desert is waged, the courtship engaged, for no less a prize than where our true treasure will be stored up, and therefore where our hearts will be. .. For all, however, the desert of the heart remains unchanged. It is not comfortable.

The three temptations Satan offers Jesus consist of the consequences of attachment. First, Satan suggests that Jesus satisfy his hunger by turning stones into bread. This invitation is remarkably similar to the one the serpent gave to Eve: to play god by using autonomous personal power, and to seek satisfaction through something other than God. Failing at this, Satan next tempts Jesus to manipulate God’s power for the sake of his own self-indulgence, by jumping off the temple parapet. The invitation is to test rather than trust God, to use God superstitiously, as a puppet. Failing once more, Satan proposes the last temptation: he offers Jesus the entire world if he will make Satan his god. This is the ultimate invitation to idolatry.

Throughout these temptations, Satan was hoping Jesus would fall prey to attachment: attachment to meeting his own needs, attachment to his own power, or attachment to the material riches of the world. Satan was trying to lure Jesus into the “I can handle it” trap, and he could have. But instead of giving in to the massive power of temptations to attachment, Jesus stood firm in his own freedom and in his faith and in grace.

It is easy to see Jesus’ success in the desert ascribed to such magnificence as God incarnate, but it makes it difficult for us to identify with him. If we think of Jesus as truly human, as a real man who was truly vulnerable to attachment, then the way he responded to Satan’s temptations reveals some things that are critically important. Jesus’ actions in the desert reveal the way through all our deserts, the way home. (1) He stood firm. He met the adversary, faced the temptation, and did not run away or rationalize. (2) He acted with strength: he claimed and used his free will with dignity. (3) He did not use his freedom willfully. None of his responses to Satan was his own autonomous creation. Instead, he relied upon the Law: his words to Satan were quotations from Scripture, the Torah.

The power of grace flows most fully when human will chooses to act in harmony with the divine will. This means staying in a situation, being willing to confront it as it is, remaining responsible for the choices one makes in response to it, but at the same time turning to God’s grace, protection, and guidance as the ground for one’s choices and behavior. It is the difference between testing God by avoiding ones’ own responsibilities and trusting God as one acts responsibly. Responsible human freedom thus becomes authentic spiritual surrender, and authentic spiritual surrender is nothing other than responsible human freedom.