Like a child

Hazel Douglas

Jesus exclaimed, ‘I bless you, Father, Lord of heaven and of earth, for hiding these things from the learned and the clever and revealing them to mere children. Yes, Father, for that is what it pleased you to do.

Matthew 11:25 - 26

Our fourth grandchild and second granddaughter, Hazel, was born in January. She is an extraordinary gift, full of life, larger than life, beautiful and utterly dependent upon those who love her, who sustain her and protect her. Matthew (also 18:1 and 19:14). grabs our imaginations to take these emotive sensations as a powerful analogy to explain the relationship God has with us - and - the relationship he invites us into with himself.

It goes without saying, that God is Abba, Father or Dad (or alternatively Immah which is Aramaic for Mother or Mum). God brings into life, provides for and nurtures, teaches and instructs, defends - but also corrects, admonishes, praises, celebrates with and loves. As sons and daughters of God we are not required to be childish in response, but childlike: that is, we remain dependent on the God who loves us, acknowledging the gift of life and the world we have been surrounded with. We remain curious - inquisitive, constantly seeking to explore, understand and engage with the world, ideas, music, art, beauty, marvels. We remain innocent and loved unconditionally, because there is no need to doubt God or his love for us, we are in the moment! We remain joyful - grateful for every surprise, sunrise, gift, tender moment, spectacular revelation. And, we remain full of anticipation - holding on that excitability, the frisson of expectation.

This is isn't childish obedience, lack of responsibility or accountability, this is a relationship of trust.

Nevertheless, we are terribly well educated, and some are very learned, and we do spend an awful lot of time focused on the detail, the numbers, the meaning of words and texts - and it is incredibly easy to get lost. And sometimes the demands of our workaday lives is sufficient to remove any semblance of the awe and wonder that enables us to encounter our God. So, it is no surprise that when it does get too hard, that Jesus issues this powerful and extravagant invitation: Come to me, all you who labour and are overburdened, and I will give you rest. Yes, we need to let go the stuff that holds us back, that prevents us from the open and honest relationship we require to thrive - as God's children.

Just be aware that we use this language as an analogy... we use language to access understanding, but that in itself is not the truth.

Peter Douglas

Click to enlarge

RESPONDING TO DISASTER

by Peter Michael Scott

Fr Peter Michael Scott

We can never be totally prepared to respond to a major incident like the fire at Grenfell Tower, West London. The scale of this emergency was not limited to the bereaved and the casualties; it extended to the much larger community who provided support but who also wanted to know how such an immense tragedy could have taken place.

Immediately after the fire in the early hours of 14 June, the local churches, mosques and Christian centres opened their doors to provide shelter, food and clothing. Fire, police, ambulance, hospitals or social services all have disaster recovery plans in place; but their resources could not respond to the number of casualties and displaced people involved in an emergency like this. To support them, local councils have major incident plans that include calling on faith communities and public buildings for assistance, although on the day of the fire, an Anglican vicar living in Grenfell Tower phoned his dean to tell him what was happening and that started the response of the local churches.

Fire at Grenfell Tower (Click to enlarge)

Here I want to discuss the contribution local parishes can make, in terms of practical help for those affected, emotional help for the traumatised, and appropriate spiritual help.

At a parish level, it is usually the Anglican area dean who has the details and guidelines of the local authority’s emergency guidelines; but leaders of all churches, temples and mosques should also be familiar with those guidelines and the advice they offer – and, of course, the guidelines must be kept up to date. The lessons that have been learned after a disaster should be incorporated into the guidelines; contact details must be kept current and correct since they are central to the dissemination of information. The faith leaders should themselves have lists of volunteers they can call upon to help. For example, people will be needed to get a space ready to receive and welcome survivors. Revising whatever emergency guidelines parishes have might include an evaluation of their facilities; they will need to estimate how many casualties or families they could temporarily accommodate in their hall or church.

After the Grenfell Tower fire, families were divided between three centres, with halls that had easy access, but which were also supervised to ensure the media did not infringe on the privacy of those in shock. Due to the enormity of public donations, other church halls and mosques were used to receive clothes, food, bedding and toiletries that were then sorted by volunteers and taken to the buildings earmarked as survivor reception centres.

While reviewing the local emergency plans, ensure to connect with the local health-care chaplains and include them in any arrangements to be made in the event of a major incident – asking for their assistance and offering assistance to them. This may require you to become an honorary chaplain with a contract and a badge, but in the event of an emergency you could be called upon to help the “on call” chaplain or to provide the hospital with sacramental and religious cover when the incident is over and they are off duty.

Some American parishes, who are on “storm watch” from June to November, have “hurricane cupboards” containing non-perishable supplies, which can be renewed annually.

Crucial to any major incident are crisis support teams of qualified volunteers, who are trained and insured by the local council to go into the various centres and, with the local clergy, begin to prepare the hall or centre to receive casualties or those displaced by the emergency. Those remarkable people aiding the survivors of Grenfell Tower acted quickly and separated hall space into registry, a makeshift canteen, and a basic first aid centre with volunteer health-care professionals who had turned up to assist. These support teams also need assistance, and value parish volunteers who provide them with refreshments and a place to rest occasionally.

Almost immediately after the emergency services arrived in west London came the media. There was a huge influx of satellite vans, reporters, cameras and sound engineers. Initial coordination of the media is usually handled by the police, via a media liaison officer, but in the case of Grenfell Tower it was almost impossible to control journalists and reporters. However, police and volunteers tactfully provided a wall of security around the survivor and family reception centres.

The crisis support teams are usually staffed by people trained to counsel and listen to those traumatised after a major emergency. Some individuals affected by the disaster may need specific help for post-traumatic stress. If clergy are called upon, it is usually to listen and console those in shock. Sometimes a familiar prayer like an “Our Father” or a “Hail Mary” can calm and comfort, but ideally prayers should be introduced gently and said together. If casualties are still waiting for ambulance and medical assistance, and are badly injured, Catholic clergy could offer to administer the sacrament of the sick.

Opening the church is also important. In the aftermath of the fire in west London, shrines of candles and flowers have been left near the tower. In one church, a memorial was made by enclosed nuns in the neighbouring monastery that comprised 24 large stones for the floors in Grenfell Tower and 120 small pebbles to denote the flats and apartments. With the pebbles and stones was a large cross. This was a powerful focus for prayer.

At the heart of these terrible events, are innocent lives lost, people brutally injured and families bereaved. Cardinal Vincent Nichols was quick to arrange to celebrate Mass in a local church after the fire at Grenfell Tower. Before the Mass there was two hours of prayer before the Blessed Sacrament. In his homily, he said: “What we can do is intercede with Jesus on behalf of the broken, the lost and the devastated.” Intercessory prayer is essential. Jesus taught us at the end of his life the most important lesson, the power of praying for each other. “Jesus intercedes for us constantly,” Cardinal Nichols said, “and when we intercede on behalf of others, selflessly, we join our prayers to his.”

The development team of Caritas Westminster is helping the community. To donate, please visit their page on the diocesan website: http://rcdow.org.uk/news/caritas-westminster-grenfell-tower/

Fr Peter Michael Scott is Cardinal Vincent Nichol’s adviser for healthcare chaplaincy, and chaplain to St Joseph’s Hospice, Hackney.

This article appeared in The Tablet, 28 June 2018.

Dr Peter Kreeft

Boston College

introduced by Martin Tobin

Assistant Director CIE

I was listening to an audio talk by Dr Peter Kreeft. Peter is a professor of philosophy, at Boston College, I was introduced to him by a friend and have used some of his material in my teaching. 

I have found his talk and videos very beneficial in developing my own understanding of philosophy and spirituality. I recently shared some of his material with friends of my eldest daughter. Their immediate enthusiastic response sparked me to think that Peter Kreeft and his ideas may resonate with some of our young teachers. I hope that they may find his work helpful; and more importantly, challenging.

Peter Kreeft is a very keen surfer and lover of the ocean. From my experience, many young people share his love for the surf and often express that surfing is as much a spiritual experience as physical. Bethany Hamilton expressed a similar experience in 'Soul Surfer'. 

In the following talk Peter provides an explanation for this experience. The link to the audio is as follows: http://www.peterkreeft.com/audio/12_sea-spirituality.htm

Bio for Peter Keeft

Peter Kreeft, Ph.D., is a professor of philosophy at Boston College and also at the King's College (Empire State Building), in New York City. He is a regular contributor to several Christian publications, is in wide demand as a speaker at conferences, and is the author of over 55 books including: Back to Virtue; The God Who Loves You; Heaven, The Heart's Deepest Longing; Everything You wanted to Know About Heaven; Your Questions - God's Answers; How To Win The Culture War; The Journey; Before I Go - Letters to Our Children About What Really Matters; and Jesus Shock.

Dr. Kreeft is a convert to the Catholic Church from reformed Protestantism. He earned an A.B. degree from Calvin College, an M.A. and Ph.D. from Fordham University, followed by post-doctoral work at Yale University. He has received several honors for achievements in the field of philosophy, including the Woodrow Wilson Award, Yale-Sterling Fellowship, Newman Alumni Scholarship, Danforth Asian Religions Fellowship, and a Weathersfield Homeland Foundation Fellowship.

According to our gifts

Jesus instructed the Twelve as follows: ‘Anyone who prefers father or mother to me is not worthy of me. Anyone who prefers son or daughter to me is not worthy of me. Anyone who does not take his cross and follow in my footsteps is not worthy of me. Anyone who finds his life will lose it; anyone who loses his life for my sake will find it.

Matthew 10:37 - 39

I have for years admired (and feared) the Legion of Mary, the Jehovah's Witnesses, and the like of Operation 513 who knock on doors or stand at street corners and preach. They take their responsibility to preach the Gospel to the world deadly seriously. I have read and heard the same call as they, but I have never felt the confidence or desire to do so myself. I admire them because they can do it. I fear them because they challenge me and make me feel uncomfortable about my passive Christianity.

There are people in our schools, towns and cities who have their passions written in their every breath. They are 'activists', sometimes outspoken, often articulate, regularly zealous and occasionally fanatical. They preach marriage equality, climate change, Aboriginal reconciliation, anti-GMOs, anti/pro-immigration/asylum seekers, Westminster democracy, sustainable forestry. Again, my advocacy on behalf those causes I support is unassertive but not indifferent, calm without being aloof.

Don't get me wrong. There are a myriad causes that must be made public. Getting air time for all of them, is, nevertheless, quite impossible.

Undoubtedly, the first disciples were radicalised (this is a word that was around long before it was purloined by the media to describe Islamic fundamentalists) by means of their encounter with Jesus. Like Jesus they met with steely resistance. The idealism we strike in the beginning chapters of Acts soon becomes the practical application of faith in everyday life in Paul's letters. Then, as now, there must have been many rich young men and women who sought eternal life (Matthew 19:16 - 122), but who in the end could not let go of their riches. And by riches we do mean, our jobs and status, our habits, our cultural and intellectual defences, our indulgent relationships as well as our beautiful homes, the technology and the bottles of dry white. Well, this is what Jesus is challenging us to consider.

I don't for a minute believe that keeping our riches excludes us, but it doesn't make it easy. We need to have the activists - the street preachers, the sign-waving anarchists, the indignant and harrowed protestors, the articulate letter writers, those promising a better world if only we.... But the world also needs the contemplatives, the philosophers, the theologians, the inspirational thinkers and talkers as well as us - the support workers - we who affirm, finance and encourage. And that is the invitation offered to all by Jesus. And each of us responds according to our gifts.

Peter Douglas

^{Click on image to view}

^{CL head sketches a Christianity beyond the culture wars}

Fr Julián Carrón and Pope Francis

^{John L Allen Jr and Ines San Martin}

^{June 22, 2017}

^{MILAN - One of the most vexing questions facing Christians in the West in the early 21st century is whether, and how, the Church ought to keep fighting the culture wars.}

^{On the Christian left, there’s a powerful current of thought that the Church ought to withdraw from the field of battle because on many issues, such as contraception and women, it was on the wrong side. On the right, some, such as Rod Dreher and his advocacy of a “Benedict option,” say the Church ought to pull back because it’s already lost and the most it can hope for in this culture is to keep alive small islands of the faith.}

^{In effect, Father Julián Carrón, leader of the influential Catholic movement Communion and Liberation, represents another form of the argument for de-emphasizing the wars of culture. In his view, it’s not that the Church’s traditional positions are wrong, and it’s also not because the battle is already over.}

^{Instead, it’s because starting with ethics was always the wrong way to present Christianity to the world, which at its heart is an “event” - a word that might seem banal in street usage, but in the lexicon of Communion and Liberation that derives from its founder, Italian Father Luigi Giussani, is rich with meaning.}

^{“The faith as an event means that someone’s life changes when they encounter a fact, like what happened to John and Andrew when they met Jesus,” he told Crux on Monday. “You can’t avoid the reality of what’s happened, you can’t undo it. It’s like St. Paul, who was a persecutor of Christians, trying to destroy them, met the living Christ and it revolutionized his thinking.}

^{“The choice can’t come down to either the culture wars or a Christianity emptied of content, because neither of those options has anything to do with Abraham and salvation history,” Carrón said. “Abraham was chosen by God to begin introducing into history a new way of living life, that could slowly begin to generate an external reality with the capacity to make life dignified, to make it full.”}

^{Rod Dreher recently argued that Christians should abandon the culture wars in the West because we’ve already lost, and the most we can hope for is a ‘Benedict option,’ meaning creatively preserving small islands of the faith amid a decaying and hostile culture. You too seem to be saying that we should get past the culture wars, without abandoning those positions, but for a different reason.}

^{Certainly, absolutely. It’s always struck me, the contraposition between trying to make Christianity into a civil religion, on the one hand, and on the other, trying to make it entirely private. To me, it’s like trying to amend the design of God. I ask myself, who would ever have bet that God would begin to reach out to the world by calling Abraham? It was the most unlikely, most confusing, way of going about it anyone could have imagined.}

^{The choice can’t come down to either the culture wars or a Christianity emptied of content, because neither of those options has anything to do with Abraham and salvation history. Abraham was chosen by God to begin introducing into history a new way of living life, that could slowly begin to generate an external reality with the capacity to make like dignified, to make it full.}

^{I imagine that if Abraham were around today, in our minority situation, and he went to God and said, ‘Nobody’s paying any attention to me,’ what would God have said? We know very well what he’d say: ‘That’s why I chose you, to begin posing to reality a presence significant enough, even if no one believes it, that I will make of you a people so numerous that your descendants will be like the stars in the sky.’}

^{When he sent his son into the world, stripped of his divine power to become man, he did the same thing. It’s like St. Paul said, he came to give us the capacity to live life in a new way. That’s what generates a culture. The question for us is whether the situation we’re in today gives us the chance to recover the origins of the design of God.}

^{You seem fairly optimistic that’s still possible.}

^{Yes, absolutely. I’m completely optimistic, because of the nature of the faith itself. I’m an optimist based on the nature of the Christian experience. It doesn’t depend on my reading of things, my diagnosis of the sociological situation. The problem is that to be able to start over again from this absolutely original point of departure, we have to go back to the roots of the faith itself, in what Jesus said and did.}

^{If there’s a case for pessimism, it’s that too many times we’ve reduced Christianity either to a series of values, an ethics, or simply a philosophical discourse. That’s not attractive, it doesn’t have the power to seduce anyone. People don’t feel the attractive force of Christianity. But precisely because the situation we’re living in today is so dramatic, from every point of view, paradoxically it’s easier to get across the novelty of Christianity.}

^{If we look at Europe today, there’s a new generation coming of age that really isn’t invested in the old battles over religion v. secularity, because they’ve been raised in a largely post-religious culture and thus often look on it not with animosity but curiosity. Does that create a new moment for evangelization?}

^{Yes, there’s a new moment. The question is whether Christians can take advantage of this opportunity to understand ourselves what the faith really is, what it means to be Christian, because it ought to interest us and it will interest others. We have to go about that independently of worrying about the numbers, and project ourselves solely to the fullness of the experience that Christ poses in our lives.}

^{I think of an expression Giussani often used, speaking of the faith, he said, “The faith is a present experience, where I have in my own personal experience confirmation of the human fittingness of the faith.”  Without that, the faith won’t be able to hold out in a world in which everything says the opposite to us.}

^{So, your strategy for evangelization in the early 21st century is to live the faith in such a way that this ‘experience of confirmation’ comes across, and then gradually to introduce others to this way of life?}

^{When a Christian lives the faith with this kind of joy, with this fulness, it’s evident that when he or she goes to work, or hangs out with their friends, or is in the airport, others will see this novelty in them. If you show up at the factory at 8:00 am and you go onto the work floor and find a colleague who’s singing, embracing you and sharing your weakness and difficulties, you’re going to ask, ‘What is it about you, that you can show up for work singing at 8 in the morning?’}

^{That gets Christianity across much more than lots of other things, than all these ethical arguments, because when you see someone like that, you naturally want to ask, ‘Where does this joy come from? Where does this fullness of life come from?’ People may not immediately think that the ultimate origin of this happiness is called Jesus Christ, that it’s called the faith. But when you start to understand that this stupefying way of living in the real world, so happy, so joyful, is rooted in the faith, they’ll start to get interested.}

^{Christianity, in a phrase, is communicated by living it. Eliot once asked, ‘Where is the life we have lost in living?’ For us, it’s the opposite … we gain life by living in the faith. If that’s not the case, we won’t interest anyone, including ourselves. To put it differently, has the Church failed mankind, or has mankind failed the Church?}

^{We’re not pitching a series of doctrines, but a way of life?}

^{It’s an experience of life.}

^{Pope Francis talks a lot about creating a ‘culture of encounter,’ and of course ‘encounter’ was also a fundamental concept for Giussani. As you look around the church today, what are the examples of a ‘culture of encounter’ that impress you the most?}

^{I’m always impressed with those examples of creating a space for encounter among people who are completely different. For example, we [Communion and Liberation] have here in Milan an after-school program, a center, in which a group of teachers … some of whom belong to the movement, some don’t … offer their free time to help kids with problems in school.}

^{Italians go there, immigrants, members of different religions, mostly Catholics and Muslims, and there you see a space of encounter. They come from very different situations, and they can find there a place where their humanity is reborn.}

^{One time, a kid showed up with a steel blade in his backpack, and under different circumstances he might have ended up as a terrorist. But by spending time with these people, he got rid of all his aggression, and eventually became an official of that operation. That’s the power of encounter.}

^{What about examples outside your own movement?}

^{Well, I don’t know the whole world, of course, but I can give examples. For instance, I move in and out of different parishes in Rome and Milan sometimes, and you can see this spirit of encounter alive in them. I know a priest here in Milan who has a relationship with some prisoners. He’s got an amazing capacity and involved himself in the lives of others, in a way that helps them rebuild their lives.}

^{There’s this experience of APAC in Brazil, this network of jails with no guards and no weapons, and where the rate of recidivism, which is about eighty percent in normal prisons, drops all the way to 15 percent. You might think that’s just an illusion, that what’s really happening is that they’re encouraging criminality. Instead, it’s an example what happens when there’s a real encounter. Everything that gets in the way of true humanity, sooner or later falls away.}

^{For instance, there was a prisoner who escaped from a series of different jails who eventually showed up at one of these, and he didn’t try to escape anymore. There was a judge who was so struck by that story he went to the prison to ask, ‘Why haven’t you tried to escape?’ The prisoner replied, ‘You can’t run away from love.’}

^{Our problem sometimes is that we just don’t believe in certain things anymore. We think virtually any other solution, however violent, is more effective than the power of love.}

^{You’re saying that in the end, our ‘realism’ isn’t actually all that realistic.}

^{That’s clear. We’ve just taken for granted that certain things are illusions, and we’ve cast aside the lone chance of truly penetrating to someone’s heart. Again, this is what makes me an optimist - the faith works!}

^{Like Pope Benedict said years ago, is there still a chance for Christianity today, in this world? He said ‘yes,’ because the heart of the human person needs something that only Christ can give. That capacity to correspond to what people are truly seeking is what will always make it attractive.}

^{You also seem to be saying we have to be audacious about it, to not be afraid to challenge conventional wisdom in this world.}

^{What we can’t have is a reduced Christianity that’s a little ambiguous, thinking that’s the way to be able to encounter anybody. No, we have to live it audaciously, fully, we have to be convinced, with the same audacity of Jesus entering the house of Zacchaeus, without in any way overlooking the things he’d done, but disarmed, responding to what was in his heart. Historically, that’s an absolutely new method. Jesus astonished St. Paul, in the same way he astonishes us.}

^{There’s nothing that challenges the heart of a person more than a gesture like this, a gesture that’s absolutely astonishing.}

^{A key concept for Giussani, which you repeat throughout the book, is that the faith is an ‘event.’ Can you explain what that means and why it’s important?}

^{The faith as an event means that someone’s life changes when they encounter a fact, like what happened to John and Andrew when they met Jesus. You can’t avoid the reality of what’s happened, you can’t undo it. It’s like St. Paul, who was a persecutor of Christians, trying to destroy them, met the living Christ and it revolutionized his thinking.}

^{It’s like that scene in the novel by Manzoni, I promessi sposi … the experience of meeting someone so ready to forgive was so astonishing that it was impossible not to yield to its attractive power. When the cardinal greets the bandit, the latter asks,  ‘When will I come back? Even if you refuse to see me, I’ll show up here at your door, obstinately, like a poor beggar needing to see you again.’}

^{That’s the sort of shocking experience that changes a life, and that’s the faith. [Note: The cardinal character in I promessi sposi is believed to have been inspired by Cardinal Federigo Borromeo of Milan, 1564-1631.]}

^{Pope Benedict always said that at the origins of Christianity, it’s not a doctrine, it’s not a teaching, it’s an encounter with Christ. The form of the Christian ‘event’ is this encounter, not in a virtual way or just as a proposal someone makes. No, it’s an encounter so powerful that you don’t want to lose it for the rest of your life.}

^{Is the aim of your book to reawaken a consciousness of this event?}

^{Certainly. The problem is how to get this event across to people. It’s like the experience of love, of falling in love … it doesn’t happen by talking about it, but by actually falling in love.}

^{You write at one point that the purpose of the community, presumably meaning Communion and Liberation but also more generally the Church, is to generate ‘adults in the faith.’ What do you mean by that?}

^{I mean people who are regenerated by participating in the Christian community, in the sense that they have a new capacity to grasp reality, a new capacity to be free in a way differently than before, and a new capacity to transmit a sense of awe to others. If Christianity isn’t able to generate a new kind of person, then it’ll stay detached from their lives.}

^{There’s nothing more decisive in the present moment than the ability to generate adults in the faith, adults who live freely among others and who can testify to the faith not just when they go to church or when they take part in some activity that’s apart from daily life, but in the middle of their work and their lives.}

^{We need people who can get across the newness of the faith in the middle of the world, which invites the question, ‘But where are you getting this newness, this freshness? What’s behind it?’ To be able to respond to that, it will naturally lead people to something bigger and greater.}

^{That’s a real witness to the faith … even if people can’t even identify the name of Christ, just looking at that person makes it impossible not to want to understand what makes them tick. They’ll want to know who the ‘third party’ is, and that’s a witness.}

^{Only a real witness can make visible and tangible the event of the faith … the ability to make the faith seem reasonable to people can only come from a real experience of it, an ‘event.’ That’s what enables one not to be afraid of being misunderstood, and to resist the temptation to reduce Christianity to something else.}

^{Let me ask you something: Why do we think sometimes that for a gratuitous gesture to be understood, it has to be reduced to something else, it has to be less gratuitous? The more gratuitous it is, the more astonishing and captivating, no? We don’t have to reduce things to be understood.}

^{Sometimes we think that for someone who doesn’t have faith, we have to reduce things to be understood. But it’s the other way around - the more a gesture is gratuitous, like forgiving someone for an offense, rather than responding in kind, it will absolutely astonish that person. It’s not that we have to reduce it, take the edge off, to avoid scandal … nobody’s ever scandalized by being forgiven.}

^{In the last line of the book, you write that joy is like a cactus flower. What do you mean?}

^{The faith introduces an attraction into life, which at the same time attracts us to it but also doesn’t leave us alone. Nothing challenges a person more than something that responds to all their expectations in complete fullness.  There’s nothing that turns life on its head quite like having all its promises fulfilled! That’s why the faith is like a cactus … it’s beautiful, it draws us in, but it also stings. You can accept it or reject it, but nothing transforms and upsets your life with the same power.}

^{Would it be fair to say that this book is an attempt to express the vision of evangelization that comes from Giussani, and which has been amplified by the last three popes?}

^{To me, the answer is yes.}