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So, the Synod on the New Evangelization once came up with 58 Proposals for making the New Evangelization work. Some of them interest me more than others.
#4 Our participation in the life of the Trinity, our sonship, our identity as Christians is the source of our power to evangelize. Nothing new here, or anywhere in this, but a great reminder that to be better givers-away, we need to be more fully who we already are!
#11 Every opportunity for Scripture study should be made available, and the Scripture should permeate homilies, catechesis, and all our evangelization. Amen, amen! Our separated brethren in the Protestant churches will hear us more clearly if we speak ‘scripture,’ and put the lie to their sense that we don’t value the Bible.
#15, 16 Standing up for human rights, for the unborn, for religious freedom IS evangelization! We don’t have to take time away from all that to be contributing mightily to the New Evangelization. Perhaps we’ll add more scripture, more prayer, more loving-kindness to our methods, but rock on, ye who are fighting these fights!
#18 The most effective form of evangelization is the sharing of the testimony of life. How has your life in Christ moved you, changed you, helped you, challenged you, blessed you? TODAY??
#20 There should be a particular attention paid to the way of beauty. Beauty attracts us to love…In this light artists feel themselves privileged communicators of the New Evangelization. Can I hear a big whoop from writers and artists and poets and musicians out there??
#27 Education needs to promote everything that is true, good and beautiful. Is this happening at your school, boys and girls?
#34 Sunday needs to be recovered with its sacred and special character together with Sunday Mass, as the center of Catholic life. Souls at Rest, anyone??
#35 THE LITURGY OF THE CHURCH IS THE BEST SCHOOL OF THE FAITH. No more nun puppets, please Father!
#39 Pilgrimages to shrines and sanctuaries are an important aspect of the New Evangelization. Where shall we go? Who else wants to put up roadside shrines??
#45 The mission proper to lay faithful is the transformation of worldly structures. I love this! Let’s get busy!!! Life witness, works of charity and mercy, renewing the temporal order, and learning how to just flat proclaim what we believe….we can do this!!
# 52 The New Evangelization promotes ecumenical collaboration…in particular, the Church invites Christians to persevere and to intensify their relations with Muslims. Despite difficulties, this dialogue must continue. Sounds pretty clear to me….we can’t be part of the demonize-the-other-guy crowd, but must take the risk of identifying with him as a human being, and keeping a respectful dialogue going. Dialogue – it’s not just for ‘liberals’, but for anyone who wants to set people free: LIBERATORS!!
Well, we’ve got our work cut out for us!! I’d like to know what you think of all this, and what you’re consciously doing for the New Evangelization.
Though I know that you are a deep mystery and a unique, unrepeatable reality, you enter my space as an object in the environment and I often do not register your presence at all. This is a sad state of affairs, exacerbated by the speedy pace of life, the isolation of persons in cars and suburbs, the barely-there transactional symbology that counts as ‘communication,’ and other obvious factors of reality that I can’t change.
What can I change? What can I suggest to help along this ‘practice of the presence of persons’?
Naturally, I am very much interested in your thoughts about how we can better practice the presence of persons. Please let me hear from you!
Live so completely immersed in the Faith that you must be in a life support suit to go out into the world.
Live so deeply embedded in Catholic culture that you are a living artifact of that culture wherever you interact with others – your gestures, collar, habits of speech, prayer before meals reveal your home of origin.
Live so fully in kairos that chronos does not limit the scope of your being.
Live so richly in Catholic community that your tribe goes into the world with you – at your back when you encounter enemies; at the service of those you serve.
Live so well-ordered to the Truth that you cannot be deceived.
Live in such need of grace that you cannot take a step without prayer.
Live in such tender awareness of pain that your heart is a fountain of mercy.
Live with such bubbling joy that you seem a foolish, childish, strangely attractive person to those who don’t know the secret of your Source.
Live with such keen perception of beauty that the world becomes a wonderland, and the distressing disguises of the persons around you cannot hide Christ.
Let the word of God dwell in you so richly that it resounds in your sounding and is realized in your becoming.
I often think of Mary as a place where I can go to be held, to be with Christ in simplicity. Psalm 27:5 speaks of God as hiding me in His pavilion, His sacred tent, His pavilion, His tabernacle. This shelter, set upon a rock, keeps me safe in the midst of my enemies. The battle may rage around me, but God fights for me with His strong arm while I am at rest – the rest of the eternal Sabbath of the Lord’s presence.
I have the sense of seeing, there, a matrix of woven light that reminds me of the invisible support of the Holy Wisdom, whose light filters through the whole fabric of Creation. That light is intangible, but fully three-dimensional, filling the space with a kind of infrastructure that holds open space, within, for me, for the growing Body of Christ. This place is silent, but vibrates with life, with light. Sound is not far away, but I am buffered from a glory I cannot yet bear. The strands of light here are like crystal strings humming with a music played far away.
Meeting with Christ there, in a womb un-skewed, unstained, un-torn by sin, is to meet where He is most fully realized – Incarnate Word barely veiled by flesh. It is enough for Him just to be, and the effect of His presence upon me is great peace and joy at just being. Love holds me afloat like an ocean, pulsing with the gentle waves of a motherly heartbeat.
Delicious, profoundly restful, beauty-full.
This is my most-requested audio – about how we can educate our children well, despite our own inadequacies. The Problem – We must get kids from where they are, to where they need to be; from ‘uneducated’ to ‘educated’. Given the poverty of our own education, we feel asked to do the impossible: build a […]
Some audiences want to cut right to the chase: “Give us practical applications of all your ideas about Sabbath-keeping.” OK – here you go: In this talk I do just that – give concrete, practical ways to dip into the kind of leisure that brings interior equanimity and leaves you more whole, more human, more […]
I prepared this talk for the Heart of a Woman group, in Kansas City, shortly after the suicide of a Catholic mother of ten. It was a shock to me, but not entirely unexpected, as I had known her during the years she struggled with depression and disintegration, despite her devotion to the Church, Christ, […]
For an Apostles of the Interior Life Women’s Retreat, where the theme was “The King Desires Your Beauty,” I prepared this truly interesting talk. Will you believe me when I say that this is another of my favorites?!?! I know, I’ve said that about a lot of these talks, but revisiting them to give a […]
I once asked a friend who calls herself a Jewish-Catholic if it had been hard for her to accept Mary’s role in Salvation History. She laughed and said, “Heck no! Every Sabbath was begun by a Jewish mama’s prayers! I’d have been suspicious if Lord Sabbaoth hadn’t come through a woman.” Jewish women welcomed Sabbath […]
Differences between the original myth of Cupid and Psyche, and C.S. Lewis’ retelling of the myth in Till We Have Faces have the effect of revealing new dimensionality in the Christian understanding of both myth and of the human person. The pre-Christian myth, like the pre-Christian person, is veiled in a darkness that constitutes a […]
In “Stour Valley and Dedham Church” Constable has painted the Vale of Dedham – a familiar and beloved area of his native England.
“The Merry Drinker,” by Frans Hals This is a portrait of an unnamed man, called in the title only ‘a merry drinker’.
Giotto’s painting, The Wedding Feast at Cana, portrays the literal and spiritual senses of this story.
Berlinghieri’s St. Francis appears behind the altar of San Francesco in Pescia, Italy. It is an excellent example of art ordered to divine worship.
A mom is the caretaker of a huge, wonderful, potentially beautiful, critically important place! She, herself, this actual, unique person, is the single most important ‘environment’ in the lives of her children. Like Mary, like the Church, she is an atmosphere. She is an atmosphere of affection. This is not just warm, fuzzy feelings, but […]
Benedictine College hosted a Symposium for Advancing the New Evangelization in 2014. The theme was Transcendentals as Preambles to Faith, and I got to propose my take on that as a paper. Anyone who knows me could probably have bet good money I’d do something ‘three dimensional’ with that, and they’d have won those bets. […]
I once got a chance to do an all-day retreat with one of the sister Apostles of the Interior Life. Naturally, I wanted to discuss the role of leisure in the formation of persons! As usual, I prayed about the upcoming event, and God brought together several threads of my contemplation to weave this talk. […]
Did you know YOU are a poem? Check out Ephesians 2:10, where the Greek ‘poema’ is usually translated ‘workmanship’. I like ‘poema’ better, as it implies beauty and artistry, but ‘workmanship’ is nice. I’ve discussed the importance of poetry, poetic education, poetic imagination and poetic reading in many different venues (many of the talk topics […]
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