The Road to Easter

Easter is at the centre of the liturgical practice and faith of Christianity. It is the time to remember and to celebrate that we are in fact immortal spiritual beings - and not just intelligent animals with a fixed life-span.

The first of the seven readings of the traditional Easter Vigil is the Genesis story of creation where we are reminded that "God created humankind in his image." (Gn 1:27)

That is the point of Easter: we are created in God's image as immortal spiritual beings, and Jesus demonstrated that when he rose from the dead and appeared to people (then and still now) as a resurrected person. That is the point of Easter.

So what is the point of Lent?

Lent, beginning with Ash Wednesday this week, is a very old tradition. For some people Lent is a time to make ourselves worthy (through acts of penance, prayer and giving) to become immortal spiritual people created in the Creator's image.

But that view is not how I see it!

We are already immortal spiritual beings created in God's image, so we are already worthy. 

But the immediacy of our physical lives takes over and we spend most of our time worrying about the physical threats and dangers we face, or responding to the deluge of sensory stimulation bombarding us. 

Lent is a time when we go back to basics and remind ourselves that we are in fact spiritual beings with an umbilical cord rooted in our Creator.

We can work for seven weeks to put our physical needs where they belong - by putting things right and giving up some of our little luxuries, by talking daily to our God, and by giving our stuff and money away to remind us that, in fact, we don't need it all!

If we don't do that, we drift more and more deeply into the physical world, until in the end we cannot conceive of any other.

PS Don't forget that you are welcome to join me on my pilgrimage to Easter - for the remaining 43 days, or just when you can: http://meditations-insights.blogspot.co.nz/

Mardi Gras: the start of Lent 2016

These few days before the Church season of Lent (beginning tomorrow) have long been something of a thorn in the side of the Church. Shrove Tuesday (today) is the Church's day to be "shriven" - to go to Confession.

However it is also the day before six weeks of fasting so the people have their own agenda: it may be fasting tomorrow - but today it is feasting!

And so the day is also known as Pancake Tuesday or Fat Tuesday, (Mardi Gras in French). For the last thousand years the Church has tried unsuccessfully to calm it all down. The day has now been taken over as a tourist event in many parts of the world, or as a celebration of alternative sexuality.

The original purpose of preparing ourselves for a journey through Lent has largely disappeared.

I am not going to allow that to get in my way though. Today I am preparing myself for a spiritual pilgrimage that will last 46 days. I am heading to Easter - but my journey follows the path Jesus took in his discoveries and teaching about prayer and suffering - his exploration of where we are, why we are here, and where we are going.

Today is an important day of preparation for the journey - although people will join us along the way or do day walks with us.

I am just one small part of the body of Christ undertaking this journey. You can join me, your local parish, or walk your own path with your own reading and reflection. The important thing is to make the journey.

In today's world much of the path is overgrown. We need to remake that path - and the best thing I can do is take a small step each day, my feet trampling down the weeds.

My daily journey will be outlined on my meditations blog. If you would like to join me for all or part of my pilgrimage, I would be honoured.

An invitation

Like many people I have had a busy and very enjoyable Christmas break - and I suspect that, as happens for many people, the change in my routine and the many new people in my daily life has made it difficult to maintain my inner life. I have mostly managed to keep up my regular reading (largely thanks to an imaginative son-in-law who gathered a collection of used books as a gift he entitled "Box-o-Merton") - but have often struggled to find undistracted time for prayer.

Hence the invitation.

To get myself back on track, I am writing a series of short daily reflections for Lent (which starts on 10 February). I see these as a sort of spiritual pilgrimage walking through the 45 days to Easter. I will use the daily readings for Lent as the basis of my contemplation - and will publish a milestone a day for the 45 day journey.

I will work hard to keep them short: I am hoping that anyone who wants to travel with me will be able to spend 10-15 minutes a day on the reflection and another 10-15 minutes on the resulting meditation or centering prayer.

If you would like to join me on my pilgrimage to Easter, I will begin on Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras or Fat Tuesday - more on that in a later post) Tuesday 9 February on my Meditations blog.

Advent

This weekend the Catholic Church begins its year with the season of Advent - a word that tells us that Jesus is coming (from the Latin adventus). That means we are just four weeks from Christmas, the annual celebration of the nativity of Jesus.

Of course that also means presents and overeating and last-minute shopping - but behind all of that we celebrate the hope of the world.

The shopping and overeating may not reinforce that sense of hope - but the gifts certainly do - and so does that other great part of Christmas celebrations: family.

The groups working on the amalgamation of the Stoke and Nelson parishes have reinforced that with their name for the new parish which begins in February next year: Holy Family parish.

It's a great name, and even though we are sure of very little about Jesus' background, childhood, and family life, we guess that someone who turned out so well as an adult MUST have had a solid early life.

It was also something of a modern family. His father seems to have died while Jesus was still quite young so Mary ended up as a solo mother. The Holy Family started under the cloud of an unplanned pregnancy, and ended up as a single parent family. And Jesus and his brothers went on to change the world.

Christmas is the time when we remember the start of that story - but it is also the time to remember the power and importance of family. It is a time for family to gather. It may be the time for forgiveness and new starts. Maybe a time to put Jesus and family back to a more prominent place in in our lives. Maybe a time to support struggling families at a difficult time of the year for poor families.

But the next four weeks and Christmas is always the time for hope.

Giving thanks

Americans have a holiday that is so integrated into their thinking, and so neatly aligned to religious thinking that most people assume it had some sort of religious origin (a bit like Christmas). That holiday (from the original "holy-day") is Thanksgiving - and they celebrate it next Thursday.

In fact it is not religious - it started as a collective sigh of relief that early settlers had survived! And it was a continuation of their European harvest thanksgiving parties: with the help of local indigenous experts, the European settlers had grown and gathered enough harvest to likely make it through the winter.

Down here in New Zealand we see Thanksgiving only in movies and television cliches where people are embarrassed by turkeys, sit around perfectly-set tables, and hold hands to say what they are grateful for.

I'm sure that is part of it - but it is also a time for families to forego the busy routines of their lives, and be together. In modern times that has become very significant for a lot of people.

On Thanksgiving day next week, again with no obvious religious intent, the staff of Garin College will welcome everybody who helped out during the year with plenty of food and drink so coaches, tutors, exam reader-writers, and all the rest can gather and be thanked.

Hundreds of invitations have gone out. Some people will come without an invitation.

People as young as our superb student sport and academic coaches - and as old as the school's famous workshop technician will come together as the community they are, to be thanked. The community will recognise that their cog is part of the whole well-oiled machine; they may feel separate when they zip into the school, do their thing, and zip off again - but in fact that well oiled machine would not run as well without them, without their contribution.

It is not a religious event any more than Thanksgiving - but "thanksgiving" is an English word that is a translation of the Greek word "eucharist". On a much earlier Thursday Jesus "gave thanks" for the fruits of the harvest, for creation and God's love, for friends, for life itself - then he blessed the bread and wine, and shared it with the instruction to keep doing this and to remember.

On Thursday next week we remember and celebrate - at least in America, and in Garin College New Zealand.

Love one another as I have loved you

Many adults feel quite disheartened by the immature behaviour of our politicians. They certainly disappoint me at times - and this week has been one of those times. Parents and teachers work hard to encourage good behaviour and strong values in our children: it might be time for our politicians to go back to school!

Throughout the democratic world we have come to expect childish one upmanship as our elected representatives forget their roles as our servants and standard-setters, and do all they can to demean, undermine and sabotage their opponents - and groups they have decided they cannot tolerate.

Adversarial governance always ends up with immature name-calling, treating people as objects, winners and losers. And too often it seems to draw us in as we find ourselves supporting the ideas and behaviour of our favourites (who we do support - but for other reasons).

In Australasia at the moment we have added what seems to be a new dimension in our part of the world. We are fighting about how badly we can treat groups of people we have decided we don't like: people who are mothers, fathers, children. But we don't see that; all we see are the group, the gang, the different-from-us.

I understand that Australia is afraid of strangers coming to their country. I understand that they want to get rid of the sorts of people-different-from-them they have decided they don't like. But, although it is shockingly new for us in 2015, both countries have incidents from our not too distant past that we don't like to remember - incidents that we should never have allowed ourselves to forget! 

There are better ways to deal with people we disagree with or fear. Just last week on 5 November we celebrated the rebellion of Te Whiti o Rongomai of Parihaka - a nineteenth century Maori New Zealand Christian pacifist who seems to have influenced the thinking and ideas of Mahatma Gandhi. He was a man who understood, and acted on that.

Politicians yelling at each other can be seen as mostly harmless posturing, albeit disappointing and setting a poor example of behaviour. But always, real individual people are being hurt. Real mothers and fathers, real children and friends and families are affected. 

All of us - you and me, as well as our leaders - need to stop thinking in stereotypes and "getting one over" the other. We are all created one-by-one by the same God, who knows and loves each of us. Wherever we are, we all need to see people as they are. I recall a memorial in Rwanda where they know what this hatred can lead to ...

“If you knew me,
and if you really knew yourself, 

then you would not have killed me.”

Felicien Ntagengwa

... and there's another Rwandan memorial that's always affected me, this one from a survivor of the sort of stereotyping we are flirting with ...

The next step

This week at Garin College in Nelson, all over New Zealand, and - I assume - all over the Southern Hemisphere, 17, 18 and 19 year old students are leaving school to take another step in their lives.

Nearly all of those students are more than ready to throw off the uniforms, the monitoring and checking, the routines and the hierarchies of school life and try themselves out in the adult world.

So far, most are not fully aware of the size of the step they are taking.

At school older adults take care and responsibility for the growth, learning and safety of their pupils. The staff want them to do well academically - and want them to develop in positive ways as people.

But over the next week our young adults enter a world where (when they leave home) no-one they see on a day-to-day basis really will care about their life as a whole or about their personal development. They move from environments where they are genuinely loved and cherished and supported - to much more impersonal places where, at best, people are paid to watch out for them for eight hours a day, for a term or a year.

At school older adults take responsibility for the safety of their students. The adults - parents and teachers - explain how things might go wrong and try to prepare them for the step they take this week.

Adults put themselves out to provide rich and stimulating experiences. Parents support them financially with free food and accommodation, and with other necessities and luxuries.

When our students were children many of the adults around our young people did their best to make them aware of the spiritual world around them. In most families and schools that support has become a rationalisation that we each must make our own way spiritually. In most families all they can do is set an example - or just pray for their children. Some families give in to the indifference of the world and are no longer involved in spiritual formation - of the adults or children.

At school and inside families, the consequences for mistakes are mostly personal and loving (even when the consequences involve short-term pain!) Next week - and definitely next year - mistakes will have adult consequences. A growling, a detention or suspension, or a "talk" - will be replaced with impersonal failure, debt, fines, prison, or lifelong commitments.

In our families and schools the adults protect young people from the worst consequences, but in the adult world that protection quickly fades and sometimes even becomes illegal. Everyone must face their own consequences.

Even the language changes. Borrow becomes steal. Tease becomes harass. Push becomes assault. Consequence becomes punishment. Experiment becomes illegal. Risk-taking may become death.

Parents and teachers have done all we can to prepare our young people for the world they step into so lightly. There will be grief for all of them - as there was for us. Most will adjust quickly and thrive. Some will continue to need our support.

Most young people stepping out this week are spiritually aware, even if most are not particularly religious. Tell them you are praying for them. Tell them you are still there for them. They will mostly be too proud to ask, but knowing you are still their backstop is an important security.

We ask God to continue to bless them, to protect them, and guide them in their lives, and as they become the people God (along with parents and teachers) created them to be.