| March 2009 |
|
Bulletin for March 2009 Sunday Mass Times 0730 Mass in Thai 0930 Mass in English Weekday Mass Times 18.00 Mass in Thai in Chapel of Building 3 18.00 Mass in English in Chapel of Building 2 [when there are English-speaking retreatants] Intentions of Pope Benedict XVI MARCH General: That the role of women may be more appreciated and used to good advantage in every country in the world. Mission:That in the light of the letter addressed to them by Pope Benedict XV1, the Bishops, priests, consecrated persons, and lay faithful of the Catholic Church in the People’s Republic of China may commit themselves to being the sign and instrument of unity, communion and peace. Some Feasts in March
In April
The Sunday Offertory Collection for the month of January was 33,418 Baht. We thank you for your very generous support of the mission & outreach of The Seven Fountains Spirituality Centre. Vatican Channel on YouTube
The Vatican launched on January 24 a channel on YouTube that will provide video news clips on the Pope's activities, currently in four languages, including English. One or two video clips will be provided each day at www.youtube.com/vatican. According to Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, director of the Vatican press office, the Holy Father is the first supporter of the initiative."The Pope has been personally informed of our project and has approved it with his customary poise and warmth," he said. "For us, this is a great motivation." The project has been under way for more than a year and a half, the Jesuit said, ever since Vatican Radio and the Vatican Television Center began to publish clips on their Web pages and make them available to TV stations and Web sites.
Father Lombardi said that the agency H2O News has offered important collaboration "in this spreading to the world of Catholic social communications." Press Agency Zenit, Rome, January 24
Meditative/Contemplative Prayer Experiences you can download Pray-as-you-go can be found at www.pray-as-you-go.org Sacred Space may be found at www.sacredspace.ie livesimply is a challenge to live simply, sustainably and in solidarity with people in poverty. www.progressio.org.uk/livesimply/AssociatesHome2/92990/livesimply/ An Online Retreat A 34 week retreat for everyday Life - A Ministry of the Collaborative Ministry Office at Creighton University. http://www.creighton.edu/CollaborativeMinistry/cmo-retreat.html International Year of Astronomy The International Astronomical Union (IAU) and UNESCO announced that 2009 is to be the International Year of Astronomy. The initiative marks the 400th anniversary of Galileo Galilei’s first astronomical observation using a telescope (1609). The official opening ceremony will take place in Paris during an important meeting of the IAU. The Specola Vaticana (Vatican Observatory) will mark this year with a number of projects. Brother Guy Consolmagno, S.J., responsible for public relations for the Vatican Observatory at Castelgandolfo writes: “The Specola and the Governatorato of the Vatican State will be publishing a book on Astronomy and the Vatican. The work, a popular-level gift-sized book, will outline the work of the Vatican Observatory and the rich history of the Church and astronomy. In June, the Vatican Observatory will be holding a week-long international symposium on the role of astronomers and astronomy in 21st century society. In October, in cooperation with the Vatican Museums, an exhibition of historical astronomical instruments, from Galileo’s time up to models of the largest telescopes used today in astronomical research, will be held at the Vatican Museums. In November the Vatican Observatory will participate in the Study Week on Astrobiology organized by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.” In addition, the Vatican Observatory is co-sponsor for the international meeting organized by the Stenson Jesuit Institute in Florence on historical, philosophical and theological re-reading of the “Galileo case”, that will be held in Florence next May 2009 and for the sixth International Conference organized by the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere e Arti, next October. Thoughts Just as a cautious businessman avoids tying up all his capital in one concern, so, perhaps, worldly wisdom will advise us not to look for the whole of our satisfaction from a single aspiration. -Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he's wrong. -Charles Wadsworth
A hermeneutic of discontinuity John Moffat, SJ.
25th January 2009 marked the 50th anniversary of the announcement of the Second Vatican Council. John Moffatt SJ looks at how we can understand the changes in the Church since the Council: do certain developments constitute a rupture with tradition, or should they be embraced as examples of growth in the life of the Church? http://www.thinkingfaith.org/articles/20090129_1.htm
Scripture Series Fr.David is continuing the series of New Testament talks 'Living Christ Life in the World'. These will continue on 16th December & every Tuesday evening Fr.David is at Seven Fountains.
To help deepen your grasp of your Christian faith THE HEYTHROP INSTITUTE FOR RELIGION ETHICS AND PUBLIC LIFE www.heythrop.ac.uk/HIREPL Thinking Faith http://www.thinkingfaith.org/index.htm Thinking Faith is a free on-line publication of the British Jesuits. Subscribe to these Thinking Faith alerts using This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it First anniversary of "Thinking Faith" This is the first anniversary of the launch of Thinking Faith, the online journal of the British Province of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits). In the 12 months since Bishop John Arnold launched the website in January 2008, over 140 articles have been published on www.thinkingfaith.org. The articles have tackled social, political and Church affairs; presented faith perspectives on, for example, biomedical science and the economy; and offered scriptural and theological reflections. In addition to these articles, Thinking Faith has also reviewed over 130 films and 40 books. The journal is free and has a "rolling" format, so there is no weekly or monthly issue, but articles are added at any time. Subscribers can sign up to receive email alerts whenever new content is added to the journal by visiting www.thingkingfaith.org and clicking 'Subscribe' in the menu at the top of the page. New authors and reviewers are also welcomed - please contact the Deputy Editor, Frances Murphy, by emailing This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it if you have anything that you would like to be considered for publication. “We’d like to thank all those who regularly visit Thinking Faith,” says Fran, “and who are among the more than 1,300 people who now subscribe to the journal. We’re particularly grateful to the editorial board and editors who contribute a great deal of time to the running of the journal, and of course to all of our authors and reviewers.” Prayer to the Christ of the Refugees
Father General of the Society of Jesus, Adolfo Nicolás SJ at Chiesa del Gesù, Rome, 9 November 2008. Jesus, our Lord and Brother, listen to our humble prayer: Here we are, your friends, your brothers and sisters, travelling companions of your refugees. We remember today another of your friends, who spent his life seeking your face: your servant Pedro Arrupe, ‘a FIRE that kindled many fires’. It was he who taught us that you love to hide yourself precisely in those places where humanity’s incredible and most spontaneous beauty is denied. True humanity and the essence of his truth are not on sale in our city centres, but in poor neighbourhoods abandoned in their misery, in refugee camps, in corners of the world where people suffer and are oppressed or excluded. This is where we can meet you and rediscover our own hearts. It is when we come to the edge, to the border of what is human, that we discover the centre, your centre and our centre. Your paths are not our paths; your ways of acting are not like ours. Jesus, our brother and friend, open the eyes of our hearts, so that we may learn to look for you where you really are, waiting and calling for our attention. May we never pass by without giving you the smile you need, may we never pass by as if you didn’t exist, or were invisible in the fine streets of our city. May we never come to believe that you haveless right than we do to live and enjoy. May we rediscover in you, foreigner, immigrant, refugee, anyone who is somehow ‘different’, the humanity we are always on the verge of losing. Like many of the refugees, our brothers and sisters, you had to leave your hometown in order to be born, to leave your country to survive, to hide yourself to elude the hostile scrutiny of the authorities, to suffer total abandonment on the cross. All around us, we meet hundreds of our brothers and sisters who have faced and are still facing such experiences. They can help us to understand you and to see your face anew, this time with African, Slavonic, Asian features, different from our own. Guide us, Jesus of ‘unattractive appearance’, so that we will not lose this great opportunity of meeting you and of changing our hearts at last. Jesus our brother, change our way of looking at and feeling about our neighbours. May we not just say “What a pity”, “How terrible”, when we hear their stories. May we see you in these stories and feel in our hearts “Jesus lived like this”. We are not meeting marginalised people, but you, and in this meeting help us to be reborn with a new humanity. Amen PRAYER GROUP EACH WEDNESDAY EVENINGS AT 7:30 P.M.
IN THE WOODEN CHAPEL
Our Connection with Creation: Some paradoxes
Mary Colwell is an Englishwoman who has worked as a documentary maker with the BBC. I met her over breakfast and we talked about a subject she loves deeply: ecology and creation. She is here to share how strongly she feels about the lack of awareness on issues of ecology in the Church. She told me that "we need to carefully un-pack what we mean when we say we are made in the image and likeness of God; science in the 21st Century is telling us many challenging things about what it is to be human. DNA science tells us we share 98% of our DNA with a gorilla - our closest relative - but 60% with a fruit fly and 50% with a cabbage. So what is the face of God?" I was struck when she asked me pointedly about the role of the Society of Jesus in supporting the right views on Ecology. We Jesuits have talked about the earth in the documents of GC 35. The questions however are coming to us faster and more searchingly than we ever expected. She added for my own consideration these words: "We are intricately inter-connected with all life and we are part of a web of life rather than a Victorian 'chain of being'. What does that mean theologically? It is also challenging to us to acknowledge that if all 'higher' animals like top predators and mammals, such as ourselves, were wiped out tomorrow, life on earth would carry on fine without us, with a few adjustments. But if we destroy the beetles on earth, then all life dies in about three months. We are utterly dependent on creatures we have very little emotional connection with and very often see as unimportant - and for Catholics that is a new challenge to our perceptions." She strongly criticized an idealized view of creation, a mere dream or movement to contemplate the "the beauty of creation". She made her point passionately: "Indeed it is beautiful, but it is blindly ruthless and that beauty is the result of sheer, unthinking competition. So what does that tell us about God in all things? What this understanding requires is for us to be humble, to accept facts that challenge us and to consider their implications in the light of faith. Humility is the key word!”
I got the message. We are too far from this way of thinking and we need to be humble to be open.
Called out of Darkness by Anne Rice But it wasn’t until sometime in 2005 that the obvious leapt out at me. The Lord of whom I was writing, the Lord of whom I was reading, was demanding a complete transformation in Him. And that transformation revolved around love. It is painful to admit that this realization came to me during a television interview at the time that the first novel was published. I was being interviewed by an intelligent man who obviously took my novel very seriously, and he asked me simply enough: “How has returning to Christ actually influenced your life?” I found myself thinking about this and then answering: “It demands of me that I love people.” This was a turning point, this simple acknowledgement. Because I began to realize what the message of Christ was for me: to love my friends and to love my enemies. And the mystery was that loving my friends was sometimes harder than loving my enemies. And that if one loved both, completely and sincerely, and if one could convince others to do this as well, one could, theoretically, bring the Kingdom of Heaven to earth.” Taken from the spiritual autobiography of Anne Rice. She is referring her novels about the life of Jesus.
Sincere or authentic?
In his book, Affluenza, Oliver James contrasts authenticity with sincerity, a word whose meaning has changed over time. In England, until the sixteenth century sincerity meant being sound or pure or whole. By the mid-seventeenth century it had changed to mean the absence of a gap between the face you present to others and what you really feel, as suggested in Shakespeare's dictum 'to thine own self be true.' As Lionel Trilling puts it, a pact was proposed between me and my self, and of that self with others, in which there shall be no subterfuges: I shall be loyal to this self and honest about it with others.
Subsequently, during the nineteenth and the early twentieth century, sincerity developed its modern meaning. To honesty and openness was added intense passion about one's convictions. Authenticity is being real: as actual, hard, durable and densely weighty as stone. Like art historians authenticating pieces for auctioneers, the authentic individual labours to distinguish the true original from the false, searching for the impenetrable and the autonomous in human existence. Someone who is grieving for a loved one or has been moved by a mountain dawn to write a poem may be sincere in doing so, or they may be authentic. The distinction depends on whether the feelings are governed by considerations wider than ‘I feel it strongly, I express it, therefore it is true.' To be sincere, one must be seen by others to express grief or feel passion for the mountain dawn, but this is not essential to authenticity. Authenticity requires wider, often moral frames of reference, be they personal experience or national history, or the natural world. In seeking it out, writers have often turned to nature - sunsets, storm-tossed seas, flora and fauna. But clues may also be found in the commonplaces of everyday life, epiphanies of the extraordinary gleaned from overheard utterances on the bus or carrying out ordinary domestic tasks, the unsophisticated and unpretentious: children, uneducated simpletons, the oppressed and the poor. The authentic go back to basics, seeking something that is true at all times and places, not subject to fashion, making the natural and the unfashionable good places to look. The consequent Being is often at odds with received habitual convention. But the authentic do not have to speak out in order to be defined as such, whereas sincerity always entails plain-speaking, even if that requires telling the offensive truth to those who do not want to hear it. The contemporary colloquial use of 'authenticity' often merges it with the concept of ‘sincerity.’ But however sincere, it’s no guarantee that one is authentic. Adapted from Oliver James, Affluenza, London 2007 http://www.jesuit.org.uk/godtalk/godtalk_current.htm Pleasure in Austerity By Joe Egerton Throughout the season of Lent, Thinking Faith will offer a series of reflections on how practicing austerity affects and benefits our own lives and the lives of those around us. In the first article of this series, Joe Egerton looks at how we might explain our Lenten observances to people who do not see the value of them – is it possible to take pleasure in austerity? http://www.thinkingfaith/org/articles/20090225_2.htm
The next bulletin Would you like to receive this bulletin via email? If so, please contact Pippa who will add you to the contact list. If you have anything you would like to be included in next month’s bulletin please send an email to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it We are looking for contributors. Have you got something you would like the Community at Seven Fountains to know about? A special anniversary or wedding? Just send the notice in, and we will include it. Laus Deo Semper
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|