The OUT Experience

Perhaps the best therapy for any illness, whether mental or any kind of phyiscal suffering, is what I call the OUT experience, the "Oh U Too" story exhcnage with another person or with the God of your understanding and inspriation. Story-exchange and prayer remind me that I'm not alone in the recovery and discovery journey of life. Here's a true story that actually happened to me.

"How'd I ever get here, in a mental hospital?" I asked myself as I sat in a white plastic chair just outside the front door of the hospital overlooking a little pond and some meandering ducks. As I sat there in my hospital attire I mocked myself repeatedly, "You're nuts, crazy, loony, bonkers, worthless, and you'll never work again."

While my self-condemnation continued, another patient came through the hospital doors, limped toward the empty chair next to me and sat down.

"Miss Arrrgnus is what they call me," the beautifully black woman said, as she leaned on the white plastic chair.

I presumed her name was actually Agnes but enjoyed the rolling sound of the extra "r's." Miss Arrrgnus slowly began to tell me her story.

"So what you in for Honey?" she finally asked.

"Depression," I answered

"I come here every now and then to get away from my family," she said.

I shocked myself with a little laugh, the first time I'd laughed in weeks.

"First time in a streeeeeeesssss unit?" Miss Arrrgnus then asked.

" Yes," I answered.

"What kind of work you do, Honey," she asked.

"I'm a Catholic priest," I said hesitantly.

"Never met one of you before," Miss Arrrgnus said. "I'll ask the people in my fellowship church to pray for you."

After a long uncomfortable pause Miss Arrrgnus spoke up again. "Come on, Honey, stop your brain strain. Help me out of this chair and let's go to the meeting the druggies are having in the conference room. The company will be good for you. Some of the nicest people you'll ever meet are recovering addicts. No nonsense there, Honey."

As we walked through the door, Miss Arrrgnus leaned heavily on my arm as though I were a crutch. I recalled at that moment an old saying: "I'd rather limp through life on the right road than run down the wrong."

To walk, Miss Arrrgnus and I had to lean forward and risk losing our balance and falling with each step. We had to let go of our previous stability, trusting that with each step there would be a new foundation, a new stability. It was good to walk with such an honorable and honest woman. This, thankfully, would not be the last time Miss Arrrgnus gracefully interrupted my isolation. Every day during our hospital stay Miss Arrrgnus and I sat with each other for lunch and would offer a prayer, not only for the food we were about to eat, but in thanksgiving for what God was giving us - the promise of Hope that if we continued the great practice of story-exchange with friends, family, companions in recovery, therapists, psychiatrists and God, we would discover a new way of living.

Fr. John Baptist Pesce - We Are the Church!

Few who have undertaken seriously to live out their baptismal commitment have found it to be a lark. That enterprise is a formidable challenge. There are weaknesses from within. There are obstacles from without. Different periods in the history of the church have made the latter loom large. Say the sixteenth century must have been a truly daunting time.

Many Catholics dedicated to gospel lives find our times as presenting uncommon pressures. What is embraced by the term the child sex abuse scandal and the remarkable irresponsibility on the part of certain church authorities in handling these matters have, as some expressed it, “tested” their faith. Not, necessarily, that they consider leaving the church (although, we are told, some have done that), but they are, as at least one has stated, “just hanging in there by their finger nails.” (Not the most promising stance, indeed.)

It seems to me that, granted all the difficulties involved and not denying them in pollyanna fashion, these are times that summon us to rise above the mediocrity, cynicism, nihilism and polarization that engulf us, to allow ourselves to be stretched out to the dimensions of Christ to show forth the beautiful and mature Christ for whom, consciously or unconsciously, people are hungering and thirsting for.

There is encouragement and inspiration to be taken from the words of Pius XI in December l937, a time when matters in state and church, though, admittedly, for far different reasons than today, could have been judged not conducive to living out one’s baptismal commitment. “This era is one of the most disturbed that mankind has ever known. It is also one of the finest, for it is an age where mediocrity is allowed to nobody, where Christian lives flower in all their beauty and triumphs are made ready for the Church, but we need holiness for that.” (Emphasis mine, but knowing how Pius XI had a capacity for irascibility, I believe he would have stressed those words).

I believe this is the faith perspective called for today. The God who call us to this task is the God who is for us and with us. The God who dwells within us. “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” “In” is the superlative degree of “with,” Yes, we are weak but, as the Church prays, “God chooses the weak to make them strong” in bearing witness. We can accommodate for our purposes the words of Gandhi to those who were not considered a people in his day exhorting them to their dignity as human beings in order to energize them to deliver themselves from under the heel of the British Empire, “We are to be the change we seek in society.”

We are to be the change we seek in the Church. Yes, structures have to be changed. Definitely reforms are called for to bring about an open church which is transparent and respectful of all. A church which fulfills its function as expressed by the Second Vatican Council to “render God the Father and his incarnate Son present and as it were visible in the world.” A church which reflects the concern of the Lord for the downtrodden and marginalized, that is stripped of pomposity and that is in the forefront of advocacy for nonviolence. A Church that is not sexist where there are no second class citizens. But we are that Church! The Church is not the Pope, the Vatican, the curia, the bishops, the clergy. (Google Nicholas D. Kristof, “Who Can Mock This Church?” New York Times, May 2, 2010) We are the Church! That is one reason I have been saying for a long time now, “Be highly critical of the Church.. . . . It may lead to your own conversion.”

“But we need holiness for that.” There is no such thing as cheap discipleship or cheap grace. Are we willing to pay that price? And it is a costly one!

Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. … This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. … I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. … At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak his name written in us … like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely. . . . I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.

Thomas Merton

Peace at the Center

Last weekend, Holy Family hosted its first annual Centering Prayer Retreat. In the coming years, we hope more of our friends will join us in this transformational prayer practice.

Centering prayer is like coming home. It helps me remember who I am. In a world that has so many claims on us and pressures us to be other than who we “truly” are, it is the place of reminder that we are a loved being of God. We realize and remember that we are literally breathed by Another and connected to all others in a web of care. All of our strivings for security and safety, affection and esteem, power and control are meaningless outside of God’s love. It is the ultimate rest stop on our journey, where we bring “nothing” and receive everything.

When I first started Centering Prayer I was at once greeted by my “monkey mind” jumping all over the place from one thought to another--each shouting for attention. My head was a roomful of noise and it was almost painful to try and sit quietly. Twenty minutes seemed like an eternity. Yet with faithfulness and the help of the sacred word bringing me back and back and back—it became a door—an icon of entry into the one true thing in my life—the presence of God.

Coming to this Presence daily I learned there is never a condition on God’s love. Every day, whether I am happy, sad, angry, afraid. I am never “not good enough”---the door is never closed. And gradually the seeds planted during this time reached out into all of my life. All I need to do is pause and remember the Presence of God in who I live and move and have my Being. Being deeply loved, I love deeply.

As Father Thomas Keating put it so succinctly in our retreat day in Bar Harbor last summer--”just sit down and shut up”--and be transformed by God’s love.

A centering prayer group meets at Holy Family on the first and third Thursdays in the Public Chapel at 7:00 p.m. Contact Joann Norr for more information at: norr31@comcast.net

For resources on Centering Prayer visit the Contemplative Outreach website at http://www.centeringprayer.com

Sue Morse

‘Tis The Season

I recently watched one of the wilderness survival shows on the Discovery channel. The guide demonstrated how to extract himself from a pit of quicksand. I was immediately captivated, because from a few of the Tarzan-like movies I watched as a child, I was very unsettled by the notion that you could mysteriously sink through the ground. I was very grateful that I didn’t live in the jungle. OK, back to the show, without warning the guide just walked onto the quicksand pit. As he started to sink he did what I expect anyone would do, he started working to lift his feet out of the sand. And the harder he worked the further into the pit he sank. By the time he was waist deep he was breathing heavily and really straining, but his situation was only becoming more desperate.

This will seem like an odd turn, but his situation reminded me of the Christmas season, well, minus the life or death consequences. In anticipation of Christmas each year I voluntarily walk out onto that competitive, consumeristic pit of quicksand; fighting for a parking space at the edge of the lot, competing with the crowds for those precious Christmas presents, and scheduling my calendar with every possible event. And it seems the harder I work at it, the more I’m pulled down into the stress of it. And it’s obviously not just me. There are more radio and TV bits about stress during the Christmas season than at any other time of the year. We all talk about it as we stand out in the pit struggling and sinking.

I did, however, do something this year that I haven’t done in a while. I listened to an old Advent reflection tape by Fr. Richard Rohr, O.F.M. The two talks are entitled, “What are we waiting for?” And, “How do we wait?” I had listened to them years ago, and of course, forgot about them. This time of year offers the most dramatic example of how counter-cultural our Christian faith is. At the very time that our culture entices us into the frenzy of comsumerism, our Advent tradition challenges us to slow down and enter into a quiet time of reflection on our relationship with God and with all of God’s creation. Fr. Richard talked about the second line of the “Our Father”, which is, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.” He said that we have to empty ourselves before we can expect to be filled. We can’t expect God’s kingdom to come until we are willing to let our kingdom to go. He described our kingdom as our over-attachment with our ideas and feelings. We tend to think our way of doing things is the right, or best, or only way. Can we let go of that, detach from it, and be truly present to another or to a different situation? The paradoxical challenge he offers us is to “care but not care.” Can we detach from the struggle? Can we find peace even when the situation is not perfect?

The funny thing is, the wilderness guide used some of Fr. Richard’s principals to get out of the quicksand pit. As he sank in above his waist he stopped and began to explain what was happening. He said that everyone’s intuitive response is to work hard to counter the feeling of sinking, but it’s actually the hard work that causes you to sink even more. What you have to do is relax, lie down and slowly raise your legs to the surface so that you are completely outstretched on top of the pit. Then with your arms extended, and bent at the elbows, you shimmy across the surface until you reach solid land. He demonstrated his instructions and successfully extracted himself from the quicksand.

My Christmas wish is that you can detach from the commercial and even the family stress of this season, and detach from your expectation of the perfect celebration. I hope that you can relax and fully extend yourself to others, to be present to them in a peaceful way. And I hope that this Christmas you find solid ground.

Bill Walsh

Why I Come to Holy Family

I’m sure you do not need me to tell you why you come to Holy Family. But let me share with you reflections from my own experience. We live in a difficult and changing world, a world that makes demands; creates pressures and forces us into an endless cycle of continuous motion; of running from this thing to that. A world that often imposes cultural values that are at odds with what we believe; with our faith life.

We are engaged in the stressful effort to continue to support our families; to fulfill job commitments and demands; to nurture and support our families; our wives, our children and grandchildren. The need to participate in our church and political communities.

And then there are the personal issues; the surprises that life holds; an illness to a loved one; an unexpected death or injury; or, our own health issues; events which always seem to come at the worst time in our lives. The fragility of life seems to become more apparent as we get older. Or maybe we are just tired, worn out, exhausted and in need of refreshment, a moment of peace, a time to meditate, to pray, to rethink our goals and objectives to reevaluate the direction of our lives.

It is at times like these that Holy Family is there as an oasis in a world of chaos and stress; an island of peace and serenity. We come with all our baggage; and regardless of what we carry, we are accepted as we are into this community of peace and security. We come with our brothers and friends for a period of comradery. We can gather together or be alone as we chose. We can attend informative sessions provided by the retreat team or just rest, if that is what we need. And then there is the spiritual refreshment; the prayer sessions; the liturgy and music ministry; the opportunity for reconciliation.

We come away refreshed, rejuvenated; spiritually alive and ready to meet the challenges of our world or our personal situation with new vigor and firm purpose; encouraged, inspired and filled with hope. This is my experience of Holy Family and this is why I want to ensure that we can continue for the many years to come.

Walter Twachtman

On Retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh

I recently attended a six-day retreat led by the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. The sessions, which drew 800 people, were held at Stonehill, a Catholic college near Boston. It was my ninth retreat with Nhat Hanh, and each one has been a profound and memorable experience. The Stonehill retreat included talks by Nhat Hanh, small group discussions, meditation and vegan meals eaten in silence.

On the final day, I took part in an early morning ceremony in which I pledged to honor the Five Mindfulness Trainings, which are similar to the Ten Commandments. The five trainings ask us to refrain from killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying, and ingesting drugs or alcohol.

The most controversial prohibition turns out to be the one involving alcohol. People on retreat often ask why they should give up alcohol. Two primary reasons are cited. First, liquor clouds the mind and takes us away from the present moment. A central tenant of Buddhism involves the importance of being fully awake and present in each moment of our lives. The second reason involves recognition of the suffering caused by alcohol abuse, a serious addiction that destroys lives and rips apart families.

By not drinking alcohol we say, in effect, that we understand the devastation caused by drinking, and we desire to support those in recovery by not drinking. I was drawn to the Five Mindfulness Trainings, in part, because of their recognition of the damage caused by alcohol. I’m disappointed that the Catholic Church has not always shown a similar awareness about alcohol abuse.

It might surprise some to learn that many Catholics aspire to live by Buddhist principles. It helps to think of Buddhism as a way of life, rather than a religion. The Buddha, who lived 2,500 years ago, discovered principles that can lead to a happier life, with less suffering. Buddhists do not seek converts. Thich Nhat Hanh urges Christians to draw on the spiritual wisdom of their own religion, rather than think about conversion.

Buddhism can deepen one’s spiritual practice, but it never claims to be the sole path to truth and wisdom. Two of Nhat Hanh’s books, Living Buddha, Living Christ and Going Home: Jesus and Buddha as Brothers, focus on the common teachings in the two faiths. Among the Buddhist principles that speak to me are these:

1.Impermanence. Buddhists point to aging, illness and death. Nothing lasts. We all return to dust. Recognition of impermanence helps us to live more joyfully in each moment.

2.Non-attachment. If everything fades, we soon realize how much pain we cause ourselves by clinging to material things, jobs, routines and relationships. We can enjoy everything in the present moment without clinging or attachment.

3.Compassion. This, of course, is no different from what Jesus taught. Buddhists talk about inter-being, the idea that we are all one, in which case war and violence make no sense. Buddhists seek to develop a finely tuned compassion for their own suffering, as well as the suffering of people around the world.

4.Forgiveness. Again, this is what Jesus taught, but it seems to be a difficult concept for many believers. Some people say they can forgive the little slights and hurts, but then draw a line beyond which they cannot forgive. One misconception is that forgiveness excuses harmful acts or crimes, but this is not true because forgiveness is about the person, not the crime. After a horrible crime, forgiveness means we let go of hatred, violence, revenge and anger directed at the perpetrator, who is still loved by God. We do not forgive the crime. That distinction is important.

5.Meditation. Buddhists stress the importance of regular meditation. During meditation, we come home to the present moment. Each time our mind wanders off, we bring it back to this moment. Meditation calms the mind, reduces stress and helps us to live joyfully in each moment. Of course, meditation is not unique to Buddhism. The Catholic priest Thomas Keating has promoted Centering Prayer, a form of meditation similar to Buddhist practice.

Thich Nhat Hanh left his native Vietnam during the Vietnam War. He now lives in France with his fellow monks and nuns at a monastic community called Plum Village, and he has opened monasteries in New York and California. He visits the United States to give retreats every other year.

Ten years ago several of us from the Hartford area attended a retreat with Nhat Hanh in New York, and afterward decided to start a meditation group, which we named the Greater Hartford Sangha. We meet for meditation and sharing in West Hartford every other Tuesday evening at 7:30.

Bill Williams

Bill Williams of St. Helena’s parish in West Hartford hosts the Greater Hartford Sangha. He can be reached at billwaw@comcast.net, or 860-561-3563.