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Shattering Shelter and Simplicity

You don’t need to have seen the movie Ida to be moved by its timeless and provocative questions. Trudging through the English captions of this Polish production only engages the viewer more deeply with the protagonist’s quest. Filming in black and white brilliantly sharpens the movie’s impact.

The story is that of a young Polish novice about to profess vows in the convent where she has been raised since being orphaned as an infant. She is encouraged by a wise and solicitous mother superior to discover her true identity and desires before moving forward with her profession.

Fledgling curiosity — like any who would engage the universal struggle for authenticity — shatters the ordered, sheltered and simple universe of Ida’s youth. She discovers her heritage as Jewish, the daughter of parents whose home was confiscated and who perished in the Holocaust. A hardened, forceful, agnostic maternal aunt serves as midwife for Ida’s birth into maturity.

A neighbor and I discovered a mutual love for Ida.  This has lead to snippets of conversation and email banter over the past few days.  Sarah and I are intrigued by lingering images, unanswered questions and left to wonder…

How is religion a “container” of sorts? In childhood this allows for a feeling of safety and security. Maturation, should we choose to grow-up, will burst these old wine-skins. Sometimes this even requires us to ask whether that original container was all that  safe or secure.

In any case, the rough and tumble of youth will force us to outgrow it. We may fiercely resist. It may be a relentless struggle. But one way or another a wise mother superior or a wizened maiden aunt is likely to introduce us to a more complex and authentic God outside of convent walls.

Does our religion — any ordered, regular spiritual practice as “convent life” implies — bring one to awakening? Or, does it close us off to the rough and tumble of life meant to move us to maturity? Does our “god”, our church, our spiritual practice keep us safe and small or does it make us magnificent and magnanimous?

The movie leaves us hanging… we do not know where Ida is headed! Had she seen enough of the world? Might she be going off in a totally new direction?  Will she reclaim the home and heritage of her parents? Returning to the convent is now a more mature option — but somehow feels like it might just be too safe of an option. But who knows?

Is this newly empowered and freshly inspired woman even ready to comprehend the complexities of life and the huge loss she has just uncovered? Any who have dealt with some hard things in our lives will, even if begrudgingly and through monumental effort, come to embrace these complexities and losses.  But this is a process into which we are mentored over a lifetime.

Wisdom comes much later… is still coming… never stops coming.

________________

See Ida if you can still find it in a theater near you. If you cannot, or if you want a perceptive synopsis before you go, Commonweal magazine provides a great [review].

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A Bad Day Amid the Ruble

Yesterday was a pretty crappy day! Anyone paying attention would have to conclude that we are in pretty dire straits.

Long gone is the consoling image of Pope Francis’ head pressed in prayer against the wall separating Israel and Palestine on the road to Bethlehem. Who even remembers Pentecost Sunday with Francis and Patriarch Bartholomew hosting Presidents Abbas and Peres in a prayer for peace?

Now Israel has begun a massive ground offensive in Gaza, a passenger plane was shot down in the Ukraine leaving some to say the pilots should have known better than to fly over a war zone, all the while Iraq implodes leading me to wonder what the hell is the point of tens of billions of US dollars and tens of thousands of human lives!

Our collective anxiety and national paranoia are epitomized in the White House lockdown yesterday because an unattended package was found on the lawn. It turned out to be nothing!

On our fenced borders a humanitarian crisis unfolds as children relegate us to bumbling and blundering about an appropriate response. Some would send drones to patrol the border reinforced with even higher fences. They would fast-track legislation to close porous loopholes in US immigration policy.  For God’s sake (literally), it’s not as simple as all that!

Before these zealous protectors of the “American way” adjust their flag lapel pins or a candidate requests another contribution from a faith-based PAC I would ask two things. Please, review your own family history and immigrant roots — why did your family come? … how were they received?

Instead of going to church services this Sunday I propose that more of us stay home and silently pray with Scripture instead. We would do well to begin with Mt 2:13-23, the Flight into Egypt.

Those familiar with the practice of Ignatian mediation might want to assume in prayer the role of the innkeeper — hearing ourselves say, feeling in our own managerial hearts, “There is no room here for you in our inn.”

Or, reenact with Francis the trek to Bethlehem.  Pick a wall, any wall in your home will do.  Press your head against it in silent prayer.  Absorb the tension and anxiety of Mary and Joseph as they traveled this route.  What were their aspirations, what does every child — Israeli, Palestinian, Iraqi, American, Guatemalan, Ukrainian — deserve?

Yes, there is plenty of evidence to indicate the world is a mess and hurting. Despair is one response. Feeling impotent is understandable. Shaking our heads in disbelief is not an option!

 

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God and Lawn Care

Courtesy of my brother-in-law, here is a humorous variation on the theme of yesterday’s post…

GOD SAID:
“Frank, you know all about gardens and nature. What in the world is going on down there on the planet? What happened to the dandelions, violets, milkweeds and stuff I started eons ago? I had a perfect no-maintenance garden plan. Those plants grow in any type of soil, withstand drought and multiply with abandon. The nectar from the long-lasting blossoms attracts butterflies, honey bees and flocks of songbirds. I expected to see a vast garden of colors by now. But, all I see are these green rectangles.”

St. FRANCIS:
It’s the tribes that settled there, Lord. The Suburbanites. They started calling your flowers ‘weeds’ and went to great lengths to kill them and replace them with grass.

GOD:
Grass? But, it’s so boring. It’s not colorful. It doesn’t attract butterflies, birds and bees; only grubs and sod worms. It’s sensitive to temperatures. Do these Suburbanites really want all that grass growing there?

ST. FRANCIS:
Apparently so, Lord. They go to great pains to grow it and keep it green. They begin each spring by fertilizing grass and poisoning any other plant that crops up in the lawn.

GOD:
The spring rains and warm weather probably make grass grow really fast. That must make theSuburbanites happy.

ST. FRANCIS:
Apparently not, Lord. As soon as it grows a little, they cut it -sometimes twice a week.

GOD:
They cut it? Do they then bale it like hay?

ST.. FRANCIS:
Not exactly, Lord. Most of them rake it up and put it in bags.

GOD:
They bag it? Why? Is it a cash crop? Do they sell it?

ST. FRANCIS:
No, Sir, just the opposite. They pay to throw it away.

GOD:
Now, let me get this straight. They fertilize grass so it will grow. And, when it does grow, they cut it off and pay to throw it away?

ST. FRANCIS:
Yes, Sir.

GOD:
These Suburbanites must be relieved in the summer when we cut back on the rain and turn up the heat. That surely slows the growth and saves them a lot of work.

ST.. FRANCIS:
You aren’t going to believe this, Lord. When the grass stops growing so fast, they drag out hoses and pay more money to water it, so they can continue to mow it and pay to get rid of it.

GOD:
What nonsense. At least they kept some of the trees. That was a sheer stroke of genius, if I do say so myself. The trees grow leaves in the spring to provide beauty and shade in the summer. In the autumn, they fall to the ground and form a natural blanket to keep moisture in the soil and protect the trees and bushes. It’s a natural cycle of life.

ST.. FRANCIS:
You better sit down, Lord. The Suburbanites have drawn a new circle. As soon as the leaves fall, they rake them into great piles and pay to have them hauled away.

GOD:
No!? What do they do to protect the shrub and tree roots in the winter to keep the soil moist and loose?

ST. FRANCIS:
After throwing away the leaves, they go out and buy something which they call mulch. They haul it home and spread it around in place of the leaves.

GOD:
And where do they get this mulch?

ST. FRANCIS:
They cut down trees and grind them up to make the mulch.

GOD:
Enough! I don’t want to think about this anymore. St. Catherine, you’re in charge of the arts. What movie have you scheduled for us tonight?

ST.. CATHERINE:
‘Dumb and Dumber’, Lord. It’s a story about….

GOD: Never mind, I think I just heard the whole story from St. Francis.

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Of Bees and Being Human

Yesterday I saw a Monarch butterfly! What a perfectly named creature — regal, majestic, elegantly attired. Yes, I saw a butterfly. Remember when we were kids? We’d see hundreds of Monarchs along with many other kinds of butterflies, moths, bees, wasps as well as other flying bugs that only God knew what they were.

Sighting the solitary Monarch yesterday frightened me. Yes, a butterfly scared me! Where have they gone? And what about the birds? In our neighborhood, the incidental cardinals outnumber the sparrows — how crazy is that? Robbins evoke as much excitement from Minneapolitans in July as they do in March. Something is really wrong in The City of Lakes when we start valuing creatures by their absence!

The wholesale collapse of bee colonies is beginning to get some attention because of the essential role their pollinating serves in human food production. Wouldn’t you think we’d show more care and solicitude for “the help” who keep our lives functioning? As brazenly self-centered as it is, wouldn’t you think the demise of honeybees would wake us up to the fact that our own well-being might be similarly threatened?

The honeybee is a remarkably resilient species that has thrived for 40 million years but now they are in widespread collapse. They are like the proverbial canary in the coal mine. An [article] in the NYTimes corroborates why a solitary Monarch and the conspicuous absence of songbirds should be seen as harbingers of a larger catastrophe in the making.

It seems that any creature that flies is threatened by factors similar to those afflicting honeybees: heavy pesticide use, destruction of nesting sites by overly intensive agriculture, a lack of diverse nectar and pollen sources thanks to highly effective weed killers, wanton disregard for the eco-system bees depend on for nutrition.

According to the author of the NYTimes piece, the real issue is not primarily the number of problems but the interactions among them. Bees offer a lesson we ignore at our peril: the concept of synergy, where one plus one equals three, or four, or more.

“A typical honeybee colony contains residue from more than 120 pesticides. Alone, each represents a benign dose. But together they form a toxic soup of chemicals whose interplay can substantially reduce the effectiveness of bees’ immune systems, making them more susceptible to diseases.”

Our problem extends far beyond the tragic truth about bees.   The fatal effects of our agricultural obsessions (obscenities?) are reflected in the disappearance of butterflies and birds as well.  If they starve, we starve!

But it gets worse… a [study] released last month from UC-Davis is only the most recent to link proximity to agricultural pesticides in pregnancy to increased rates of Autism and other types of developmental delay among children. Regardless of age, we are what we eat.  And what we eat might just be killing us!

Those of us from a sacramental faith tradition, indeed all who profess faith in the God of Genesis, recognize that humans (literally, earth-creature and cognate of humus) have a special role and bear a unique responsibility for creation. Eco-spirituality is not a fad — it’s a moral duty!

Humility is a virtue hard to come by for most of us. The word has the same root as human and humus. We would do well to cultivate more of it. Humans have no “being” apart from this creation.  We begin by acknowledging that we are merely one part of God’s creation — one part, and one with sacred responsibilities.

The etiology of humility, human and humus affirms that at some deep intuitive level we “get it.”  We know in our bones that the way we relate to creation mirrors the way we relate to God.

We pray as we live… may it be “on earth as it is in heaven.”

 

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Something is Radically Wrong

“When I was young I thought the goal of a spiritual life was some form of bliss or contentment. In my pride, I wanted not only to attain this but to be seen to have attained it. Christian mysticism and Buddhism intrigued me, and of course I understood neither of them.”

This self-admission by John Garvey in the current issue of Commonweal magazine really caught my attention! I became even more intrigued by his honest admission that “being a fool for a while is part of the process.”

Garvey explains that it wasn’t until many years later that he turned around to look at his life and saw that what had led him to where he really was involved a mix of depression, anger, fear, and anxiety. As the wise sage he has become, Garvey observes that “all you can deal with at the start is yourself.”

Seems so obvious, self-evident. But is it? Aren’t most of us inclined to fix everybody else before we get to ourselves? And if we courageously look in the mirror are we not inclined to shift blame?   Even “accepting Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior” can be little more than a delay tactic forestalling life-saving major surgery.

Garvey tells of a man who was ordained a Zen monk, and is now an Orthodox Christian. He teaches meditation and asks his students, “What do you hope to gain from this?” They may say something about having a more whole life, serenity, etc.—the usual clichés that surround the idea of enlightenment.

The monk points out that he is a divorced man, a recovering alcoholic, and has suffered through long periods on unemployment—the point being that nothing, including meditation, can guarantee wholeness or any sense of moral or therapeutic achievement.

It is common for people to think of morality as a major end of the religious life, or some sense of “being right” with God, or of being on the right side of a particular issue. Garvey has come to recognize that this need to be right is at best ego-satisfaction and an idolatrous temptation.

What John Garvey didn’t see when he was younger — and why I resonate so strongly with his reflection — is quite simple: the common insight of the great religious traditions is that something is wrong! Something about ordinary human consciousness doesn’t work, and it only gets worse when we try to put ourselves in control, to fix things.

To admit that I need help and cannot somehow conjure it up through my own power is liberating. We must turn from ourselves to something outside ourselves, hoping it will be gracious. We must acknowledge our core interior emptiness.

This is where the Christian story matters so much—brokenness is the beginning of salvation! We must enter our emptiness, return to the radical “nothingness” from which all was created. In a culture addicted to control, power and autonomy this knowledge is hard to come by.

How much more counter-cultural can we get than to believe, to truly profess, that we are the most open to grace when we admit how broken we are. But it is in this that we are saved!

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You may access John Garvey’s excellent reflection [here]. However, Commonweal restricts full access to subscribers.  My post here is largely dependent on his insights so I hope I have done him — and you — justice.

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Being Truly Orthodox

First, a disclaimer: My brother Fred will not like this post. He will consider it churchy, pious and too preachy. I have no defense. Nor do I make any apology.

Regular readers know of my commitment to inter-faith dialogue and active curiosity about other faith traditions. Currently, my attention is focused on the Orthodox Church and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew in particular. You will remember him as the one who officially invited Pope Francis to Jerusalem (though that quickly became overshadowed by geo-political issues). Bartholomew was invited by Francis to the prayer service with the Israeli and Palestinian presidents at the Vatican.

Any who are interested in Orthodoxy can do no better than to get a copy of the Ecumenical Patriarch’s 2008 book Encountering the Mystery: Understanding Orthodox Christianity Today. Although I am increasingly concerned about Amazon.com’s aggressive and unscrupulous attempts to dominate the market, I did get my copy for just a few bucks from an independent book seller through Amazon’s “used” book purchase option.

Among many topics I found insightful and consoling, Bartholomew’s comments about prayer rank near the top… “Learning to be silent is far more difficult and far more important than learning to recite prayers.” He describes silence as “not the absence of noise but the gift or skill to discern between quiet and stillness.” (I can see my brother’s eye’s rolling back in their sockets!)

Sorry, bro, but I’m intrigued when the Patriarch taps thousands of years of spiritual practice by emphasizing how we must learn to listen in silence, to silence, if we are to approach true wisdom. Such silence elicits a kind of listening by which we are fully engaged, actively attentive, alive and compassionate. That’s hard, demands practice and perhaps requires a lifetime!

Prayerful silence “shocks us out of numbness to the world and its needs.” Anything but autonomous navel-gazing, silence “sharpens our vision … by focusing on the heart of all that matters.” Silence enables us to notice, pay attention, and respond with truly human hearts.

We discover there is no libertarian autonomy in our world. The solidarity to which Christians are called is as counter-cultural as God’s Word has always been. Seeing through our social obsessions and beyond passive acceptance of cultural norms of what is fashionable or acceptable, we recognize God’s own imprint — all creation is intimately inter-connected and mutually interdependent.

If we would be truly “orthodox” in our faith, what is a Christian to do?

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My references are from pages 80-81 of Encountering the Mystery: Understanding Orthodox Christianity Today by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew: New York, Doubleday, 2008.

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Fear of Flying

“COME TO THE EDGE.”
“No, we will fall.”
‘COME TO THE EDGE.”
“No, we will fall.”
They came to the edge.
He pushed them, and they flew.

Thus, early 20th century French poet Apollinaire cuts to the heart of the matter! We humans have an insane case of vertigo and cling to what is “safe”, clutching tight to social norms and standard expectations for our security. Life, more precisely living, isn’t like that!

I love riding my scooter — yes, it costs $3.74 to fill the tank. But what I really love is the rush of the air, the freedom of movement, openness to the elements, feeling one with the machine. I’m careful and have never ridden without a helmet and a florescent lime vest like the ones used by road crews.

I really tire of the litany of warnings the majority of folks repeatedly intone… Be careful! That’s dangerous! Watch out! Is that safe? You could get killed! Growing weary of their professions of concern, I am increasingly curious whether my self-appointed safety patrol is in fact secretly jealous, actually envious of something they would love to do but remain hamstrung with fear.

Apollinaire was on to something! Riding my scooter is as close to flying as I will ever get this side of being a pilot. Though even scootering doesn’t quite rank up there with sky-diving — only once from 15,000 feet about ten years ago. The one-minute 10,000 foot free-fall before opening the parachute was one of the greatest spiritual experiences of my life. And, yes, it scared the crap out of me!

The way we live our lives mirrors how we practice our religion — often clustering in self-selected enclaves of like-minded folks who share our answers to life’s important questions. This is perfectly okay and necessary. Just last Sunday the Gospel was “Come to me all who labor and are weary; I will give you rest.” The problem is getting too fixed in our ways — too settled in our own weariness, resting with own answers.

Take Peter for example — our “rock” of faith on which Jesus would build his church. Along with the other apostles Peter repeatedly asked, “What’s in it for me?” Despite the many reassurances of the hundred-fold, even a master-teacher like Jesus must exhibit super-human patience… and still does with the rest of us!

Apollinaire’s “COME TO THE EDGE” is a lot like Jesus prodding Peter to get out of the boat and walk on water (Mt 14:22-32). “Wudda ya, nuts!?!” Like the master teacher to whom I was tethered in my sky-dive, Jesus was right there to grab Peter when he experienced his latest bout of self-doubt.  Too often these doubts paralyze us in a nasty case of vertigo.

In Learning to Walk in the Dark, Barbara Brown Taylor observes that religion serves two functions in our lives. First, it provides a way for people to understand and find meaning and purpose.  That’s good! But like a self-appointed safety patrol who scorn scooters, too many of us play it safe and settle for the security they find.  Unwilling to inch closer to the edges of life, they never get to see horizons that provide unimagined vistas or the hundred-fold Jesus promised in this life. (Mk 10:30)

The crunch comes, as it did for Peter, when we come face to face with the second function of religion — real conversion, genuine transformation. We prefer that religion simply function like Guy Noir of Prairie Home Companion giving us answers to all life’s important questions.  But there’s more — the “losing your life” part.

We, like Peter, will fight to defend the Jesus we think we understand, even drawing swords to keep him from being taken from us.  All the while we cut our selves off from him.  We deny the very path of salvation Jesus came to show us by example, the very way that leads to life and is our truth: “Those who find their life will lose it and those who lose it will find it” (Mt 10:39 & 16:25).  When we see that Jesus really means it, we like Peter run for our lives!

BBT quotes Christian mystic, Ken Wilber in stating the obvious — this “transformation” talk doesn’t sell well. It didn’t in Jesus’ time and it doesn’t in ours! According to Wilber, “soul” for most Americans has come to mean little more than “the ego in drag.” Much of what passes for spirituality is really all about comforting the self, not losing it!  We so want the answers to life’s questions and solutions to its heartaches to come from somewhere or someone else.  Isn’t that God’s job, to keep us safe!?!?

“COME TO THE EDGE.” Get out of your boat! If you want to save your life lose it… Yes, we often need to be tethered or assured by an out-stretched arm. That’s what the church is for — not to enfeeble us but to set us free!  Thankfully we have a patient, though persistent, teacher who walks his talk.  In addition to the reassurance of a good teacher, we sometimes just need a big hard push!

We too will ultimately hear the words addressed to Peter as our own: “I tell you the truth, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are mature you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will put a belt around you and lead you were you do not want to go.” (John 21:18)

“COME TO THE EDGE.”
…
They came to the edge.
He pushed them, and they flew.
__________________
Barbara Brown Taylor’s reference to Ken Wilbur may be found on pages 86-88 of Learning to Walk in the Dark. She is quoting One Taste: Daily Reflections on Integral Spirituality by Ken Wilbur. Boston: Shambhala, 2000.

 

 

 

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Give It Up!

This morning I have spent so much time composing a post that I’ve decided to save it for the weekend.  It’s entitled “Fear of Flying.”  Today I will simply share one of my all-time favorite prayers which expresses the essence of what I have tried to express in what you will have a chance to read tomorrow.

This prayer poem is by Elizabeth Rooney and entitled, Oblation:

 

I hope each day 

To offer less to you,

Each day

By your great love to be

Diminished

Until at last I am

So decreased by your hand

And you, so grown in me,

That my whole offering

Is just an emptiness 

For You to fill

Or not

According to Your will.

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Enough With Polite Pleasantries!

Most of us squirm when politics or religion come up in conversation. We are taught from a young age to be “polite”. We learn to stay with amicable and amenable pleasantries lest we be deemed rude or, worse, even crude. Any hint of conflicting opinion or suggestion of contentious topics is a sure way to get your name nixed from future invitation lists.

Such etiquette is all the more intensified by the average American’s simplistic interpretation of “Separation of Church and State.” Live and let live! Isn’t every thought or perspective equally valid? Who am I to judge?  Leave religion out of it!

“My, what lovely weather we’ve been having… Oh, what a cute outfit you are wearing… You look great, you must have gotten away this winter… You know what my silly dog Jeb did yesterday… Yes, I’d love to see photos of your grandkids!…  How ’bout them Cubs!…  Did you have a nice Fourth?”

We all know the schtick! And, yes, there are settings like wedding receptions and picnics in the park when keeping the tenor festive is the order of the day. There are also volatile situations, as when a lot of alcohol is being consumed, when it is prudent to steer clear of matters that could create an ugly scene.

But politics and religion touch on the stuff that really matters. My experience confirms that not talking about them over time leads to a pretty boring conversation.  It’s hard to sustain much of a relationship on trifles and trivialities.  Too much avoidance of hot-button topics and I don’t mind at all being scratched from that invitation list. Life’s just too short and too valuable to fritter it away!

So here is something to chomp on… Unemployment is at a remarkably low 4% in Minnesota. The Dow broke 17,000 this week and continues to set record highs. Wouldn’t you think politicians running for reelection would be touting the economic recovery? But they are not!

Though no longer under-water, home values remain flat for most of us. More people have found jobs, but most workers have not seen their wages rise or “real income” make much inroad into the cost of living. Candidates aren’t talking much about our robust economy because the average American hasn’t felt that much robustness.

“Polite” conversation and a cultural preoccupation with “self-reliance” precludes much honest self-disclosure. But more and more people are beginning to see the facts and speak the truth — fully 95 percent of the nation’s income growth since the recovery began in 2009 has gone to the wealthiest 1% of Americans. Corporate profit trumps the interests of workers who make these gains possible.

The promise of  the American dream plays out as a recurring nightmare for far too many Americans! The soaring Dow has yet to be reflected in the average American’s paycheck. “Recovery” only trickles down to most of us in our dreams.  As the Gipper said so well, “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”

If you have read this far you are probably in a different sort of 1%! By now, 95% have probably hit the “close” icon, such is our preoccupation with polite pleasantries and propensity to ignore the facts.  But we Americans evade contentious topics and have learned — to our peril — to steer clear of politics. And never, never bring religion into the conversation!

Sorry, but Kneading Bread is about spirituality, a spirituality grounded in the incarnation of a God in time, flesh and community!

Faced with the harsh realities too many face in our increasingly global economy, what is a Christian to do?

_________________

Source for data showing 95% of income growth going to the top 1% of Americans is from a September 2013 report by University of California economist Emmanuel Saez.  The ten page report is available [here].

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Dare We Hope?

The biggest, boldest headline doesn’t always tell the most important story. That’s the case this week with Pope Francis’ much anticipated and highly publicized meeting with victims of clergy sex abuse. Though survivor advocate groups cited deficiencies and questioned the Church’s resolve, Francis gained generally high marks for personal empathy and promise to hold bishops accountable.

But as ordinary Catholics know and this blog has reiterated many times, the root cause of our sex abuse crisis is the culture of clericalism, hierarchical arrogance and preoccupation with protecting power in the Roman church. Though not as insidious as the sexual abuse of a child, recognition of the urgent need to reform the Vatican Curia is a subset of the same core malignancy.

A sliver of light shone through the long socked-in cloud cover yesterday.  It came in the form of a copyrighted [story] by Carol Glatz for the Catholic News Service — to their credit, this is an arm of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Though it seems not to have even registered on mainline media it portends the level of awareness that must be in place for any meaningful change.  It suggests a few in church leadership are beginning to “get it” and we may have reason for hope beyond what the Pope promised.

“To some it might seem less than prudent to think that the church would go out of its way to seek out even more victims and survivors,” opening up further possibilities for lawsuits, anguish and “trouble,” Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin told representatives from bishops’ conferences from around the world.

However, when Jesus tells pastors to leave behind their flock to seek out the one who is lost, that mandate “is itself unreasonable and imprudent but, like it or not, that is precisely what Jesus asks us to do.”

Helping perpetrators, victims, parishes, communities and people who are distanced from the church out of “disgust at what has happened to children” won’t happen with “slick public relations gestures or even from repeated words of apology,” Martin said.

“Healing cannot be delegated,” the Archbishop emphasized. It requires every church member be humble and Christ-like in lovingly embracing “wounded men and women, with all the brutality and unattractiveness of wounds.”

It will come when the church recognizes “how compromise and insensitivity and wrong decisions have damaged the witness of the church,” he said, and when its members have their own personal healing, becoming more humble and journeying close to those who are lost and hurting.

“We are not there to tell the survivors what they have to do, but together to find new ways of interacting with respect and care,” and not hoping the problems go away, but seeking them out for reconciliation, he said.

Archbishop Martin was one of a number of speakers at an annual meeting of Conference on the Safeguarding of Children, Young People and Vulnerable Adults. The 2014 conference is being held this week in Rome.

In his address, the Archbishop said, “The greatest harm that we could do to the progress that has been made right across the church is to slip back into a false assurance that the crisis is a thing of the past.”

“What has happened has wounded the entire church,” he said, and “the entire church is called to put right what has happened.”

“We are not that kind of church yet: and by far,” he said.

With this awareness finally being expressed by church leadership there might finally be a toe-hold for hope in this tragic saga of clergy sexual abuse and a few cracks showing in a perverse culture of clericalism.

It’s a refreshing story and a welcome week when the most significant report coming out of Rome originates from someone other than the Pope.
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I have no intention to violate copyright laws and respect the restriction posted on the CNS story that is my source: Copyright (c) 2014 Catholic News Service/USCCB. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed. But with good news like this, how could I not share it? I enthusiastically refer you to the full copyrighted story with the link provided above.