Advent: A Season of Hope and Anticipation

On this Sunday, Christian Churches all over the world will mark the season of Advent – the beginning of the Church's new year - a time that lends itself to hope and anticipation as we prepare for the coming of the Lord, Jesus Christ.



The Advent Wreath will play an important part in ceremonies, as different candles on it are lit over the four Sundays before Christmas. The wreath - a garland of evergreen branches representing eternity, holds four candles (3 purple, and 1 rose colour), with a fifth (white) placed in the centre.

On the First Sunday of Advent, a purple candle is lit, symbolising HOPE .
On the Second Sunday, another purple candle, symbolises LOVE.
The Third Sunday sees the rose candle, symbolising JOY.
On the Fourth Sunday, the last purple candle is lit, symbolising PEACE.

The fifth candle is the white Christmas Candle, and will be lit on Christmas Day – Christ's Birthday!

So, this Sunday, we light the candle inspiring HOPE!
There is a popular saying: "We live in hope!" It is this hope which enables us to see the light at the end of the tunnel, though for many people in these times, the end of the tunnel is a great distance off. Some are simply terrified that they'll never see that light!

Over the next few weeks, many charities eg St. Vincent de Paul, will be making their annual Christmas Appeal, – here in Lucan, the Lions Club do their bit, also in St. Mary's, the Justice and Peace Group will be launching the Giving Tree, with proceeds going to Focus Ireland and Alone, and several other groups will be raising funds through Carol Singing and Christmas Fairs etc.

Give what you can, and God bless you! If you can't contribute, may God bless you too with a new-found hope, that will lead to better days.

M.M.

Church Social Teaching - Editorial Lucan Newsletter

          The Catholic Church’s social teaching has often been called the “best kept secret” of the Church.  Few are aware of its teaching on wealth and poverty, injustice in economic and political structures, its critique of capitalism and globalisation, and its views on private property. 

The Church’s Social Teaching is a very radical teaching.   To those who view the Church (often with good reason) as conservative and supporting the status quo, this Social Teaching will come as a surprise – a welcome surprise to those who yearn for a better world, a very unwelcome surprise to those who fear the consequences of change for themselves and their lives.

          Based on the fundamental Gospel principle of the dignity and equality of each and every human being as a child of God, the Church’s social teaching tries to apply that principle to the varied situations in which people find themselves socially excluded, powerless and in poverty.   It spells out how, and in what way, the Gospel message applies to the concrete, but changing, circumstances of our societies and world. 

Unfortunately, the sins of the Church are often the biggest obstacle to the promotion of the Church’s social teaching.   Sexual abuse of children by clergy and religious is a horrendous denial of the very dignity which the Church’s social teaching is trying to defend.  The marginalisation of women within the structure of the Church makes it very difficult to hear the call for equality. 

          Nevertheless, the Church’s social teaching expresses the ‘mind’ of the Church as it reflects on the implications of the Gospel for the problems which arise at different times and places in our world, even if it often fails, in its own life and structures, to implement the values it professes.  

          Don’t come to the four talks over the next few weeks unless you are prepared to be challenged.  Some might be shocked, others enthused.   But I think we can promise that you will be surprised. 

Peter McVerry

Sotto il Monte

In the foothills of the Alps lies the beautiful northern Italian town of Bergamo. One of its claims to fame is that Ryanair flies in there utilising it as a gateway to Milan. The upper part of the town is a medieval gem featuring the fifteenth century red brick basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore.  Go just a few miles down the road and you encounter the less imposing but equally charming town of Sotto il Monte which is the birthplace of Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli better known to us as Pope John XXIII.
This small mountain town radiates the spirit of that good man and it is as if the inhabitants expect his return at any moment.  John was a bringer of peace in the world, which lived in the shadow of the cold war. He was also a great pastor who made a landmark visit to Rome's central prison and slipped out from the Vatican at night, dressed as an ordinary priest, to visit the poor and the sick.  In fact his night time walks became so famous that he was nicknames "Johnny Walker". Pope John showed a rare gift for preserving what was best from the past and combining it with optimistic confidence in the future.  he gave people hope.
This wonderful spirit, which touched the hearts of so many people, is summed up beautifully in his last will and testament where he writes:
"My dear children love each other. Search more for that which unites than that which divides.  In the hour of farewell, or better still, of see you soon, I want to remind everyone of that which is worth more in life - Blessed Jesus Christ, his Gospel, his holy Church, truth and kindness. I remember everyone and for everyone I will pray.  See you soon".

Fr Peter O'Reilly (Newsletter Editorial 16th October 2011)

Irish Council for Prisoners Overseas (ICPO)

About the Irish Council for Prisoners Overseas (ICPO)

The Irish Council for Prisoners Overseas (ICPO) is currently the only organisation working on behalf of Irish prisoners overseas and their families.
ICPO’s purpose is to promote social justice and human dignity for Irish people in prison overseas and their families. This is carried out by offering information, support and advocacy to prisoners and their families. Casework, publications and policy/networking are key elements of the service provision to the core group.

 

History of the ICPO

ICPO was established by the Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference in 1985. At this time the Irish Chaplaincy in Britain were greatly concerned about the number of Irish women and men in prison in the UK. There were deeply held concerns regarding their trials and subsequent imprisonments. In recent years the ICPO has been able to offer a more comprehensive service to prisoners and to expand our existing services to prisoners’ families. This is due to an increased level of funding from the Department of Foreign Affairs.

 

ICPO Members

The ICPO is a subcommittee of the Council for Emigrants, chaired by:
Bishop Séamus Hegarty
The ICPO has two offices; one located in Maynooth, Co. Kildare and the other in London. The London office deals solely with Irish born prisoners held in the UK, while the Maynooth office assists Irish prisoners held all over the world.
Staff Maynooth: Joanna Joyce, Catherine Jackson, Sr Anne Sheehy
Volunteers Maynooth: Sr Agnes Hunt, Eileen Boyle, Joan O’Cléirigh, Sr Mary Whyte
Staff London: Liz Power, Joseph Cottrell-Boyce
Volunteers London: Sr Maureen McNally, Sr Cecelia Snape, Rev Stephen McKenna

 

Work of the ICPO

The ICPO works for all Irish prisoners wherever they are: it makes no distinction in terms of religious faith, the nature of the prison conviction, or of a prisoner’s status.
The objectives of the ICPO are to:
•Identify and respond to the needs of Irish prisoners abroad, and their families
•Research and provide relevant information to prisoners on issues such as deportation, repatriation and transfer
•Focus public attention on issues affecting Irish prisoners (ill-treatment, racist abuse, etc)
•Engage in practical work in aid of justice and human rights for Irish migrants, refugees and prisoners at an international level
•Visit Irish prisoners abroad when possible both in the UK and elsewhere

Contact:

Irish Council for Prisoners Overseas (ICPO)
Columba Centre,
Maynooth,
Co Kildare
Ireland.
Tel.  00 353 1 5053156
Fax: 00 353 1 6016401
E Mail:  icpo@iecon.ie
Web:  www.catholicbishops.ie/prisoners-overseas

A Vision

Every idea needs someone to have a vision first, to imagine, to consider the possible.  Ideas must be thought into existence, then hope gives them wings.  Until I went to Malawi, I thought hope was a type of pious, academic, optimism, but now I realise that hope is a passion for the possible and without it people are indeed hopeless.

The vision was simple: that some of the poorest people should have clean, safe drinking water.

We envisaged using the simplest, low cost pump technology, producing a sustainable long lasting pump that could be repaired by the village women and made from local materials. This realised, with our pump factory in Mzuzu and the numbers of people with clean water increasing every day to well over 100,000, we are now on an expanded vision.

Wells for Zoe is a tiny organisation, but passionate about what we do, and so thankful to our villagers or volunteers, for having enabled so much to be achieved. To achieve, in Malawi, one needs to be inspiring every day.

“To be inspired means to move forward with purpose and enthusiasm. Purpose denotes a clarity of intention while enthusiasm is derived from the Greek en theos, a God or spirit within. Clarity of intention propelled by a spiritwithin is the most potent combination for achievement and creativity known to humankind.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ob3Vpilu_0  With our friends and volunteers, we bring hope to people in despair, not by cursing the darkness, but by lighting a light, and considering challenges as opportunities. All this happens as a result of your support and the energy of our amazing volunteers.

Our latest venture is to support self-help groups (SHG). SHG’s are village based groups of about 20 women. Members make small regular savings contributions over a few months until there is enough capital in the group to begin lending to members who submit proposals. SHGs have been shown to be a powerful means of developing leadership abilities, increasing school enrolments, and improving nutrition among villagers in many developing countries. The success of the 15 groups, I have met with, in the past 8 months has been phenomenal. (One group of very poor women now have a loan book of over €2,000, starting with savings of less than 20 cent per week each) All they need now is infrastructural support from us.

The first meeting I sat in on was held in a small enclosure for cows, where 20 women, came on time, as there was a fine for being late, sat on the ground, put out their 3 bowls, one for savings, one for loan payments and one for a social fund. These women started saving and doing little business ventrues in February 2011 and are now in full flow. I sat there quietly while 15,000 (€68) was counted out into the first bowl, 31750 (€144) of loan repayments was counted, with every note on clear view, into the second and 3100Kw (€14) went into the social fund. Loans were sought to the value of 51,000Kw (€232), so the woman seeking the largest loan, 25000 agreed to take what was left. They kept 785 in the kitty and this was the end of the financial dealing.

If one considers that the pay for one day may be 200Kw on a very very good day, the woman looking for a loan of 25000, was looking for 25 weeks wages up front. This was a huge amount of money and no one batted an eyelid. She was doing business and would have no bother paying it back within the eight weeks while paying the 20% interest before anything else.

When I first heard of this I thought it was the craziest idea ever, but now we are focusing our future on working with 50 groups of these remarkable women over the next three years. I have always read of the huge profitability of micro business, but in Asia, not Africa. Some go 100km to the lake, buying fish to sell locally, some buy second hand clothes and salt  in Tanzania 280km, while others make bricks. The 20% interest rate is fundamental and applies to any term of loan up to eight weeks, as it builds up funds quickly.

John Coyne. http://www.wellsforzoe.org/

The Ghost in the Machine

Lucan Newsletter Editorial by Fr Peter O'Reilly

People have reacted in different ways to the changes introduced in the Mass recently, one thing for certain is that they are far more than minor updates and it will take people quite a while to get used to them.

One change which comes up numerous times in the Litrugy is the response to the prayer "the Lord be with you" which now adds to the response "and also with you" the words "and with your spirit". The change brings the English translation into line with that in all other languages and with the original Latin. However, the change goes deeper than this and reminds us that we are much more than material beings and hidden inside is a whole world of the spiritual.  All this runs counter to a strong current in our world which denise the spiritual.

The 20th century British Philosppher Gilbert Ryle sums up this materialist view of the world when he refers to those who look for the spirit within as seeking after the ghost in the machine, a viewpoint whose greatest exponent  in recent times has been the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. Yet try as the materialists might people's intuitive sense of the spiritual, of the ghost in the machine remains.

Everytime we encounter the mystery of love, glimpses of it shine out from the depths of our humanity.  So when we answer "and with your spirit" at Mass we are saying a lot more than meets the eye.

When I’m Gone

When I come to the end of my journey
And I travel my last weary mile
Just forget if you can, that I ever frowned
And remember only the smile

Forget unkind words I have spoken
Remember some good I have done
Forget that I ever had heartache
And remember I've had loads of fun

Forget that I've stumbled and blundered
And sometimes fell by the way
Remember I have fought some hard battles
And won, ere the close of the day

Then forget to grieve for my going
I would not have you sad for a day
But in September gather some flowers
And remember the place where I lay

And come in the shade of evening
When the sun paints the sky in the west
Stand for a few moments beside me
And remember only my best

    (Mrs Lyman Hancock)

St. Lawrence of Brindisi

At first glance perhaps the most remarkable quality of Lawrence of Brindisi is his outstanding gift of languages. In addition to a thorough knowledge of his native Italian, he had complete reading and speaking ability in Latin, Hebrew, Greek, German, Bohemian, Spanish and French.

He was born on July 22, 1559, and died exactly 60 years later on his birthday in 1619. His parents William and Elizabeth Russo gave him the name of Julius Caesar, Caesare in Italian. After the early death of his parents, he was educated by his uncle at the College of St. Mark in Venice.
When he was just 16 he entered the Capuchin Franciscan Order in Venice and received the name of Lawrence. He completed his studies of philosophy and theology at the University of Padua and was ordained a priest at 23.
With his facility for languages he was able to study the Bible in its original texts. At the request of Pope Clement VIII, he spent much time preaching to the Jews in Italy. So excellent was his knowledge of Hebrew, the rabbis felt sure he was a Jew who had become a Christian.
In 1956 the Capuchins completed a 15-volume edition of his writings. Eleven of these 15 contain his sermons, each of which relies chiefly on scriptural quotations to illustrate his teaching.
Lawrence’s sensitivity to the needs of people—a character trait perhaps unexpected in such a talented scholar—began to surface. He was elected major superior of the Capuchin Franciscan province of Tuscany at the age of 31. He had the combination of brilliance, human compassion and administrative skill needed to carry out his duties. In rapid succession he was promoted by his fellow Capuchins and was elected minister general of the Capuchins in 1602. In this position he was responsible for great growth and geographical expansion of the Order.
Lawrence was appointed papal emissary and peacemaker, a job which took him to a number of foreign countries. An effort to achieve peace in his native kingdom of Naples took him on a journey to Lisbon to visit the king of Spain. Serious illness in Lisbon took his life in 1619.

The Great Fire of Rome

Background

Though the infamous emperor Nero ruled Rome for less than two decades, his reign witnessed tremendous changes to the empire's capital city. Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus -- more often known as Nero -- was a great-grandson of Caesar Augustus. When he was a child, he and his mother, Agrippina, were exiled by Agrippina's brother, emperor Gaius Caligula, to the tiny Pontian Islands. Two years later, however, the banishment was lifted when Agrippina's uncle, Claudius, took hold of the empire. Nero's mother soon convinced Claudius to marry her and make Nero his heir. In 54 A.D., Claudius was murdered, purportedly a victim of poisonous mushrooms given to him by Agrippina. Nero became the emperor of Rome at age 16. Several years later, Nero had his power-hungry mother moved to a separate residence; shortly thereafter, he allegedly had her killed. There was no end to Nero's ambition. One of his grandest plans was to tear down a third of Rome so that he could build an elaborate series of palaces that would be known as Neropolis. The senate, however, objected ardently to this proposal. Exactly what happened next has remained a mystery for nearly 2,000 years.

On the night of July 19, 64 A.D., a fire broke out among the shops lining the Circus Maximus, Rome's mammoth chariot stadium. In a city of two million, there was nothing unusual about such a fire -- the sweltering summer heat kindled conflagrations around Rome on a regular basis, particularly in the slums that covered much of the city. Knowing this, Nero himself was miles away in the cooler coastal resort of Antium. Yet this was no ordinary fire. The flames raged for six days before coming under control; then the fire reignited and burned for another three. When the smoke cleared, 10 of Rome's 14 districts were in ruin. The 800-year-old Temple of Jupiter Stator and the Atrium Vestae, the hearth of the Vestal Virgins, were gone. Two thirds of Rome had been destroyed.

History has blamed Nero for the disaster, implying that he started the fire so that he could bypass the senate and rebuild Rome to his liking. Much of what is known about the great fire of Rome comes from the aristocrat and historian Tacitus, who claimed that Nero watched Rome burn while merrily playing his fiddle. Gangs of thugs prevented citizens from fighting the fire with threats of torture, Tacitus wrote. There is some support for the theory that Nero leveled the city on purpose: the Domus Aurea, Nero's majestic series of villas and pavilions set upon a landscaped park and a man-made lake, was built in the wake of the fire.

"It would have been seen as very inappropriate on the part of the elite in Rome," says art historian Eric Varner. "They would have been happy if Nero had built the Domus Aurea out in the country, but to do it here in the city really was an extraordinary kind of statement."

Tacitus was a member of this Roman elite, and whether there is a bias in his writing is difficult to know. Indeed, Tacitus was still a boy at the time of the fire, and he would have been a young teenager in 68 A.D., when Nero died. Nero himself blamed the fire on an obscure new Jewish religious sect called the Christians, whom he indiscriminately and mercilessly crucified. During gladiator matches he would feed Christians to lions, and he often lit his garden parties with the burning carcasses of Christian human torches. Yet there is evidence that, in 64 A.D., many Roman Christians believed in prophecies predicting that Rome would soon be destroyed by fire. Perhaps the fire was set off by someone hoping to make the prediction come true.

Twenty centuries later, is there a way to establish who or what started one of antiquity's most destructive conflagrations? Is there any truth to Tacitus's insinuation? Or to Nero's? Archaeologists, historians, and contemporary fire investigators try to pinpoint the cause of this monumental tragedy of the ancient world.

Searching for the hero inside of yourself

This summer at the movies promises to be one packed full of Blockbusting super heroes. From Harry Potters last stand to the return of Captain Jack Sparrow the heroes come to town. The interesting thing is that being a hero doesn’t come easy and they are very often deeply conflicted.

Harry Potter struggles with his inner identity whereas Captain Jack seems to be an accidental hero who rises above his vices to save the day.

The spiritual writer Deepak Chopra wrote a book recently looking at what makes for a superhero and he came up with the seven spiritual laws of superheroes. The first and most important is “the Law of Balance” which is grounded in the interaction between being, feeling, thinking and doing. At their core the hero finds a balance between the darkness and light this is within and so achieves an inner power like no other.

Finding a balance inside ourselves is a theme taken up in the Gospels when Jesus speaks of the dilemma of the weeds among the wheat. How do we cope with the failings or sins which seem choke our every effort to be a better person, we recognise the rich harvest of goodness that is within and allow it to outgrow our weakness.

Ultimately we are assured despite appearances the wheat is so much stronger than the weeds.

Fr. Peter O'Reilly

Song of the Builders

On a summer morning
I sat down
on a hillside
to think about God-

a worthy pastime.
Near me, I saw
a single crcket;
it was moving the grains of the hillside

this way and that way.
How great was its energy,
how humble its effort.
Let us hope

it will always be like this,
each of us going on
in our inexplicable ways
building the universe.

Mary Oliver

The Yen for Order

Summer undoes my careful allotment of time parcels to this and that--this day, this hour for administration, that other day, that other hour for writing my blog, and so on. Actually, life, aka God, undoes my careful allotment of time parcels all the time. And I realized this morning that I spend far too much time trying to tie them up again.

According to Genesis 1, "making order" is a quick way of describing God's creative work. God spends five days out of seven ordering time, space, and the first pragmatic interactions of created beings in a life-sustaining food chain. Only then does God set human beings down into an ordered cosmos, suggesting that a certain amount of order is essential to human survival. However, if you read carefully, you begin to notice that God is not particularly tied down to the kind of linear order laid out in your typical planner. (I wonder if the proliferation of calendars, planners, time management seminars, how-to-organize-your closet-your-desk-and- your-life books, and other gems of the human gift for parting one another from our money reflects a love of order or a frantic but fruitless scramble to impose it.) God creates light and darkness quite awhile before coming up with sun, moon and stars, for example. God makes provision for seed-bearing plants both to feed animal life and to proliferate into an undefined future to feed future generations of animal life but offers very little for the sustenance of marine life (in Genesis 1, not in the actual cosmos. This may be one more sign of the Israelites' utter disinterest in having anything to do with the seas and their denizens.) And there is the forever unanswered question about how Evil, the force that runs around undoing all order, got into the picture at all.

God's work of ordering has two facets that tend to elude me when I sit down to plan the tying up of my careful time parcels into nice, neat, diagrammable pages in my various calendars, planners, and notebooks, which, of course, I can never find when it comes time to put the diagrams into practice because my desk is such a jumble. The first is that God's creative energy all goes into orders that sustain the always-untidy business of life and living on a very grand scale. If we don't understand where cockroaches and mosquitoes fit (God's gonna have a lot of 'splainin to do in heaven), why mountains sometimes fall into the sea as the psalmist notes, what good hurricanes are, and above all why human beings, charged with the task of continuing the divine work of creating, make such an all-fired mess out of it without calling down on our heads another cosmic flood (see Genesis 6!), perhaps it's because we don't really understand what life in all its richness is.

The second facet of God's creative work that eludes me when I'm "planning," is that it always starts with chaos: the rather terrifying primal chaos of Genesis 1:1-2, or the degenerate human chaos with which the biblical new creation begins in the prophets' promises of a new promised land after the return from exile in Babylon or in the gospels' testimony to Christ, the restorer of all that has gone awry. In both cases, chaos is the essential preliminary to the work of creation. The primal chaos is what I've often called "a seething cauldron of possibilities" out of which God draws everything.

I am a creative person. We all are, whether our creativity makes Michelangelo's David or Bach's Magnificat or a birthday cake to delight the hearts of a roomful of four-year-olds or simply that unappreciated gift, a clean, uncluttered space in which we can live, move and have our being. We must be. At the end of Genesis 1, when we know very little yet about God except that God is an incredibly imaginative Creator, God says "let us make humankind in our image." Christian reflected has heaped all sorts of things into that basket, "the image of God," but that image begins with creativity. As a creative person, I need to start where God started: with chaos, with "the seething cauldron of possibilities" as yet unnamed, unsorted, apparently purposeless. If we try to explain Genesis 1 from the belief that God created ex nihilo (out of nothing), then we have to believe that God first made the chaotic mess from the Divine Word then drew all of created reality. Contemporary thinkers who have given us the chaos theory propose that God never actually reduced all that primal chaos into order: it is still among us and around us, still seething with possibilities, still giving birth to beings.

I wonder, then, if "chaos" is really an enemy to be confronted with the chair and whip of my various planners and licked into submission so that I can get on with life. I wonder if chaos isn't rather the perpetual treasure chest from which spill out all the possibilities that spurn creative work in all its forms. Human beings do need order, especially the truly primal order of purpose, to survive. But I wonder what would happen if I were finally to succeed in wrestling every breath of time, every corner of space, every piece of paper and dust bunny in my own small universe into the kind of careful order for which I seem to hanker. I wonder if I would find that not chaos but excessive order, neatly packaged in linear rows, is sterile.

©2009 Abbey of St. Walburga