Posts

Posted on

21st Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B

I have had the good fortune to visit many places of exceptional natural beauty.

Two stand out in my memory always; the Grand Canyon in Arizona, and Niagara Falls which border New York State in the USA and Ontario Canada.

Like many natural beauties, they can be experienced, however words fail to describe the experience with any accuracy.

“You will just have to see for yourself!” the person trying to describe will end up saying.

The same is true for great works of art, opera, musical composition. How does one put into words the different hues of blue in Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”, or the exquisite beauty in the harmony from Mozart’s duet ‘La ci darem la mano’ from the opera Don Giovanni, or Puccini’s B4, required of the tenor in the aria ‘Nesun Dorma’ from the opera Turandot?

I remember well while on a formation programme for Spiritual Directors one of the facilitators of the course saying quite definitely, “whenever you are sitting with another, and they preface their remarks by saying, ‘you are not going to believe this, but . . .’ or in a similar way saying, ‘this may sound silly to you, but . . . ‘ prick up your ears and pay close attention, they are about to attempt to put into words an experience of God!”

God’s ways are not our ways!

There is more truth to that than we normally think.

God is ineffable.

What that means is that God cannot be captured in our thoughts or pictured inside our imaginations.

This truth is one of the first things that the church affirms in its understanding of God, defining as a dogma at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 that God is so metaphysically different from anything we can know or imagine that all of our concepts and language about God are always more inadequate than adequate.

God can be known, but never imagined or captured in a thought.

Why not?

Why can we never form a picture of God or speak about God in adequate ways?

Because God is infinite and our minds are finite. Infinity, by definition, can never be circumscribed.

That might sound abstract, but it is not.

For example: Try to imagine the highest number to which it is possible to count?

Instantly you realize that this is an impossible task because numbers are infinite and there is always one more. It is impossible to conceive of the highest number.

This is even truer in terms of any imaginative picture we try to form of God and of how we try to imagine God’s existence. God is infinite and infinity cannot be captured or imagined inside of any finite thought.

This is important to understand, not to safeguard some theoretical point, but for our understanding of faith.

We tend to identify a weak faith with a weak imagination, just as we tend to identify atheism with the incapacity to imagine the existence of God

Faith in God is not to be confused with the capacity or incapacity to imagine God’s existence.

Infinity cannot be circumscribed by the imagination.  All we say of God is true, but . . . there is always more.

With God it is always ‘not only but also’.

Many will have heard part or all of the duet titled ‘Au fond du temple saint’ from Bizet’s opera The Pearl Fishers (NZ Rail do the duet are huge disservice by using only a part of the duet as music to their TV commercial!).

My guess is that few would understand a word of it as it is sung in French!

Few would know that it is a song of reconciliation between friends who had fallen out!

However, if you close your eyes and listen with the ears of the heart, words and meaning have no purpose as you are caught up in the beauty of the sound.

My suggestion is, faith may be less about knowing, and more about enjoying.

If you wish to experience God, close off the eyes of your mind, open wide the ears of your soul and listen to the music your God is singing.

Posted on

The Feast of the Assumption of Mary

In Aotearoa Maori culture, meeting houses (whare nui or whare puni) are symbols of tribal prestige and are often named after, and seen as the embodiment of, a tribal ancestor.

The structure itself is seen as an outstretched body, with the roof’s apex at the front of the house representing the ancestor’s head.

The main ridge beam represents the backbone, the diagonal bargeboards which lead out from the roof are the arms and the lower ends of the bargeboards divide to represent fingers.

Inside, the centre pole (poutokomanawa) is seen as the heart, the rafters reflect the ancestor’s ribs, and the interior is the ancestor’s chest and stomach.

Whare are richly carved, and these carvings will be particular to the local tribe (iwi), and will declare “this is our house”.

At Pukekaraka  in the township of Otaki, an hour north of Wellington city, there lies a meeting house which shares its whenua (land) with the Catholic Church.

Things are different at Pukekaraka.

There is a meeting house (wharepuni) which has been there since 1905, and there is not a carving in sight!

The meeting house follows the same design as wharepuni throughout the country, however the whare is bereft of carvings.

The name of the meeting house is “Hine nui o tea o katoa”, and in the name is the reason for no carvings.

Translated the name means ‘Mother of all the world’.

In other words, no one iwi (tribe) or whanau (family) can lay claim to Mary as “our” ancestor.

She (Mary) does not belong to us, we belong to her.

What I find of great interest here is that the Marist Maori Mission was established at Otaki in 1841.

In 1894 the Sisters of St Joseph had established a school there to teach (and board), local children. The whare was built in 1905. Within 60 years the local people had a sense of Mary belonging to everyone, “ o tea ao katoa”.

This Sunday, on the initiative of the New Zealand Bishops Conference, the country of Aotearoa/New Zealand is being rededicated to Our Lady Assumed into Heaven.

The country was originally dedicated by Bishop Jean Baptiste Pompallier when he celebrated the first Mass on the whenua known as Aotearoa on 13th January 1838.

Mary, the mother of Jesus, was never a Roman Catholic, we have however laid claim to her and made her ours.

This rededication is not a rededication of Catholic New Zealand; that was not Bishop Pompallier’s intention, nor is it the intention of our present Bishops.

This is a rededicating of our land and its people to the care of Mary, the Mother of God.

Posted on

19th Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B

While living and working on the island of Ovalau, in the Fiji group, I had the misfortune to sprain my ankle.

I hobbled into the Church the following morning and was asked by one of the elderly women, who with others had gathered for morning Mass what was wrong.

I explained my predicament and was told to see her after Mass.

We went over to the parish house, where she asked me to sit and remove my sandal.

She placed my foot on her lap and began to massage the ankle.

She returned in the evening and on three subsequent days (morning and evening) to massage the ankle.

The ankle healed! No strapping, no doctor’s visit, no pills.

Simply, and profoundly, there was only touch.

Continue reading “19th Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B”

Posted on

18th Sunday Ordinary Time Year B

In this Sunday’s Gospel there is a small phrase with, may I suggest, huge meaning.

The Gospel (John 6: 24 – 35), speaks of the crowd, “got into the boats and found him on the other side.”

I think I can safely say that the phrase is indicative of a journey from one side of the lake to the other. And maybe that motif is being asked of each of us, namely ‘to cross over’ to find him on the other side.

When we consider the First Reading for this Sunday (Ex. 16: 2 – 4, 12 – 15), this is precisely the situation of the Israelites. They have ‘crossed over’ the Red Sea and are in the desert, wandering and complaining, wanting to return to Egypt!

The motif of crossing over and entering the wilderness has been described by the author Joseph Campbell as The Hero’s Journey.

In his study of different cultures, Campbell found an amazingly similar motif played out in the culture’s foundational story, and while details altered (for example the threshold might be a river, a sea, a forest, a mountain range) the fundamentals were unerringly similar.

Continue reading “18th Sunday Ordinary Time Year B”