Memorial Saint Ignatius Loyola 2012

Statue of Ignatius Loyola (Photo credit: elycefeliz)

Ignatius Loyola (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Birth place and sanctuary of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, in Azpeitia, Basque Country. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Scripture readings for today's Mass are here.

Some of you may have been celebrating with 31 days with St Ignatius from Loyola.
If you missed it there's still time get all the posts for each day from here.


 Ignatius always challenges us to keep our focus on God, asks us to find God in all things, and reminds us to do everything for God’s greater glory.
 

"They should practice the seeking of God’s presence in all things, in their conversations, their walks, in all that they see, taste, hear, understand, in all their actions, since His Divine Majesty is truly in all things by His presence, power, and essence."

from Letters of Saint Ignatius of Loyola

The First Principle and Foundation
(St. Ignatius of Loyola, as paraphrased by David L. Fleming, S.J.)

St. Ignatius begins his Spiritual Exercises with The First Principle and Foundation. While not typically thought of as a prayer, it still contains much that is worth reflecting on.

The Goal of our life is to live with God forever.
God, who loves us, gave us life.
Our own response of love allows God's life
to flow into us without limit.

All the things in this world are gifts from God,
Presented to us so that we can know God more easily
and make a return of love more readily.
As a result, we appreciate and use all these gifts of God
Insofar as they help us to develop as loving persons.
But if any of these gifts become the center of our lives,
They displace God
And so hinder our growth toward our goal.

In everyday life, then, we must hold ourselves in balance
Before all of these created gifts insofar as we have a choice
And are not bound by some obligation.
We should not fix our desires on health or sickness,
Wealth or poverty, success or failure, a long life or a short one.
For everything has the potential of calling forth in us
A deeper response to our life in God.

Our only desire and our one choice should be this:
I want and I choose what better leads
To God's deepening his life in me.

 This is a fine reflection on St Ignatius and what he has to teach us about prayer and leadership. Ignatius encourages us to use our imagination when we pray.

                                                                        

Image source

                                                                          

I especially like this quote at the end.

"You will know life and be acknowledged by it according to your degree of transparency–your capacity, that is, to vanish as an end and to remain purely as a means.” - Dag Hammarskjold

• Last year's post for St Ignatius is here

• A selection of previous posts on St Ignatius here 
• and here

• A selection of prayers from the British Jesuits here. 

The Examen

Ignatius left his Society two spiritual legacies: The Daily Examen, a short period of daily reflection and the Spiritual Exercises. St. Ignatius believed that he received the examen as a gift from God that not only enriched his own Christian life but was meant to be shared with others. 

The examen was a "method," a way to seek and find God in all things and to gain the freedom to let God's will be done on earth.

The Examen traditionally has five steps:

• Recall you are in the presence of God. No matter where you are, you are a creature in the midst of creation and the Creator who called you forth is concerned for you.


• Give thanks to God for favors received. Pause and spend a moment looking at this day's gifts. Take stock of what you received and gave. Notice these clues that guide living.


• Ask for awareness of the Holy Spirit's aid. Before you explore the mystery of the human heart, ask to receive the Holy Spirit so that you can look upon your actions and motives with honesty and patience. The Spirit gives a freedom to look upon yourself without condemnation and without complacency and thus be open to growth.



• Now examine how you are living this day. Recalling the events of your day, explore the context of your actions. Review the day, hour by hour, searching for the internal events of your life. Look through the hours to see your interaction with what was before you. Ask what you were involved in and who you were with, and review your hopes and hesitations. What moved you to act the way you did?


• Pray words of reconciliation and resolve. Having reviewed this day of your life, look upon yourself with compassion and see your need for God and try to realize God's manifestations of concern for you. Express sorrow for sin, give thanks for grace, and praise God for the times you responded in ways that allowed you to better see God's life.
•  

 SPIRITUAL EXERCISES OF ST IGNATIUS

 More information and resources on The Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius can be obtained from here and here and here.

Saint Ignatius’s motto was “Ite, inflammate omnia.” - “Go set the world aflame” – his parting words to Francis Xavier who was carrying the Gospel to the East.

 My friend Fr John Predmore SJ has a blog fittingly called Ignatian Spirituality : Set the World Ablaze here.

John is shortly to set off for a new post carrying the Gospel to the East as Pastor to Latin rite Catholics in Amman, Jordan and there will be plenty of news and photos to look forward to. Here is a post on his inaugural trip there earlier in July from his other blog To The Frontier.Please keep him in your prayers.

                                                                           Image source

Video : These Alone Are Enough For Me by Dan Schutte

based on the Suscipe prayer by St. Ignatius of Loyola.

 Image source.

Great Ignatius pictograph above found on an office wall at St. Ignatius High School in Cleveland, Ohio, depicting his maxim Finding God in All Things.

Margaret Silf has a great article on St Ignatius titled  An Imperfect Pilgrim in America magazine.

There is still time to download a FREE copy of her new e .book on Ignatius, Just Call Me Lopez thanks to the kindness of Loyola Press.

 Further Details here.

Salvation or Enlightenment

Two videos from a series of four from a recent day of inter-faith dialogue in London  between Benedictine monk Fr. Laurence Freeman OSB and Dr. Alan Wallace (Tibetan Buddhist) exploring the theme Salvation or Enlightenment.  

You can watch all four videos here.

                                                                         

                                                                Laurence Freeman OSB

Dr. Alan Wallace

How I Got My Song

 I cam across a fine article from Laurence Freeman OSB in his July newsletter for TheTablet.

The opening paragraph begins:

"In a YouTube worth watching, the charmer Leonard Cohen charms a glittering Spanish audience during an award ceremony for his poetry. First, he said, he felt false in accepting a prize for something he had no control over: poetry came from a place which ‘no one commands and no conquers’.

 Then he confessed his debt to Spain. What little he knew of the guitar he had learned from a young Spanish musician whom he had met briefly before he took his own life. 

Cohen confided that all his music was based on the few chords he learned from this doomed teacher. 

“This land” had given him that much; and then, a momentous throwaway line for that audience, ‘I know that just as an identity card is not a man so a credit rating is not a country’.

I managed to find the video and it is a remarkable acceptance speech for the Prince of Asturias Poetry Award 2011.

You can read the rest of Laurence Freeman's article here

How I Got My Song

                                                                  English Transcript here

Summer Cliff Walk

Summer late July walk on the cliffs at Portreath about a mile from home.

 and then home.

 

Our bodies ache

for sabbath

and move towards it

as rain moves

toward the earth

while people within

their coffee scented homes

watch steam rise

from the streets

and their cups

waiting for the day

peace, too, is perpetual. 

Poem by David M. Ayres.

Seventeenth Sunday Ordinary Time 2012 Loaves and Fishes

                                                                      Image source

This Sunday's gospel relates the parable of the feeding of the five thousand with five loaves and two fishes. 

John's gospel tells of feeding with bread but is also a microcosm for Jesus Himself who will become for us the bread of eternal life.

Scripture readings for the Mass are here

My post last year on this Gospel coincided with a famine in the Horn of Africa.See here.

Related post here.

Apart from bread filling the physical need of hunger we need to be fed spiritually to fill the empty space in our lives. We need to be fed hope and love !

I read this week how Tesco supermarkets are revamping their 900 bakeries to include 30 more varieties of artisan bread, an array of amazing varieties of fresh bread.

 We have become inured to the mechanically aerated, non-nutritional, sanitized loaves on offer.

Not only have we lost respect for the way our food is produced, we have become remote and indifferent to the work of human hands when it is the result of exploitation for cheap profits.

Not only are we are estranged from the knowledge of how our food is made from seed and carried from soil to table but we are increasingly indifferent to  the work and social justice issues involved in its production. 

Read here how something practical can be done with our food surpluses and waste.

"Feeding the 5000" a partnership between farmers and a group of environmental charities campaign for better use of surplus food - FareShare, FoodCycle, Love Food Hate Waste and Friends of the Earth and most parishes I know locally, have food banks so even small offerings can make a huge difference to people for whom life has taken a bad turn.

Spiritually too we seem to be ever more estranged from ourselves and our communities.

This powerful poem by David Scott is so much more than a half baked lament for the old days.

 It is a metaphor for the empty spaces in our lives too and the spiritual hunger that is left unresolved by the faddish pretentious diets of pap and drivel we feed on.

A Long Way From Bread

We have come so far from bread.
Rarely do we hear the clatter of the mill wheel;
see the flour in every cranny,
the shaking down of the sack, the chalk on the door,
the rats, the race, the pool,
baking day, and the old loaves:
cob, cottage, plaited, brick.

We have come so far from bread.
Once the crock said ‘BREAD’
and the bread was what was there,
and the family’s arm went deeper down each day
to find it, and the crust was favoured.

We have come so far from Bread.
terrifying is the breach between wheat and table,
wheat and bread, bread and what goes for bread.
Loaves now come in regiments, so that loaf
is not the word. Hlaf
is one of the oldest words we have.

I go on about bread
because it was to bread
that Jesus trusted
the meaning he had of himself.
It was an honour for the bread
to be the knot in the Lord’s handkerchief
reminding him about himself. So,
O bread, breakable;
O bread, given;
O bread, a blessing;
count yourself lucky bread.

Not that I am against wafers,
especially the ones produced under steam
from some hidden nunnery
with our lord crucified into them.

They are at least unleavened, and fit the hand,
without remainder, but it is still
a long way from bread.
better for each household to have its own bread,
daily, enough and to spare,
dough the size of a rolled towel,
for feeding angels unawares.

Then if the bread is holy,
All that has to do with bread is holy;
Board, knife, cupboard,
So that the gap between all things is closed
In our attention to the bread of the day.’

I know that
“man cannot live on bread alone.”
I say, let us get the bread right.

                                                                            Image source

A commentary by David Scott on the Gospel of the feeding of the five thousand, titled "Bread Left Over" is here.

Below a poem from Iona  Wild Goose Publications- Author Unknown.

When you touch Bread
Let it not lie
Uncared for … unwanted
So often
Bread is taken for granted
There is so much beauty
In Bread
Beauty of sun and soil
Beauty of patient toil
Winds and rain have caressed it
Christ so often blessed it
Be gentle when you touch Bread

                                                                      Image source

Paul's second reading urges us to live in a way that is worthy of our calling and this fine poem by Nissim Ezekiel below sums up for me the wonderful gift of life we are freely given and in the Eucharist, the ongoing call to receive a daily renewal to keep trust in God and to keep trying even when our efforts seem to be in vain.

  
                                                                    Image source

Process

Just when you give up
the whole process
begins again

and you are as pure as if you had confessed
and received absolution

You have done nothing 
to deserve it;
you have merely slept
and got up again 

feeling fine
because the morning is fine

sufficient reason
for faith in a process
that can perform such miracles

without assistance from you
Imgaine what it would do 
with a little assistance from you.

Great reflection here called God Provides where the author Sister Mary McGlone says
"The key is that when we give out of our scarcity, we will find that there is enough." 

So, some more reflections on living in ways worthy of our calling. 

In his book "Our One Great Act of Fidelity, Waiting for Christ in The Eucharist , Ron Rolheiser relates this story about St Augustine. When he was giving the Eucharist, instead of saying the body of Christ," he would say "Receive what you are." 

Rolheiser says : what is supposed to happen at the Eucharist is that we, the congregation, by sacrificing the things that divide us, should become the body and blood of Christ. More so than the bread and wine, we the people are meant to be changed, to be transubstantiated.

The Eucharist as sacrifice asks us to become the bread of brokenness and the chalice of vulnerability."

 So how can we live this out in our daily lives ? From Rolheiser again :

 " family and community aren't boring: they're terrifying. They're too full of searing revelations, there we have no place to hide. In family life, our selfishness and our immaturities are reflected back to us through eyes that are steady and unblinking. But Rolhesier also says that staying within them is often the hell that leads to heaven. 

The Eucharist as a spirituality invite us into community and family. To live out the eucharist in daily life is to share our everyday lives with each other.

..........
Theologians tell us that God is as much a verb as a noun. God is a trinity of persons: Father , Son and Holy Spirit. for Christians this is more than a simple dogma that we are asked to accept, even if we don't understand it.

It is something that invites us to a whole way of life : God is a family, a community of persons sharing life together in such a way that a spirit an energy of gratitude and joy flows out of that shared life.

We are asked to do the same-to share our lives with one another in such a way that joy and gratitude flow out as an energy that nurtures others. Life in the spirit is quite simply life shared with others. ...... He goes on:....

"Jean Paul Sartre once suggested that community is hell. On a given day, the tensions inherent within community life can certainly make that seem true. However in our better moments, we all know that the reverse is the truth: alienation and aloneness are hell: shared life is heaven.

The Eucharist is an invitation to us not just to come together in church to celebrate a sacred ritual that Jesus left us. The Eucharist invites us to commit ourselves, inside our families and communities, to share all aspects of our lives with others."

All true, but sometimes the demands are such that we do have to take time out and withdraw to a mountain alone !!

                                            Source Church of the Multiplication ,Tabgha, Israel 

                       possible site where the miracle of the feeding of the multitudes took place

                                                                             Image source

                                                            Stone mosaic under altar at Tabgha

We Come To Your Feast

We sang this beautiful hymn (also one of my favourites), by Michael Joncas at the Clear Voices Festival at Buckfast earlier this month.

Click here to listen: Scroll down page and click on the arrow on the second track on the list - Lyrics are below.

 

 We Come to Your Feast

We place upon Your table a gleaming cloth of white
The weaving of our stories, the fabric of our lives,
The dreams of those before us, the ancient hopeful cries,
The promise of our future, our needing and our nurture
Lie here before our eyes.

CHORUS
We come to Your feast, we come to your feast,
the young and the old, the frightened ,the bold,
the greatest and the least.
We come to Your feast, we come to Your feast,
with the fruit of our lands and the work of our hands
we come to Your feast.

We place upon Your table a humble loaf of bread,
The gift of field and hillside, the grain by which we're fed,
We come to taste the presence, of Him of whom we feed,
To strengthen and connect us,
 to challenge and correct us,
To love in word and deed. 

(CHORUS)

We place upon Your Table a simple cup of wine,
The fruit of human labour, the gift of sun and vine
We come to taste the presence of Him we claim as Lord
His dying and his living, His leading and His giving,
His love in cup out poured. 

(CHORUS)

We gather round Your table

we pause within our quest

We stand beside our neighbours, 

we name the stranger guest;

the feast is spread before us,

you bid us come and dine:

in blessing we'll uncover,

in sharing we''ll discover

your substance and your sign.

CHORUS x2

We come to Your feast, we come to Your feast,

the young and the old, the frightened ,the bold,

the greatest and the least.

We come to Your feast, we come to Your feast,

with the fruit of our lands and the work of our hands

we come to Your feast.

Related articles

• 5 Loaves, 2 Fish and 1 Mother (sheensteve.wordpress.com)
• Seventeenth Sunday Ordinary Time (frdoug.typepad.com)

Update Olympics 2012 : A Brief Sprint

                                            Image source via my friend Teresa Leong,


****** Click here for an update of media reactions AFTER the opening ceremony from the BBC and ********another here

The 2012 Olympics opening ceremony is tonight. Expectations run high to see Danny Boyle's spectacular curtain raiser to the next 16 days competition for the glittering prizes of world class sport.  

For many in Britain the armchair is becoming the sole place where live sport action is viewed.

I'm trying to get into the spirit of it but unlike the honed and super fit athletes, maybe I haven't prepared properly. I like sport and I hope that the true Olympic spirit will rub off on me at some point but the events in the Olympic village are being overshadowed by many other wider events taking place in our global village at present.

Enthusiasm wained when I saw the Orwellian one eyed Wenlock, the Olympic mascot, and Mandeville, the Paralympic mascot, and the truly awful choice of Olympic symbol. It brought to mind that phrase "In the kingdom of the blind the one eyed man is King."

So all I have for today are a few eye openers and a sprint through some headlines to make do.






See here for Andrew Gilligan's  article to suggest that the Olympic Spirit is not as alive as the hype surrounding it suggests.

Full explanation of background to mascots here and see article here.


The opening ceremony's theme is Isles of Wonder, inspired by William Shakespeare's play about shipwrecked castaways, The Tempest. An actor is due to recite Caliban's speech, the one that runs 'Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises'.

Despite Boyle's enchanted-island inspiration, few expect the man who depicted Scottish heroin addicts in Trainspotting and Indian slum dwellers in Slumdog Millionaire to deliver a sanitised image of Britain. 

At present some may re-caption that vision of Britain as Isles of Wonder and Woe with a quirky eccentricity thrown in.

Boyle has said the show is 'trying to show the best of us, but we're also trying to show many, many different things about our country'.

The ceremony will open at 9:00pm with the sound of a 27-tonne bell — the largest harmonically tuned bell in the world — forged at London's 442-year-old Whitechapel Bell Foundry, which made London's Big Ben and Philadelphia's Liberty Bell.

Boyle hasn't disclosed what comes next, but has said the ceremony will depict Britain's past, present and future.

Earlier this year Simon Jenkins wrote this article 

Danny Boyle explains his vision of the Isle of Wonder and how it fits the Olympic Spirit

This one examines Caliban's speech from Shakespeare's The Tempest

This morning's Jonathan Freedland article has some interesting comments !! They seem to oscillate somewhere between these two extremes below :

"What sort of people are we?

The sort of people who enjoy the harmless fun of someone ridiculously trotting around the country with a torch, the sort of people who wish the athletes well, who understand that subverting the efforts of the corporations is truly British, and who shame them into paying their taxes.

We are the people who understand no matter how hard the here-today-gone-tomorrow politicians try to be centre stage they are just a sideshow.

We are the people who understand there is indeed something noble in striving to do your personal best, and if that means your the best in the world then that's nice too.

Have a good Olympics." 

and this one :

"It's about selling stuff - not just burgers and sugar drinks, poison and debt, but selling an idea of a particular world back to itself. The idea is predicated on fake competition and glitter, dubious achievement and a magician's misdirect. It's meant to make us look one way while we're being robbed at the other, it's meant to close our eyes and numb us into a collective idiocy. It's a confederacy of flags colluding in the corporate takeover of our consciousness. It's ATOS sponsoring the paralympics. It's the killers of Bhopal wrapping an entire stadium in lies. It's Zil lanes for the rich and a circus for the poor. And every writer who colludes in this queasy mulch is as culpable of Ronald MacDonald. It's not about us, Jonathan Freedland. It's about them."

Related articles

• Op-Ed Contributor: With Olympic Pageantry, Britain Struts Again on the World Stage (nytimes.com)

• from the Online Journal of the British Jesuits an article by Tim Byron SJ, 

"about the man responsible for the growth of ‘Olympism’ in the modern age. Tim Byron SJ explores the roots of Baron Pierre de Coubertin’s thinking in his Catholic educational experience, and tracks the rise of the Olympic movement alongside de Coubertin’s relationship with the Catholic Church."

St James The Great and Patron Saint of Spain

Image source

 Happy Feast of St James, especially to Claire and all Spanish friends and readers.

Interesting post at i-Benedictine today from here with the great title St James, Spain and Anger Management.

Good article: The apostle whom Jesus called a "son of thunder" from  here.

Personal story of pilgrimage along the Camino to Santiago de Compostela, the alleged site of the relics of St James from here 

Brief History of how St. James the Greater became the Patron Saint of Spain. The music is the Hymn to Santiago (St. James, in Spanish), interpreted by the choir of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.

 

The Way of St James : More than Just a Journey.

El Camino Santiago Route from Roncesvalles to Santiago de Compostela.

The Way of St James

    
            Pope visits Cathedral in Santiago de Compostela in 2010, famous for the
            swinging thurible.

Gather Me God

Whilst searching through my older posts in advance of Sunday I came across this one so I am reposting it here...

Scripture readings for Sunday are here.

Thinking ahead to Sunday's Gospel which is the parable of the loaves and fishes  I was struck by this phrase which I have often overlooked in the light of the main miracle.

"They all ate and were satisfied,

and they picked up the fragments left over—

twelve wicker baskets full. "

                                                         Image source

For some reason I was led to thinking that even after being given the opportunities to be filled with the life of God time after time, we can convince ourselves we have little left to give, but God can always turn us into something much more; so that when we are fragmented God takes the little bits and pieces we are and gathers us in to restore us to wholeness.

So perhaps this poem by Ted Loder, from Guerillas of Grace fits well with that.

Gather Me God 

O GOD, gather me now to be with you as you are with me.

Soothe my tiredness;

quiet my fretfulness;

curb my aimlessness;

receive my compulsiveness;

let me be easy for a  moment.


O LORD, release me from the fears and guilts which grip me so tightly;
 
from the expectations and opinions which I so tightly grip,

that I may be open to receiving,

to learn something refreshingly different.

 
O GOD, gather me to be with you as you are with me.

Forgive me for claiming so much for myself that I leave no room for gratitude;

for confusing exercises in self-importance with acceptance of self-worth;

for complaining so much of my burdens that I become a burden;

for competing against others so insidiously that I stifle celebrating them and receiving 

your blessing through their gifts.


O GOD, gather me to be with you as you are with me.

Keep me in touch with myself,

with my needs,

my anxieties,

my angers,

my pains,

my corruptions,

that I may claim them as my own rather than blame them on someone else.

O LORD, deepen my wounds into wisdom;

shape my weakness into compassion;

gentle my envy into enjoyment,

my fear into trust,

my guilt into honesty,

my accusing finger into tickling ones.

O GOD, gather me to be with you as you are with me.

 Image from here

Amy Winehouse: The Day She Came To Dingle

This is a great tribute to Amy Winehouse who sadly died in her London home just over one year ago.

English: Amy Winehouse at the Eurockéennes of 2007 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It's an hour long video and is titled Amy Winehouse : The Day She came to Dingle.  one of my favourite places in Ireland.

 I don't know how long this will be available to watch in BBC i Player so catch it from here while you can.

From the programme description :

"Back in 2006 on a stormy December night, Amy Winehouse flew to the remote, south-western corner of Ireland to perform for Other Voices, an acclaimed Irish TV music series filmed in Dingle every winter. 

Amy took to the stage of Saint James's church, capacity 85, and wowed the small, packed crowd with a searing, acoustic set of songs from Back to Black. 





After leaving the stage, a relaxed and happy Amy spoke about her music and influences - Mahalia Jackson, Sarah Vaughan, Ray Charles and the Shangri-Las to name a few. 

Arena joined forces with "Other Voices" and went to Dingle to catch up with some of the people that Amy met on that day, including taxi driver Paddy Kennedy, her bass player Dale Davis and Rev Mairt Hanley of the Other Voices church. 


This film showcases not only Amy herself, but the musical geniuses that inspired her to forge her own jazz pop style."

Related articles

• Amy Winehouse: A Year Of Tributes (newsroom.mtv.com)