2011 July archive at Being Frank

Archive for July, 2011

Jul

Joan of Arc…signing off

By Joan of Arc 8 Comments

Categories: Being Frank...

First of all – apologies for my lack of a post last week. My life seems to be spinning a little out of control at the moment!

People keep asking me if I’m excited to be leaving tomorrow – to be entering a convent – starting a new adventure. I’m not quite at the point of excitement – in fact, some better descriptive words for me at the moment would be: stressed, tired, busy, emotional, nervous, etc.

But … what I am excited about is … vocations!

Within the last two weeks I’ve had a friend enter into postulancy with the Carmelites in Christchurch, another friend become consecrated with the Community of the Sons and Daughters of God, another friend celebrate her wedding with a truly beautiful Mass, and tomorrow I leave New Zealand for the Sisters of Life in New York (via a pilgrimage through some of the Holy sites of France, Spain, and Italy). It is so exciting to see other young women really taking the time to discern where God is calling them, and to witness their ‘stepping out’ in faith.

When I first started writing on Being Frank just over a year ago my prayer and hope was for an increase in courage (hence the name Joan of Arc). I believe that stepping out of my comfort zone to do this has been an important part of my journey so far. One of my favourite lines from Brooke Fraser’s songs is: ‘for my comfort would prefer for me to be numb, and avoid the impending birth of who I was born to become’. I believe it was St Catherine of Siena who said ‘If you are what you are meant to be you will set the world on fire’. This is what vocation is all about (all types of vocation). But sometimes it takes a lot of courage and trust in God to be what you are meant to be.

I just want to say thank you to all of you out there who have shared a part in my journey (admin, posters, commenter, readers). I pray that each of you, too, will find (or continue being) what you are meant to be.

Here’s a little verse by Charles Peguy (1873 – 1914) which I have found encouraging…

I myself will dream a dream within you
Good dreams come from me you know.
My dreams seem impossible,
not too practical,
not for the cautious man or woman.
a little risky sometimes,
a trifle brash perhaps,
Some of my friends prefer
to rest more comfortably,
in sounder sleep,
with visionless eyes.
But from those who share my dreams,
I ask a little patience,
A little humour,
Some small courage,
And a listening heart -
I will do the rest.

Then they will risk,
and wonder at their daring.
Run ,and marvel at their speed,
Build, and stand in awe at the beauty of their building.

You will meet me often as you work,
in your companions, who share your risk,
in your friends, who believe in you enough
to lend their own dreams,
their own hands,
their own hearts,
to your building.
In the people who will stand in our doorway,
stay awhile, and walk away knowing they, too, can find a dream.
There will be sun-filled days,
and sometimes it will rain.
A little variety.
Both come from me.
So, come now,
be content.
It is my dream you dream,
my house you build,
my caring you witness,
my love you share,
and this is the heart of the matter.

Jul

“Did you hear about that guy who blogged about gossip?”

By Voice in the wilderness Closed

Categories: Being Frank...

It’s so tempting to talk about other people who aren’t present. I think we are all guilty of it, well, I definitely am.

In the movie Doubt, which is a great movie by the way, there is a scene where the priest is giving a homily about gossip. This often comes to mind when I think about the way I and others talk about people behind their backs.

The metaphor given is that of a feather pillow taken to a rooftop and split open, the feathers allowed to blow away in the wind. This is the result of gossip also, it is impossible to undo or ‘collect up’. Watch the scene here…

Whether the gossip is right, wrong, or a collection of half truths, it breaks down relationships, breeds mistrust and fosters resentment. I think if we want to improve things or are worried about particular person and their actions, we need to act, but we need to be careful, sensitive and above all else, motivated by love.

Jul

“Mcbain to base, under attack by commie-nazis”

By Methuselah's Beard 5 Comments

Categories: Being Frank...

Someone brought up the dwindling participation of posters on Being Frank last week. I blame age. As people get older, they tend to want to do more old people stuff. Like reading, or enjoying a cup of tea while reading. Or watching tv while reading. Getting involved in online altercations isn’t the best way to spend a day or an evening.

I think the problem may also be the general lack of hard hitting issues lately on the blog which is understandable because who really wants to read bad news? We have the Catholic Soapbox for that (free plug). And maybe the Church doesn’t really want to be hard hitting at the moment. However I do see, or remember seeing at any rate, that the Catholic Church recently recalled its envoy to Ireland amidst the ongoing scandal and uproar over there. On a scale of hard hitting, I would rate this a ‘JCVD in “Double Impact” ‘ on the Scale of Hard Hitting. That’s quite hard hitting. I think this shows that the Church is about to get serious about Ireland.

Also more recently, I see a Maori Party MP made some quite hard hitting comments about people who have committed suicide which caused a bit of a kerfuffle in good old New Zealand. I think the Catholic Church’s position on suicide is quite hard hitting, perhaps rating a ‘JCVD in “Universal Soldier”‘. Actually I’m quite out of touch with the Church’s position. From memory, anyone that commits suicide goes straight to hell or limbo? Although this may have changed in the recent past to take into account the victim’s state of mind.

You know, I’m not really comfortable making judgements of this sort on people. Sure the Catechism seemingly lays out positions for damnation and condemnation in black and white terms, but I like to think that God in his infinite mercy applies some element of Godliness when He does the judging.

But then again, what do I know? I’m a hard hitter along the lines of ‘Arnie in “Kindergarten Cop”‘.

Jul

Where do you want us to prepare it?

By Opthomistic 8 Comments

Categories: Being Frank...

Personally I find rehashing this old can of wyrms rather boring, but some people just don’t get it.

Next week: something mostly harmless.

Luke 22:9-13

They asked him, ‘Where do you want us to prepare it?’ He said to them, ‘Look, as you go into the city you will meet a man carrying a pitcher of water. Follow him into the house he enters and tell the owner of the house, “The Master says this to you: Where is the room for me to eat the Passover with my disciples?” The man will show you a large upper room furnished with couches. Make the preparations there.’ The set off and found everything as he had told them and prepared the Passover.

Christ chooses an odd sign for the two closest apostles to look for in finding the location for the Last Supper. He asks them to look for someone carrying a pitcher of water. But not just any person, he asks them to meet a man carrying a pitcher of water. I think it would be wholly unremarkable if Christ had asked them to search for women carrying water; carrying water was a job that only women used to do. That a man is doing what was “a woman’s job” in Palestine 2,000 years ago should give us a reason to wonder: why?

The answer is that this man was one of the Essenes, a religious group that consisted only of men. These communities were a prelude to some kinds of monastic life which later developed in the Church. The Essenes household would not have celebrated the Paschal feast with women like elsewhere in Israel. This means that, contra Dan Brown conspiracy nuts, there is no plausible way to say that Mary Magdalene was present at the Last Supper. And, contra women sacramental priesthood sympathisers (please try not to give them the internet traffic by clicking that link), there were no women ordained into sacramental priesthood at the Last Supper. Christ would have simply sent his disciples somewhere else to prepare for what would be the Institution of the Eucharist if he had intended anything other than male only efficacy of Eucharistic consecration.

Yet another reason women are not priests. I lose count of the number of real reasons. I also lose count of the number of straw person arguments that the advocates of women priests construct, attempt to pin to the Church and attack.

General revelation is finished, and the authority to ordain women as priests wasn’t contained in it. The Catholic Church would have to step outside it’s power, which is a power it doesn’t have power to do, a flat out contradiction.

It’s like trying to carry water in a basket.

Jul

The Amy Winehouse lifestyle

By Inkling 1 Comment

Categories: Being Frank...

Apparently few people were surprised to hear of the recent death of Amy Winehouse – her lifestyle was one of the sort of hard drinking and drug-taking that can’t be sustained for long, so her friends and family (and the odd celeb magazine) said – which of course was no secret to anyone who knew her and her reputation.

It raises an interesting point though – talking to a friend after the tragedy (and it is a real tragedy) they said that it calls to question the kind of lifestyle more and more young people are living – and, to some extent, are expected to be living. Socialising with friends of a weekend no longer takes the innocent form of the Saturday night ball at the hotel in town, with girls in long dresses and boys in suits. Our modern-day Cinderellas leave home at midnight, and it’s a series of nightclubs with drink and drunks and drugs and druggies, mixing with strangers in dimly lit bars, and a taxi home at 5:30am.

This friend, one night in a club, said something which made a couple of highly unlikely people turn around quite unexpectedly and ask if she was Catholic – to which she replied ‘yes’, so they threw their arms around her and jumped up and down saying ‘We’re Catholic too! We’re all Catholic!’ - and my friend found herself wondering if they were in fact Catholic – because being Catholic is a lot more than just the name.

But then she found herself wondering how ‘Catholic’ her Saturday night habits were. It’s ok for Catholics to drink, but not to get drunk, right? And in the Bible, she said, it says that we shouldn’t mix with the sort of people one finds at nightclubs – but she was out with friends – did this mean it was ok? And yet she couldn’t help feeling like a hypocrite at Mass on Sunday morning.

I suppose it’s a difficult one – is it a good thing for there to be a Catholic presence in that night-time world? But I think if this lifestyle is wrong, if it’s going to lead to more Amy Winehouses in society, maybe we need people to start taking a stand, to start changing habits and opinions – and should the first of those be the young Catholics?

Jul

The Language of Form

By Marty Rethul 5 Comments

Categories: Being Frank...

I found a video on youtube the other day which looks at the influence that the form of a church can have upon a congregation. Here is the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evYzQBoFp0c

The following are a number of quotes (perhaps not all word perfect, but as close as I could render them) from the video:

Space forms one – space leads one into certain expectations.

Church architecture is crucial to worship…it has a material impact upon the spiritual…it is one of the great Catholic principles that the spiritual is mediated to us through the material.

Building forms have meanings…architecture affects every single person, whether they want it to or not…the church building has been described throughout the centuries as a catechism in stone.

Architecture is a language; the architecture of a building tells people who we are, and as we use buildings, it gives us a renewed sense of who we are and what we stand for.

Church architecture, understood linguistically, needs to be able to meaningfully communicate what it is that the Catholic Church is to the Catholics who are there. The experience of the person in the pew, and the priest at the altar, is directly related to…the fluency of the language of the building that they are in.

Ultimately one needs to get back to the first principles of what a church is. If we understand our Church as being throughout time and for all times, then we can have a stronger appreciation for the validity and indeed the value that classical architecture brings to the Church.

Because we are human, our devotion is incarnated through our bodies. Our interior life is fostered by a certain exteriority. For example, liturgy and spirituality can only be lived by means of the external bodily nature of man and woman. Even using the imagination is impossible without the externality of the body. Where do images come from, if not through the senses? How are new ones conceived in the imagination, if not through the use of the organ of memory which is, of course, directly linked to the matter of the body which is in the external realm?

The point I’m trying to make here is that our experience of churches is not simply as a place to gather. The liturgy is not to be reduced to the ‘purely internal human essentials’ – this is dangerously inhuman in fact. The church is part of the liturgical experience – or ought to be – which is why bulldozing altars, or building dreadful modernist rubbish endangers the faith.

Jul

Joy

By Voice in the wilderness 2 Comments

Categories: Being Frank...

I read an article by famous Catholic writer and papal biographer, George Weigel the other day. He was writing about how the bishops being appointed today are more joyful and evangelical than their predecessors.

It made me think how important it is that we as Christians are joyful. I’m not talking about being constantly happy and bubbly in our actions and emotions, to be like that 24/7 would be false and personally turns me away from a group or organisation. Rather, our joy must be deep and truthful, in touch with our own and others sufferings. For instance, someone who spends their life ministering to the dying or imprisoned would struggle to be constantly ‘happy’ in a worldy sense, but if they are living the truth of the gospel, one would hope that their deep joy, founded in the resurrection of Jesus and His victory over sin, would radiate and be obvious to all.

Over the last few months, I have had he pleasure of interacting with the new Christchurch Catholic Mission Team. A group of four young adults (about 18-19) who have given a year of their lives to Christ and His Church. They are a great example of people joyfully living the Gospel.

“The biggest challenge [...] everywhere, is to preach the Gospel. . . . We need to have confidence in the Gospel, we have to live it faithfully, and to live it without compromise and with great joy.”

- Archbishop Charles Chaput

“Joy is a net of love by which we catch souls.”

- Blessed Theresa of Calcutta