You're Italian, aren't you?

Just this week, I was asked by a sophisticated Thai woman, I know from a distance through a close, mutual friend, where I came from.  I said Australia.  She was shocked as she always thought I was Italian, as our mutual friend, Nando, is an Italian.  She had just assumed for so long that, like Nando, I was Italian.  It just goes to show how easily we can assume and be mistaken in our assumptions, when approaching the other. 

While we keep our distance and remain that other, we don't meet; we don't talk; we don't engage.  So we miss out on so much, not realizing a rich potential for friendships and for bettering our world.   We are the world; not a bunch of I's, sharing the same planet.  We need each other and care for each other, co-existing as good neighbours to build up our world, ever better and stronger.    

"Holy, beloved Father, your Son Jesus taught us that there is great rejoicing in heaven whenever someone lost is found, whenever someone excluded, rejected or discarded is gathered into our “we”, which thus becomes ever wider. 

We ask you to grant the followers of Jesus, and all people of good will, the grace to do your will on earth. Bless each act of welcome and outreach that draws those in exile into the “we” of community and of the Church, so that our earth may truly become what you yourself created it to be: the common home of all our brothers and sisters. Amen."

A Prayer of Pope Francis for World Day of Migrants and Refugees - 26th September, 2021  

Our Power is in embracing Our Powerlessness

A Celtic blessing prayer of love

We prayed this blessing prayer at mass this Sunday for a lovely copule celebrating and remembering 25 years of committed love.  What a wondrous remembrance at any time, but especially as we suffer the rigors of a pandemic.  

I would propose that it is the unknown brings upon us grave and shared concerns.  With the unknown, come fear, accompanied by rising insecurity and anxiety.    In the midst of life's ever chaos and struggle, we are best to acknowledge and hold onto enduring and life-giving love as our sure anchor to weather any storm.  .

What more to say?  Love, the gift of God, endures all storms and sustains the human spirit.  

It is all an Illusion

 

Life is an illusion.  Illusion is defined as when something "is likely to be wrongly perceived or interprted by the senses".  So one holds a false idea or belief.  

Plato reflected upon the nature of reality using the scene of looking into a cave, within which a group of people was gathered around a fire.  He could see the shadows of the group upon the wall of the cave but, from the shadows, he asked if  he could he tell the reality of that group within the cave.  Thus he used this to pose the question - What is real?  

The same philosophical question remains ever with us. 

Our present age seems to be full of illusions.  We live under changing conditions within an ongoing pandemic and present lockdown, but what does that mean in reality for us?  Where is this time leading us in society and church?  Many questions arise and remain. We are entering a new era but what will it look like?  I have no definite answers.  Who does?  No one, really.  We all just have many questions. 

We have just remembered the 20th anniversary of 9/11.  We know what followed.  Now with the withdrawal of western forces from Afghanistan, we see part of the outcome of the western response to 9/11.  The same still question arises - what is real?  

I feel assured of one reality.  9/11 saw many heroes arise from its ashes and from among ordinary citizens.  I never knew at the time, that when with the Franciscans in 1999 in New York, I had met one hero among many of 9/11, Fr Mychal Judge.   A message is that any of us can be a hero when facing the challenges of the true reality, not the illusion, before us.   

Lord, take me where You want me to go;                                                                                                  Let me meet who You want me to meet;                                                                                                           Tell me what you want me to say, and                                                                                                              Keep me out of your way.                                                                                                                                         (Mychal Judge, Franciscan priest and New York Fire Department chaplain who died at                                   World Trade Center on 9/11, while anointing a dying fireman.)

Good Attracts Good

Jesus pulling up a struggling Peter

We build back better together. 

We are in this together.

It is not over until we all come out together. 

We leave no one behind.

These are some of the cathch phrases for the present pandemic.  They capture both the truth and a vision.  The pity is to see how the reality does not match the vision. 

"I have but one desire - to be lost in the secret of God's face."  (Thomas Merton) 

What does this mean?  God is mystery.  Let us be lost in the mystery that is ever in our midst, and so much so that we express the mystery through our humanity and our bodiliness.  As we are, so we live out the mystery in physical ways, in ways that truly express the divine.  

As we live with the mystery, thus we build up the good in the world and be the co-creators God ordains us to be.  That is at the core of the mystery.  So good builds upon good and the bad, that we so readily focus upon, is diminished.  This is God's doing and choice through us.  

A God reality is so often identified by many as being unreal because this world is not a place for such things as living ideals of love and justice..  Faith tells us oherwise.  Despite all that goes wrong in our world, the perceived unreal within the world's reality becomes real through good building upon good, through our acts of kindness, through human love lived and shared.  

So we enter the unreal, the new era that Pope Francis points us to within a post-pandemic world.