Some useful advice for the Anglican Communion

I came across this today in 'The Irish Catholic' Fr. Rolheiser is one of the main reasons I read this paper. If we in the Anglican Communion were to follow his advice how much better things might be. His columns are available HERE

On Litmus Tests for Christian Discipleship

2009-11-01

We live today with a lot of polarization, both inside of our churches and in society at large. There is something healthy in this, despite its bitter underside. Moral outrage and anger is in the end an indication of moral fervor. We still believe in things, in right and wrong. There's virtue in that.

But that being said, there is also something very unhealthy in our present situation, one within which sincere people can no longer have a civil and respectful conversation with each other over certain moral and religious issues because each side ultimately disrespects the other, convinced that the other has sold out on some issue that constitutes a litmus test for moral goodness. Inside the church and inside of our civic political processes, invariably, each side, liberal and conservative alike, has one issue that is its ultimate non-negotiable and which constitutes the litmus test by which to judge the moral and religious goodness of everyone else.

For some the single issue is a moral one (abortion, gay marriage, justice for a particular group), for others the single issue is an ecclesial practice (church attendance. membership in a particular denomination), and for others the single issue is dogmatic (women's ordination, the uncritical acceptance of scripture or of church authority, syncretism). But invariably one issue is singled out so as to become the basis for an ultimate discriminating judgment, a litmus test, as to whether someone else is worthy of religious and moral respect.

But is this legitimate? Can a single issue become a litmus test? What does Jesus say on this? What do the scriptures say on this? Can one single moral or religious issue be seen as constituting the very essence, the center, the non-negotiable heart of Christian discipleship?

In a sense, yes, though this must be carefully nuanced. As well, each New Testament writer formats this in a different way:

In the Gospel of Matthew the moral heart of discipleship is articulated by Jesus in what we call The Sermon on the Mount. At its center lies this challenge: Can you love an enemy? Can you truly forgive someone who has hurt you? Can you bless someone who has cursed you? Can you be good to those who have done you harm? Can you forgive a murderer?

This challenge is what sets Jesus' moral teaching apart from others and gives it its unique character - and its real teeth. This is meant to be the distinguishing mark of a follower of Jesus: He or she can love and forgive an enemy. If the Gospel of Matthew, or perhaps the New Testament as a whole, gives us a litmus test for discipleship, this might be its one-line formulation: Can you love and forgive an enemy?

Luke's Gospel makes essentially the same point in a different language. There Jesus challenges us to be compassionate as our heavenly Father is compassionate and then goes on to define that compassion as a love, like that of the Father of the Prodigal Son and Older Brother, that lets its light shine on the bad as well as the good, that reaches out and loves irrespective of what is deserving and what isn't. The litmus test here might be worded: Love each other beyond differences and beyond what you think is deserving of love. Do not love just your own kind or someone who reciprocates. Embrace in love as widely as God embraces in love.

The Epistles of Paul capture this in the distinction Paul makes between what he calls life in the flesh as opposed to what he calls life in the Spirit. The former, life in the flesh, is characterized by "lewd conduct, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, hostilities, bickering, jealousy, outbursts of rage, selfish rivalries, dissensions, factionalism, envy, drunkenness, and orgies." When these exist in our lives, Paul cautions, we may not delude ourselves into thinking we are living inside of God's spirit.

Conversely, life in the Spirit, for Paul, is characterized by "charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, long-suffering, endurance, mildness, kindness, generosity, faith, and chastity." It is only when we these qualities are manifest in our lives that we may understand ourselves as walking in true discipleship.

For Paul, the litmus test is not one, single moral issue but rather a whole way of living that radiates more charity than selfishness, more joy than bitterness, more peace than factionalism, more patience and respect than negative judgment and gossip, more empathy than anger, and more willingness to sweat the blood of sacrifice than to give into the temptations of the moment.

This is not to suggest that particular moral, dogmatic, and ecclesial issues are not important; some of them are a matter of life and death. But Christian discipleship is not just about our actions, it's also about our hearts. The essence of Christian discipleship lies in putting on the heart of Christ. Proper morality, defense of truth, and life-giving church practices follow from that - and, when rooted in that, they become respectful, forgiving, and loving.

Film on Obama's Irish Roots to screen at Waterford Film Festival

Read all about it here at irishvoice.com
Incidentally the cleric in the picture is wearing some of my robes

Weird Wednesday: What happens to your pet when you go to heaven?

I think this is for real which makes it even crazier:
Eternal Earth-Bound Pets, USA
The next best thing to pet salvation in a Post Rapture World

The School Ansaphone

The school Ansaphone - an essential piece of equipment in all schools. As a school manager this is sooooo true - I love it!

A great country this for old men!

The law is truly an ass! Welcome to Ireland 2009 where a pervert 57 year old dentist can take advantage of a vulnerable trainee dental nurse, unbuttoning her top despite her protests on the pretence of 'checking the buttons' and gets away with a €1000 euro fine while a consensual sexual encounter between a teenage boy of nineteen and a teenage girl of 16 ends up in the boy getting a criminal custodial conviction and an entry on the sex-offenders register! And we expect people to respect the law!

I don't like Saints!

Sermon for All Saints 2009

I want to start today with what may sound like an extraordinary statement:
I don’t like Saints!
Does that sound odd on this day of all days - All Saints Day? It may sound heretical to suggest that there is a problem with Saints, but I think Saints rather than inspiring us in our lives of faith can actually be a hindrance to our walk with God.
You might well ask what is the problem with the Saints – Surely people who led godly lives and did heroic deeds of self sacrifice for the sake of their faith should be celebrated and revered as the Church has traditionally done. What about St. Peter and St Paul, or more recent saints such as Mother Teresa or indeed our own St. Brigid or indeed St. Kieran who has a particular association with this group of parishes? Should they not be revered and celebrated. Actually No, I don’t think so or at least not in the way we tend to celebrate the Saints and have done through the ages. We have made of the Saints impossible role models who in the way their lives have been portrayed make us feel inadequate and guilty for our failings. We have attached to them a perfection that Christ himself never demanded of any of his followers. We have turned them from icons to idols always an easy line to cross and one which the Church has continually done through the ages.
There is an almost direct equivalent in today’s celebrity culture though at least in the celebrity culture we are aware of the warts as well as the achievements of our cultural idols. When it comes to Saints things are very different – they are painted in terms of their virtues with little or no account of their vices and yet like all human beings they had their vices….and were all the more human for them.
It is very hard for you and me, mere mortals, to identify with an image of almost sterile perfection.
It is neither realistic or attractive – It may fascinate us but we cannot ultimately relate to it. We really do the Saints a disservice when we portray them in this way. We actually devalue their witness because we dehumanise it and make it impossible for us to aspire to. I am named after St Stephen, traditionally the first Christian Martyr (I don’t aspire to that for one moment) I would love to think I had that courage but I doubt it - but I would love to know more about him – Apart from his Martrydom all that is concrete is that he was one of the first deacons of the Church – There was probably a lot more to St. Stephen, plenty of weaknesses and failings, plenty of idiosyncrasies, but all we tend to think of is a heroic martyrdom.
So one thing is clear, the lives of the Saints as presented and celebrated are heavily edited – all we get are the highlights and like watching the highlights of a great sporting occasion they are no substitute for the real thing. We miss those little seemingly insignificant moments which might actually have allowed us to identify with them.
The other problem with the Saints is that it is all about them! What do I mean by that? Well it is all about their achievements and their witness when it really should be about something or someone else entirely. The stories of the Saints are not about heroic human beings but rather about God’s extraordinary Grace working in them. It is not about them – It is about God! The Saints are not saintly because of any innate virtues but rather because they were open to God and so more perfectly fulfilled their God given potential, a potential in which we all share! How often are we told that we were created in the Divine image? What does that mean? It means surely that we ALL can be Saints of God and it certainly means that we are ALL called to be Saints of God. We all have the potential to mirror something of the Divine in our lives, not the totality but something and that is surely the most extraordinary privelage.
And sometimes it is in our imperfection that God is revealed. One of my favourite and I think most profound lyrics from contemporary music comes from Leonard Cohen and it is this – ‘There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in’.
The wonderful story of our faith is that we are acceptable with all our flaws and imperfections. By becoming incarnate god has sanctified the whole of Creation and revealed in Christ the incredible potential, not just of humanity but of the whole created order. It is not about the Saints but it is about God, a generous God who calls us all to participate in helping this beautiful world achieve its true potential to mirror the glory of God.
Amen.

1 Parish 2 US Presidents! Are we blessed or what?

See the report below: President Josiah Bartlett is coming our way shortly. Actor Martin Sheen is a familiar sight locally as his family hail from Borrisokane where he is to film his latest work, STELLA DAYS.
Irish Times report HERE and below:

An Irishman's Diary

Frank McNally

Sat, Oct 31, 2009

IT IS ALL of 100 years now since an Irishman living in Italy became so impressed with the potential of a new, fast-growing entertainment medium that he decided to introduce it to his home country. So in October 1909, he went back to Dublin to make the arrangements. And two months’ later, a week before Christmas, he opened Ireland’s first dedicated cinema at No 45 Mary Street.

It was not exactly a success. Partly because all the films he arranged to screen were in Italian, the cinema struggled. But undaunted, the would-be impresario – James Joyce – returned to Italy and went on to make quite a name for himself in another of his big interests, literature.

Fast-forward almost half a century and a not dissimilar drama played out in a small, north Tipperary town called Borrisokane. Too late for Joyce, Ireland’s love-affair with the movies was by now in full bloom, consummated nightly in such vast picture palaces as Dublin’s Carlton and Adelphi. But like many rural towns, Borrisokane still didn’t have a cinema, until one man determined to change this.

The unlikely Joycean figure was the local parish priest, Canon Cahill, who – defying the clergy’s traditional suspicion of the medium – decided that the town would have a silver screen. The priest was a cultured man, but also a steely one: known for his habit of swimming daily in Lough Derg, even in the winter of 1963 when the lake froze and he had to bring a pick with him to break the ice.

He was used to getting his way; so the necessary money was soon raised. And in April 1957 the Stella Cinema opened in Borrisokane’s Clarke Memorial Hall.

With a proper sense of occasion, Canon Cahill made a speech beforehand on the cultural importance of film, a medium that – at 60 – was about the same age as himself. He paid tribute to the pioneering Lumière brothers. And with a warning to the audience not to clap too hard – “It’s a very old building”, he brought the lights down on Marching Along , a musical biopic about bandmaster John Philip Sousa.

There were many better films shown during the Stella’s heyday – Casablanca, The Third Man , and All Quiet on the Western Front , to name just a few; along with such less celebrated classics as Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman . But it was a short heyday.

As mass entertainment, cinema-going had already peaked by the 1960s. Television was on the rise. And in May 1967, barely 10 years after it opened with great hoopla, the Stella closed almost unnoticed.

Its story is similar to many others in small-town Ireland. We might have heard nothing more about it but for two locals. One was Michael Doorley who, in 2002, wrote a book called Stella Days , a glowingly affectionate tribute to the old cinema. The other was a woman called Mary Anne Phelan.

The latter had emigrated to the US many years before, where she became Mrs Estevez. Her children were called Estevez too. But she is better known to posterity as the late mother of one of Hollywood’s greatest actors, whose stage name is Martin Sheen: a man deeply proud of his Tipperary roots and – incidentally – now about the right age to play Canon Cahill.

One thing led to another. And although the details are still being sorted, it is hoped that filming of Stella Days, directed by Thaddeus O’Sullivan and with a cast including Sheen, Stephen Rea and Romola Garai (of Atonement and Inside I’m Dancing) will begin soon, shot partly on location in and around Lough Derg.

Sheen is not Borrisokane’s only link with Hollywood, as it happens. Although born in Dublin, the once famous silent-movie director Reginald Ingram Hitchcock – Rex Ingram for short – spent formative years in the Tipperary town, where his father was Church of Ireland rector.

Not to be confused with the actor of the same name, Ingram reached his peak with such films as The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) and The Prisoner of Zenda (1922). A contemporary film-maker once called him “the world’s greatest director”.

But that was arguably not the greatest compliment paid him.

Unsurprisingly, he also came to the attention of the aforementioned Irish-Italian cinephile, Mr Joyce: earning a reference in Finnegans Wake as “Rex Ingram, pageant master”.

Of course, Finnegans Wake is widely regarded as a heroic failure, a bit like Joyce’s Volta cinema. For more encouraging omens, Borrisokane and the makers of Stella Days might look to another Italian source, the 1988 film Cinema Paradiso . Directed by Giuseppe Tornatore, this concerned a veteran cinematographer’s return to his Sicilian birthplace for the funeral of an old friend, the projectionist in the local picture house who had inspired him as a child to make movies The film is about friendship, coming of age, love, and loss: all considered against the background of a small-town cinema. It did poorly on initial release in Italy. Then the producers cut half an hour out of it for international release, and it took off: winning the special jury prize at Cannes and the best foreign film Oscar, en route to earning status as a popular classic and reviving the Italian film industry.

© 2009 The Irish Times

Trapatonni to lead Ireland to historic victoire!

Here's to Trapatonni- - The Corrigan Brothers encourage Trap to fry the French like their fries! No Mercy! (Or should that be Non Merci?)

Canterbury has finally lost the plot!

++Rowan seems to think ecumenism is about being walked on! Will anyone rid us of this meddlesome priest? Please!!!

Obama plays the waiting game

Most interesting column by Andrew Sullivan in today's London Sunday Times:

President Obama may seem to dither, but he is ready to strike

There is a strange quality to Barack Obama’s pragmatism. It can look like dilly-dallying, weakness, indecisiveness. But although he may seem weak at times, one of the words most applicable to him is something else entirely: ruthless. Beneath the crisp suit and easy smile there is a core of strategic steel.

In this respect, Obama’s domestic strategy is rather like his foreign one — not so much weakness but the occasional appearance of weakness as a kind of strategy. The pattern is now almost trademarked. He carefully lays out the structural message he is trying to convey. At home, it is: we all have to fix the mess left by Bush-Cheney. Abroad, it is: we all have to fix the mess left by Bush-Cheney. And then ... not much.

The agenda may be clear. He wants an engaged Iran without nuclear weapons. He wants to be the first American president to enact universal health insurance coverage. He wants a sane two-state solution for Israel/Palestine. He wants to leave Iraq without having it blow up on him. He wants to find a way to solve the AfPak Rubik’s Cube. He wants to allow gays to serve openly in the military. But on all these things, it’s mid-October and still ... nothing substantive. So obviously, he’s a total fraud and failure, right?

Wrong. When Obama moves, he moves with chilling swiftness. The stimulus package went through Congress like a speeding bullet. The appointment of Hispanic judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court was as clean as these things can be. But these were matters over which he had almost complete control. When he doesn’t have such control, he takes another tack.

He sets out a goal and then he waits. He waits for the other players to show their hand. He starts a process that itself reveals that certain options are unfeasible, until he is revealed by events to have no other choice but ... well, the least worst practical way forward. He always knows that things can change, and waits for the optimal moment to seize the initiative.

On Iran, for example, he has done not much more on the surface than open up direct talks. Beneath, you see deeper shifts. His election itself and his Cairo speech laid some important groundwork for June’s Green revolution.

He managed to inspire the opposition without throwing his lot in with them (playing the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, with finesse). In America, he has slowly defused the debate away from the polarising “Are you a patriot?” or “Are you with those scary Muslims?” to the more realistic: “If we want to keep Iran from having a nuclear weapon, what’s the least worst way of trying — or is it impossible after all?”

By waiting, we learn. We now know, for example, that Russia’s president, Dmitry Medvedev, is more sympathetic to sanctions against Iran than Vladimir Putin. We learn more about divisions within the Tehran leadership. We may also discover that even with a transparent, good-faith engagement from Obama, the Chinese and Russians have no intention of shifting. That will leave him with a clearer, if narrower, set of policy options. The president can afford to do this because he has more power than anyone else. But he doesn’t have total control, especially as America’s global power is balanced by China, India and Russia. He’ll act when he knows what the options really are. And not until.

On health insurance reform, you see the same cunning. Universal insurance is now all but certain in some form, but how to restrain costs remains a difficult challenge. One way would be the dreaded public option, or rather a compromise in which a public option would be available, but only if individual states approve it for their own populations. Obama knows the public option, insofar as most Americans understand it, is popular. So why not get his opponents to fight it in their states where they can be hurt, rather than nationally, where they can tar Obama as a “socialist”. Sneaky.

It may not happen, of course. But what’s important to note is that it’s still possible even at this late stage. After months of wrangling, his near-ideal solution is still viable. (Compare that with how Hillary Clinton’s fared in 1993.) He has fudged without cornering himself with a commitment he will be unable to fulfil, while leaving open the best practical option in the near future. That way, whatever happens, he will get the credit.

And he has framed the debate so that the Republicans find themselves as their own worst enemies. Support for Obama’s health reform was sliding until August’s right-wing temper tantrum. Since then, his approval ratings on the issue have steadily climbed, and Democrats are increasing their lead in congressional polling.

Now look ahead to next year. The impact of health reform will be initially all positive: more and more people able to get insurance, without the full costs being felt. The stimulus package has been so steered towards spending in 2010 (sneaky again) that it will doubtless boost the recovery as the mid-term congressional elections approach. And, with health reform under his belt, Obama could easily pivot from his liberal base towards an emphasis on fiscal responsibility — which puts the Republicans on the spot and appeals to independents.

In other words, he has kept most of his options open. He is thinking further ahead than the Republicans. If he gets real universal coverage, he will be an icon on the left and thereby get more breathing space to tilt to the right. That’s why he may well not make a big move or decision on Afghanistan any time soon. It would be nuts to either alienate or please his liberal base until he gets healthcare passed.

But if healthcare passes, and the economy revives, Obama will have dodged several premature traps. And he will then be in a very strong domestic position from which to deal with Iran and Afghanistan and Israel. My sense is that on the really divisive issues — accountability for torture, and gay rights, for example — he intends to wait for a second term. If that enrages his base — as it has — they have few other places to go. And he looks bipartisan by resisting them. At the same time, he has not explicitly ruled out bringing justice to the torturers or rights for the gays. He’s able to balance a commitment to the right thing with an almost chilling ability to restrain himself from doing it.

As a long-term political strategy, you can see the method in his apparent meandering. Yes, there are vast risks. It may still fail. And yet, when you look at it closely, you see that in all this, he has both maintained his vast ambitions and yet shrewdly minimised the political risks to himself. This is cunning, not weakness. And one day, his opponents will realise it.

The Men who built the Motorways

This new song from the Corrigan Brothers tells the story of the forgotten men who sacrificed home and family to build the motorways of the UK. I wonder how similar is their story to the East Europeans who have built our motorways? Time will tell. Anyway a great song and a great video to go with it.

A few days in Dingle / An Daingean

 

 

 

 

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