Christmas tidings to heal the spirit

I Love the  prayer i copied below, which brings us the tidings of a cleansed peaceful joy. This year has been both sad and joyful,  and I am still trying to make sense of it all. To make sense of the death of those close to you is hard especially when trying to explain it to a child. it brings into question all our beliefs and forces us to look at the essence of our belief. All I can say is that prayer has helped and that fellow Christians have helped. Which is why it is so important for us to be in a community, you cannot go it alone. 


 Prayer for Christmas Morning

by Robert Louis Stevenson

The day of joy returns, Father in Heaven, and crowns another year with peace and good will.
Help us rightly to remember the birth of Jesus, that we may share in the song of the angels, the gladness of the shepherds, and the worship of the wise men.
Close the doors of hate and open the doors of love all over the world?
Let kindness come with every gift and good desires with every greeting.
Deliver us from evil, by the blessing that Christ brings, and teach us to be merry with clean hearts.
May the Christmas morning make us happy to be thy children,
And the Christmas evening bring us to our bed with grateful thoughts, forgiving and forgiven, for Jesus sake.
Amen

So this Christmas, for all of us who have suffered a loss and need kindness, reach out to kindred spirits and let the powerful cleansing and wholeness of Christmas heal you.

St Nicholas a children's saint

Today for many children in Europe it is a day of bounty and joy! Sint Nicholas, patron saint of children distributes presents and goodwill galore. Being Dutch, this is my favourite day of all, I well remember the excitement of waiting for Sint Nicholas to arrive on a boat from Spain, together with his helpers called black peters (zwarte pieten!), who dressed as 17th century court pages add to the fun by carrying round a bag with presents, but also mock to punish children who misbehave. When you get older and no longer believe in  Saint Nicholas, riding on his white horse on the roofs of houses, the evening before Sint Nicholas feast, on 5 December is a time when adults will give each other'surprises' or small presents often with a joke attached and accompanied by poems describing, the personality and perhaps faults of the recipient.

Good clean fun and a good occasion to give each other a present. Especially as for me this helps christmas take on a more religious and family meaning, and is not so overrun with commercial present giving. For children it is hard to distinguish the real meaning of Christmas and thus Saint Nicholas provides parents with a good occasion to split the commercial aspects of Christmas from the spiritual one

Adoration;the need to give up control and let Jesus give you all his love and protection

We need to be humble when we want to respond to God's humbleness( dixit Benoit XVI in 2008!).

 

Today our parish is celebrating a day of eucharistic adoration, with times dedicated to the children and their parents, as they come out of school! For children who are used to seeing their parents rush around especially if both work, a time amidst their schoolfriends and parents in which prayer stands at the centre is so important. They and we adults need to realise that it is through prayer that Jesus reaches our souls and can make us part of his presence.To adore the eucharist is to adore the presence of Jesus and his love for all of us. Let us be joyful and thankful for this supreme gift.

 

El Camino (the road to Santiago de Compostella)

"Life must be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards" said Soren Kierkegaard (1813 - 1855 philosopher)". The famous pilgrim's route to Santiago de Compostella, is known amongst pilgrims as "el camino" or the road. The starting place if you follow the true pilgrimage ,should be from your own home, but otherwise there are starting places in France and on the Spanish border, in the Pyrenees. There are many who follow this pilgrimage out of religiouos convictions, others do it for the beauty of the road, others for the companionship. Some do it in stages, a part each year, others take time out of their lives and do it for 5 months, all come out of this experience with a renewed look on life and their role in it.
I read a wonderful, witty, thoughtful book by french author, Alix de Saint André, on her experiences on "the road". She travelled it 3 times; the first two times she took the shorter route starting at the Pyrenees. These two pilgrimages, left her feeling unsatisfied, wanting more. The result was that she took some months off from her busy life as a journalist to start from her home town in the region of Brittany in France.She relates her experiences, in a wry manner, she is a practising catholic but the road fills her with anguish at the physical exhaustion and the companions she meets. Sometimes, she feels close to God, sometimes she is assailed by doubts. Her companions include a man and a donkey, 7 older men described by her as her 7 "husbands", because of the protectiveness they develop towards her!

Some of her fellow pilgrims are patently nonchristians, some devout believers. Her conclusions? She is touched by the words of a prior celebrating mass in Leon:"Jesus said: I am the road, 'el camino' is a moment in time to look for a treasure; God, in silence and solitude. Not tourism." The author notes that she had never thought of it that way, that Jesus is the road.Walking on the road we are within God, by walking we open up our arteries. The big bypass, created by the road to Santiago is circulating the blood between the three; the beauty of paternal creation, the sacrifice of the son shared in daily suffrance, and the pure love of the holy spirit that joins us".

Having read her book, I too feel called to join the road.Perhaps not inmediately, but soon.

What is happiness?

Jacob de Backer the Garden of Eden 2nd half of the 16th C

Watched a television interview with french writer and journalist Gonzague de Saint Bris the other day, he was asked what happiness meant for him. His reply: "Il n'y a pas de bonheur mais des bonnes heures" which is a pun on the word happiness in french, which translated literally means the good hours! Indeed happiness is not a state, rather a series of happy moments in our lives. We need to remember that as we face greyer periods. Look around you and savour the good moments, they are nuggets of gold, that can bring back a smile to your face when you most need it! My happy moment this week was watching my daugher and her class dancing to the theme of Pocahontas in the school's fancy fair. I said a Hail Mary to thank God for the joy of my child.

Belonging!

 

Georges Seurat (french impressionist), A sunday afternoon at the island of the Grande Jatte 1886

Following from my post on indifference and the need to form loving       communities, last week, I was struck by this part of the new bishop of Portsmouth's ( UK) ordination speech:

" that human needs ever remain essentially the same:
the need to love and to be loved,
the need for a purpose and vocation in life,
the need to belong to family and community,
the need for mercy and forgiveness, for peace and justice, for freedom and happiness,
and most profoundly, the need for immortality and for the Divine.
All these fundamental desires, hard-wired into the human heart:
theology expresses in the word 'salvation,' and we profess that every child, woman and man on this planet can find that salvation. "

 A beautiful text from Saint Paul to the Corinthians, reinforce this message ( 12, 31 ...): I may speak in tongues of men or of angels, but if I am without love, I am a sounding gong or  a clanging cymbal. I may have the gift of prophecy, and know every hidden truth; I may have faith strong enough to move mountains; but if I have no love, I am nothing...love is patient , love is kind and envies no one"

Just what I needed, it confirms my own chosen path to seek and give love in community, sharing my emotions and my path through this life!

 

The threat of indifference

by LS Lowry
This painting by LS Lowry (1887-1976) symbolises for me the cataclysm created by the industrial society; busy worker bees hastening through the streets to their work or home, living to work!  No time to give to chance encounters on the streets and be open to others. A chance glance at my book of quotations brought up this disturbing quote, by Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881):"If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. they would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it".

 Nothing much has changed in the two centuries after this was written; Sometimes I still feel that at a dinner party it is not so chic to talk about one's faith to nonbelievers. this makes it all the more crucial to show how christianity can give back humanity to the human race. It is all about caring, Jesus cared for us by giving up his life in a most cruel way.It is time for us to accept this gift and re form loving caring neighbourly communities. In these times of crisis, it warms my heart when someone takes the time to talk and enquire how one is doing. To receive a helping hand when you feel unable to cope. the gestures will provide the stepping stones to continue.

In the words of George Bernard Shaw, English playwright  (1856-1950): "The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity"

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A church with a tree

The holidays are over and what did we do? Did we take time to reflect on what life is about, Did we take time off from our busy loves especially during the holidays to pray and come closer to God?
I was in Greece, as my husband is Greek and this summer found it very hard to take the time to pray.  It was only when I went to visit this small church in the western peloponnessos, high up in the mountains, that I really prayed.The church is dedicated to Agia Theodora a byzantine saint from the 10th century. The story of Saint Theodora, is that when the army asked the family for a boy to become a conscript in the army, Theodora came instead as her family had no boys and her father was too old and too poor. She was convicted and beheaded on wrong charges and as she died she said that god would bear witbess to her innocence and faith by growing treeswithin the church where she is buried. the miracle is that 17 trees grow in this tiny church with no visible roots and throughout the last 10 centuries the walls hve not fallen down.
Every year in September pilgrims make the journey through the mountains for a mass and celebration in her honour. You can leave pieces of paper with your prayer and the priest will say them for you.

To me this simple little church with its trees reaching out to the skies and its roots in our earth symbolises our faith and belonging to the christian community. It gave me back the power to pray.

Sport and lessons for life

I am not a football fan but witnessing the european cup final on sunday between Spain and Italy, was a lesson for life. I had always seen the negative effects of football, which is a problem as children of today are so impacted by their heroes. Well sunday's match was a shining example of team play, respect for your rivals and a sense of understanding those around you. My hero is Spain's goalkeeper Iker Casillas, who asked the referee to stop the match before the end, in the final minutes in respect for his rvial Italy (Spain was leading with 4-0!), then even before going on to celebrate with the rest of his team, he shook hands and embraces with the Italain team. Iker, what an example for all of us and especially our children. This truly is an example how we can practise humility and feeling for our neighbours. When teaching our children about the ways of Jesus, such an example is one of the best.

despair and hope

From lamentations 3 1-34
first on despair:

"I am the man who has known affliction
I have felt the rod of his wrath"... yes we are all feeling the wrath of God, our world is imploding and in the next generation a new order and govenance will have to be established if we dont want to destroy all.

However look at the enormous messsage of hope in the text following despair:

 Hope
"the memory of my distress and my wanderings,
is wormwood and gall.
remember, o remember, and stoop down to me;
All this I take to heart, and therefore I will wait patiently; the Lord's true love is surely not spent, nor has his compassion failed;
they are new every morning,
so great is his constancy"
Let it give us the tools to accept change and change our world for the better!

au revoir

This weekend a dearest friend and godmother to my daughter passed away after a long battle with cancer. I met her in the sea in greece 7 years ago and our friendship was intense and her love for my daughter inmense. She was a great artist, photographer, photographing with an eye to behold for the future. She was a devout christian and helped me through the maze of complex greek orthodox rituals. We often spoke of the closeness of the catholic and orthodox traditions and how this  would evolve in my daughter.
With her passing I cried not for her death but for the missed opportunities to be more together to enjoy life. How often would we try to arrange a visit and would work or other activities creep in.
By chance I fell on a BBC programme which documented 6 people, believers and nonbelievers, who voluntarily went on a retreat to rediscover silence. They were told to switch off all machines and to learn to be in the silence. Their biggest realisation was how we stuff our lives in order to be busy, hence risking to bypass the truly essential things in our lives.
Today I feel that more than ever, as in this world I will not see my dearest friend again. I will treasure those moments I passed with her, and feel blessed forever.
pie jesu by faure
May she rest in peace

sunny sunday or dimanche soleil

This sunday is the last sunday in our parish before the breaking of the summer holdiays of our children. As we are an international parish, many will leave for their home countries. To celebrate on the feast of St John the Baptist, we all pitch in and prepare a huge barbecue in the grounds of the cloister attached to our church. Old and young, sit hopefully in the sun, fathers are cooks for one day behind the fires. it is a very joyful occasion, unifying our community.The following words of Peter sum up for me this moment:

"to sum up:be one in thought and feeling, all of you; be full of brotherly affection, kindly and humbly minded. Do no repay wrong with wrong, or abuse with  abuse; on the contrary, retaliate with blessing, for a blessing is the inheritance to which you yourselves have been called" 1 Peter 3 8-9

If we could but keep life simple, enoy each other for what we can give and share joyful moments to sustain us in the lonelier times!

Corpus Christi a leap of faith

Today is Corpus Christi, when catholics commemorate, and adore the eucharist, which to us represents the real body and blood of Christ. It is a leap of faith which to nonbelievers is not easily understood.How many times in one's life do we not have to take a huge leap of faith, which seems totally unbelievable? The New Testament prepares the way and then at a certain stage in your life, you are touched by the holy spirit and you believe. I cannot put this in an easier way except to say that this is what happend to me, I grew up a catholic, with anglican and protestant influences but at a certain stage in my life became intellectually cynical and did not practise anymore. Then came a long period of self analysis and suffering where I rediscoverd my belief.

 I recently read a book by french author and televison producer, Thierry Bizot. He was a catholic by upbringing, but like me had lapsed. One day through the teacher of one of his sons, he was inspired to follow adult cathechism and rediscover his faith. In his words, he felt a fool as his enviroment; telelevion and french intellectualism was not condusive to announcing one's conversion! If you want to know more about his story read his book Catholique Anonyme( I"m afraid it is still only in french but available online) and the film his wife Anne Giazzeri made of the book!

writing about faith

It is so difficult to find good books about faith, that can help us in a world that persists in relegating faith to a small corner.What I enjoy most is writers passing on their experiences and most of all from those that have converted to the christian faith. In my university days in the UK I first came across C.S. Lewis, (1898-1963), converted anglican. He taught literature at Oxford and was a close friend of Tolkien( he of the Lord of the Rings!). You can still find his books on;line and I would really reccomend "The Screwtape letters", which is essentially a dialogue between two demons, an uncle and a nephew.Another I would reccomend is "The Problem of Pain", in which he looks at christianity and pain, why  do we suffer  if God loves us. This point has always been difficult for me too as I battle with sadness as I see a close friend in her battle with cancer.

Slightly earlier is G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936), whose two novels, "The Everlasting Man" and "Orthodoxy", are great favourites of mine. He defended the roots of christianity in a matter of fact fashion which even today gives you great clarity.

We are all together in this world

Yesterday I was watching a programme on the confirmation process of a group of children in the Bordeaux area in France, on french catholic tv station KTO. It followed the preparations for their confirmation over a year. Just before their confirmation, the children meet over a lunch and prayers and discussion with children from the muslim and jewish faiths. They meet in turns every year at their place of worship and this year that was in a mosque. Each group prepared a presentation of a figure important to their faith and finally over lunch discussed their differences and similarities. What a wonderful iniative for children to learn tolerance and openmindedness, and above all not to be afraid of the different faiths!





It reminded me of a children's book by Peter Spier, called" People", which I think adults would be advised to read as well. It shows through some wonderful illustrations, that diversity is wonderful, we all have different colours, noses, shapes etc, but without diversity life would be monotonous!

Forgive and move on

I have recently gone through a very black period and thought it would be impossible to forgive. However reading French author Christine Orban's little booklet on"Petites phrases pour traverser la vie en cas de tempete... et par beau temps aussi ( "Small phrases to go on with life in case of thunderstorms...and also in case of fair weather"), I want to share these two with you all:

"Le pardon ouvre des portes, la rancune les referme" ( forgiveness opens doors, rencor closes them")

" Les malheureux oublient le bien et jamais le mal. Une bonne vie consiste a garder le meilleur et oublier le pire." (Those that are unhappy forget the good things and never the bad. A good life consists in keeping the good and forgetting the bad)

This is good advice!

Mothers

Today at my daughter's school we are celebrating Mother's day. The love we receive from our children and our role in the family structure, always makes me turn to our universal mother, and the endless love she has shown for all of us. What bigger love then to be able to accept the sacrifice of your son for the greater good of mankind?
As a mother Maria is able to help me and stand by me when I find it difficult to adress my prayers. She brings such love to comfort all of us.

Ave Maria
gratia plena,
Dominus tecum.
Benedicta tu in mulieribus,
et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus.
Sancta Maria, Mater Dei,ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen