Dear Readers:
For some time, I haven't felt the desire to write in this space.
So, at this change of season, I'm announcing my own shift:
I have no plans for new posts. Please feel free to peruse the archives; perhaps you will find something of meaning for this moment in your life.
May this be a Spring of Transformation!  May we all find ways to experience more gratitude, contentment and new forms of self expression.
Your Bethany with love

A Mighty Lenten Message

Powerful Words from my Favorite Contemporary Writer...Sister Joan Chittister. (Here she is, pictured with the Dalai Lama)

The Eucharist Dilemma

The major problem of eucharistic theology in our century is not that people do not understand and value the meaning of Eucharist. The problem is that they do.

The Eucharist, every child learns young, is the sign of Christian community, the very heart of it, in fact. And who would deny the bond, the depth, the electrical force that welds us together in it? Here, we know, is the linkage between us and the Christ, between us and the Gospel, between us and the Tradition that links us to Jesus himself and so to the world around us. No, what the Eucharist is meant to be is not what’s in doubt.

What’s in doubt is that the Eucharist is really being allowed to do what it purports to do—to connect us, to unify us, to make us One. The truth is that as much as Eucharist is a sign of community it is also a sign of division. For the sake of some kind of ecclesiastical political fiascos centuries ago between the East and West, we close the table between Orthodox and Uniate—though the faith is the same and the commitments are the same and the vision of life and death are the same.

What’s in doubt, too, is that the divisions posited between baptized men and baptized women can possibly witness to what we say is the faith: that men and women are equal; that women are fully human beings; that God’s grace is indivisible; that discipleship is incumbent on us all; that we are all called to follow Christ.

At the end of one presentation after another, women make it a point to continue the discussion with me. ‘I used to be Catholic,’ they begin. ‘I was a Catholic once,’ they say. ‘I’m a recovering Catholic now,’ they announce. It’s a sad litany of disillusionment and abandonment by a Church they once thought promised them fullness of life and then let them know that it is their very persons that deny them that. They are to get out of the pronouns and off the altars of the Church, they read in its latest dictums. They may want to follow Jesus but Jesus, they’re told, does not want to be followed by them.

Call it ‘holy’ communion if you want, they tell me, but it’s not. Not like that. Not under those conditions.

So they go away to where Jesus waits for them, arms open, in someone else’s Christian church. There’s something about it all that simply defies the lesson of Mary Magdalene or the Woman at the Well or Mary of Bethany or Mary of Nazareth. They go where every minister at the altar, every bishop, every lawgiver, every homilist, every member of every Synod on the planet is not male. They go where they can see ‘the image of God’ in themselves in another woman. They go where eucharistic theology, which we’re told makes us one, is palpable.

– from “Eucharist” by Joan Chittister, Spirituality Magazine. Volume 18, March-April 2012, No 101. Dominican Publications: Republic of Ireland.

Beautiful Message from Beautiful Joan Chittister

A Place Called "Home"

In each of us there is a place where we go in the middle of chaos to escape from the fray. It is that “home” place, that hiding place, that soft place where no memories of it come with ragged edges and no thought of it is tinged with fear. It’s an empty beach, perhaps. Or a hidden place on the bluff above town where we remember being able to see everything while no one could see us.

It is the place of our dreams and the hope of our hopes.

It’s that place to which we return in our minds to change life in the middle of too much life for us to take just then.

It’s that natural place within us where the roar of the water or the silence of the mountains or the warmth of the desert or the moss of the swamp soothes our souls and makes us feel human again, at one with the universe again, in control again.

Whatever it is, wherever it is, it calms us and makes us new again.

For me, ironically, that special place was right in the center of the city. In the very shadows of the city buildings lay a world beyond the world. It was the public dock on the bay of one of the Great Lakes, where tourists came to fish and sail and ride on a water taxi from the mainland over to the peninsula. Nothing more than a hotdog was ever sold there. There were no bands, no arcade games, no skate-board parks. It was commercially non-commercial. And yet it was my own small planet. There in that place everyone walked more slowly than usual, talked in more measured tones, dared to sit alone on the breakwall in total silence. There you could simply be yourself, no airs, no deadlines, no pressure, nothing false to serve or adore. Nothing that required us to bow down before it. There we just all melted into nature.

It is that kind of place of which the Flemish artist, Pieter Bruegel, the Elder, paints. His work, called genre painting, is a call to us to understand the relationships we build between who we are and where we are. He reminds us of our place in the universe, small, simple and sustained by the world around us.

In our own day, when technology has trumped nature, we would do well to sink into Bruegel’s work and remember who we are. We would do well to realize that those “home” places we all need andseek out in a time of the mechanical, the digital, the virtual and the plastic are calling us to the

center of our real selves. We must remember that it is the self for which we are seeking when we leave our worlds of glitz and glamour and sink into the real world. It is environment that shapes us and it is the natural to which we must, like Bruegel, cling when everyone else abandons it or lose the very soul of our lives.

– from The Monastic Way by Joan Chittister (February 2012). Order now.

I'm Ready for 2012

2012

Love the number.

I see Happy Birthday, Bethany, on 2-12-2012!

Love the number 60!

I see GO!

I'm ready, 2012.