The Fatigue Society

The modern age has been called the "Fatigue Society." By this is not meant the fatigue that comes from living a busy life, but the fatigue that arises in this busy life from not knowing what to select to do among the many things we would like to do, which can produce  pathologically induced feelings of tiredness. The seminary professor writing for the Kyeongyang magazine says we often hear the humorous phrase: "The idle man is dying of overwork."

In the past, work often brought on fatigue, but at least it was always clear what had to be done. The world we lived in was separated from the world of others, says the professor, and we could depend on our own society to reinforce our way of acting and to protect us from the threatening and dangerous world of the other.

Today's society has changed, he says. The values are no longer shared by  our society. What is of value is the personal vision and convictions of individuals. Other people are of little interest and somewhat of a burden. The family is no longer seen as a refuge but a hindrance to personal development. The individual and not the family is what is  important.

It used to be the imposition of rules--the can't dos of life--that  made life difficult, but today, the professor says it's not the negative rules of life that tend to overwhelm us but an over-abundance of the positive that brings on fatigue and many mental difficulties. Parents still support their children by giving them what they need, but parents often don't receive back the respect they had in the past. 

This is also seen, says the professor, in the life of the Church. Among Catholics, the Church was once seen as speaking for God. Sins and punishment were clear; the teaching and commandments were basically understood and leaving the Church was to put in danger your future life.

But all this is changing, he says. The old procedures are no longer considered valid to many Catholics, feeling themselves no longer bound by the old ways. One can follow, they believe, the teachings of Jesus without the Church, whose teachings are considered by some as outdated; a person's decisions and convictions are considered more important. Peace of mind has priority over working to evangelize society. The emphasis on the relativity of truth, while forgetting or denying its absolute character, has made the existence of the Church problematic, he says.

In the past the Catholic Church and atheism were in conflict. Today there are thousands of different beliefs that have tried to find the answers to the mysteries of life, pain and death.  No longer is Christianity unique among the religions. Which means, the professor believes, there has to be a difference in the way Christianity is presented. Stressing the  Commandments-- our obligations is  not going to do it. We are going to have to show what has been lost in the changes of society and the love God has shown to humanity and  creation.

Pope Francis, in Brazil during the World Youth Day, stressed that we must fight against an unhealthy reliance on money, on honors and pleasure, which seem to be the sole goals of many. The fight against our materialistic culture by the Church must be waged; without this encounter the Church will not have a  place to stand on. Yes, the professor admits, life for many has progressed, becoming more comfortable and enjoyable. We have, however, lost what  is important: joy, peace freedom, love and hope. The Church has to stress what we have lost, the professor says. We have to find the words that will move hearts, dispelling the darkness that encompasses so much of society.

Learning from the Protestant Minister

On the spiritual page of the Catholic Times, the priest-columnist remembers the day he paid his respects to the family of a friend whose mother had died. He arrived at the mortuary and, believing that a Mass would be consoling to the family, began to prepare for the Mass while the Christians were praying the office for the dead.

In the adjoining cubicle he heard the members of another grieving family singing hymns along with their minister. After the singing, they recited the Apostles' Creed, and the minister began preaching. The brief sermon was so moving, the priest says, that if one of the members from his mourning group  did not come to find him, he would have joined the minister's group.

What was it about the sermon that moved him? There was nothing new being said, the priest said, nothing philosophically interesting or with theological  depth. It was the minister's utter conviction, his earnestness and strength of voice, that moved him. The words of the minister carried so much clarity and sincerity that the natural fear of death simply disappeared on hearing the minister's convincing, reassuring voice. There seemed to be, the priest felt, no room left for the mourners to doubt that the deceased was resurrected.

He was embarrassed, he said. Here he was all set to say a Mass, and that would be it; the thought of giving a sermon never entered his mind. But thanks to the minister, he gave a short sermon, sharing with the members of the family the good news of the Resurrection. He noticed the tears in the eyes of some of the family members as they thanked him for the consoling words of his sermon.

Reflecting on his initial intention of just saying Mass, he admits that saying Mass is the easy consoling answer, especially in difficult times, but at the same time, he is also aware that it might not be enough to meet the needs of everyone. Deep feelings engendered by a death in the family may not always be addressed by only a Mass.

September 20--Korean Feast of the Martyrs

Today,in Korea  we celebrate the Feast of Sts. Andrew Kim, Paul Chong and Companions.  

Martyrdom is witnessing  to your belief and confessing your faith. This witnessing has at its center love. There are those who have made the words of Jesus "to love your neighbor," even when he is an enemy, the essence of their lives.  A professor writing in the  Inchon Bulletin informs us that a martyr is not only one who gives his life for what he believes but does it out of love.
 
Writing the history of the martyrs, he says, usually involves concentrating on their death and overlooking the love that inspired their actions. When thinking of the martyrs we are reminded of the death and resurrection of Jesus. Martyrdom is a decision to follow the example of Love itself, Jesus. We find this exemplified many times in the history of the martyrs and he gives us one example from Taegu in 1815.

During a persecution in Taegu, one of the Christians, expecting a reward, reported the place where the Christians would be meeting for prayer on Easter, and led the police to the location. A number of those arrested denied their faith and were released, but not a few were to die for their faith.

The informer was later picked up by the police for some criminal act and was put in the same prison as the Christians. What he did was so despicable that the inspector in command told the guards to let him starve. The Christians arranged to cut back on what they were eating to enable the informer to eat. After some  time, the jailors drove the informer out of the prison without clothes, and the Christians again helped, gathering enough clothes to cover his nakedness.

In writing about the incident at the time, it was said that the Christians showed unbelievers what true love meant by the way they treated their enemies. Their act of love for the one who put them in prison helped them to have the strength to go ahead and give their lives for what they believed, when it would have been so easy to say they decided to stop being a Christian. The practice of love nurtured their faith life.

A Christan without love, writes the professor, using the words of St. Paul, "...is a noisy gong, a clanging cymbal." When we only see the suffering of the martyrs and forget the love that accompanies it, we do the martyrs a great injustice. This is what is meant by the spirituality of martyrdom.  During the month of September, the month of the martyrs according to our Korean liturgical year, our Catholics have the opportunity to reflect on what the spirituality of the  martyrs has to teach them.

Happy Chuseok

 

Today is Chuseok, the Autumn Moon Festival, which is somewhat similar to our Thanksgiving day. It is a celebration of the new harvest and a remembrance of ancestors and family members who have died. However, it's not uncommon that family problems will arise during the celebrations. A front page article in the Peace Weekly on the festival mentions a divorce that was occasioned by the festival.

The husband, a Buddhist who was following the traditional Confucian rites for ancestors during the Festival, would end up fighting with his wife. The wife, a Protestant, when asked by her husband to visit the family home on a Sunday in observance of the festival, would refuse because of her own observance on that day. And on a weekday, she would not participate in the rites even though the husband told her she did not need to observe the traditional bowing. This finally came to a head, and they decided to divorce. 

Because of the importance of these rites in the lives of most Koreans, the Catholic Church faced many difficulties. In the beginning all Christians followed the rites, but still having doubts about whether they should, some Christians on a trip to Beijing asked Bishop Gouvea what was the proper thing to do. They were told the Confucian rites were forbidden, which set in motion many problems for the Church, and confused many Christians. When Paul Yun Ji-chung and James Kwon Sang-yeon, two of the early Christians, burned the ancestral tablet and performed the Catholic rites instead of the Confucian rites when the mother of Paul Yun died, they were arrested and killed by decapitation, becoming in 1791 the first two martyrs of the Korean Church.

In 1939, the Vatican re-assessed the issue, and Pope Pius XII authorized Catholics to observe the ancestral rites. Later, the general principle of admitting native ceremonies into the liturgy of the Church, whenever possible, was reinforced.  The rites were seen not as idol worship but as a cultural tradition, and therefore not against Catholic teaching.

The Second Vatican Council's document on the Liturgy states that the Church respects the gifts of the various races: "Anything  in their way of life that is not indissolubly bound up with superstition and error, she studies with sympathy and, if possible, preserves intact. Sometimes, in fact, accepting such things in the liturgy itself, as long as they harmonize with its true and authentic spirit"(Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy #37). With this as background, the Catholic Church of Korea recommended that these rites of filial piety and cherishing the memory of the dead be incorporated into liturgical practices.

Since Korea has many religions with diverse religious practices, it's necessary that this be appreciated, acknowledged and respected. A priest member of the Bishops Committee on Relationship with Other Religions mentions that we have to respect the beliefs of others and not force one to do something they don't want to do, like bowing. The ancestral rites should be a way  of expressing love for the family and of strengthening the family bond. Catholic  members should be mediators to overcome some of the problems that may remain because of the different understandings concerning the rites.

 

Education: Specific or General?

During this time of  year, students will be preparing for their college entrance exams: a very trying time not only for students but also for parents. A professor writing in the Peace Weekly notes that many students being interviewed for the exams are unable to answer the easiest of the questions. Their faces turn red and they cry, he says, which prompts him to ask a question he cannot refrain from asking: What is the reason for education?

The big difference between high school and college, he believes, is the student's decision to pick a major in college. The hope is that picking a good major and going deeply into it will enable one to find work and to succeed in one's chosen field. There would be few students who, on graduating, would not be thinking about what they will be doing with their major. There is a connection, most students believe, between picking a major that immediately prepares them for their future work--a connection that would be missing if they were to take any of the humanities, making them unable to compete in the marketplace with the better prepared students.  What is the realty? the professor asks.

He uses the example of the United States: Those who graduate with degrees from the humanities find work in many areas of life. Those who are in the field of education say the study of the humanities--though not immediately helpful in the marketplace--in the long run is a better choice in college. The days of staying on the job for a lifetime, he says, is over. A person who started off in his major and remains in that work for more than 10 years is not the norm. Persons change, work changes, just as the rivers and mountains change.

The business magazine Forbes reported last year that more than 60 percent of college graduates find work in a field outside their major. Which is the reason many are saying it is better to have a general and transferable education in preparation for both work and life.

During the Victorian days in England Cardinal Henry Newman was asked to start a university in Ireland, prompting him to write the book "The Idea of a University," from which the professor quotes the following: "A university  should be teaching a variety of subjects. Students can major in a small number of subjects but should immerse themselves in the traditions of the university and to  understand the whole outline of the system of knowledge, the underlying principles of knowledge, the breath of each course of study, their shadow and their light, the good and the bad points. General education is to cultivate the philosophic inclinations of the mind towards personal liberty, balance, serenity, the golden mean, and wisdom."

The professor ends by mentioning that about the same time as Newman, Wilhelm Von Humboldt in Germany took the initiative in starting a research university, whose ideas spread throughout the world. Now in the 21st century, the ideas of Newman are being rediscovered  and interest in the humanities is returning to the world of education, aided, it is believed, by the rapid changes in the world. The movement away from the modern specialization of education to a more general liberal arts education is, the professor says, a necessary step back into the past, where, as Newman believed, learning was valued for its own sake.  The professor would like to tell parents of high school students who are preparing for college in the humanities not to worry, for it is the most modern of the majors and the one that will give them the best opportunity for a fulfilling life. 

The Movement for a Better World (MBW)

The community aspects of Church, often overlooked, such as relationships, our neighbors, working for the common good and building communities of people of God, aspiring for communal holiness is the mission of "The Movement for a Better World (MBW). The Movement had its start in Rome in response to an appeal by Pius XII to the worldwide Church and gathered momentum from the preaching of Fr. Ricardo Lombardi S.J. It was given official approval by the Church in 1952. Fourteen years later Fr. Lombardi was invited to Korea to begin preparations for our own Movement, and in 1968 a team was formed, and by 1973 there were nine dioceses ready to begin the MBW.

The movement has many different courses of study on change, dialogue, secularization, the Church as the people of God and the world, and the new image of the parish.  There are also programs for renewal.

The Taegu diocese, in its recent bulletin, described the Movement and its success in producing many leaders. Taegu, on average, has about 10 programs each year. They can be evening programs lasting four evenings, or full-day programs lasting two nights and three days. They are intended for everyone--priests, religious and lay people--making the programs another sign of the communal aspects of Church. 

The programs seek to instill the thinking from the Second Vatican Council, that Church is a community of association and sharing, and introducing this thinking into the life of the parishes and dioceses. In this time of the new evangelization, renewing the faith life of the participants is an important aspect of parish life.

Over recent years there was sadness in seeing that in certain dioceses, the programs seemed to have disappeared and little was heard of the Movement.   Few articles have been written on the movement. The other movements within the Church are well-known and receive a great deal of publicity.  BWM makes a point of not calling attention to itself and wants to keep out of the press, which no doubt is the reason behind the absence of news about the movement.  In  the Taegu diocese, however, according to the bulletin, it continues strong and active.
 
 

A New Way to Live

Simplicity is a word that usually has positive overtones, especially in our hectic society where many have the desire to leave behind the hustle, artificiality and competition and return to a more natural lifestyle. We see this tendency in the return to the farms and occasional trips to the countryside by city dwellers. Many think the talk about simplicity is  excessive, that the desire to distance ourselves from a modern technological society is unintelligible, and yet the voices of those who speak about this need is growing, and not without reason, says a columnist on the opinion page of the  Catholic Times.
 
He reflects on John 1-4:  "Whatever came to be in him found life, life for the light of men," after reading a sign at a construction site: "We are sorry for the inconvenience but everything will be returned shortly to as it was." The last words "as it was" kept spinning around in his head. Yes, material things can be replaced, he says, but not the life that has been destroyed.

In Genesis 1:28, we read: "Have dominion over...all living things that move on the earth." These words are meant for us to take care of life and not to destroy it. Pope Benedict, in his peace message of 2010, used as the theme of the message: "If You  Want to Cultivate Peace, Protect Creation." However, the columnist believes we are not sufficiently sensitive to the natural world  to see the value of all life. In our headlong pursuit of economic development we very easily destroy life, forgetting what the geoscientists tell us. When the butterflies and bees disappear from the earth, humanity also will cease to exist.

If this is true of the small forms of life, how much more will this be true of human life? he asks. At present, the biggest cause of death of those under forty is suicide. Korea is a country that is driving its citizens to kill themselves, he says, as it inadvertently creates a culture of death. One reason for this situation is the extraordinary educational demands of the country and the economic structures that have been built. How many more have to die before something is done? he asks. Have we become a world that worships money?

He remembers reading the words of an American Indian that made a big impression  on him. "When the last tree dies, the last river polluted, the last fish caught; we will know we can't live by eating money."
 
What are we to do? he asks at the conclusion of the column. Change the way we live, he answers. Be content with less and with a little more discomfort. We have to cut back on our eating, our clothing and the homes we build. We have to learn that with less we can have more satisfaction and live happier lives. During this month dedicated to the martyrs would be a good time, he says, to take the first steps in this new way of living.