The Beauty Of Life

The world is beautiful but we need help to see its beauty, says a religious sister writing in the Bible & Life magazine. Our attention is distracted, she says, by the not-so-beautiful. To see the beauty surrounding us, we need to make a concerted effort to pay less attention to our daily habitual routines and more attention to the life that made those routines possible.

From the time she made her first vows, she has been asked why she became a sister.  Because the world is so beautiful is her answer. And for over 35 years being a sister, she answers in the same way.

One day before she became a sister, feeling bored with life, she went into a bookstore and picked up a book with the title "Why Pain?" Opening it, she read  "I am happy now because someone suffered pain. There are many people who endured pain and difficulties for me." The lines surprised her, bringing to mind her parents, the many meals they prepared for her, and the sacrifices they made for her as she was growing up.

As she reflected on the sacrifice of her parents, the help of her siblings, the concern of her friends, and all those, known and unknown, who had given help and shown concern, she realized that it had all been given unconditionally. It was not dependent on any particular quality she possessed but was given freely; for this she felt only gratitude. It was because of their love, she said, that she began to see God's unlimited love: "This is my body to be given for you"  (Luke 22:19).
 
Experiencing this enormous love of our Lord, the world, she believes, was filled with beauty. That thought brought a change into her life; she wanted to repay the pain of many who had nurtured her life by her own sacrifices and life. While growing up she never gave the religious life a thought, she said, but the moment she  became aware of God's love she ran to him. And now because of this great love, she is in a convent, living the consecrated life. However, she feels as if she still fails to measure up to living such a life; there is much to endure, she says, as she makes her way through the valleys and the crooked, rough ways of life.  But despite it all, she is able to give thanks and turn her eyes to the Lord and give praise.                        

Such a life is not only for those who have formally chosen the religious life, she maintains, but for everyone: "Thus it is evident to everyone that all the faithful of Christ, of whatever rank or status, are called to the fullness of the Christian life and to the perfection of charity" (Constitution on the Church #40). "In a word, you must be made perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect " (Matt 5:48). "Treat others the way you would have them treat you; this sums up the law and the prophets" (Matt. 7:12 ).                                                         

Because of the dedication of many who have been called to living the fullness of Christian life, we hope to see, she says, its fruition in many more people living with thankful hearts. She prays that she also will be living each day with thanks in her heart, and that this will continue into the future.

Living What We Believe

Misunderstandings of common sense phrases and ideas sometimes used in our daily conversations occur frequently, such as "God helps those who help themselves," or a similar expression "Pray as if everything depended on God and work as if everything depended on you" (Found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church #2834). This way of thinking has  a long  history in the West, as it does it in the East. It appears in the Chinese phrase:盡 (All)人(Person)事( Work) 待 (Await) 天 (Heaven)命 (Orders), meaning "Do all you can and wait for heaven." We see these words framed on the walls of many homes and places of business here in Korea.

In our Scriptures, we find in Thess. 3:18 "Anyone who will not work should not eat." And in Mark 9:23 "Everything is possible for the person who believes." All such expressions point to the fact that as humans  we do what is possible and then leave the rest to God. But many feel that prayer is sufficient, as if God will do all with his grace.

The misunderstanding of these expressions tends to appear when there is a misunderstanding of grace; grace also seeks to move our feet and body to accomplish what we pray for. Though all is grace, it requires some thought to understand what this means without denying what is being said by the statements quoted above. As Catholics we know that grace cooperates with nature. There are obviously circumstances where the phrase "All is grace" is used where it shouldn't be--as a put-down of the poor and weak--but the basic truth of the idea is imbedded in everything we do as Christians: to cooperate with the graces that are given.

Rev. Timothy Yu Gyoung-chon and Rev. Peter Chung Soon-taek O.C.D. were named auxiliary bishops of Seoul recently. Bishop-elect Yu in his book To the 21 century Believer, reviewed recently by the Catholic press, says "The concrete putting into practice what we believe is necessary if we want to see a change in the world. Without this engagement with the world, no matter how much we pray it will be only empty words." It is understood that he is talking about those who are able to do something and do nothing.

There is little justice in the world, mostly distrust and war which obviously is not the will of God. When we ignore the reality we see around us, as the bishop says, we are not living the life we have been called to live. He wants us to be aware of this calling that we have as Christians. Even though we might not see or experience injustice in our own lives, we are not free to ignore the call we have received to improve the world we live in.

The need to improve the world is not some new way of thinking, he reminds us, but the way Jesus lived during his time here on earth. We have all been called to put into practice what we believe and what we say, confessing by our actions what our hearts know about this God we need to experience.

A Mature Spiritual Life

What direction should a spiritual life take?  An article in Bible & Life magazine, by a priest-professor of spirituality, begins by  telling us that he used the short Apostle's Creed at Mass but changed recently to the longer Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed.

It's important, he says, for a Christian not to have a personal imagining of God according to ones likes or dislikes; doing so, a correct  faith life will not follow.  History has shown us that those who have followed their personal preferences have gone far afield. Consequently, one needs to have the correct understanding of Jesus if one is going to have a healthy spirituality.  For a Catholic, the two sources of our faith life are the Scriptures and Tradition, the truths of the gospel that were kept alive orally and finally written down in the Scriptures. From the beginning there was always  a tension between our spirituality and the Scriptures.

The disciples used the Old Testament as their text in sermons. The Church Fathers spent a great deal of time commenting on the Scriptures. This was the way they understood the revealed message and the identity of Jesus. It was not an intellectual and speculative study of the Scriptures. It was the foundation of their spirituality, as it was of the Desert Fathers, who spent much time  reading the Scriptures to map out their spiritual journey.

The religious of the middle ages worked with Lectio Divina (Divine Reading) to develop their spirituality: reading the Scriptures, meditating, praying and contemplating on what was read, which gave a structure to the 'Divine Reading'. But unfortunately, at the same time, universities were appearing, and with the beginning of systematic theology there was a separation of spirituality from Scripture.  There were a few religious groups who had difficulty accepting this new trend, but the majority went along with this speculative and intellectual approach to the spiritual life, which gave a  false understanding to the spiritual life, according to the writer.

At the beginning of modern times, there has been a return to volition and feelings as a foundation for the spiritual life as presented in the Scriptures. The attempt was to get closer to the words of Scripture, in meditating on the  humanity of Jesus and his public life. During the middle of the modern era, however, there was a return to the intellectual  pursuit of knowledge, which again influenced the Church. This was the period of enlightenment, positivism (scientific knowledge) and historicism (a theory that events are determined or influenced by conditions and inherent processes beyond the control of humans). Many feared that if they did not participate in this intellectual pursuit they would be left behind and, consequently, meditating on the Scriptures was not considered important.  Biblical criticism became the highest form of study of the Scriptures in the eyes of many.

In conclusion, the writer stressed that our spiritual life has to begin with the Scriptures. Only through the Scriptures will we get  to know Jesus. When the study of Scripture becomes an exercise in intellectual curiosity, then we are bound to block the real message of Scripture from affecting the full flowering of our spiritual life. We have to meet Jesus in the Scriptures. When reading the words of Scripture and are genuinely moved by the love of Jesus, we will be filled with his grace and feel a oneness with him. Christian prayer without this basic understanding of Scripture, not only lacks Christian meaning but can lead us in a wrong direction.

Love is a Decision

The book The Invisible Gorilla  reminds us that what we often think we know, we do not.  An article in Bible and Life returns to the experiments conducted some years ago by two professors that showed that when we are concentrating on something, we miss seeing other things happening around us, which tends to self-deception and an illusory view of reality.

Loving is not any different. We have seen the portrayal of love in numberless movies, dramas, poetry and novels. We have experienced love in a variety of ways which has left us with a feeling that we understand what love is.

The priest-writer quotes from a poem in which a lover revels in the thought of buying a present for the loved one. The very thought of buying a present fills him with great joy;  he has someone he loves. When we think of love the first thought that often comes to mind is this emotional expression of love. But when we hear  what Jesus had to say about love his words leave us  perplexed.

"The command I give you is this, that you love one another" (John 15:17). This is the command that was given at the Last Supper to his disciples.  This is a strange kind of love. A command is what a superior tells a subordinate to do:  A mother commanding her child to stop watching TV., an officer telling a soldier to dig a trench. Jesus told his disciples to follow him and to take up their cross, but commanding another to love is different, says the writer. It's an entirely different command than the those given above.

Love, most of us think, has to do with the heart and our feelings. Is Jesus asking the disciples to like each other, to have a warm feeling toward the other? Is this possible? asks the writer. Can anyone command another to have a loving feeling toward another?  Of course not, and Jesus knew this well; he was not asking us to do what we often understand love to be.

The article goes back to the Book of Leviticus and the command to love (19:11-18). You shall not steal, lie, swear falsely, defraud, withhold the wages of your day laborer, act dishonestly or spread slander and stand idly by when your neighbor's life is at stake, but love your neighbor as yourself. Loving in this very concrete and practical way has nothing to do with feeling, says the writer.

Love is not limited to the field of emotions. Love has to do with the structures of society, with justice. The command of Jesus is to help those who are in need of our help: the weak, the poor, those whose rights have been trampled; that we are to work for justice in society.

Love must manifest in doing, he says. And now is the time for us to do the work that will bring the justice and peace of God into society. This is love. This is our duty.

"That All May Be One"

The Peace Weekly gives us a brief history of the Octave of Prayer, whose goal is a united Christianity. The Octave began on Jan. 18 and will end on Jan. 25th, the Feast of The Conversion of St. Paul.  The first great division of Christianity, between the Eastern and Western Churches, occurred in 1054;  463 years later, in 1517, the  Protestant Reformation began the fragmentation of Western Christendom. 17 years later, the Church in England broke away from Rome, founding the Anglican Church. And because of theological differences within Protestantism, it has continued to splinter into many denominations.

Offering the hand of reconciliation after doctrinal disputes and separation have occurred is difficult; the sense of unity is no longer there to help repair the break. The beginning of a search for unity began, according to the Peace Weekly, with the founding in 1857 of The Association for the Promotion of the Unity of Christians; Anglicans, Roman Catholics and Orthodox Catholics participated, though at the time the Catholic Church did not  show much interest.
 
Pope Leo 13th used the words "separated brethren," which brought a change from the use of the harsh word "heretic" used in the past.  This brought a change in the way Catholicism looked upon those who had left the Church. From that time on there was a movement within Catholicism to unite all Christians.

Anglicans have been in the forefront of the movement ever since the  prayer for Christian unity was written in 1908 by Father Paul Watson, an Anglican priest. Protestants joined the movement in 1926,  and at the Second Vatican Council, the Church took an active interest in working for unity with its decree on ecumenism. Today, Catholics, Protestants and the Orthodox are all united in praying for unity during the Unity Octave period.

In Korea, starting from 1965, the Bishops Committee on Ecumenism has been active in promoting unity. During the last part of the 60s to 1970, they worked with Protestants for a joint-translation of the Bible, have held prayer meetings together and forums on unity.  From 1965 Catholics And Anglicans have come together in prayer, and from 1986 the Protestants and Orthodox have joined together for the same purpose.  Since 2001 different religious leader have met personally to work to promote  unity among Christians in Korea.  From 2008, Catholic  deacons have been associating with the different Orthodox and Protestant groups to learn more about the other religions.

Despite the efforts of the Church  there are many Catholics who are not familiar with the Unity Octave or who show little interest in the movement. Last year Cardinal Kurt Koch, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, came to Korea asking all Catholics to keep the goal of unity in their prayers.

This year the subject of the octave of prayer is: "Has Christ been divided?" The material was put together by both Protestant and Catholic leaders and is used in many parts of the world during this period of prayer. There is still opposition within the different communities that do not look on these efforts favorably, but what is  important is that we are doing things together, which was not always the case. The meetings and discussions will continue, and when we do have a united awareness  of the situation among the different Christians that we need to be one, we will see God's grace moving us to the unity that Christ willed before his death.

Considering A Trip to Korea

VATICAN - SOUTH KOREA
Fr Lombardi: pope considering trip to Korea
Holy See Press Office director says Francis might visit the Korean Peninsula to attend Asian Youth Day in August in Daejeon.


Vatican City (AsiaNews) - Pope Francis could make a visit to South Korea in 2014, Holy See Press Office director Fr. Federico Lombardi told journalists this morning.


The pope is considering a visit to the Korean Peninsula as part of Asian Youth Day, which will take place in August in the Diocese of Daejeon.

On his way back from World Youth Day in Brazil, the bishop of Daejeon had told AsiaNews that the Bishops' Conference and the South Korean government were trying to get Francis to visit the  Asian Nation.
 
According to Mgr Lazarus You Heung-sik, a papal visit "would give new momentum to our missionary Church and the Churches of Asia, as well as help peace talks with North Korea."

Mgr You himself renewed the invitation in a letter to the pope in which he presented Youth Day, an event that will bring together young Catholics from all over the continent.

South Korea's Catholic Church and Catholic community strongly hope that the Pope will visit their country.

This year, plans are underway for two events of great importance for the Church in South Korea and Asia. In addition to Asian Youth Day, a decree of beatification is expected for 124 "new" South Korean martyrs, and Francis himself might beatify them in person.

On his way home from his trip to Brazil, the Pope had told reporters that he planned to visit Asia in 2014. "I have been invited to go to Sri Lanka and also to the Philippines. But I must go to Asia. Because Pope Benedict did not have time to go to Asia, and it is important. He went to Australia and then to Europe and America, but Asia . . ."

In his recent New Year's Greetings to the diplomats accredited with the Holy See, the pope said, "On this, the fiftieth anniversary of diplomatic relations with the Republic of Korea, I wish to implore from God the gift of reconciliation on the peninsula, and I trust that, for the good of all the Korean people, the interested parties will tirelessly seek out points of agreement and possible solutions.

Another sign of the pope's interest towards Korea is his decision to name Mgr Andrew Yeom Soo-jung, archbishop of Seoul and apostolic administrator of Pyongyang, to the post of cardinal.

Follow your heart

The columnist in the Peace Weekly "Preview of Events" discusses the reasons the novel by Susanna Tamaro, Follow Your Heart (Va' Dove ti Porta il Cuore, in Italian), quickly became, in 1994, an international best seller. Over 20 million hearts, it is said, have been moved by the story, which was made into a movie and translated into 45 languages, even being recommended by the Vatican and translated several times into Korean.

The book is written in the style of letters, written by Olga, a grandmother, to her teenage granddaughter, Marta, now in the United States, after living briefly, and unhappily, with Olga, who took her in after her mother died. Like an autobiography, the book reviews the life of the grandmother, who examines her life from her early years in an autocratic family, to being married unhappily to Augusto, her relationship with a married doctor, Ernesto, his death, and the unpleasant relationship she had with her daughter Ilaria, Marta's mother. Olga relates all this very honestly to Marta with all the passion and pain that went along with it. She explains that Marta's mother, Ilaria, was not the daughter of Augusto, Olga's husband, but of the doctor Ernesto, who was the grandmother's lover. She also told Marta that on the day she confessed the truth to Ilaria, she bolted from the house, very much distressed and died in an automobile accident that same afternoon. 

The columnist points out that Olga was brought up in a conservative family and that her daughter Ilaria, influenced by her mother, became involved in women rights issues. This also brought conflict into their relationship which later influenced the granddaughter, who was not able to find what was important in life and lived purposelessly.  The book shows the conflict that tends to exist between different generations (grandmother, mother, granddaughter) and looks at the 20th century women rights issues, and its woman-to-woman talk about love and truth.

The grandmother, in her letters to her granddaughter says that the first thing of importance when wanting to change something--as one is growing into adulthood--is the need to begin the change from within oneself. One of the mistakes, she warns, that we often make is to forget this self-awareness when problems arise, and as we struggle to resolve them. The grandmother advises her granddaughter that when you are faced with many paths to choose from and you don't know which to take, don't take just any path but sit down and take time to think and to listen to the voice within you. When you hear the voice speaking to you from inside, that is the voice, she says, you want to follow.

“Who among us has wept for these things, and things like this? Who has wept for the deaths of these brothers and sisters? Who has wept for the people who were on the boat? For the young mothers carrying their babies? For these men who wanted something to support their families? We are a society that has forgotten the experience of weeping, of 'suffering with': the globalization of indifference has taken from us the ability to weep!" These are the words of Pope Francis in his sermon on the island of  Lampedusa, shortly after the boat carrying migrants from Libya sank, killing 360 who had left their country hoping for a better life.

The columnist mentions a retreat she made in which the bishop giving the retreat used the words of St. Augustine: "Love and and follow the way of your heart." This is not a subjective teaching, she says, but one that makes us think of what, ultimately, is our desire and intention. She thinks this is the difference that has entered the Church with Pope Francis. Before Francis, people were seeing the problems of society but not knowing precisely how to express what they were seeing. The Pope is now showing us how to respond.

There is no denying that the disputes today in society are getting more violent: Impetuous, careless words hurled at others we disagree with, opposing positions, armed with great emotion, intent on forcing their views on others. And the competitive climate that surrounds any endeavor contributes to stifle our ability and willingness to reach out to the other, as does the need to care for ailing parents, the search for personal fulfillment, while not a few despair about their situation in life and choose extreme solutions. The need for human sensitivity and compassion is now being expressed by many voices. The hope we have for blessings, isn't it related to our God=Love understanding? If we could follow this 'follow your heart' understanding, as the grandmother finally came to realize, we would be much closer to living a life that is truly human.