Nourished by the Sacraments - Eucharist

(the Eucharist - taken from here)

It's been awhile since I last attended the talks at LSCO, with time away back home and other stuff- and today I managed to catch 'Nourished by the Sacraments' and today the featured Sacrament was the Holy Eucharist. The talk was given by Brother Lance, a Jesuit novitiate.

He began by asking us 2 questions:-
1. What gets you most in touch with God?
2. What does the Holy Eucharist mean to you?

We wrote our answers on slips of paper and he read them out - there was a range of answers, which Bro Lance said just went to show how different we all were. Nevertheless, what is important to know is that we all have a limited human conception of God for God cannot be boxed in, He is a mystery.

"The fact that you're surrounded by God and you don't see God, because you know ABOUT God" - Anthony de Mello SJ.
or put another way, we're like the little fish in the ocean who says, "Excuse me, i m looking for the ocean. Can you tell me where to find it?" (Anthony De Mello SJ)

The fact is that we're so caught up in our lives, we don't see/feel God, leaving us more and more dead. We bring our 'deadness' to the Sacrament, with no sense of God.

• Mundane vs Mystical

"We have emptied the Lord's Supper of its mystical union with the divine presence in the bread and wine. We have lost the divine reality it represents"
There is a dual existence to all of us: spiritual/mystical and the physical reality, which is why the fact of the Incarnation, that Christ was fully divine and fully human is so important.
Briefly: the truth of the Incarnation was already laid down as early as 381 AD at the Council of Constantinople and the Council of Chalcedon, 461 AD.

Who am I? Why do I exist? What is my purpose here?

In gazing with love at the Eucharist, it awakens something in us as we get to truly know ourselves as a child of God.

• Spirituality vs Religiosity

"God would be much happier, according to Jesus Christ, if you were transformed than if you worshipped. He would be much more pleased by your loving than by your adoration, or by saying Lord, Lord ... that's spirituality, that's everything. If you have that you have God"
-Anthony de Mello SJ -

Worship is empty without spirituality, and the sad thing is most of us are ignorant of the spirituality of the Eucharist.

So, how to worship/adore the H0ly Eucharist?
It begins with Awareness.
Are you awake? What is your reality? What is your prayer like?
or Are you asleep? Are you confused? or Are you in touch with God??
The question is do we understand what the deeper reality of life is and are awake spiritually.
To do that, we must learn to listen to God in the silence of our prayer -do we feel anything during Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament?
One of the members of the audience shared that she felt nothing, heard nothing, but felt patience and peace come much later.

In fact, we sometimes pray without even realising it - what comes from the heart is honest prayer.
Getting to the heart prayer - starts with honesty!
1. Knowing God
2. Knowing ourselves
3. Coming to accept the juxtaposition
Even if the gulf between God and the self is large, it does not matter. Acceptance is the key.

Spirituality , there is not about piety, devotion, religion or worship but is about awareness: to love, to be free, to have joy and peace.
Religion minus Spirituality makes us in danger of becoming mechanical people.

The question put to all of us by Christ is : Who do you say I am?
Master? Teacher? Friend? Lover?
God = the friend to whom we can pour out all our feelings, deep within our heart.
Our lamentations and joys are all prayer.
The Eucharist invites us to a personal vertical relationship with God, calling for a complete surrender to Him in openness.
Are we allowing God to transform us through the Eucharist?

The speaker then moved to the doctrine of transubstantiation - the transformation of the bread and wine into the blood and body of Christ.
The 2 requirements are a priest and bread and wine. Through the process of Consecration during Mass, the bread and wine is changed.
Scriptural foundation for this can be found here:-
1. John 6: 51-56
2. John 6:63, 66
Cf 1 Cor 2:12-14 and 10:16

Take note of 1 Cor 11: 27-29:-

*Herefore anyone who eats the bread** or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily is answerable for the body and blood of the Lord. Everyone is to examine himself and only then eat of the bread or drink from the cup; because a person who eats and drinks without recognising the body is eating and drinking his own condemnation. *

Receiving the Eucharist in a state of sin deadens us even more - we are eating and drinking sin on ourselves, living in a state of unawareness, spiritually dead.

Moving on to the historical aspect, the basic features of Catholicism were fixed during the period from Constantine to Pope Leo the Great.
The belief in the Real Presence of Christ was highlighted by many saints, St Ignatius of Antioch, St Justin Martyr and St Cyril the Great.
even though the senses suggest it is just bread and wine, let faith make you firm!

The Eucharist is primarily a calling - reawakening us to the God within us.
What is the real reality of our lives?
Who is calling us? Christ? or our feelings/thoughts?
Thus the Holy Eucharist is the daily saving action of Christ - what was visible during His earthly life is now sacramentalised and rendered visible through the official actions of His body, the Church.
It engages all of who we are - saying Yes to God, and to be the salt and light of the Earth.

This said, although we are so often lost - the disconnect between head and heart i.e. we know but we truly do not know which is all the more reason for us to build a real friendship with the Holy Eucharist.

We could try contemplating Psalm 139 or try the Examen (both personal favourites) and remember that the primary thing to be honest in our prayer - tell God what we are grateful for and not grateful for. In short, to allow God to actually come into our lives.
And when we do that, we love God and all His people
to be special to no one, and love everyone because love shines on good and bad alike, it makes rain fall on saints and sinners alike. (Anthony de Mello SJ)

We all need to learn to focus on true spirituality and not get too caught up in piety.

***

I have much to share about the Eucharist, but since this has been a long post I'll end now with a lovely Eucharistic hymn, 'One Bread, One Body'

Nourished by the Sacraments - Reconciliation

(as usual, pic credits here)

Living Stones Saturday Prayer Meet - Nourished by the Sacraments - Reconciliation

This Saturday's talk on Nourished by the Sacraments was delivered by Chris Aw and it was on Reconciliation.

Chris started off by asking us, What is the 'Stuff of Life'?
(ff John 9:6 - Having said this, he spat on the ground, made a paste with the spittle, put this over the eyes of the blind man)

He explained that the Sacraments relied on real stuff i.e. perceivable substance/real matter which is then made whole, holy and powerful by God in order to reach us (man).
Chris linked this to the incarnation of Christ (that He was God-made-man) and that Christ used real, everyday things in close contact to heal us.

The cry for healing has echoed throughout the Old and New Testament - Jeremiah Chapter 8 "looking for a physician and/or the balm of Gilead" and then in Luke 4:23 and Luke 5:31 "only the sick need healing"

Question: can you heal yourself when you are sick?
(Think about the story of the healed paralytic whose friends lowered him down to be healed by Jesus.)

Now, sin has a number of different dimensions:-

• Self - it deforms the character - sowing the seeds of new evil habits
  
• Neighbour - even sins committed in secret harms your neighbour as it changes the self's character and makes one more likely to interact with one's neighbour more sinfully
• God - damages our relationship with God.
  

Sin = a refusal of God's love!

Coming now to the recognition of God as the Trinity - Father, Son and Holy Spirit, it is also a relationship of Lover, Beloved and Love and Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier.
therefore : Holy Spirit = Sanctifier = the one who makes us Holy
and as Healing = to be made whole. And this is what true Holiness is, to be whole.

At the point of Creation, Man was originally whole. After giving way to temptation from the Evil One, Man fell and now had a Wounded Nature, prone to Personal Sin. This led to Fractured Communion with God.
The question is : What can restore our Communion with God and Original Wholeness?

Answer: the outpoured blood of Christ
ff Ephesians 1:7 in whom, through his blood, we gain our freedom, the forgiveness of our sins. Such is the richness of the grace)
Sin distorts our own image and likeness of God, alienating ourselves from our brothers and sisters and God.
In order to make us whole again, reconciliation with God and our sisters and brothers was made possible only through the supreme sacrifice of Christ - as all our sins are 'a cosmic injustice'

In summary:-

1. it is easier to destroy than to build up
2. it is also often pleasurable to watch other people tear each other apart -'a perverse pleasure'
3. when trying to reconcile, we often need help from a 3rd party who will be a mirror to show what we've really done - else we'd still be trapped in our own way of seeing things.
   
4. it is important to hear affirmation directly with a real human voice.
   

In this regard, the sacrament of Reconciliation addresses the Whole Person - spiritually, emotionally and sensually : body, mind, soul and spirit.
We all need to know we are totally forgiven from the depths of our being through Jesus' blood.
To know, hear and experience forgiveness is to overcome Fear, Shame and Guilt.
ref Jude 1:24-25

***

A Sacrament = Outward Expression of Inward Grace.
Reconciliation is easily one of the most misunderstood of all the Sacraments - it seems to be something we do only once in a while, over Easter or Advent and we often wonder what to say to the Priest in the Confessional.
Is he going to think any less of us after what we've done? Or is God going to love us any less?

Let's move away from thinking along the lines of guilt and punishment in the Confessional and view it instead as tapping into a spring of grace where we can wash ourselves clean of our sins and start again, with hope in our hearts.
In the end, that is what Reconciliation is really all about , reconciling ourselves with God, the Church, our brothers and sisters - and an opportunity to learn too where we have messed up and to take small steps in the right direction.

Courage to those who have abandoned this for a long time - God loves you and longs Himself to make you whole again, so come to Him and pour out your broken heart that He may refresh you.

Heaven and Earth

(picture taken from here)

Today at Living Stones prayer meet, Bryan continued with Part 2 of his talk which was entitled "Heaven and Earth".

He began with a wonderful slideshow of the wonders of Nature while the Creation story was being read out slowly - for those who are interested, it's from Genesis Chapter 1 which is available online here.

Bryan impressed upon us the necessity of understanding the reading in its historical context. in Biblical times, the conception of the world is that of a flat plane with a vault/dome/firmament above - which would be the Heavens where the sun, moon, stars were located.

The reading and images gave us a sense of awe and wonder, that only an Almighty Creator could have made this world, and to cap it off, on the 6th day, God looked back at all He had made and saw that it was very good. Note that this was after God had created man - a point which Bryan would elaborate later on.

Bryan explained that Heaven = All Spiritual realities
while Earth = All Physical Realities

It is known that God created Heaven first, and with it billions upon billions of spiritual beings, as many as there are stars in the sky. these were intelligent beings with free choice. through their beauty and the good they do, they praise God.
Indeed, the most brilliant of the spiritual beings had 12 wings, and his name was Lucifer, the bearer of Light (now, doesn't this name sound familiar?)

Then God created Earth, an act which confounded Lucifer - where was the element of free choice in the creations so far? they seemed nothing more than a vainglorious act of making things just to praise God. But the folly of God is greater than the wisdom of these spiritual beings, and was seen in the ultimate of God's creations on the 6th day: Man. Now, at this point, Lucifer had enough and together with other spiritual beings who agreed with him, decided to abandon God.

Man is both a Spiritual and Physical Being who can bring all realities into praising God.

Praising God is manifested through the following ways:-

• man's inner beauty and goodness;
• the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit:- wisdom, understanding, counsel, courage, knowledge, piety and fear of the Lord; and
  
• bringing all physical realities into praising God - by his dominion over the land and creatures of Earth.

Most importantly, it is voluntary, an act out of free will. To worship in the best way possible is to praise God, and we have an entrusted duty to bring all of Creation to praise Him. Here, worship means to cultivate and keep in a good state the physical and spiritual 'gardens' which have been entrusted to us - as was first used in Gen 2:15.

Thus Lucifer has made it his mission to launch an all-out spiritual battle against Man, tempting him to be more animalistic and abandon his role in praising God. the animalistic side of Man is shown when he sins - relating back to last week's topic on the 7 Deadly Sins.

Lucifer's methods are simple, but with terrifying results:-

• influencing Man into taking advantage of physical realities and each other
  
• selfishly enjoying to the limits without transcending Man's own limitations; and
  
• destroying resources, others and finally themselves.
  

All this is done to show proof of the folly of Man. Hence the word 'Devil' is derived from the Greek word "Diabolos', which means 'the accuser' - and Lucifer will stand and accuse us of failing to live up to our God-given role when we die.

Now, take this is a fact - a spiritual man is higher than angels as one of the Sufi mystics put it - although angels are higher than men. This point is made in 1 Cor 6:2-3 as well.

Therefore, it is important that Man fulfils his divine role via free choice and the supremacy of spirit, with the help of the Holy Spirit (The Advocate). We too have a Guardian Angel each whom we ought to get to know!

Reassuringly, God is more powerful than all temptations, and none of these occur without His permission or knowledge. We take comfort in this and seek to praise Him through discipline, freedom of choice and sincere action without any ulterior motives. to this end, we need to get to know our spiritual side, and we can start by attending a silent retreat.

***

The Earth is awesome. We know that. But even more awesome are the tremendous blessings and role we have to play in praising, reverencing and honouring God.
Long ago, St Iranaeus made this observation "God is glorified when man is fully alive"
In conclusion, we are most fully alive when we have sought to live sinless lives (we can never really be free of sin because of the stain of original sin) and also cultivate all our many charisms in the act of reflecting God's glory and bringing others closer to Him.
Finally, AMDG - Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam = all for the greater glory of God (the Ignatian motto) - it's something handy to remember when we are doing anything at all, that it all goes to the Creator Lord.

The 7 Deadly Sins

I attended a talk yesterday during the Living Stones Campus Outreach (LSCO) prayer meeting on 'the 7 Deadly Sins' given by Bryan Shen, a lay missionary.

Surprisingly (or not), there was no brimstone and hellfire - instead, Bryan prefaced his talk with the link between psychology, psychiatry and counselling.
Psychiatry = physical abnormalities that affect the mind
Psychology = whatever that affects the psyche (everything subconcious)
Counselling = coping with all the issues in life.

all these 3 elements overlap, and Bryan remarked that often those who have been wounded deeply seek to be in the helping/healing ministry as they have the greatest potential to be healers.
BUT the Devil prevents them from doing so by being The Bearer of False Light (as Lucifer's name meant Bearer of Light).

indeed the work of Evil is to convince us that WRONG is not WRONG, while RIGHT is boring, old-fashioned, unusuble or just plain old wrong.

Evil = Fun and Humour (?!)

now wait a minute, it's actually the OBSESSION with fun that's problematic - as Satan wants us to feel light hearted so that we will not feel the weight of our sin/wrongdoing. while this was a good concept to start off with, somewhere along the line the Church descended into strict penances and bans on laughter and gaiety.
finally St Philip Neri stood up and said 'Laughter has its own good but use it carefully'.

so what ARE the negative effects of excessive fun/humour/laughter?

• the inability to know the difference between funny and wrong
• removes the weight of wrongs done
• increases insensitivity
• increases irresponsibility
• more crucially, it hurts the growth of maturity - unable to understand, reflect and contemplate - clarity of thought remains infantile/undeveloped ...

Ref Luke 6:25 ' Alas for you who are laughing now; you shall mourn and weep'

Sin = anything (action, thought, belief, practice, habit, influence etc) that prevents you/another person from reaching your/their highest/divine Potential.

therefore, evil pulls us in the opposite direction of fulfilling our highest/divine Potential.

Through the gifts of the Holy Spirit, the Lord wishes to share His wisdom and understanding with us in order to counter the attacks of evil.
"A Christology that ignores Satan is crippled and will never understand the magnitude of redemption" - Fr. Gabriele Amorth, Chief Exorcist in Rome.
we are either being sabotaged or aware of being in a state of spiritual warfare and battling actively.

Now on to the 7 Capital/Deadly Sins

1. Gluttony
2. Lust
   
3. Avarice
4. Sloth/Despondency
5. Anger
6. Pride
7. Envy

and the 7 Contrary Virtues

1. Chastity
2. Temperance
   
3. Charity
4. Diligence
5. Patience
6. Contentment
7. Humility
   

Lust - Luxuria/Scheming - the opposite would be Chastity, Honesty, Congruence, Purity;
Gluttony - letting loose - the opposite virtue would be Temperance, Self control, Moderation;
Greed - the hoarding of wealth and resources - go for Charity instead;
Sloth - Acedia - not doing what should be done, either physically or spiritually out of laziness or disinterest or doing something else - Spiritual Diligence is the counterpart of sloth;

* in this respect, Boredom can be dangerous as it pushes us to do things which are fun but dangerous without knowing the difference!
it is even worse when a person's deep internal self worth is damaged.
contrast with if after doing a tedious task, you feel satisfied, that's Spiritual Diligence, the sense of accomplishment, of being able to complete a task and overcome drudgery. *

Wrath = internalized low self worth - it's addictive
Repeated abuse leads to putting the blame on someone else, keeping you from facing feelings of sadness and enabling them to avoid crying/showing vulnerability.
Internalized low self worth is balanced by finding external manifestations of worth by cultural/social standards i.e. you look fine, but inside you're not!

Pride/Vainglory=

Symptoms:

• stubborn urge for service and increased busyness to the point of being unable to say No even when overstretched;
• the increased irritability at the moral imperfections of others - resulting in condemnation and so-called 'justifiable anger';
• inconsistent drive and energy - praise drives the momentum of service - no praise, no service!
  
• increased confusion and suspicion when counsel is given
• naturally - increased politicking ... AND
• any good works done are not blessed by GOD!
  

Envy/Prejudice/Contempt - try this on for size instead : - Contentment/Kindness/Compassion

In the final analysis - we are to root sin out of our own hearts, and to become a witness to God to teach others not to sin.

***

My first thought after hearing all this was the immediate sensation of being caught in so many acts of wrongdoing - as if this list of 7 sins were booby traps and minefields placed by a God who demanded nothing less than survival by avoiding them.

but then i thought again - if we were to see these instead as the many varied ways in the which the Evil One can attack us and draw us away from the love of God, then it might be easier to be conscious of them and to ask for His grace in facing up to daily temptations. It is not that God created these, but that the absence of God in the presence of Evil has made them come about.

when we ponder more deeply on the depth of love our Creator has for us, it begins to make sense that sin is a rupture in the relationship we have with Him.
St Augustine put it so beautifully : "If you but love God you may do as you incline".