Tag Archives: faith

Faith Comes Alive in the Dark

St. Paul of the Cross, Letter 594

“By God’s high providence, you find yourself struggling in darkness. That’s where humility and self-knowledge are found. So don’t give up prayer, interior solitude, acceptance of God’s Holy Will and all other virtues. Faith come alive in the dark. With love, then, detached from everything else, reach out to God in the silence and alone. Search for God carefully and peacefully.

But what am I saying? Isn’t God always with us? With naked faith, go to the depths of your soul and find your highest Good. Stay there and you’ll find all riches. We know that; remember it.”

A Rejected Prophet

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Usually celebrities are welcomed to their hometowns by proud family members and neighbors, but when Jesus returns to his native place, a rising star in Galilee, he’s driven out of the synagogue and almost killed by the people of Nazareth. He claims to be anointed by the Spirit of God and he’s been acclaimed elsewhere, but they see him only as the son of Joseph, the carpenter, and reject him. (Luke 4,21-30)

They stay unconvinced, it seems, because some of his family appear later at Capernaum, the base for most of his ministry, and want to take him home because he’s out of his mind,they say.

Why are they against his extraordinary claim? Is it because they know him too well? Or really, not enough? They’ve watched him grow; he’s worked on their homes and in their fields. He built some of the tables they’ve used for their meals. They know his father, his mother, his relatives. An unassuming young man whom they’ve known since infancy.

Where does he get all this?

We have to be careful that, like them, we get used to Jesus Christ, whom we may have known from our infancy. They took him for granted. His silence through the years made them blind to his power and they did not believe in him.

We know his silence too in faith and sacraments. He may act somewhere else, we may think, but not in us. We can mistake his silence for powerlessness too.

Give us faith in you, Lord.

(4th Sunday of the Year)

The iPad

The iPad, the new mobile tablet from Apple, was “revealed” the other day and the reviews say it may change the face of communication. It offers email, internet access, ebooks, and audio-visual features from a 9” screen. The geeks are picking it apart for one thing or another, but one reviewer may have gotten it right. Apple didn’t make this for the geeks but for their mothers.

If I were thinking of producing media content today, which I am, I should think of producing it for the iPad.

If I had an iPad now, what would I be able to carry around with me? For starters, the whole bible, the readings for Mass, video Mass homilies and short bios of the saints, courtesy of the US Bishops. http://www.usccb.org/nab/ The entire Liturgy of the Hours by way of Universalis: http://www.universalis.com/ Documents of Vatican II, The Catechism of the Catholic Church and the Compendium of the Catechism from the Vatican site: http://www.vatican.va/

For Catholic news, there are the blogs from CNS: http://cnsblog.wordpress.com/ America Magazine, http://www.americamagazine.org/blog/ Commonweal http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/blog/ Zenit:http://www.zenit.org/0?l=english

I could have with me my homilies, my email, podcasts, slide and video presentations. Resources like Wikipedia, the Library of Congress, the New York Public library would be available by way of the internet.

Not a bad treasure of resources to carry around and work on as you go.

But, as Yeat’s poem says, “What then?”

We need to work on what we’re doing now, our websites, blogs, etc..What will they look like on the iPad?

The iPad could use simple catechetical material, strongly visual. I think it will be the basic tool for providing catechesis in tomorrow’s church, but it will mean rethinking how we catechize and what form our catechesis will take. I like the approach used in the new US Catholic Catechism for Adults, which uses saintly people to say what faith means. Short 10 minutes or 24 minute presentations.I have been using it for retreat and mission talks.

We need good material on the Passion of Christ too. In a quote from yesterday’s blog, St. Thomas Aquinas said we human beings find “relief through the passion of Christ. Yet, it is no less an example, for the passion of Christ completely suffices to fashion our lives.” How can we present the Passion of Jesus on the iPad?

Let’s think about it.

David Carr, in the New York Times for January 31, looks into the future of the iPad. It’s there, he says, now book and magazine publishers and other providers of media content have to think about it and work on prototypes and figure out the financials of it all.

The Leaking Boat

The story of the storm at sea in today’s gospel is so dramatic:

“A violent squall came up and waves were breaking over the boat,
so that it was already filling up.
Jesus was in the stern, asleep on a cushion.
They woke him and said to him,
‘Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?’
He woke up,
rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, ‘Quiet! Be still!’
The wind ceased and there was great calm.
Then he asked them, ‘Why are you terrified?’
Do you not yet have faith?'”

I’m thinking of another boat, not so dramatically endangered, but still in trouble ahead–old age. “We are in a drifting boat with small leakages” (T.S. Eliot)