APAC: OVERVIEW
“Every moment and every event of every man’s life on earth plants something in his soul. Each moment brings with it germs of spiritual vitality. If these seeds would take root in my liberty, and if His will grow from my freedom, I would become the love that He is. and my harvest would be His glory and my own joy."
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| Photo taken on December 29, 2024 @5:18pm about the time when we discovered the bishop's pastoral letter on the internet. The original post was on December 30, 2024 @ 12:39pm |
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MY COMMENTS ARE IN BOXES No other document, whether from the Pope, or the American Bishops, or any diocese or any parish has been as relevant to my life as this letter. It indeed seems as if the bishop has written it personally just for me. Why is that? How can that be? First, the bishop asks us to do simple basic things. He asks us to read the letter carefully as something meant for us personally. He asks us to begin talking about it with others. He asks us to devote fifteen minutes a day to improving our relationship with God. He asks us to find a social network where we can share the story of our lives and discover support for our concrete unique missions of service in the world. Second, the bishop recognizes the dignity and worth of each person and the value of personal initiatives. He suggests we personalize the letter by underlining it and making notes. He wants the letter to facilitate our conversations about basic things. (This post consists of some of my underlines with comment boxes to start conversations). The bishop is confident that we will discover what forms of prayer are best for us personally. He understands that the best support network may be one that we form ourselves starting with families, friends and neighbors. We each have our experiences, talents and gifts; therefore, our stories and missions will be unique. If we pour our uniqueness into these basic things, the letter will become relevant in very different and very personal ways for each of us. About twice as many Catholics pray daily as go to Mass each weekend. That is true for other Christian denominations. Talking about daily prayer could become a non-threatening way of opening conversations about our spiritual lives with Catholics and other Christians. Conversations about daily prayer bypass questions about where, when and how often we go to church. These conversations should be easy if we agree with the bishop that there are many ways to pray, and that each person decides what is best. In our conversations about prayer, let us emphasize using FIFTEEN MINUTES OF QUALITY TIME each day to improve our relationship with God. If we focus too much on fifteen minutes as a minimum some may assume the more the minutes the better the prayer. Scripture warns us against being proud because we pray more than others. We can all share practices of improving our friendship with God by fifteen minutes of quality time no matter how many or how few minutes a day we are accustomed to pray. SUGGESTED INITIATIVE FOR DISCUSSION We could begin our practice of fifteen minutes of quality prayer a day by contemplating the meaning of this letter for our own lives. As we underline and make our notes to share with others, let us be open to the Holy Spirit in discerning the following. What might the letter mean for our relationship with God? For our relationships with families, friends, and coworkers? For our relationship with parish and diocesan ministries? How can we best tell the story of our spiritual experiences in ways that invite others to do likewise? How can we talk about our talents, gifts, and missions in ways that will not only receive support from others but also help them identify their talents, gifts, and missions? |
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Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer each consist of about fifteen
minutes of Trinitarian prayer. As the chief parts of the Liturgy of the Hours
they are prayed daily by bishops, priests, and deacons. They are sung in
choir or recited in common by many religious. Vatican II encouraged laity
to pray the Hours with the clergy, or in common, and even alone. The Hours have been the heart of my life since childhood. In
recent decades, a large collection of liturgical music provided the
soundtrack for their celebration. Although I was able to share the music with
small groups at my house, the elaborate structure and costs of breviaries
meant group celebrations of the Hours were out of reach. When the pandemic arrived in 2020, I began collecting and organizing YouTube resources
on a blog to support our household celebration of Morning and
Evening Prayer. There was an abundance of resources of varying quality and
suitability. Two lay initiatives seemed most promising for widespread
use since they both provided the complete approved text of the Hours but in
different forms. DivineOffice.org focuses on
community recitation of the Hours. SingtheHours.org provides
a completely sung celebration by a cantor. YouTube has many psalms, hymns, and canticles, some of outstanding audio-visual quality, although these often do not use the official text.
However, they are suitable for mediation and background music with the
official text. In 2022 Word on Fire began
publishing a monthly booklet. It provides the complete text of Morning and
Evening Prayer and reads through like a book without complicated
instructions, page turning and ribbons. Their booklet and our website share a
common purpose: that the Hours may be prayed anywhere, anytime with
anyone. The Saint Gabriel Hours blog provides a
rich but manageable set of choices each day. The options include recitation in
common with others, or singing the Hour with a cantor, or listening to the
Hours being recited or sung, or meditating upon the text either with
or without musical accompaniment, or some combination of these options. The emphasis of the blog is upon using FIFTEEN MINUTES a day to discern the
place of the Hours in our lives. QUALITY time in prayer is more important than
quantity. Praying one Hour a
day well is better than attempting to do both Hours. Praying a portion of an Hour well is better
than rushing through the Hour. Use small amounts of time, some even
less than fifteen minutes, to decide where, when and how to best to pray the
Hours. Anywhere emphasizes integrating the Hours into the places of our
life: in the car on the way to or from work, when using the treadmill, when
walking outdoors, before and after meals and meetings, during work breaks,
and while doing routine tasks that don't require much attention. (The early Egyptian
monks did basket weaving while a cantor recited psalms). Anytime spreads Morning and Evening Prayer across the day. We can
share the opening hymn with family at breakfast, pray the psalms while commuting
to work, mediate upon the daily scripture readings during a work break and
then share the Gospel Canticle with companions at lunch. Processing from place to place is a common liturgical practice. Finding right places, times, and amounts of time is the key to good choreography. With Anyone emphasizes sharing specific celebrations of the Hours with others either personally or virtually anytime anywhere. Virtual resources provide more than the dry bones of the liturgical text. They celebrate the Hours with sounds and images. Most importantly they provide community, both community with those who produced the sounds and images, and community with those who celebrate the Hours with the same sounds and images at various times and places. Sharing specific celebrations is the key to creating friendship, household, small group, ministry, organizational, and parish communities. SUGGESTED INITIATIVES FOR DISCUSSION 1. Sharing the Hours is an opportunity to open conversations with others about the bishop's letter, discuss the importance of quality daily prayer, and begin sharing our spiritual lives with one another. 2. Discerning the place of the Hours in our lives provides a common project whereby we can relate to one another, groups, parishes and the pastoral letter. |
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COMMONWEAL LOCAL COMMUNITIES We should abandon the model of attempting to bring subscribers together in one CLC. Rather subscribers acting alone and together should create a network of small groups in homes, parishes, and elsewhere using a variety of models. We should begin inviting friends who are not subscribers to read articles by using the five free links per month allowed by Commonweal. In that same year that CLCs were created, a group of about a dozen of us created a national blog similar to a CLC. About a half a dozen of us are the core, contributing about a post a week, and daily comments on the posts. We could bind the Cleveland CLC network together by creating a virtual community of monthly contributors and commentors. Models for Reinventing Commonweal Local
Communities My plan was to send e-mails to members after the first of the year asking each person what they thought of the proposals. The discovery of the bishop's letter on December 29, 2024, profoundly changed the environment for reinventing CLCs. The proposal that everyone join a small group and encouragement personal initiatives to start such groups creates a very favorable environment for CLCs. Commonweal certainly has an abundance of concrete material relevant to service in the world. Two recent articles on grief by Paul Lauritzen, emeritus professor of John Carroll, are fine examples. Should Grief be Considered a Medical Disorder? Why We Need Graveyards. SUGGESTED INITIATIVES FOR DISCUSSION 1. Imagine how various locations of CLCs might enrich your life. A household CLC, a parish CLC, a Lake County CLC, and a diocesan wide CLC would all help me although they would be composed of very different people and focus on very different issues. 2. Think about what type of CLC might benefit people whom you know. Considering just the people whom I have met in the Cleveland CLC, a variety of small groups would help. 3. Third, study the models post. Which models are most attractive to you? Which might be most attractive to other people? Which might fit into the bishop's vision? 4. Share this post and the models post with others as a way to begin discussions about potential CLCs. Such e-mails might be the beginning of a virtual network of people interested in CLCs. |
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TWO SUGGESTIONS FOR DEVELOPING ONE’S STORY CONVERSION –METANOIA -CHANGING OUR UNDERSTANDING The bishop writes that “Catholic Christian living is not about a one-time conversion, but about a lifetime of conversions, of authentic growth in friendship with God.” However. his own life example focuses mainly on his college experience. At the top of this post is a quote from Thomas Merton. The introduction to Seeds of Contemplation is an image of life-long conversion. His book was given to me by a math teacher in my public high school. It became a guide to the contemplative dimension of my life and began a life-long friendship centered on theology with the giver of the book. Both events and persons are part of conversion. As a social psychologist interested in spirituality, I would define conversion as any event that leads to a change in how we understand ourselves in relation to God and others. We often begin rethinking ourselves when our relationships change: leaving home for college, graduating with a degree, becoming a member of a profession, getting a job, getting married, having children, experiencing the death of a loved one, etc. Research indicts that in many conversions, our relationships change first, only later do our minds understand their significance. BECOMING MISSIONARY DISCIPLES The bishop writes: Many Catholics are uncomfortable with being called missionary disciples or being asked to share their faith with others as evangelizers, because, for many of us, it was thought to be enough to simply go to Mass and be a good person.” In other words, many think of themselves as disciples, as followers. Now Pope Francis and the Bishop want us to go out and become leaders in the world by adding the word missionary before disciple. A deeper understanding is needed. Vatican II has a word for the missionary activity which flows from baptism. It is called the apostolate, and there is a whole Vatican II Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity that has largely been ignored. Why? Most of us do not think of ourselves as apostles, or even priests as apostles, although we recognize the bishop as a successor to the apostles. Apostolate sounds very churchy. The average person even average Catholic would have wondered what I was talking about if I had described the work that I did in the public mental health system to encourage consumers to be leaders and have others treat them as leaders as an apostolate! Explaining to them Catholic social teaching would have been a distraction. “For the exercise of the apostolate, the Holy Spirit Who sanctifies the people of God through ministry and the sacraments gives the faithful special gifts also (cf. 1 Cor. 12:7), "allotting them to everyone according as He wills"(1 Cor. 12:11) in order that individuals, administering grace to others just as they have received it, may also be "good stewards of the manifold grace of God" (1 Peter 4:10),to build up the whole body in charity (cf. Eph. 4:16). From the acceptance of these charisms, including those which are more elementary, there arise for each believer the right and duty to use them in the Church and in the world for the good of mankind and the building up of the People of God, in the freedom of the Holy Spirit who "breathes where He wills (Apostolate of the Laity, Chapter 2). Not only have we experienced a lifetime of rethinking ourselves, so we have experienced a lifetime of giving and receiving gifts, i.e. charisms. These gifts were often given as seeds by others (family, teachers, friends, the people whom we serve, -some of my greatest gifts have come from serving those with mental illness). These seeds grow to maturity under our care as well as that of others, so that we can give them away! After outlining your life as a series of conversions, begin seeing it as a lifetime of experiencing charisms, yours and others. We are a charismatic apostolic church. After seeing our lives as a series of changes in our understanding and as the sharing of gifts, then it is fairly easy to talk about discipleship as leadership not only in the world but also in the church, as the Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity does. I have found Greenleaf's Servant Leadership a great aid in doing this. |
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Back in 2011 in the above post on the PrayTell liturgy blog, I argued that we should fast from television during Lent and use the time to do good things for others and to pray the Divine Office. Praying the Hours had just become easier because of the DivineOffice.org website. Before I extol the power of screens to evangelize, let me bash the television screens of my own generation. The post documents that television screens took over a large portion of our daily lives just as total leisure increased from 1965 to 1995. All that increase and more were channeled into television viewing. TV time rose by 5.7 hours from 9.3 hours per week to 15.0 hours per week for women; it rose by 5.4 hours from 11.9 to 17.3 hours for men. Increased television time not only absorbed time freed up from paid and unpaid work it reduced the number of hours spent socializing, reading and listening to stereo. Why? TV is inexpensive and easily available in comparison to alternatives. Increased free time has become available in small amounts spread over the week rather than increased weeks of vacation, or less wor0 days per week. When people go on vacation they don’t watch much television. People report television is less satisfying than alternatives such as socializing, hobbies, sports, etc. However, these more satisfying alternatives generally need larger chunks of time and more advanced planning. When asked what they would do if they needed more time, people say they would give up television. Time is our most precious resource we only get it minute by minute. In 1780 about 37% of a waking day in England was food related, e.g. production, processing, and consumption. Data from 1980 indicated that total food related time was down to 15%. Now that screen reality consumes so much of our time, it makes sense both to limit screen time and more important to turn it to better uses. The pandemic illustrated to us the great value of virtual resources for improving personal and household life. Our household search for resources for Hours led us to discover Canterbury Cathedral in English. While there choral services shut down for along time, the Dean, Robert Willis did Morning Prayer in the garden with a lone cameraman. The service expanded in length from 15 minutes to 40 or more minutes. It included bible study and much information about English history, secular and religious, Catholic as well as Protestant. It used all the critters and vegetation of the garden to great effect. It ended only with the mandatory age retirement of the Dean. Its audience reached over ten thousand a day from around the world. They named themselves the Garden Congregation; its contents are housed under that YouTube site. It is a great education in how to use virtual reality. Dean Roberts died recently in the US. At his funeral, the Dean of the National Cathedral was homilist. He remarked that although the Cathedral had installed a system of 16 state of the art cameras right before the pandemic they were not able to be as effective. At the same time that Commonweal began to promote Commonweal Local Communities, it abolished the dotCommonweal blog which had been a great source of virtual community since 2006. Unfortunately community meant that only about fifty people participated regularly. Since about fifty local communities have been formed that means that probably five hundred people have participated in them across the country. Some participants in the dotCommonweal blog did not take its closing easily. At least a dozen of us decided to continue with our own blog. It was up and running within a week! There were initially about a dozen people who have posted and commented. Most contributors posted about once a week and commented daily on other posts. We are now in our seventh year. We are down to about half a dozen but all participate on a daily basis. The members have no efforts to attract new viewers, commenters or contributors. I think every CLC should have a blog where members can contribute posts and comment on each other’s posts. It would eliminate a lot of the problems of scheduling, traveling long distances and being unable to participate because of health or other reasons. |