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." 

Thomas Merton, Seeds of Contemplation, 


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


“It’s simply a letter about how we can draw closer to Christ, and there is no controversy in that,” Bishop Malesic said. “Let’s just pray 15 minutes a day; join a small group; invite your Catholic neighbors and friends together to have a cup of coffee and talk about ‘Why are you Catholic?’; ‘How can you become a disciple of Jesus?’ I think these are the basic things.”

-from a media interview of the bishop


I invite every Catholic in the Diocese of Cleveland to read this pastoral letter in its entirety, as I have written it with each of you in mind. Make notes and underline your copy of the letter; Consider reading it more than just once. then, meet with some other Catholics who have read this letter and discuss it in a small group. Over the next year I would like this letter to be at the forefront of conversations around the diocese. (page 2)

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.



Fifteen Minutes in Prayer Each Day

Perhaps the most important question we all need to answer is this: What kind of friendship do I have with God? Meaning, do I know God the Father? If so, what does it mean to be his beloved son or beloved daughter? Do I know Jesus the Son, and do I allow him to know and walk with me? Do I speak with the Holy Spirit often, and do I listen when he speaks to me in the recesses of my heart? Chances are that most of us reading this letter desire to deepen our friendship with God, with each person of the Holy Trinity, and with each other.

I am convinced that none of those things will matter or be effective if we are not serious about deepening our friendship with God. I invite you, if it is not already part of your daily routine, to make time for God – at least fifteen minutes of prayer a day.

I am convinced that there is no moving forward for us as a diocese unless we first move forward in our friendship with the Triune God, who will then allow us to enter into deeper friendship with each other as Missionary Disciples (pages 6-7)

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I have already mentioned above that I encourage every Catholic in the diocese of Cleveland to spend at least fifteen minutes in prayer each day. It may not sound like much, but carving out fifteen minutes during which one puts aside everything else and dedicates that time to one’s relationship with God can be life changing. 

Again, if we compare our relationship with God to our other relationships, we know that we make time for the people whom we love most, and the people who love us most make time for us. The same is true in our relationship with God.

There are many ways to pray, and you can each figure out what form of prayer works best for your given state in life, but for the sake of your spiritual health and the spiritual health of our diocese, take at least fifteen minutes to be alone with God. (page 8)


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.  

 SAINT GABRIEL HOURS

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. By clicking on either of two links one can celebrate the Hour without making any other choices. Or one can customize one's experience by choosing among four hymn settings, an additional setting for each psalm, a longer reading, and alternative settings for the Gospel Canticle and Lord's Prayer. 

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: e.g. 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 important to creating friendship, household, small group, ministry, organizational, and parish communities.


Develop Small Circles of Friends 

People look for community in the Church, and rightly so. We all need a small circle of friends with whom we can share our faith, in order to grow in our faith.  This sort of thing should be happening within families, which are the original and most natural of small groups. Families are called “the Church at home.” Make sure Jesus is at the center of your family life.

Small faith-related groups allow us to recognize what is universally true about our Catholic faith in our particular situations. Share what the Holy Spirit is doing in each of your lives. Don’t hide God’s action in your life from others. Share it!

I am asking pastors and parish leaders to see that such small group opportunities are available, but even more, I also ask parishioners themselves to take the initiative to create such small groups. This might be as simple as asking some of your Catholic neighbors to come over for a get-together. (page 10)

COMMONWEAL LOCAL COMMUNITIES

 According to its website, “Commonweal fosters rigorous and reflective discussions about faith, public affairs, and the arts, centered on belief in the common good.”  Commonweal Local Communities (CLCs) “gather in their local communities for critical conversation on the issues that matter most. Each community determines their goals, set-up, meeting times, and the readings best suited for them. 

About Commonweal

On Sunday, last November 17, I received an e-mail message that I had not seen in more than three years "New Member for your Commonweal Local Community."  Instantly the idea formed. November, the Centennial Issue of Commonweal would be an ideal time to begin reinventing Commonweal Local Communities. On November 23, I put a first draft on this website analyzing what the CLC did in the 29 meetings between September 13, 2017, and February 24, 2020, when the pandemic forced us to cancel future meetings. That experience pointed toward what needs to be done differently.

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 the same year that CLCs were created, Commonweal discontinued its blog. A group of about a dozen of us who had commented regularly on that blog created our own private blog which still survives. About a half a dozen of us are the core, contributing about a post a week, and daily comments on the posts. Creating a virtual community of monthly contributors and commentors here in Cleveland could overcome the time conflicts and travel distance problems associated with physical meetings.       

Models for Reinventing Commonweal Local Communities

My plan was to send e-mails to CLC 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 encouraging personal initiatives to start such groups creates a very favorable environment for CLCs. 

Even more favorable is the letter's emphasis upon service in the world. "I would like each and every Catholic in the Diocese of Cleveland to be able to identify his or her mission of service in the world. The People of God are the front-line workers for Christ in our society. Your apostolate, flowing from your baptism, is to transform those within your sphere, those you encounter on the journey of life. Use the gifts God has lavished upon you in ways that build the Kingdom of God on earth in the image of what the Kingdom of Heaven will be like: a place of peace, love, and joy."  

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


Knowing and Telling One’s Own Story

St. Athanasius said, “God became man so that man might become God.” Of course, we will never be God, in the strictest sense, but we are meant to be like God. In the eastern-rite Christian churches it’s called theosis; in the West we call it becoming a saint or becoming holy. God became human so that we humans can become God-like, or holy, or saints who have been perfected by God. Jesus said it this way: “So be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Mt. 5:48). Jesus came as one of us to make us one with God. (page 11)

What is your story? What has God done in your life? How has your life changed because
of your participation in the life of the Catholic Church?  (page 13)

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 with the giver of the book, centered on theology. Both events and persons are parts 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 the 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 on the dignity and worth of each person 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 (Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity, Chapter 2).

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 are then able to give them away! After outlining your life as a series of conversions, try seeing it as a lifetime of experiencing charisms, yours and others. We are a charismatic apostolic church. 

After seeing our lives 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. 


Evangelize

It is true that we live in an age saturated by screens and information, and that a majority of young people spend a great deal of time on the internet and social media. We must ask ourselves, are our parishes present online? Are we reaching out to our parishioners and potential parishioners online with the Gospel message? Do we have a social media presence that is filled with hope and joy? Are our websites attractive and easy to navigate? Can people easily find us and our Mass times? Can they easily identify what is offered for visitors and inquirers? Can they find a community to meet in person? Have we consulted our younger parishioners to ask for their help as “digital natives” in this regard? If not, it is time we begin. These are tangible ways we live out our call to be missionary disciple. (page 17)

 Television, Time Use, Lent and the Divine Office

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 pray the Hours of the Divine Office and do good things for others.  Praying the Hours had just become easier because of the DivineOffice.org website and its podcasts.  Time is our most precious resource. We only get it minute by minute. Back in 1708 when 37% of the waking day in England was spent in food related activity, it made sense to free some of that time up for other things.  Data from 1980 indicated that total food related time was down to 15%.  

Now however screens, beginning with television, have consumed our time. In the period from 1965 to 1995, while total leisure increased, television screens not only absorbed all the time freed up from paid and unpaid work they reduced the number of hours spent socializing, reading, and listening to music. In those three decades 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.  How and why did television come to absorb so much of our time? 

Television 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 work 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. 

Much of our time does come in large chunks of paid and unpaid work and planned leisure activities. The key to productive time management is what to do with small amounts of time, other than watching TV.  Robert Boice answered that question for academics with a book called Advice to New Faculty. His research had led him to conclude that successful academics, those who published more, who were better teachers, and were better colleagues had learned how to use small amounts of time on a daily basis to write, read and socialize. When the bishop suggests that praying even fifteen minutes will change lives, the data on academic faculty tends to support that proposition. If we also put small amounts regularly into improving our spiritual support system, that should also produce positive results. It did so for faculty who put time into their support systems. Boice’s approach is not a total time management system. It is project oriented, and he suggests a limit of about three projects at a time.

What I had neglected in my analysis of television for the 2011 article is that screens promote community.  We quickly discovered that when we began to collect resources for the Hours during the pandemic.  When lockdown came, the Dean of Canterbury Cathedral in England begin recording Morning Prayer in the garden with only a cameraman who was never seen and never spoke. The service expanded in length from 15 minutes to 40 or more minutes. It came to include bible study and much information about English history, secular and religious, art and literature.  The cameraman used locations, critters and vegetation of the garden to great effect.  Its audience reached over ten thousand a day from around the world even after lockdown ended. The viewers named themselves the Garden Congregation; its contents are housed under that YouTube site. They are a great education in how to use virtual reality to create a virtual community around Morning Prayer.  


Serve

II would like each and every Catholic in the Diocese of Cleveland to be able to identify his or her mission of service in the world. At the end of Mass, we often hear, “Go in peace, glorifying the Lord by your life.” This sending must not remain vague or abstract. Each of you must identify a concrete mission, a place where you have been commissioned by the Lord to take his love through service to those in need. There are countless missions and apostolates to be lived out, and I am asking each of you to prayerfully consider where the Lord is sending you on mission to serve others here in our Diocese of Cleveland (pages 18-19)

MY MISSION IS 

to deepen our friendships with God and one another
through small amounts of time spent daily in contemplative activity
with the help of virtual resources and communications
for the good of mankind and the building up of the People of God.

SAINT GABRIEL HOURS 

This blog promotes discerning the place of Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer from the Liturgy of the Hours in one’s life. Virtual resources include YouTube links each day to the full text of the Hours either as recited by a small group, or sung by a cantor. Additional settings for the hymn, psalms, canticles, and Lord’s prayer plus links to the daily Mass readings as substitute for the brief readings allow one to customize the Hours.  Each post contains a directory of pages giving suggestions on how to use virtual resources to celebrate the Hours anywhere, anytime, with anyone. 

The blog is designed so that the user needs no other resources such as books, lectures, meetings or programs.  Users are encouraged to be very creative in discerning the place of the Hours in their own lives, and to create communities both physical and virtual by sharing the Hours with others. 


Individuals, groups, organizations and parishes are encouraged to support this grassroots endeavor by advertising it on their websites and by developing additional resources, especially blogs or websites that provide material such as songs, lectures, group discussions, and celebrations of the Hours that customize the Hours for a community. 

LAKE COUNTY OHIO WEAL 

This blog contains resources for the development of Commonweal Local Communities (CLCs) oriented to the environment of Lake County Ohio using material from Commonweal, a variety of data oriented articles that are not behind paywalls, and reviews of books. The aim is to create a virtual community of readers as well as facilitate the development of a variety of CLCs in homes, parishes, and various organizations.  Participation in a CLC does not require having a subscription to Commonweal nor being a Catholic although both make things easier.   

The resources of LAKE COUNTY OHIO WEAL are organized around a vision of voluntary spiritual leadership along the dimensions of : Leadership,  (Human/Social/Cultural )Capital, Time, Spirituality, Voluntarism (Friendship), the Bible, and Prayer.  Capital is defined as the accumulation of labor in various forms  especially though the use of small amounts of time in a thoughtful planned manner over time such as improvement of our skills (Human Capital), improvement of our interpersonal and institutional relationships (Social Capital) and improvement of shared understandings and experience (Cultural Capital).  This overall vision of spirituality beyond Lake County is balanced by an emphasis on how Lake County is different from even our neighbors in Cleveland when it comes to some issues such as the environment and mental health. 

Users anywhere whether in Lake County, the Cleveland area, or Commonweal Local  Communities around the country are encouraged to develop themselves personally and form communities both virtual and physical by using small amounts of time spent in contemplating the resources available on the website and by creating their own websites to adapt the materials to their own communities and localities. 

CLEVELAND COMMONWEAL LOCAL COMMUNITY NETWORK 

This blog was designed to facilitate my role as contact person for the Cleveland CLC.  After the first year of our meetings I decided it was important to have a visible public record of our activity as a way to introduce ourselves to new and potential members.   I decided to call it a network looking forward to a future in which we might have more than one group meeting in the Cleveland area.    

“ In addition to a meeting facilitator, it is imperative to have good communication as a group. We recommend having one point-person for communications that does not rotate. This role includes sending out emails or making phone calls a week (or more) before the meeting with a confirmation of the location, time, and discussion topic clearly stated. This person should also be willing to be in touch with Commonweal when there are new sign-ups in their particular community. Though this role is not a major time commitment, it is a huge asset to the success of these groups.”   -from the Commonweal website.