St Mary's

Terry Fitzpatrick 21st- Feb 2010

© Copyright belongs to author. This cannot be reproduced/published without author permission.

Luke 4:1-13

At the very core of what it means to be a Christian, a spiritual person, or
whatever term you would like to describe yourself, is a connection to an essence, an
awareness, a sense of other, something more – God.  Call it what you may.

Almost every religion, which has this at its heart, often has set Periods of time to encourage people to become more focused, more connected to this source.

•    Such times as Ramadan, people of Islamic faith,
•    Seasons of Earth/times of Equinox for people of Wicca and Pagan Religions
•    Dadirri – Miriam Rose Ungunmerr – Baumann
•    Time away as Bus/Women – Bus/Men
•    Lent and Advent for Christians.
•    The weekly Sabbath for the Jews, Sukkoth a week long
•    Yom Kippur – day of fasting and prayer, Jewish Day of Atonement.

It is connection to this source that makes sense of life, adds depth and meaning to
everything.  It is the epode (hymn of triumph) to move out, to serve, to connect.

•     “ the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, to bring good news to the poor, freedom     to captive”  (Isaiah 42)
•    “This is my Son the Chosen One.  Listen to him” (Lk 9:36)

In today’s Gospel Jesus is filled with this Spirit, this connection.
Jesus goes into the wilderness to strengthen this connection and it is here we learn of
the THREE  OBSTACLES to overcome in order to maintain this connection.
We see these obstacles in the three temptations of Jesus.

The first obstacle:

The devil, the personification of temptation, begins by trying to place DOUBT in the
mind of Jesus.  Doubt whether there is any connection to this divine essence at all.
He says, “If you are the one born of God, do ……” We can all recognize this doubt in ourselves.

We can all doubt our innate inbuilt goodness, the sacredness of our very being, always connected to the ONE SOURCE and hence our oneness with all of life. Something within the human “animal” forgets this, wants to separate off, be disconnected, or at least doubt the connection.

The essence of Jesus’ whole teaching about the Reign or Dream of God was to set
people free from thinking poorly of themselves in relation to God.  Yes, we are all
sons and daughters of God – however people imagine God.  Jesus’message was not
to fear God but to call God Abba “Daddy”.

All of us have equal access to God, there was no need for a religious middle management in order to access God.  This presence of God was not a commodity that

people with special religious powers could control, make possible, or deny.
It was this teaching that ultimately lead to his death.
The first obstacle for maintaining the connection is to get caught up in doing.
“If you are the one born of God, tell this stone to turn into bread…”.  What a spectacular feat to perform. The false self – marvelling at what it can achieve.  Getting lost in its achievements.  “Look at me, how good am I?  What an enormous trap this is for each of us, particularly in Western culture where we define ourselves by doing.
It is a big obstacle to maintaining our connection to our Source, our Divine Essence.

It is why as a Judeo Christian Culture we have in place a Sabbath Day, the 7th day, a Sunday, where there is an attempt to refrain from doing and to place this time
aside to nourish our relationship with the Source.  It is why we have Lent and Advent,
why we have a long tradition of Christian going on retreats, pilgrimages, to move away from the achieving, the doing, which gets in the way.

The second obstacle:

The tempter takes Jesus out onto a great height and shows him the world, that he
could have all this and give up this connection with the Essence.
In a culture which is so centred in consuming, where we have to define who we are,
where we get a sense of how important or non important we are and where our sense
of worth comes from, we say to ourselves “If I can only have this, this job, this
degree, this place of honour, this house, this car, if only I was in a better relationship,
then I would be complete, happy.

Everywhere we turn, another advertisement is re-enforcing this sense of incompletion. And completion will be achieved when I attain.  In our materialistic culture this obstacle is never ending – one where we have to be constantly on our guard.

The third obstacle:

In the third temptation Jesus is taken to the Holy City and made to stand on the very
parapet of the temple.  It is the position of social aggrandizement, social advancement, power, and a place where you will be looked up to and admired.  Who of us is not seduced by power, prestige and celebrity status, or simply concerned with what other people think of us?

This is most surely a trap for the false self.  Jesus refuses it.  He responds by saying
the angels of God will hold him up, being in the Presence of the Divine, being
connected, will hold him up and nothing he can do or what the tempter can offer him
can ever hold him up.  He says he has no fear of falling down, for he knows that it is
in falling down is where often our greatest lessons are learnt.

At the end of the gospel we hear  “Having exhausted all these ways of tempting Jesus,
the devil left to return.”

Emphasising that the temptations, these obstacles are always with us.  We need to
always be on our guard.

We need all the help we can get to support and encourage us.  Hence times of retreat,
Sabbath days, Lent and Advent. We begin this Lent with new resolve to place our relationship and connection to our deepest self, the Divine, the source of our being at the centre of our lives.  This relationship is the most important thing in our lives.

In a moment we will be invited to Ash ourselves and others.  We use Ash to remind
ourselves that all forms are temporary -  just passing… our bodies, our relationships,
our homes, families, friends, are all passing.

There is something beyond, something bigger than us, something eternal, forever
mysterious which holds us.

So let us Ash ourselves and one another to remind ourselves of all that is temporary and that we also inhabit an eternal world forever mysterious.

Homily – St. Mary’s in Exile

Sunday 7^th March 2010

Dr. Val Webb

© Copyright belongs to author. This cannot be reproduced/published without author permission.

Last month, when John sent me today’s Gospel reading, the timing was perfect.  The fig trees in our orchard were bulging with ripe, purple figs and we were eating fresh figs, stewed figs, figs with cheese, fig salad and fig jam.  However, one of our trees has stubbornly refused to bear fruit for even longer than the three years recorded in this parable from Jesus, and so the reading grabbed my attention in a practical way.

This parable isn’t just a simple story – they never are, although we often tell them as if they were cosy little stories affirming how we already act.  The parables that Jesus told were all about subverting the status quo and challenging myths perpetuated by the dominant and powerful in society as to how life is.  Despite Christian art depicting Jesus working with his father in a well-appointed carpenter’s shop, Jesus’ family were at the bottom of the social class – they were landless Galilean peasants and basic labourers, perhaps building scaffolding for stonework on construction sites.  Remember the derisive words when he taught in his hometown and the locals took offense — “Where did he get his wisdom and healing powers — Isn’t this the carpenter’s son whose parents and siblings we know?”  This makes it all the more pertinent when Jesus tells parables about reimagining a world that subverts powerful religious, political and social norms.  When the Samaritan became the hero in the “Good Samaritan” story, the Jewish audience would have been outraged because of their established myths about the despised Samaritans.  And so, if we are to understand this parable of the fig tree, we need to search for clues in the story that tell us what dominant Jewish myth is being challenged by Jesus in his turn-the-world-upside-down style.

The fig tree was symbolic in biblical times – it meant peace and prosperity with its sweet fruit and its shady leaves, but it was also a symbol for the Jewish people themselves.  In another story in two of the Gospels, Jesus looks for fruit on a fig tree out of season and curses it because it had none – a strange story that referred to the Jews — but this parable is the opposite of that story.  According to our Gospel reading, people had come to Jesus to tell him that some Galileans had been murdered by Pilate, assuming that this tragedy happened because of their sinfulness, that same belief that led people to ask Jesus about the blind man “Who sinned, he or his parents?”  Who knows – since Jesus was Galilean, perhaps this was also a cheap shot at Galileans.  Jesus comes straight back at them.  Trying to make direct links between sin and consequent suffering is wrong and totally misses the point, which is that everyone is capable of missing the mark and thus all need to repent our damaging actions.  To prove his point, Jesus pulls in another example.  Apparently some fortification tower had fallen and killed a group of people, and Jesus made the point that, whether a natural disaster like this or deliberate evil like people being murdered, neither was punishment for human sin, but all of us need to repent our wrongs.  It’s also good to remember that repentance was more about corporate repentance in Jesus’ day, rather than individuals counting out the many sins they needed to confess.  Repentance was about collective guilt, about changing one’s mind and ways and coming to a new way of thinking and acting as a people – bringing in God’s reign.

The fig tree parable challenges the Jewish myth that poverty, illness and suffering are the result of sin; and wealth, health and success were signs of righteousness, a theology preached openly in Victorian England and still believed internally by many people today who refuse to address homelessness, poverty and powerlessness.   It’s interesting to imagine who they players are in this parable – Jesus doesn’t tell us, expecting that we can work it out.  It is the owner of the orchard that comes to check the trees and found this non-productive tree.  The owner tells the gardener to cut it down.  Although in the long run, it is about economics – who wants a fig tree with no fruit to sell or eat – the reason given here is “Why should it exhaust the soil?” or, in other words, why should something unproductive be a drain on resources that could be put to better use, namely to support those that are productive.  Does this sound a bit like some of today’s arguments – why pump money and resources into welfare systems or prop up unproductive members of society or, as a corollary, let’s give incentive payments to those who produce results and millions to CEO’s who will get the most profit out of the soil?  It’s the old argument of the best use of limited resources, an argument that always pushes some off the lifeboat.  So who is the owner of the orchard in the story?

It’s the gardener, the hired hand, who stops the hand of the owner, saying that this is not the only solution.  The gardener is passionate about the trees and the soil.  “If you’re worried about exhausting the soil,” the gardener says, “I shall cultivate the ground around the tree and fertilize it so that it has a better chance to bear figs – leave it for another year while I try.  If not, you can cut it down.”  The gardener argues for a reprieve, offering nurture and special care of this unproductive tree by providing better resources which add rather than take away from the whole.  The gardener is not about to give up on it or the exhausted soil.  The story is actually not about the either/or of one fig tree, but about how to nourish all life — the interdependence of soil, air and all the trees – so that everything and everyone flourishes.

I’m so glad that this was the Gospel reading assigned for today because it made me look more closely to see what Jesus might have been saying about the worldview of his time.  I hadn’t noticed how contemporary the parable is, which is exactly what parables are for – metaphors and stories drawing on common life that arrest us with their vividness or strangeness, such that we have to stop and tease them out.  We could think through this parable for all its meanings for hours and not exhaust it – make it your meditation for the coming week.  What does it say about sharing resources?  What about people we think of as “unproductive” or a drain on society’s resources?  How do we measure productivity in people?  Why is it so much about economics in our society?  Who deserves the best care, the extra fertilizer and digging around their roots?  What does it say about mercy, new life, hope, the patience and commitment of the gardener?

So who are the players in the parable?  Interestingly, the owner of the orchard is not God – or at least we don’t imagine so.  We need to give God the compassionate role, the merciful role, that of the gardener who tenderly cares for the plant – and yet we are making that assumption, it is not spelled out as that.  What if the orchard owner is God, the God with whom the Jews who questioned Jesus would relate – didn’t they assume that suffering and death was God’s punishment on sin which, in the case of a fig tree, meant not bearing fruit?  Wasn’t that their original assumption that Jesus challenged – the direct relationship, 2 + 2 = 4 between sin and punishment?  They would be thinking that God was the orchard owner until, wait, the gardener stands up to this God and stays the Divine hand, desiring mercy not death.  So is the gardener the “other” God, the God of the transformed way of living, the God whose “reign” Jesus is all about bringing in?  Is this about the conflict between the ways we have imaged God as the punishing Judge who comes from outside the orchard to give orders, control and to destroy – and the God who gives and operates within the garden, the gardener who nurtures the soil, cares for the trees and promotes the flourishing of everything within the universe, seeing the unique worth of each?

Dare I bring the metaphor even closer?  You’re allowed to do anything with parables.  There is more to life than figs.  In biblical times, the fig tree was valued as a beautiful shade tree, something essential for hot climates.  The leaves were used as medicinal poultices for healing the sick and fig leaves were incorporated into the Genesis story in order to hide the nakedness and shame of Adam and Eve.  They are also a symbol of peace and prosperity – all this without even the need for fruit.  Perhaps the owner of the orchard is the institutional church who only judge the usefulness of a fig tree or congregation by the homogenous crop of traditional fruit or believers it produces.  The orchard owner had to search for fruit on the tree which suggests it had a healthy mass of leaves under which they might be hidden.  St. Mary’s has been about the leaves – sheltering people from the heat of an unforgiving, merciless world; spreading its leaves such that peoples’ fear and nakedness will not be exposed to cruel judgment; making leaf poultices that heal the body as well as the soul; and offering a cool haven of peace and calm in a hostile world where all questions can be asked and discussed.  The orchard owner sees only figs as the point of the tree, but this community has recognized so much more and thus the Spirit of the community, the gardener, asks that it be allowed to grow, to be cultivated and fertilized to see what it can actually become, something beyond the institutional vision.

When I started pondering this parable, I saw nothing of this – it was a fig tree story with a generic idea of God’s care, but it gets deeper and deeper and wider and wider as we apply our own particular experiences and context to it.  This is the beauty of parables – they are free of baggage about truth, doctrine and form, because they loudly proclaim themselves as fiction and thus we are free to take them on board and let them speak to our own situation – Jesus said after one of his parables, “Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.”  He was also reluctant to explain his parables when the disciples found them troubling for exactly this same reason – let them simply speak to where the hearer is in their life.  Some might say, why bother about these old stories?  We can come up with similar examples in our own day, but when so much of the Bible has become outdated with its cosmology, patriarchy and violence and when so much of what is good in it has been smothered by institutional baggage and medieval interpretation, even the person of Jesus himself, it is refreshing to be able to take these stories which, according to contemporary scholars are more likely than other material to have come from the lips of Jesus, and thus feel we are responding to what he saw as the transformed way to live in the world and with each other.

Where do you find yourself in this parable?  Are you part of the soil that nourishes life, or the gardener who never give up on anything or anyone – God has no hands but our hands, so the cultivating and nurturing is ours to do.  Or the fig tree that had a series of bad years and has been rendered unproductive and dying of thirst and nourishment, needing some good soil around you to support and strengthen you – or even simply not to give up on you?  Or do you find yourself more in the role of the orchard owner, striving for profit and success, and valuing everything and everyone around you by the bottom line?  Or, perhaps you are one of the other trees in the orchard, disdainful of the one squandering the soil without giving anything back, or alternately, thankful for a gardener who sees value and potential life in every tree?

From what I have read about this community, especially in the recent book published about Father Kennedy and you all, I see you as the gardener, caring for so many people whom the orchard owner would reject, believing in the worth of every living thing, resisting a society that looks only at productivity and the bottom line and, most of all, living in hope that, with a little bit of cultivation, nurture and tender loving care, everyone of us can flourish and no one needs to be overlooked or eliminated. You are believers in the interconnectedness of all life and the Spirit that lives within you and this garden, caring about its survival and flourishing.  May you continue to be so.

You can support St Mary’s by donating to

St Mary’s Community Ltd, BSB 064-131 10339414

or contact St Mary’s Catholic Community and Micah Projects

PO Box 3449 SOUTH BRISBANE 4101 Ph 3029 7000

www.stmaryssouthbrisbane.com

The new sets of envelopes for the community giving system have arrived and will be available for collection after Masses on the weekend.

The various ways to donate here at St Mary’s include:
1    A cash donation is placed on the collection plate,
2    A numbered envelope is used where amounts can be written according to the contributor’s wishes,
3    A quarterly/half yearly contribution can be given and apportioned according to the members wishes using a plain envelope with details and amount enclosed,
4    Community members may wish to use their own internet banking system to transfer an amount weekly, monthly or quarterly to the St Mary’s account or approach their own bank to arrange a periodic payment to BSB 064-131  Account number: 10332933

Increasingly more members are choosing this fourth option and a form for this purpose is available giving the details of St Mary’s Commonwealth Bank account.  If you are not using prenumbered envelopes we ask that you consider joining this scheme and leave your name and address on the sheet provided at Mass so that appropriate receipts can be issued for the tax deductible portions that are given.

Here at St Mary’s we have only one collection time during the mass. This collection time is just after the Homily and before the Prayers of the Faithful. One amount is given by the those present to cover the traditional first and second collections.

If you would like to borrow a book from the library you need to:
•    Email Marg margdoc2@bigpond net.au
•    Fill in a request form from the library table
Your book, if available, will be delivered in a named Ziploc bag the following Sunday.
You are asked to make a donation when you collect your book.
Most books can be borrowed for a month, but a few popular titles, of which we have only one copy, will be ‘Fast Back’ and only available for two weeks.
Keep reading – it helps us to develop as a community, as we explore similar themes.

Book List
Armstrong Karen – THE HISTORY OF GOD
Anderson ‘Sailor’ Bob – WHAT’S WRONG WITH RIGHT NOW?
Arntz et al – WHAT THE BLEEP DO WE KNOW?
Braha James – LIVING REALITY
Campion Edmund – TED KENNEDY – PRIEST OF REDFERN
Charlesworth Max – DEMOCRATIC CHURCH
Fiand – AWE-FILLED WONDER
Fiand – FROM RELIGION BACK TO FAITH
Freke & Gandy – THE JESUS MYSTERIES
Harpur Tom – THE PAGAN CHRIST
Hodgens Eric – NEW EVANGELIZATION IN THE 21ST CENTURY
Hollaway Richard – BETWEEN MONSTER AND SAINT
Holloway Richard -  DOUBTS AND LOVES
Holloway Richard – GODLESS MORALITY
Holloway Richard -  LOOKING IN THE DISTANCE
Holloway Richard – ON FORGIVENESS
Kung Hans – THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
Leloup Jean-Yves – THE GOSPEL OF MARY MAGDALENE
Morwood Michael – TOMORROW’S CATHOLIC
Morwood Michael – FROM SAND TO SOLID GROUND
Morwood Michael – IS JESUS GOD?
Ogden Steven – I MET GOD IN BERMUDA
Oliver Patrick – THE FREEING OF GOD
O’Murchu Diarmud – CATCHING UP WITH JESUS
Pearce Joseph Chilton – THE BIOLOGY OF TRANCENDENCE
Pope John XXlll – IN MY OWN WORDS
Ranke Heinemann – EUNUCHS FOR THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN
Rohr Richard – WILD MAN TO WISE MAN
Spong John Shelby – A NEW CHRISTIANITY FOR A NEW WORLD
Spong John Shelby – ETERNAL LIFE: A NEW VISION
Spong John Shelby – THE SINS OF SCRIPTURE
Spong John Shelby – WHY CHRISTIANITY MUST CHANGE OR DIE.
Tolle Eckhart – PRACTICING THE POWER OF NOW
Tolle Eckhart – THE POWER OF NOW
Tolle – FINDHORN RETREAT  (BOOK AND DVD)
Vosper Greta – WITH OR WITHOUT GOD
Walsch N.D – HOME WITH GOD
Wheeler John – AWAKENING TO THE NATURAL STATE

To celebrate The Year of the Priest, past priests from within the St Mary’s Catholic Community in Exile have begun to preside at some of its masses.

Jim Kilbride has presidered.

Tony Carol has presidered.

Dermot Dorgan presided at the Sunday evening mass on February 6th  2010.

Kerry White presided at the Saturday evening mass on February 5th 2010.

Kevin Kehoe presided at morning mass on January 24th 2010 with two of his children

Baptism recertification

Baptism recertification

‘For Baptism to be valid the Catholic Church requires that the minister must pour the water and say the words in the ritual. This has not always happened in this parish. This certificate attests that a ceremony took place but is not a guarantee that the Baptism was valid. If the one whose name appears on the certificate is preparing for the reception of other sacraments such as the reconciliation and confirmation reception of first holy communion  or wishing to be married in the Catholic Church  please show this certificate to the priest involved in the preparation. He will do what is needed to ensure validity of the baptism.’

Peter Kennedy response

This is an excellent example of what the former Scottish Anglican Primate Richard Holloway calls the “theology of anxiety” which the church imposes upon its people, in the name of orthodoxy”.

It is moreover a nonsense to argue that a baptism is invalid – “read ‘does not work” – because the celebrant uses the words “Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer of Life” instead of “Father, Son and Holy Spirit”. We can only talk about God in metaphor – that which is unknowable, ineffable is always beyond words.

The Leadership of the Catholic Church in this Archdiocese is complicit in encouraging unnecessary anxiety in the minds of some parents. But not many I would suggest.

As Father Eric Hodgers – a priest in the Melbourne Archdiocese – said only last year: “of course baptisms at St Mary’s are valid. All you have to do is apply the ‘duck test’. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it is a duck”.

What Eric Hodgers is pointing out, albeit humorously, is that the INTENTION to baptise is what matters, not the use or non-use of a “magical” formula/metaphor.

The Catholic Church under its current leadership is rapidly descending into farce.

Where are the voices of sanity?

Over the last few years we have been providing opportunities for people of the community to engage with the theology of current writers.   This has been through Doc buying books and  on-selling (without markup) at the Drop Shop.

However there are people in the community who would prefer not to have to buy these books—as least not until they have had a chance to read them.

To this end we have established a small library.    The books can be borrowed by emailing Marg.   She will leave the book you require in a named ziploc bag  in the Drop Shop.   You should return it within a month of borrowing.  You are invited to make a small donation to our library costs when you return your book.

We have only one copy of some books so there may be a little wait.  Just be a little patient.

We would appreciate donations of any of the listed books.   We have to be somewhat restrictive as to titles until we have a permanent home for our library.

If you want to borrow or donate a book email margdoc2@bigpond.net.au

St Mary’s Community Library List

Anderson ‘Sailor’ Bob – WHAT’S WRONG WITH RIGHT NOW?
Arntz A et al – WHAT THE BLEEP DO WE KNOW?
Braha James – LIVING REALITY
Campion Edmund    - TED KENNEDY – PRIEST OF REDFERN
Charlesworth,   Max – DEMOCRATIC CHURCH
Fiand – AWE-FILLED WONDER
Fiand – FROM RELIGION BACK TO FAITH
Freke & Gandy – THE JESUS MYSTERIES
Harpur Tom – THE PAGAN CHRIST
Hodgens Eric – NEW EVANGELIZATION IN THE 21ST CENTURY
Hollaway Richard  – BETWEEN MONSTER AND SAINT
Holloway Richard -  DOUBTS AND LOVES
Holloway Richard  – GODLESS MORALITY
Holloway Richard -  LOOKING IN THE DISTANCE
Holloway Richard – ON FORGIVENESS
Kung Hans – THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
Leloup Jean-Yves – THE GOSPEL OF MARY MAGDALENE
Morwood   Michael – TOMORROW’S CATHOLIC
Morwood   Michael – FROM SAND TO SOLID GROUND
Morwood   Michael – IS JESUS GOD?
Ogden Steven – I MET GOD IN BERMUDA
Oliver Patrick – THE FREEING OF GOD
O’Murchu Diarmud – CATCHING UP WITH JESUS
Pope John XXlll – IN MY OWN WORDS
Ranke Heinemann – EUNUCHS FOR THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN
Rohr Richard – WILD MAN TO WISE MAN
Spong John Shelby – A NEW CHRISTIANITY FOR A NEW WORLD
Spong John Shelby – ETERNAL LIFE: A NEW VISION
Spong John Shelby – THE SINS OF SCRIPTURE
Spong John Shelby – WHY CHRISTIANITY MUST CHANGE OR DIE.
Tolle Eckhart – PRACTICING THE POWER OF NOW
Tolle Eckhart – THE POWER OF NOW
Tolle – FINDHORN RETREAT  (BOOK AND DVD)
Walsch N.D – HOME WITH GOD
Wheeler John – AWAKENING TO THE NATURAL STATE