Brian’s Reflection: Friday, November 9, 2007


By the time we hit fifty, we have learned our hardest lessons.
We have found out that only a few things are really important.
We have learned to take life seriously, but never ourselves.

- Marie Dressler (Leila Marie Koerber), actress, born on
this day in Canada, 1869

Oh Lordy! Who could forget Marie Dressler as “Min”, alongside Wallace Beery as “Bill” in that great film! She won the Academy Award that year (1930) for her performance. She was great as the owner of a tough dockside hotel, struggling to know what to do for the young girl she took in and raised. I’ve seen the movie three times - I just love Marie’s strong character and her gutsy acting.

Marie might better have said, “By fifty, we ought to have learned our hardest lessons ….”. I don’t think I can say that I have. O, I know what’s important, I think, at least for me. But I continue to allow all sorts of other things to take up my time and energies. I’ll have to take some quiet time and really think about why that is. Why is it that I still find myself in a rush all day long, doing several things at the same time, not leaving enough time, dashing to appointments having left just seconds to get there – and being in a fury when someone or something (perfectly predictable, of course!) gets in my way. Sigh.

Could it be that ….. oh, surely not! ….. that I take myself too seriously?? That I really think that I need to be doing all these things at breakneck speed because I think this means I’m taking Life seriously?? Yikes!

I think I do know, in the center, what’s really important. By 50, most of us probably do. We have learned what is genuinely serious in Life.

If we can just learn not to take ourselves too seriously, we can see all the distractions for what they are. We can let them go. I think this is what Jesus meant in saying, “Take up your cross” - He meant, Live and Die for what’s really important.

After 50, that’s the goal!

Brian+

Brian’s Reflection: Thursday, November 8, 2007


We have all known the long loneliness
and we have learned that the only solution
is love and that love comes with community.

- Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic
Worker movement, born on this day,
1897


Dorothy Day was born in Brooklyn. She survived the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Her family moved into a tenement on Chicago’s South side, where, with her father out of work, Dorothy came to understand the shame of failure, and poverty, and the beauty even of slums and their fullness of life and people.

Her experiences led her to Roman Catholicism, and to working for the equality of women and for social services to the poor. She was drawn to the Franciscan way of life. Eventually, to further outreach to the poor, she started a newspaper called The Catholic Worker - it sold 100,000 a month. And then Catholic Worker houses, for the homeless; they grew to 33 by 1936. And, in my mind, being the best of Christian love and charity, people were never proselytized - they were just loved and cared for in Christ’s name. To me, this is the very best of Christian witness. Charity for conversion is only unholy manipulation.

In the Christian myth, Jesus did not die for love of any one person. He died for the whole community of God’s human family. Of course love can begin between two. But any loving relationship draws others to it. Community forms - where people come “com muneris”, with gifts to share, so that all may grow together in mutual affection.

Anyone can pray alone – and this is good. And God can be found alone, or often finds us when alone. The church is only useful if it is a community of Love patterned after God’s unconditional Love. If it is not, it is a millstone around God’s neck.

If you are a church-goer, work to make your community a solution to the long loneliness that so many of us know.

Brian+




Brian McHugh, priest & vicar
St. Peter's, Casa Grande
St. Michael's, Coolidge
orrock1946@msn.com
520.705.2689 (telephonitto)
blog: http://brianstakeontheworldfaithandreligion.blogspot.com/

Brian’s Reflection: Wednesday, November 7, 2007



http://www.maniacworld.com/Phone-Salesman-Amazes-Crowd.html


You may have seen this; if not, here it is.
It made me cry.
What a joy to see someone with a gift move the whole crowd.

Brian+

Brian’s Reflection: Tuesday, November 6, 2007


Evolution seems to close the heart to some
of the plainest spiritual truths while it opens
the mind to the wildest guesses advanced
in the name of science.

- William Jennings Bryan, who lost
the Presidential election to McKinley
on this day, 1900


Well, I don’t know who Mr. Bryan talked to ….. but he didn’t talk to me!! Why, I even projected myself back in time and stood outside the polling booth to give him the opportunity on this night in 1900 - but he must have been preoccupied.

For me, nothing could be more glorious than the elegance of evolution. And if “God” is anything, God is elegant! God is not some crude hucksterish magician - whose cache is illusion and delusion and trickery. “God” is about Reality.

And, since Science is Reality, they are Twins. Born of the same Beauty and Elegance and marriage of Imagination and Intellect.

There is no separation or contradiction between Science and Faith. Science is the biology and the geology and the genetics and the chemistry. Faith (or Religion) is the glorious Art of elegant explanation which honours the science and exalts the Mind - the Mind being the fountain of God’s language.

Bryan, alas, allowed himself to be misled by small-minded people.

Don’t make the same mistake. Your sanity depends on it.

Brian+

Brian’s Reflection: Monday, November 5, 2007


Life is too short to work so hard.

- Vivian Leigh, English actress,
born on this day, 1913.


Miss Scarlet! I’ll bet most people think that Vivien Leigh was American. She was born in Darjeeling, India - as was her Irish mother. Her father was British, her mother Irish and part Armenian, contributing to her daughter’s dark features. She had a fine career, but Vivien Leigh will always be Miss Scarlet to Americans.

You know, Life IS too short to work so hard!

Balance, balance is the goal. It’s hard in America. Puritan blood still courses through our bodies. Thinking we can “earn” Heaven and God’s Love. And, Life as we want it - all the trimmings, all the MRI’s, all the techie toys, $30,000 per year colleges, Starbuck’s coffee at $3.95 a frappacino.

Relax guys! Take a deep breath. Think about what expensive stuff you don’t need! Buy a grill and have good salmon and veggies on it! Play Scrabble. Reduce cable TV to 5 good channels.

Take the extra moolah every year and go to the Greek isles and eat moussaka from a cheap stall.

Feel better??

Brian+

Brian’s Reflection: Saturday, November 3, 2007


Mutation

They talk of short-lived pleasure--be it so--
Pain dies as quickly; stern, hard-featured pain
Expires, and lets her weary prisoner go.
The fiercest agonies have shortest reign;
And after dreams of horror, comes again
The welcome morning with its rays of peace.
Oblivion, softly wiping out the stain,
Makes the strong secret pangs of pain to cease:
Remorse is virtue's root; its fair increase
Are fruits of innocence and blessedness;
Thus joy, o'erborne and bound, doth still release
His young limbs from the chains that round him press.
Weep not that the world changes--did it keep
A stable, changeless state, 'twere cause indeed to weep.

- William Cullen Bryant, American poet, born on
this day, 1794



Born in Cummington MA, Bryant was a sickly child - but he prospered, went to Williams College, later became a lawyer, practiced successfully, but leaned more to literature than the law. Whether or not this had anything to do with the fact that his doctor father tried to reduce the size of his enormous head by having him plunged as a baby into a cold stream daily, we cannot know. As I often say - Ain’t People Amazing!

I guess we can give thanks for the short reign of fierce agonies. For Oblivion, wiping out the strong pangs of pain. For remorse, welling up and flooding our lives and causing innocence and blessedness to flower, and Joy given strength to break chains and take over from mistakes and meanness and cowardice.

Lord, how many people I know who resist Change! We are using some new formats for the Liturgy, encouraging new insights into the nature of God, Self, Repentance, Salvation, Love. Oh the behind the scenes bitching! One person swept by me the other day and spit out, “Don’t tell me what page we need, just tell me whether we are using the Liturgy “we” (who’s “we”???) hate or the one we like!”

“Weep not that the World changes …. Did it keep / A stable, changeless state, ‘twere cause to weep.”

Weep. Yes, weep. Resist change, especially in ourselves, and we wither and die.

But The Christ calls us to change and Live.

Brian+

Brian’s Reflection: Friday, November 2, 2007


The world is too much with us;
late and soon, getting and spending,
we lay waste our powers;Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
the winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.

William Wordsworth "The World Is Too Much With Us"

“We lay waste our powers.” I think so, oh, I think so. Is my perception just clouded by cynicism? I wonder sometimes. I am always grateful for National Public Radio. It helps me not to wallow in discouragement about “the World” that “is too much with us”. Especially on the weekends, the news programs are filled with fascinating people who are doing wonderful, interesting, creative, thoughtful, fresh, kind, artistic, or funny things. I can’t watch TV News - too negative. And even NPR is getting way too filled with news of violent, saddening stuff, so I limit myself to an hour a day.

“We have given our hearts away”. Indeed I think we have. And here is where some words of Jesus come to mind. “Where your treasure is, there your heart will also be.”

Ponder Wordsworth with me today. Are we “out of tune”? Especially if we have given our hearts and minds and all we are to the God of Love and to the building of the Kingdom of Peace? The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon and the howling winds are but symbols of the wonder of Creation. Are we moved?

Treasure whatsoever is lovely, gentle, kind, generous.

Sleeping flowers of divine humanity will unfold.

Brian+