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Feast Day of St. Anthony of Padua
St. Anthony was born in Lisbon in 1195. He entered religious life as an Augustinian monk but was immensely impressed with the Franciscans who took him into their order. On his first mission Anthony got sick in Morocco and returned to run a hospice.
Called upon to preach in an emergency situation, this Franciscan monk came through with flying colors and was assigned to preach and teach theology for the friars. His sermons mixed spiritual uplift with prophetic commentary on the greed and selfishness of the times.
Anthony died on June 13, 1231, at the tender age of 36. He was made a saint one year after his passing, and in 1946 he was declared a Doctor of the Church. He is known as the patron saint of finding lost objects.
Spiritual Practices
A Practice in Honor of St. Anthony:
"When you misplace your keys, leave something important behind, or can't find something, pause for a moment and realize that your loss is probably minor compared with the losses of people around the world. Offer a prayer for others, those who are deprived of the very necessities of life."
— Tom Cowan in The Way of the Saints
A brief profile of St. Anthony of Padua, known as the patron saint of finding lost objects.
Marianne Williamson, Everyday Grace
The mystic doesn't seek to avoid a disagreement so much as to infuse it with grace. A disagreement is like a cut on the skin. You need to treat it gently and not cut further. So it should be, when we see things differently, that the gentleness of spirit guides our speech. Emotional havoc usually comes not from the issues that divide us so much as from the things we say and do because of the issues that divide us. Indeed, it's often fairly simple things that we disagree about. Learning how to disagree with love is an important skill on the mystical path.
The gentleness of spirit guides our speech
John Dear, Mary of Nazareth, Prophet of Peace
Thich Nhat Hanh advises us to be mindful about every word that we speak to another person. If we use language that does not hurt people but that affirms people, we will lead people to greater peace, happiness, hope, and consolation. If we use the language of violence and fear, we will speed up the culture's downward spiral.
Use language that affirms people
Desert Fathers , The Wisdom of the Desert
One of the elders used to say: In the beginning when we got together we used to talk about something that was good for our souls, and we went up and up, and ascended even to heaven. But now we get together and spend our time in criticizing everything, and we drag one another down into the abyss.
Dragging each other down
Paula Huston, The Holy Way
The truth was that I could not trust my tongue. For too many years, it had been my instrument of self-aggrandizement; it had developed its own destructive habits, nearly impossible to break. I thought of how complicated my relationships had always seemed, how easy it was for me to wound and betray others without meaning to do so. I realized that behind almost every ruined relationship in my life lay words — words spoken in anger, in haste, in high and unthinking good spirits, in deception. I knew that if I were ever to become a simpler being, single-minded in my dealings with others, I would have to permanently curb my tongue.
The truth was that I could not trust my tongue
Life Together
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) received his doctoral degree from the University of Berlin at age 21. After living in Barcelona, Spain, and in the United States, he returned to the same university in 1931 as a lecturer in theology. Bonhoeffer, as a Lutheran, helped organize the Pastor's Emergency League against the Nazi regime and was a leading spokesperson of the confessing church. He actively participated in the German resistance movement and was arrested and hanged after being implicated in the 1944 assassination attempt on dictator Adolf Hitler.
In 1935, Bonhoeffer created and led a secret seminary in Finkenwal for training young men for ministry. Although the seminary was shut down in two years, this experiment in "life together" has inspired Christians around the world with its devotional ardor, its Christ-centered emphasis, its ethical imperative of being our brother's keepers, and its celebration of the bounties of Christian fellowship.
Bonhoeffer melds the practices of personal prayer, worship in common, work, and service to others. Other practices which are important to him are table fellowship, singing, intercession, Bible reading, and the confession of sin. The end result of all this is people of God who are committed to the ministry of listening, active helpfulness, and bearing with others.
A Christian classic on community, the ardor of devotion, the gift of grace, and the goal of service to others.
Patience
Allan Lokos is the founder and guiding teacher of the Community Meditation Center in New York City and author of Pocket Peace: Effective Practices for Enlightened Living. "It takes patience to develop patience," he says in this thought-provoking book on a virtue that has gotten short-shrift in our speed-oriented society. Lokos taps into his many experiences as a Buddhist practitioner and a spiritual teacher as he explores the relationship between anger and patience.
Sharon Salzberg has written: "Impatience is feeling upset because things are not happening on our timetable, or wanting to be more in control of a process so that we can have something happen the way we'd like to see it happen." The cultivation of patience is not an easy task given the bad habits we have established based on ego and illusion.
In a section devoted to establishing patience with ourselves, Lokos presents meditation as a worthwhile vehicle for change. In a chapter on relationships, he writes about the importance of skillful speech and listening closely to what other people say when they are in your company. At work we are called upon to not give in to our feelings of anger at co-workers or bosses. Lokos turns to Shantideva, a great Buddhist sage, for counsel on a cluster of issues related to the "mental misery" we bring on ourselves by impatience or giving in to the foolishness of anger.
We agree that patience for many people must become a way of life and not just a virtue or an occasional practice. The end result of commitment to moving beyond impatience is a life animated by peace, wisdom, and compassion.
Practices designed to develop patience as a way of life.
Speaking Christian
Christian language emanates from the Bible and the words used in worship, creeds, hymns, study, and community gatherings. But the numbers of people growing up Christian has decreased in the United States and even more in Europe. According to surveys, of the Americans born since 1980, 25 percent describe themselves as having no religious affiliation. In this wake-up call, Marcus J. Borg, bestselling author of many books on the historical Jesus, states that the diminishment of Christian language has come about through a rigid literalism which has distorted the understanding of Christianity's rich tradition and core ideas. The original appreciation of faith as a path for goodness and transformation has been replaced by what Borg calls "the heaven-and-hell-framework" consisting of four elements: the afterlife, sin and forgiveness, Jesus' dying for our sins, and believing. Borg's goal is to redeem (set free) Christian language from the prison of narrow dogmatism which distorts the meanings of the Bible and Christianity.
The first big word covered is "salvation" which has been totally warped as "going to heaven." Instead the church would do better by the gospel by relating it to "a transformed world of justice and peace." This capacious definition speaks to the yearnings of people of all ages and beliefs. As far as the word "God" goes, we need to replace the idea of God as punitive and threatening with that of God as gracious, loving, and compassionate.
In his discussion of "believing and faith," Borg refutes the idea that believing the right things about the creation of the world is what is essential. Instead the church could emphasize faith as a deep "movement of the heart, of the self at its deepest level." In his treatments of "sin," "forgiveness," and "repentance," Borg demonstrates how an over emphasis on these terms has resulted in a depletion of the wisdom of the Bible and produced a toxic self-hate in millions of people around the world. Other words covered include born again, the only way, heaven, mercy, and the rapture and second coming.
Borg closes Speaking Christian with his appreciation for its accent on the transformative power of love and communal renewal.
A wake up call for churches to redeem the Christian language from its imprisonment within literalism, dogmatism, and a heaven-and-hell framework.
Spiritual Disciplines
Adele Ahlberg Calhoun, a Protestant pastor of spiritual formation, who has put together this impressive collection of 62 spiritual disciplines for Christian communities. Some are inwardly focused, others emphasize outward activity, and a number of then put the accent on relationships with others. But the thing that unites them all is that they "open us to God." Calhoun probes the movement from desire to discipline and believes that we can choose the practice that most suits us at the moment.
The practices are divided into seven sections:
• Worship
• Open Myself to God
• Relinquish the False Self
• Share My Life with Others
• Hear God's Word
• Incarnate the Love of Christ
• Pray
We were delighted to see that Calhoun chose six of the 37 practices in our Alphabet of Spiritual Literacy: compassion, gratitude, hospitality, justice, silence, and unity. We were also glad to see the inclusion of the following: Rule for Life, Journaling, Self-Care, Simplicity, Solitude, Spiritual Friendship, Care of the Earth, Control of the Tongue, and Mentoring. Calhoun gives us added value with indexes and a glossary.
Sixty-two spiritual disciplines for Christian communities.
The Kabbalah of Envy
"Yiddish has a very special verb, unknown to most other languages: farginen. It means to open space, to share pleasure; it is the exact opposite of the verb to envy. While envy means disliking or resenting the happiness of others, farginen means making a pact with another individual's pleasure or happiness. This unique word represents the space in which we allow others to express their happiness, feeling of success, or gladness.
"When a person shares the news that he has come into a lot of money, he often has to contend with forced smiles, with muttered and mumbled congratulations. These are verbal attempts at covering up envy, the difficulty people have in dealing with good things that happen to someone else.
"At such times it is hard to avoid averting one's gaze and escaping within, to silent tormenting thoughts. As if in a movie, one hears oneself repeating, in slow motion, 'How wonderful, how nice,' while questions echo inside, such as, 'Why him? What I couldn't do with that much money. . . .' Usually in these situations, the difficulty in dealing with another's happiness is so obvious that the other person perceives it. Many friendships and confidences end in these rapid exchanges, when the worst and often unspoken fears about a friend are confirmed, with very little margin for error.
"Though the envy felt at these destructive moments is real, this doesn't necessarily mean that evil is wished on the person whose happiness is so difficult to share. But sadly, the incident carries deep implications, and any positive goodwill that may exist in the relationship is immediately lost. So it is extremely important to be able to fargint another person.
"Discipline is needed for farginen, because this feeling is rarely natural to human beings in their animal dimension. There is nothing wrong or false about seeking such learning. Like any other kind of social ability, such as not stealing, farginen comes through discipline. . . . When we are able to farginen someone spontaneously, it means we have done the required groundwork of dealing with our self-esteem, at least to some extent. But we will always have to work at reacting to opportunities for farginen, so as not to miss them.
"To develop the ability to farginen, we must first recall from our own experience those moments when we were able to do it. And if this feeling was sincere, it will certainly have been felt with great happiness, a kind of catharsis. To reach farginen is an experience of freedom, in which we find ourselves liberated from the heavy load dragged by those who envy. This is a liberation from the fantasy that we can control the world around us: the very special feeling of not being limited to the sphere of the ego and individual consciousness. . . .
"Discipline is a fundamental factor. The greater the investment in life, the greater value given to the inner self, the easier it is to feel content with one's share in life. And the greater the satisfaction with life, the greater the ability to feel happy, to farginen other people. Every time we are able to celebrate someone else's happiness, we will, by definition, have greater reason to celebrate ourselves. In this way, we can widen our chances for enjoying life, freeing ourselves from the imprisonment of our own luck. Farginen sets up networks of confidence that enrich life.
"It's much easier to suffer with a friend, to help someone who is less fortunate, than to farginen. It's much harder to sincerely share others' happiness. And the consequences are proportional: those whose suffering we share are eternally grateful, while those whose happiness we share will eternally care for us, as true friends."
Rabbi Nilton Bonder on enthusiasm as the antidote to envy.