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THIS WEEK'S HIGHLIGHTS
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Religious Education
New Phone Number
(for all inquiries & messages)
856-461-0023
ST VINCENT DE PAUL HELP LINE
856-461-1131
Sacrament of Reconciliation:
SATURDAYS
From 4 - 4:30
in the Chapel
ANOINTING
OF THE SICK
FIRST Saturday
9:00 am Mass
at St. Casimir's
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Last Updated:
May 4, 2008 _______________________________________________________________________________
The Casey Club invites
you to join them on Friday, June 27 to see the Camden Riversharks for an
evening of food, fun and FIREWORKS!!!
(Click here for details)
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From:
Rev.
David Stachurski, OFM Conv.
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He is Risen – Thomas Merton
So
we are called not only to believe that Christ once rose from the
dead, thereby proving that he was God; we are called to
experience the Resurrection in our own lives by entering into
this dynamic movement, by following Christ who lives in us.
This life, this dynamism, is expressed by the power of love and
of encounter: Christ lives in us if we love one another. And
our love for one another means involvement in one another’s
history. Christ lives in us and leads us, through mutual
encounter and commitment, into a new future which we build
together for one another. That future is called the Kingdom of
God. The Kingdom is already established; the Kingdom is a
present reality. But there is still work to be done. Christ
calls us to work together in building his Kingdom. We cooperate
with him in bringing it to perfection. Such is the timeless
message of the Church not only on Easter Sunday but on every day
of the year and every year until the wold’s end. The dynamism
of the Easter mystery is at the heart of the Christian faith.
It is the life of the Church. The Resurrection is not a
doctrine we try to prove or a problem we argue about; it is the
life and action of Christ himself in us by his Holy Spirit.
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Grace – Wendell Berry
The woods are shining this morning;
red, gold and green, the leaves
lie on the ground, or fall,
or hang full of light in the air still.
Perfect in its rise and in its fall, it takes
the place it has been coming to forever.
It has not hastened here, or lagged.
See how surely it has sought itself,
its roots passing loudly through the earth.
See how without confusion it is
all that is, and how flawless
its grace is. Running or walking the way
is the same. Be still. Be still.
“He moves your bones, and the way is clear.”
These images
of faith as a hangover, of religion as struggling with God’s
shadow, of an absent God whose calling card we still possess,
describe in a general way our everyday struggle with faith and
agnosticism. We still have some experience of God, though rarely
is it a vital one in which we actually drink, first-hand, from
experience. Most often He is not experienced as a living person to
whom we actually talk, from whom we seek ultimate consolation and
comfort, and to whom we relate person to person, friend to friend,
lover to lover, child to parent.
Rather God is
experienced and related to as a religion, a church, a moral
philosophy, a guide for private virtue, an imperative for justice,
or a nostalgia for propriety. For most of us, belief in God
resembles the following: God is religion and religion represents a
way of life - churchgoing, guidance from the Bible, sex within
monogamous marriage; no lying, cheating or swearing, democratic
principles, proper aesthetics, and being nice to each other.
God then, is
more of a moral and intellectual principle than a person, and our
commitment to this principle runs the gamut from fiery passion, by
which people are willing to die for a cause, to a vague nostalgia,
in which God and religion are given the same kind of status as the
royal family in England– namely, the symbolic anchor of a certain
way of life, but hardly important to its day-to-day functioning.
It is not that this is bad, it is just that there is little
evidence in it that anyone is actually all that interested in God.
We are interested in building communities for worship, support,
and justice. But, in the end, moral philosophies, human instinct
,and a not-so-disguised self-interest are more important in
motivating these activities than are love and gratitude stemming
from a personal relationship with a living God. God is not only
often absent in our marketplaces, he is frequently absent from our
religious activities and religious fervor as well.
The struggle
to experience God is not so much one of God’s presence or absence
as it is one of the presence or absence of God in our
awareness. God is always present, but we are not always
present to God.
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The Problem of
Unbelief Among Believers
– Ronald Rolheiser
We
live in an age of unbelief. What sets us apart from past
generations is that, today, this is as true within religious
circles as outside them. The problem of faith is especially one
of unbelief among believers.
Belief in God,
for many of us, is little more than a hangover. We feel the
effects of the religious activity of the past, but our own
consciousness borders on agnosticism. Rarely is there a vital
sense of God within the bread and butter of life. We still make
a space for God in our churches, but He is given a very
restricted place everywhere else. |
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A hundred years ago, when
Frederick Nietzche made his declaration that God is dead, he was
not suggesting that God in the heavens had died. He was saying
that God no longer mattered in everyday life. God is dead, he
said, but his “shadow is a long one, and we must first conquer
this shadow.”
Contemporary analyst Philip
Reiff says much the same thing. In his view, our generation has
an ambivalent relationship toward God: God has disappeared but
we still have his calling card. He is absent but, because of
our religious past, we still have a sense of him. Future
generations, he asserts, will not even have that.
These images
of faith as a hangover, of religion as struggling with God’s
shadow, of an absent God whose calling card we still possess,
describe in a general way our everyday struggle with faith and
agnosticism. We still have some experience of God, though
rarely is it a vital one in which we actually drink,
first-hand, from experience. Most often He is not experienced
as a living person to whom we actually talk, from whom we seek
ultimate consolation and comfort, and to whom we relate person
to person, friend to friend, lover to lover, child to parent.
Rather God
is experienced and related to as a religion, a church, a
moral philosophy, a guide for private virtue, an imperative
for justice, or a nostalgia for propriety. For most of us,
belief in God resembles the following: God is religion and
religion represents a way of life - churchgoing, guidance from
the Bible, sex within monogamous marriage; no lying, cheating
or swearing, democratic principles, proper aesthetics, and
being nice to each other.
God then, is
more of a moral and intellectual principle than a person, and
our commitment to this principle runs the gamut from fiery
passion, by which people are willing to die for a cause, to a
vague nostalgia, in which God and religion are given the same
kind of status as the royal family in England– namely, the
symbolic anchor of a certain way of life, but hardly important
to its day-to-day functioning. It is not that this is bad, it
is just that there is little evidence in it that anyone is
actually all that interested in God. We are interested in
building communities for worship, support, and justice. But,
in the end, moral philosophies, human instinct ,and a
not-so-disguised self-interest are more important in
motivating these activities than are love and gratitude
stemming from a personal relationship with a living God. God
is not only often absent in our marketplaces, he is frequently
absent from our religious activities and religious fervor as
well.
The struggle
to experience God is not so much one of God’s presence or
absence as it is one of the presence or absence of God in
our awareness. God is always present, but we are not
always present to God.
How is our
self-awareness muddied? How do we lack purity of heart?
Experience has
shades of quality, degrees of openness. We are aware and awake
according to more or less. God can be very present in an event
but we can be so preoccupied and focused on our headaches,
heartaches, tasks, daydreams, and distracting restlessness that
we can be oblivious to that presence.
These things
severely limit our awareness. Normally there is a huge gap
between what we are aware of and what is available for us to be
aware of. The quality and depth of our ordinary experience in
general determine our awareness or non-awareness of God. We can
be asleep or awake to where God appears. Our awareness in
ordinary life, or lack of it, depends upon our ability to be
contemplative. |
If
each age is unique in its unhappiness,
what is at
the root of our own age’s
unhappy
religious experience?
Contemplation is about waking up.
To be contemplative is to experience an event fully, in all its
aspects. Biblically this is expressed as coming “face to face” with
God, others and the cosmos. We are in contemplation when we stand
before reality and experience it without the limits and distortions
that are created by narcissism, pragmatism, and excessive
restlessness.
Spiritual writers like St. John
of the Cross assure us that if our awareness is not reduced or
distorted, there will be present in ordinary experience a sense of
the infinite, the sacred, God. If we are fully awake to ordinary
experience, it brings with it a certain contuition of God.
If our ordinary awareness is diminished, if it is not contemplative,
God dies in our awareness and eventually in our churches as well.
Our struggle with unbelief, the
struggle to make God more real in ordinary life, is really a
struggle with contemplation. But are we not natural
contemplatives? Hasn’t the study of psychology and the social
sciences given us deeper self-understanding? Do we not, today more
than ever before, crave solitude, peace, and quiet?
All those things are true. But
none of these necessarily mean that we are contemplative in our
daily lives. It is obvious that our sense of God is weak. This can
only mean that our contemplative sense is likewise weak. Why is
this so?
It is tempting to be unduly
negative or, alternately, unduly uncritical of our culture. We tend
to be optimists or pessimists, liberals or conservatives, by
temperament and, accordingly, it is easy to be overly generous or
overly critical in assessing any situation. In assessing our
culture we must first point out its ambivalence. It has its
strengths and its weaknesses, which are often the shadow sides of
its strengths. However, it is clear that interiority and
contemplation are not its strengths. Theologian Jan Walgrave once
commented that “our age constitutes a virtual conspiracy against the
interior life.”
Joining together
in a spirit of love
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OUR COMMUNITY IS SERVED BY:
Rev. David Stachurski, OFM Conv., ADMINISTRATOR
Rev. Hilary Brzostowski, OFM Conv., PAROCHIAL VICAR
Mr. Jim Manaloris, Permanent Deacon
Mr. Joseph Barbara, Permanent Deacon
Mrs. Pat Brooks, Coordinator of Religious Education
Ms. Mariana Pirri, Parish Secretary
Ms Veronica Urbanski, Financial Secretary
Mrs Cathi DeMarco, President, Parish Pastoral Council
Mr Jerry Boyle, President, Parish Finance Council
Mrs Pat Wilf, Coordinator, Perpetual Adoration
Mrs. Anne Moore, Director of Music
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260
Conrow
Road PO Box 1099 Delran NJ 08075
