Transcript religion of the heart

Symposium
(from Greek sum – together
& ponein – to drink)
so … to get together to drink!
but also to talk – serious discussion,
drinking and thinking
The spirituality of young people
-- how it is changing
Ministry to young people
-- Religion of the Heart
St. Alphonsus’s
Religion of the Heart
Everyone knows that St Alphonsus’s
“Religion of the Heart”
was a great gift to the Church of his time …
Not everyone understands
that Alphonsian “Religion of the Heart”
is also the gift that the Church most needs
today!
Let’s recall:
The great pastoral crisis,
the challenge to faith,
in the time of Alphonsus…
How did St Alphonsus respond?
What were the teachings
and the pastoral strategies he used
to revive Religion of the Heart?
Today,
a different pastoral crisis,
& challenge to faith
(especially among young people)…
What is
“Religion of the Heart”
And how can it resolve
this crisis?
A
student told me his vocation story…
Remember when your sense of being
called to be a Redemptorist took hold & it
became the thing you wanted most in
your life?
THAT was Religion of the Heart!
Aim of ministry is to assist youth to
become seekers / disciples, as you did.
Pope Francis
on Religion of the Heart
“We cannot understand the things of God
only with our heads, we need to open our
hearts to the Holy Spirit too…”
“They believe that the things of God can
be understood only with the head, with
ideas, with their own ideas. They are
proud. They think they know everything,
and what does not fit into their
intelligence is not true.”
I would like all of us to ask ourselves today:
are we still a Church
capable of warming hearts?
A Church capable of leading people back to
Jerusalem? Of bringing them home?
The Church, in her maternal concern,
tries to help them
experience a conversion
which will restore the joy of faith to their
hearts and inspire a commitment to the
Gospel
Ordinary people always have room to take
in the mystery.
Perhaps we have reduced our way of
speaking about mystery to rational
explanations;
but for ordinary people
the mystery enters through the heart.
The best incentive for sharing
the Gospel comes from contemplating it
with love, lingering over its pages and
reading it with the heart.
If we approach it in this way,
its beauty will amaze
and constantly excite us.
Religion of the Heart
There are two ways of knowing:
(RH is not just feeling!)
-head knowledge: ‘analytic-discursive’
breaks down into parts
-heart knowledge: ‘synthetic’
takes in as a whole things too great
for the head.
Heart knowledge
-personal: the way you know your mother;
the way the lover knows his beloved;
-comes from experience
-‘fire in the belly’
-shapes character & life
-determines who we are
& where we are going
Religion of the Heart
-too deep and rich for literal words
-communicated in SYMBOLS:
music, poetry, art, dance,
RITUAL
“The Christian of the future
will be something of a mystic
(that is, one who has
experienced something)
or he/she will not exist at all”
(Karl Rahner)
Symbols, stories and communities
Symbol: an object, action, word … based in
sensory experience which makes present a
reality belonging to a (transcendent) world
beyond everyday life.
Without symbols, we live in a one-storey
world: what you see is all there is!
Stories are symbols clustered into
narratives: they are our most basic way of
making sense of what we experience.
We love to hear stories of our family, when
we were born, when we were little, and
we make our own stories, to make sense of
our past. We are part of stories about the
future…
Our
sense of identity – who we are –
comes from knowing how our story fits
into bigger stories – of our family, our
country, our culture & traditions, our
church…
People’s stories are linked with the
communities they belong to, and when
their links to those communities are
broken, their stories are broken.
In a healing community
you tell and retell your story
and come to see how it is broken,
and the hurt places
where your story,
(and in the process your self,)
needs to be
rewritten, healed.
‘Salvation” is the process
in which my story is healed
by being brought into relationship
with God’s saving story in Jesus.
His story transforms my story,
enables me to reinterpret it in a new way.
When I grasp my brokenness,
my “unredeemed human situation”,
I am ready for the Story of Jesus,
the story of
God’s saving action in Christ.
So the minister to
youth
must be a
“Dreamweaver”
How does all this happen?
One important way is
ritual
(Religious) ritual is a symbolic process
developed by a community
expressed in specially-shaped, repeated,
speech / music / movement,
to enter the sacred world,
to express and evoke consciousness of
realities beyond the everyday life-world.
WHAT RITUAL DOES
By putting us through the same paces
over and over again,
ritual rehearses us in certain kinds of
interactions and attitudes;
a repeated befriending of sacred images
and symbols, so that they penetrate more
and more deeply into our inner self and
remake us in their own image.
The
texts of Scripture and the images of the
liturgy are symbols to be toyed with,
befriended, rubbed over and over again,
until, gradually and sporadically, they yield
flashes of insight and encounter with the
“Reality” of which they sing.
So there is a discipline of listening, looking,
and gesturing to be learnt: ways of standing,
touching, receiving, holding, embracing,
eating, and drinking which recognize these
activities as significant; they open us to the
mystery they mediate (Mark Searle)
Salvation
is by entry into the mystery
(Casel).
"A mystery is a sacred ritual action in
which a saving action is made present
through the rite;
the congregation, by performing the rite,
take part in the saving act, and thereby
win salvation."
The “saving action” is
Christ giving his life
for us, to us
an action eternally present
in which we participate in the Eucharist
and are thereby transformed, saved.
“And we, with our unveiled faces
reflecting like mirrors
the brightness of the Lord,
all grow brighter and brighter
as we are turned into
the image we reflect…”
(2Cor3:18 JB)
So now we can understand in a new way
how right St. Alphonsus was about prayer:
when he repeated over and over:
“Whoever prays is saved”
In the very act of praying, the believer, in
faith, affirms the reality of God / enters
the sacred world / meets God / is saved.
Religion of the Heart
in
Redemptorist
ministry
Religion of the Heart
is the greatest strength
of Redemptorist ministry
-communicates with ordinary people
-makes faith relevant to daily life
-evokes strong feelings: joy, sorrow…
-motivates big changes in lives
-strengthens Catholic communities
RH in preaching:
-focus on redemption, conversion
-UHS  GSAX
-Dreamweaver; mystery-story of salvation
-Express genuine emotion: +/stories, personal experience
-Evoking people’s own RH
Common experiences
of the presence of God:
-A death in the family or among friends
-The birth of a child, or
a special moment with a child
-Experiencing the beauty of nature
-Listening to music
-An answer to prayer
LITURGY AND RELIGION OF THE HEART
How to allow liturgy to ‘take off’: (many don’t)
1. Get out of the way!
2. Make everything as beautiful as possible;
3. Maintain the focus on the sacred (dramatic
continuity). (Macbeth)
4. Strengthen the links to community: “Liturgy
makes community makes liturgy”.
-Use new forms of community
e.g. weekend retreats for a mix
of teens & older people
-Ministry of like to like
-Youth must lead in ministry to youth
-Task of elders is to initiate, form
and guide youth leaders
Lastly, or perhaps first of all,
is your religion
truly religion of the heart?
(Why does it matter?)
Only the minister
who has
developed his own Religion of the Heart
can help others
to discover and develop theirs!
SEE “How to nurture your own religion of
the Heart”
You will find many more resources
on Religion of the Heart
on my website at
Australian Catholic University
http://tinyurl.com/cssr2016/
Issues for discussion:
-So Eucharist is not just a friendly
gathering of the Christian community?
No -- you can have a better one of those at
the pub or on a parish picnic!
Eucharist is something else.
-Isn’t ritual cold, empty, formal, old-fashioned?
Isn’t everyone moving away from that? The
very word connotes “empty forms”, “going
through the motions”, people saying words
they don’t mean, perhaps don’t understand!
Or else it refers to weird pagan rites…
-On the other hand, what kind of wedding do
most people want?
Formality of any kind makes people
(especially Australians) uncomfortable;
seems artificial…
See Mason, Michael, Yesterday's failure of
nerve and today's fear of flying.
Compass 23:15-20, 1988.
Imagine going out to the airport
to use your frequent-flier points
for a “mystery flight”, and …
Imagine going to see Shakespeare’s
Macbeth, and…