The Diocese of Victoria has embarked on a Pastoral Planning process to develop a Pastoral Plan for the next five years (2010 - 2015). It will also serve as the basis for long-term Pastoral Planning.

Consultation phases are diocese-wide …with a process that is rooted in prayerful community discernment and focused on the mission of the Church. Communication and input will also reflect on the pastoral initiatives of the past, such as the Synod of 1986-91, to help formulate pastoral directions for the contemporary Church.

This Sunday Parishes in the Diocese will be distributing a confidential questionnaire designed to obtain useful information based on Parishioners’ experience of church life. Such information gathered will assist in fuelling parish growth, development and vitality. In addition to local parishes, Catholic Schools and other various groups within the Diocese, including our youth, will be consulted on spiritual and pastoral needs. Responses are anonymous.

Based on your valuable feedback of this questionnaire, a second short survey will be developed and distributed in early 2010. Our faith community members will once again be invited to reflect and discuss on Diocesan pastoral priorities.

There will be a number of opportunities for consultation in writing, on line, and discussions. All of this input and participation will be translated into specific pastoral initiatives as part of the Diocesan Plan.

During our current time, the challenges and opportunities, which face us, are great, making our reflection and planning all the more critical. I invite all of you to complete and return the Parishioner Questionnaire so that, together, we can assist in responding: Who are we as a Parish? What are we called to do? How are we best going to do it?

James and John were trying to situate themselves in the grand scheme.

When I ask children to draw a picture of their place in the universe, most of them draw a big picture of themselves in the middle of the page and some smaller planets and stars surrounding them. Then, as we talk about their picture compared with reality, they realize that in fact they are just a small speck on a small marble of the huge galaxy. But it feels as if they were the center of the universe.

And when I ask children to draw a timeline of their life, they start with their birth date and extend a line to the present day. When I suggest that their little life is part of the larger life cycle stretching back to the beginning, and that may continue for billions more years, they understand what I’m saying. But they can’t get past the feeling that their little life is historically pivotal.

We adults know that earthy life might have begun 3.5 billion years ago as a patch of algae off the coast of Australia. And we know about primitive hominoids and the birth of democracy in ancient Greece and Mozart and Elvis and Vietnam. But all of that knowledge does not prevent us from looking at reality from our present personal perspective.

This is understandable. After all, we are centers of consciousness. We have no alternative than to see what we see, hear what we hear, know what we know. We shouldn’t apologize for being self-centered. Every self is born centered.

The problem begins when we forget that everyone else is also automatically self-centered. Misunderstanding begins when different selves try to make their self the center of other selves.

We should know our self better as we get older. Modern Maturity magazine gives this rule for aging well: “Remember, nobody is thinking about you. You may feel that friends are becoming enemies, that enemies are acquiring weapons, that the cashier thinks you buy junk food, that neighbors discuss your crabby lawn, that everyone has an opinion of your life. Not true. Nobody is thinking about you. They are thinking about themselves just like you are.”

But if everyone is thinking of themselves and God is not saying anything, then how can we understand ourselves and each other and the universe and God? How can we get outside of ourselves to see things as God sees them?

When Moses asked God who he was, God answered, “I am,” God could have expanded on that answer, could have said: “You may think of me as good and kind and forgiving. Indeed, I am all those things, But if you strip them away, you are left with ‘I am.’ And you cannot get under that to discover who I really am. I really am ‘I am.’

“And you are pleasant and industrious and loving. But if you strip all of those things away, you are left with the simple core of who you are. And you cannot psychoanalyze that basic self to discover who you ‘really are.’ You just are.

“All the rest of reality is beautiful and ugly, violent and peaceful, hot and cold, solid and fluid. And though you can dissect its composition and rearrange its parts, you cannot find a way beyond those physical facts to the secret of what it ‘really is.’ It simply is what it is.

“To summarize: I am who I am and you are who you are and it is what it is.”

And the people said: “Amen!”

Fr. James Smith

He replied, “What do you wish me to do for you?” They answered him, “Grant that in your glory we may sit one at your right and the other at your left.” Jesus said to them, “You do not know what you are asking” (Mk 10:36-38a).

We all nurse a secret dream of glory. We daydream that in some way we will stand out and be recognized. And so we fantasize about great achievements that will set us apart from others and make us famous. The daydreams vary but, inside them, always we are at the center - the most admired person in the room, the one scoring the winning goal, the ballerina star, the actor picking up the Academy award, the author writing the best-seller, the intellectual winning the Nobel Prize, or even just the one in the circle who tells the best story.

What we are chasing in all this is notice, appreciation, uniqueness, and adulation so that we can be duly recognized and loved. We want the light to be shining on us.

And this isn’t all bad or unhealthy. We are built to stand in the spotlight. Our own reality is massively (sometimes oppressively) real to us and scientists today tell us that the universe has no single center but that everywhere and every person is its center. And so it is not a big secret that each of us feels ourselves at the center and wants to be recognized as being there. We nurse a secret dream of glory and, partly, this is healthy.

What’s less healthy in our daydreams is how we envision that glory. In our fantasies, glory almost always consists in being famous, in standing out, in achieving a success that makes others envious, in somehow being the best-looking or the brightest or the most talented person in the room. In our fantasy, glory means having the power to actuate ourselves in ways that set us above others, even if that is for a good motive. For instance, some of our fantasies are daydreams of goodness, of being powerful enough to squash evil. Indeed, that was the messianic fantasy. Before Jesus was born, good-hearted and religious people prayed for a Messiah to come and, in their fantasy, that Messiah was generally envisaged as a worldly superstar, a person with a superior heart and superior muscles, a Messiah who would reveal the superiority of God by out-muscling the bad.

But, as we see from the Gospels, real glory doesn’t consist in out-muscling the bad, or anyone else. When Jesus was being crucified, he was offered precisely the challenge to prove that he was special by doing some spectacular gesture that would leave all of his detractors stunned and helpless: “If you are the Son of God, prove it, come down off the cross! Save yourself!”

But, with a subtlety that’s easy to miss, the Gospels teach a very different lesson: On the cross, Jesus proves that he is powerful beyond measure, not by doing some spectacular physical act that leaves everyone around him helpless to make any protest, but in a spectacular act of the heart wherein he forgives those who are mocking and killing him. Divine kingship is manifest in forgiveness, not in muscle.

That is real glory, and that is the one thing of which we really should be envious, namely, the compassion and forgiveness that Jesus manifested in the face of jealousy, hatred, and murder.

We see this illustrated in the Gospels in the incident where James and John come to Jesus and ask him to give them the seats of glory at his side. Jesus takes their request seriously and does not, on that occasion, caution them against pride. Rather he asks them: “Can you drink from the cup [of suffering] that I shall drink?” In naiveté, they answer: “We can!” Jesus replies: “The cup that I shall drink you shall drink, but as for the seats [of glory] at my right hand or left, these are not mine to give.”

What Jesus is saying, in effect, is this: You will taste suffering, everyone will, and that suffering will make you deep. But, it won’t necessarily make you deep in the right way. Suffering can make you deep in compassion and forgiveness, but it can also make you deep in bitterness and anger. However only compassion and forgiveness bring glory into your lives.

Jesus defines glory very differently than we do. Real glory, for him, is not the glory of winning a gold medal, of being a champion, of winning an Oscar, or of being an object of envy because of our looks or our achievements. Glory consists in being deep in compassion, forgiveness, and graciousness - and these are not often spawned by worldly success, by being better-looking, brighter, richer, or better muscled than those around us.

We all nurse the secret dream of glory. Partly this is healthy, a sign that we are emotionally well. However, this is something that needs to grow and mature inside of us. Our secret dream of glory is meant to mature so that eventually we will begin, more and more, to envision ourselves as standing out, not by talent, looks, muscles, and speed, but by the depth of our compassion and the quality of our forgiveness.

Fr. Ron Rolheiser

At that statement his face fell, and he went away sad,

for he had many possessions (Mk 10:22).

French philosopher, Leon Bloy, a man very instrumental in helping bring Jacques and Raissa Maritain to faith, once stated: “There is only one real sadness in life, that of not being a saint!”

That’s not a statement of piety, but a deep insight into the heart of life itself. Sin makes us sad. Life would be better if we understood that. We’ve always associated sin with badness more than sadness, but we lose something in that equation. Sin makes us more sad than it makes us bad.

Sin can also make us bad because it makes us prone to lie. That’s its ultimate danger. Giving into temptation because of weakness or passion doesn’t make us bad. What does is when we deny, rationalize, excuse ourselves, and accuse others after we sin. That’s what hardens, warps, and embitters the soul.

We see this already in the Adam and Eve story, the first sin. Their disobedience was one thing, but their need afterwards to hide and try to cover themselves, with clothes and excuses, was what ultimately put them outside the garden of joy. We have the same impulse every time we sin, namely, to try to cover and excuse ourselves. We try to make sin all right by denying how it affects us. That, not God’s forgiveness, is the problem.

It’s not about God’s understanding, generosity, or forgiveness that we ever need to worry. God, Jesus assures us, is generous and forgiving beyond our imaginings. Jesus forgives his killers even as they’re murdering him and, as the parable of the vineyard workers who arrive at different hours but still all receive the same reward makes clear, our real problem is not whether or not God is generous, but whether or not we can receive that generosity without weighing merit or being jealous. The danger is not that we won’t receive our due; the danger is more that we might end up getting everything and enjoying nothing. Sadness, not hell-fire, is what looms as the real threat.

The problem with sin is not that it makes us bad or puts us outside God’s love, it’s that it makes us sad, here and now. And this, as we know from experience, is not an abstract thing.

To the exact degree that we sin, we begin to lose our capacity for simple joy, delight, and freshness, and become bored, angry, jealous, and incapable of appreciating anything or praising anyone. To the degree that we sin too, the sound of joy, the sound of what’s childlike and innocent, begins to irritate us and we, almost-automatically, begin to protect ourselves by enfleshing ourselves inside a cocoon of sophistication, cynicism, and hardness. Inside that hardness we too easily begin to see our bad choice as a moral triumph, as a victory for freedom, and as something that has made us smarter and wiser than others.

But, with that comes a sadness that we can’t hide from others even when we try to hide it from ourselves. Like Adam and Eve, we walk out of the garden of innocence with our eyes more open, but with our hearts much less capable of being delighted or inspired.

Sin robs us of our innocence by wounding and killing the child inside. To be innocent, as we know, means to be “un-wounded” and our capacity to experience joy, as know both from experience and scripture, is very much linked to innocence, to what’s still childlike inside us. Sin makes us sad precisely because it makes us sophisticated in a way that wounds the child inside of us. The opposite is also true.

A couple of years ago, a group of young priests asked me to join their support group for one of their weekly meetings. Their group was unlike any group, clerical or lay, with whom I've ever spent an evening. They'd come together to support each other in their resolution to try to live out their priesthood in a way that was more honest, transparent, non-compensatory, and saintly. So each week they met and with searing honesty confessed their most private sins and weaknesses to each other. Obviously this made them better priests, and that was their aim. But what surprised them, as a delightful by-product, was that it also made them much, much happier with their lives. Their joy (and their lack of anger, lack of self-pity, and lack of complaint) was palpable.

The youngest member of the group, just thirty-five years old, told me: “Father, I joined this group last year and doing this each week and attempting to live such a radical lifestyle is the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. But it's also the best thing I've ever done. I've never been this happy!”

When the rich young man in the gospels walks away from Jesus’ invitation to radical discipleship, it doesn’t say that he walked away bad, only that he walked away sad. He remained good, sincere, and sad.

And isn’t that perennially our situation?

Fr. Ron Rolheiser

The man with many possessions went away sad from Jesus and his advice. He was torn between his everyday life and eternal life, the good life and the great life. All of us are.

As the poet Rilke writes: “There is an ancient enmity between our daily life and the great work.” And even if we consider poetry to be impractical, we bear its truth in our bones. That is why we set out to mow the lawn but never get out of the garage. We can almost see the grass growing at an alarming speed — yet we persist in honing the blade, measuring the fuel.

Or, we pick up the phone to conclude a quarrel, mend a friendship or finalize a breakup. But we somehow end up making a dental appointment, calling time and weather or simply listening to the dial tone.

Call it gravity. Life is a heavy thing; the weight of the world is upon us. We want to rise above it all, but our body lolls on the comfortable ground. It takes too much energy to smile, to have a happy thought, to sustain a brilliant idea, to raise our mind and heart to God. We cannot even consider rising above our station in life, our position at work, our place in the communion of saints. Every single thing we take hold of is just an ounce heavier than we can manage.

Call it entropy. The glaciers are gradually melting; the sun is rapidly burning itself to death; every day, several species devolve into nonbeing. The cosmos is grinding to a glorious explosion or a heartless blackout. Golden boys must, along with drudges, dissolve in dust. God knows we try to escape this universal rush into nothingness. But every task we assume, every project we start, every dream we pursue dries up, grows old, becomes passé, falls apart, dies unborn. And after endless attempts, this no longer depresses us — we see it as the way of the world.

Call it glaucoma. In the beginning there was light. And we saw everything with innocent clarity. The earth was our home and not a laboratory; people were fellows and not competitors; the warp and woof of existence formed a pattern of providence and not a shroud of fate.

Then a shadow descended all over the earth. It consisted of many shades: indifference, willfulness, laziness, boredom, inattention, uncaring, satiety, sin. Our eyes were glazed, objects acquired a dull patina. And we went blind. We could not even see the ancient enmity between our daily life and our great work.

Call it attachment. We attach ourselves to things. Things grab hold of us. Existence becomes a sticky spider web in which things are trapped. Life becomes a nest in which we amass all kinds of trinkets, no matter how uncomfortable they make our home. Things have an overpowering attraction — but they ensnare us. It doesn’t take a great thing to keep us from flying. A silk thread can ground us as much as an iron chain, in that ancient enmity between our daily life and our great work.

And what is our great work? To become what God made us to be; to answer when God calls our name; to create our finished self from the raw material at hand. We must escape the gravitational force of material things. We must resist the universal death wish. We must laser our fuzzy eyes. We must sever every binding tie. We must finally understand that our daily life is an audition for our great work.

In this anxious world, only one work is necessary.

Fr. James Smith

"Let no human separate what God has joined."

I attended a wedding this summer. It seemed a special privilege, since I did not have to preside, or "do" the ceremony. The bride was a former student of mine, one of those young people you hold always as a luminous presence in your life.

It was beautiful in every sense: in its simplicity, in the strong words of the celebrant-homilist, in the splendor of bride and groom, in the families all gathered and garnered.

I thought of that wedding as I read this Sunday's scriptures."It is not good for the man to be alone." Intimacy, relationship - the bottom of our being."God took out one of Adam's ribs." Adam spoke,"This one, at last, is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh." The two of them became one body.

A psalm sings:"Your spouse shall be like a fruitful vine in the recesses of your home; your children shall be like olive plants about your table. Behold thus is a human blessed. May you see your children's children."

What act of great moment is remembered here? I thought of the young bride and groom. What was it that they wanted to say to each other and the world? They wanted to say"forever."

There is something that reaches the godly in such holy desire. When we abide in love, our hearts arch to the infinite. Rilke said,"Lovers, you touch pure permanence underneath."

Yet marriages fail. You'd think that fact alone might tame our dreams of forever. Yet I have never met an engaged couple who wanted to give their futures to each other"till it doesn't work out, till you get sick, till you go broke, till you break down."

What is it about us that wants to say"forever"? To say"eternally"? To say"till the end of time"?

Jesus was given a test by the Pharisees. It was a conundrum about eternal love and life. He asks them in return, somehow aware of their stubbornness, about the judgment of Moses, who permitted divorce. But Jesus digs down to the well of our hearts' desires."They are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore let no man separate what God has joined.""Whoever divorces a wife and marries another commits adultery; and the woman who divorces her husband and marries another commits adultery."

It seems so clear and fast and abrupt. It seems even cruel to some who hear it. And surely painful. But isn't this always true with matters of love? Would any of us, bent on a life of covenant, settle for less?

Which brings us to the lapse of our loves, of our marriages. Some endings we call annulments (a term that others might deride; they say, why not call it a divorce - what it is - instead of pretending it is something else?). Others think that annulments are a farce, easily purchased, easily forgotten.

Well, they are not purchased, not a farce, and not easy. Just ask someone who has gone through one. An annulment is our own churchly attempt to deal with our own law, our own promises, and our desire to honor and obey Jesus as well as Genesis. It is not so much a judgment about our relationship to God (there are some divorced and remarried people, without benefit of annulment, who are, no doubt, far closer to God than the likes of myself, having never been married) as it is a statement about our relationship to each other and to our own intentions. We want to honor and respect our own words.

So an annulment process is an attempt to determine whether two people were, as a matter of fact, free and able to choose irrevocably in God to become"one flesh."

A divorce may mean many other things: that two who actually made an eternal covenant slowly grew apart, that they had irreconcilable differences, that one person could no longer abide another, or that they somehow never adequately and wholly chose to become irrevocably one. An annulment says only the last.

We Catholics have our liturgies, our communions, our Eucharists. Some of us attending are divorced and remarried and place it all before God, not knowing really whether we have put asunder what God had once joined in us. Some have annulments, a human judgment offered only after long analysis and painful remembrance. Some of us weep in the back, not approaching the altar of union. Some trust God and abstain. Some trust God and partake.

Few, thank God, judge. For no matter what our rightful relationship to our church, its laws and traditions, we all pray in an assembly of believers who are sinners; and, most assuredly, we all stand before our good and great God as children.

And Jesus spoke to the child in each of us."Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them. It is to just such as these that the Kingdom of God belongs. I assure you that whoever does not accept the Kingdom of God like a little child shall not enter it."

"Then he embraced them and blessed them, placing his hands on them."

John Kavanaugh, S. J.

If you save your life, you lose it, Jesus tells his followers. How do we save our life, find our life, take possession of our life? We do it basically by finding our place in the world, our niche in society. Everyone must do that to become a unique person. But that task is fraught with danger. Because the world we must fit into is a crooked world.

Some of it is not directly our fault. We live in a country that wastes more resources than other nations use for survival. We spend more on one fancy cup of coffee than the coffee picker earns in a week to keep his family alive. And just as the virtues of our country influence our personality, so do the sins of our country warp our personality, diminish our self.

We then add to our distorted self by personal choices. We twist our bodies out of shape to fit passing fads; we overspend to keep up; we cheat to attain worldly success; we consume to fill the vacuum we create as our real self shrinks to fit the tiny space allotted to us. If we are not careful, we trade our true self for an artificial, acceptable self.

From the very beginning, starting with its founder, Christianity has warned us about the danger of saving our self. Tradition has devised a pattern of life, a discipline, a set of exercises that help us lose our worldly self. The first step is to avoid sin, which is the greatest destroyer of any self. That is because we are made to do good.

Next, we separate our self not only from sin, but from anything that might encourage us to sin. Then, we gain control of our choices by getting detached from all inordinate desires. According to Ignatius, the perfect person would be so indifferent to the lure of this world that he would not care if he were rich or poor, healthy or ill, a success or a failure. He would save his real self by losing his false self.

But this self is not always attractive. We may save our soul at the cost of our senses. We may try to live like angels instead of humans. We may become closed instead of open persons; we may spurn the good earth that God created for our life. In protecting our self from the dangers of the world, we may insulate our self from the opportunities of the world.

That kind of living presumes that life is a warfare. But you can lose your self in two ways: You can hand control of your self over to law, or to love. You may obey the law or love the lawgiver. You may choose to be a legal or a loving person.

It’s not an even choice. If you choose the way of law, you forgo love; but if you choose to love, you will also obey the Lover’s wishes. Law can cover only law, but love fulfills every law.

What if we experienced life as a love affair? What if we recognized our time on earth as a special gift we were given to create a personal self? While recognizing the dangers all over, what if we were courageous and daring? What if we paid more attention to the good instead of the bad things? What if we looked at everything as a gift rather than a temptation? Love is a risk — but without it, life is barren.

Fr. James Smith