Ecumenical Franciscan Order in Sydney, Australia | Religious organisation

Ecumenical Franciscan Order

Locality: Sydney, Australia

Address: Lalor Park, 2147 Sydney, NSW, Australia

Website: www.efo.org.au/index.htm

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20.01.2022 Minute Meditations By Franciscan Media Carry the Light ... In the liturgy we relive the state of mind of the disciples over the news which the women had brought: Jesus is Risen! We have seen him! If only we were so luminous! But this is not just cosmetic! It comes from within, from a heart immersed in the source of this joy, like that of Mary Magdalene, who wept over the loss of her Lord and could hardly believe her eyes seeing him risen. Whoever experiences this becomes a witness of the Resurrection, for in a certain sense he himself has risen, she herself has risen. He or she is then capable of carrying a ray of light of the Risen One into various situations: to those that are happy, making them more beautiful by preserving them from egoism; to those that are painful, bringing serenity and hope. Pope Francis One of Pope Francis’s favorite distinctions is the difference between joy and mere happiness. This is something that’s good to carry with us into the Easter season. His example of Mary Magdalene points to a key aspect of joy: It often follows a time of suffering, of disappointment, of struggle overcome and transformed. If Mary hadn’t cared so much for Jesus, her sense of loss wouldn’t have been as deep, but neither would her joy at their reunion. If we live our lives only on the surface, surrounding ourselves with acquaintances rather than real friends, we will find it difficult to experience deep emotions. Likewise, if our faith is only an intellectual exercise, a list of rules and doctrines instead of a personal encounter with the divine, we will miss the way it can truly change our hearts. One of the hallmarks of a true friend is someone who can accompany us through good times and bad, weeping and rejoicing as circumstances change. A genuine faith offers the same support. We are blessed if we have such friends, graced if we have such faith. Pope Francis reminds us that when we recognize the blessings in our lives, we will have a joy that we can share with others in good times and bad. If someone has done this for you recently, take a moment to let them know. As you reflect on your own joy in this Easter season, find a way to share it with someone who needs a ray or two of Christ’s light in their lives. from the book The Hope of Lent: Daily Reflections from Pope Francis, by Diane M. Houdek

20.01.2022 Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation Monday, 29th March 2021 Week Thirteen: Scapegoating and the Cross... A Temporary Solution The word scapegoating originated from an ingenious ritual described in Leviticus 16. According to Jewish law, on the Day of Atonement, the high priest laid hands on an escaping goat, placing all the sins of the Jewish people from the previous year onto the animal. Then the goat was beaten with reeds and thorns, driven out into the desert, and the people went home rejoicing. Violence towards the innocent victim was apparently quite effective at temporarily relieving the group’s guilt and shame. The same scapegoating dynamic was at play when European Christians burned supposed heretics at the stake, and when white Americans lynched Black Americans. In fact, the pattern is identical and totally non-rational. Whenever the sinner is excluded, our collective ego is delighted and feels relieved and safe. It works, but only for a while, because it is merely an illusion. Repeatedly believing the lie, that this time we have the true culprit, we become more catatonic, habitually ignorant, and culpablebecause, of course, scapegoating never really eliminates evil in the first place. As Russian philosopher Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. [1] As long as the evil is over there, we can change or expel someone else as the contaminating element. We then feel purified and at peace. But it is not the peace of Christ, which the world cannot give (see John 14:27). Jesus became the scapegoat to reveal the universal lie of scapegoating. He became the sinned-against one to reveal the hidden nature of scapegoating, so that we would see how wrong even educated and well-meaning people can be. This is perfectly represented by Pilate and Caiaphas (state and religion), who both find their artificial reasons to condemn him (see John 16:811 and Romans 8:3). In worshiping Jesus as the scapegoat, Christians should have learned to stop scapegoating, but we didn’t. We are still utterly wrong whenever we create arbitrary victims to avoid our own complicity in evil. It seems it is the most effective diversionary tactic possible. History has shown us that authority itself is not a good guide. Yet for many people, authority soothes their anxiety and relieves their own responsibility to form a mature conscience. We love to follow someone else and let them take the responsibility. It is a universal story line in history and all cultures. With the mistaken view of God as a Punisher-in-Chief that most Christians seem to hold, we think our own violence is necessary and even good. But there is no such thing as redemptive violence. Violence doesn’t save; it only destroys all parties in both the short and long term. Jesus replaced the myth of redemptive violence with the truth of redemptive suffering. He showed us on the cross how to hold the pain and let it transform us. [1] Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 19181956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, III, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (Harper & Row: 1974), 168. Adapted from Richard Rohr, CONSPIRE 2016: Everything Belongs, sessions 2 and 3 (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2016)

16.01.2022 Tuesday 30th March 2021: TUESDAY IN HOLY WEEK. An Australian Lectionary: Isaiah 49:1-7; Ps 71:1-14; 1 Cor 1:18-31 John 12:20-36 MEDITATION: Reflect, today, upon your call in life to see everything from the divine perspective. If you are upset, angry, despairing or confused at times, know that God wants to bring clarity and grace to every situation. Seek out the ways that your life must give glory to God in everything, especially those things that seem incapable of being used ...for good. The more an experience in life seems incapable of being used for God’s glory, the more that experience is capable of giving true glory to God. PRAYER: My glorious Lord, You brought forth good from all things. Even the grave evil of Your betrayal was transformed into a manifestation of Your glory. I offer to You, dear Lord, all that I endure in life and pray that You will be glorified in all things, and that my life will continually become a manifestation of the glory due Your holy name. Jesus, I trust in You.

14.01.2022 Minute Meditations By Franciscan Media Pain of Betrayal ... There is a poignant passage in the Servant Song from Isaiah that illustrates and prepares us for two betrayals that are about to happen: I thought I had toiled in vain and uselessly, I have exhausted myself for nothing (Isaiah 49:4). Surely that is the human feeling after someone we love turns against us. On some level, we all feel we have made some kind of contract with life, when life does not come through as we had hoped, and we feel a searing pain called betrayal. It happens to all of us in different ways. It is a belly punch that leaves us with a sense of futility and emptiness. And here it happens to Jesus from two of his own inner circle, both Judas and Peter. The more love and hope you have invested in another person, the deeper the pain of betrayal is. If it happens at a deep and personal level, we wonder if he will ever trust again. Your heart does break. It is one of those crossroad moments, when the breaking can forever close you down, or in time just the oppositeopen you up to an enlargement of soulas we will see in Jesus this week. What is happening is that we are withdrawing a human dependency, finding grace to forgive and let go, and relocating our little self in The Self (God), which never betrays us. It can’t! It might take years for most of us to work through this; for Jesus it seems to have been natural, although who knows how long it took him to get there. All we see in the text is that there are no words of bitterness at all, only a calm, unblaming description in the midst of the night, which is almost upon us. Solitary Jesus, you get more alone as the week goes on, till all you have is a naked but enduring hope in God. Do not bring me to such a test, I would not know how to survive. from the book Wondrous Encounters: Scriptures for Lent by Richard Rohr, OFM

13.01.2022 Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation Thursday, April 8th 2021 Week Fourteen: All Will Be Well... A Wisdom for Our Time I believe it is a loss to our Christian heritage that Julian’s mystical teachings have not received more widespread hearing. Matthew Fox points out that she was in many ways ahead of her time. Her voice and writings were sidelined by a patriarchal church and culture unable to hear her nondual message of oneing and her celebration of embodiment as an extension of the Incarnation itself. Perhaps we are finally ready to hear Julian’s wisdom today. Matthew Fox writes: We learn about ourselves, our history and society by asking questions that expose the shadows in which we still live. To me it is obvious why [Julian’s] work was ignored, and in naming the obvious we name the shadows we have inherited from our ancestors. First, she was ignored because she was a woman. . . . Julian found her voiceand wrote the first book in English by a woman. She speaks out about womanhood and about mothering and about the Divine Mother. She insists on the feminine side of God as imbuing not only God the Creator, but God the Liberator, and God the Spirit. . . . She bakes into her entire book the constant theme of nondualism and of oneing. Sensuality and substance are one thing. . . . She talks of the glorious mingling of body and soul, matter and spirit. She insists on the marriage of nature and God, on panentheism [God in all things and all things in God] as the very meaning of faith, and on the marriage of God and the human (for we, too, are part of nature): between God and the human there is no between.. . . We were not ready for her. We were too engrossed with the masculine projects of empire building and discovery doctrines of raiding and destroying indigenous cultures of mother love; we were too busy chasing knowledge, at the expense of wisdom, for the power it brings to buttress our empires through science and technology, too preoccupied with creating capitalist behemoths that demanded we extract whatever goods we could from Mother Earth without asking any questions about paying Mother Earthor future generationsback. . . . Julian’s feminism did not fit the patriarchal agenda at hand . . . and she stands up to patriarchy (including the institutional church) in many instances. But subtly soas a lover, not as a prosecutor. The second principal reason Julian has been ignored for so many centuries, and why we were not ready for her, is that she is so thoroughly creation-centered in her theology that people did not understand her insistence that God is in nature, that nature and grace are one, and that goodness is everywhere but first of all in nature. When the agenda is to exploit nature for all the profits it can deliver, who wants to hear about the sacredness of nature? Matthew Fox, Julian of Norwich: Wisdom in a Time of Pandemicand Beyond (iUniverse: 2020), 110111.

12.01.2022 Tuesday 30th March 2021: Prayer of The Day All-powerful, ever-living God, may our sacramental celebration of the Lord’s passion bring us your forgiveness. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,... who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, (one) God, for ever and ever. Amen. See more

11.01.2022 Wednesday 7th April 2021: Prayer of The Day Lord of all life and power, who through the mighty resurrection of your Son overcame the old order of sin and death to make all things new in him:... grant that we, being dead to sin and alive to you in Jesus Christ, may reign with him in glory; to whom with you and the Holy Spirit be praise and honour, glory and might, now and in all eternity. Amen. See more

09.01.2022 Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation Wednesday, April 7th 2021 Week Fourteen: All Will Be Well... A Sacred Sweetness Today, treat yourself to reading directly from Julian. I am using Mirabai Starr’s wonderful translation of Julian’s Showings, which is also aptly called Revelations of Divine Love. This is from her Long Text, chapter 52. God rejoices that he is our Father. God rejoices that he is our Mother. God rejoices that he is our Beloved and we are his true lover. Christ rejoices that he is our Brother. Jesus rejoices that he is our Savior. These are five supreme joys and he wants us to rejoice in them, too, and praise him, thanking and loving and endlessly blessing him. During our lives here on earth, we experience a wondrous mixture of well and woe. We hold inside us both the glory of the Risen Christ and the misery of the Fallen Adam. Christ protects us in our dying and, through his gracious touch, uplifts us and reassures us that all will be well. . . . We are so fragmented, afflicted in our feelings in so many ways, that we hardly know where to turn for comfort. The various pains and transgressions of this life fill our hearts with sorrow and cloud the eyes of our souls. But we cultivate our intention and wait for God. We have faith in his mercy and grace, and trust that he is working within us. In his goodness, he opens the eyes of our understanding and gives us insight. Sometimes we glimpse more, sometimes we see less, depending on what God gives us the ability to receive. Now he elevates us; now he allows us to come tumbling down. The mixture of sorrow and joy is so powerful that we cannot figure out how to handle it all, let alone assess how our fellow spiritual seekers are doing. The diversity of feelings can be overwhelming. And yet, in those moments when we sense the presence of God, we surrender to him, truly willing to be with him, with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our strength. This holy assent is all that matters. It eclipses all the wicked inclinations inside usphysical and spiritualthat might lead us to miss the mark. Sometimes, however, that sacred sweetness lies deeply buried, and we fall again into blindness, which leads to all kinds of sorrow and tribulation. So we must take comfort in the essential article of our faith that teaches us not to give into our negative impulses, but to draw strength from Christ, who is our defender against all harm. We need to stand up against evil, even if to do so causes discomforteven painand pray for the time when God will once again reveal himself and fill our hearts with the sweetness of his presence. And so we remain in this muddle all the days of our lives. But our Beloved wants us to trust that he is always with us. With such deep and tender wisdom, is it any wonder that Julian is one of my favorite mysticsand human beings? The Showings of Julian of Norwich: A New Translation, Mirabai Starr (Hampton Roads: 2013), 142143.

06.01.2022 Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation Tuesday, March 30 2021 Week Thirteen: Scapegoating and the Cross... Opposing Evil without Becoming It The mystery of the cross teaches us how to stand against hate without becoming hate, how to oppose evil without becoming evil ourselves. We find ourselves stretching in both directionstoward God’s goodness and also toward recognition of our own complicity in evil. In that moment, we will feel crucified. We hang in between, without resolution, our very life a paradox held in hope by God (see Romans 8:2325). Over the next three days, I share a few examples of women who have understood the mystery of the cross in a personal and embodied way. They have known great suffering; they have been victims of oppression and cruelty and yet they sought to respond consciously, not reactively. Today, I offer a journal entry from Etty Hillesum (19141943), a young Jewish woman who was killed at Auschwitz. In her diary, she recreates a conversation with her friend, writer Klaas Smelik, about the hatred and bullying she saw within her own community: Klaas, all I really wanted to say is this: we have so much work to do on ourselves that we shouldn’t even be thinking of hating our so-called enemies. We are hurtful enough to one another as it is. And I don’t really know what I mean when I say that there are bullies and bad characters among our own people, for no one is really bad deep down. I should have liked to reach out to that [bully] with all his fears, I should have liked to trace the source of his panic, to drive him ever deeper into himself, that is the only thing we can do, Klaas, in times like these. And you, Klaas, give a tired and despondent wave and say, But what you propose to do takes such a long time, and we don’t really have all that much time, do we? And I reply, What you want is something people have been trying to get for the last two thousand years, and for many more thousand years before that, in fact, ever since [humankind] has existed on earth. And what do you think the result has been, if I may ask? you say. And I repeat with the same old passion, although I am gradually beginning to think that I am being tiresome, It is the only thing we can do, Klaas, I see no alternative, each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others. And remember that every atom of hate we add to this world makes it still more inhospitable. And you, Klaas, dogged old class fighter that you have always been, dismayed and astonished at the same time, say, But thatthat is nothing but Christianity! And I, amused by your confusion, retort quite coolly, Yes, Christianity, and why ever not? [1] Richard again: It is a truth of the world’s major religions that the goal of God’s workGod by any name, I might addis always healing reconciliation and not retributive justice, resurrection and not death. [1] Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life: The Diaries, 19411943; and, Letters from Westerbork, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans (Henry Holt and Company: 1996), 211212. Adapted from Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (Franciscan Media: 2008), 203204

02.01.2022 Wednesday 7th April 2021: WEDNESDAY IN EASTER WEEK. An Australian Lectionary: Acts 3:1-10; Ps 105:1-7; Luke 24:13-35 MEDITATION: Only one disciple (Cleopas) is named in the story. Am I the other disciple? PRAYER: Risen Lord, help me to recognize your presence in the Mass.