Meeting Reminder — May 8, 2010

Just a reminder that we are all set to meet this Saturday with a new format. Rather than saying that we start at 7:30 AM, let’s arrive between 7:30 and 8:00. We’ll spend that time drinking Dave’s coffee, eating my bagels (yes, Jack, I will have them!), catching up, and relaxing. At 8:00, we’ll get the discussion underway until 9:00 AM. Of course, this is what we’ve been doing forever now.

We will be discussing John, Chapter 7. Yet more opposition to Christ, yet more misunderstanding. Yet more love. See you there!

Materials:

The Gospel According St. John, Chapter 7

Preview Questions, John, Chapter 7

Agape Study Materials, John, Chpater 7

St. Augustine —
Tractate 29 –
Tractate 30 John 7:19-24
Tractate 31 John 7:25-36
Tractate 32 John 7:37-39
Tractate 33 John 7:40-8:11

St. Thomas Aquinas — Commentary on St. John, Chapter 7

Frank Sinatra’s Way or Christ’s Way — Sr. Mary Prudence Allen Continues Teaching

This continues the excerpt from “Nun Sense: Women In The Catholic Church“. After discussing the external structure of her life, the interviewer posed the obvious question: “And you did this of your own free will? Chose to be subservient in a patriarchal church? ”

Sr. Prudence’s answer goes to the heart of the matter. First, she states first that the answer is a simple “yes.” But then she adds something very important:

I asked to be received into the Catholic Church while I was studying for my Ph.D. in philosophy, and later asked to enter the Religious Sisters of Mercy of Alma as a postulant, asked to be received as a novice, asked to make first vows, asked to renew my vows, and then asked to make perpetual vows — each request from the depths with which I was capable of exercising my own free will. The Catechism (#1733) has a wonderful description of how freedom increases within us: “The more one does what is good, the freer one becomes.” Through the years, I experience myself making devotional renewals of my vows (at Easter and after retreats) with an ever greater sense of freedom to give myself to the Lord and to my neighbor.

Freedom is thus not the power to ensure that one’s will dominates other people or, to put is colloquially, to do things “My Way.” Rather, through grace, it is the release from the grip of sin and everythng else that prevents us from giving ourselves to the Lord and our neighbors. Sr. Prudence continued:

In religious life, we practice our vow of obedience in simple acts to one another, to our religious sisters who are either local superiors or our general superiors, and to the Holy Father, who is the superior general of all religious. These acts are always out of a reverence and obedience to Jesus Christ, who was obedient unto death to His Father. This is not the subservience of someone without a free will, but it consists in many free acts of self-gift. Through these repeated acts, we hope to become ever more capable of total, rather than partial, self-gift, so that at the moment of our death we will make the ultimate gift to Jesus Christ, whom we will then see face to face.

The contrast between Sr. Prudence and the world could not be greater. For her, freedom is self-gift; for the world, freedom is self-taking. For her, freedom has a purpose — perfection leading to eternal self-gift; for the world, freedom is at best an end in itself. Whose freedom do you want and, if we choose Christ’s Way, rather than FrankSinatra’s “Way,” how do we live it as lay, single and married people? Comments are open.