Focusing on the One Thing Needful

Fred Lawrence talks of Augustine talking about how one is a burden to oneself, scattering energies in many directions instead of focusing on 'the one thing needful.'

Advent is a persistent call to focus on the one thing needful. "And a feeling of expectancy was growing among them," we will be reading in the gospel of the coming 3rd Sunday of Advent. Longing, waiting, expecting, in eagerness, till the trumpets of joy sound and fill our hearts, and the deserts bloom....

Finding Neverland

Finding Neverland - wonderful movie about J.M. Barrie (played by Johnny Depp) and his writing of the Peter Pan play, thanks to his involvement with the family of a recently widowed young woman (played by the extraordinary Kate Winslet) and her 4 sons (one of them is the young boy who acts in August Rush).

I am learning to see Johnny Depp in a new light. A different genre. What's Eating Gilbert Grape was one of his early movies. Then there is the horrible Beyond Hell. And now this one, Finding Neverland.

And Kate Winslet is getting only better by the movie. I am thinking of The Reader, and of Revolutionary Road. What an actress.

And what of the power of pretending - or is it believing? That the eyes of the heart see more than our physical eyes? Or that the eyes of children see more than the eyes of adults, as Saint-Exupery says in The Little Prince?

Brahman and Person: Essays by Richard De Smet

Just wanted to share the good news with all of you: my book, Brahman and Person: Essays by Richard De Smet, ed. Ivo Coelho, is finally out of the press (Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi). I received the first copy this morning. The cover price is Rs 695, but I am willing to part with the copies due to me for the unbelievable price of Rs 350 only. Postage extra for foreign orders only; please specify surface mail or air mail.

You can send your DD / MO directly to me:

Ivo Coelho, SDB
Don Bosco School and Parish
Don Bosco Marg
Nashik 422 005

What is the book about? Well, it is the first collection of Fr De Smet's essays - something he was always dreaming about. (Richard De Smet was a Jesuit Indologist who taught us at Jnana Deepa Vidyapeeth, Pune; a well-known figure in Indological circles in India and abroad, especially for his Sankara studies.) All 14 essays revolve around the topic of the person - divine as well as human. In several essays, De Smet shows how the nirguna Brahman, or the Brahman without qualities, which most Indologists and Hindus tend to translate as impersonal, is really personal - provided 'personal' is understood in the classical sense that was hammered out in the Christian effort to speak about the mysteries of the Trinity and the Incarnation. For the first time, all these essays are available within the covers of a single book. Something that every library in India should have, seeing that the clarification of this point is one of the significant gains in interreligious and intercultural dialogue of the closing decades of the last century.

Fr Josef Neuner, SJ, passes away

Fr Josef Neuner passed away on 3 December 2009, Feast of St Francis Xavier. I believe Fr Neuner was more than 100 years old. A fitting day - feast of a great Jesuit missionary - Neuner was a great latter day missionary, with all the differences that 400 years make: a man of dialogue, of great respect for the religions of the world and of India, yet a man of deep faith in Christ and in his Church. RIP, Fr Neuner.

4th December 2009

This is Fr. Noel Sheth, S.J. writing. I am at present in Manila, the Philippines, teaching a course on Buddhism at the Ateneo de Manila. I just got news about the passing away of Fr. Josef Neuner, S.J. Please pass on this news (see below) to those who knew him. The death of this renowned theologian, peritus of Vatican II, and one of the pillars of Jnana-Deepa Vidyapeeth, leaves a great void in Pune, in India and the world.

Centenarian Fr. Josef Neuner, S.J. passed away last night (3rd December, the Feast of St. Francis Xavier, Patron of India) at the Pune Provincial's House, Sanjeevan Ashram. His funeral is at 4.30 p.m. today in Papal Seminary-Jnana-Deepa Vidyapeeth. He will be buried in the Campus Cemetery, in accordance with his wish to be buried in the place where he spent most of his life, animating the professors and the students, building up the Church in India and radiating his influence throughout the world.

I thank God for the gift of Neuner to Jnana-Deepa Vidyapeeth, to Pune, to India and the world. May he continue to be an inspiration to all of us and in this way live on in our memories and our deeds.

RIP

Noel Sheth, S.J.

Creativity and preaching

Another discussion at the meeting of Formators was about preaching.

The danger of cut and paste homilies - earlier from books and commentaries and manuals of homilies, now from the net - was universally decried.

Still, there were two 'schools': one advocating pure creativity, drawing from the resources of the individual, the other pointing out that creativity passes also through reading and learning from others, including books and commentaries.

I guess what is at play here are the tendency of the Enlightenment to stress pure individual creativity at the expense of tradition, and the pre-modern and postmodern rejection of isolated Cartesian subjectivity and acceptance of the self as always being-in-the-world, and therefore participant in a tradition.

And Fred Lawrence: the coming to light of the self is at once the coming to light of the tradition. One's drawing out of one's inner resources does not happen by closing one's eyes, but in interaction with a text - whatever that text might be. Of course, reflecting on one's experiences is itself reflection on a text; but text also includes books and commentaries and, why not, even manuals. Provided we don't just cut and paste. That would be sheer laziness, and rank inauthenticity.

Relevance

We have just concluded a longish meeting of the Formation Staff of our province. The topic was prayer, and one of the points that came up was the question of relevance. The prayer of the church, for example: the psalms are often not relevant. Relevant to whom, Aidan Kavanaugh asks.

Good question, I think. Because playing in the background here is the isolated Cartesian subject we have inherited from the West. But am I merely I? Or am I not a participant in a history, in a tradition, in a community?

Theologically speaking too the question is powerful: who is this 'I'? It is the Body of Christ, the Church. And if the boundaries of the Church extend beyond what we might be able to see and define, then there is a way in which the 'I' expands to cover humanity and the cosmos.

But Kavanaugh, I think, has another, more specific answer: the I to whom the psalms are relevant is the I who has been united in baptism with the Paschal Mystery of Christ....

Life is soft, flexible

“At birth all people are soft and yielding
At death they are hard and stiff.
All green plants are tender and yielding,
At death they are brittle and dry.
When hard and rigid
We consort with death.
When soft and flexible
We affirm greater life.”

Lao Chu