Posted in category "Faith"
What makes a Catholic, a Catholic?
Some people believe an “authentic” Catholic is one who is totally anti-abortion.
Others believe a Catholic identity is found in our social teaching, with its emphasis on justice for the poor, the marginalized, the earth and all creation.
Various Catholic spiritual practices are experiencing a revival: retreats, saying the rosary, fasting and abstinence, parish fish frys during Lent, praying the Liturgy of the Hours, examination of conscience, following the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, and more.
Will venerating the body parts of saints and martyrs make a revival? For centuries a normal part of Catholic life was to revere and make pilgrimages to sacred places holding a skull, vial of blood, finger bones, toe nails or a hank of hair of a long-dead person believe holds a special place in Heaven.
Our holy dead.
This past Sunday was the Feast of St. John Vianney, the patron saint of priests.
Pope Benedict XVI has declared a “Year for Priests†beginning with the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus on June 19, 2009. The year will conclude in Rome with an international gathering of priests with the Holy Father on June 19, 2010.
The Pope has declared St. John Vianney the Universal Patron of Priests on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the death of the Curé d’Ars.
The Holy Father isn’t a stranger to St. John Vianney. The book, Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World’s Holy Dead, relates that when Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI, he sequestered himself in his apartment with the heart of Saint Jean-Baptiste-Marie Vianney, patron saint of priests.
Three years ago in 2006 the heart of St. John Vianney traveled from France to Cure of Ars Church in Merrick, NY. More than 5,000 people visited from October 7-9 to pray before his heart, and the pastor expected thousands more before the heart left for a stop in Boston on its way back to France.
The heart and Vianney’s chalice was placed at the front of the altar. People could walk by the relics and pray, or see it during Mass. 
In life, St. John Vianney was a revered 19th-century French clergyman who was said to be blessed with the ability to read the hearts of worshippers. He was widely known to Catholics as the Cure (parish priest) of Ars. He won over the hearts of his villagers by visiting with them, teaching them about God and reconciling people to the Lord in the confessional. It was said he heard confessions 16-18 hours a day. He died in 1859.
When his body was exhumed in 1904 because of his pending beatification, it was found intact.
Fr. Charles Mangano of Cure of Ars Church said there’s a long-standing tradition in the Catholic Church of venerating relics such as the heart of Vianney. But for the uninitiated, he said, think of Elvis Presley.
“People get on eBay and they’ll try to get belongings or artifacts from like Elvis Presley, like people that they idolized, they admired,” the pastor explained. “Because having something of that person, you know, makes you feel close to them.”
He said for Catholics, “having a relic in our presence, it inspires us because this relic is from the body of a person whose body and soul was for God.”
Venerating the remains of saints and martyrs goes back to the earliest days of the Catholic church, said the Rev. Jean-Paul Ruiz, a professor of theology at St. John’s University.
“When we venerate the relics of saints, it puts us in touch with those persons who we believe are still alive beyond the death of their bodies.”
Fr. Mangano said he first saw the heart last year while on a retreat to Ars–inspired because he is a pastor of s church that honors Vianney.
“It’s an actual heart, 3-D, not in any kind of gel or formaldehyde,” he said. “It’s brownish color. When you get really close to it, the center is still pinkish-red. Everything else around it is all like browned with age.”
Some of the people who stood in long lines to see the heart described an overwhelming need to see a real miracle. Others said it was a historic moment. And still others–many seminarians and priests–came to thank the Cure of Ars, patron saint of parish priests, for answering prayers during times they struggled with their vocation or ministry.
“I came here to see a miracle,” said Laura Musto, 46, of St. Mary of the Isle Church in Long Beach, referring to the heart. “And we need miracles in today’s world.”
“I came to see the heart of a saint,” said Maria Gilmore, 82, of Sacred Heart Church in North Merrick. “I thought everyone turned to dust but I guess not.”
“We came here on a mini-pilgrimage to be close to his heart, to have a moment of intimacy with the saint,” said Charlie Gallagher, 23, a seminarian for the Archdiocese of Washington who was joined by two classmates, Ted Hegnsuer and Rick Nichols.
“This relic represents who St. John Vianney was and who we aspire to be. When I kneel before the heart, I will ask St. John Vianney to replace my heart with his heart so I can emulate him,” Gallagher told The Long Island Catholic, the newspaper of the Rockeville Centre Diocese.
But when I saw the a picture of the heart in a newspaper, it reminded me of a bear’s heart I saw in the refrigerator of an Indian family member in Alaska. Like most of the people in the village they mostly lived off the land in the traditional ways and and killed a bear for food. The heart was there in case anyone was hungry and wanted a snack.The Vianney relic looked just like the cold, cooked heart on white plate.
I didn’t go see the heart, even though I live about 45 minutes away from Merrick.
I was more morbidly curious to see a mummified heart than faith-filled, so out of respect I passed. Maybe if it was another body part, like a finger bone, I could have coped. Or, if I went with other people I knew I could justify the visit like a modern day Canterbury Tales pilgrimage. We could have all shared our stories of faith and doubt and sin en route.
But I didn’t know any Catholic who wouldn’t have given a “Huh?” response at the offer to go see a saint’s heart on the middle of Long Island.
“The Catholic Church does not extend the love that we, as Catholics, are called to show the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered community. As a gay woman, I desire and deserve to receive love, which I believe is somewhere deep down in the heart of the Catholic Church. Once I chose to live an authentic life by revealing my sexual orientation, the love quickly faded.”
“I hope and pray that in my lifetime my gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered brothers and sisters will have a permanent seat at the table of the Catholic Church.” 
- Bennie Shenelle Thierry -
Her statement appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of Centerings, a publication of the 8th Day Center for Justice in Chicago.
The Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), an association that icludes the leadership of most U.S. women’s congregations, is under investigation by the Vatican.
Cardinal Levada said the assessment of the LCWR will be conducted by the Bishop of Toledo, Ohio, Leonard P. Blair. Bishop Blair is a member of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Doctrine. 
The Vatican assessment became necessary, according to Levada, because at the 2001 meeting between LCWR and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which took place in Rome, the women were invited “to report on the initiatives taken or planned” to promote the reception of three areas of Vatican doctrinal concern: the 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio sacerdotalis, the 2000 declaration Dominus Jesus from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and “the problem of homosexuality.”
Cardinal Levada informed conference leaders: “Given both the tenor and the doctrinal content of various addresses given at the annual assemblies of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious in the intervening years, this Dicastery can only conclude that the problems which had motivated its request in 2001 continue to be present.”
The National Catholic Reporter, an independent newspaper, said the Vatican ordered the probe because the sisters had not addressed issues raised by the Vatican in 2001 about their promotion of church teaching on homosexuality, salvation and the priesthood, which the Vatican said is reserved for men.
The ripples from a keynote by Sinsinawa Dominican Sister Laurie Brink at the 2007 LCWR assembly roused the Vatican machinery into action. 
In that keynote address, titled A Marginal Life: Pursuing Holiness in the 21st Century,” Sr. Laurie Brink urged leaders of Catholic religious orders to make clear, if painful choices about the future of religious life. She began with this assumption: “Old concepts of how to live the life are no longer valid.” The rest of the speech outlined four possible options or outcomes as a starting point for discussion.
- ”Death with dignity and grace” as opposed to becoming a “zombie congregation” that staggers on with no purpose. This option must be taken seriously, since the average age of the 67,000 sisters and nuns in the United States is 69. Many retreat ministries are closing, and large “mother houses” are struggling with finances, while some congregations no longer invite or accept new candidates.
- Brink noted that some orders have chosen to turn back the clock – thus winning the favor of Rome. “They are putting on the habit, or continuing to wear the habit with zest…Some would critique that they are the nostalgic portrait of a time now passed. But they are flourishing. Young adults are finding in these communities a living image of their romantic vision of religious life.”
- During this era of crisis and decline, some Catholic religious orders have chosen to enter a time of “sojourning” that involves “moving beyond the church, even beyond Jesus.” “Religious titles, institutional limitations, ecclesiastical authorities no longer fit this congregation, which in most respects is post-Christian,” added Brink, a former journalist who is a biblical studies professor at Chicago’s Catholic Theological Union.
For these women, the “Jesus narrative is not the only or the most important narrative…They still hold up and reverence the values of the Gospel, but they also recognize that these same values are not solely the property of Christianity. Buddhism, Native American spirituality, Judaism, Islam and others hold similar tenets for right behavior within the community, right relationship with the Earth and right relationship with the divine.”
She described the Benedictine Women of Madison as having a commitment to “ecumenism” which led them “beyond the exclusivity of the Catholic Church into a new inclusivity, where all manner of God is welcomed. They are certainly religious women, but they are no longer women religious as it is defined by the Roman Catholic Church. They choose as a congregation to step outside the Church in order to step into a greater sense of holiness.”
- Finally, some women are fighting on, hoping to achieve reconciliation someday with a changed, egalitarian church hierarchy. “Theologians are denied academic freedom. Religious and laywomen feel scrutinized simply because of their biology. Gays and lesbians desire to participate as fully human, fully sexual Catholics within their parishes,” Brink said. Many Catholics also oppose the “ecclesial deafness that refuses to hear the call of the Spirit summoning not only celibate males, but married men and women to serve” as priests.
Read Brink’s 2007 address and the keynotes from the LCWR 2008, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003 and 2003 assemblies here.
The blog, Journey to a New Pentecost, provided a very crisp and thorough assessment of the LCWR investigation. You can read it here.
Brink’s comment about being “post-Christian,” and the sentence: “They are certainly religious women, but they are no longer women religious as it is defined by the Roman Catholic Church,” may have been the spark that ignited the gas can.
Amy Welborn, a Catholic blogger who writes on Beliefnet said: “If you are going to be post-Christian, then be post-Christian. I don’t say that with snark. It’s just reality. If you’ve moved on – move on. Step out from the protective mantle of identity that gives you cachet, that of ‘Catholic nun.’”
Here was a comment on America Magazine’s blog that summed things up for this conservative reader: “The Vatican investigation is long overdue. If you want to be a social worker then be a social worker–not a nun. A nun’s first allegiance is to the Church. I am quite tired of running into nuns who: look like aged hippies, push for women’s ordination, push for abortion, push homosexuality as an ok lifestyle and do this, supposedly, in the name of Christ.”
Sr. Jeannine Gramick, former co-director of New Ways Ministry, commented on the probable political reasons for the investigation: “It is difficult for me to believe that the CDF (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) has not already made a predetermined conclusion. This seems to be the Vatican’s modus operandi. An “investigation” process puts a veneer of fairness to the result. Consider the investigations of theologians like Charles Curran, Leonardo Boff, Roger Haight, etc. etc. No matter what the investigating party does to please them (or not please them) the outcome will be the same. For example, in the Vatican investigation of Fr. Robert Nugent and me, Bob agreed to make some “profession of faith” about the church’s teaching on homosexuality while I refused. The sanction for each of us was identical.”
“In this case, I expect the predetermined outcome to be a change in the canonical relationship of LCWR to the Vatican. The Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious (CMSWR), the traditional group of nuns formed in 1192 by Cardinal Hickey, was not to be the official group representing women religious to the Vatican. By 1195, they not only had canonical status but also were favored over LCWR (e.g., CMSWR had more delegates than LCWR at the synod on Religious Life.) The Vatican would like CMSWR to be the official representative of the leaders of US women’s communities. I think the Vatican is using this investigation to usurp LCWR’s role and replace them with CMSWR.”
I agree with Amy Welborn. I also tend to agree with Jeannine on the politics of the situation. LCWR gave the Vatican the opening it needed by Sr. Laurie Brinks candid–but public–remarks about the choices facing the communities of the LCWR and the options a few members have chosen to pursue. They were imprudent, considering how many enemies LCWR has in the Church.
However, in addition to ideological purity, there is also the issue of property and endowments. These aging communities are sitting on a lot of very valuable real estate. I think the church definitely has an interest in what happens to it when communities begin to fold and the property is sold off. What happens to the money? That may be easier to influence or manage if a more traditionalist group of sisters is involved.
There is another investigation underway running parallel to the investigation of the LCWR.
On March 10, 2009, the Vatican ordered an apostolic visitation of the institutions of the Legionaries of Christ following disclosures of sexual impropriety by the order’s late founder, Father Marcial Maciel Degollado. The letter was signed by Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Sectetary of State. It was addressed to Father Alvaro Corcuera, director general of the Legionaries and its lay association, Regnum Christi.
In 2006 Pope Benedict XVI disciplined Fr. Maciel. He was banned from exercising his ministry in public and told to retire to a life of prayer and penitence, following allegations that he sexually abused about 30 boys and young men over a period of 30 years. The Vatican initially stonewalled the sexual abuse investigation for well over a decade.
The Legionaires of Christ were much admired by the late Pope John Paul II for its conservative views, strict loyalty to Vatican teaching, fund raising ability and success in attracting seminarians.
But it was not until Fr. Maciel’s death in 2008 that his secret life was revealed. In February 2009 the Legionaries admitted he kept a mistress and fathered a daughter who is now in her 20s.
The leadership of the order recently admitted that Maciel, a cult figure among Legionaires, led a “double life” after the discovery of his liaison with the mother of his daughter.
Several prominent Catholic commentators said publicly–and some Vatican officials said privately–that the situation called for an outside investigation into the Legionaries of Christ, in order to ascertain the truth, determine whether officials of the order covered up Father Maciel’s misconduct and judge whether Father Maciel’s teachings could still inspire the order.
Also at stake in the investigation is the significant estate Maciel left behind–which his daughter could have a claim to…
The probe could also uncover more cases of sexual abuse similar to those committed by Fr. Maciel.
“We have testimonies that there have been other Legionaires who followed Maciel’s example,” said Jose Barba, the legal representative of eight former Legionaries who started court proceedings against Marciel in 1998. “The ramifications of the problem exist throughout the Legionaires of Christ,” he added.
It will be interesting to compare the end result of each investigation. It will also be interesting to see if Fr. Maciel’s daughter pursues gaining an inheritence or is offered a settlement by the order. Children of priests and bishops laying claim to church property is one of the reasons priestly celibacy became a requirement years ago.
Tony Blair has challenged the “entrenched” attitudes of the Pope on homosexuality, and argued it is time for him to “rethink” his views.
During an April 8, 2009 interview with the U.K.’s leading gay magazine, Attitude, the former Prime Minister said: “Organised religions face the same dilemma as political parties when faced with changing circumstances.” 
“You can either A: hold on to your core vote, basically, say ‘Look let’s not break out because if we break out we might lose what we’ve got, and at least we’ve got what we’ve got, so let’s keep it.’ Or B: you say, “Let’s accept that the world is changing and let us work out how we can lead that change and actually reach out.’”
Asked about the Pope’s stance, Mr. Blair blamed generational differences and said: “We need an attitude of mind where rethinking and the concept of evolving attitudes becomes part of the discipline with which you approach your religious faith.”
“There are many good and great things the Catholic Church does, and there are many fantastic things this Pope stands for, but I think what is interesting is that if you went into any Catholic Church, particularly a well attended one, on any Sunday here and did a poll of the congregation, you’d be surprised how liberal-minded people were. The faith of ordinary Catholics is rarely found “in those types of entrenched attitudes,” he said.
Not all British Catholics applauded with his remarks.
On March 29, 2009, former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, was received into the Catholic Church. He has not said publicly why he converted, but his third wife, Callista Bisek, is Catholic. Mr. Gingrich had been a Baptist.
But a comment he recently made may contain a hint: “Over the course of the last decade, attending the basilica…reading the literature, there was a peace in my soul and a sense of well-being in the Catholic church.”
Mr. Gingrich, a conservative Republican who has not run for elective office since he was forced out of Congress in 1999, has toyed with running for president in the past and is much-rumored to be considering a 2012 bid. It is not clear how his Catholicism might affect his political future, but in a recent Twitter post Gingrich commented President Obama has “anti Catholic values.” 
“It is sad to see,” he texted, “notre dame invite president obama to give the commencement address Since his policies are so anti catholic values”
Based on his sexual infidelities and multiple marriages, some U.S. Catholics question Rep. Gingrich’s self-promotion as a spokesman for authentic ”Catholic values.”
When people forget that the Holy Spirit speaks directly to individual consciences and not only through the church, there is a risk that laypeople would be pushed to the margins of the church’s life, the papal preacher told Pope Benedict XVI and top Vatican officials.
“The ideal is a healthy harmony between listening to that which the Spirit tells me, individually, and that which the Spirit tells the church as a whole and, through the church, what it tells individuals,” said Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa, preacher of the papal household. 
In his weekly Lenten meditation March 27th for the pope and his closest collaborators, Father Cantalamessa focused on a passage from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans: “Those who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.”
The Holy Spirit, he said, speaks through individual consciences and through the church.
Through the conscience, he said, “the guidance of the Holy Spirit extends even outside the church to all men and women.”
But, the Holy Spirit also speaks through the church, Cantalamessa added. “The interior witness of the Holy Spirit (in consciences) must be joined to that external, visible and objective witness which is the apostolic teaching” of the popes and the church.
“When this is reduced only to the personal, private listening of an individual, the path is open to an unstoppable process of divisions and subdivisions because each person believes he or she is right.”
“But we also must recognize that the opposite risk exists: that of absolutizing the external and public witness of the Spirit.”
“In other words, there is a risk of reducing the guidance of the Paraclete to only the official teaching of the church, impoverishing the varied action of the Holy Spirit. In this case the human, organizational and institutional elements prevail, the passivity of the members is encouraged and the door is opened to the marginalization of the laity and the excessive clericalization of the church,” Father Cantalamessa said.
Father Raniero Cantalamessa’s website can be found here.
Did the Holy Father, and members of his household in attendance, contemplate that the witness of Call to Action, Dignity, Quest, Voice of the Faithful, theologians like Dr. Dan McGuire and Fr. Charles Curran, prophets like Dr. Mary E. Hunt and Sr. Jeannine Gramick, all the men who are listed on the blogroll of this site, and the thousands of gay and lesbian Catholics everywhere…are heeding the voice of the Spirit?
By the time theologian and sociologist Nancy Eiesland was 13 years ago, she already gone through 11 operations for the congenital bone defect in her hips and realized pain was her lot in life. So why did she say she hoped that when she went to heaven she would still be disabled? 
The reason, which seems clear enough to many disabled people, was that her identity and character were formed by the mental, physical and societal challenges of her disability. She felt that without her disability, she would “be absolutely unknown to myself and perhaps to God.”
By the time of her death at 44 on March 10, 2009, Eiesland has come to believe that God was in fact disabled, a view she articulated in her 1994 book, The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability.” She pointed to the scene described in Luke 24:36-39 in which the risen Jesus invites his disciples to touch his wounds. 
“In presenting his impaired body to his startled friends, the ressurrected Jesus is revealed as the disabled God,” she wrote. God remains a God the disabled can identify with, she argued–he is not cured and made whole; his injury is a part of him, neither a divine punishment nor an opportunity for healing.
I recall a lot of Bible stories about Jesus healing the blind, the lame, the disfigured, the possessed, the hemorrhaging. I don’t recall any stories of a man or woman running away when they heard Jesus was in the neighborhood, afraid he might touch them and change their condition. Just the opposite. But did any melt into the crowd when they heard Jesus was coming down the street? We don’t know. The Bible only describes one group.
A lot of people think of homosexuality as a disability or sickness no one would choose not to be freed from, because of the loss, humiliation, vulnerability, and especially, the pain involved.
In a statement about a year before her death, Eiesland described how her experience of pain changed after an extended stay on medical leave.
“I return with pain,” she said, “but for the first time in at least five years I do not come back on pain killers, mood elevators, or other pharmacological means to dull the ache. I say these things neither to inspire, invite your sympathy or disapproval, nor to chisel into your life in any way. I offer here my experience of pain to remind us that for most of us pain will be an ordinary partner in an ordinary life. The social fiction that long-term pain ought to be treated with more and better drugs is an attractive one.
But even when it is severe and unremitting, I am persuaded that pain is a better friend than is the pain killer. As my life began to reveal, one never can be sure what else within you dies when you try to kill the pain.”
Read her whole statement here.
Wondering why English food was so awful in the 1960s set Delia Smith off on a quest to learn about it and educate people in how to cook their traditional dishes, a mission that, for the past 33 years, has made her Britain’s favorite cook. Her first book was How to Cheat at Cooking (1971) and the following year she started writing a column in the Evening Standard. From the start, hers has been a practical and inspirational approach to cooking healthy, delicious food. 
Delia Smith, 67, is also known for her spiritual books. Her first two religious books, A Feast for Lent and A Feast for Advent (both published in 1983), are readings and reflections for these seasons. In 1988 Delia took on the much larger challenge of writing a full-length book on prayer, A Journey into God.
Faith has been part of Delia’s life from childhood. “My mother would put me to bed too early, when I could hear that all the other children were still up, so I was awake and bored. One night, she gave me a picture of Jesus with the children of the world, and taught me to say the Our Father. That is when I started with silence and stillness–there was this need in me even then for the spirit.” When she was 22, she became a Catholic after being taken to Mass by a friend.
Each day, as well as attending Mass, Delia carves out a half an hour in the morning and a half an hour in the late afternoon for absolute quiet. “We all have a need sometimes to be by ourselves and be still. I know that making that sort of commitment can be very difficult, so what I suggest is that you build it up gradually, over years. Start with 20 minutes a day. How do you know when 20 minutes has passed? The simplest way is a kitchen timer!”
Her new venture with Cafod (the official overseas development and relief agency of the Catholic Church in England and Wales), all started with an interview last year on BBC Radio 4′s Today programme. Her latest book, Delia’s How to Cheat on Cooking, had just come out and she was doing an interview to promote it.
“Answering one of their questions, I admitted I was confused about the ethics of food miles and planet warming and carbon emissions. I said that I had stopped buying vegetables that had travelled long distance, but then I had started worrying about what was happening to growers in places like Kenya if there was no longer any overseas markets for their produce.”
Her on-air confession that she didn’t have an answer to this dilemma made headlines in the national press, but also promoted a call to her office from Cafod, offering to guide her through their research on this sensitive issue. From that call a relationship blossomed. “Cafod contacted me,” Delia explains, “and said they had some scientists who were experts on the question of food miles, so I went and spent a day at the Cafod offices and had a very productive time.”
This meeting led her to offer her services to the charity. Cafod came back with a suggestion that she lead their Lenten programme, which she accepted. “I wasn’t at all sure about it,” she admits. “There wasn’t going to be much space on the website to explain what I felt, and with anything having to do with religion you run the risk of being misunderstood. But you have to think what being is a Christian is all about. And if we think being misunderstood is bad, what is that next to what happened to Christ? If there is a reason why I have agreed to do this, it’s because he did it. He coped with ridicule and misunderstanding every day.”
The theme of her Lenten programme is not Kenyan beans, or even the development issues usually associated with Cafod and its work of supporting people in need around the globe. It is something more specifically spiritual and revealing of Delia’s own approach to faith. On the charity’s website she is urging the benefits of making a daily commitment to stillness and silence. “Lent is the perfect time to make a commitment to spending serious one-to-one time in God’s presence,” she wrote in her introductory reflection.
“As I have got older I have become more aware of the simplicity of our faith,” comments Delia on her motivation for proposing this Lenten exercise. “If Jesus has said, ‘there’s only one thing needed,’ we cannot grow as Christians without incorporating that ‘one thing’ into our daily lives and take his words utterly seriously.”
“Throughout the gospels Jesus spends time alone, away from the pressures of life to be ‘with’ his Father. How can any of his followers not understand their own need for this, faced with the challenges of life today?”
Delia quotes the example of Jesus’ visit to the sisters Martha and Mary. Martha (who sounds like a Delia type of person) is busy making supper and doing housework, while Mary sits at the feet of Jesus, hanging on to his every word. But when Martha gets annoyed and tells her sister to help her, Jesus tells her to stop fussing. “You worry and fret about so many things, and yet few are needed–indeed, only one.” That “one thing” Delia believes, is silence and in it, openness to God.
The idea of silent contemplation seems to be having something of a resurgence, including the rising numbers of people called to a monastic lifestyle. Delia thinks that economic crisis may have something to do with it, in the sense that material plenty tends to equate with spiritual poverty, and vice versa. “I think there may be an opening to God right now because the pressures people are under with this recession. They may be realising that materialism can never make you happy in the end.”
Many advocates of silence insist on the need to go much further…to banish worldly thoughts and concerns and find an inner voice. Delia doesn’t agree. “My mind is still making up recipes when I’m silent,” she admits, “but that doesn’t matter. Sister Wendy (Beckett), always tells me that God created our minds to think. We can’t just switch them on and off when we want to. You just have to trust in God that he will be the instigator. He will enable. That’s an important word. Enable. It is a kind of blind trust.”
Delia is contemplating writing more about religion. The attacks by atheists have irked her, in particularly what she sees as their “stupidity” in stating categorically that there isn’t a God. “Their behaviour always makes me think of two ants in a crack in the pavement in front of St Paul’s Cathedral. One asks the other ‘Do you believe in architecture?’ and the other says, ‘No, I don’t.’”
