Tag: god

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Once upon a time

Those four words can whisk you off to a land of Disney fairy tales or maybe family memorabilia of other times and places. They are the before and after of what was once the present. Like, once upon a time I believed in Father Christmas, confusing Santa Claus with God; after all  I pictured both as old men with long white hair and beards. That was then.

Sometime I think that the Christianity that has shaped my life has been relegated to once-upon-a-time land. Reorganizing my cluttered bookshelves started me off on this train of thought. After oohing and aahing over long ago favourites and pondering the possibility of re-reads, I picked up my Bible.

Once upon a time, 70 years ago, a Bible was on the ‘bring with you’ list that I took with me when I chose life as a nun. Eventually I left convent life behind, but my bible accompanied me into the next stage of life. An upgrade of my Catholic school teaching qualifications stipulated a semester of biblical studies. I told myself that childhood familiarity with the Jesus story coupled with seventeen years of daily meditation on verses from the New Testament meant I would breeze through this requirement.

Instead the lecturer, Mercy Sister Shelia Byrne, changed my life – and my spirituality. Sister Shelia was a Scripture scholar and she taught me to read Matthew, Mark, Luke and John from the historical perception of a first century Jew, along with a current newspaper.

Up till this time I had never really twigged that the Jesus story was also the stuff of everyone’s life, of my life. In all the years since then my Bible, and the New Testament in particular, has been my go-to, a backdrop to Words from the Edge and before that, to Tarella Spirituality Sunday Gospel readings.

In the once upon a time of my life, most Christian families had a Bible  sitting on the bookshelf among a mixture of biography, novels, encyclopaedias and outgrown Enid Blyton tales. Maybe it’s still there. But if the TV runs from morning to late night, the radio plays endless talkback or the latest must-listen to music and we feel the need to respond to the frequent mobile phone query “Where are you?” while messenger pings with can’t wait news, there’s not a lot of time to read the Christian Bible and even less to hear its relevance to 2024.   

If your Bible has been sitting unread for many years, consider dusting it off and putting it on your stack of bedtime reading. An occasional slow, careful reading of something from Matthew, Mark, Luke or John can give familiar details a chance to be heard in your own voice and from personal experience.

Stop reading if a word or phrase catches your interest or imagination. It’s like a hook that the Spirit of God uses to bring something to your attention. Gospel reflection is like a cow chewing a mouthful of grass. It invites us to chew some of the words over and over again, ruminate on them, let them sink right into your minds and heart. There’s more than a chance that Scriptural words that once sounded tired and worn out are now relevant persona, even challenging . . .  and alive with a freshness that is energising.

Judith Scully

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A time to hope

At midnight on Sunday 31st of December 2023, country by country, time zone after time zone will tick into January 1st 2024. Bells will ring out and fireworks light up the dark as people hug and a hope stirs in them. To borrow a line from a Johnny Mathis Christmas song, maybe “hate will turn to love, war to peace and everyone to everyone’s neighbour, and misery and suffering will be words to be forgotten forever.”

Hope is a frequently used word: “I hope the weather improves”.  “I hope the anxiety I’m feeling goes away.“  “I hope the floodwaters recede soon.”   I hope the baby sleeps till at least 6 o’clock.”  “ I hope the war between Russia and Ukraine will come to an end very soon.”  “I hope we are spared bushfires this year.”

Hope isn’t like closing your eyes and making a wish as you blow out the candles on your birthday cake. It’s not the wishful thinking that accompanies a belief that no matter how bad things are everything will turn out OK eventually. Right now the news bulletins are all the evidence we need of the tremendous suffering and widespread destruction in so many parts of the world. There’s nothing warm and fuzzy about it.

Hope is a God-given spark lying deep in our soul, along with that pulse of truth, an inner knowing that ‘all will be well, and all manner of things will be well’. It gives us the strength to stay in the moment when an accident, a betrayal or an epidemic can tear us from ordinary life or relationships, or shake the hope we had taken for granted.

We learn to live with hope when we experience adversity and discomfort in all their manifestations. The writer Rebecca Solnit says that hope means living with the complexities and uncertainties that will always be there in one shape or another- with openings. Richard Rohr might be referring to these openings when he says that “hope keeps the field of life wide open and especially open to grace and to a future created by God rather than ourselves.”

It reminds me of a story by Fr Anthony de Mello. In my version a woman dreamt she walked into a brand new shop in the heart of Melbourne Central and to her surprise, found God behind the counter. “What do you sell here?” she asked. “Everything your heart desires,” said God. Hardly daring to believe what she was hearing, the woman decided to ask for the best things that a human being could wish for. “For myself I want peace of mind, happiness, wisdom and freedom from fear, and I want my children and my grandchildren to be spared anything that may harm them.” God smiled. “I think you’ve got me wrong my dear. We don’t sell fruits here. Only seeds.”

As 2024 begins my hope is that the seeds of peace, harmony and equality planted by people the world over will flourish in the Light that gives them life.

 Judith    judith@judithscully.com.au