Carla Mae's Blog

“My Soul Longs for you… … like a dry and weary land without water.” (Ps. 63) We live always in Advent. We marvel at him who has come in history and who will come finally in majesty. Most of all we marvel at him who is always coming to meet us in the mystery of our common human encounters. History, Mystery, and Majesty. The deep desire of this holy season of the Church Year is a heart-hunger springing from our woundedness, our sense of powerlessness, our craving for genuine peace. We might do well to ponder the image given us for this season of our longing. It is the image of a helpless child. Indeed. Is this an appropriate image for the God of the universe to offer us as we open this Jubilee Year of Mercy, this 800 th Anniversary Year of the Dominican Order dedicated to the proclamation of the Word of God? Couldn’t God have managed something more spectacular ? You want spectacular? Bear with me. We are given a God who thinks small . God begins there because we are small. We are...

Mercy, Mercy, Mercy… We are women and men of the Word. We do not just imitate Jesus, the Incarnate Word in our flesh. No, we identify with the Incarnate Word. So how are we to enter this Jubilee Year of Mercy? We find a clue in Francis’ letter opening the Jubilee year, a celebration which is corresponding with the 800 th Anniversary Celebration of the Dominican Order. In Misericordiae Vultus (The Face of Mercy), Francis opens his letter with “Jesus is the face of Mercy.” This means more than meets the eye. Mercy is compassion when it goes out to one who in no way deserves it. So, if Jesus is the face of mercy, this means he is the most accurate revelation of the true nature of God. Jesus is the revelation of the Father. Now each of us has our own images of God from childhood. The God keeping black marks…the judging God… But then we look at Jesus and we see a God bouncing children on his lap, a God hanging on a tree with arms outstretched to welcome us home when we have put h...

Ancient Cosmological Period:  Dawn of Human Consciousness; animist nature worship: the sacred identified with nature. First Axiel Shift  (750 BCE to approx. 250 BCE, peaking about 500 BCE across cultures with Confucius, Zoroaster, Socrates, the Jewish Prophets, etc. and the emergence of primitive science.)      - The shift from animist nature worship (fire, air, water, earth characterized by ritualistic magic)  to ethical                awareness, character and ethical norms manifest in organized religion and religious law.      - The shift to primitive science and the resulting distinction of  nature from the divine.      - The momentum toward idolatry of human reason ( Enlightenment:  approx.1750 through the modernist                     movement of the early 20th century) through World War I and II, and the mili...

Art as Sacramental Art is a sensate window into mystery...both human and divine. As such a window, it plays a  sacramental  role, opening us up to mystery as it plays in our human struggle and as it points to something beyond time/space. The Incarnation is our model. The Christ looks at us through human eyes, and veils the Divine Word. He teaches us to take seriously our own humanness, and shows us how our human struggle can be a window revealing to us the Divine at work in our very concrete human lives. The human Jesus was an inclusive welcomer. He was a nurturer, an encourager, a healer, a forgiver, a wild lover, a shepherd-leader. He is not dead. In his risen life, by power of His Spirit he continues to be all these things. Now he invites us into the act. Baptism makes us inclusive welcomers. To be a bigot goes against our baptism. He invites us to nourish one another, so he becomes our Eucharistic food to make this possible. He continues to strengthen and enco...

How to Approach the "Other" In the Jewish Kabbalah, specifically the Zohar, there is a powerful image that we might find very useful when we encounter someone who is not our faith tradition, not our gender, not our race, or not of our political opinion. When we meet such a person, the first thing that we encounter is the "garment." This is a metaphor for all the externals concerning that person. In interfaith work, it is the appearance of the person, the way he or she prays, the way these folks celebrate weddings, or funerals. It includes the way they shape their beliefs, and teach their moral taboos. Beneath the garment is the "body." Now bodies come in different stages of development. There are the new bodies of infants, adolescent bodies, and the bodies of elders. The body is a metaphor for all the meanings and values that support the garment. The meanings and values are what the person holds dear, and these meanings and values change as th...

On the "Evil" of Falling in Love as a Comitted Celibate, as Expressed by an Archbishop: Ah, ...I do not agree with the archbishop...it is not bad for a priest to fall in love with a woman...it is the Spirit's way, often of opening him up to God. What is bad is that we do not discuss this within priestly formation, and so the priest is torn when it happens to him. Celibate love must be white hot, for blue heat will not do. The loving celibate must know how to love more, not less. The love must be so intense that neither his own or the other person's life style is to be disturbed. But loving...we are made for it...it must not be feared. It must instead cauterize our celibate souls.

On Taking About God Today as Triune: to an Inquirer The tension between fear and love for God will plague us until Jesus' message is accepted more widely. It is not only part of the history of the Catholic Church, but of many other traditions. What we don't understand, we fear. Jesus asks total trust of us. It would seem that is the only intelligent choice...either we trust him because of who he is, or we don't. What is important to keep in mind is the fact of the Holy Spirit continuing to work with us like a tender Mother, opening us ever more to a fuller truth. It isn't so much that we were "wrong" as that we are learning under God's guidance.   Your explanation to the dear man who couldn't believe in God was not far off at all. All of our images are incomplete, because we do not have full knowledge of the Mystery, so not to sweat about it. The Mystery of God is so immense and so rich that in explaining it, we simply do the best we can trying ...