I participated in the synod - UPDATE

I get our parish newsletter each week.  I try to read it but don't always succeed.  I glanced through it this week and discovered our archdiocese is collecting Synod input from people via a website.  After some explanatory information and a synod prayer, it invites people in the archdiocese to submit reflections on these statements:

for me Communion means…..

for me Participation means…..

for me Mission means…..

So I did.  I can only hope someone reads them!

UPDATE 4/1/2022 3:51 pm CDT - I saw that one or two commenters asked for my responses.  Here they are.  These were a little (well, completely) off the cuff; I wouldn't apply the term "well thought out" to them.

Communion to me means unity. - all of us united in Christ.   The world seemingly doesn't realize this: it is starving for communion:

* Our divisive politics reflects the reality of our divided society.  Communion can heal these divisions

* Younger generations are staying away from the communal aspect of faith, and consequently, they are not receiving communion

* The war in Ukraine, in which religious divisions are playing a part, is a great scandal against communion with Jesus

Participation means living here in this world as a citizen of God's kingdom.  Our participation in worship strengthens and symbolizes this participation, but it doesn't exhaust the possibilities of participation.  We participate even more by serving those who are hungry or homeless or immigrants or refugees.   

Mission happens first of all in the home.  When we share our faith with one another in our families, we are fulfilling the church's mission.

Befriending Trees by E-mail

 Even if you can't read the NYT article, the idea of e-mail addresses for trees (and maybe other creatures and things) is very interesting.

Befriending Trees to Lower a City’s Temperature

A program in Melbourne, Australia, that tracks every public tree — and even gives each an email address — is seen as a way to manage climate change.

Central Melbourne, on the other hand, lacks those cities’ financial firepower and is planning to plant a little more than 3,000 trees a year over the next decade. Yet it has gained the interest of other cities by using its extensive data to shore up the community engagement and political commitment required to sustain the decades-long work of building urban forests.

A small municipality covering just 14.5 square miles in the center of the greater Melbourne metropolitan area — which sprawls for 3,860 square miles and houses 5.2 million people in 31 municipalities — the city of Melbourne introduced its online map in 2013.

Called the Urban Forest Visual, the map displayed each of the 80,000 trees in its parks and streets, and showed each tree’s age, species and health. It also gave each tree its own email address so that people could help to monitor them and alert council workers to any specific problems.

That is when the magic happened.

City officials were surprised to see the trees receiving thousands of love letters. They ranged from jaunty greetings — “good luck with the photosynthesis” — to love poems and emotional tributes about how much joy the trees brought to people’s lives.

Members of the public were subsequently recruited to help with forestry programs such as measuring trees and monitoring wildlife, and politicians were left in no doubt about how much Melburnians valued their trees.

City of Melbourne councilors of all political stripes agreed on the ambitious goal of increasing their tree canopy cover to 40 percent of public land by 2040, from 23 percent in 2012.

Their plan is on track after a decade and has been gradually replacing many of the grand European elms and London plane trees that shade the city’s widest boulevards, moving instead to indigenous species such as eucalypts and other trees better able to cope with climate change.

Scams

 Our IT department at work puts out a news letter every week, entitled "Scam of the week".  I had patted myself on the back that up to now I had avoided falling for any of them. 

Well, pride cometh before a fall.  Yesterday an announcement came up on Facebook that due to economic conditions, the San Antonio Shoe Company, better known as SAS, was going out of business. They were having a clearance sale, everything must go, both from their factory outlets and physical stores. Everything was heavily discounted.

I was sorry to hear that they were going out. They are one of the last remaining shoe manufacturers still based in the USA.  And they make good everyday shoes which are kind to sensitive feet, which I have.  So I placed an order.  Everything looked legit.  But it wasn't.

One of my sisters sent me a link to SAS shoes announcement that they were NOT going out of business.  They had asked Facebook to pull the fake ad, and supposedly they did. But it was still showing up. I felt like a total fool, and called my credit card company. They were sympathetic but said that since I had initiated the charge, they couldn't stop payment until I failed to receive the merchandise after a reasonable length of time. After which they would be happy to credit my account. 

I looked in my e-mail and their was an acknowledgement of my order. With contact information in Chinese characters.  Gotcha. It's not my life savings, or anything. But I will have to keep an eye on the credit card account to make sure nothing else gets charged to it before the charge is able to be credited back. And then probably ask for a new card and account number. And remember that if a bargain it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Will the Communion Cup Ever Make a Comeback?

This is the subject of an article on the NCR site today.  The broader question is, will some things we used to do in liturgy ever come back?

In the article, the answer to these questions concerns the livelihood of some people:

A Different Military View of Putin

I guess I never quite believed the stories the Russian military was inept. However, I think they operate very differently than the US. Military so it is difficult to understand their strategy and tactics.

Putin's Bombers Could Devastate Ukraine But He's Holding Back. Here's Why

Good, evil and mercy

This is my homily for the weekend now ending, the Third Sunday of Lent for Cycle C (I say "now ending" because this will post before midnight Central Time, but the blog is in Eastern Time, and it is already Monday on the East Coast).

I should explain that not all parishes hear the same readings for the past Sunday.  Parishes with RCIA candidates would celebrate the Third, Fourth and Fifth Sundays of Lent as Scrutiny Sundays, and for those occasions, the Lenten Sunday readings from Cycle A (Matthew's year) are used for those weeks, even if the actual year is Cycle B (Mark's year) or Cycle C (Luke's year).  Those parishes with RCIA candidates would have heard the lengthy Gospel reading of the Woman at the Well this past weekend.  For parishes that have no RCIA, each year has its own appointed readings for those Sundays of Lent.  Our parish doesn't have any RCIA candidates this year (which is worrisome - RCIA has become pretty moribund in our parish since the pandemic started) so we're using the appointed Cycle C readings.  This homily is based on those readings, which are here.  In that selection, the first reading is the familiar story of Moses and the burning bush, while the Gospel is the parable of the fig tree that bears no fruit.  Here is my homily text:

Francis issues Vatican Reorganization Document UPDATED AGAIN!

UPDATE: Here is Tom Reese's evaluation: He is a tough critic. Few points for good intentions.

Pope Francis reforms the Vatican Curia. Here’s hoping he’s not done.

Reforming the Vatican bureaucracy should not be a rare, revolutionary event. It takes nine months for a woman to produce a baby. It took nine years for the Vatican to birth a new document reforming the Roman Curia. Perhaps the Vatican would act more quickly if there were more women working there.

Potentially the biggest change in “Praedicate Evangelium” is its opening of top positions in the Vatican to laypeople. This could have monumental impact if truly implemented. Theoretically, the secretary of state, the highest official after the pope, could be a laywoman. A woman theologian could be prefect of the Dicastery for Doctrine of the Faith. This will upset those who believe that only the ordained can exercise the power of governance in the church. 

There are other problems, however, in employing laity in the Vatican.

Having laypeople in top jobs will not magically change the church for the better. Laypeople bring their own values and baggage to their jobs. As parishioners know, lay ministers can be just as clerical and authoritarian as priests.

The second issue is money. How is the Vatican going to pay for qualified lay specialists and executives?

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