SAFCAM Communique #39

SAFCAM Communique #39          13/02/2021      

Dear Subscribers

Happy St Valentines weekend!

Let us not promote too negative an attitude to the world’s tendency to reduce this celebration to passing romances consisting of roses and cards and not much more. Let us instead celebrate the natural and healthy attraction between the sexes which is the rocket-launcher for future marriage vocations, and let’s use the occasion to remind the teens and young adults that true love is not just a feeling but a commitment, and real love waits and lasts! Falling in love is a conversion experience which turns and immature self-centred individual into an other-centred character. It can be a life-changing gospel experience, and obviously we need to accompany the young through it guiding them to respect the boundaries and ‘rules of the game’ if they wish it to avoid heartbreak and hurt.

The gospel calls us to conversion. The gospel says: “Change your way of life! It challenges everybody on the face of this planet. And I think that in God’s plan, for the average person, the first and most serious conversion experience that most people ever have, and it is a deeply spiritual experience, is falling in love. Until that time we are very self-seeking; and that is precisely what the gospel is calling us out of. And once we fall in love, we become other centred. Those who were totally self-centred, wrapped up in themselves, start to think about someone else, become other-centred. And they become so generous! I always know when a boy is ready to break up with a girl. As soon as he starts complaining about how much she is costing him, then he’s on the point of breaking up. Meanwhile, when he was in love, he was proud of how he could afford her expensive tastes. He even took pride in that…

(For more – see the posting “Sexy-Saint or Sinner?”)

Ash Wednesday coming-up: Lent is in the air! – more calls for conversion.

We the pandemic and so much distressing news around, we are faced with quite a bit of chaos on the ‘outside’… But lent challenges us to deal with the chaos ‘inside’ of us which we tend to either deny or simply refuse to face - our paranoia, our anger, our jealousies, our distance from others, our fantasies, our desire for status and popularity, our addictions, our unresolved hurts, our lusts, our inability to really pray, our doubts, and all our sins. The usual foods and entertainments tend to distract us from the more significant elements of life, and shield us from the deeper chaos that lurks beneath the surface of our lives.

Lent invites us to stop eating and indulging in whatever protects us from having to face the desert that is inside of us. It provokes us to experience our vulnerability and inadequacy, and to open ourselves up the chaos of the desert so that we can instead give the angels a chance to nourish us.

It is not only religions which set special times like lent or ramadam, for extra prayer and fasting:

In every culture, there are traditions and stories which call for times of penance and mourning similar, times to sit in sackcloth and ashes.

The story of Cinderella for example. The name Cinder-ella literally means, the little girl (puella) who sits in the ashes (cinders). The moral of the story is that before you get to be beautiful, before you get to marry the prince or princess, before you get to go to the great feast, you must first spend some lonely time in the ashes, humbled, smudged, attending to duty and the unglamorous, waiting…

Lent is that season, our time to sit in the ashes. So it is not incidental that we begin lent by mark ourselves with ashes. We could say that to truly enjoy a feast there must first be a fast. To get to the promised land and be able to celebrate Easter fully, we need to first spend some time in a desert, in ashes…

(For further reflections on the season of lent, look up the website!)

If you have 15 minutes to spare, please watch this YouTube clip: https://youtu.be/zymBhgUqoh4

If you only have 3 minutes – watch 1 x 3 minutes of it at minutes 5, 12, 15.

God blessTop of Form

Camiel and François