With the time of our annual recommitment upon us, this is a good time to bring up some of the needs we have for Communio.

Our biggest need at this point is someone who can do some all-purpose writing for us, ideally someone who is already (or who wants to) attend many of talks given at Malachi’s or other events that would be of interest to the Community. We would like to run more summary reports, or reflections on the events. Special journalistic expertise is not needed, although the ability to express oneself clearly in writing is.

We continue to need more items published elsewhere that we can hold as filler material. This could be just about anything, although I prefer it not be from local sources like The Plain Dealer, Free Times or Universe Bulletin, unless there is something extra special about the article, for instance if it was written by a Community member. For example, this issue we are printing a letter to the editor by Father Tony that was in last Sunday’s Plain Dealer. Poems, songs, verse, inspirational "refrigerator door" items, and other things I perhaps haven’t thought of are all acceptable. We’ve run some rather long theological/moral articles as well. Look for things other Community members probably have not seen. Older articles are fine, too.

I would like to see more reviews, whether of books, movies or music, written by Community members. It might be something you liked and want to share, but in any case, don’t be afraid to be critical.

Mostly I would like to see the committees make better use of Communio, as Jane Smith of Spiritual Development has in the last two issues. Background information pertinent to upcoming events, occasional updates on committee activities, excerpted articles that preview upcoming speakers or that relate to what the committee is working on. All this would be appropriate.

As a practical matter, we ask that whenever possible articles be submitted either on computer disk or by E-mail. This saves a considerable amount of work. Regarding E-mail, accessing America Online has become a lot easier in the last week or two, and its $20 a month flat fee is the best deal going among all these services. (That’s what got them into their well publicized problems.) For E-mail alone, Juno is very good, very simple to use and free, although you are exposed to some advertising (as with AOL, for that matter). None of the advertisements I’ve seen so far on Juno have been in any way, or to any sensibility, offensive. Call 1-800-654-JUNO for a starter disk. CompuServe continues to be good, reliable service with exceptionally deep content. I like it because I can get getting all the information and E-mail I need in a short time. Depending on how much you use it, it’s a little more expensive than AOL.

And as I mentioned last time, dear readers, please give Communio’s writers some affirmation for their efforts. People who write here are putting themselves on the line in a real way, and many of them are looking for some reaction to their articles.

Along those lines, Frank Schiros mentioned that he is looking for interested people to contact him regarding his article on environmentalism and religion. He would like to start a discussion group. As one who has participated in past discussion groups coordinated by Frank, I highly recommend him to anyone who is interested.

Some other news about Communio, we are giving Peter Toomey an official title: Assistant Editor. Peter has been doing the job unheralded for many years now, working with the graphic design and backing me up with proof-reading and other input. Why give him the title now? Truth be told, it was because we felt it important for people to know who to call with a question about Communio if they can’t reach me.

Next issue, I hope to write a little bit about Communio itself, what it is, why it exists and what we dream of it becoming.

That would also be an appropriate time for someone else to review what the Community itself is about and put it in perspective of recommitment and our annual elections. Any volunteers?

Thanks to Frank, Fr. Tony, Chris Schenk and Joan Nuth for their items, to Richard Grace for his letter to St. Malachi’s from his Peace Corps post in Zambia, and to John Lucic for the disk full of reprinted items he gave me a couple of weeks back. They really came in handy this time.

God made the earth,

Declared it good, and called on us to care for it.

If today is a typical day on the planet, we will lose 116 square miles of rain forest or about an acre a second. We will lose another 72 square miles to encroaching deserts, the result of human mismanagement and overpopulation. We will lose countless numbers of species and the human population will increase by 250,000. Today we will add 2,700 tons of chlorofluorocarbons and 15,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Tonight the earth will be a little bit hotter, its waters a little more acidic and the fabric of life more threadbare. (From Earth in Mind, by David W. Orr.)

It is worth noting that this degradation is not the work of ignorant people. But rather it is largely the result of work by people with BAs, BSs, LLBs, MBAs and PhDs, who were not willing to accept the moral consequences of the outcome.

Religion has been slow to embrace environmentalism or consider its ties to spirituality. However Paul Gorman, director of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment believes we need to make a religious response to nature because it is germane to the idea that the world is not of humanity’s making, but God’s.

The National Partnership has provided strong moral arguments to the environmental debate and has succeeded in building what may be the broadest interfaith coalition working in the United States.

Rev. Joseph Parrish believes that the environmental movement has been too secular for too long and God must be connected with Earth. He says that Earth is not just a place we live; it is God’s creation and should be honored as such

I’m hoping that the issue of caring for creation enters the hearts of members of St. Malachi’s and that joining together and helping to integrate stewardship concerns into every area of religious life will resonate loudly and clearly in our lives. I’m hoping that a faith group of members from the Community can be formed to disseminate and distribute information and materials throughout the diocese. The National Partnership, of which the U.S. Catholic Conference is a member, will provide assistance.

I’d like to ask anyone interested in forming such a group to please call or write me:

Frank Schiros

1516 Clarence Ave.

Lakewood, OH 44107

521-4195

Related reading: Two Economies by Wendell Berry and Last Gospel of the Earth by Tom Hayden.

"God who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which God loved us even when we were dead through our sins, made us alive together with Christ...for it is by grace you have been saved." (Ephesians)

Today’s first reading from the book of Chronicles summarizes about 450 years of Israeli history. Despite the prophets’ pleas to turn back to "doing the truth" of Yahweh, Israel would not turn back. The Kingdom had split into Judah in the south and Israel in the north. Israel fell in 721 B.C. after ignoring the prophecies of Amos, Hosea and Isaiah. Judah was conquered in 587 B.C. by the Chaldeans (Babylonians) after the prophecies of Zephaniah and Jeremiah were not heard.

The Chronicles reading is instructive because it tells us that God is able to work through those we regard as our enemies to both chastise us and to restore us. For though the Babylonians were the immediate cause of the destruction of Jerusalem and of the exile, it was also in Babylon that the Hebrew people came to a deeper understanding of Yahweh’s profound faithfulness. Even though they were exiled from the "Promised Land" (which heretofore they thought to be inviolably and eternally their own), it was in Babylon that Israel learned that God is always with them, even in exile. This was especially significant because to ancient societies, the divine -- God -- was thought to be particularly linked to the land. When you physically left your own land, it was thought that you left your God too. So, in Babylon, the Israelites learned how big their God is. God literally came to be with them in their exile, and then restored them to their own land in a remarkable way. It was through the agency of another "enemy," Cyrus of Persia, that God restored the Israelites to their homeland, even going so far as to provide for the rebuilding of their beloved Temple in Jerusalem.

There are several Lenten messages here I think. The first is that despite our willful and deliberate turning away from the truth God wants us to act upon and walk within, our God is a God of mercy. While we must necessarily suffer the consequences of preferring the darkness to the light of God’s truth, God’s grace is able to restore us, sometimes in very surprising ways. That which looks like disaster can really be the occasion of entering into a deeper understanding of the depth and breadth and wisdom of God’s love for us.

The second and very crucial message is that it is not by our own efforts that we come to salvation. God can make even those we regard as our enemies become the vehicle of a restored life for us, just as God used Cyrus of Persia for the Israelites. There is no limit to the ways God can lead us and love us. In this latter day however, God has shown us particularly, "the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus." (Ephesians)

I find these readings particularly consoling in this present time of pain and difficulty for so many women in Catholicism. It is hard to understand what we may have done to deserve the seeming rejection and lack of respect evidenced by recent Vatican pronouncements. These pronouncements say that Jesus deliberately chose to exclude us. Yet this was not the experience of women in the early Christian communities, nor is it the experience of Catholic women today.

Even more difficult to understand is the refusal of Vatican officials to meet or talk with Catholic women, or even biblical scholars and theologians, whether female and male, who have a different view. If this is not an experience of exile for Catholic women, (and any justice-loving Catholic) then I don’t know what is. Worse, it feels like an exile in which we are not the ones running from openness to a truth, but that it is our leaders who turn away.

Yet God is faithful, even and especially in our exile. Perhaps we may even come to some deeper understanding of the closeness of our God, just as our Israelite ancestors did. Surely if God can use a Cyrus of Persia to write straight with the crooked lines of Israel’s history, God can also find a way to restore Catholic women -- and our Catholic community as a whole -- to our full baptismal integrity.

My guess is that we must look to the saving mystery of Jesus to restore us and our Church to a new wholeness: "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life." A paradox of the Christian life is that we cannot really know who Jesus Christ is until we put our faith in him. And often, we don’t do that until we are in great need. The sickened Israelites looked at the healing serpent lifted up by Moses at God’s command for healing. So too must we look to God’s "free gift of grace" in Jesus Christ who was "lifted up" on the cross to heal us, our Church, and our world of all that ails us.

If God does not condemn us or our world even when we choose to "love darkness rather than the light," then neither must we condemn anyone. Rather, we must try to be "rich in mercy," even while being faithful to our truth, so that all things, even those most difficult for us to accept, y be restored in God’s own time and in God’s own way:

"It is God who loved us even when we were dead through our sins, and made us alive together with Christ... for it is by grace you have been saved."

Amazing grace has brought us safe thus far, and that same grace will lead us back from our exile to a new and more inclusive homeland.

Letters to the Editor

The Cleveland Plain Dealer

1801 Superior Ave.

Cleveland, OH 44114

Dear Mr. Brazaitis,

Your column "In what do you put your faith?" describes science and religion as opposed to one another, as the heading "Heated battles over public policy often find science dueling with God" describes. This reveals a fundamental, although all too common, misunderstanding of the relationship between science and religion.

A simple, but essentially accurate, description of the proper relationship between the two is found in the old adage: "Science tells us how the heavens go; religion tells us how to go to heaven." That is, science is basically descriptive and explanatory in nature; religion deals with ultimate questions and is value-centered. The role of Science is to investigate, discover, describe and explain the nature and workings of the universe and all that is within it. Religion deals with meaning and the ultimate questions of life: "Where did it all come from? Why does it exist? What does it all mean? Why am I here? How should I live? What should I do? What is the meaning and purpose of my life?"

Science and religion have their proper areas of competence. Within that area of competence, each has made great contributions to human understanding of reality and life. When either science or religion strays beyond its area of competence, problems arise. The infamous persecution of those who questioned the flatness of the earth or the position of the earth as the center of the solar system was a result of the mistaken belief that the Bible taught scientific as well as religious truth. Religion had gone outside its area of competence.

Describing public policy decisions as "science triumphing over religion" is misleading. Science can develop family planning methods from pills to devices to natural family planning (using observable, measurable changes in temperature and mucous which occur on a reasonably predictable basis to determine the fertile periods of a woman’s cycle). Science can determine the attendant risks of each method and the probabilities of those risks being realized in various circumstances. However, science cannot determine which, if any, natural family planning method(s) ought to be used. It cannot create the rationale to determine whether or not public funds should be appropriated in support of family planning education and/or distribution of materials. These are value questions, which belong to the realm of ethics/morality, i.e. religious thinking.

Similarly, science can demonstrate that, from the moment of fertilization, an embryo’s DNA is human and distinct from either parent’s. Science can also devise various methods for terminating the life of the embryo/fetus. However, evaluating whether it is proper to do so, and under what circumstances is an ethical/moral decision, not a scientific one.

Thus, the debate on whether or not to approve RU-486 ("the abortion pill") for use in the United States is a public policy issue which needs to be informed both by science (what the pill is and does, side effects and risks) and by religion (balancing the reality of a human embryo’s death against the personal rights and privacy of the mother, the moral/ethical implications of such a decision for an individual and for society). Both can, and should, inform the debate and serve as resources to those who will decide the issue.

To assert that the First Amendment (which does not contain the words "separation of church and state") "does nothing to protect the state from the influence of religion" seems to imply that the state could or should have such protection. To grant such "protection" would leave the state, the society, without the moral/ethical compass it needs if its choices are to be in accord with the values which have been fundamental to our civilization.

I disagree with Dr. James Williamson’s description of religion as "the antithesis of scientific thinking." Religious thinking in not the exact opposite ("antithesis") of scientific thinking. He is correct in stating that science is based on study of the physical world while religion is based on supernatural revelation. Science is rational in its thinking and demands reproducibility of experiments. However, much scientific "knowledge" is really scientific theory, i.e. the most convincing way to explain our current information -- in other words, a statement of "belief" about the way reality is. That is why, as Dr. Williamson points out, the "laws" of science and scientific "knowledge" continue to change as new discoveries are made.

Nor is religion "irrational," as Dr. Williamson claims. Religious teaching, within its own discipline, is logical and self-consistent. Cursory examination of the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas (to cite a classic text) reveals the product of enormous critical and rational thought. "Creationism" is held in disrepute by many religious people not because it is impossible (an almighty, all-knowing God certainly could create a universe according to the sequence described in the book of Genesis, complete with fossils, etc.) but because it is so unreasonable (why would a God who made creatures capable of reason, "created in God’s own image" deliberately choose to mislead those same creatures?). Rigorous study of a theological work could greatly enhance "the teaching of critical and rational thinking," just as studying an "unscientific" subject like poetry does.

To answer the question, "In what do you put your faith?" When the issue is information about the world -- science. When the issue is faith or values -- religion. The combination of both, each in its proper sphere, makes for one truth to live by.

Sincerely,

To St. Malachi’s,

Muli bwanji onse (hello to all)! I’m writing from the Eastern Province of Zambia where I am serving as an extension worker with the U.S. Peace Corps. I’m not exactly sure what the purpose of this letter is or why I felt the need to pick up a pen.

I just returned from two weeks of travel to a mailbox full of letters and notes from friends and family. As always, I feel very fortunate to have so many people thinking about me and providing so much support. So many of the letters and notes I get express appreciation and thanks for my presence here in Africa. I’m here, south of the Equator, because I feel like I have some energy to share. I think we all have something to share, but we all don’t have to cross continents, enter the third world, or move 9,000 miles from home to find someone to share it with. You don’t have to come as far as I have to find someone who needs help in helping themselves.

One of the interesting aspects of this experience has been the spectrum of reactions I’ve received from people regarding my decision to serve in the Peace Corps and to be here in Africa. I’ve heard everything from, "Are you mad?" (to use better terms) to "The world needs more people like you." I’m not mad, yet, and I certainly don’t think the world needs anymore like me. But what I do think is that we can use more of us helping one another. It’s been quite awhile since I sat in a pew, but I seem to remember one of the foundations of the Church, Catholic or otherwise, being to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. For me that has always been inclusive of helping others as you would have others help you.

Tsalani bwino. (go well.)

I am in the process of preparing a paper for the next meeting of the Catholic Theological Society of America. The topic is "Women’s Experience of the Eucharist." In my paper, I will be drawing some comparisons between the eucharistic experience of medieval women of the 12th to 14th centuries, when there occurred a great resurgence of eucharistic piety, and contemporary women.

I am asking the women of St. Malachi’s to help me with the contemporary part. I have prepared a survey designed to elicit from you a description of your own experience of the eucharist. If you would like to participate in this, you may pick up a copy of the survey at coffee hour on March 9, 16 or 23. You may fill out the survey on the spot, or take it home and return it to me either by way of St. Malachi’s (at coffee hour on March 16 or 23) or directly to me at the following address:

Dr. Joan M. Nuth

Religious Studies Dept.

John Carroll University

University Heights, OH 44118

Thanks for your help with this.

For every one year of peace in mankind’s history, there have been 14 years of war. And why its popularity? I believe the central reason is very straightforward: war, just like money, is a simple and easily accessible immortality symbol. Both war and money have been equally popular throughout history because neither requires much talent to gather or use. They are much, much easier to come by than are other immortality symbols, such as a pyramid or mummification. Both gold and war placed immortality prospects in the hands of the average citizen... For not only could you traffic for immortality in the marketplace, you could traffic for it on the battlefield. And historically, both have been the necessary glues for complex societies...

Aggression, in this sense, is property defense. Even in the animal world, aggression almost always occurs as a simple defense of territorial property. But man alone of all the animals has a property in his person, and thus a new form of aggression: man alone will lash out blindly to defend his egoic immortality status and "save face"... Each attachment, each property, whether internal as self or external as possessions, acts as a stick point or lesion in choiceless awareness that will fester with the stench of hostility. This lesion, this person/property defense... can fuel both oppression and repression, for one aggresses internally and externally to protect the person/property.

And mankind will never, but never, give up this type of murderous aggression, war, oppression and repression, attachment and exploitation, until men and women give up the property called personality. Until, that is, they awaken to the trans-personal. Until that time, guilt, murder, property, and persons will always remain synonymous...

"Christ died for your sins" means, "Christ died to his separate self so as to relieve you of yours." This, surely, is what Christ meant by "No man can be my disciple who hateth not his own soul" (Luke 14:26). As Blake put it, "I will go down to self annihilation and Eternal Death; Lest the Last Judgement come and find me unannihilate; and I be seiz’d and giv’n into the hands of my own selfhood."

1. Children are not pets.

2. The life they actually live and the life you perceive them to be living is not the same life.

3. Don’t take what your children do too personally.

4. Don’t keep scorecards on them -- a short memory is useful.

5. Dirt and mess are a breeding ground for well being.

6. Stay out of their rooms after puberty.

7. Stay out of their friendships and love life unless invited in.

8. Don’t worry that they never listen to you; worry that they are watching you.

9. Learn from them; they have much to teach you.

10. Love them long; let them go early.

THE COMMUNITY OF ST. MALACHI is a lay-directed, non-territorial personal parish of the Diocese of Cleveland. Although separate from the Parish of St. Malachi, we join together for many worthwhile activities. All are welcome to worship at the 11:00 a.m. Community liturgy on Sunday. Community members are expected to actively contribute of their time, talent and treasure.