Please remember our monthly prayer/meditation gathering on the fourth Saturday of each month at St. Joan of Arc Parish Center from 9-10:30 AM. Mary Eoloff will be facilitating this month and the meditation piece she selected is below.

The Body as Eucharist (word document)

Saturday, October 3rd
Minneapolis Eagles Club, 25th Ave and 25th St, Minneapolis
The event is free: family friendly, free parking, great music, hobnob with the other good-timers for peace and change.

Musicians Bret Hesla and Linda Breitag are hosting a free CD release concert. The CD, What We Do: Good-Time Songs For Peace And Change is a collection of twelve original songs. It’s a blend of progressive politics and acoustic folk. With great vocals, hot fiddle, driving guitar, these joyful and sometimes poignant songs are a snapshot of life & themes in the vibrant Minnesota peace culture (Lake Street Bridge vigil, Hennepin Ave Peace march, CSAs, Mother’s Day at Lake Harriet, consumerism overload, etc.)
 
These seasoned song leaders have led music at many gatherings of peace, social change and faith over the past 15 years. You can hear the tunes, and find more concert details, at www.breitaghesla.com. Or call 612-729-7304.
 
It’s a long journey: let’s build up our community.

Wednesday, September 30
Room 64, Biological Sciences on the St. Paul campus of the University of Minnesota.
1445 Gortner Avenue in St. Paul, see this link for map: http://www1.umn.edu/twincities/maps/BioSci/index.html
 
According to a recent report by the United Nations, lack of access to clean water poses a significant threat to the health of Iraqi children. In the province of Najaf, 100 miles south of Baghdad, a unique partnership has developed to help meet the challenge of providing clean water at schools, hospitals, and clinics. An Iraqi NGO, the Muslim Peacemaker Teams, has partnered with a Minnesota non-profit, the Iraqi and American Reconciliation Project, to install water filtration systems in important public sites in Najaf. This program will bring together a multi-disciplinary panel of speakers to discuss the impact of clean water on education, health, and other aspects of public life, and how a bilateral community organizing effort can mobilize citizens to impact community health issues.

The program is sponsored by the Iraqi and American Reconciliation Project, the Muslim Peacemaker Teams, and College of Education and Human Development and Office of International Programs at the University of Minnesota.

PC Twin Cities invites you to celebrate Arab Culture Night

Thursday, September 24
St. Joan of Arc Gym, 4537 3rd Ave. So. Minneapolis

More details on their visit can be found at the IARP website: http://www.reconciliationproject.org or Arab Night flier.

In celebration of the newly official Sister City relationship between Najaf, Iraq and Minneapolis, USA, a festive Arab Night will be jointly hosted by the Iraqi and American Reconciliation Project and the Najaf delegation on Sept 24th, 2009 from 7pm-9pm. Arab Night will provide an opportunity for the delegates to share a taste of their city with the community through live music, food provided by Big Marina Grill and Deli, and a display of current joint projects between Minneapolis and Najaf, including water sanitation projects, art pieces and an opportunity for children to write to Iraqi kids. The public is invited to join us for an entertaining and friendship-building evening.

PC Twin Cities sponsored a water filter for a school in Najaf under the Water For Peace project. It is a great example of a local group working at a grassroots level towards reconciliation with Iraqis.

An Afternoon Reflection About Peace and Justice For Young Adults 

Sponsored by Pax Christi Minnesota and St. Kate’s Campus Ministry

WHEN: Sunday, September 27th, 2009

WHERE: St. Kate’s in the north sacristy behind the chapel.  This is at the College of St. Catherine and when you register you will be given directions if you need them.

HOW to register: call Chris at (507) 206-1347 or e-mail her at collage94601@yahoo.com with the information requested below.  The event is FREE.  Limited to 20 participants.

WHAT: Kairos is a day of reflection aimed at deepening Christian discipleship, discerning the signs of the times, and building a united Catholic student-young adult movement for peace and justice. Kairos is an ancient Greek word meaning the right or opportune moment.

Each day of reflection will include a keynote speaker or facilitator who will provide some context – theologically and politically – for the group to reflect on and discern courses of action for themselves individually and as communities.  During the afternoon, participants will have time to network and share their experiences in campus and faith-based organizing and their work on specific issues.

There will be opportunities for participants to hold caucuses or “roundtables” around specific themes, issues, concerns, etc. Individuals and groups are encouraged to bring any resources or information they would like to share with others. The day of reflection weaves together time for prayer and reflection, study and discussion, organizing and action.

Schedule
1:30 Check in and light refreshments
2:00 Welcome and opening prayer
2:15 Introductions and icebreaker
2:30 Keynote
4:00 Break
4:15 Scripture study and sharing
5:15 Pax Christi plug and planning
5:30 Closing prayer and end with pizza (there will be veggie pizza too)- continue networking

TO REGISTER: e-mail Chris Curran at collage94601@yahoo.com with KAIROS in the subject line:

Name:
Phone number:
E-mail address:
Home address:

PC Twin Cities invites you to join them for their upcoming Meditation and Prayer Gathering.

Saturday, August 22
St. Joan of Arc Parish Center, 4537 3rd Ave. So. Minneapolis

These gatherings are open and welcoming to all who wish to join for reflection and prayer.  If you would like to volunteer to facilitate one of their upcoming monthly prayer/meditation gatherings, please let PC Twin Cities know and they would be happy to add you to their schedule.

Corinne Moncada will be the faciliator and attached is her reflection piece.

Also, please remember that there will be no gathering in September – instead please consider attending the Pax Christi MN State Assembly, Choosing the Non-Violent Way of Compassion, on Saturday, Sept. 26th at St. Frances Cabrini Church with keynote speaker Father Michael Crosby.

Creative Silence by Thomas Merton, OCSO

The following piece was originally published in The Baptist Student, the student newspaper of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky (vol. 48, no. 5, February 1969).

Imagine a man or a group of people who, alone or together in a quiet place where no radio, no background music can be heard, simply sit for an hour and a half in silence. They do not speak. They do not pray aloud. They do not have books or papers in their hands. They are not reading or writing. They are not busy with anything. They simply enter into themselves, not in order to think in an analytical way, not in order to examine, organize, plan, but simply in order to be. They want to synthesize, to integrate themselves, to rediscover themselves in a unity of thought, will, understanding, and love that go beyond words, beyond analysis, even beyond conscious thought. They want to pray not with their lips but with their silent hearts and, beyond that, with the very ground of their being.

What would prompt modern people to do such a thing?

Are they moved only by a sense of human need for silence, for reflection, for inner seeking? Do they merely want to get away from the noise and tension of modern life, at least for a little while, in order to relax their minds and wills, and seek a blessed healing sense of inner unity, reconciliation, integration?

These are certainly good enough motives. But for a Christian there are even deeper motives than this. A Christian can realize himself called by God to periods of silence, reflection, meditation, and “listening.” We are perhaps too talkative, too activistic, in our conception of the Christian life. Our service of God and of the church does not consist only in talking and doing. It can also consist in periods of silence, listening, waiting. Perhaps it is very important in our era of violence and unrest, to rediscover meditation, quiet inner unitive prayer  and creative Christian silence.

Silence has many dimensions. It can be a regression and an escape, a loss of self, or it can be presence, awareness, unification, self-discovery. Negative silence blurs and confuses our identity and we lapse into daydreams or diffuse anxieties. Positive silence pulls us together and makes us realize who we are, who we might be, and the distance between these two. Hence, positive silence implies a disciplined choice, and what Paul Tillich called the “courage to be.” In the long run, the discipline of creative silence demands a certain kind of faith. For when we come face to face with ourselves in the lonely ground of our own being, we confront many questions about the value of our existence, the reality of our commitments, the authenticity of our everyday lives.

When we are constantly in movement, always busy meeting the demands of our social role, passively carried along on the stream of talk in which people mill around from morning to night, we are perhaps able to escape from our deeper self and from the questions it poses. We can be more or less content with the external identity, the social self, which is produced by our interaction with others in the wheeling and dealing of everyday life. But no matter how honest and open we may be in our relations with others, this social self does imply a necessary element of artifice. It is always to some extent a mask. It has to be.

Even the American taste for frankness, homely simplicity, affability, plainness, and humor is often a front. Some people are naturally that way. Others educate themselves to play this part in order to be accepted by society. Nor is it entirely pretense: it appeals to us. But do we ever give ourselves a chance to realize that this talkative, smiling, perhaps rough-and-ready personage that we seem to be, is not necessarily our real self? Do we ever give ourselves a chance to recognize something deeper? Can we face the fact that we are perhaps not interested in all this talk and business? When we are quiet, not just for a few minutes, but for an hour or several hours, we may become uneasily aware of the presence within us of a disturbing stranger, the self that is both “I” and someone else. The self that is not entirely welcome in his own house because he is so different from the everyday character that we have constructed out of our dealings with others‹and our infidelities to ourselves.

There is a silent self within us whose presence is disturbing precisely because it is so silent: it can’t be spoken. It has to remain silent. To articulate it, to verbalize it, is to tamper with it and in some ways to destroy it.

Now let us frankly face the fact that our culture is one which is geared in many ways to help us evade any need to face this inner, silent self. We live in a state of constant semi-attention to the sound of voices, music, traffic, or the generalized noise of what goes on all the time around us. This keeps us immersed in a flood of racket and words, a diffuse medium in which our consciousness is half-diluted: we are not quite “thinking,” not entirely responding, but we are more or less “there.” We are not fully present and not entirely absent; not fully withdrawn yet not completely available. It cannot be said that we are really participating in anything, and we may, in fact, be half conscious of our alienation and resentment. Yet, we derive a certain comfort from the vague sense that we are “part” of something, although we are not quite able to define what that something is-and probably wouldn’t want to define it even if we could. We just float along in the general noise. Resigned and indifferent, we share semiconsciously in the mindless mind of Muzak and radio commercial which pass for “reality.”

Of course, this is not enough to keep us completely forgetful of the other unwelcome self that remains so largely unconscious. The disquieting presence of our deep self keeps forcing its way almost to the surface of awareness. To exorcise this presence we need a more definite stimulation, a distraction, a drink, a drug, a gimmick, a game, a routine of acting out our sense of alienation and trouble. Then it goes away for the time being and we forget who we are.

All of this can be described as “noise,” as commotion and jamming which drown out the deep, secret, and insistent demand of the inner self.

With this inner self we have to come to terms in silence. That is the reason for choosing silence. In silence we face and admit that gap between the depths of our being, which we consistently ignore, and the surface which is so often untrue to our own reality. We recognize the need to be at home with ourselves in order that we may go out to meet others, not just with the mask of affability, but with real commitment and authentic love.

If we are afraid of being alone, afraid of silence, it is perhaps because of our secret despair of inner reconciliation. If there is no hope of being at peace with ourselves in our own personal loneliness and silence, we will never be able to face ourselves at all: we will keep running and never stop. And this flight from the self is, as the Swiss philosopher Max Picard pointed out, a “flight from God.” After all, it is in the depths of the conscience that God speaks, and if we refuse to open up inside and look into these depths, we also refuse to confront the invisible God who is present within us. This refusal is a partial admission that we do not want God to be God any more than we want ourselves to be our true selves.

Just as we have a superficial, external mask which we put together with words and actions that do not fully represent all that is in us, so even believers deal with a God who is made up of words, feelings, reassuring slogans, and this is less the God of faith than the product of religious and social routines. Such a “god” can come to substitute for the truth of the invisible God of faith, and though this comforting image may seem real to us, his is really a kind of idol. His chief function is to protect us against a deep encounter with our true inner self and with the true God.

Silence is therefore important even in the life of faith and in our deepest encounter with God. We cannot always be talking, praying in words, cajoling, reasoning, verbalizing, or keeping up a kind of devout background music. Much of our well-meant interior religious dialogue is, in fact, a smoke screen and an evasion. Much of it is simply self-reassurance, and in the end it is little better than a form of self-justification. Instead of really meeting God in the nakedness of faith in which our inmost being is laid bare before him, we act out an inner ritual that has no function but to allay anxiety.

The purest faith has to be tested by silence in which we listen for the unexpected, in which we are open to what we do not yet know, and in which we slowly and gradually prepare for the day when we will reach out to a new level of being with God. True hope is tested by silence in which we have to wait on the Lord in the obedience of unquestioning faith. Isaiah recorded the word of Yahweh to his rebellious people who were always abandoning him in order to enter into worthless political and military alliances. “Your safety lies in ceasing to make leagues, your strength is in quiet faith” (Isa. 30:15). Or as another translation has it, “Your salvation lies in conversion and tranquility, your strength in complete trust.” Older texts say, “In silence and hope shall your strength be.” The idea is that faith demands the silencing of questionable deals and strategies. Faith demands the integrity of inner trust which produces wholeness, unity, peace, genuine security. Here we see the creative power and fruitfulness of silence. Not only does silence give us a chance to understand ourselves better, to get a truer and more balanced perspective of our own lives in relations to the lives of others: silence makes us whole if we let it. Silence helps draw together the scattered and dissipated energies of a fragmented existence. It helps us to concentrate on a purpose that really corresponds not only to the deepest needs of our own being but also to God’s intentions for us.

This is a really important point. When we live superficially, when we are always outside ourselves, never quite “with” ourselves, always divided and pulled in many directions by conflicting plans and projects, we find ourselves doing many things that we do not really want to do, saying things we do not really mean, needing things we do not really need, exhausting ourselves for what we secretly realize to be worthless and with out meaning in our lives: “Why spend your money on what is not food and your earnings on what never satisfies?” (Isa. 55:2)

The psychologist Erich Fromm has pointed out that this inner contradiction derived from the alienation and frustration in American life is one of the roots of violence in our society. We are at odds with ourselves, and we seek release by fantasies and dramas of violence. These are simply an amplification of the inner noise and resentment which fill us when we continually ignore the demands of our inmost real self and of God within us.

In many religions, the practice of silent meditation has always been given great importance. This is particularly true of Hinduism and Buddhism, where the art of meditation and the cultivation of inner silence are right at the heart of everything. But it is also true in Christianity. Catholic monasticism has always stressed the importance of silent meditation on the word of God. The Quakers have always attached great importance to a communal listening to the inner moving of the Spirit. Even Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the apostle of a radical and “secular” Christianity, remarked on the importance of silence. In his prison letters he wrote of his repugnance for the superficial gossip of the prisoners. And yet, they did not seem preoccupied about the deeper form of expression that would take place if they unburdened themselves to a trusted friend and spoke of what was most intimate in themselves.

What is much more serious is Bonhoeffer’s observation that the church itself engaged in too much empty talk. The church, in fighting to preserve and assert it position, seemed to him to make self-preservation an end in itself. The church talked more and more about itself and more and more for itself, less and less for the kingdom. He said the church had “thereby lost its chance to speak a word of reconciliation to mankind and the world at large.” Bonhoeffer foresaw that this would lead the church-all the churches-into a realm of silence, confusion, and apparent helplessness in which “traditional language must perforce become powerless and remain silent.” He wisely saw that the real purpose of this period of relative silence was a deepening of prayer, a return to the roots of our being, in order that out of silence, prayer, and hope we might once more receive from God new words and a new way of stating not our message, but His.

Choosing the Non-Violent Way of Compassion
Saturday, September 26, 2009
St. Frances Cabrini Church, Minneapolis, MN

Keynote by Michael Crosby

Michael Crosby is a Capuchin Franciscan. He lives in community with other friars in a downtown Milwaukee parish that serves the urban poor, homeless and marginated.

Schedule of Events
9:00  Registration
9:30  Opening prayer and Welcome
10:00 Morning Keynote
11:45 Lunch
12:30 Pax Christi USA
1:00  First Afternoon Keynote
2:30  Break/Socializing
3:00  Second Afternoon Keynote
4:00  Closing prayer and Announcements

For more information and to register, please print out the Pax Christi MN 2009 State Assembly and mail in.

Co-sponsored by St. Frances Cabrini Justice and Peace Coalition.

PC Twin Cities invites you to join them for their upcoming Meditation and Prayer Gathering

Saturday, April 25
St. Joan of Arc Parish Center, 4537 3rd Ave. So. Minneapolis

These gatherings are open and welcoming to all who wish to join for reflection and prayer.  If you would like to volunteer to facilitate one of their upcoming monthly prayer/meditation gatherings, please let PC Twin Cities know and they would be happy to add you to their schedule.

Darlene White will facilitate and has provided the following reflection piece.

Leaning on God

We can grow through difficult times because of this power of your love at work in our lives. For we are certain of this: neither death nor life, no angel, no prince, nothing that exists, nothing still to come, not any power, no height or depth, nor any created thing, can come between us and your love which has been made visible in Jesus. We lean upon you and we offer you our thanks. AMEN. (adapted from Rom 8:35-39)

Forty Questions Our Lean-To God Asks
(You might take one question for each day of Lent.)

1. Will you believe that I love you without any reservations?
2. Will you trust me?
3. Will you let me be your strength?
4. Will you let go of your strong control?
5. Will you believe in your own giftedness?
6. Will you walk with insecurity for a while?
7. Will you believe that I am inviting you to greater wholeness?
8. Will you allow my grace to move within you?
9. Will you open up your heart?
10. Will you come to me in prayer so I can empower you?
11. Will you be vulnerable with me?
12. Will you look long at my love for you?
13. Will you place your hand in mine?
14. Will you give me your life?
15. Will you take me to the places in your heart where you hide out?
16. Will you drink of the living waters I bring to you?
17. Will you unburden your heart to me?
18. Will you take refuge in the shadow of my wings?
19. Will you talk with me about what is really difficult for you?
20. Will you thank me for always being there for you?
21. Will you recognize your own weak areas?
22. Will you take shelter in the home of my love?
23. Will you wait patiently for me to revive your spirit?
24. Will you say yes to the growth I offer you?
25. Will you be there for someone to lean on today?
26. Will you allow me to walk with you?
27. Will your spirit open up to my consolations?
28. Will you rest your weariness on me?
29. Will you give me your ache so I can heal you?
30. Will you bring me your anxieties and concerns?
31. Will you accept my compassion?
32. Will you share the strength I’ve given you with someone else?
33. Will you receive my love?
34. Will you taste the nourishment I have for you?
35. Will you be quiet enough for me to hear you?
36. Will you trust me to raise up the good things in you that have died?
37. Will you accept my mercy?
38. Will you listen closely as the story of my suffering is proclaimed?
39. Will you stand close to Calvary and learn from me?
40. Will you believe in the power of my resurrection?

April 20, 2009
University of St. Thomas, OEC Auditorium, St. Paul Campus

Presented by Dr. Anne Klejment, historian, and author of works on Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement, co-editor of American Catholic Pacifism: Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker, and recipient of the 1997 Pax Christi USA Book Award.

Co-sponsored by the Department of History, the Program in Justice and Peace Studies, and the Women’s Studies Program.

Free parking for this event in the H parking area (Cretin and Summit).

St. Michael’s Multipurpose Room
1600 South Marian Road (Entrance F)
Sioux Falls, S.D.

Bishop Tom Gumbleton, longtime national and international activist in the peace movement and founding bishop president of Pax Christi USA, will be the featured speaker at the fifth annual Growing Peace South Dakota Pax Christi conference.

Registration begins at 9:00 a.m. A freewill donation will be collected for the conference fees, and there will be a $7 charge for lunch. The event is open to the public and all those interested in peace and justice are encouraged to attend.

This annual conference is sponsored by the Presentation Sisters’ Social Justice Team and Pax Christi chapters including: Aberdeen, West River, and Southeastern South Dakota and Estherville, Iowa.

For more information, please contact:

Growing Peace Conference Info