Thursday 24
May
Session One
11.30-1.00 pm
Austin
Cooper on Dorothy L. Sayers
Wit, Work
and Wisdom
Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957) was education
at home and for a short time at the Godolphin School in Salisbury followed by
Somerville College Oxford, studying Modern and Classical Languages. Dorothy
worked all her life: first for an advertising agency then as the successful
author of detective novels. The invitation to write a play for the Canterbury
Festival resulted in, Zeal for Thy House.
Now her skill with words involved re-stating the Christian tradition, what C.S.
Lewis called ‘Mere Christianity’. This first religious work displays Sayers at
her best, treating the ‘drama’ of sin and redemption. The closing speech of the
play leads to what is her greatest theological The Mind of the Maker (on the Trinity): the great reality in which
we live, move and have our existence. Her later writings were greatly enriched
by her study of the medieval Italian poet Dante, whom she first read to while
away the hours of a wartime air raid. Her clear grasp of the great truths of
the faith, her skill in presenting apparently ‘dull dogmas’ in clear and
sparkling prose, leave us with a legacy of Christian wisdom which can still
speak to the contemporary world.
Hugh Brown
on Henri Nouwen
Henri Nouwen
: From Wounded Healer to the Inner Voice of Love
The
presentation will look at some of the profound insights that Henri Nouwen made
to contemporary spirituality. From his beginnings as a trained psychologist to
his early death, Henri was always in search of meaning, a quest that brought
him face to face with his own struggles. He moved from the position of being a
psychologist delving into spiritual matters, to a person whose life long quest
for God brought him peace and a profound sense of purpose. His peripatetic
journey and his marvellous insights had a profound effect on the spiritual
journey of those who lived through the excitement and then perhaps
disillusionment that followed the Second Vatican Council. His early death
finally led him to the God that his restless spirit yearned for.
Session Two
2.30-4.00 pm
Graeme Garrett
and Jan Morgan on the Earth
‘To
exist is to be outside’: Earth as spiritual guide
The
contemporary French philosopher, Jean-Louis Chrétien, makes this observation
about the life of faith. ‘We cannot tear ourselves away from the world to offer
ourselves to God.’ This is a challenging statement. To try to offer ourselves
to God without bringing with that offering, the world – the world of birds and
trees, of morning light and evening darkness, of sea and sand, of sky and
cloud, of grassland and desert, of ant and lizard – to try to offer the one,
ourselves, without the other, the Earth – is to pull apart what belongs
inextricably together. The world is where God has placed us. The world is God’s
domestic artistry and architecture. In the time of the Anthropocene, when this
world is under severe threat from human economic activity, the moment has come
when, if we wish to hear the voice of the Creator, we must pay attention to the
Earth herself as a primary spiritual guide.
Anne Elvey
on Paul Celan
‘To stand in
the shadow / of the scar’: engaging with Paul Celan’s apophatic poetry
In
Seamus Heaney’s Station Island, a confessor says to the poet ‘read poems as
prayers’. In this presentation, I propose to read a small selection of poems by
Paul Celan as ‘prayers’. Michael Hamburger, one of Celan’s English translators,
points to the poet’s attentiveness to situation and world as itself a kind of
prayer. For Hamburger, moreover, Celan’s poetry expresses a negative (or
apophatic) theology. Born in 1920 into a Jewish family in Romania, Celan lost
his parents in the Shoah, though he escaped arrest himself. His poetry since
has stood ‘in the shadow’ of the Holocaust. Writing in German, he developed a
poetic language to express the inexpressible. This presentation will explore
his poetry, with references to examples such as ‘Corona’, ‘Assisi’, ‘Tenebrae’,
‘All Souls’, ‘The Straitening/Stretto’, ‘There was earth inside them’, ‘Psalm’,
‘Tabernacle Window’, ‘To Stand’, and ‘Once’. That there is reference to
religious motifs in many of these works and their titles suggests a resonance
between their being poems and their possibility as spiritual reading. In
Celan’s work, the aftermath of unthinkable horror becomes the space for address
to an unknowable, perhaps absent, other/Other.
Session
Three 4.30-6.00 pm
Robyn
Reynolds on Ivone Gebara
Ivone Gebara-- A Prophetic Voice – and Life!
Ivone Gebara is a Catholic nun and a
pioneering Latin American feminist liberation theologian. Her life and writings
are seen to be prophetic and challenging, grounded as they are in the concerns
of the poor and marginalized in Gebara’s own context, alongside her engagement
and dialogue with global realities.
Ivone Gebara’s own search for liberation,
and for the liberation of others, shapes her understanding and articulation of
a fresh and inclusive vision for theology and for social justice. Her life as a
religious sister, as a theologian, as spiritual counsellor, teacher, writer,
preacher... defies the traditional theological anthropology which still
struggles to recognize that women, the poor, ones on the margins of society,
(and not only those seen to be ‘privileged’, respectable and powerful) may
truly reveal and represent God’s presence and grace in our world.
Ruth
Harrison on Raimon Panikkar
Panikkar’s Mystical
Vision of Reality
Raimon
Panikkar was attracted to mystical experience at an early age, and throughout
his life, this influenced his work as a philosopher, theologian and cultural
historian. His Catalan-Catholic and Indian-Hindu heritages enabled him to
engage in both Eastern and Western perspectives, not only of mystical theology
and praxis, but also of the global challenges of the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries. The question being asked in this presentation is, what can we learn
from him in our quest to live authentically as Christians and contemplatives in
the world of today?
Session Four
7.30-9.30 pm
Michael
McGirr on Flannery O’Connor
A good God is hard to find: the long reach of Flannery O’Connor’s short
fiction
In her short life, Flannery O’Connor
(1925-64), did not suffer fools. This is part of the reason why her humour is
so astringent. It is hard to get through her stories without laughing
uncomfortably. She wrote slowly and thought long and hard about her craft. Her
fiction was an expression of a profound and unsettling relationship with God;
she read Thomas Aquinas every night to get to sleep. O’Connor lived most of her
life in Georgia and draws on the broken world of the American south. This talk
will focus mainly on the stories in the only collection published during her
lifetime, A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955).
Carol
O’Connor on John O’Donohue
John
O’Donohue was a mystic with feet grounded in a limestone valley. For him faith
meant our being encircled by the fire of love between God, Son and Spirit. The
more you read his work, or go back to the poetry or stories, you seem to learn
something anew about this relationship. His works continue to draw my own
vision outwards with a sense that the generosity of God’s love is tireless and
ongoing. Since my first encounter with the work of John O’Donohue in the 1990s
I’ve always resonated with a sense of something very ‘elemental’ in his work:
his spiritual wisdom is founded on an understanding of life that is premised on
the concrete, visceral, our very makeup. Tonight we shall explore his life and
his work via this theme of the elements: of earth, water, air and fire
which ripple through his works.
Friday 25
May
Session Five
9.30-11.00 am
Glenn
Loughrey on Thomas Merton
Merton, Zen and the 'Every There, Then' of the Dreaming
For
Merton there was no separation between the past, the present and the future; it
was all now. It was how you lived your life now in relation to those you shared
the world with that mattered. Wisdom was timeless and intersects all of time at
the same time. Everything was Zen and Wisdom, and there was no thing that stood
alone or remained outside of time. Zen was the essential essence or truth of
all things. For Aboriginal spirituality the dreaming is not a far off place
disconnected from the now. The Dreaming is the every, then of all that exists;
or more accurately it is the experience of all that has, does and will exist
right here, now. This paper will look at Merton’s thought, his understanding of
Zen and the interaction with the Aboriginal concept of the Dreaming to provide
a stepping off point for engagement with Aboriginal understanding of time.
John Dupuche
on Henri Le Saux (aka Abhishiktananda)
Dom Henri Le Saux OSB (1910-1973) aka Abhishiktananda :
“Bringing
the new and the old from the storehouse” of the Church. (Mt 13:51)
In
1950, Dom Henri Le Saux OSB (1910-1973) founded an ashram in India together
with Rev. Jules Monchanin. He took on the name Abhishiktananda (‘Christ’s
bliss’). His encounter with India amazed him, especially his meeting with the
great Rāmana Mahāṛṣi. He was ‘blown over’ when he saw the sacredness of the
Hindu tradition, especially the Vedānta of the Upanishads. This created a spiritual
crisis in him that proved to be very fruitful. He set on the path to exploring
the spirituality of India and its connection with his own Christian faith. This
gave rise to several books that have attracted immense and on-going interest.
Even his diaries are pored over. Fr
John will present a selection of texts from his writings that show the richness
of his thought. John will also explain how this meeting of religions can lead
to discovering new depths in one’s own tradition.
Session Six
11.30-1.00 pm
Susan
Frykberg on Cynthia Bourgeault
Susan's
presentation will give an overview of the content of most of Cynthia Bourgeault's books before
focussing on two particular aspects of her thinking - The Wisdom Jesus and
Centering Prayer. It will end with a short liturgy from 'The Meaning of Mary
Magdalene'.
Chris Morris
on Bruno Barnhart
Bruno Barnhart’s Fontal Wisdom
Bruno Barnhart
(1931 – 2015) lived the monastic life throughout the tumult of the of the
twentieth century and came to believe it as a time of the rebirth of Christian
wisdom. From its very beginnings Christianity was expressed in a wisdom milieu,
however it then went into eclipse for many centuries. Our time calls for a “new
wisdom” encompassing the movement of history and looking forward with global
paths. This session will explore its unique character as fontal wisdom
- a discovery of “a wellspring of life flowing from unseen depths and
flowing forth to others.”
Session
Seven 2.30-4.00 pm
Philip
Harvey on Ruth Burrows
Sister
Rachel and the Modern World
Ruth Burrows is a Carmelite nun living in
Norfolk in England. She is 94 years old. This makes her modern, but modern in
what sense? Ruth Burrows herself uses the word ‘modern’ in different senses in
her own writing and it is these differences that are the starting points for
this exploration of her life, her spirituality, and her understanding of time,
place, and people. The paper will be heavily punctuated with her own words.
Saturday 26
May
Retreat with
Paul Beirne
No comments:
Post a Comment