Tag Archive for: The Vatican

CONFESSION…THERE’S AN APP FOR THAT

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I don’t know if you heard the news  today.  The Vatican has released an I-tunes application called Confession, for $1.99; it has been billed as “the perfect aid for every penitent”.  It lets you pick a commandment and list all your sins, keeping a running tally to bring into the confession booth with you.  Why couldn’t I have thought of that?

If you can’t find your particular transgression on the sin scroll,  no worries.  You are able to add you own specific misdeed, customize your very own naughty list.  In fact, the app walks the user through the sacrament of reconciliation (the more recent title for the sacrament of confession).

You can examine your conscience based on personalized factors such as age, sex, or marital status.

It’s actually quite brilliant.  In an age when the number of Catholics that actually go to confession on a regular basis has been steadily declining, this may very well be the fresh air that blows the cob webs out of the confessional.

While the Roman Catholic Church has been unapologetically slow in moving into other areas of mainstream modernity (women as religious leaders, married clergy, birth control, to name a few), it has decidedly embraced the toys of  technology and blessed the good works of social networking.

In 2007, the Vatican launched its own YouTube channel.  Two years later, it created a Facebook application that lets users send virtual postcards featuring the pontiff.

Pope Benedict XVI, in his World Communications Address on Jan. 24th, said it was not a sin to use social networking sites, “I invite young people above all to make good use of their presence in the digital world.”    While the pope sanctioned these new tools for salvation, he added, “It is important to remember that virtual contact cannot and must not take the place of direct human contact with people at every level of our lives.”

Words of wisdom to be sure.

Yet, with information flying at us, all clamoring for our attention, “Confession” is designed to keep the user mindful of one’s individual and personal Catholic faith journey.  For instance, for reviewing the 1st Commandment, “I am the Lord thy God, thou shall have no other Gods before me”, you are given a check list that includes these questions, “Do I not give God time every day in prayer?”, “Do I not seek to love Him with  my whole heart?”, “Have I been involved with superstitious practices or have I been involved with the occult?”, and “Do I not seek to surrender myself to God’s Word as taught by the Church?”

As a sinner myself, I know my own too human tendency to let myself off the hook, to not only forgive my trespasses, but simply just forget ’em. Perhaps daily prompts on an I-phone could get us one step closer to holiness?  Personally, I’m all for ways for us to engage in our faith journeys more fully and daily…and if these ways are fun and include colorful graphics, all the better.

And one more plus, it was  made in the US of A (Indiana to be exact…America’s heartland).  Gotta love it.

OIL ILLS HAVE NOT BEEN FOR THE PELICAN BRIEF

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This past week I was listening to a woman being interviewed on NPR.  She has been volunteering for some weeks now cleaning the thick oil off the pelicans in Louisiana.   Her voice faltered several times as she described the heartache of watching several of them die or struggle with wings to laden to lift.  I hear the weary gratitude when her scrubbing efforts with simple dish soap and water restore a number of these birds towards health.

The photos of oil slicked birds display in Technicolor detail what havoc we humans can wreak on the rest of the animal kingdom in our insatiable need for more. Even if you are the unusual “bird” who doesn’t get too emotional about animals or feel a kinship with nature, amongst the gazillion other lessons we can glean from this disaster, one is the absolute necessity to put our environment before the profits and desires of big business.

We are discovering the hard way that this paradigm of short term gain is actually putting the “people on Main Street” out of their small businesses and livelihoods that have been a family’s source of pride for generations.  We all have become accustomed to being an active consumer in a consumer society (myself included).  So, to a degree, we are all complicit in the continuing crisis.       

One of the sources of healing, that can change our thinking and shift the collective perspective is the wisdom of Celtic spirituality.  Theirs is a language that can guide us to a new or remembered perspective about the creatures (on land and sea) and the landscape we inhabit. As John O’Donohue relates in his book Anam Cara- A Book of Celtic Wisdom, we are the newcomers here: 

“The animals are more ancient than us.  They were here for millenia before humans surfaced on the earth…Animals live outside in the wind, in the waters, in the mountains, and in the clay… (They) know nothing of Freud, Jesus, Buddha, Wall Street, the Pentagon, or the Vatican.  They live the politics of human intention…The Celtic mind recognized the ancient belonging and knowing of the animal world.  The dignity, beauty, and wisdom of the animal world by any false hierarchy or human arrogance.”

Instead, Celtic spirituality was a reservoir of stories that told of the union between animals and humans.  These tales fastened us to the wild landscape, grounding ourselves as a part of the circle of life, not as apart.  

My friend Kim has a saying she often uses for when her deepest intuition guides her to make a difficult decision or leads her to a clear perspective.  She says, “I know it in my knowings.”  That’s what Celtic spirituality calls us to.  Not to heed the heated and divisive mob mentality, but to listen in stillness to a saner, less selfish approach. 

Instead of “drill baby drill”, what we have gotten is “spill baby spill”.  This too shall pass (with a heavy toll for years to come), but LET’S LEARN THE LESSON IT IS TRYING TO TEACH US.