{"id":428,"date":"2008-02-14T09:23:40","date_gmt":"2008-02-14T09:23:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2008\/02\/varia-to-get-myself-going.html"},"modified":"2008-02-14T09:23:40","modified_gmt":"2008-02-14T09:23:40","slug":"varia-to-get-myself-going","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/02\/varia-to-get-myself-going.html","title":{"rendered":"Varia, to get myself going"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ll just highlight some recent reads of interest, then perhaps something will inspire me <\/em>to write something of interest:
\nIn San Diego: Garden of Innocence – providing dignified burials for abandoned children who have died. <\/a>\u00a0(via Fr. Stephanos<\/a>)
\nThis family is adopting a baby from Liberia who’s got serious (but very treatable) problems<\/a>. Go read their story and see if you can donate to help them expedite the process.
\nJust a few of the many groups helping children around the world that always need your <\/em>help: Grace and Hope for Children<\/a>\u00a0; Half the Sky<\/a>\u00a0; Blood: watermission<\/a>. Just a few. Some more. <\/a>Just a very few. How many more are there? How much stuff do you and I really <\/em>need?<\/p>\n

\n

Elsewhere:The new document regulating the promotion of saints’ causes will be released on Monday.\u00a0 Good.<\/a><\/p>\n

Cardinal Saraiva Martins, told the Italian ANSA news agency that the document aims to guide bishops “in the new spirit introduced by Benedict XVI.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“Everything is on Fire” – an article\u00a0 in Books and Culture <\/em><\/a>by John Buescher, who journeyed from cradle Catholic to Buddhist back to Catholicism
\nFr. Edward Oakes, SJ, with great stuff on Newman and conversion <\/a>at First Things<\/em>
\nAnd…you know what? There’s so much more, and I’ve been following it all with various degrees of puzzlement and astonishment, from Rowan Williams, to Barack Obama and beyond…but sincere there’s a lot of good commentary out there already, no reason for me to add to the din. At this moment, anyway.
\nFinally, most of you know that Pope Benedict has done several Q & A sessions with various groups over the past three years, the most recent of which was last week, with the clergy of Rome. Zenit is slowly putting the transcript up, in sections:
\nPart 1<\/a>
\nPart 2<\/a>
\nPart 3<\/a><\/p>\n

Another step is how to find God, how to choose God. Here we arrive to the Gospel: God is not a stranger, a hypothesis of the first cause of the cosmos. God has flesh and bones. He is one of us. We know him with his face, with his name. It is Jesus Christ who speaks to us in the Gospel. He is man and he is God. And being God, he chose man to make it possible for us to choose God. Thus it is necessary to enter into knowledge of and afterward friendship with Jesus, to walk with him.
\nI consider this the fundamental point of our pastoral care for youth, for everyone, but above all for youth: Call their attention to the choice of God, who is life. To the fact that God exists. And he exists in a very concrete way. And teach them friendship with Jesus Christ.
\nThere is also a third step. This friendship with Jesus is not a friendship with a person who isn’t real, with someone who belongs to the past, or is far from man at the right hand of God. He is present in his body, which continues to be a body of flesh and bones: It is the Church, the communion of the Church. We should construct and make communities that are more accessible and reflect the great community of the living Church. It is everything: the living experience of the community, with all of its human weaknesses, but nevertheless real, with a clear path and a solid sacramental life in which we can also touch what can seem so far away — the presence of the Lord. In this way, we can also learn the commandments — to return to Deuteronomy, from where I began. Because the reading says: To choose God means to choose according to his Word, to live according to his Word. For a moment this seems almost positivist: They are imperatives. But first is the gift — his friendship. Later we can understand that the indicators of the path are explanations of the reality of this friendship of ours.
\nWe can say that this is a general overview, which flows out of contact with sacred Scripture and the life of the Church each day. Afterward it is translated step by step in the concrete encounters with youth: To guide them in their dialogue with Jesus in prayer, in the reading of sacred Scripture — reading in common, above all, but also personal — and sacramental life. These are all steps to make these experiences present in the professional life, even though this realm is frequently marked by the total absence of God and by the apparent impossibility of seeing him present. But precisely then, through our life and our experience of God, we should try to make the presence of Christ enter into this world far from God.
\nThirst for God exists. A short time ago, I received the “ad limina” visit of bishops from a country in which more than 50% are declared atheists or agnostics. But they told me, in reality all of them are thirsting for God. This thirst exists, though hidden. Because of this, let’s start beforehand, with the youth we can find. Let’s form communities in which the Church is reflected; let’s learn friendship with Jesus. And in this way, full of this joy and this experience, we can also today make God present in this world of ours.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Coincidentally, just this past week, OSV released a collection of the Pope’s Q & A’s up to this point. It’s a hardcover book,<\/a> very nice, with translation assistance and helpful notes from Fr. John Zuhlsdorf. <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ll just highlight some recent reads of interest, then perhaps something will inspire me to write something of interest: In San Diego: Garden of Innocence – providing dignified burials for abandoned children who have died. \u00a0(via Fr. Stephanos) This family is adopting a baby from Liberia who’s got serious (but very treatable) problems. Go read…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nVaria, to get myself going - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/02\/varia-to-get-myself-going.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Varia, to get myself going - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I’ll just highlight some recent reads of interest, then perhaps something will inspire me to write something of interest: In San Diego: Garden of Innocence – providing dignified burials for abandoned children who have died. \u00a0(via Fr. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=428"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}