Wednesday 31 December 2014

'AFFLUENT' PEOPLE AND POST-ABORTION SURVIVOR SYNDROME (Letter to DomPost, January 1 2015)

Thank you, Margaret Dunne (To the Point, December 31), for reminding us in connection with the ‘freeloaders’ attending the City Mission’s Christmas lunch, of Mother Teresa of Calcutta’s insight into the poverty of loneliness.  

Studies by practising child psychiatrist and psychologist Professor Philip Ney of Canada on the subject of sibling loss, especially loss of siblings by abortion, show effects similar to those displayed in survivors of the Holocaust. I suggest that with thousands of our unborn babies lost every year to their siblings by abortion, very many people who look and are ‘quite affluent’ are suffering post-abortion survivor syndrome with its symptoms of survivor guilt, deep-seated distrust of parents and loneliness.

Monday 22 December 2014

THE CHRISTMAS STORY IS ACTUALLY NOT TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE (Letter published in Dom Post, December 26)

If anything’s sadder than hating Christmas, it’s thinking life’s an insult to everyone’s good intentions, as Jane Bowron puts it (I wasn't going to have a bar of it, December 22).  

Because those who know that the Christmas story is actually not too good to be true also know that everything in life is ordered to their real advantage. 

Sunday 21 December 2014

OUR 'UNNERVING EMOTIONAL DISCONNECTION' (Letter to Dompost, Dec 20)

Sentencing a man for inflicting serious injuries on a 5 week-old boy (Father gets four years’ jail for severely injuring newborn, December 20), the judge remarked on his ‘unnerving emotional disconnection and inability to understand the seriousness of his actions’.  

Considering it would have been quite okay if fatal injuries had been inflicted on that baby only six weeks earlier by a certified consultant performing an abortion, it would seem fair to say the judge’s assessment fits not just this unfortunate father but our society as a whole.

Saturday 20 December 2014

CONTEMPLATIVE PRAYER'S FOR EVERYONE - A POODLE REFLECTS ON VATICAN II (Published in 'NZ Catholic' Dec 21)


Our local veterinarians, a serious vet service dealing with serious cattle and sheep, have a sign up saying ‘Anxiety – Is Your Cat a Silent Sufferer?’ My dog took offence. He said he was being discriminated against.

Poodles do talk, you know. The modern milieu, Bosy went on to say, is a maelstrom of noise, threat, conflict and change, to which the human response is distraction.

We add to the racket by wiring our heads for sound even when asleep, with Musak in the supermarket, buses and planes. We expose ourselves to conflict by watching the news and horror movies or merely reading the newspaper. We accelerate change by consuming far too much (look at the leviathans we used to call lorries, shifting our stuff) constantly moving house, holidaying overseas (and returning with viruses), by reshaping our bodies with surgery, weird diets and working out. Angst-ridden, we project our problems onto those around us, even our pets.

Imagine how much simpler life was in the third century. But Thomas Merton tells us  even then St Anthony, the father of monks, ‘believed that to let oneself drift along, passively accepting the tenets and values of what they knew as society, was purely and simply a disaster.’ To escape what Henri Nouwen terms ‘the seductive compulsions of the world’, St Anthony and his monks fled to solitude, silence and prayer. And so can we.

I know. That sounds appalling. Because we’re victimised by a world that demands we  ‘know stuff’, ‘buy stuff’, ‘go to things’, ‘support things’. But there’s another world, as close as our sighs, which showcases real treasure: the kingdom of God, advertised by Christ in parables which a cathedral newsletter I read earlier this year described as ‘baffling’.

Baffling, maybe, for the very reason that understanding is one of the treasures hidden in that kingdom entered by St Anthony and his monks, and which we too are called to enter through contemplative prayer, prayer of the heart where God dwells and Satan attacks.

‘We all have different spiritualities,’ someone said to me recently. But authentic spiritualities must encompass the sacrifice and detachment required by Christ in his Gospel and practised by all the saints, which can be achieved only when as Vatican II says, ‘action is subordinated to contemplation’. Vatican II prescribed contemplative prayer for everyone, without exception.

 It’s not rocket science. It’s not complicated. When Nouwen asked Mother (now Saint) Teresa what he needed to live his priestly vocation she said, ‘Spend one hour a day in adoration of your Lord, and never do anything you know to be wrong.’ If I were cheeky enough, I’d add that an hour a day will also show you what’s wrong and strengthen you not to do it.

And having unburdened himself of these reflections, Bosy the dog admonished Orlando the cat, who was sharpening his claws (anxiously?) on the curtains, went to his pozzie in ‘im indoors’ office, sat down and closed his eyes.

I tiptoed out and did the same.

 

 

 

 

Tuesday 16 December 2014

WHY THE AFFABLE MAN, JOHN KEY, STAYS TOP OF THE POPS (Letter to Dompost, December 15)

In connection with the appalling revelations of CIA torture, Jane Bowron (Street sinning, karma and why the US can't handle the truth, December 15) admits we’ve become ‘so used to letting the bad go by and no one owning it or saying it even exists’.
 
Yes. Think outrageous pay packets for public servants, think video beheadings, think dirty dairying, hungry children, axe murderers. Think old people in retirement homes, put away beyond the pale of ordinary society. 

This is why the affable man, John Key, stays top of the pops. While he’s still up there spinning and grinning, New Zealand can pretend everything in the garden’s rosy. We can moralise about the US and its barbaric torture practices but at least they’ve at last admitted it. Our self-delusion will come to an end only when we admit our own barbaric torture. Think abortion.

Wednesday 10 December 2014

TORTURE OF ABORTION IS A MORAL ABOMINATION TOO (Letter to the Dom Post, December 11)

‘Torture’, you thunder in your editorial, (Torture report damning for US, December 11) ‘is a moral abomination.’ It’s easy enough to pontificate when you know your readers will agree with you.

Surely sucking a sentient human being limb by limb up a cannula is torture, but because one in three women in this country have by now inflicted this brutal procedure on their own unborn children, the media euphemizes it as ‘the right to choose’.