First published in 'NZ Catholic' in my column 'Sweet Garden', June 30

On a frosty morning recently, parked in my car with the motor running to keep the heater on while changing my jacket, and still in drive mode with the brake off, I goofed, bigtime. My right foot inadvertently hit the accelerator. Hard. And I drove my Honda Jazz Sports up the church steps.

I exaggerate, of course - hyperbole was ever my long suit. I drove up one step. My reaction was to reverse smartly, switch off the engine and bury my face in my hands.

‘Im indoors, who for once was outdoors, round the corner watching our grandson the mighty Quin play soccer, surveyed the crumpled front fender and the sinister pool beneath, and kissed me.

My friend the sacristan cried, ’Aha! ‘Old Lady Drives Into Shop’!’

Our dear P P, emerging from the presbytery, said fervently, ‘How embarrassing!’

Hmmm. I felt for ‘im indoors, who’d be sharing his car with his high-risk wife and shelling out once more to the panelbeaters, and for my pious poodle who’d be missing daily Mass, or rather the church carpark, for however long it took; ‘im indoors doesn’t believe in dogs in cars. But I wasn’t embarrassed. Why not?

For one thing, I’ve had lots of practice at being humiliated - by playing the organ at Mass for example, rather badly. Humiliations willingly accepted are a necessary evil, revealing our true selves as devoid of any good not given by God, and dependent on him for everything except the lamentable inclination to sin. The other reason I can poke fun at myself in this column or my blog, I believe, is the humbling effect of contemplation, and the key to that door is found in the practice of Christian Meditation.

In Christian Meditation, a prayer of silence, stillness and simplicity, the Spirit joins us to Christ’s prayer to the Father. The term ‘meditation’ linked with ‘mantra’ may invoke images of maharishis performing asanas in the dhoti, but was usurped by CM in the ‘60s presumably as a godly alternative to the transcendental variety glamorised by the Beatles. It’s hardly a come-on for people versed in the Catholic vernacular of deeper prayer, so when an inter-faith CM group started here I approached warily, hoping only to accompany anyone eager to join the search for ‘the pearl of great price’.

I discovered that CM’s founder, John Main OSB, didn’t differentiate between meditation (humanly produced, by thinking) and contemplation (which is divinely infused). But Main’s ‘mantra’ is a ‘prayer word’ originating with the Desert Fathers, being essentially what Teresa of Avila calls ‘one of the best ways of concentrating the mind’, leading to prayer of the heart, the grace of contemplation. And Main’s successor, Laurence Freeman OSB, says that progression is best accelerated by ‘little acts of kindness’ – a dumbed-down, modern equivalent of Teresa’s insistence on ‘intense practice of the virtues’.

Christian Meditation is a question of the chicken and the egg. It effects change, which effects deeper prayer.  It’s how we go to God.

You’d think that brevity - which, they say, is the soul of wit – would appeal to a newspaper editor but not always, it seems. With all the brouhaha about Mr Sensible, Peter Dunne, including a cogent summary of his abysmal voting on pro-life issues by Ken Orr in a letter to the Dompost which would seem to brand him instead as Mr Nonsensical or perhaps even Mr Insensible, I couldn’t resist the temptation to write the following, on June 12:

 

Dunne like a dinner.

 

Julia du Fresne

A Death Wish Granted and an Erstwhile Friend Turned Foe

Death wish granted (letter to Dompost, May 28): 

Nikki Turner of the Child Poverty Action Group (When a tax break penalises poorest children, May 28) aptly quotes Dame Anne Salmond as saying ‘a nation that does not care for its children has a death wish’.  With around 18,000 unwanted children dead by abortion every year, surely New Zealand has already been granted ours. 

Julia du Fresne

 

Amnesty International: my ertswhile friend, turned foe (letter to Dompost, May 30):

Here’s Amnesty International saying Papua New Guinea’s taken ‘one step forward in protecting women from violence’ but ‘several giant steps back’ by moving closer to the death penalty. But Amnesty now promotes both the death penalty and violence to women in the form of abortion. That’s why I resigned from AI: you can’t dance with a partner who think they’re taking a step forward, when actually they’re going backwards.

 

Julia du Fresne

Three letters to the Dompost in just over a week: how opinionated. Guess which one got printed? (A clue: ‘im indoors disapproved.) 

 May 15: 

Jim Hollis says ‘the Catholic Church discriminates against women who want to be priests’. Is Hollis a Catholic? If he is, let him protest to his bishop. If not, he could become a Catholic and then protest to his bishop. Or he could mind his own business.

Julia du Fresne 

 May 21:

Callous indifference to the continuing slaughter on our roads, as Steve Russell puts it (Points, May 21), is shame enough. But at least road deaths are unintentional. What about our callous indifference to the continuing slaughter in our hospitals of around 18000 preborn infants annually which is deliberately sought, bought and paid for by the taxpayer?

 

Julia du Fresne  

May 23:

Yvette Cooper, UK’s shadow home secretary, says that now Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Sweden, the Netherlands and Uruguay have legalised same-sex marriage, it’s time for England and Wales to follow. Maria Miller, the Tory equalities minister, tells MPs it’s time to ‘move on’. I’m reminded of a telling line from Eugene Ionesco’s play, Rhinoceros: ‘Just before he became a beast, his last human words were ‘we must move with the times’.

 

Julia du Fresne

 

 

DIVINE MERCY IS FOR EVERYONE (first published in 'NZ Catholic', May 5-18)

 

‘Divine Mercy,’ I heard someone say recently, ‘is rather esoteric.’

The speaker was attempting to explain why at a major inner-city church, at the cathedral and a large suburban church in the same city, there was no celebration of the Feast granted to the universal Church by Blessed John Paul II when he canonised Mary Faustina Kowalska. This Polish nun had, under obedience, recorded Christ’s repeated requests for what the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments calls ‘a perennial invitation to the Christian world to face, with confidence in divine benevolence, the difficulties and trials that mankind will experience in the years to come’.

Now, (I sound like those Tv reporters, usually female, who preface their remarks with a school-marmish, ‘Now …’) mention of the Congregation will cause many a Catholic lip to curl in disdain, and mention of private revelations of the St Faustina kind (except maybe Fatima or Lourdes) will evoke a similar reaction.

But Divine Mercy Sunday fell the day ‘im indoors and I returned from Easter in Melbourne. I saw our son’s acquisition of an apartment in St Kilda as an opportunity to enjoy active participation in the liturgy as opposed to the usual hyper-active, and the Triduum, in three different churches (I walked to a fourth for the Vigil) culminated at the cathedral with Archbishop Denis Hart, a fine baritone, singing the Mass, magnificent organ music and boy choristers. ‘Im indoors, who once sang treble, cried. I cried too.

Maybe that Mass refreshed my vision. Because when at Melbourne airport I noticed a man in a wheelchair, I was disturbed by the realisation that we’d seen koalas, kangaroos and kookaburras in the wild but no wheelchairs, anywhere. I don’t know where Melburnians put their disabled but my next thought was, in future they’ll be even less in evidence. Because in Victoria, abortion’s legal right up to full-term and the death peddlers are organising the same here.

On the flight back to New Zealand were several passengers who might have required two seats each, and next day in the streets and cafes it seemed overweight people were everywhere. Mostly they were women. Are they eating and drinking to fill the vacuum once occupied by their unborn child? With surviving children raised by parents obsessed with food and drink (look at the space that takes in our magazines) how will we pay for the diabetes, hypertension, strokes, heart attacks, cancer, gallstones, gout and arthritis we’re letting ourselves in for?

Look overseas, at the US where kids get mown down in their classrooms by misfits with machine guns, or as in a recent incident, stabbed by a fellow student with an appetite for human flesh. Abroad, America’s politicking inadvertently makes bedfellows of North Korea, led by a megolamaniac with a fetish for atomic weaponry, and Iran, whose strangely similar rhetoric talks up World War III.

‘Esoteric’ means ‘designed for an inner circle of advanced disciples’. But it would seem Divine Mercy is needed by everyone.

And another letter to the Dompost, sent in the first week of May:  

There’s a certain hideous logic in Tom Scott’s proposal that babies in the womb carry guns. After all, unborn babies are by far the most likely to be victims of violence. 

Julia du Fresne

Ineffably silly legislation (letter to the Dompost, April 22):  

So columnist Dave Armstrong’s disappointed that in the debate on same-sex marriage, the MPs who opposed it ‘failed to show up‘. I suggest the reason for their muted performance was deep depression, caused by the premonition that such ineffably silly legislation would succeed. We should be thankful they didn’t go out and hang themselves with a halter.

 

Julia du Fresne