A QUISLING'S DOUBTS ABOUT CHRISTIAN MEDITATION (First published in 'NZ Catholic', November 17)

Who am I, to question the prayer of the World Community for Christian Meditation, a global movement present in 100 countries? However, even if I’m seen as a quisling or turncoat, I have to say that as a lay Carmelite member of a Christian Meditation group I now have serious doubts about this method of prayer. ‘Im indoors says I’m in good company – Richard Dawkins’.

I joined CM to support people wanting deeper prayer, and for a while I was hooked. CM is ecumenical, simple, accessible; I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. Now I believe my initial graces flowed simply from a resolution to adopt CM’s twice-daily prayer routine: as Woody Allen has said, ‘showing up is half the work’. Then I began to think I was showing up at the wrong address.

I was discombobulated by CM’s claim to have retrieved from 4^th century obscurity a prayer practised by Carmelites for the past eight hundred years. Recorded talks by CM’s founder John Main and his successor Laurence Freeman told us week in, week out to ‘say your mantra’; it sounded like to get God’s attention that was all we had to do.

CM is Hindu in everything except intention, and abolishes all distinctions between styles and stages of silent prayer. You ‘say your mantra’ (an effectively meaningless word) until you can’t say it - when God supposedly intervenes, infusing contemplation - and recommence when you realise you’ve stopped. Never mind traditional prerequisities for receiving contemplation like conformity to God’s will, humility, service, generosit y, purification, penance, receptivity, solitude, determination; just ‘say your mantra’. Was this a prayer word, I wondered, or a god?

John Cassian, a disciple of the desert fathers, was ‘discovered’ by Main as the Christian authority he needed for the meditation he’d learned from a swami, but on becoming a monk had obediently abandoned. The prayer which Cassian (who incidentally is to be found, quoted, in the Divine Office) had learned from  one Abbot Isaac is ejaculatory, continuous prayer, not reserved to periods of meditation. Detachment (in essence, the conditions given above for contemplation) was essential for such prayer, which ‘we hand on only to a very small number of souls eager to know it’: a principle reiterated in The Cloud of Unknowing (oft-quoted by CM), by Doctors of the Church Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross.

But CM is taught to allcomers – thousands, maybe millions - in the pious belief that regardless of their spiritual state, the Holy Spirit fetches them there and sits them down to repeat a meaningless word while emptying their minds of everything, including Jesus Christ- who taught that ‘no one comes to the Father except through me’ (Jn 14,6). And astonishingly, should the Spirit offer them the blissful experience of God’s love, they ought to refuse it.  

To CM’s theory of ‘one size fits all’, we may cite contrary, incontrovertible evidence: ‘Strait is the way, and few are they who find it!’( Mt 8,14).

SEXUAL EXCITEMENT FOR FIVE YEAR OLDS; A BABY'S A PERSON WHEN IT'S WANTED; IT'S VERY BAD FOR YOU (Letters to Dom Post, Nov 2013)

SEXUAL EXCITEMENT FOR FIVE-YEAR OLDS 

If Chris Trotter thinks the Roast Busters’ victims (How have we raised sons such as these? Nov 8) at age 13 are ‘pitiably young’, what does he think of the drones of Planned Parenthood whose latest target, in ensuring ‘the right to explore nakedness and the body’, is toddlers and children up to age four? Who believe information around ‘sexual feelings (closeness, enjoyment, excitement)’ should be foisted on little ones just starting school, and ‘first sexual experience’ and ‘orgasm’ should be taught even before they make it to secondary?  

These apparently are the World Health Organisation’s Standards for Sexuality Education in Europe, published in 2010 with major input from Planned Parenthood, the international body of Family Planning – and maybe, coming soon to an intermediate school, a kindergarten or play group near you.  

Julia du Fresne

 

A BABY'S A PERSON WHEN IT'S WANTED

Poor Mr Plod. How can the police be expected to decide whether an unborn baby is a child (Unborn babies and the law, A3, Nov 2) which would mean killing it is breaking the law - or a foetus, which means it’s not? Here’s a rule of thumb: if the baby’s wanted, it’s a person and you can’t kill it; if the baby’s unwanted it’s a foetus and you can.

Julia du Fresne

IT’S VERY BAD FOR YOU 

Forgive me if I state the obvious, and contradict the good Dr Stephenson for stating in an otherwise excellent column (You’re never too old for sex, Oct 29) that ‘sex ... with a loved one can only be a good thing’. Maybe it’s no longer obvious to most of your readers, but Scripture states explicitly that it’s a good thing only if you’re married. Otherwise, it’s called fornication and it’s very bad for you.

 Julia du Fresne 

NEW ZEALAND ACQUIRES A BIG SISTER - First published in 'NZ Catholic' as GOVERNMENT POLICIES MUST NOT ADD TO ABUSE, September 22, 2013

 

NEW ZEALAND ACQUIRES A BIG SISTER

 

First published in NZ Catholic, September 22 2013 as

GOVERNMENT POLICIES MUST NOT ADD TO ABUSE

 

New Zealand seems to have acquired a Big Sister. In suggesting that, I’m not alluding to Paula Bennett’s size, merely noting a similarity of thought between the Minister for Social Development and the Orwellian character ‘Big Brother’, who ‘is watching you’.

With this sinister difference: while George Orwell’s ‘Big Brother’ is now universally recognised and loathed as a symbol of dystopian surveillance, Bennett’s plans for screening all government employees working with children, and possible instant dismissal for anyone even suspected of child abuse, are winning support.

Although the subject of legally killing up to 18,000 unborn children a year is proscribed by the media - who publish only the official statistics, because they have to - they feed on the abuse of born children as a kind of manna from hell. Gauging public sentiment by the headlines (and surely, genuinely dismayed themselves) politicians scent votes and jostle to get their snouts into the trough; the worst Labour’s Annette King could say was that the proposal had ‘fishhooks’.

But the presumption of innocence until guilt is proven is due to everyone. Ms Bennett will only aggravate the situation by denying that right to anyone working with children, or for that matter, to people frequenting parks and pools. How will she police this ridiculous measure, and who’ll pay for it? Taxpayers, who have better things to spend their money on.

You can’t stop child abuse with adult abuse; ‘charity’ that’s not based on justice is not charity. That’s why abortion, which denies our most basic right, is the root of cruelty to children, violence in the home and much more that’s evil in society. ‘The greatest destroyer of peace today,’ stated Blessed Teresa, ‘is abortion. If we can accept that a mother can kill her child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?’

The gangrene of legal abortion would only be worsened by this egregiously unjust and inadequate bandaid. As Pope Francis says, ‘violence begets violence’, therefore in New Zealand, children are battered to death, usually by that modern phenomenon, the cruel stepfather; in Syria, children are poisoned to death by a cruel tyrant.

My mother, who once stood on a chair - because she said, ‘they were all such big women’ - to berate feminists clamouring for abortion at the United Women’s Convention in the ‘70s would never accept that justice and the law are not synonymous. But if she were alive today, following the gay marriage legislation and anticipating this threat to freedom, I’m afraid she’d have to.

So what exactly is justice? Jesus’ statement, ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s’ (Mt 22,21), inspires this definition from St Thomas Aquinas: ‘Justice is the perpetual, constant will to give to everyone what is due to him.

Giving implies self-denial; self-denial connotes prayer. To return to Blessed Teresa: ‘If we pray, we will believe; if we believe, we will love; if we love, we will serve.’

Behold, justice. 

 NZ

MOST ABUSERS ARE FATHERS AND GRANDFATHERS (First published in 'NZ Catholic', October 20 2013 as AN EMOTIONAL PRO-LIFE CONFERENCE IN DUNEDIN:

 

 

Harrowing, heart-broken sobbing; sublime hymn-singing: these sounds, more than the presentations, defined last month’s Voice for Life conference in Dunedin.

Well, for me they did. Only two delegates heard the singing, in St Joseph’s cathedral late that Saturday night. One had decamped from the conference dinner to watch the footie, the other to call a taxi. (‘You’re not walking through the Octagon,’ said ‘im indoors who was watching the game in our room, ‘take a taxi.’)

We coincided at reception. He hadn’t heard about the Eucharistic Adoration for Syria. He was keen, and he had a car. In the cathedral, the sacred silence was broken only by Tongans singing hymns, in four-part harmony, a cappella.

The weeping happened in full conference when Anne Lastman of Melbourne, an international expert on trauma, grief and loss, was giving us the lowdown on sex abuse.

‘One, two, three abortions,’ she said, ‘that’s not out of the way. But when someone’s had five or six, you immediately know there’s a history of sex abuse.

‘It’s okay to talk about priests abusing children,’ she went on, ‘but it’s not okay to talk about abuse in ‘normal’ families. Most abusers are fathers and grandfathers.’

That’s when the sobbing started. Near the back of the room. Quietly at first, just gasps. Then full-throated, full-on sobbing. No one looked round. Anne Lastman left the podium and went down the back. We heard the door close behind them.

Anne’s place was taken by Hilary Keift. Hilary’s a share-milker from the ‘Naki. She spoke slowly, calmly, without notes. She told us how five years ago her twin son and daughter found their big sister hanging in the car shed. Ariana survived, but emotionally she’s still the fifteen year-old who a year earlier had been taken from her Anglican school for an abortion, and delivered home afterwards by the school nurse. ‘She sat at our kitchen table,’ said Hilary, ‘and told me she’d taken Ariana to counselling.’

Hilary was probably crying too, but I was sitting too far back to see. Or maybe she cried at the opening of a subsequent session when she said, ‘It was a botched abortion. Ariana will never have any children.’

The electric atmosphere in the cathedral that Saturday night spoke to me of the pro-life activist’s need for intimacy with Jesus Christ. As he demonstrated by keeping his apostles close for three years before sending them out, the casual acquaintance we make with the Lord by avoiding serious sin isn’t enough to effect change in others. To turn back the tide of evil we ourselves must be radically changed, by keeping company with Christ in prayer, every day.

‘This kind (of devil) is not cast out but by prayer and fasting’ (Mt 17,20). Activists may campaign, write letters, make speeches, even hold conferences; but if prayer doesn’t go up to God his grace can’t come down. Nothing is achieved. 

‘I planted,’ says St Paul (1 Cor 3, 6) ‘Apollos watered, but God gave the increase.’

 

LETTERS TO THE DOM POST, October 2013

How ironic that President Obama should offer assistance to a pregnant woman who’d begun to faint (Website glitches hold up Obamacare rollout, Oct 23). His ‘Obamacare’ offers assistance of another, sinister kind in requiring all institutions and companies to provide insurance cover for abortions, rejecting any conscientious objections and enforcing draconian financial penalties for civil disobedience.

 

Julia du Fresne  

KEEPING PREGGIES AWAKE AT NIGHT (Printed in Dom Post Points, Oct 25): 

That’s right. Give the poor preggies something else to keep them awake at night (Poor sleep a danger to pregnancy, Oct 23). Nothing keeps you awake better than the worry of not being able to sleep. 

Julia du Fresne

EMULATING THE NETHERLANDS  (Printed in Dom Post, Oct 20)

Let me assure Coroner Ian Smith, MP Maryan Street and End of Life Choice president Don Grant that no matter how many heart-rending accounts are ‘reported’ as sob stories in the Dominion Post about voluntary deaths self-administered or otherwise, euthanasia is abhorred by anyone who thinks as opposed to emoting.

Thinking people predicted the consequences of legalising abortion, and what a Pandora’s box that was. Now that we’ve aborted a number equivalent to the population of Canterbury we have ‘pro-choice’ psychology professor David Fergusson admitting that far from rescuing women from depression and possible suicide, ‘abortions lead to mental health issues’, and Linda Holloway, chair of the fraudulent Abortion Supervisory Committee, admitting that if we change that law now, ‘we might end up with something worse than what we have got’ (my emphasis).

Does New Zealand really want to emulate the Netherlands, where 27% of doctors admit to euthanasing their patients without approval, where you can order up a mobile euthanasing clinic, and where two and a half times more people were euthanased in 2011 than in 2008?

According to Grant, ‘when it comes to dying everybody buries their head in the sand’. Just who is the ostrich here? 
 

             Julia du Fresne

 

CELIBATE CATHOLIC PRIESTS ARE SCAPEGOATS  (Printed in Dom Post, Sep 18)

 

Judging by the media (Church braced for new child abuse complaints, Sept 17), you’d think children were violated almost exclusively by Catholic priests. But given that the media tell us what we want to hear, it seems that in the same way as in the Third Reich wealthy Jews were blamed for Germany’s poverty, celibate Catholic priests now make convenient scapegoats for our sex-crazed, sex-saturated society. Anne Lastman, an Australian expert and international speaker on trauma, grief and loss, states unequivocally that most children are sexually abused in their own home, most often by their fathers and grandfathers. 

Julia du Fresne
 

JOHN KERRY AND CATHOLICS’ PRAYER AND FASTING FOR SYRIA ( A letter to Dom Post, September 13)

Seems like there just might be a connection between that totally unexpected and momentous remark of John Kerry’s and its consequence – the unlikely alliance of the US and Russia – and the millions of Catholics worldwide who complied with Pope Francis’ request for prayer and fasting for Syria. As Tennyson wrote in Idylls of the King, ‘More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of.’

 

Julia du Fresne

TWO LETTERS TO THE DOMPOST ON  THE SAME DAY (AUGUST 29).

 

FIRST, NURSES KILLING HALF THEIR PATIENTS:

 

How many of the 2500 extra nurses or midwives provided to DHBs who could be on the wards bathing and moving their bedridden patients, or reinserting lines, are actually employed in their abortion clinics, killing half their patients? Maybe the DHBs consider these dead patients to be a savings in ‘care rationing’.   

Julia du Fresne

 

SECOND, COLUMNIST VERNON SMALL’S NAIVETY:

 

I’m afraid that in claiming a more tolerant society is evidenced by the gay marriage law, Vernon Small’s naivety is showing. There was no clear public mandate for it. The bill was rammed through Parliament; the Select Committee treated objectors, particularly one 18 year-old woman who felt ‘humiliated and menaced’, with disrespect; thousands of unique objections were dismissed as form letters; a majority of submissions were opposed to it. One might call the gay marriage law a law of the jungle.

Julia du Fresne