Bishop Morlino of Madison Wisconsin accuses Nuns of Modern Witchcraft with Vatican codewords New-Agism and Indifferentism

The witch burning of two nuns and two female associates will take place as soon as Governor Scott Walker signs off on pending witch burning legislation in the Wisconsin capital and ultimate approval from the Koch Brothers of course, that goes without saying, wink, nod.

Drunk on the blood of the saints and some of Paul Ryan’s $350 a bottle French Merlot leftover from Paul's unsuccessful, crashing, failed, run for the White House, Bishop Morlino of Madison Wisconsin, the cheese state, is ranting and raving and sending out mean anti-vagina secret memos to his priest buddies, about nuns who teach meditation and yoga as part of their Gospel message and service to the Community.

At least they are trying to serve the message of Jesus and are not trying to drink themselves blind in a campaign to get a better bishop’s assignment than in a backwater shithole like Madison Wisconsin.

Oh, how the great have fallen. The Roman Church is starting to cannibalize itself. So many hungry bishops and so few tasty true Catholics left to consume. LOL

Two longtime Madison nuns who lead an interfaith spirituality center have been banned by Madison Catholic Bishop Robert Morlino from holding workshops or providing spiritual direction or guidance at any Catholic churches in the 11-county diocese. 

Sisters Maureen McDonnell and Lynn Lisbeth, both Sinsinawa Dominicans, have diverged too far from Catholic teaching, according to a confidential memo sent Nov. 27 to priests on behalf of Morlino. A copy of the memo was leaked to the State Journal. 

Two other women connected to the interfaith center, called Wisdom's Well, also have been banned as part of the same action. 

The memo says Morlino has "grave concerns" about the women's teachings, specifically that they "espouse certain views" flowing from such movements as "New Ageism" and "indifferentism." The latter, according to the memo, is "the belief that no one religion or philosophy is superior to another."… 

Wisdom's Well was founded in Madison in 2006. The center has no physical facility but offers workshops and retreats on topics such as nonviolence, contemplative living and Christian meditation. 

The center's website says it "serves to support those who desire to grow spiritually, seek inner wisdom, and yearn for a transformative spirituality." Its mission statement says the center is "grounded in the Christian tradition, while embracing the wisdom found in other religious traditions."  

Along with the sisters, the third staff member is Beth O'Brien, a married mother of two and a religious layperson affiliated with the Benedictine community. She also is banned, as is Paula Hirschboeck, a philosophy professor at Edgewood College in Madison who helped found Wisdom's Well but is no longer on its staff. 

The women declined comment, referring questions to the Dominicans of Sinsinawa Congregation, based in southwestern Wisconsin.

Read more: http://host.madison.com/news/local/bishop-robert-morlino-cracks-down-on-madison-nuns-for-espousing/article_37f434d0-4325-11e2-a826-001a4bcf887a.html#ixzz2EloFxCtG

Elvis, Jesus on Toast – Mary on a Mountain – Hand of Mohammed

Mary on the Mountain?

It has taken some time to write this. It was coincidence or serendipity that the topic of seeing Jesus or Elvis on a piece of toast kind of thing came up recently for me.

I can remember meditating on my lunch hour, sitting on a low wall behind Wal-Mart in some little shade on the recreational walkway, bike, park trail along the Rillito (little river) River in Tucson about fifteen years ago.

I was meditating trying to relieve middle age and work stress.  I opened my eyes and then I focused on a distant peak, part of the Santa Catalina mountain range.  I was looking specifically at the large smudge like area on Big Horn Mountain.

In the noon day sun, a summer Arizona sun I should add, I saw what appeared to be the Christian Icon of Mary on the side of the mountain. As I wrote previously, only a Christian is likely to see Christian iconography and iconic images in the abstract darks and grays of a mountain side. That and only mad men in the noon day desert sun are crazy enough to see God and or start world religions sometimes.

With some additional lunch time meditation sessions, I began to make out more of the total image surrounding the Mary iconic image that I imagined that I saw connecting the dots on a mountain side.

It was then that the words of Revelation 12 seem to take shape before my eyes:

Revelation 12 - A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. ² She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth.  ⁵ She gave birth to a son, a male child, who “will rule all the nations with an iron scepter.” And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne. ⁶ The woman fled into the wilderness to a place prepared for her by God, where she might be taken care of…

¹³ When the dragon saw that he had been hurled to the earth, he pursued the woman who had given birth to the male child. ¹⁴ The woman was given the two wings as of a great eagle (angel), so that she might fly to the place prepared for her in the wilderness, where she would be taken care of for a time…

Along with the opening words of Psalm 121:

I lift up my eyes to the mountains—
    where does my help come from?
My help comes from the Lord,
    the Maker of heaven and earth.

Of course all this was against a backdrop of being in bible study with my local pastor.  And seeing Mary, which was more so a Catholic Icon than a Protestant Icon, and as then being Protestant, I discounted the Mary image seen and kept it to myself. No point in running around sounding like a lunatic and saying there was a giant image of Mary on some mountainside in Tucson.

Though I must recall and admit that my local pastor at the time on our group study of Luke sparked a certain chemistry and or electricity within the group that I file mentally under the category of Holy Spirit (whenever two or more are gathered in my name...).

Fast forward, we move back east for some years and I keep the image, the Jesus, Elvis image on toast, Mary on a mountain thing in the back of my mind.

Some years later I go visit my son in college at Tucson and again am seeing Christian Iconography on a mountain.  From the second floor balcony of his dorm apartment I show him the outline of the smudge on the mountain and tell him what I think I see.  He does not see the image of a woman and child. He says he sees what looks like five fingers on a hand.  Shadows can be so tricky.  I look again and yes I guess you might also see a hand.

And of course since I am so steeped in esoterics and religious lore, I see both images, of Mary and also of the hand.  I see what I choose to see.  What I have in confidence and or in faith am willing to see.

And of course looking, connecting the dots on the image of a hand, I am reminded of the Hand of Mohammed, whose original handprint is said to be imprinted on a charter of protection to the ancient St. Catherine’s monastery in the Sinai Desert.

What is in a name? Or an image? The global reality of the present global culture  is to try and see with all the eyes of all cultures and see what best results in image or form evolve out of all those local cultural and religious contexts of the planet. 

So it goes.

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Arizona Webcam

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meditation moment

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Massenet – Thais - Meditation

Brian O’Hanlon – SMX – Homily March 26-27

Again, down under, an interesting homily from the St. Mary’s in Exile (SMX) community in Brisbane, Australia.

Faith community versus belief community is mentioned as well as the future of the faith in terms of a community living the word (God) through justice, compassion and love…

Brian O’Hanlon – SMX – Homily March 26-27

I was fortunate enough through the enthusiasm of my wife, Angela, to discover this community a long time ago – 1988 I think, and I have been a fairly regular attendee ever since.  Certainly I have been a constant attendee since, to borrow a term from the Irish, “since the troubles”, the troubles of exile. 

Peter in a homily towards the end of 2010 when restating his vision of this community, emphasised that we are a faith community not a belief community. A faith community is one developing a spiritually of Justice Compassion and Love. More recently he restated the value of the mystical contemplative tradition in Christianity traditionally suppressed throughout history. This implies  a letting go of, a freeing up from,  much if not all of our classical conditioning of religious tradition,( Recently at a friends wedding-a nuptial mass, I was sitting next to a women , who at the end of the ceremony commented “ that was scary- I have not been inside a catholic church for 25 years, yet I just knew how to do everything), or there could be a shifting of the core of our traditional stories and belief systems; if this is so what do we have left, what do we replace it with? What do we develop as the core of our own practice. According to Fr Richard Rohr OSM the oppositional mindset that was set in place after the reformation of the 16^th century, and after the enlightment of the 17^th and 18^th centuries meant that the ancient tradition of gaining spiritually through meditation was lost. We lost the older tradition of praying beyond words. I want to propose that this is what we can develop, praying beyond words, meditation-a vehicle for our spiritual pathway.

For a long time I have thought that the Book of James was the most useful, social and practical of the gospel writings; James warned against taking the Pauline view of Christianity to an extreme where Paul urged his followers to put their faith in Christ (i.e. what to believe, one who would deliver them).  James called his listeners to action, “Faith without works is dead, be doers of the word and not hearers only.  Religion that is pure and undefiled is this – to visit orphans and widows in their affliction and to keep ones-self unstained from the world” – to keep ones-self unstained from the world – what is this? Christians are very good at relieving the struggling and suffering of others-there are helping missions in every part of the world, just look at the community support provided during our natural disasters, out of this faith community Micha arose, and I am sure that nearly all of us are caring for family, relatives or friends; visiting the widow in her affliction, and as well there does seem in our community a growing interest in the spiritual/contemplative tradition, through the transformative experience of meditation, a way of remaining unstained from the world, our pastors refer to it in various ways, the Eckhart Tolle CD’s are taken home each week, and many books referring to the subject are sold, at  the drop in shop, the existing meditation groups are regularly attended. 

Jesus, it now seems, was primarily a teacher, a sage who bequeathed to his followers principles by which to live, not a body of eternally fixed doctrine that he expected people to believe. 

The teachings that Jesus bequeathed to us focused not on believing but on doing.  Even before the term ‘Christian’ (originally with a derogatory meaning)  came into use, the first Jesus-followers were attempting to practise the kind of life he taught.  They called it ‘The Way’. 

An ancient book called ‘The Didache’ (a Greek word meaning ‘teaching’) throws considerable light on this. 

It is interesting to find that the Didache has preserved the primitive label, ‘The Way’.  This is how it starts off: ‘There are two ways , one of life and one of death, but there is a great difference between the two ways’.  In its short description of the Way of Death we find listed all the commonly acknowledged human crimes and misdemeanours that are condemned in almost every culture.  But the emphasis of the Didache is on the Way of Life.  Listen to how it continues:

The way of life is this: First, you shall love God who made you; second, love your neighbour as yourself, and not do to another what you would not want done to you...