The Spiritual Directors International Web site is now multilingual. Sort of. Go to the home page, and then scroll all the way to the bottom. On the bottom tool bar, click on "Choose your language." A small Google Translate box will appear, and you can choose the language you'd like to read the Web site in. The translation isn't always perfect, but take a look at see what you think.

G. Jeffrey MacDonald writes in a recent issue of USA Today about the quest of more and more people in the United States to discover an inner life. Many are seeking to develop spiritual practices. He writes:

Choosing a spiritual practice shouldn't be an arbitrary process, says Christopher Beeley, an Episcopal priest and assistant professor of early Christian theology at Yale Divinity School....

Community connections to support the inner life can take various forms. A person might share experiences in a faith community, in a support group, in psychotherapy or in spiritual direction, which involves working with a trained guide in matters of the spirit, Beeley says. He says the process of reflecting with partners should help clarify the ultimate values that guide an individual's life.

Read the entire article here.

Buddhist monk Ashin Nyanissara is standing up to the military crackdown in Myanmar by telling stories. 

Shielding himself with allegory, he crisscrosses the country giving lectures that draw on history and legend to remind people that rotten regimes have fallen before. As the generals try to crush the last remnants of resistance, he is cautiously keeping the fire alive.

The story appears in the January 14 issue of the Los Angeles Times. Click here to read why spitting on a hermit is not a good idea.

Spiritual Directors International expresses condolences to the family and global friends of Irish poet and anam cara [soulfriend] John O’Donohue. To learn more about John and write a tribute to John O’Donohue, letting the community know how John’s teachings and writings inspired your spiritual direction, please submit your reflections here, sdiworld.org/tributes-in-memoriam/johnodonohue.html.

A blog titled "The Fungus" recenly posted some of the thinking of Wayne Teasdale on friendship.

Looking at my own life as a contemplative in the world, living at the crossroads of fundamental societal change, I want to explore here the vital nature and value of friendship as it functions in my experience. As a hermit monk in the Catholic tradition, I am naturally also a celibate. Neither marriage nor the joys of sexuality are options for me, given my commitment to the monastic ideal. This path is not a popular one, and I don’t expect the worldly wise to understand it, but it affords its own joys and possibilities. For one thing, it has made it possible for me to appreciate how precious a gift friendship actually is.

Click here to read the entire post.

If you don't have the time or money to make a pilgrimage to the Vishwanath Temple in Varanasi, India, to offer your prayer, you can outsource your obeisances to a cyber-priest.

The temple went online in August and within a month received 180,000 hits on its Web site, www.shrikashivishwanath.org. That is more than double the average number of devotees who show up in person every month, braving difficult journeys, the smelly narrow alleys leading to the temple, the security pat-downs outside the entrance and the vendors hawking sweets, marigolds and jasmine, and other religious paraphernalia.

Cyber-worshipers can be spared all of that - and in the bargain save time, a commodity in increasingly short supply for the growing cohort of middle-class Indians busy with the trappings of secular affluence, from attending cocktail parties to shuttling their children to after-school tutorials.

To learn more, click here.

Deadline May 15, 2008

 

Presence: An International Journal of Spiritual Direction announces its fourth annual juried poetry contest.

 

The grand prize winner will be awarded a $100.00 USD cash prize. Three runners-up will receive $ 75.00 USD each.

The top four selections will be published in the September, December, March, and June issues of Presence respectively. A number of honorable mentions will also be featured in future publications of Spiritual Directors International.

Anyone may enter. However here are a few essential criteria to follow. 

• Only one poem per person is allowed.
• Poems may be no longer than 30 lines.
• Only previously unpublished poetry can be entered.
• Poems may not be submitted to other publications until after the results of the Presence Poetry Contest are announced.
• Poems chosen for publication in Presence may not be submitted to other publications until after publication in Presence.
• Poems should pertain to a spiritual theme or should relate to spiritual direction.
• All poems must be submitted by e-mail, as an attachment, preferably in MS Word form.

• Write “Presence Poetry Contest” in the subject line.

• DO NOT INCLUDE ANY IDENTIFYING INFORMATION IN THE ATTACHMENT OTHER THAN
  • THE POEM TITLE
  • THE POEM ITSELF
  • DO NOT INCLUDE YOUR NAME ON THE ATTACHMENT

The poems will be judged anonymously by a three judge panel. 

Include all of the following information in the body of the e-mail submission:

• Name of Poet
• Name of Poem
• E-mail address
• Country 

ALL POEMS SUBMITTED WILL BE ACKNOWLEDGED. HOWEVER ONLY SUBMISSIONS WHICH CONFORM STRICTLY TO THE CRITERIA ABOVE WILL BE JUDGED.

Okay, this last part is the most important:

E-mail your poem to poetrycontest@sdiworld.org.

If you send them to any other e-mail, there is a high likelihood they will wind up in poetry heaven but not in the poetry contest. Good luck!

 

 

The New York Times recently published a story on Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi, a 100-year-old Rinzai Zen master.

Forty-five years after arriving in the United States at 55 with no English but two dictionaries tucked into his robe sleeves, Roshi, or "venerable teacher," the honorific by which he is widely known, is still going strong, traveling from his base in California to more than a dozen Zen centers he opened or inspired around the country, ordaining priests -- more than 25 to date -- and challenging students with Buddhist-style tough love.

"Enlightenment? I don't like this subject at all," Joshu Roshi said, speaking in Japanese through his interpreter and chuckling softly in a rare interview. "I bet you can find all sorts of different descriptions of it in the bookstore."

Read more about Joshu Roshi here.

Jayarava, a western Buddhist, points out the primacy of practice over text in Buddihst teaching.

I love the Buddhist scriptures, and value them both as spiritual inspiration and as literature. But I believe that what we Buddhists actually do is far more important than what we believe. The scriptures may well contain echoes of the words of the Buddha, but there is no substitute for practice, and the instruction of a more experienced spiritual friend. If, in the end, what works is in contradiction to the texts, then we must follow our insights, as the composers of the later Buddhist texts did. Buddhism is founded on principles, not on texts. Buddhist fundamentalism can never be justified in terms of Buddhist principles.

Click here to read more of what he has to say.

A British Buddhist, living and teaching in Ubon, Northeast Thailand, recently commented on the six kinds of reverence in Buddhist practice. My favorite is number six, reverence for hospitality.

Being a good host to everyone that comes our way is a fuller way to live out this particular kind of reverent behavior. Seeing everyone as my guest, to whom I should be a generous host and make them feel comfortable and happy.

Click hereto see all six.

The Jerusalem Post reported yesterday about a campaign to encourage Jews around the world to light one less candle for Hanukka to help the environment.

The founders of the Green Hanukka campaign found that every candle that burns completely produces 15 grams of carbon dioxide. If an estimated one million Israeli households light for eight days, they said, it would do significant damage to the atmosphere.

However, everyone is not every is happy about the campaign.

Rabbi Benny Lau of Jerusalem's Ramban Congregation, who is himself an environmental activist, praised the good intentions of the people behind the campaign. But he said the environmentalists should be trying to reach out to observant Jews instead of running campaigns that turn them away.

You can read all about it here.

Steve Coats has reviewed PORTRAIT OF A PRIESTESS: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece for the New York Times. He says:

These are just some of the influential women visible through the cracks of conventional history in Joan Breton Connelly’s eye-opening “Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece.” Her portrait is not in fact that of an individual priestess, but of a formidable class of women scattered over the Greek world and across a thousand years of history, down to the day in A.D. 393 when the Christian emperor Theodosius banned the polytheistic cults. It is remarkable, in this age of gender studies, that this is the first comprehensive treatment of the subject, especially since, as Connelly persuasively argues, religious office was, exceptionally, an “arena in which Greek women assumed roles equal ... to those of men.” Roman society could make no such boast, nor can ours.

Click here to read the entire review.

[via DallesNews Religion]

The Perspective blog recently quoted William Barry, SJ's, thoughts on the ordination of women in the Roman Catholic Church. 

In the contemporary Catholic Church in the United States and elsewhere there are hundreds of women who identify with Therese's desire [to be a priest]. They feel that God has called them to ordained ministry in the church, and they find themselves unable to follow through on the Lord's call because of the stance of authority in the church .....

All my instincts, training and experience lead me to the conclusion that these women are experiencing an authentic call of God ..... All of us in the church need to take seriously the experiences of women such as I have described. Is God saying something to us about ministry in the church through them? And if so, what is he saying?

Click here to read the entire post. 

A missionary with twenty years experience in the Philippines recently listed ten reminders about spiritual direction. Here's number ten:

“Learning unsupported by grace may get into our ears; it never reaches the heart. It makes great noise outside but serves no inner purpose.”

Click here to see the first nine.

Forty enrichment, formation and training faculty and directors gathered at Wisdom House in Litchfield, Connecticut. Vivienne Joyce, SC and Janet Ruffing, RSM from Fordham University in New York presented “The Supervision and Practicum Element of Spiritual Director Formation: Uncovering Inherent Mutuality.”