Fr Jim's (old) Blog

The Christian Spirituality Program I am doing is emotionally stretching. Both courses I am doing, The Discernment of Spirits , and the Pre-Practicum (which is about how to do spiritual direction) constantly ask us to notice our emotional responses to well, pretty much everything. Each day we have reading to prepare for class the next day. And rather than just know the content, which I find I do fairly easily, we have to come with a written prepared "Horizon Analysis", where we answer two questions: What are you attracted to in this reading (and why), and what do you feel resistance to (and why). Noticing resistance, naming it and processing it challenging. We all manifest resistance in our daily lives: we put off that awkward phone call or that difficult task. We don't want to watch a film / read a book which might bring up difficult memories, etc. So constantly attending to this is actually hard work. Some people here seem to have genius-level emotional intelligenc...

The course I have most been looking forward to taking is The Discernment of Spirits with Fr Richard Hauser, SJ. He's written books on the subject and is quite well renowned. He's close to retirement and I was hoping I'd get to do it  with him. The discernment of spirits might at first sound like a bit of an occult, seance & ouija board kind of thing. But it's actually a key part of Ignatian (Jesuit) spirituality. It's the way to make decisions, to choose in accord with what God wants for my life. But before getting into the more complex and technical version of discernment which Ignatius gives in his Spiritual Exercises, Fr Richard taught us his own, simplified version from a book he's written, Moving in the Spirit.  The key to discernment of spirits is being able to recognise and name my own emotional responses. This is also the first element of emotional intelligence . Hauser uses the term mood rather than emotion. Once I can name my mood, I name wha...

The storm which was brewing as I wrote my last post on Friday night hit with force, and I watched from my window as the sky turned dark, the rain pelted driven by the wind, and there was nearly constant lightning and thunder. We found out later that there was damage and a couple of small tornadoes out in the suburbs. But the storm passed, and the sky lightened, and I went out for an evening run. It was spectacular. The sky was doing amazing things, with the setting sun coming in underneath a layer of mammatus cloud which I have never seen before. Mammatus clouds are like udders handing from the sky. Then there was the biggest rainbow I've ever seen, a perfect half circle, not flattened, because the setting  sun was on the horizon, and the the storm itself moving out into the distance.  

The first week at Creighton is always busy as both the returning students like us and the new students go to various orientation sessions as well as unpacking, buying supplies and working out the technology. Add in jetlag for lots of us and we usually finish pretty tired. It's Friday night as I write this. We've had our end of week social gathering and now at 7.30pm people are retreating to their rooms. There's a wild midwest storm brewing and the air is thick so we're grateful for the the airconditioning. It's taken one week to get my head in the time zone, and I've slept through the past two nights which is great after waking up nearly every hour for the first two nights. How on earth do parents of newborns sustain that for months on end? I thought I would have had the longest journey to get here, but no, that prize belongs to 5 Ugandan nuns who flew Nairobi to Frankfurt to to Chicago to Omaha, taking more than 28 hours, and 2 Nigerian priests who flew from ...

Today was my first day back at Creighton. As I sat down to pray in front of the window in my room this morning I realised that all the travelling, the planes, the shuttle buses, the queues and the security checkpoints are over. I have arrived, and I can sit in this chair for the next 55 days. So I'm unpacked and set up, and ready to begin. I'm still not quite adjusted to the timezone, waking up a few times during the night, but I'm getting back to sleep rather than being awake from 2am - 5am as I was on my first night. Last year I was disappointed by the lack of hospitality for new students, so this year my classmate Coco and I have tried to do something about it, having welcoming information in each room, having a gathering yesterday afternoon and taking people on tour to find their buildings. The program does have an official orientation and welcome dinner on the Sunday afternoon, but we wanted to make sure that the people who arrived on Friday or Saturday didn't ...

First step in my journey is two days in Chicago, both to start to adjust to the timezone (15 hours behind Sydney) and to visit my friends TC & Romana. I'm staying at an Airbnb apartment around the corner from their house as they have a studio apartment and a two year old, and I know my sleep will be all over the place. I did better than I usually do on the flight over, immediately setting my watch to Chicago time and trying to sleep and wake those hours. It meant sleeping from 4pm - 9pm Sydney time, then waking up and staying awake. I got to sleep when I arrived at my flat, but woke up at 2am and was awake for 3 hours. 4pm in the afternoon then becomes the time I want to crash, but I'm resisting the urge for a nap and hoping that I reset my body clock in the coming days. The US school summer holidays have begun, so TC is off work, so we did an architecture cruise up the Chicago River on Thursday and saw the Chicago Cubs play baseball at the iconic Wrigley Field (yes, l...