On the first Sunday we started by introducing ourselves and making a few practical decisions about how we are going to meet.  You were asked "Who are you?"  You replied by giving me your name.  I asked you what that name told us about you.  What did you know about the family whose name you carry?  You also belong to the Family of God.  What name do you carry from that connection?

I asked if you were adopted, and then told you that all of us were adopted, adopted / chosen to be part of the family of God.  It was our baptism that made us adopted brothers and sisters of Jesus, and it is our Confirmation that is going to be our own personal decision to accept this connection.

Your Journal Directive asked you to find out as much as you could about your human family

On the second Sunday we started by talking about what is important to each of us, and we made lists.  Then I asked you to pick the most important things from that list. That was a bit harder.  We noticed that we had not listed "God" on that list, and when we thought about it, we said that we had sort of taken that for granted because all of the other important things depended on God.  But, just maybe, that was a sign that we tended to take God for granted in our lives.

An exercise that was mentioned that could be done at home was to consider that you had only 24 hours to live ... no getting out of that or extending it.  What would you want to do with your last 24 hours?  Who would you want to be with?  When you had that figured out, you have figured out what is really important in your life.  If what we were planning to do anyway in no way resembles those answers, then we are not really living our life according to what we consider most important, and maybe we need to take another look at our lives.

Your Journal Directive asked you to tell the Holy Spirit more about yourself.

We became members of God's family when we were baptized. There were certain things that were done then that were part of our "initiation".

We belong to many other groups.  Some of these we were born into or are part of without us having decided to be part of the group.  Other groups we joined because we wanted to.  We talked about what some of those groups were, and some of the things that were required to become part of those groups.  Sometimes there were fees.  Sometimes special qualifications needed to be met, like team trials.  Sometimes we had to be introduced to the group by someone who was already a member.  Sometimes there were special passwords, or special rituals that had to take place before we were considered to be members.  Sometimes there were different stages of becoming full members.  Sometimes we had to be a certain age to qualify.

The things that enabled us to be part of God's family of adopted daughters and sons are what we have started to talk about in this session.

First Sunday of Advent (The first day of the new church year!) Happy New Year!

This Sunday session had two main parts;  first of all you were asked to recall some of the "groups" that you have chosen to belong to.  These voluntary groups tend to be different than the groups to which we belong because of the family into which we were born or that have been chosen for us.  These "involuntary" memberships are no less important to us and our futures than the ones we choose for ourselves, but they are different and our commitment to them also tends to be different.

Membership in groups tends to be a gradual thing.   Sometimes  we do not fully understand what membership means until a long time after we have become members.  Although our responsibilities and rights may have been explained to us at the beginning, only when we live the experience of group membership do we really come to understand what is involved.  Think of the many hours of team practice times and the aching muscles that come with belonging to a sports group.  Even though we might have been told what our  membership might mean in terms of practice and hard work, it is only when we are experiencing it that we really understand it .... and then, sometimes we might even reconsider our membership.  Whether we stay with the group and our determination to make it successful  is a mark of our character and courage and persistence  AND often is influenced by whether it was our own personal decision to join or if it was in part the decision of someone else.

Our membership in God's family happened at our Baptism, but it will be in our Confirmation that we make that decision for ourselves.  Membership in the family of God is not a part time thing.  It is a full time thing until and after our death.    We do not know now what this membership will cost us, but we know that God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit walk that whole journey with us to give us the insight and the strength we will need.  We also know what we have been promised  because of our membership, but  just like the hard parts, the rewards will only really be known when we experience them.

We will be back to this theme again later in the program.

At the end of the Mass, some of our parents carried our new bibles to the front and Father Nick asked God to bless them.  We very briefly talked about the fact that the Bible is really a library of different books, and that the version we have is one that has all of the books that the Catholic Church teaches are truly the word of God to us.  We took a quick look at the Gospel of Matthew and the story of Jesus' Teaching in what is called the Sermon on the Mount, or sometimes the Beatitudes.  If  we are followers of Jesus, it is probably important that we know what things were important to him.  We will continue that next Sunday.

"Beatitudes" and "Baditudes"

We started to make lists of what we thought were the important "ATTITUDES" of the "World" / "Culture" in which we live, and some of the things that were  seen as negative values or ATTITUDES.  Although we may not have each come up with the same lists, we quickly began to recognize that things like power, wealth, beauty, attractiveness to others/ being thin, being young but not a child, being a bully rather than the person being bullied, being well liked by others and so on were the "desired" things.  We also looked briefly at the larger scene and saw that being an aggressor country would be seen as better than being the invaded country, that having economic power in the world is better than being poor and in debt.

Then we took another look at the "BEATITUDES" that Jesus summarized in the Sermon on the Mount at the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew Chapter 5.  Those attitudes do not look much like the attitudes of the "world", and yet Jesus tells us that these attitudes are needed for us to be happy.  He tells us that these are the attitudes of the Kingdom that his Father, our God, wants to reign in our hearts.  We briefly looked at the Attitude of being gentle of heart, of having a humble attitude, of not seeing ourselves as important in the eyes of others.  A brief consideration of that attitude showed us that if we do not have that sense of needing the power of God in our lives, of being content with the simple things that God provides for us on a daily basis, then we are going to be dissatisfied, and unhappy, because we always will want more and think we have to get more by ourselves.  To have the attitude of the Kingdom of God requires us to be simple and gentle, humble and vulnerable, merciful and pure of heart.  To have the attitudes of the Kingdom requires us to have attitudes that are very different than the main values of the world / culture in which we live and grow up.

We call the attitudes of the Kingdom the "BEATITUDES", or those things that make us Blessed, that make us Happy.  These are in strong contrast to the attitudes that we might call "BADITUDES", things that are  much more likely to make us unhappy and unfulfilled and certainly do not last.

We started out by looking at an image of a line of poor men in ragged clothing waiting for something, probably to get a warm meal at a charity kitchen.  When we looked again, one of the figures could be understood to be Jesus.  When we talked about it, we remembered that Jesus spent his time with the poor people of his time, and that is where we are likely to find him in our time as well.

During our session we took a look at the readings for the 4th Sunday of Advent.  The Gospel story was of Mary going to help her cousin Elizabeth because she was pregnant and elderly and needed help.  We saw that this attitude of looking out for the needs of others was in line with the "attitudes" that Jesus would show in his own life and teach us to follow in our lives.  Just as we learn positive attitudes (and sometimes not so good ones) from our parents and others  of influence in our lives, we can also understand that Jesus had a great teacher in his mother Mary.

We had been asked to prepare the prayer intentions for the final Sunday of Advent, and we got down to business deciding, first of all who or what we wanted to pray for, and then for each of these, what we were asking God to do to support the person or need that we had identified.  We ended up with a list of things and because we ran out of time, Gerald agreed to put them into final wording for the Sunday.  You can see the final version of these intentions by clicking here:

After welcoming all back after a good Christmas break, we started to talk about what memories are to us ... how we remember things.  We saw that how we remember things is not always exactly the way someone else remembers the same event or situation.  What we remember, and how we remember is influenced by many things.

Photographs, the stories we have been told, the reflections from our own memories, all these are used to recreate the past and make it present to us now.  In truth, memory makes the past present to us.  We will remember things that have importance to us, and those are things we will recount in stories.

We remember that the Bible is the recorded memories of peoples about things that were important to them or to their communities.  The stories of the New Testament that we read in the "Good News" / Gospel, are the stories of who Jesus was, what he did and why  he was important to people in the past and to us in the present.

We looked at four different accounts of Jesus calling his first disciples.  We saw that the accounts in the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke were similar, but not exactly the same, but that the account in John was quite different in its details.  We understand that the Gospels of Matthew Mark and Luke were probably written using a common source as heir guide, and that accounts for their similarity.  Still each of these evangelists had a different intended audience for  each account, and how a story is told often will vary depending on who we are speaking to and what we are trying to emphasize in our story.  The Gospel of John was written later and with a rather different audience and a different purpose.

The differences we saw in the sample readings we did  do not bother us, for we saw the common truth that all told.  Jesus called disciples from ordinary walks of life, and invited them to become his followers.  The writers of the Gospel stories were telling us that Jesus also calls each of us  now.  But since we do not meet the historic person of Jesus, we  need to better understand how we are called in our own lives.  Our next session will try to get us to think more about that.

This Sunday Candidates were asked what it would take for them to not go home with their parents, but to go home with Gerald and spend the rest of their lives  following Gerald's directions and guidance.  As strange as the question might have sounded, a few humorous comments and answers were volunteered.  Most answers involved things or money, though one answer said "happiness".     When we looked a bit more deeply we found that  no amount of money or no thing would be worth trading our entire lives for, and even if we tried, and gave up our lives for those things, we would not even have our own lives to "enjoy" those things anyway!  So, the answer was "No way would we do that!"

Gerald then pointed out that this is exactly what we had read about in the Gospels when Jesus called his disciples, and they did leave things and go to follow him.  What did Jesus have going for him that Gerald or other human beings do not?

If no amount of things could get us to respond that way, what would? The answer  turns out to be that it would have to be a love  of  a special person, and an absolute trust arising from that love that doing this would give us the true happiness that we value more than everything else, that by doing so, we would find what we really want our lives to be.  This kind of deep love and trust is what causes people to get married and want to share the rest of their lives with each other.  It takes that kind of "irrational" response of the heart that would get a person to give their life over to another person.  That is also what it will take for us to give our live over to Jesus, and we aren't going to be able to make that kind of commitment and outpouring of love to an idea or even to a story about a person;  we will need to know and love that person directly! 

That leads us to consider how we get to know Jesus that intimately.  How do we know the God who loves us that deeply so that, experiencing that love, we are drawn to respond to it  with our own love and commitment to that special person?  We started to consider this question and will follow it up next week.

We started by looking at each of the Seven Sacraments of the Catholic Church to see them as  special events of God coming to support us and to affirm God's love for us.  These events cover  all of our lives;  Baptism affirms that we are part of god's family, the Body of Christ on earth, Eucharist affirms that God stays with us and nourishes us for all of the ordinary and extraordinary things we do along the way,  Confirmation gives each of us a chance to  affirm that we want to be part of God's family ... to make that commitment to follow Jesus for ourselves,  Reconciliation, as often as we want or need it, affirms that God is always forgiving and always loving, no matter what,  Matrimony affirms that God's love comes to us through others, Orders affirms affirms our spiritual leaders and supports them in their promise to serve God's people and the Sacrament of the Sick affirms God's love and healing during our weakest moments.

I then asked one of the Candidates to light the candle that we have on the table to represent the presence of God in our midst.  I said it this way;  "Would you do me a favour and light the candle?"  There was no hesitation  and the candle was lit.  Then I said to another Candidate, "Would you do me a favour?"  And I did not indicate what that favour might be,  Probably suspicious because of the question I posed the week earlier, that Candidate said, "No, I don't think so."  That was a very appropriate answer.  To have answered with a yes would have implied a trust and relationship between us that does not exist at the present, and would have shown a confidence that whatever would be asked would be do-able and would be for that Candidate's good as well.

That allowed us to consider the difference between the requests;  "Would you do me a favour and do this?" ... asks for a response to a request.  You can consider what is being asked and decide if it is in your interests to do so.  "Would you do me a favour?"  is asking a response to a person.  That is the kind of thing that God asks of us.  That is the kind of thing that was part of Jesus' question calling his disciples.   They trusted him that when he asked them to follow him they could only expect good things to happen for them as a result.  That is based on how much they trusted him.  The question for us is the same.  Jesus is asking each of us to be a follower of him, to commit to changing our lives, to saying YES to whatever that will require form us later in our lives, trusting that this is the only way we will ever really find the things that we most want for our lives.

But are we ready to say yes?  The Journal Directive for the week asks each Candidate to consider what "favours"  they would NOT be ready to do for God if asked.  That is a very tough question and its answer, or even the beginning of its answer, will tell us a lot about how much we have come to trust the God  who has absolutely no hesitation to do whatever it takes to care for us, even to being born as human, living and dying for each of us!

What would we not do if God asked?  That depends on the nature of our connection to God.  How much do we believe that God would never ask something of us that would be bad for us?  How much do we trust God?  How much do we BELIEVE IN GOD?  How much do we love God?  All of these questions is basically the same.

We can look at the development of a human love relationship to  see what needs to happen before one person is ready to commit his/her life to another person in confidence and trust ... in love.  We don't make that kind of commitment to strangers, or even to people we don't know much about.  We need to get to know the other person and like what we find out.  We need to want to get to know more about the person and we will find our attraction growing.  In human relationships this does not always lead to wanting a closer relationship.  Sometimes it leads to an end of the relationship and we explore connections with others.  Even when a couple decide that they are really in love and want to live their lives together, things happen and people change and the relationship breaks up.  Being hurt in a relationship when trust is violated can make people really hesitant to enter another relationship of trust and love. 

We have all encountered some  broken relationships, and that will tend to  make us hesitate, and perhaps even make us hesitate to trust in God.  And yet we are told, and we say, that God will never change, God's love and trustworthiness is total and unchanging.  We need to think about this as we start to consider what we declare to be our beliefs about God in our Creed.

We started to consider what a Creed is, and will take it up again next week.

 

This week dealt with a number of different elements.  We continued to make the distinction in "believing something about God" and "believing IN God."  When we say the Creed, we say we believe In God.  That means that we trust God, that we love God, and that we have a very special connection to God.  We then jumped ahead in the Creed to look at the expression; "I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints..."

A comparison was made to part of a Lakota ceremony in which food is set aside for all of the deceased friends and relatives who are present at special ceremonies, and how this belief in the connectedness of all people is similar to the Catholic belief in the communion of saints.

Candidates were reminded that they should consider the role of "sponsor" and that they had the right to take on another name if they wished.  That led to a discussion of what names mean for us and if the name  is selected with a special significance, it can represent a new way of life for us.  To illustrate this Gerald referred to the different names that he had been given, including the recent naming as "Sacred Tree Sacred Hoop Boy".  Several questions arose from that discussion.

After a two-Sunday break because of a school holiday, we will resume by looking further at the Creed.

You are all "SAINTS".  In the creed we  say that we believe in the holy catholic and apostolic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins,and the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.  The term "saints" refers to "holy ones."  So we talked about what it means to be holy.  To be holy mean to be connected to God, and anything or anyone who helps us to stay connected to God is holy.  Likewise, to be unconnected from God means that we have sinned, and since that happens with us, we need to be forgiven so that we can reconnect. 

We know that our God is always ready to reconnect us by forgiving us our sins, and that the right to be called holy comes because we have been redeemed by Jesus, whose rising from the dead is the sole basis for our belief that we too will rise to everlasting life.  What proof do we have?  None, we just have the word of Jesus, and that has been enough for his disciples and for all of the generations of believers who have shared this belief right to ourselves.  Remember, you are holy people.  Remember, you are Saints of God, Remember that you are connected because Jesus forgives us and reconnects us to the Father and the Spirit.

Next week we will look at the middle section of the creed, where we look at what our faith tells us about Jesus.

This week we took at look at how Jesus redeemed humanity and reconnected us to God for all time.  We considered how Jesus came to be one of us, a human being, conceived and born as a simple, helpless but wonderful baby.  We don't know how that happened.  We declare our belief that it was accomplished by the "Power of the Holy Spirit.".  Our Creed then jumps ahead and declares that Jesus, for our sake, suffered  a most cruel death under the Romans. The reference to Pontius Pilate places this  event into a particular spot of human history.  The death of Jesus was a death,  a real death, and he was buried.

We then declare our belief that what happened to Jesus is what was believed to happen to all those who died; that he  "descended to the dead", that is, that Jesus went "to that place" where all those who died went.  If Jesus had been an ordinary person, that would have been the end of the story.  We declare our belief that Jesus rose  on the third day, and that after establishing the truth of the resurrection with his disciples, he  went to the Father where he exists as God, as the Son of God.

For the apostles, and now us, to declare this belief is a profound statement.  The Jesus who lived like we live was truly God, and his resurrection and complete union with the Father, is what he has earned for all of us.

What an incredible God!  It is really impossible to imagine that our God would do that for us  ... would do that out of a profound love for each of us.  We are called to share in that life and in that love of God.  What are we willing to do for the person we love the most?  That is our question to reflect on.  When we come to a true and honest answer to the question, we can come a bit closer to understanding just how great is God's love for us.

 Under the heading of "Living our Beliefs", we did a bit of review;  why did the apostles follow Jesus?  What does being a follower of Jesus mean?  We had been considering that God's love for us was so huge, and anything we might try to do as a follower of that Jesus would seem quite insignificant.  The good news is that we are not expected to do this on our own.  Following Jesus is something we will be helped with in many ways.  The Gifts of the Holy Spirit are one of the principles ways that God in the Holy Spirit supports our efforts.

Gerald described how he had walked a "Sacred Hoop / Medicine Wheel" in the snow over the winter months, and how the act of walking that path and praying along the way became a powerful teaching of how we are called to live our lives and how we are supported along the way, even when we become disconnected from God, and even when the way seems to have been lost from view.

We will look more closely at the Gifts of the Holy Spirit at our next meeting.