Archive for the ‘Spirituality’ Category

As the newly appointed director of campus ministry and chaplain for Fordham University, Jesuit Father John J. Shea’s first order of business was to get rid of the office furniture.

“I said jokingly that this would be a perfect office if I were coming in to open a bank account,” said Fr. Shea, who replaced his desk and conference table with a couch and two plush chairs.

“This is where students can come in, feel relaxed, talk,” he said.

Fr. Shea, who earned his bachelor’s degree from Fordham, has previously worked at the university as a teacher in the psychology department, a psychologist in the counseling center, rector of Murray-Weigel Hall (a community of retired Jesuits from the New York Province) and associate vice president and then vice president for student affairs from 1989 until 1996.

He then continued his work in higher education, serving as president of John Carroll University and vice president for mission and ministry at the University of Scranton.

The last seven years, however, have found him in an entirely different setting. Since 2005 Fr. Shea has been the director of the East Asia Theological Encounter Program in Chiangmai, Thailand — a post he will continue to hold remotely. There, he instructed Jesuit scholastics on Eastern theology, taught English to Thai students (he speaks Thai fluently) and worked at a retreat house in Chiangmai.

“I’d wanted adventure, change,” Fr. Shea said of his experience in Asia. “I’d been in higher education for 26 years and just felt that I wanted to do something different. When this opportunity arose, I jumped at it.”

One of Fr. Shea’s goals at Fordham is to create a weekly meditation group, offering students a way to decrease stress while learning about a lesser-known practice of Christianity.

“There’s a whole tradition of Christian meditation,” he said. “It’s very much like Zen or Buddhist meditation. You sit quietly and don’t think, and if thoughts come, then you simply bring yourself back to focusing on breathing rather than going where your mind takes you. Over the years, you become much more at peace, and much more aware.”

Read more about Fr. Shea’s return to Fordham University.

Every Jesuit makes an annual 8-day silent retreat, and Jesuit Brendan Busse, a scholastic, welcomes this time away.

“I need this time. I long for it. Of course I do what I can to nurture silence in my heart on a daily basis, but these annual retreats are privileged moments, graced times. They are, in a word, a gift,” Busse wrote in a blog entry for The Jesuit Post, before leaving for his yearly retreat.

“It’s not that I can’t find the joy of love and the presence of God immersed in our world,” Busse wrote. “It’s simply that I need time to be with God. Or really: it’s simply that I need God. I immerse myself in silence so that I can clear the air, the desk, the mind, the heart, and make room again for God.”

Busse compares daily life to a game of basketball, with moments of rest and re-collection occurring when there are pauses in the game. For Busse, the silent retreats are like those moments:

I’ve stepped away from the game to retrieve something lost, to catch my breath, to find the one thing necessary for the game to continue. The Compassionate Stranger bends over and takes the ball in hand and then performs a simple, perhaps thoughtless, act of generosity, an act of random kindness. Given the opportunity to be of ‘a little help’ they toss the ball back to me, and I jog back to join the players on the court so the game can continue.

Read Busse’s full entry at The Jesuit Post.

Jesuit Father Robert McChesney, interim director for the Hispanic Institute at the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University (JST), recently spoke with Catholic San Francisco on how the rapid growth of Hispanics in the U.S. church is changing schools and seminaries.

Fr. McChesney said, “We have to prepare our students for the changing face of the church, and that means attention to the devotional life of the Mexicans and the Latins in general. There is much more of a devotional faith than many of our students are familiar with. It takes me back to the church of the ’50s. We have to prepare our students to be part of a more devotional church.”

One devotional he’s become familiar with is practicing posadas during Advent. “The Latino Catholics will process around the neighborhood knocking on the door. It goes back to no room at the inn. … I’m an Irish-American Caucasian, but I’ve had to learn that because it’s certainly the religious practice,” said Fr. McChesney, who is also director of the Intercultural Initiatives and the New Directions Sabbatical programs at the JST.

“I have been taken back to my youthful practice of devotion, if you will, because it’s a way of prayer I needed to cultivate to serve the Latin community because it’s so central to them,” he said.

Fr. McChesney also said Hispanic leaders are influencing the U.S. church. “I think the Hispanic bishops have had a huge impact on immigration reform,” he said.

To read more of the interview with Fr. McChesney, visit Catholic San Francisco.

This month ends with the Feast of St. Ignatius, but Loyola Press is celebrating for the entire month in what they are calling 31 Days with St. Ignatius. They’ve assembled a calendar of Ignatian articles, videos, and prayers for every day.

It’s a new edition of resources from their sister site, IgnatianSpirituality.com, so if you followed along in previous years, you’ll find new things to explore this summer.

Across the United States, the Society of Jesus, the U.S.’s largest order of priests and brothers in the Roman Catholic Church, runs universities, high schools and middle schools, parishes and retreat houses.  And today, the 450-year-old religious order has an app.

Available for free at the iTunes App Store, the Jesuit app operates on any iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad; a similar app will soon be available at the Android Marketplace for use on devices such as the Droid, Evo and HTC Touch.

The new app allows users to locate Jesuit retreat centers, schools and parishes across the U.S., read the latest news and information about the Jesuits, and access Jesuit prayers and spirituality documents.

The app’s three sections include:

Locations
Here users can find Jesuit apostolates – parishes, retreat centers, colleges and universities. It includes easy-to-use directions and contact information for any Jesuit institution in the U.S. and is searchable by apostolate name, by the user’s current location or through any address the user enters.

News
All the latest news stories from National Jesuit News are displayed here.  Users can tap on any headline to view the full story, share the link with friends or open the story in their browser.

Prayer
In this section, users can view prayers, spirituality documents and background information on the Society of Jesus.

The video below explains in more detail how the app operates. Visit the app information page here to find out more.