Latest Space #21
The Newsletter of SacredSpace.ie
Greetings to all members of the Sacred Space community! As I write this greeting in this holy season of Advent, a time of preparation for the celebration of the birth of Christ, the words of the popular Christmas Carol come to mind:
Joy to the world, the Lord is come!
Let earth receive her King
Let every heart prepare Him room,
And heaven and nature sing...
I trust you are united with me in these sentiments whenever and wherever you read (or sing!) these words. It is good to recall that we are all united in the peace and joy of the great mystery of Christmas.
Fr. Gerry, Editor Sacred Space
In this issue of Latest Space
Greetings from the Associate Editor of Sacred Space
Dear pray-ers in Sacred Space,
May you get over Christmas happily. What do we mean by that odd phrase, often used in Ireland, 'getting over Christmas'? People grow anxious at this time, just as they grow anxious coming up to a birth; things can go wrong.
In the birth of Jesus nothing went wrong. He was born, and grew up, wonderfully healthy and with all his senses intact. All the senses, eyes, ears, speech, taste, smell, touch, were there in the baby Jesus although he was infans, meaning without speech yet, nor were his eyes focussed. When he lay in the manger, for the first time in history, God was responding to his own creation through human eyes and ears and senses.
In our day God no longer senses the world in that way. The baby Jesus grew to maturity and was killed. One consequence of the Incarnation is that we are God’s eyes in the world, we are his hands, ears, taste and voice. God reaches the world through us, and specifically through our senses. We ask the infant Jesus that, like him, we may treasure our senses, these miraculous windows on the world, so that we may effectively become God’s healing touch, and compassionate gaze and voice, and keen ears, and discerning taste, savouring all that is in his creation.
- Paul Andrews, SJ
From the Manager of the Irish Jesuit Communication Centre
The Northern Irish poet Louis Mc Niece has a wonderful poem about a childhood memory and the particular memory it triggered off by the smell of soap as he washes his hands. Every Christmas I feel as if I’m opening a big treasure chest of memories that come floating out, without rhyme or reason, depending on what trigger opens the box: the smell of the Christmas tree, the taste of mince pies, the lovely wooden nativity characters in our crib, the Vienna boys choir singing Silent Night… A forty–nine year old woman is suddenly a seven year old child again and I can actually smell the pink perfume in a bell shaped bottle stuck on a card pulled at the end of a rope pulled by a little choir boy! Chanel it wasn’t, but my first bottle of perfume it was, and I remember the excitement.
It’s the power of memory also that makes Christmas such a time of contradiction. I can feel joy and happiness along with sadness and a sense of loss. I can feel excitement and have pep in my step along-side a sense of encroaching darkness and even depression. I can experience the comfort of ritual, tradition and things staying the same, along with the lingering sense of everything changing and people passing on.
Such is the power of the interweaving of Christmas-time and memory. The poet Mártin Ó Direáin was from the Aran Islands and wrote in Gaelic. His poems about Christmas capture beautifully and poignantly the dream and the reality that Christmas holds in tension for Christians. Here is his poem ‘An Invitation to Mary’ translated by Ciarán Mac Murchaidh in his wonderful book ‘Lón Anama -Poems for Prayer from the Irish Tradition’ (published by Cois Life).
This Christmas,like every other since the birth of Christ will be celebrated in hearts filled with peace and turmoil, in homes filled with pain and joy, and in a world filled with good and evil. Let me, like the poet, make an invitation to the great community of prayer that is you, our Sacred Space visitors, to pray together for each other, for our families, our country, our world this Advent. We can then in turn make our own invitation to Mary, to visit with Christ our little island of solitude and reflection nurtured through the prayer in our hearts this Christmas.
- Pat Coyle
From the Assistant Manager of the Irish Jesuit Communication Centre
Having studied religious education in Dublin and in New York, I spent some thirteen years teaching the discipline at third level, visiting schools and working with children and with their teachers, parents and priests. I became interested in the engagement of children in prayer and began to facilitate reflection and meditation in the classroom. It was a great joy to find effective strategies of moving from the child's experience of life or story to reflection and prayer. Incorporating these in the national catechetical texts and working with adults and children was challenging and fulfilling.
Somewhere in all of this talking and thinking about prayer, I found that my own prayer was returning to some basic questions of vocation. Following that path has led to working now in the Jesuit Communication Centre, not as an occasional visitor, but as Assistant Communications Manager where part of my work is concerned with Sacred Space.
We often have requests for new functions, links or suggestions about Sacred Space. People who have reflected and prayed with the site often ask for copies of prayers that are no longer online. As we answer these queries, we are building a picture of how we might better structure and present Sacred Space, while keeping a priority on the simplicity that is essential to the experience of praying online. At the moment we are reviewing how the site is put together and maintained. This involves postponing some developments and demands some patience from our translators and other contributors while we do our housekeeping.
All of these developments and considerations will keep us busy here in Dublin for some time. I look forward to working with the team here to support and resource the daily tide of prayer that Sacred Space generates around the world.
I hope that Sacred Space offers you a haven of calm at this season - we'll try to make sure that there's always room at our inn.
- Piaras Jackson, SJ
From a New Member of the Team
Newly arrived in the Jesuit Communication Centre, I am helping on the Sacred Space web site. I studied my theology in Colombia and was previously working in the Jesuit Youth Apostolate (www.sli-eile.com). I upload Living Space (the reflections of Frank Doyle SJ) on the daily and Sunday scriptures. These are really worth looking at; they can be found through a link at the bottom of the home page of Sacred Space.
I was invited to contribute the prayer reflections for the Advent Sacred Space retreat of this year (www.sacredspace.ie/retreat/advent06/) A group of young adults from the Gospel Choir Mass at St. Francis Xavier's Church , Gardiner Street, Dublin (www.gardinerstreetgospelchoir.com), will be coming together on Sunday 17th December, 3-6 p.m., to reflect on their experience of the retreat. It promises to be a great occasion. Although space is limited, if you are in the neighbourhood and are interested, you are invited to contact Sylvia at +353 86 6012711 or gallagher.s [at] mellon.com .
I also edit an internal Jesuit weekly newsletter (www.amdg.ie/amdg/weekly) and help in writing press releases for the Irish Jesuits. I am a trained teacher in dance-therapy (called Biodanza) and teach a weekly class (www.biodanzaireland.com) on how to "get out of your head and into your body!".
I wish everyone in the Sacred Space community a great Christmas. Let us not forget that "Jesus is the reason for the season" - a Light in the darkness.
- Brendan McManus, SJ
The Continuing Growth of the Sacred Space Community
Latest Space #11 in 2004 noted that the average number of visitors recorded on Sacred Space counter for each day of five weeks between Sunday, April 18, and Saturday, May 22 was: Mon.: 11,470; Tues.: 11,290; Wed.: 11,075; Thurs.: 11,480; Fri.: 11,475: Sat.: 5,890; Sun.: 6,830. The average for the five weekdays was 11,360, and for the days of the weekend 6,360.
On June 9, 2005, we reached 14 million visits since the site was launched on Ash Wednesday, 1999. Over the previous 12 weeks the average number of visitors for each day was:
Mon.: 14,644; Tues.: 14,514; Wed.: 14,133; Thurs.: 13,537; Fri.: 11,154: Sat.: 7,510; Sun.: 10,124.
The average for the five weekdays was 13,596, and for the days of the weekend 8,817.
Between Sat., Oct, 14, and Friday Dec.1, 2006, the average number of visitors for each day was:
Mon.: 19,283; Tues.: 17,882; Wed.: 18,087; Thurs.: 17,551; Fri.: 14,913; Sat.: 11,239; Sun.: 12,506.
The average for the five weekdays was 17,543, and for the days of the weekend, 11,439.
On Ash Wednesday of this year (March 1, 2006) the number of visitors recorded for the day was the highest ever - 26,118 - and the average number of visitors per day during Lent was close to 20,000. By Easter, 2006, the number of visits to the site had reached 18 million. Before the end of August, the counter had reached 20 million, and in mid-December, as we prepare to send out this newsletter, we have moved beyond 21,700,000 with the likelihood that 22 million will be reached before 2007 begins.
SACRED SPACE - THE PRAYER BOOK 2007
This is the third year that the book, based on the Sacred Space web site, has been published. According to reports, The Book 2007, like its predecessors in 2005 and 2006, has been selling very well. First published by Anderson Publications in Australia, the publishing rights for America were sold to Ave Maria Press, and for Ireland and England to Veritas Publications. Negotiations between the original publisher and St Paul's for publication in India and Africa are in progress. Ave Maria Press is to publish a special pamphlet form for Lent 2007. We may recall that the web site itself began on Ash Wednesday, 1999, as “something to do for Lent”.
The magazine, Books Ireland, December 2006, has this to say about the latest edition: “Trust the Jesuits to move successfully into a new medium. This is the third collection of prayers and meditations for different seasons of the year that have been accessed by twenty million visitors to www.sacredspace.ie This web site, which has been translated into twenty languages was originated by the Jesuit Communication Centre in Dublin.”
Another Irish magazine, The Furrow, writes: “Among the more imaginative efforts at evangelization made in Ireland in recent years, the Jesuit web site www.sacredspace.ie must rank highly. It reaches PC screens, and the people who sit at them, in ways that more conventional methods could never hope to equal. It offers a short (ten minute) guided prayer exercise in the Ignatian tradition, which includes the elements of awareness, the Word of God, questions for reflection and pointers for prayer. This book gives a structured, yet simple, approach to prayer for each day of 2007. It offers to those without access to a PC, or who simply prefer a book for this purpose, an easy to follow guide to prayer for each day. It is very much to be recommended as a means of making the gospel message, and the personal relationship with God which it offers, more readily accessible in the –hi-tech world of today.”
The Coming Months in Sacred Space
Loyola Press, Chicago, has offered to conduct a survey on Sacred Space that we hope will give us feedback on ways that we might better respond to the spiritual needs of the Sacred Space community. Early in 2007, there will be a link on our homepage inviting those who visit the site to participate in this endeavour. We look forward to your cooperation.
For the past few months, as mentioned by Fr. Piaras in his greeting above, work has been in progress to rebuild the Sacred Space web site in a way that will bring it up to current web standards and make it visually more appealing, while maintaining its current ethos of peace and removal from the busy world. It is hoped that not too long into the new year the new system will be functioning and will reduce the amount of maintenance required for the site by using technology to make the work easier, or even remove the need for maintenance, e.g. by writing a program that will eliminate the need to change the link to the daily scriptures by doing it automatically.
Already the reader may have seen, and even made, the Advent 2006 Retreat that was put together for the Sacred Space community by Fr. Brendan. He has promised another retreat for Lent 2007, which this coming year will begin on February 21st.
Spread the Word about Sacred Space
To help in spreading the word about Sacred Space, you might:
- Check the web site of your local diocese, parish, or other similar organization. Do they have a link to Sacred Space? If not, why not recommend a link? You might suggest that they use one of the icons to the left.
- Do your friends have homepages? Ask them to include a link to Sacred Space.
- Would your local newspaper (diocesan or otherwise) be interested in an article on Sacred Space? If you think so, do not hesitate to write and suggest one. There is plenty of material in past issues of Latest Space, or in the feedback of past years, archived from as far back as the year 2000. If they need more information, you might suggest that they contact us at feedback@jesuit.ie .
- Have you, or your family, or friends, ever considered a financial contribution to Sacred Space? Christmas might be a time to consider such a present that would help us in the coming year to respond as effectively as possible to the spiritual needs of our very special international community? Consult our link Support Sacred Space at the end of each day's prayer.
Happy Birthday, Jesus
As we look back on the many gifts
You have given throughout the year,
the blessings have been many, priceless
in every way, to some most dear.
And one of those gifts is Sacred Space.
We now share it with family and friends.
They too have found comfort each time
they visit; the blessings there never end.
And the people you have sent them
to enhance what was already there,
only shows the love You have for us,
a sign of Someone who really cares.
And what the New Year brings
is not for us to know right now.
But with confidence we march forward,
because You will pave the way somehow.
Together we can make a difference
to those that do not understand,
as we go about our day, sprinkling
Your love every chance we can.
So, as we gather together with
loved ones, open a present or two,
we celebrate Your Birthday, Jesus,
and the gift of life because of You.
Frances Berumen 11/26/06
(www.prayerinpoetry.com)