CSD Australia April 2016 Newsletter
Posted 1st February, 2016
The April 2016 CSD Newsletter is now available for you to download,
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Prayers
Posted 29th February, 2016
Dear CSD Members, we have received the sad news that Margaret Dwyer, long
time member of CSD, has recently been diagnosed with an aggressive form
of Motor Neurone Disease. We ask you to keep Margaret in your prayers.
Kind regards, Tim Moloney
National Chair
CSD Australia
CSD Australia February 2016 Newsletter
Posted 1st February, 2016
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CSD Australia December 2015 Newsletter
Posted 1st December, 2015
The December 2015 CSD Newsletter is now available for you to download,
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CSD Australia October 2015 Newsletter
Posted 1st October, 2015
The October 2015 CSD Newsletter is now available for you to download,
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CSD Australia August 2015 Newsletter
Posted 1st August, 2015
The August 2015 CSD Newsletter is now available for you to download,
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CSD Australia June 2015 Newsletter
Posted 1st June, 2015
The June 2015 CSD Newsletter is now available for you to download,
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CSD Australia April 2015 Newsletter
Posted 1st April, 2015
The April 2015 CSD Newsletter is now available for you to download,
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CSD Australia October 2014 Newsletter
Posted 1st Ocotber, 2014
The October 2014 CSD Newsletter is now available for you to download,
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Australian Ecumenical Council for Spiritual Direction Questionnaire
Posted 18th September, 2013
Forming tomorrow's spiritual directors today...
Dear colleague,
We need your help with forming spiritual directors by answering a questionnaire.
As the Australian Ecumenical Council for Spiritual Direction, we offer formation guidelines to programs training Australian spiritual directors. In 2008, we updated the Formation Guidelines: Recommendations to Foster, Support, and Recognise the Formation of Spiritual Directors in Australia. Since then, we have awarded Certificates of Recognitions to six eligible programs.
We recently set up a Formation Guidelines Review Committee to update the Formation Guidelines. The members of the Committee are John Auer, Peter Bentley, Tess Milne and Stephen Truscott.
Your responses to the questionnaire will help us to revise the Formation Guidelines. After collating and analysing your responses, we shall give all respondents feedback about the analysis that may help you form spiritual directors. From the analysis, we shall draft new guidelines for you to comment on. Your comments will help us to finalise the guidelines that we shall send to you.
We shall liaise with the programs we currently recognise about how they might use the new guidelines. We understand this could take some time to do, especially for part-time programs conducted over several years.
CLICK HERE to do the questionnaire and please complete by Monday 14 October.
Please send this email to anyone who could contribute to the review.
Thank you for helping to develop future Australian spiritual directors.
Peter Bentley
President AECSD
E. president@spiritualdirection.org.au
I. www.spiritualdirection.org.au
CSD Australia August 2013 Newsletter
Posted 28nd August, 2013
The August 2013 CSD Newsletter is now available for you to download,
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New Director for Heart of Life Spirituality Centre
Posted 30th July, 2013
Missionaries
of the Sacred Heart Provincial Superior, John Mulrooney msc, has announced
the appointment of Paul Beirne as Director of Heart of
Life Centre from 2014.
Paul comes to the position with extensive experience in leadership and in ministry in spirituality. Most recently, Paul was the Dean of Melbourne College of Divinity (now MCD University of Divinity), a position he held for eleven years. For some years he was also Professor of Comparative Religion, with a particular interest in Asian spiritualities. Paul was awarded the title of Emeritus Professor on his retirement in 2012.
Paul’s contact with the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart goes back to his secondary schooling at Downlands College, Toowoomba fifty years ago, and his involvement with Heart of Life to his graduation in Siloam (the formation program in spiritual direction) thirty years ago. This year, Paul is presenting a monthly seminar at Heart of Life on The Way of the Heart.
In welcoming Paul, John Mulrooney spoke also of the leadership of the present
director at Heart of Life, Sue Richardson pbvm. He noted, with gratitude,
that Sue will continue ministry at Heart of Life in 2014 when Paul begins
as director.
CSD Australia July 2013 Newsletter
Posted 2nd July, 2013
The July 2013 CSD Newsletter is now available for you to download,
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South Australian Region - Conference Report
'STARTING OUT' - Directing
Those Unfamiliar with the Inner Journey
Tue 11 Jun
2013, at ACD Common Room, 34 Lipsett Tce, Brooklyn Park
Report from Mary Cresp on SA Regional Conference
Despite cold and wet weather, 17 Spiritual Directors attended the Conference
on 11 June 2013 hosted by CSD and led by Suzanne Dunbar, B.Sc. Dip.Ed. MA
Spirituality.
Sue is well known in Australian Spiritual Direction circles. Currently Director
of Barnabas Ministries Inc, an ecumenical agency offering spiritual care
and nourishment for those on the journey of faith, Sue is also the director
of two training programs in spiritual direction in Newcastle and Canberra.
She trained in spiritual formation at the Institute for Spiritual Leadership,
Chicago, becoming a staff member there while completing a master’s degree
in Spirituality at Loyola University. Her generosity, interest and expertise
in spiritual formation has found expression in service as:
.. National President for the Australian Network for Spiritual Direction,
.. Australian Ecumenical Council for Spiritual Direction council member,
.. Eremos Retreat Team member ,
.. Various roles with Spiritual Directors International.
The topic chosen for the CSD Conference was popular – ‘Starting Out: Directing
Those Unfamiliar with the Inner Journey’. As Sue pointed out, Spiritual
Directors today frequently come into contact with people who are unfamiliar
with the interior journey. The encounter covers a wide range – dedicated
church-goers, devout people not adhering to any formalised religion, spiritual
seekers, people from other faith traditions, all those ‘in between’. ‘These
people often come without many of the personal skills and background that
could be assumed in the past’ said Sue.
Participants opened up the question by exploring what has changed in the
environment over the past 30 years, and how we might address it. Directors
can no longer take for granted that they share the moral norms, faith expression
and underlying theology of those who seek accompaniment. The experience
of Directors verified Sue’s point that ‘the landscape of Spiritual Direction
in 2013 is a larger and more diverse environment than existed previously.’
Just as the milieu in which theories for the conduct of Spiritual Direction
were devised in the 1970s has changed, so too might attitudes towards some
of the rules then established have to become more flexibile. For example,
there may well be occasion when the ‘script’ calls for more than merely
reflecting back what the Directee says. Sometimes a ‘teaching moment’ calls
for faith sharing, especially when the seeker is looking for a way out of
ignorance. How this is done demands sensitivity and care on the part of
the Director. The stance of Presence allows the encounter, then, to be one
of contemplation.
All participants were high in their praise of a very satisfying and nourishing
conference.
CSD Australia,
CSD Australia May 2013 Newsletter
Posted 22nd May, 2013
The May 2013 CSD Newsletter is now available for you to download,
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Fr Bill Connolly sj - RIP
Posted 20th April, 2013
Father Bill Connolly died in Boston on April 5. Bill is well remembered in Australia because of his several visits and workshops for spiritual directors (with Madeline Birmingham) in 1980s.
Bill
Connolly and Bill Barry founded the Centre for Religious Development (CRD)
in Boston in 1970, a centre for spiritual direction and the formation of
spiritual directors. Later Bill and Bill wrote the classic The Practice
of Spiritual Direction, first published in 1982.
Our association was initially called CRD, named after the Boston centre
where most of our early members had graduated as spiritual directors. Later
the name was changed to CSD (the Conference of Spiritual Directors) to respect
the broader, expanding membership. Still, the contemplative approach to
spiritual direction, first promoted by Bill Connolly and CRD has remained
our primary focus. As it has for formation programs for spiritual directors
around the world.
(Picture: Brian Gallagher with Bill Connolly at Croydon early 1980's).
Below is Bill Barry’s homily at the funeral Mass for Bill Connolly. May he rest in peace.
During the prayers for the dying for Bill, Bob Levens read from the book of Job. It struck Peg (Bill’s sister) and me as appropriate for Bill’s funeral Mass. Bill was a very passionate man, but he did not wear his heart on his sleeve. However, I do recall one time years ago when he was overcome with emotion while giving a homily during an 8 day directed retreat at Eastern Point Retreat House. Bill was speaking about God’s love for us when he choked up and almost could not go on.
The passion of Job in the first reading speaks of Bill’s passion for God:
For I know that my Redeemer lives,
and that at the last he will stand upon the earth;
and after my skin has been thus destroyed,
then in my flesh I shall see God,
whom I shall see on my side,
and my eyes shall behold, and not another.
My heart faints within me!
Bill now has what he wanted all his life, to see God face to face. Let’s rejoice with him.I chose the reading from Luke about Jesus’ teaching his disciples to pray because Bill spent most of his adult life teaching people to pray and training others to help people with their prayer. But it was the way that he helped people that made such a difference to people around the globe and to the whole enterprise of spiritual direction. Bill took very seriously the message of the 15th Annotation of the Spiritual Exercises, which warns the one who gives the Exercises not to get in the way of the Creator dealing directly with the creature and the creature directly with the Creator. Bill passionately believed that God wants a personal relationship with each one of us, and he gave his life and energy to helping individuals to engage in that personal relationship and to helping spiritual directors become the kind of people to whom others would want to speak about their experience of the relationship with God. We can easily forget how unusual it was for spiritual directors to listen to people’s experience of God prior to the early 1970s. Spiritual direction in those days was most often a matter of giving advice, hearing confessions, or solving problems. Through experience Bill had learned that people wanted to talk about their relationship with God and that he very much enjoyed listening to people talk about their experience of God. He helped all of us who had a hand in the founding of the Center for Religious Development to learn what he had learned. Those early years of CRD were the most exciting and creative of my life, I would have to say, and Bill played a big part in that excitement and creativity. Spiritual direction throughout the world has been influenced by what we did in those days, and Bill was at the heart of our enterprise. What was it that set him apart. Well, it was rather simple: he paid attention.
Iris Murdoch, an avowed agnostic, once wrote that “prayer is properly not petition, but simply an attention to God, which is a form of love.” Repeat. If this is true, and I believe it is, then Bill Connolly spent a lot of his time in prayer. My Lord, could he pay attention, whether it was to the sea, the sky, birds, another person, the words of scripture or the words of Ignatius of Loyola! The attention he paid was a form of love of God, and a very profound form at that. Those of us who worked at the Center for Religious Development learned from him how to pay attention, how to be contemplative in the deep sense that Ignatius means that word. Simone Weil, a great influence on Iris Murdoch, wrote eloquently about attention and compassion, which seem like synonyms in her work. She notes that in one version of the Grail legend the knight who wins the Grail is the one who, instead of fighting the old, wounded protector of the Grail, asks “What are you going through?” In other words, this knight lays down his sword, pays attention to the knight and shows compassion. At its heart, she believes, compassion means “to give one’s attention to a sufferer” which “is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle.” Bill Connolly was one of those rare miracles. She continued: The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: “What are you going through?” It is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen from the social category labeled “unfortunate,” but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark of affliction. For this reason it is enough, but it is indispensable, to know how to look at him in a certain way.
Weil’s description of this look comes down to this: to look with attention and care at the person without worrying about oneself. This is the kind of look Bill Connolly practiced and which helped so many to know God in a new and intimate way. At CRD we called this kind of look or attention the contemplative attitude; with this attitude we forget ourselves and pay attention to the other in all that other’s uniqueness. What this look does is to make the other feel a part of the human family, even when we cannot do anything to change their circumstances. With this look we are acting as images of God who looks in this way at all of us suffering and wayward human beings. Indeed, Weil once wrote: “God is absent from the world, except in the existence of those in whom His love is alive. There they ought to be present in the world through compassion. Their compassion is the visible presence of God here below.”
Bill was the visible presence of God here below for many, many people, and through his work in training spiritual directors now scattered around the globe he helped other spiritual directors to become the visible presence of God here below. A few years ago I read a memoir by Tony Hendra, the British entertainer, about his teacher, a monk named Father Joe. In this excerpt he is talking about engaging in improvisation in the theater. It runs this way: The advice I’d gotten from every source … was: listen. Listen at every level: to the words, the emotions, the intent of the other or others. Be completely open to them, bring nothing preconceived or prepared to the moment. Listen and then speak only to what you’ve heard. Do that, and you can’t go wrong. Improv is not just a means to entertain, it’s also a process that is an end in itself, a way of knowing, of grasping the nature of another, the reality of the other’s existence, an aspect of the truth of the matter under discussion which you thought you knew but didn’t until this moment. Which is also why a successful improv is exhilarating, uplifting, enlightening, renewing. That first night after we wrapped I did feel rather exhilarated and uplifted – if not yet enlightened and renewed. There’d been only two short scenes and my role was pretty secondary, but something remarkable had happened both times, and that simple advice had done it: listen.
As I pondered this, a memory was suddenly standing in the far shadows of my mind: hadn’t Father Joe twenty or more years ago said an almost identical thing?
The only way to know God, the only way to know the other, is to listen. Listening is reaching out into that unknown other self, surmounting your walls and theirs; listening is the beginning of understanding, the first exercise of love.
None of us listen enough, do we, dear? We only listen to a fraction of what people say. It’s a wonderfully useful thing to do. You almost always hear something you didn’t expect.Bill Connolly listened that way to people, and he helped spiritual directors to listen in that way. Because he listened in this way thousands of people in his own lifetime came to realize that God wanted their friendship, and the world is a better place as a result. Because of his pioneering work this kind of spiritual direction continues to live on and will continue to live on, to the greater glory of God. It is so like Bill that this great contribution has gone almost unnoticed beyond a relatively small circle of people. Bill always wanted to give God the glory. But now God is thanking you, Bill, for your self-effacing focus on him and on what he was doing in the hearts of those to whom you ministered. Bill, while the honor and the glory belong to God, we also honor you and thank you for your great love of God and of God’s people. Peg and the rest of your family thank you with full hearts and tear-filled eyes for your quiet, but real love of them. Your Jesuit brothers thank you for your single-minded focus on God and for helping us to know better the treasure we have in the Spiritual Exercises. For me, meeting you was life-changing; as a result of our friendship and our work together I got rid of the hyphenated Jesuit-psychologist identity and became a more unified Jesuit. With all my heart, with all our hearts, thanks Bill for helping us to come closer to God.
Fr Adrian Lyons sj - RIP
Posted 20th April, 2013
Adrian Lyons sj, a member of CSD, died at 6.00am on Easter Tuesday, 2
April, 2013 at Caritas Christi Hospice, Kew, Vic., aged 70 years. Adrian
was a very talented spiritual director and presenter. He was preparing for
very active ministry earlier last year when he was diagnosed with lung cancer.
Just two weeks prior to his death, Adrian participated in a book launch
at Campion for two publications that he had authored. He was active to the
end.
To his Jesuit confreres, and undoubtedly many others, he was a man with
a listening heart. Formator, Educator, Chaplain, Vocations Promoter, Parish
Priest, Editor, Author, Spiritual Director, etc, Adrian was many things
to many people. We are grateful for his life and pray he will live into
Easter joy.
We are thankful for the contributions and influence of these two men on
our lives. May they rest in peace.
CSD Australia March 2013 Newsletter
Posted 25th March, 2013
The March 2013 CSD Newsletter is now available for you to download,
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Included in this month's CSD Newsletter:
- Easter Morning Reflection
- Details for this year's Regional Conferences
- A welcome to New Members
- CSD National eConference 2014
- Membership Renewals for 2013
- Tribute to Trish Dance
- CSD Reference Group
- Dates to Note in 2013
Please Note: CSD Australia has a new address - please
send all postal correspondence to:
P O Box 171, Surrey Hills Vic 3127.
CSD December 2012 Newsletter
Posted 23rd December, 2012Dear Members,
Please find attached our December 2012 newsletter ,
the first instalment by our new chair Tim Moloney cfc.
Best wishes to you all for a blessed Christmas.
Kind regards,
Cecilia Rogers Secretary & Treasurer CSD Australia
New Chair for CSD Australia
Posted 8th October, 2012
The
AGM of the Conference of Spiritual Directors, Australia elected a new chairperson
on September 21, 2012. Tim Moloney was elected unopposed. Tim is a Christian
Brother, 56 years of age, the eldest in a Melbourne family of four boys,
all Richmond supporters. Tim resides in St. Kilda in Melbourne.
Over the years, Tim has worked in Victoria and Tasmania, in South Africa, Tanzania and Kenya, as a teacher, property manager, formator and spiritual director. He graduated in Siloam at the Heart of Life Centre in 2007, ministered at Emmanuel Centre in Launceston in 2010, and currently studies and works part-time at Campion Centre in Kew. Tim is also a Cluster Leader for the Christian Brothers, offering pastoral care for 28 brothers in Hobart and Melbourne.
Tim will be chair of CSD for a period of three years. His contact details
are
P O Box 171, Surrey Hills VIC 3127
tjmoloney@edmundrice.org
0423 611 758
These words are Tim’s own:
I love travelling with others in spirituality and being a spiritual director. The need for exploration into the things that matter in our lives in this day and age is critical, as our Universe evolves and the Church is in transition. Also there are new names for God and emerging spiritualities, some new and some old ones revisited, that are facing us as we sense and experience the Spirit moving in our midst. So the future is exciting. For most of us current spiritual directors, we were born into a structure of religion and grew into spirituality. Most people today have a spirituality and are searching for somewhere to ‘pitch a tent’, to share their stories, and I am sure we can be there to accompany them.
I am delighted to be the National Chairperson of CSD and I am appreciative of the many messages of support I have received from so many members. I am also very grateful for the work Brian Gallagher, Kevin Hennessy and Yvonne Harte have achieved in setting up a new framework in which we can confidently move forward. It is my hope as we do move forward as an association that we can grow together and support each other in our important ministry.
CSD Conference September 2012
Further Steps on the Way of the Heart
Posted 8th October, 2012
The 2012 CSD Conference was held at the James Knox Centre, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, East Melbourne, on September 21.
2011 eConference
The Way of the Heart : Journeys of Transformation
Posted 8th October, 2012