2013 Press Release

Dear Friends of the Murphy Initiative for Justice,

I wish you a Christmas and New Year filled with blessings and peace. As the sun turns and the light returns, my thoughts are drawn to where we have been and where we are going. I invite you to join us on this journey of the human spirit and the quest for a just and peaceful world.

As I sit in my cozy office, I think of my friend, John Dear. In this holiday season, John left the safety of home on a peace mission to Afghanistan whose young people are searching for non-violent resolutions to save the country they love. John’s courage inspires us all to do what we can to help a wounded world.

2012 brought new life to the Murphy Initiative:
• For Peace~ We revised our weekly update and website (www.pfmjpi.org) to inform and motivate.
Where words are not enough, we take action as with our weekly vigil in front of the Super Max to end
the death penalty.
• For Justice in the Church~ The Murphy Initiative was invited to organize for Nuns on the Bus. On a day of wild weather, we filled the Quaker House with supporters for LCWR. We joined the Board of the
Central Maryland Ecumenical Council and embarked on planning for the Christian Unity Day of Prayer
and the celebration for the 50th Anniversary of Vatican II.
• For Intercultural Relations ~We speak out about the horror of human trafficking to communities
and joined a task force to end modern slavery. We toiled hard on the campaign to bring the Dream Act
into reality in the state of Maryland. We support and give thanks to the work done by A.W.E. to shelter,
guide and save lives.
• For Education in Peace and Justice~ Along with Pax Christi, we presented the Peace Award in
seven local high schools. We look forward to honoring even more students this year. Opportunities
continue to open up in this area. We’ll be conducting classes through Mt. St. Agnes Theological Center
and offering a presentation at Loyola University in the spring.

Every gesture for peace is a prayer that our loving God hears. The Murphy Initiative continues in prayer and action to embrace the dream of a world without violence.

Please join us. Your gift can help make this dream come true.

Thank you for all you do for Peace.

Ever in our prayers with blessings from the heart,
Rosemary Maguire Thompson
Executive Director

“In the name of the Lord Jesus, and protected not by a helmet and buckler, but by the sign of the cross, I will thrust myself into the thickest squadrons of the enemy without fear.”

I grew up in the Catholic Worker tradition so for me this national holiday has taken on a deep and holy aspect. I grew up believing that hard work was to be respected. I was taught to be aware of those who labor for me; everyone from the garbage collectors to the varied individuals who touched our lives. Dorothy Day created the Catholic Worker as places where it is “easier to be good.” She said we were to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

I believe the working poor are especially loved by God. God has, we are told by our Church, a preferential option for the poor. The Beatitudes call us to elevate the meek (the Biblical word for poor) for” they shall inherit the earth.”

Sometime I worry that we know that God loves the poor and that is enough but it is not enough. As we watch politicians vie for more and more space in our newspapers and on our televisions and their rhetoric becomes increasingly more distasteful I wonder who is protecting God’s beloved poor.

Budget cuts to the very entities that are meant to offer assistance to the poor are at terrible risk. Until we stand up to say loud and clear “I care”; these most vulnerable and marginalized will suffer.

According to the most recent government statistics, there are 12 million Americans officially unemployed, millions more underemployed or have simply given up looking for work. There are 10 million “working poor “families and 46 million people including 16 million children living in poverty.

These facts are heartbreaking and yet there is hope. Every time we celebrate the human spirit and trust in God with our whole being we are working towards a new world.

“May God guide our nation in creating a more just economy that truly honors the dignity of work and the rights of workers” so wrote Bishop Blaire on behalf of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

I think Dorothy Day would agree!

What I recognize as the work of the Holy Spirit – John suggested that she reach out to the Murphy Initiative.

Basically, here is the issue. For years St Francis Academy has sponsored a peace camp for some of the very poorest kids in Baltimore City . Because of financial difficulties St Francis is not able to extend their hospitality . The staff and volunteers of the camp are filled with hope that the camp continue ( for one week in August ) but are struggling with optimism .
The need is critical and urgent. On behalf of John as well as the Murphy Initiative I am turning to you for help. Checks can be made out to Jesuit Volunteer Corps – with a note that says “ peace camp” and sent to our address.
Or you can go to our web site www.pfmjpi.org and use our donate button and we will turn the money over. 
You are the people I know who are committed to justice, care deeply about children and are living your lives in hope.
Thank you Blessings of peace, Rosemary

RE: A personal Message for John Dear- Please Pass on
Hi Nawal, Thank you so much for writing and sharing–and for all you do for peace! I am with you, 100%, except that I have no money…. I hope you will try to do the camp anyway, and I encourage you to keep on doing whatever you can for peace! This is the most important thing we can do with our lives. We have to practice nonviolence, and teach nonviolence, and form young people to be more and more nonviolent. I am copying this email to my friend Rosemary Thompson who lives and works in Baltimore and is the director of the Murphy Initiative, a great network of people working for peace and justice in Baltimore, see: www.pfmjpi.org. Perhaps Rosemary might be able to help! Thanks Rosemary for reading this… I sending every blessing of peace, hope and love, carry on, all the best, John
 www.johndear.org

Icon by Fr. Bill McNichols

“In a Buddhist monastery in northern Japan there is a statue of a young Irish-American woman whose memory is revered by many pilgrims. How a Catholic woman came to be honored as a Buddhist saint is an interesting story of “interreligious dialogue.” But it also says something about the convergent paths of holiness and their capacity to meet in a spirit of compassionate awareness. [...] Her short road to holiness in a Zen monastery has been compared to the compressed career of Therese of Lisieux, the French nun who set out as a child to become a saint. Both young women, having accomplished their spiritual business in this world, promptly departed.”- Robert Ellsberg All Saints: Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses For Our Time.

Maura O’Halloran was born in Boston in 1955 to an American mother and an Irish father. She was the eldest of six children. When she was four years old the family moved to Ireland and it was there that she was educated in convent schools. In 1966 they returned to Boston so that her father could go to the university for graduate studies. Unfortunately, he died in 1969 and so the following year, the O’Hallorans moved back to Ireland. Maura was fourteen years old when her father died. She continued her studies in Catholic convent schools and, after receiving excellent marks at her graduation from the secondary school, she obtained a scholarship for entry into Trinity College in Dublin where she graduated with joint degrees in mathematical economics/statistics and in sociology.

On December 10, 1979, Maura O’Halloran formally started her rigorous training in Zen at the Toshoji Temple in Tokyo. In this male monastery, she was the first Western woman to be accepted among the ranks of Japanese Buddhist monks. She fulfilled the temple duties of cleaning, cooking, gardening, washing, and ironing, along with several hours of meditation and study, the daily chanting and ritual in the temple, and religious ceremonies in private homes which monks were asked to perform. During the winter months she went with the other monks for their begging tours. She did everything her fellow monks did; they walked in the snow wearing only straw sandals and stockings on their feet, “with bare fingers holding a Buddha bowl on one hand and a bell with a cloth-wrapped handle (so the fingers don’t freeze) in the other.” She performed all of her duties diligently and generously and so fulfilled the requirement of Zen monks to work for twenty hours and sleep in the zazen position for three hours daily.

Under the guidance of her master she learned meditation practice and tried to solve the koans that were assigned to her. She completed her one thousand days of continuous Zen practice at the Kannonji Temple and solved all three thousand koans in that comparatively short time. So delighted and impressed was her Roshi (master) by her extraordinary progress that he tried repeatedly to convince her to marry one of the monks so that she could inherit the temple and replace him as its Roshi. This, of course, she turned down.

On August 7, 1982 she was officially certified as having reached “enlightenment,” an extraordinary achievement for one that had barely three years of training. After her death in a bus accident on the way to Cheng Mai, Thailand, she was given the posthumous name of “Great Enlightened Lady, of the same heart and mind as the Great Teacher Buddha” and proclaimed as the “reincarnation of Kannon Bosatsu, to be loved and respected forever.”

And yet, no less than the Roshi of the Kannonji Temple, in his condolence letter to the O’Halloran family, attested that Maura “Soshin” O’Halloran was “the modern Dogen” because she “achieved what took the Sahkuson (Shakyamuni Buddha) 80 years in twenty-seven years. She was able to graduate Dogen’s thousand-day training. Then she left this life immediately to start the salvation of the masses in the next life! Has anyone known such a courageously working Buddha as Maura? I cannot express my astonishment.”

How does Maura’s idea of good works as a Christian compared with her own reflection on her practices as a Buddhist monk? After having achieved “enlightenment” she wrote the following:

“I’m twenty-six and I feel as if I’ve lived my life. Any desires, ambitions, hopes I may have had have either been fulfilled or spontaneously dissipated. I’m totally content. Of course, I want to get deeper, see clearer, but even if I could only have this paltry, shallow awakening, I’d be quite satisfied. For myself there is nothing else to strive after, nothing more to make my life worthwhile or to justify it. If I have another fifty or sixty years (who knows?) of time, I want to live it for other people. What else is there to do with it? So I must go deeper and deeper and work hard, no longer for me, but for everyone I can help.” –  Pure Heart, Enlightened Mind: The Zen Journal and Letters of Maura “Soshin” O’Halloran

summer letter 2012