this THE CALL


The time I took my life into my prayer
Was when I said to you, simply, you bore me
For then it happened, you were everywhere
And my life suddenly no longer stormy.

The self within and what I call my life
Became identical and I was new
The preferential option for the strife
Dissolved as you gave me yourself as you.

This is the bliss that waits upon us all
Who have to learn a self no longer two,
The dualism that prevents the call
From coming through to the deep self from you

To tell us as no one on earth is able
That we are loved, and not otherwise stable.






























HOW CAN JESUS OF NAZARETH BE COSMIC?


The enormous leap that has to take place for the entire cosmic evolutionary process to be believed to be concentrated and directed to an unimaginable fulfilment in one human being, this leap is simply inconceivable unless that being is seen as transformed into such a being as Saul of Tarsus encountered on the road to Damascus, a vision so luminous that it blinded and floored him, and unless that being is in the baffling new state encountered by his disciples: further, unless the identity between this new man and the man they knew had been for them a fact even more overwhelming than what Saul encountered who had never known the man: unless these conditions were fulfilled, as we believe they were, the cosmic claim for Jesus of Nazareth cannot be sustained. For myself, I have only just seen how simply devastating must have been the realisation that the humble and awesome Galilean and the heavenly man they now knew were one and the same person. To be convincingly cosmic, he has to be devastatingly risen from the dead.

































THE ORIGINAL DUALISM


The fundamental dualism is between I and me, and this is dissolved by the Spirit in the Tolle night. It appears also in Eliot’s The Dry Salvages, section 3 (see the following note), as the point of intersection of the timeless with time, an occupation for the saint. This dualism and its dissolution appear with the force of divine revelation as the identity between the pain-body, Jesus crucified, and Jesus risen the man of heaven, so victorious over death that he is, as risen, his Body the Church. As a devastating sign of the revelation, the pain-body vanishes, leaving the tomb empty. And the victim thus manifestly undisposed-of shows the failure of our dualistic order of sin to maintain itself by victimizing and thus disposing of him who challenges it. So here too, with the empty tomb seen in the shock of the Resurrection, we see, in the consummation, the tortured one through Easter eyes. Having seen the tortured victim with Easter eyes, with Easter eyes we see him buried and not disposed of.

I knew all this intuitively before I could explain it, for after reading Tolle for the first time I found I could look in on Jesus risen and feel the air escaping from the inflatable toy of the ego. This I understood as Jesus dying, and in the same insight I understood how Paul can talk of crucifying the flesh, meaning that the dying of Jesus was a dying to sin, as Paul says. Sin is the dualistic world we live in that Jesus dissolves.

Now classicism is of course dualistic, a dualism of truth lived and true spoken, from which historical thinking is the beginning of emancipation. Rome’s present attempt to undo Vatican II takes the form of applying a classical critique to the Council’s documents.

Why is all this suddenly clear, when at 1AM tomorrow the world stock-market opens in Tokyo and we shall soon see whether the Brown salvage plan is working.















IN AN ANXIOUS TIME

Men’ curiosity searches past and future
And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint.

First of all, what we are dealing with in this time of intense anxiety over world money, is curiosity not of an idle dreamy kind such as the examples Eliot has just given to lead up to the above momentous passage, but of the most urgent kind, the huge, terrifying what-if that is made of my immediate situation in this global financial crisis.

So the first thing is to voice his what-if, in all its acuteness, to speak it, to face it, to spell it out: if these particular securities were suddenly voided…

Then be acutely aware of yourself clinging to that curiosity heated up. Breathe it, repeat it to yourself in a concentrated way. Cling to that dimension in you mind, in yourself. Suddenly realise that you are attached to your worry, addicted to it. This is important. Since you want the anxiety, you can drop it. This is odd, but it’s true. It’s to do with what Tolle calls the pain-body which he defines as an inherited addiction to unhappiness, the tragic history into which I am born though I in myself am immaculate, loved into being.

Then look at yourself clinging to this anxiety, and say, ‘you poor thing!’ Take pity on yourself in this acute state.

Now comes the difficult bit. Do I say ‘now this is not me!’ or do I let the frightening possibility into me and say, ‘this is me, and there is only me’? I think the latter, because it makes me feel helpless. And alone!

Now where I am alone is where I am not alone. Where I am only me with my anxiety is where I can let something else in. Something that perhaps I am coming to know when I am doing my favourite meditative exercise. Bring the different experience, of loving myself in God, of feeling not alone when I am most alone, most me, to bear on this moment of me, desperately worried. It’s the same me, after all, only now I am not alone. It’s as though the peaceful sense of not-alone had slipped across and attached itself to the anxious me-alone.

There are no exact words for this, because it is not in our control. It is a learned passivity that makes room for me-not-alone-in-prayer-time to move across the mind—or body if you like—and attach itself to me-now-so-anxious.

When you get a hint of this, let in more of it.

Now look at the Eliot passage again. Just where you cling to your anxiety is where you may suddenly let go. Just where you can feel yourself clinging is where you don’t have to cling, you can uncling and surrender to what is trying to happen in you, where you are passive.

Now read Tolle at the beginning of his book, when he realises that there is only one me, alone and terrified. Then the key words, unique in all spiritual literature I think: resist nothing! Don’t insist on yourself, let yourself be annihilated. The moment of release from fear, classically described by Eliot as coming at ‘the point of intersection of the timeless (I) with time (me) This moment is given ‘neat’ in the Tolle description, and is what I am trying to enter in this time of stress.

is me, and there is only me’

PROPHETIC MOMENT?

A PROPHETIC MOMENT

Here is what looks like the description of a prophetic moment. It is the experience recorded by Eckhart Tolle as the foundation of his book ‘The Power of Now.’

‘I cannot live with myself any longer.’ This was the thought that kept repeating itself in my mind. Then suddenly I became aware of what a peculiar thought it was. ‘Am I one or two? If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the ‘I’ and the ‘self’ that ‘I’ cannot live with. ‘Maybe,’ I thought, only one of them is real.’
I was so stunned by this strange realization that my mind stopped. I was fully conscious, but there were no more thoughts. Then I felt drawn into what seemed like a vortex of energy. It was a slow movement at first and then accelerated. I was gripped by an intense fear, and my body started to shake. I heard the words ‘resist nothing’ as if spoke inside my chest. I could feel myself being sucked into a void. It felt as if the void was inside myself rather than outside. Suddenly, there was no more fear, and I let my self fall into that void. I have no recollection of what happened after that.
I was awakened by the chirping of a bird outside the window. I had never heard such a sound before. My eyes were still closed, and I saw the image of a precious diamond. Yes, if a diamond could make a sound, this is what it would be like. I opened my eyes. The first light of dawn was filtering through the curtains. Without any thought, I felt, I knew, that there is infinitely more to light than we realise.
Tolle came into a crisis that was prophetic: where he could not any longer live the way we all do, as a duality of inner consciousness and the world into which we are born, of gender, race, and an infinity of other loyalties. He said,’I cannot any longer live with myself’ and a voice asked him, ‘am I two then, me and my life?’

The blinding insight ‘maybe only one of them is real’ put an end, programmatically (very!!), to history as we know it, that has as its principle source of suffering the tension between our inner and our outer world. Who has not known, who does not know, this tension?

It was suffered in a way revelatory for all of us in the son of Mary, who was to question the rabbis from a centre that was destined, through his Passion and Resurrection, to be the habitat of us all and of all the earth.

Once you see this, so much poetry throbs with it, especially the Quartets of Eliot and the Duino Elegies of Rilke. Did not Rilke come to have the fantasy that the whole world was destined to become invisible? Here’s Eliot:

The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So,while the light falls
On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England. Little Gidding V


I seek the bliss of being one not two,
To have no longer what I call my life
But lose it in an all-containing you
Denied the ancient luxury of strife.

We are addicted to unhappiness
That sinks roots deep beyond my power to grasp,
I think I let it go once in the Yes
To love, but then so soon I had to clasp.

Two did become one in the faith I know:
Jesus the man of earth and heaven too
All pain assumed into the generous flow
Of you for whom no way can I be two.

O God in Jesus hold me firm and bind,
Make this more than an exercise of mind!


Sebastian Moore
Feast of St Francis, 2008

NEW SECULARITY

A NEW SECULARITY

‘Even in apologetic terms, it seems wiser for theology to risk rejection of Christian claims for the right reason—and not because of a truncated or excessively abstract intellectual position.’ ‘The Resurrection Effect: transforming Christian life and thought’ by Anthony J.Kelly, Orbis 2008

Recently, Stefan Reynolds, who was staying with us unfolded for me a very striking idea, one that resonated with me at the most live points in my thinking. The idea was this. The classical theologians, such as Ratzinger and Balthasar, have, as the human base of their theology, the Bible and a whole mass of reflections on the Bible. For them, faith in search of understanding goes to this source as their terra firma. They do not draw on a world outside the Bible for their basic images, symbols, culture. It is the Bible that is to come alive in explication of salvation through and in Christ. It is the Old Testament that the New elucidates.

Let me be more precise. The more these theologians are concerned with the very substance of salvation, with what being saved consists in, the more strictly confined they are to the Bible to make clear and appealing what they have to say about the human condition and its transformation by Christ. And yet the closer you come to the risen Jesus, the more cosmic becomes your perspective.

Now what my friend was suggesting was that outside the Bible there is to be found the rudiments of a spiritual culture, of a meta-anthropology, unknown or at least not consulted by Ratzinger and Balthasar as the prime human datum. And my friend was claiming far more for this alternative anthropological base: namely that, being much more attuned to modern consciousness than is the Bible, it can make manifest the beauty and humanity of our transformation in Christ, more deeply human, and vividly than does Holy Writ. And as my friend talked, with some passion, I found that I do, in fact, draw on extra-biblical sources more deeply and fruitfully than on the Bible.

Let me ta this stage make a check-list of these sources. The massive work of Rene Girard for starters. There is nothing in the theology of Balthasar like the way Girard finds Christ in Dostoevsky, Nietzsche in a way, a whole slew of literature both novelistic and dramatic. Next, for me, come Focusing or Biospirituality, that enables me to discern and speak out of what I call a soft spot of tenderness to myself and to others, an expansive tenderness. How much more closely this speaks of the love of God and neighbour as the perceived grammar of the soul than does the Bible, certainly than does the Bible theologically interpreted, this regarded, I hasten to add, as the exclusive available human ground. It is ‘the Bible only’, not the Bible as humanity in the raw—for God’s sake, The Song of Songs, David and Jonathan etc –that I am critical of, the Bible as salvation’s anthropology. Back to my list. Next, Eckhart Tolle and all the other teachers who embody what has been well called the Awakening West. Then the contemporary sources of self-understanding in relation to the ground of being, such as the Enneagram and the Myers-Briggs inventory

I know that there are more. But even the ones I have listed come together to form a very incomplete ‘organon’ of spiritual self-understanding, that has about it a vividness, a closeness to the nerve of being conscious today, that, although very patchy when compared with the huge array of biblical illustration, gives the unmistakable feeling of must-have, and, above all, making a theological system confined to the world of the Bible seem—provincial?

And of course there is the phenomenology of Husserl, that transforms data into the given-to-us, brilliantly used by Anthony Kelly (Catholic University of Australia) to show in all his immediate splendour Jesus the risen man.

The feeling I get when I read Ratzinger and Balthasar is the question ‘are they reading these people, at least with immediate enthusiasm, do they feel what I am coming to know? I use the word provincial, and it is rude of me, but I hope I convey what I mean. I recall John L.Allen in his life of Ratzinger—which he seems to have forgotten about in his recent, dull and proper account of ‘the new pope’—interviewed the German theologians who were in Ratzinger’s set, who, asked whether they recommended his books to students, answered no, he’s a brilliant theologian but not that extra bit interesting.

I have just read a brilliant piece by Robert Bellah on Charles Taylor, and what he is saying Taylor does for us is this. Modern secularity has emancipated itself from Christian culture, that is to say, not from Christianity but from a social situation in which Christianity was not only available for people to choose and become saints in, but was the way you had to be to be civilized, Christianity as the criterion of decent living. Now to be shot of that sort of Christianity was ‘a good thing’, a becoming free of that most constricting thing, Christianity as imposed—one thinks of the nightmare of Franco’s Spain. The secularity that secedes from Christian culture enjoys something of that freedom which a Christian saint enjoys, as a saint and not as a ‘good Christian.’

Now I think there is a connection between this secularity as opposed to membership of a Christian society, a secularity with some freedom of spirit, and the condition I am writing about, of being able to understand myself and life and the world, the better for not being limited to the Bible for my self-elucidation. The freedom to cast in other and deeper waters is a beautiful thing that I feel the lack of in the biblically limited theologian. I’ve always had this feeling that Ratzinger is ‘provincial’, and now I would add ‘and his province is the Bible.’

Self-recognition in another mirror
Than that provided by our holy writ
More accurate about our under terror
The sense now of a deeper, truer fit.

Not only is the self accommodated
But Jesus too and what he does to us
And it’s as though for this he has long waited
To be immediately glorious.

Then suddenly the Bible is too narrow
For him and us and our condition
To show me what he is, my insight’s arrow
On its true make where something new is won.

While high authority in this perspective
Looks insecure and nervously corrective.

Maybe this shift I am experiencing to an extra-biblical inspiration for receiving the benefit of Jesus has something to do with the Nietzsche disturbance, that ‘profound and ancient trust turned to doubt’ that he detected today. It does fit really. What is happening is that ‘the soul of man’ is awaking to the fact that it is only in a cultured embodiment that it has been trustful . The trust is something imposed by the culture, itself loosely Christian in memory. We put on these clothes in which we look trustingly at the unknown. But now the clothes come off, and the soul shivers.

It is true that what I have been describing is not the loss of all cultural clothes in which we once trusted, only the loss of biblical clothes. Still, biblical clothes are being discarded not in favour of new clothes but, as it were, of a new and frightening immediacy to ourselves—and remember the Tolle moment!—as we confront the unknown. There is this new sense of immediacy as I invoke the Tolle moment, or the felt sense in Focusing, or self-exposure in the Enneagram, or my subjection to a world of insistent mutual imitation from which a transforming love would free me. In these facilitators, rather than in that of the Bible.

Perhaps the point is that these alternative ways of being self-immediate are saying that it’s up to me, not to the God of the Bible. ‘Up to me’ comes to the same thing as ‘no longer trusting a power not me.’ But once I say that it is up to me, I invoke, nakedly, the unknown. This may be what Taylor means by a new secularity.

And of course we have to factor in here the chronic crisis of authority set up in the church by the encyclical Humanae Vitae, for a crisis of authority in the one church that claims it in a unique way ministers to the deep fear to which Nietzsche came to point, as ‘a profound and ancient trust turned to doubt.’ This is all of a piece with the fact that authority in Rome is so moved by the fear of losing control, that, in a recent outright attack on the standard history of Vatican II by an official of the Secretariat of State, the author is driven to the preposterous expedient of discrediting the minutes of the last General Council of the Church. The author is Archbishop Agostino Marchetto, and his book had a launch in Rome on 17 June 2005. It consisted in a systematic attack on the afore-mentioned History, and was said to give ‘the Holy See’s point of view on that milestone event.’ This points, somewhat polemically, to a crisis in the church, which not surprisingly reflects the crisis of our time.

2

‘When modern science began, when the Enlightenment began, then the theologians began to reassure one another about their certainties.’ The second part of this essay applies the wisdom of Bernard Lonergan, evident in this statement.

Truth is served, and charity maintained, only when the diagnosis of our time is deep and wide and comes up with general statements that are apposite. An example of this kind of diagnosis is Lonergan’s notion of the classical in our self-analysis. That mentality is classical for which the word culture does not provoke the question ‘whose culture? Of ‘what culture? but refers to something that the educated have and the uneducated lack, culture as the happy possession of the cultured. Today, however, there are many cultures. The fascinating thought occurs to me that Girard uses the word culture to indicate a mid-point between the old, universal meaning, and the new and multiple one. For he talks about ‘the culture’and means what theology means by ‘the world’, the world under the reign of death that Jesus has effectively challenged for us. Between ‘culture’, the privilege of the educated, and ‘cultures’ that are innumerable, is ‘the culture’ that you or I or anyone in the world are in and are addressed by the challenge of the Good News of emancipation from it. We are resistant to the Gospel for the real reason, as I say in my opening quote: it badly upsets us.

Now that mentality is classical which not only is still understanding of ‘culture’ in the old universalist way but mistakes its certainties for the deeper certainty of faith itself. ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’ translates straight into the dogmas of the church as generally understood. And the passion and militancy of faith is attached to its formulas as themselves dictating the way we are to think if we wish to remain faithful.

It was not for nothing that Pope John opened his Council with the statement ‘the faith is one thing, the way it is expressed is another.’ A mentality that has never been at ease with the Council is in denial of that distinction, and so puts the whole weight of belief into its classic formulas.

Behind this way of thinking is the classical, or, better, the classicist mentality. And we need a clear understanding of how this becomes obsolete. It becomes obsolete when it ceases to speak to us as we consciously are. It becomes obsolete not through some itch for novelty, though of course the itch, in the intelligent, exploits the development in the observed process of ongoing life and which Eliot called a changing sensibility.

Theologians tend to downplay the Zeitgeist. But of course there is the spirit of a time, the feeling of what it like really—and boringly and horrifically and gloriously, to cite Eliot—being alive now. The zeitgeist that is rightly criticised is this sense of now regarded as something easily tapped and appealed to by politicians.

So, back to the ‘classicist’ way of thinking. Here is a good statement by Lonergan. Referring to the alleged crisis of faith that believers today are going through, he says that it is ‘a crisis not of faith but of culture. There has been no new revelation from on high to replace the revelation given through Jesus Christ. There has been written no new Bible and there has been founded no new church to link us with him. But Catholic philosophy and Catholic theology are matters, not merely of revelation and faith, but also of culture. Both have been fully and deeply involved in classical culture,’ and ‘that culture’, adds Nicholas Lash, ‘has now, irretrievably, broken down.’ Lash is not going further than Lonergan here, as I know from a long acquaintance with both.

This description is devastating in its implications. For take this classicist mentality and imagine it exercised not only by a politician or by an art critic but by one concerned with God’s self-disclosure to us in Jesus crucified and risen and Spirit-imparting, the believer as theologian in other words. Now the classicist mentality as a preferred way to think about politics or art or just life in general is the way one thinks one’s faith. Then the feeling of thinking universally enjoyed by the person becomes the privileged medium of the universality of God’s love in Christ, and commitment to God in Christ becomes the commitment to its formulas. And now take a further step. Suppose the ‘person’ we are thinking about is the pope, he whom God is believed to have appointed to confirm the faith of his brethren’ (gospel ref here) Here the attraction of classicism can seem overwhelming, enhanced daily by the the sight of the Bernini Colonnade.

Now comes the most tricky part. Vatican II was a huge graduation into historical thinking on the part of its participants, themselves schooled for this by ‘periti’ or experts, theologians the most challenging of whom had been severely disciplined by the Holy Office for the way the were doing theology. With Vatican II, they cane into their own. Not least of them was Joseph Ratzinger. Thus the Council, not only on the floor but, more importantly, in several working parties, was a schooling of the world’s bishops in thinking historically—of which relativism is the abuse—about the grand themes of Catholic truth. They came up with ‘decrees’ that were voted-in nearly unanimously. One American bishop said to John Todd, my oldest friend in the world, ‘some of the theology was above our heads, but we saw that the periti were on the side of freedom and the curial people were negative about freedom, so we voted for freedom. A candid admission that could be used, obviously against me.

Now comes the crucial question. How is a mind still wedded to classicist thinking going to judge an extensive product of historical thinking? And how is it so to judge, knowing that it has a papal magisterium? Inevitably, the ecclesial authority vested in those who exercise this judgment will reinforce the classicism with which they judge this extensive product of historical thinking? But, to reiterate, how is this entrenched classicist approach going to interpret the monumental documents with which it is faced? Well first of all, it will take them as documents solemnly given to the world as the teaching of the church, they will demand unequivocal respect for them. How is this respect to be paid by the classicist mentality to these documents other than to ‘classicize’ them? This means to read them not as the record of a profound change of mind from the ‘siege mentality’ of the post-Tridentine church into a changed way of being the church we always were, but as a set of statements about the various topics that certainly did not contradict anything previously believed, but did cry out ‘it all looks new!’ This cry, which was for Pope John aggiornamento—which means attunement to the Zeitgeist deeply understood as what it feels like to be a Catholic Christian today, was not heard, could not be heard, by a classicist mind. Such a mind reads the documents with an inbuilt filter that lets through the live, vibrant elements, and leaves behind ‘a truth that has not changed: only its life in us has: only it has come to life in our minds with the conversion from a static classicist way of thinking into a historical way that has irreversibly replaced it.

Now let me call upon the reader’s patience. I ask you to read the following statement by Pope Benedict, and see whether it is, in the light of my analysis, more or less predictable.

Problems in the implementation of the Council arose from the fact that two contrary hermeneutics came face to face and quarrelled with each other. One caused confusion, the other, silently but more and more visibly, bore and is bearing fruit. On the one hand, there is an interpretation that I would call ‘a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture’..on the other, there is the ‘hermeneutic of reform’, of renewal in the continuity of the one subject-Church which the Lord has given to us. She is a subject which increases in time and develops, yet always remaining the same, the one subject of the journeying People of God. The hermeneutic of discontinuity risks ending in a split between the pre-conciliar Church and the post-conciliar Church. It asserts that the texts of the Council as such do not yet express the true spirit of the Council. It claims that they are the result of compromises in which, to reach unanimity, it was found necessary to keep and reconfirm many old things that are now pointless. However, the true spirit of the Council is not to be found in these compromises, they assert, but instead in the impulses toward the new that are contained in the texts. These innovations alone were supposed to represent the true spirit of the Council, and starting from and in conformity with them, it would be possible to move ahead. Precisely because the texts would only imperfectly reflect the true spirit of the Council and its newness, it would be necessary to go courageously beyond the texts and make room for the newness in which the Council’s deepest intention would be expressed, even if it were still vague. In a word: it would be necessary not to follow the texts of the Council but its spirit. (quoted from the website Holy See.)

This is just what a good history of the Council looks like to a mind that is still firmly ensconced in the classicist way of thinking, for which the true is the eternally fixed, the new an innovation. Absent from this mind is historical consciousness for which, as Newman said, to live is to change and to have lived much is to have changed often. And what a jumble this fitting of a live text into this mould involves! What you have just read is not good prose.

Now once this ‘move’ by the classical mind faced with a history-conscious document has been made and held to be the true understanding of the documents, then the protest at this on the part of the short-changed historical approach can only be heard as a ‘liberal’ as opposed to a ‘solid’ understanding. The protest of the history-conscious mind at its evisceration by the classicist is going to be heard by the classicist as rampant liberalism. How thoroughly this misreading of the history-conscious mind by the classical has gone is shown by a recent statement by the eminent theologian Avery Dulles in which he characterises the ‘two approaches’ to Vatican II in a way that describes the protest of the history-centred mind at its evisceration as a notion—I don’t have the text here—of the church that has no fixed dogmas and is free to go along with any movements of a promising kind. This is a travesty of the Alberigo position. Still, this resorting to caricature on the part of a brilliant but still classical mind is a rather powerful acknowledgment of the position being so caricatured. I have often found that the last ditch defence of a position is to caricature the opposite. For instance, I spent half a lifetime trying to convince my beloved mentor Illtyd Trethowan that the Aristotelian idea of ‘agent intellect’ was a brilliant description of having an insight, but he persisted in seeing the theory as positing a clumsy mental machine for turning sense-data into concepts.

But how this huge misunderstanding is to be remedied, and Vatican II allowed its own voice again in our time, is a matter for dialogue between human beings, not, as with science, the opportunity of error to reveal itself and accept dismissal. This dialogue has to be thought of with real fleshly protagonists: the pope, say, and the Catholic Christian who has and grows in historical consciousness. It is at this point that I find myself drawing on one important element in my own adventure into new secularity, Focusing or Biospirituality.

What then of the new secularity to which so much is pointing, inexorable as is the preference for a spirituality that nourishes, when confronted with the classicist mentality convinced that it is upholding the true faith? What a confrontation! It is almost painful to think about, because it sends each of the participants down to the roots of their being. A Catholic who would be spiritually conscious today has surely to embrace this pain.

And it has to speak to the pain in the one who holds the supreme authority in the church. A precious discovery I am making these days is that in any situation of conflict and ready misunderstanding, there is a point, sometimes reached, where an appreciative self-observation—to quote our recent retreat-master—of myself in painful conflict (perhaps only imagined, not confrontational) I come to feel the other as ‘in the same boat.’ In the same boat of conflict and confusion and pride and misery that is the human condition.

The great danger in confronting authority consists in unawareness of the dynamic I am describing. For then, the classicist mentality I am confronting induces in me the imitation of itself—to invoke the basic insight into mimesis, the key to another of my spiritual aids. The classicism of the pope evokes the counter-classicism of the protesting one. And did not Kierkegaard point out that when the protest at Rome became Protestantism, it acquired an authoritarian quality by imitation—certainly at Geneva.

The statement that love, perfected, casts out fear needs to emphasize the word ‘perfected’. Mutual fear, accepted as mimetic, is the inextricable knot that only the Spirit—and Our Lady ‘the untier of knots’—can resolve.

Christianity, after all, is aggressively historical. It speaks of an empty tomb, and of witnesses to the transformed and deathless condition of the crucified leader. It became dangerously near to losing its historicity when a powerful pope transformed its key idea of itself from the sacramental to the juridical in the 11the century. Less gently, Arnold Toynbee said that Gregory VII ‘lifted the papacy out of the ignominy into which it had sunk, and set it firmly on the wrong course.’ A splendid new book, ‘The Resurrection Effect’, says ‘Even in apologetic terms, it seems wiser for theology to risk rejection of Christian claims for the right reason—and not because of a truncated or excessively abstract intellectual position.’(p. 23) ‘The right reason’ for rejecting the Christian claim is the reluctance of the world of sin in us to accept the challenge and dislocation of the cross and resurrection. The same author repeats this idea, saying ‘Apologetics is at its most persuasive when Christian faith risks being rejected for the right reasons (p.78) Non-historical orthodoxy—equals classicism in theology—offers its defence of Christianity which takes the form of ‘a sound philosophy,’ the half-baked Thomism that was imposed until Vatican II derailed it under the influence of the periti who had suffered it, in the form of censorship and censure, for years.. But Paul is quite explicit here: he came to the Galatians not with a sound philosophy but ‘knowing nothing but Jesus and him crucified’—a pathetic sales pitch, but the only really convincing one`
The non-historical orthodoxy that the church outgrew at Vatican II is now becoming orthodoxy, while its opponents, animated by the creative theology that Vatican II embodies, are now dismissed as liberals with the itch for the new. So, implicitly, to describe people like Congar, de Lubac, Chenu, and Ratzinger, is a calumny.

It is time to call a halt. A new secularity such as I have been sketching, finds its focus, surprisingly, in history, an historic dislocation of the values of our sinful world. We must bring the church back, or rather forward, to the glimpse it had of itself at Vatican II. Christianity at its most historical touches the modern world at its most desperate.

CODA
But are you not in this essay contradicting yourself? On the one hand, you are appealing to our access to the unknown that is not confined to the Bible and its theology. But now you are appealing to the Bible in its focus, Jesus risen from the dead. Just what are you doing?

I am going back to our beginning as humans. Our emergence from the animal is marked by desire as it supervenes on and sublates instinct, and desire is mimetic: we see our own in each other, and we behave accordingly, that is, rivalistically—with, however, the other possibility: admiring love. In this dialectic is our language: it is universal. Wherever we go in humanity we find, as Michel Foucault says, people without power over others seeking it or people who have it holding it. To take a big leap, what manifests the provincialism of the present Roman position is that it shows power nervously insisting on itself. For it is in the other option of mimesis, admiring love, that our universal human nature finds its salvation: the model is a Jewish teacher, killed by envy and risen from the dead in a condition of divine vindication minus human vindictiveness and manifest thus to his disciples who, riveted, his tomb found empty, by the identity between the man of earth and the man of heaven, are enraptured and, in the supreme historic instance of mimesis, became, as he is, people who have died into a deathless life beyond life that we call eternal life, the life of the church.
CODA 2
Some gleanings from the current Commonweal are ad rem. Here is the description of the installation of a new bishop in Ghana, in a Mass that took five hours of enormous fun. ‘Vatican II cleared the way for African Catholics to use their own music and dance in their worship, and also opened the way for charismatic renewal groups (There is an active one in Techimen), the use of tribal symbols and the bright colours favoured in Africa. It’s hard to imagine how the Church’s remarkable growth in Africa could have happened without the council’s liturgical reforms. In Techimen that day, it seemed that the church had taken the teaching of the council and not only run with it but danced with it too.’ How pathetic are our speculations and fears as we contemplate the recent Vatican resumption of the dressing-up box and the rumours of the words of consecration being put into Latin!
‘By 2025, there will be 600 million Christians in Africa, but only 250 in North America. By mid-century, 30% of Chinese people will be Christians. These demographic shifts are vivid evidence of Karl Rahner’s observation that Vatican II marks the emergence of the Weltkirche or world-church…what Christian theology will look like when freed from its cultural bonds is a big question.’













































A NEW SECULARITY

‘Even in apologetic terms, it seems wiser for theology to risk rejection of Christian claims for the right reason—and not because of a truncated or excessively abstract intellectual position.’ ‘The Resurrection Effect: transforming Christian life and thought’ by Anthony J.Kelly, Orbis 2008

Recently, Stefan Reynolds, who was staying with us unfolded for me a very striking idea, one that resonated with me at the most live points in my thinking. The idea was this. The classical theologians, such as Ratzinger and Balthasar, have, as the human base of their theology, the Bible and a whole mass of reflections on the Bible. For them, faith in search of understanding goes to this source as their terra firma. They do not draw on a world outside the Bible for their basic images, symbols, culture. It is the Bible that is to come alive in explication of salvation through and in Christ. It is the Old Testament that the New elucidates.

Let me be more precise. The more these theologians are concerned with the very substance of salvation, with what being saved consists in, the more strictly confined they are to the Bible to make clear and appealing what they have to say about the human condition and its transformation by Christ. And yet the closer you come to the risen Jesus, the more cosmic becomes your perspective.

Now what my friend was suggesting was that outside the Bible there is to be found the rudiments of a spiritual culture, of a meta-anthropology, unknown or at least not consulted by Ratzinger and Balthasar as the prime human datum. And my friend was claiming far more for this alternative anthropological base: namely that, being much more attuned to modern consciousness than is the Bible, it can make manifest the beauty and humanity of our transformation in Christ, more deeply human, and vividly than does Holy Writ. And as my friend talked, with some passion, I found that I do, in fact, draw on extra-biblical sources more deeply and fruitfully than on the Bible.

Let me ta this stage make a check-list of these sources. The massive work of Rene Girard for starters. There is nothing in the theology of Balthasar like the way Girard finds Christ in Dostoevsky, Nietzsche in a way, a whole slew of literature both novelistic and dramatic. Next, for me, come Focusing or Biospirituality, that enables me to discern and speak out of what I call a soft spot of tenderness to myself and to others, an expansive tenderness. How much more closely this speaks of the love of God and neighbour as the perceived grammar of the soul than does the Bible, certainly than does the Bible theologically interpreted, this regarded, I hasten to add, as the exclusive available human ground. It is ‘the Bible only’, not the Bible as humanity in the raw—for God’s sake, The Song of Songs, David and Jonathan etc –that I am critical of, the Bible as salvation’s anthropology. Back to my list. Next, Eckhart Tolle and all the other teachers who embody what has been well called the Awakening West. Then the contemporary sources of self-understanding in relation to the ground of being, such as the Enneagram and the Myers-Briggs inventory

I know that there are more. But even the ones I have listed come together to form a very incomplete ‘organon’ of spiritual self-understanding, that has about it a vividness, a closeness to the nerve of being conscious today, that, although very patchy when compared with the huge array of biblical illustration, gives the unmistakable feeling of must-have, and, above all, making a theological system confined to the world of the Bible seem—provincial?

And of course there is the phenomenology of Husserl, that transforms data into the given-to-us, brilliantly used by Anthony Kelly (Catholic University of Australia) to show in all his immediate splendour Jesus the risen man.

The feeling I get when I read Ratzinger and Balthasar is the question ‘are they reading these people, at least with immediate enthusiasm, do they feel what I am coming to know? I use the word provincial, and it is rude of me, but I hope I convey what I mean. I recall John L.Allen in his life of Ratzinger—which he seems to have forgotten about in his recent, dull and proper account of ‘the new pope’—interviewed the German theologians who were in Ratzinger’s set, who, asked whether they recommended his books to students, answered no, he’s a brilliant theologian but not that extra bit interesting.

I have just read a brilliant piece by Robert Bellah on Charles Taylor, and what he is saying Taylor does for us is this. Modern secularity has emancipated itself from Christian culture, that is to say, not from Christianity but from a social situation in which Christianity was not only available for people to choose and become saints in, but was the way you had to be to be civilized, Christianity as the criterion of decent living. Now to be shot of that sort of Christianity was ‘a good thing’, a becoming free of that most constricting thing, Christianity as imposed—one thinks of the nightmare of Franco’s Spain. The secularity that secedes from Christian culture enjoys something of that freedom which a Christian saint enjoys, as a saint and not as a ‘good Christian.’

Now I think there is a connection between this secularity as opposed to membership of a Christian society, a secularity with some freedom of spirit, and the condition I am writing about, of being able to understand myself and life and the world, the better for not being limited to the Bible for my self-elucidation. The freedom to cast in other and deeper waters is a beautiful thing that I feel the lack of in the biblically limited theologian. I’ve always had this feeling that Ratzinger is ‘provincial’, and now I would add ‘and his province is the Bible.’

Self-recognition in another mirror
Than that provided by our holy writ
More accurate about our under terror
The sense now of a deeper, truer fit.

Not only is the self accommodated
But Jesus too and what he does to us
And it’s as though for this he has long waited
To be immediately glorious.

Then suddenly the Bible is too narrow
For him and us and our condition
To show me what he is, my insight’s arrow
On its true make where something new is won.

While high authority in this perspective
Looks insecure and nervously corrective.

Maybe this shift I am experiencing to an extra-biblical inspiration for receiving the benefit of Jesus has something to do with the Nietzsche disturbance, that ‘profound and ancient trust turned to doubt’ that he detected today. It does fit really. What is happening is that ‘the soul of man’ is awaking to the fact that it is only in a cultured embodiment that it has been trustful . The trust is something imposed by the culture, itself loosely Christian in memory. We put on these clothes in which we look trustingly at the unknown. But now the clothes come off, and the soul shivers.

It is true that what I have been describing is not the loss of all cultural clothes in which we once trusted, only the loss of biblical clothes. Still, biblical clothes are being discarded not in favour of new clothes but, as it were, of a new and frightening immediacy to ourselves—and remember the Tolle moment!—as we confront the unknown. There is this new sense of immediacy as I invoke the Tolle moment, or the felt sense in Focusing, or self-exposure in the Enneagram, or my subjection to a world of insistent mutual imitation from which a transforming love would free me. In these facilitators, rather than in that of the Bible.

Perhaps the point is that these alternative ways of being self-immediate are saying that it’s up to me, not to the God of the Bible. ‘Up to me’ comes to the same thing as ‘no longer trusting a power not me.’ But once I say that it is up to me, I invoke, nakedly, the unknown. This may be what Taylor means by a new secularity.

And of course we have to factor in here the chronic crisis of authority set up in the church by the encyclical Humanae Vitae, for a crisis of authority in the one church that claims it in a unique way ministers to the deep fear to which Nietzsche came to point, as ‘a profound and ancient trust turned to doubt.’ This is all of a piece with the fact that authority in Rome is so moved by the fear of losing control, that, in a recent outright attack on the standard history of Vatican II by an official of the Secretariat of State, the author is driven to the preposterous expedient of discrediting the minutes of the last General Council of the Church. The author is Archbishop Agostino Marchetto, and his book had a launch in Rome on 17 June 2005. It consisted in a systematic attack on the afore-mentioned History, and was said to give ‘the Holy See’s point of view on that milestone event.’ This points, somewhat polemically, to a crisis in the church, which not surprisingly reflects the crisis of our time.

2

‘When modern science began, when the Enlightenment began, then the theologians began to reassure one another about their certainties.’ The second part of this essay applies the wisdom of Bernard Lonergan, evident in this statement.

Truth is served, and charity maintained, only when the diagnosis of our time is deep and wide and comes up with general statements that are apposite. An example of this kind of diagnosis is Lonergan’s notion of the classical in our self-analysis. That mentality is classical for which the word culture does not provoke the question ‘whose culture? Of ‘what culture? but refers to something that the educated have and the uneducated lack, culture as the happy possession of the cultured. Today, however, there are many cultures. The fascinating thought occurs to me that Girard uses the word culture to indicate a mid-point between the old, universal meaning, and the new and multiple one. For he talks about ‘the culture’and means what theology means by ‘the world’, the world under the reign of death that Jesus has effectively challenged for us. Between ‘culture’, the privilege of the educated, and ‘cultures’ that are innumerable, is ‘the culture’ that you or I or anyone in the world are in and are addressed by the challenge of the Good News of emancipation from it. We are resistant to the Gospel for the real reason, as I say in my opening quote: it badly upsets us.

Now that mentality is classical which not only is still understanding of ‘culture’ in the old universalist way but mistakes its certainties for the deeper certainty of faith itself. ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’ translates straight into the dogmas of the church as generally understood. And the passion and militancy of faith is attached to its formulas as themselves dictating the way we are to think if we wish to remain faithful.

It was not for nothing that Pope John opened his Council with the statement ‘the faith is one thing, the way it is expressed is another.’ A mentality that has never been at ease with the Council is in denial of that distinction, and so puts the whole weight of belief into its classic formulas.

Behind this way of thinking is the classical, or, better, the classicist mentality. And we need a clear understanding of how this becomes obsolete. It becomes obsolete when it ceases to speak to us as we consciously are. It becomes obsolete not through some itch for novelty, though of course the itch, in the intelligent, exploits the development in the observed process of ongoing life and which Eliot called a changing sensibility.

Theologians tend to downplay the Zeitgeist. But of course there is the spirit of a time, the feeling of what it like really—and boringly and horrifically and gloriously, to cite Eliot—being alive now. The zeitgeist that is rightly criticised is this sense of now regarded as something easily tapped and appealed to by politicians.

So, back to the ‘classicist’ way of thinking. Here is a good statement by Lonergan. Referring to the alleged crisis of faith that believers today are going through, he says that it is ‘a crisis not of faith but of culture. There has been no new revelation from on high to replace the revelation given through Jesus Christ. There has been written no new Bible and there has been founded no new church to link us with him. But Catholic philosophy and Catholic theology are matters, not merely of revelation and faith, but also of culture. Both have been fully and deeply involved in classical culture,’ and ‘that culture’, adds Nicholas Lash, ‘has now, irretrievably, broken down.’ Lash is not going further than Lonergan here, as I know from a long acquaintance with both.

This description is devastating in its implications. For take this classicist mentality and imagine it exercised not only by a politician or by an art critic but by one concerned with God’s self-disclosure to us in Jesus crucified and risen and Spirit-imparting, the believer as theologian in other words. Now the classicist mentality as a preferred way to think about politics or art or just life in general is the way one thinks one’s faith. Then the feeling of thinking universally enjoyed by the person becomes the privileged medium of the universality of God’s love in Christ, and commitment to God in Christ becomes the commitment to its formulas. And now take a further step. Suppose the ‘person’ we are thinking about is the pope, he whom God is believed to have appointed to confirm the faith of his brethren’ (gospel ref here) Here the attraction of classicism can seem overwhelming, enhanced daily by the the sight of the Bernini Colonnade.

Now comes the most tricky part. Vatican II was a huge graduation into historical thinking on the part of its participants, themselves schooled for this by ‘periti’ or experts, theologians the most challenging of whom had been severely disciplined by the Holy Office for the way the were doing theology. With Vatican II, they cane into their own. Not least of them was Joseph Ratzinger. Thus the Council, not only on the floor but, more importantly, in several working parties, was a schooling of the world’s bishops in thinking historically—of which relativism is the abuse—about the grand themes of Catholic truth. They came up with ‘decrees’ that were voted-in nearly unanimously. One American bishop said to John Todd, my oldest friend in the world, ‘some of the theology was above our heads, but we saw that the periti were on the side of freedom and the curial people were negative about freedom, so we voted for freedom. A candid admission that could be used, obviously against me.

Now comes the crucial question. How is a mind still wedded to classicist thinking going to judge an extensive product of historical thinking? And how is it so to judge, knowing that it has a papal magisterium? Inevitably, the ecclesial authority vested in those who exercise this judgment will reinforce the classicism with which they judge this extensive product of historical thinking? But, to reiterate, how is this entrenched classicist approach going to interpret the monumental documents with which it is faced? Well first of all, it will take them as documents solemnly given to the world as the teaching of the church, they will demand unequivocal respect for them. How is this respect to be paid by the classicist mentality to these documents other than to ‘classicize’ them? This means to read them not as the record of a profound change of mind from the ‘siege mentality’ of the post-Tridentine church into a changed way of being the church we always were, but as a set of statements about the various topics that certainly did not contradict anything previously believed, but did cry out ‘it all looks new!’ This cry, which was for Pope John aggiornamento—which means attunement to the Zeitgeist deeply understood as what it feels like to be a Catholic Christian today, was not heard, could not be heard, by a classicist mind. Such a mind reads the documents with an inbuilt filter that lets through the live, vibrant elements, and leaves behind ‘a truth that has not changed: only its life in us has: only it has come to life in our minds with the conversion from a static classicist way of thinking into a historical way that has irreversibly replaced it.

Now let me call upon the reader’s patience. I ask you to read the following statement by Pope Benedict, and see whether it is, in the light of my analysis, more or less predictable.

Problems in the implementation of the Council arose from the fact that two contrary hermeneutics came face to face and quarrelled with each other. One caused confusion, the other, silently but more and more visibly, bore and is bearing fruit. On the one hand, there is an interpretation that I would call ‘a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture’..on the other, there is the ‘hermeneutic of reform’, of renewal in the continuity of the one subject-Church which the Lord has given to us. She is a subject which increases in time and develops, yet always remaining the same, the one subject of the journeying People of God. The hermeneutic of discontinuity risks ending in a split between the pre-conciliar Church and the post-conciliar Church. It asserts that the texts of the Council as such do not yet express the true spirit of the Council. It claims that they are the result of compromises in which, to reach unanimity, it was found necessary to keep and reconfirm many old things that are now pointless. However, the true spirit of the Council is not to be found in these compromises, they assert, but instead in the impulses toward the new that are contained in the texts. These innovations alone were supposed to represent the true spirit of the Council, and starting from and in conformity with them, it would be possible to move ahead. Precisely because the texts would only imperfectly reflect the true spirit of the Council and its newness, it would be necessary to go courageously beyond the texts and make room for the newness in which the Council’s deepest intention would be expressed, even if it were still vague. In a word: it would be necessary not to follow the texts of the Council but its spirit. (quoted from the website Holy See.)

This is just what a good history of the Council looks like to a mind that is still firmly ensconced in the classicist way of thinking, for which the true is the eternally fixed, the new an innovation. Absent from this mind is historical consciousness for which, as Newman said, to live is to change and to have lived much is to have changed often. And what a jumble this fitting of a live text into this mould involves! What you have just read is not good prose.

Now once this ‘move’ by the classical mind faced with a history-conscious document has been made and held to be the true understanding of the documents, then the protest at this on the part of the short-changed historical approach can only be heard as a ‘liberal’ as opposed to a ‘solid’ understanding. The protest of the history-conscious mind at its evisceration by the classicist is going to be heard by the classicist as rampant liberalism. How thoroughly this misreading of the history-conscious mind by the classical has gone is shown by a recent statement by the eminent theologian Avery Dulles in which he characterises the ‘two approaches’ to Vatican II in a way that describes the protest of the history-centred mind at its evisceration as a notion—I don’t have the text here—of the church that has no fixed dogmas and is free to go along with any movements of a promising kind. This is a travesty of the Alberigo position. Still, this resorting to caricature on the part of a brilliant but still classical mind is a rather powerful acknowledgment of the position being so caricatured. I have often found that the last ditch defence of a position is to caricature the opposite. For instance, I spent half a lifetime trying to convince my beloved mentor Illtyd Trethowan that the Aristotelian idea of ‘agent intellect’ was a brilliant description of having an insight, but he persisted in seeing the theory as positing a clumsy mental machine for turning sense-data into concepts.

But how this huge misunderstanding is to be remedied, and Vatican II allowed its own voice again in our time, is a matter for dialogue between human beings, not, as with science, the opportunity of error to reveal itself and accept dismissal. This dialogue has to be thought of with real fleshly protagonists: the pope, say, and the Catholic Christian who has and grows in historical consciousness. It is at this point that I find myself drawing on one important element in my own adventure into new secularity, Focusing or Biospirituality.

What then of the new secularity to which so much is pointing, inexorable as is the preference for a spirituality that nourishes, when confronted with the classicist mentality convinced that it is upholding the true faith? What a confrontation! It is almost painful to think about, because it sends each of the participants down to the roots of their being. A Catholic who would be spiritually conscious today has surely to embrace this pain.

And it has to speak to the pain in the one who holds the supreme authority in the church. A precious discovery I am making these days is that in any situation of conflict and ready misunderstanding, there is a point, sometimes reached, where an appreciative self-observation—to quote our recent retreat-master—of myself in painful conflict (perhaps only imagined, not confrontational) I come to feel the other as ‘in the same boat.’ In the same boat of conflict and confusion and pride and misery that is the human condition.

The great danger in confronting authority consists in unawareness of the dynamic I am describing. For then, the classicist mentality I am confronting induces in me the imitation of itself—to invoke the basic insight into mimesis, the key to another of my spiritual aids. The classicism of the pope evokes the counter-classicism of the protesting one. And did not Kierkegaard point out that when the protest at Rome became Protestantism, it acquired an authoritarian quality by imitation—certainly at Geneva.

The statement that love, perfected, casts out fear needs to emphasize the word ‘perfected’. Mutual fear, accepted as mimetic, is the inextricable knot that only the Spirit—and Our Lady ‘the untier of knots’—can resolve.

Christianity, after all, is aggressively historical. It speaks of an empty tomb, and of witnesses to the transformed and deathless condition of the crucified leader. It became dangerously near to losing its historicity when a powerful pope transformed its key idea of itself from the sacramental to the juridical in the 11the century. Less gently, Arnold Toynbee said that Gregory VII ‘lifted the papacy out of the ignominy into which it had sunk, and set it firmly on the wrong course.’ A splendid new book, ‘The Resurrection Effect’, says ‘Even in apologetic terms, it seems wiser for theology to risk rejection of Christian claims for the right reason—and not because of a truncated or excessively abstract intellectual position.’(p. 23) ‘The right reason’ for rejecting the Christian claim is the reluctance of the world of sin in us to accept the challenge and dislocation of the cross and resurrection. The same author repeats this idea, saying ‘Apologetics is at its most persuasive when Christian faith risks being rejected for the right reasons (p.78) Non-historical orthodoxy—equals classicism in theology—offers its defence of Christianity which takes the form of ‘a sound philosophy,’ the half-baked Thomism that was imposed until Vatican II derailed it under the influence of the periti who had suffered it, in the form of censorship and censure, for years.. But Paul is quite explicit here: he came to the Galatians not with a sound philosophy but ‘knowing nothing but Jesus and him crucified’—a pathetic sales pitch, but the only really convincing one`
The non-historical orthodoxy that the church outgrew at Vatican II is now becoming orthodoxy, while its opponents, animated by the creative theology that Vatican II embodies, are now dismissed as liberals with the itch for the new. So, implicitly, to describe people like Congar, de Lubac, Chenu, and Ratzinger, is a calumny.

It is time to call a halt. A new secularity such as I have been sketching, finds its focus, surprisingly, in history, an historic dislocation of the values of our sinful world. We must bring the church back, or rather forward, to the glimpse it had of itself at Vatican II. Christianity at its most historical touches the modern world at its most desperate.

CODA
But are you not in this essay contradicting yourself? On the one hand, you are appealing to our access to the unknown that is not confined to the Bible and its theology. But now you are appealing to the Bible in its focus, Jesus risen from the dead. Just what are you doing?

I am going back to our beginning as humans. Our emergence from the animal is marked by desire as it supervenes on and sublates instinct, and desire is mimetic: we see our own in each other, and we behave accordingly, that is, rivalistically—with, however, the other possibility: admiring love. In this dialectic is our language: it is universal. Wherever we go in humanity we find, as Michel Foucault says, people without power over others seeking it or people who have it holding it. To take a big leap, what manifests the provincialism of the present Roman position is that it shows power nervously insisting on itself. For it is in the other option of mimesis, admiring love, that our universal human nature finds its salvation: the model is a Jewish teacher, killed by envy and risen from the dead in a condition of divine vindication minus human vindictiveness and manifest thus to his disciples who, riveted, his tomb found empty, by the identity between the man of earth and the man of heaven, are enraptured and, in the supreme historic instance of mimesis, became, as he is, people who have died into a deathless life beyond life that we call eternal life, the life of the church.
CODA 2
Some gleanings from the current Commonweal are ad rem. Here is the description of the installation of a new bishop in Ghana, in a Mass that took five hours of enormous fun. ‘Vatican II cleared the way for African Catholics to use their own music and dance in their worship, and also opened the way for charismatic renewal groups (There is an active one in Techimen), the use of tribal symbols and the bright colours favoured in Africa. It’s hard to imagine how the Church’s remarkable growth in Africa could have happened without the council’s liturgical reforms. In Techimen that day, it seemed that the church had taken the teaching of the council and not only run with it but danced with it too.’ How pathetic are our speculations and fears as we contemplate the recent Vatican resumption of the dressing-up box and the rumours of the words of consecration being put into Latin!
‘By 2025, there will be 600 million Christians in Africa, but only 250 in North America. By mid-century, 30% of Chinese people will be Christians. These demographic shifts are vivid evidence of Karl Rahner’s observation that Vatican II marks the emergence of the Weltkirche or world-church…what Christian theology will look like when freed from its cultural bonds is a big question.’













































A NEW SECULARITY

‘Even in apologetic terms, it seems wiser for theology to risk rejection of Christian claims for the right reason—and not because of a truncated or excessively abstract intellectual position.’ ‘The Resurrection Effect: transforming Christian life and thought’ by Anthony J.Kelly, Orbis 2008

Recently, Stefan Reynolds, who was staying with us unfolded for me a very striking idea, one that resonated with me at the most live points in my thinking. The idea was this. The classical theologians, such as Ratzinger and Balthasar, have, as the human base of their theology, the Bible and a whole mass of reflections on the Bible. For them, faith in search of understanding goes to this source as their terra firma. They do not draw on a world outside the Bible for their basic images, symbols, culture. It is the Bible that is to come alive in explication of salvation through and in Christ. It is the Old Testament that the New elucidates.

Let me be more precise. The more these theologians are concerned with the very substance of salvation, with what being saved consists in, the more strictly confined they are to the Bible to make clear and appealing what they have to say about the human condition and its transformation by Christ. And yet the closer you come to the risen Jesus, the more cosmic becomes your perspective.

Now what my friend was suggesting was that outside the Bible there is to be found the rudiments of a spiritual culture, of a meta-anthropology, unknown or at least not consulted by Ratzinger and Balthasar as the prime human datum. And my friend was claiming far more for this alternative anthropological base: namely that, being much more attuned to modern consciousness than is the Bible, it can make manifest the beauty and humanity of our transformation in Christ, more deeply human, and vividly than does Holy Writ. And as my friend talked, with some passion, I found that I do, in fact, draw on extra-biblical sources more deeply and fruitfully than on the Bible.

Let me ta this stage make a check-list of these sources. The massive work of Rene Girard for starters. There is nothing in the theology of Balthasar like the way Girard finds Christ in Dostoevsky, Nietzsche in a way, a whole slew of literature both novelistic and dramatic. Next, for me, come Focusing or Biospirituality, that enables me to discern and speak out of what I call a soft spot of tenderness to myself and to others, an expansive tenderness. How much more closely this speaks of the love of God and neighbour as the perceived grammar of the soul than does the Bible, certainly than does the Bible theologically interpreted, this regarded, I hasten to add, as the exclusive available human ground. It is ‘the Bible only’, not the Bible as humanity in the raw—for God’s sake, The Song of Songs, David and Jonathan etc –that I am critical of, the Bible as salvation’s anthropology. Back to my list. Next, Eckhart Tolle and all the other teachers who embody what has been well called the Awakening West. Then the contemporary sources of self-understanding in relation to the ground of being, such as the Enneagram and the Myers-Briggs inventory

I know that there are more. But even the ones I have listed come together to form a very incomplete ‘organon’ of spiritual self-understanding, that has about it a vividness, a closeness to the nerve of being conscious today, that, although very patchy when compared with the huge array of biblical illustration, gives the unmistakable feeling of must-have, and, above all, making a theological system confined to the world of the Bible seem—provincial?

And of course there is the phenomenology of Husserl, that transforms data into the given-to-us, brilliantly used by Anthony Kelly (Catholic University of Australia) to show in all his immediate splendour Jesus the risen man.

The feeling I get when I read Ratzinger and Balthasar is the question ‘are they reading these people, at least with immediate enthusiasm, do they feel what I am coming to know? I use the word provincial, and it is rude of me, but I hope I convey what I mean. I recall John L.Allen in his life of Ratzinger—which he seems to have forgotten about in his recent, dull and proper account of ‘the new pope’—interviewed the German theologians who were in Ratzinger’s set, who, asked whether they recommended his books to students, answered no, he’s a brilliant theologian but not that extra bit interesting.

I have just read a brilliant piece by Robert Bellah on Charles Taylor, and what he is saying Taylor does for us is this. Modern secularity has emancipated itself from Christian culture, that is to say, not from Christianity but from a social situation in which Christianity was not only available for people to choose and become saints in, but was the way you had to be to be civilized, Christianity as the criterion of decent living. Now to be shot of that sort of Christianity was ‘a good thing’, a becoming free of that most constricting thing, Christianity as imposed—one thinks of the nightmare of Franco’s Spain. The secularity that secedes from Christian culture enjoys something of that freedom which a Christian saint enjoys, as a saint and not as a ‘good Christian.’

Now I think there is a connection between this secularity as opposed to membership of a Christian society, a secularity with some freedom of spirit, and the condition I am writing about, of being able to understand myself and life and the world, the better for not being limited to the Bible for my self-elucidation. The freedom to cast in other and deeper waters is a beautiful thing that I feel the lack of in the biblically limited theologian. I’ve always had this feeling that Ratzinger is ‘provincial’, and now I would add ‘and his province is the Bible.’

Self-recognition in another mirror
Than that provided by our holy writ
More accurate about our under terror
The sense now of a deeper, truer fit.

Not only is the self accommodated
But Jesus too and what he does to us
And it’s as though for this he has long waited
To be immediately glorious.

Then suddenly the Bible is too narrow
For him and us and our condition
To show me what he is, my insight’s arrow
On its true make where something new is won.

While high authority in this perspective
Looks insecure and nervously corrective.

Maybe this shift I am experiencing to an extra-biblical inspiration for receiving the benefit of Jesus has something to do with the Nietzsche disturbance, that ‘profound and ancient trust turned to doubt’ that he detected today. It does fit really. What is happening is that ‘the soul of man’ is awaking to the fact that it is only in a cultured embodiment that it has been trustful . The trust is something imposed by the culture, itself loosely Christian in memory. We put on these clothes in which we look trustingly at the unknown. But now the clothes come off, and the soul shivers.

It is true that what I have been describing is not the loss of all cultural clothes in which we once trusted, only the loss of biblical clothes. Still, biblical clothes are being discarded not in favour of new clothes but, as it were, of a new and frightening immediacy to ourselves—and remember the Tolle moment!—as we confront the unknown. There is this new sense of immediacy as I invoke the Tolle moment, or the felt sense in Focusing, or self-exposure in the Enneagram, or my subjection to a world of insistent mutual imitation from which a transforming love would free me. In these facilitators, rather than in that of the Bible.

Perhaps the point is that these alternative ways of being self-immediate are saying that it’s up to me, not to the God of the Bible. ‘Up to me’ comes to the same thing as ‘no longer trusting a power not me.’ But once I say that it is up to me, I invoke, nakedly, the unknown. This may be what Taylor means by a new secularity.

And of course we have to factor in here the chronic crisis of authority set up in the church by the encyclical Humanae Vitae, for a crisis of authority in the one church that claims it in a unique way ministers to the deep fear to which Nietzsche came to point, as ‘a profound and ancient trust turned to doubt.’ This is all of a piece with the fact that authority in Rome is so moved by the fear of losing control, that, in a recent outright attack on the standard history of Vatican II by an official of the Secretariat of State, the author is driven to the preposterous expedient of discrediting the minutes of the last General Council of the Church. The author is Archbishop Agostino Marchetto, and his book had a launch in Rome on 17 June 2005. It consisted in a systematic attack on the afore-mentioned History, and was said to give ‘the Holy See’s point of view on that milestone event.’ This points, somewhat polemically, to a crisis in the church, which not surprisingly reflects the crisis of our time.

2

‘When modern science began, when the Enlightenment began, then the theologians began to reassure one another about their certainties.’ The second part of this essay applies the wisdom of Bernard Lonergan, evident in this statement.

Truth is served, and charity maintained, only when the diagnosis of our time is deep and wide and comes up with general statements that are apposite. An example of this kind of diagnosis is Lonergan’s notion of the classical in our self-analysis. That mentality is classical for which the word culture does not provoke the question ‘whose culture? Of ‘what culture? but refers to something that the educated have and the uneducated lack, culture as the happy possession of the cultured. Today, however, there are many cultures. The fascinating thought occurs to me that Girard uses the word culture to indicate a mid-point between the old, universal meaning, and the new and multiple one. For he talks about ‘the culture’and means what theology means by ‘the world’, the world under the reign of death that Jesus has effectively challenged for us. Between ‘culture’, the privilege of the educated, and ‘cultures’ that are innumerable, is ‘the culture’ that you or I or anyone in the world are in and are addressed by the challenge of the Good News of emancipation from it. We are resistant to the Gospel for the real reason, as I say in my opening quote: it badly upsets us.

Now that mentality is classical which not only is still understanding of ‘culture’ in the old universalist way but mistakes its certainties for the deeper certainty of faith itself. ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’ translates straight into the dogmas of the church as generally understood. And the passion and militancy of faith is attached to its formulas as themselves dictating the way we are to think if we wish to remain faithful.

It was not for nothing that Pope John opened his Council with the statement ‘the faith is one thing, the way it is expressed is another.’ A mentality that has never been at ease with the Council is in denial of that distinction, and so puts the whole weight of belief into its classic formulas.

Behind this way of thinking is the classical, or, better, the classicist mentality. And we need a clear understanding of how this becomes obsolete. It becomes obsolete when it ceases to speak to us as we consciously are. It becomes obsolete not through some itch for novelty, though of course the itch, in the intelligent, exploits the development in the observed process of ongoing life and which Eliot called a changing sensibility.

Theologians tend to downplay the Zeitgeist. But of course there is the spirit of a time, the feeling of what it like really—and boringly and horrifically and gloriously, to cite Eliot—being alive now. The zeitgeist that is rightly criticised is this sense of now regarded as something easily tapped and appealed to by politicians.

So, back to the ‘classicist’ way of thinking. Here is a good statement by Lonergan. Referring to the alleged crisis of faith that believers today are going through, he says that it is ‘a crisis not of faith but of culture. There has been no new revelation from on high to replace the revelation given through Jesus Christ. There has been written no new Bible and there has been founded no new church to link us with him. But Catholic philosophy and Catholic theology are matters, not merely of revelation and faith, but also of culture. Both have been fully and deeply involved in classical culture,’ and ‘that culture’, adds Nicholas Lash, ‘has now, irretrievably, broken down.’ Lash is not going further than Lonergan here, as I know from a long acquaintance with both.

This description is devastating in its implications. For take this classicist mentality and imagine it exercised not only by a politician or by an art critic but by one concerned with God’s self-disclosure to us in Jesus crucified and risen and Spirit-imparting, the believer as theologian in other words. Now the classicist mentality as a preferred way to think about politics or art or just life in general is the way one thinks one’s faith. Then the feeling of thinking universally enjoyed by the person becomes the privileged medium of the universality of God’s love in Christ, and commitment to God in Christ becomes the commitment to its formulas. And now take a further step. Suppose the ‘person’ we are thinking about is the pope, he whom God is believed to have appointed to confirm the faith of his brethren’ (gospel ref here) Here the attraction of classicism can seem overwhelming, enhanced daily by the the sight of the Bernini Colonnade.

Now comes the most tricky part. Vatican II was a huge graduation into historical thinking on the part of its participants, themselves schooled for this by ‘periti’ or experts, theologians the most challenging of whom had been severely disciplined by the Holy Office for the way the were doing theology. With Vatican II, they cane into their own. Not least of them was Joseph Ratzinger. Thus the Council, not only on the floor but, more importantly, in several working parties, was a schooling of the world’s bishops in thinking historically—of which relativism is the abuse—about the grand themes of Catholic truth. They came up with ‘decrees’ that were voted-in nearly unanimously. One American bishop said to John Todd, my oldest friend in the world, ‘some of the theology was above our heads, but we saw that the periti were on the side of freedom and the curial people were negative about freedom, so we voted for freedom. A candid admission that could be used, obviously against me.

Now comes the crucial question. How is a mind still wedded to classicist thinking going to judge an extensive product of historical thinking? And how is it so to judge, knowing that it has a papal magisterium? Inevitably, the ecclesial authority vested in those who exercise this judgment will reinforce the classicism with which they judge this extensive product of historical thinking? But, to reiterate, how is this entrenched classicist approach going to interpret the monumental documents with which it is faced? Well first of all, it will take them as documents solemnly given to the world as the teaching of the church, they will demand unequivocal respect for them. How is this respect to be paid by the classicist mentality to these documents other than to ‘classicize’ them? This means to read them not as the record of a profound change of mind from the ‘siege mentality’ of the post-Tridentine church into a changed way of being the church we always were, but as a set of statements about the various topics that certainly did not contradict anything previously believed, but did cry out ‘it all looks new!’ This cry, which was for Pope John aggiornamento—which means attunement to the Zeitgeist deeply understood as what it feels like to be a Catholic Christian today, was not heard, could not be heard, by a classicist mind. Such a mind reads the documents with an inbuilt filter that lets through the live, vibrant elements, and leaves behind ‘a truth that has not changed: only its life in us has: only it has come to life in our minds with the conversion from a static classicist way of thinking into a historical way that has irreversibly replaced it.

Now let me call upon the reader’s patience. I ask you to read the following statement by Pope Benedict, and see whether it is, in the light of my analysis, more or less predictable.

Problems in the implementation of the Council arose from the fact that two contrary hermeneutics came face to face and quarrelled with each other. One caused confusion, the other, silently but more and more visibly, bore and is bearing fruit. On the one hand, there is an interpretation that I would call ‘a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture’..on the other, there is the ‘hermeneutic of reform’, of renewal in the continuity of the one subject-Church which the Lord has given to us. She is a subject which increases in time and develops, yet always remaining the same, the one subject of the journeying People of God. The hermeneutic of discontinuity risks ending in a split between the pre-conciliar Church and the post-conciliar Church. It asserts that the texts of the Council as such do not yet express the true spirit of the Council. It claims that they are the result of compromises in which, to reach unanimity, it was found necessary to keep and reconfirm many old things that are now pointless. However, the true spirit of the Council is not to be found in these compromises, they assert, but instead in the impulses toward the new that are contained in the texts. These innovations alone were supposed to represent the true spirit of the Council, and starting from and in conformity with them, it would be possible to move ahead. Precisely because the texts would only imperfectly reflect the true spirit of the Council and its newness, it would be necessary to go courageously beyond the texts and make room for the newness in which the Council’s deepest intention would be expressed, even if it were still vague. In a word: it would be necessary not to follow the texts of the Council but its spirit. (quoted from the website Holy See.)

This is just what a good history of the Council looks like to a mind that is still firmly ensconced in the classicist way of thinking, for which the true is the eternally fixed, the new an innovation. Absent from this mind is historical consciousness for which, as Newman said, to live is to change and to have lived much is to have changed often. And what a jumble this fitting of a live text into this mould involves! What you have just read is not good prose.

Now once this ‘move’ by the classical mind faced with a history-conscious document has been made and held to be the true understanding of the documents, then the protest at this on the part of the short-changed historical approach can only be heard as a ‘liberal’ as opposed to a ‘solid’ understanding. The protest of the history-conscious mind at its evisceration by the classicist is going to be heard by the classicist as rampant liberalism. How thoroughly this misreading of the history-conscious mind by the classical has gone is shown by a recent statement by the eminent theologian Avery Dulles in which he characterises the ‘two approaches’ to Vatican II in a way that describes the protest of the history-centred mind at its evisceration as a notion—I don’t have the text here—of the church that has no fixed dogmas and is free to go along with any movements of a promising kind. This is a travesty of the Alberigo position. Still, this resorting to caricature on the part of a brilliant but still classical mind is a rather powerful acknowledgment of the position being so caricatured. I have often found that the last ditch defence of a position is to caricature the opposite. For instance, I spent half a lifetime trying to convince my beloved mentor Illtyd Trethowan that the Aristotelian idea of ‘agent intellect’ was a brilliant description of having an insight, but he persisted in seeing the theory as positing a clumsy mental machine for turning sense-data into concepts.

But how this huge misunderstanding is to be remedied, and Vatican II allowed its own voice again in our time, is a matter for dialogue between human beings, not, as with science, the opportunity of error to reveal itself and accept dismissal. This dialogue has to be thought of with real fleshly protagonists: the pope, say, and the Catholic Christian who has and grows in historical consciousness. It is at this point that I find myself drawing on one important element in my own adventure into new secularity, Focusing or Biospirituality.

What then of the new secularity to which so much is pointing, inexorable as is the preference for a spirituality that nourishes, when confronted with the classicist mentality convinced that it is upholding the true faith? What a confrontation! It is almost painful to think about, because it sends each of the participants down to the roots of their being. A Catholic who would be spiritually conscious today has surely to embrace this pain.

And it has to speak to the pain in the one who holds the supreme authority in the church. A precious discovery I am making these days is that in any situation of conflict and ready misunderstanding, there is a point, sometimes reached, where an appreciative self-observation—to quote our recent retreat-master—of myself in painful conflict (perhaps only imagined, not confrontational) I come to feel the other as ‘in the same boat.’ In the same boat of conflict and confusion and pride and misery that is the human condition.

The great danger in confronting authority consists in unawareness of the dynamic I am describing. For then, the classicist mentality I am confronting induces in me the imitation of itself—to invoke the basic insight into mimesis, the key to another of my spiritual aids. The classicism of the pope evokes the counter-classicism of the protesting one. And did not Kierkegaard point out that when the protest at Rome became Protestantism, it acquired an authoritarian quality by imitation—certainly at Geneva.

The statement that love, perfected, casts out fear needs to emphasize the word ‘perfected’. Mutual fear, accepted as mimetic, is the inextricable knot that only the Spirit—and Our Lady ‘the untier of knots’—can resolve.

Christianity, after all, is aggressively historical. It speaks of an empty tomb, and of witnesses to the transformed and deathless condition of the crucified leader. It became dangerously near to losing its historicity when a powerful pope transformed its key idea of itself from the sacramental to the juridical in the 11the century. Less gently, Arnold Toynbee said that Gregory VII ‘lifted the papacy out of the ignominy into which it had sunk, and set it firmly on the wrong course.’ A splendid new book, ‘The Resurrection Effect’, says ‘Even in apologetic terms, it seems wiser for theology to risk rejection of Christian claims for the right reason—and not because of a truncated or excessively abstract intellectual position.’(p. 23) ‘The right reason’ for rejecting the Christian claim is the reluctance of the world of sin in us to accept the challenge and dislocation of the cross and resurrection. The same author repeats this idea, saying ‘Apologetics is at its most persuasive when Christian faith risks being rejected for the right reasons (p.78) Non-historical orthodoxy—equals classicism in theology—offers its defence of Christianity which takes the form of ‘a sound philosophy,’ the half-baked Thomism that was imposed until Vatican II derailed it under the influence of the periti who had suffered it, in the form of censorship and censure, for years.. But Paul is quite explicit here: he came to the Galatians not with a sound philosophy but ‘knowing nothing but Jesus and him crucified’—a pathetic sales pitch, but the only really convincing one`
The non-historical orthodoxy that the church outgrew at Vatican II is now becoming orthodoxy, while its opponents, animated by the creative theology that Vatican II embodies, are now dismissed as liberals with the itch for the new. So, implicitly, to describe people like Congar, de Lubac, Chenu, and Ratzinger, is a calumny.

It is time to call a halt. A new secularity such as I have been sketching, finds its focus, surprisingly, in history, an historic dislocation of the values of our sinful world. We must bring the church back, or rather forward, to the glimpse it had of itself at Vatican II. Christianity at its most historical touches the modern world at its most desperate.

CODA
But are you not in this essay contradicting yourself? On the one hand, you are appealing to our access to the unknown that is not confined to the Bible and its theology. But now you are appealing to the Bible in its focus, Jesus risen from the dead. Just what are you doing?

I am going back to our beginning as humans. Our emergence from the animal is marked by desire as it supervenes on and sublates instinct, and desire is mimetic: we see our own in each other, and we behave accordingly, that is, rivalistically—with, however, the other possibility: admiring love. In this dialectic is our language: it is universal. Wherever we go in humanity we find, as Michel Foucault says, people without power over others seeking it or people who have it holding it. To take a big leap, what manifests the provincialism of the present Roman position is that it shows power nervously insisting on itself. For it is in the other option of mimesis, admiring love, that our universal human nature finds its salvation: the model is a Jewish teacher, killed by envy and risen from the dead in a condition of divine vindication minus human vindictiveness and manifest thus to his disciples who, riveted, his tomb found empty, by the identity between the man of earth and the man of heaven, are enraptured and, in the supreme historic instance of mimesis, became, as he is, people who have died into a deathless life beyond life that we call eternal life, the life of the church.
CODA 2
Some gleanings from the current Commonweal are ad rem. Here is the description of the installation of a new bishop in Ghana, in a Mass that took five hours of enormous fun. ‘Vatican II cleared the way for African Catholics to use their own music and dance in their worship, and also opened the way for charismatic renewal groups (There is an active one in Techimen), the use of tribal symbols and the bright colours favoured in Africa. It’s hard to imagine how the Church’s remarkable growth in Africa could have happened without the council’s liturgical reforms. In Techimen that day, it seemed that the church had taken the teaching of the council and not only run with it but danced with it too.’ How pathetic are our speculations and fears as we contemplate the recent Vatican resumption of the dressing-up box and the rumours of the words of consecration being put into Latin!
‘By 2025, there will be 600 million Christians in Africa, but only 250 in North America. By mid-century, 30% of Chinese people will be Christians. These demographic shifts are vivid evidence of Karl Rahner’s observation that Vatican II marks the emergence of the Weltkirche or world-church…what Christian theology will look like when freed from its cultural bonds is a big question.’













































A NEW SECULARITY

‘Even in apologetic terms, it seems wiser for theology to risk rejection of Christian claims for the right reason—and not because of a truncated or excessively abstract intellectual position.’ ‘The Resurrection Effect: transforming Christian life and thought’ by Anthony J.Kelly, Orbis 2008

Recently, Stefan Reynolds, who was staying with us unfolded for me a very striking idea, one that resonated with me at the most live points in my thinking. The idea was this. The classical theologians, such as Ratzinger and Balthasar, have, as the human base of their theology, the Bible and a whole mass of reflections on the Bible. For them, faith in search of understanding goes to this source as their terra firma. They do not draw on a world outside the Bible for their basic images, symbols, culture. It is the Bible that is to come alive in explication of salvation through and in Christ. It is the Old Testament that the New elucidates.

Let me be more precise. The more these theologians are concerned with the very substance of salvation, with what being saved consists in, the more strictly confined they are to the Bible to make clear and appealing what they have to say about the human condition and its transformation by Christ. And yet the closer you come to the risen Jesus, the more cosmic becomes your perspective.

Now what my friend was suggesting was that outside the Bible there is to be found the rudiments of a spiritual culture, of a meta-anthropology, unknown or at least not consulted by Ratzinger and Balthasar as the prime human datum. And my friend was claiming far more for this alternative anthropological base: namely that, being much more attuned to modern consciousness than is the Bible, it can make manifest the beauty and humanity of our transformation in Christ, more deeply human, and vividly than does Holy Writ. And as my friend talked, with some passion, I found that I do, in fact, draw on extra-biblical sources more deeply and fruitfully than on the Bible.

Let me ta this stage make a check-list of these sources. The massive work of Rene Girard for starters. There is nothing in the theology of Balthasar like the way Girard finds Christ in Dostoevsky, Nietzsche in a way, a whole slew of literature both novelistic and dramatic. Next, for me, come Focusing or Biospirituality, that enables me to discern and speak out of what I call a soft spot of tenderness to myself and to others, an expansive tenderness. How much more closely this speaks of the love of God and neighbour as the perceived grammar of the soul than does the Bible, certainly than does the Bible theologically interpreted, this regarded, I hasten to add, as the exclusive available human ground. It is ‘the Bible only’, not the Bible as humanity in the raw—for God’s sake, The Song of Songs, David and Jonathan etc –that I am critical of, the Bible as salvation’s anthropology. Back to my list. Next, Eckhart Tolle and all the other teachers who embody what has been well called the Awakening West. Then the contemporary sources of self-understanding in relation to the ground of being, such as the Enneagram and the Myers-Briggs inventory

I know that there are more. But even the ones I have listed come together to form a very incomplete ‘organon’ of spiritual self-understanding, that has about it a vividness, a closeness to the nerve of being conscious today, that, although very patchy when compared with the huge array of biblical illustration, gives the unmistakable feeling of must-have, and, above all, making a theological system confined to the world of the Bible seem—provincial?

And of course there is the phenomenology of Husserl, that transforms data into the given-to-us, brilliantly used by Anthony Kelly (Catholic University of Australia) to show in all his immediate splendour Jesus the risen man.

The feeling I get when I read Ratzinger and Balthasar is the question ‘are they reading these people, at least with immediate enthusiasm, do they feel what I am coming to know? I use the word provincial, and it is rude of me, but I hope I convey what I mean. I recall John L.Allen in his life of Ratzinger—which he seems to have forgotten about in his recent, dull and proper account of ‘the new pope’—interviewed the German theologians who were in Ratzinger’s set, who, asked whether they recommended his books to students, answered no, he’s a brilliant theologian but not that extra bit interesting.

I have just read a brilliant piece by Robert Bellah on Charles Taylor, and what he is saying Taylor does for us is this. Modern secularity has emancipated itself from Christian culture, that is to say, not from Christianity but from a social situation in which Christianity was not only available for people to choose and become saints in, but was the way you had to be to be civilized, Christianity as the criterion of decent living. Now to be shot of that sort of Christianity was ‘a good thing’, a becoming free of that most constricting thing, Christianity as imposed—one thinks of the nightmare of Franco’s Spain. The secularity that secedes from Christian culture enjoys something of that freedom which a Christian saint enjoys, as a saint and not as a ‘good Christian.’

Now I think there is a connection between this secularity as opposed to membership of a Christian society, a secularity with some freedom of spirit, and the condition I am writing about, of being able to understand myself and life and the world, the better for not being limited to the Bible for my self-elucidation. The freedom to cast in other and deeper waters is a beautiful thing that I feel the lack of in the biblically limited theologian. I’ve always had this feeling that Ratzinger is ‘provincial’, and now I would add ‘and his province is the Bible.’

Self-recognition in another mirror
Than that provided by our holy writ
More accurate about our under terror
The sense now of a deeper, truer fit.

Not only is the self accommodated
But Jesus too and what he does to us
And it’s as though for this he has long waited
To be immediately glorious.

Then suddenly the Bible is too narrow
For him and us and our condition
To show me what he is, my insight’s arrow
On its true make where something new is won.

While high authority in this perspective
Looks insecure and nervously corrective.

Maybe this shift I am experiencing to an extra-biblical inspiration for receiving the benefit of Jesus has something to do with the Nietzsche disturbance, that ‘profound and ancient trust turned to doubt’ that he detected today. It does fit really. What is happening is that ‘the soul of man’ is awaking to the fact that it is only in a cultured embodiment that it has been trustful . The trust is something imposed by the culture, itself loosely Christian in memory. We put on these clothes in which we look trustingly at the unknown. But now the clothes come off, and the soul shivers.

It is true that what I have been describing is not the loss of all cultural clothes in which we once trusted, only the loss of biblical clothes. Still, biblical clothes are being discarded not in favour of new clothes but, as it were, of a new and frightening immediacy to ourselves—and remember the Tolle moment!—as we confront the unknown. There is this new sense of immediacy as I invoke the Tolle moment, or the felt sense in Focusing, or self-exposure in the Enneagram, or my subjection to a world of insistent mutual imitation from which a transforming love would free me. In these facilitators, rather than in that of the Bible.

Perhaps the point is that these alternative ways of being self-immediate are saying that it’s up to me, not to the God of the Bible. ‘Up to me’ comes to the same thing as ‘no longer trusting a power not me.’ But once I say that it is up to me, I invoke, nakedly, the unknown. This may be what Taylor means by a new secularity.

And of course we have to factor in here the chronic crisis of authority set up in the church by the encyclical Humanae Vitae, for a crisis of authority in the one church that claims it in a unique way ministers to the deep fear to which Nietzsche came to point, as ‘a profound and ancient trust turned to doubt.’ This is all of a piece with the fact that authority in Rome is so moved by the fear of losing control, that, in a recent outright attack on the standard history of Vatican II by an official of the Secretariat of State, the author is driven to the preposterous expedient of discrediting the minutes of the last General Council of the Church. The author is Archbishop Agostino Marchetto, and his book had a launch in Rome on 17 June 2005. It consisted in a systematic attack on the afore-mentioned History, and was said to give ‘the Holy See’s point of view on that milestone event.’ This points, somewhat polemically, to a crisis in the church, which not surprisingly reflects the crisis of our time.

2

‘When modern science began, when the Enlightenment began, then the theologians began to reassure one another about their certainties.’ The second part of this essay applies the wisdom of Bernard Lonergan, evident in this statement.

Truth is served, and charity maintained, only when the diagnosis of our time is deep and wide and comes up with general statements that are apposite. An example of this kind of diagnosis is Lonergan’s notion of the classical in our self-analysis. That mentality is classical for which the word culture does not provoke the question ‘whose culture? Of ‘what culture? but refers to something that the educated have and the uneducated lack, culture as the happy possession of the cultured. Today, however, there are many cultures. The fascinating thought occurs to me that Girard uses the word culture to indicate a mid-point between the old, universal meaning, and the new and multiple one. For he talks about ‘the culture’and means what theology means by ‘the world’, the world under the reign of death that Jesus has effectively challenged for us. Between ‘culture’, the privilege of the educated, and ‘cultures’ that are innumerable, is ‘the culture’ that you or I or anyone in the world are in and are addressed by the challenge of the Good News of emancipation from it. We are resistant to the Gospel for the real reason, as I say in my opening quote: it badly upsets us.

Now that mentality is classical which not only is still understanding of ‘culture’ in the old universalist way but mistakes its certainties for the deeper certainty of faith itself. ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’ translates straight into the dogmas of the church as generally understood. And the passion and militancy of faith is attached to its formulas as themselves dictating the way we are to think if we wish to remain faithful.

It was not for nothing that Pope John opened his Council with the statement ‘the faith is one thing, the way it is expressed is another.’ A mentality that has never been at ease with the Council is in denial of that distinction, and so puts the whole weight of belief into its classic formulas.

Behind this way of thinking is the classical, or, better, the classicist mentality. And we need a clear understanding of how this becomes obsolete. It becomes obsolete when it ceases to speak to us as we consciously are. It becomes obsolete not through some itch for novelty, though of course the itch, in the intelligent, exploits the development in the observed process of ongoing life and which Eliot called a changing sensibility.

Theologians tend to downplay the Zeitgeist. But of course there is the spirit of a time, the feeling of what it like really—and boringly and horrifically and gloriously, to cite Eliot—being alive now. The zeitgeist that is rightly criticised is this sense of now regarded as something easily tapped and appealed to by politicians.

So, back to the ‘classicist’ way of thinking. Here is a good statement by Lonergan. Referring to the alleged crisis of faith that believers today are going through, he says that it is ‘a crisis not of faith but of culture. There has been no new revelation from on high to replace the revelation given through Jesus Christ. There has been written no new Bible and there has been founded no new church to link us with him. But Catholic philosophy and Catholic theology are matters, not merely of revelation and faith, but also of culture. Both have been fully and deeply involved in classical culture,’ and ‘that culture’, adds Nicholas Lash, ‘has now, irretrievably, broken down.’ Lash is not going further than Lonergan here, as I know from a long acquaintance with both.

This description is devastating in its implications. For take this classicist mentality and imagine it exercised not only by a politician or by an art critic but by one concerned with God’s self-disclosure to us in Jesus crucified and risen and Spirit-imparting, the believer as theologian in other words. Now the classicist mentality as a preferred way to think about politics or art or just life in general is the way one thinks one’s faith. Then the feeling of thinking universally enjoyed by the person becomes the privileged medium of the universality of God’s love in Christ, and commitment to God in Christ becomes the commitment to its formulas. And now take a further step. Suppose the ‘person’ we are thinking about is the pope, he whom God is believed to have appointed to confirm the faith of his brethren’ (gospel ref here) Here the attraction of classicism can seem overwhelming, enhanced daily by the the sight of the Bernini Colonnade.

Now comes the most tricky part. Vatican II was a huge graduation into historical thinking on the part of its participants, themselves schooled for this by ‘periti’ or experts, theologians the most challenging of whom had been severely disciplined by the Holy Office for the way the were doing theology. With Vatican II, they cane into their own. Not least of them was Joseph Ratzinger. Thus the Council, not only on the floor but, more importantly, in several working parties, was a schooling of the world’s bishops in thinking historically—of which relativism is the abuse—about the grand themes of Catholic truth. They came up with ‘decrees’ that were voted-in nearly unanimously. One American bishop said to John Todd, my oldest friend in the world, ‘some of the theology was above our heads, but we saw that the periti were on the side of freedom and the curial people were negative about freedom, so we voted for freedom. A candid admission that could be used, obviously against me.

Now comes the crucial question. How is a mind still wedded to classicist thinking going to judge an extensive product of historical thinking? And how is it so to judge, knowing that it has a papal magisterium? Inevitably, the ecclesial authority vested in those who exercise this judgment will reinforce the classicism with which they judge this extensive product of historical thinking? But, to reiterate, how is this entrenched classicist approach going to interpret the monumental documents with which it is faced? Well first of all, it will take them as documents solemnly given to the world as the teaching of the church, they will demand unequivocal respect for them. How is this respect to be paid by the classicist mentality to these documents other than to ‘classicize’ them? This means to read them not as the record of a profound change of mind from the ‘siege mentality’ of the post-Tridentine church into a changed way of being the church we always were, but as a set of statements about the various topics that certainly did not contradict anything previously believed, but did cry out ‘it all looks new!’ This cry, which was for Pope John aggiornamento—which means attunement to the Zeitgeist deeply understood as what it feels like to be a Catholic Christian today, was not heard, could not be heard, by a classicist mind. Such a mind reads the documents with an inbuilt filter that lets through the live, vibrant elements, and leaves behind ‘a truth that has not changed: only its life in us has: only it has come to life in our minds with the conversion from a static classicist way of thinking into a historical way that has irreversibly replaced it.

Now let me call upon the reader’s patience. I ask you to read the following statement by Pope Benedict, and see whether it is, in the light of my analysis, more or less predictable.

Problems in the implementation of the Council arose from the fact that two contrary hermeneutics came face to face and quarrelled with each other. One caused confusion, the other, silently but more and more visibly, bore and is bearing fruit. On the one hand, there is an interpretation that I would call ‘a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture’..on the other, there is the ‘hermeneutic of reform’, of renewal in the continuity of the one subject-Church which the Lord has given to us. She is a subject which increases in time and develops, yet always remaining the same, the one subject of the journeying People of God. The hermeneutic of discontinuity risks ending in a split between the pre-conciliar Church and the post-conciliar Church. It asserts that the texts of the Council as such do not yet express the true spirit of the Council. It claims that they are the result of compromises in which, to reach unanimity, it was found necessary to keep and reconfirm many old things that are now pointless. However, the true spirit of the Council is not to be found in these compromises, they assert, but instead in the impulses toward the new that are contained in the texts. These innovations alone were supposed to represent the true spirit of the Council, and starting from and in conformity with them, it would be possible to move ahead. Precisely because the texts would only imperfectly reflect the true spirit of the Council and its newness, it would be necessary to go courageously beyond the texts and make room for the newness in which the Council’s deepest intention would be expressed, even if it were still vague. In a word: it would be necessary not to follow the texts of the Council but its spirit. (quoted from the website Holy See.)

This is just what a good history of the Council looks like to a mind that is still firmly ensconced in the classicist way of thinking, for which the true is the eternally fixed, the new an innovation. Absent from this mind is historical consciousness for which, as Newman said, to live is to change and to have lived much is to have changed often. And what a jumble this fitting of a live text into this mould involves! What you have just read is not good prose.

Now once this ‘move’ by the classical mind faced with a history-conscious document has been made and held to be the true understanding of the documents, then the protest at this on the part of the short-changed historical approach can only be heard as a ‘liberal’ as opposed to a ‘solid’ understanding. The protest of the history-conscious mind at its evisceration by the classicist is going to be heard by the classicist as rampant liberalism. How thoroughly this misreading of the history-conscious mind by the classical has gone is shown by a recent statement by the eminent theologian Avery Dulles in which he characterises the ‘two approaches’ to Vatican II in a way that describes the protest of the history-centred mind at its evisceration as a notion—I don’t have the text here—of the church that has no fixed dogmas and is free to go along with any movements of a promising kind. This is a travesty of the Alberigo position. Still, this resorting to caricature on the part of a brilliant but still classical mind is a rather powerful acknowledgment of the position being so caricatured. I have often found that the last ditch defence of a position is to caricature the opposite. For instance, I spent half a lifetime trying to convince my beloved mentor Illtyd Trethowan that the Aristotelian idea of ‘agent intellect’ was a brilliant description of having an insight, but he persisted in seeing the theory as positing a clumsy mental machine for turning sense-data into concepts.

But how this huge misunderstanding is to be remedied, and Vatican II allowed its own voice again in our time, is a matter for dialogue between human beings, not, as with science, the opportunity of error to reveal itself and accept dismissal. This dialogue has to be thought of with real fleshly protagonists: the pope, say, and the Catholic Christian who has and grows in historical consciousness. It is at this point that I find myself drawing on one important element in my own adventure into new secularity, Focusing or Biospirituality.

What then of the new secularity to which so much is pointing, inexorable as is the preference for a spirituality that nourishes, when confronted with the classicist mentality convinced that it is upholding the true faith? What a confrontation! It is almost painful to think about, because it sends each of the participants down to the roots of their being. A Catholic who would be spiritually conscious today has surely to embrace this pain.

And it has to speak to the pain in the one who holds the supreme authority in the church. A precious discovery I am making these days is that in any situation of conflict and ready misunderstanding, there is a point, sometimes reached, where an appreciative self-observation—to quote our recent retreat-master—of myself in painful conflict (perhaps only imagined, not confrontational) I come to feel the other as ‘in the same boat.’ In the same boat of conflict and confusion and pride and misery that is the human condition.

The great danger in confronting authority consists in unawareness of the dynamic I am describing. For then, the classicist mentality I am confronting induces in me the imitation of itself—to invoke the basic insight into mimesis, the key to another of my spiritual aids. The classicism of the pope evokes the counter-classicism of the protesting one. And did not Kierkegaard point out that when the protest at Rome became Protestantism, it acquired an authoritarian quality by imitation—certainly at Geneva.

The statement that love, perfected, casts out fear needs to emphasize the word ‘perfected’. Mutual fear, accepted as mimetic, is the inextricable knot that only the Spirit—and Our Lady ‘the untier of knots’—can resolve.

Christianity, after all, is aggressively historical. It speaks of an empty tomb, and of witnesses to the transformed and deathless condition of the crucified leader. It became dangerously near to losing its historicity when a powerful pope transformed its key idea of itself from the sacramental to the juridical in the 11the century. Less gently, Arnold Toynbee said that Gregory VII ‘lifted the papacy out of the ignominy into which it had sunk, and set it firmly on the wrong course.’ A splendid new book, ‘The Resurrection Effect’, says ‘Even in apologetic terms, it seems wiser for theology to risk rejection of Christian claims for the right reason—and not because of a truncated or excessively abstract intellectual position.’(p. 23) ‘The right reason’ for rejecting the Christian claim is the reluctance of the world of sin in us to accept the challenge and dislocation of the cross and resurrection. The same author repeats this idea, saying ‘Apologetics is at its most persuasive when Christian faith risks being rejected for the right reasons (p.78) Non-historical orthodoxy—equals classicism in theology—offers its defence of Christianity which takes the form of ‘a sound philosophy,’ the half-baked Thomism that was imposed until Vatican II derailed it under the influence of the periti who had suffered it, in the form of censorship and censure, for years.. But Paul is quite explicit here: he came to the Galatians not with a sound philosophy but ‘knowing nothing but Jesus and him crucified’—a pathetic sales pitch, but the only really convincing one`
The non-historical orthodoxy that the church outgrew at Vatican II is now becoming orthodoxy, while its opponents, animated by the creative theology that Vatican II embodies, are now dismissed as liberals with the itch for the new. So, implicitly, to describe people like Congar, de Lubac, Chenu, and Ratzinger, is a calumny.

It is time to call a halt. A new secularity such as I have been sketching, finds its focus, surprisingly, in history, an historic dislocation of the values of our sinful world. We must bring the church back, or rather forward, to the glimpse it had of itself at Vatican II. Christianity at its most historical touches the modern world at its most desperate.

CODA
But are you not in this essay contradicting yourself? On the one hand, you are appealing to our access to the unknown that is not confined to the Bible and its theology. But now you are appealing to the Bible in its focus, Jesus risen from the dead. Just what are you doing?

I am going back to our beginning as humans. Our emergence from the animal is marked by desire as it supervenes on and sublates instinct, and desire is mimetic: we see our own in each other, and we behave accordingly, that is, rivalistically—with, however, the other possibility: admiring love. In this dialectic is our language: it is universal. Wherever we go in humanity we find, as Michel Foucault says, people without power over others seeking it or people who have it holding it. To take a big leap, what manifests the provincialism of the present Roman position is that it shows power nervously insisting on itself. For it is in the other option of mimesis, admiring love, that our universal human nature finds its salvation: the model is a Jewish teacher, killed by envy and risen from the dead in a condition of divine vindication minus human vindictiveness and manifest thus to his disciples who, riveted, his tomb found empty, by the identity between the man of earth and the man of heaven, are enraptured and, in the supreme historic instance of mimesis, became, as he is, people who have died into a deathless life beyond life that we call eternal life, the life of the church.
CODA 2
Some gleanings from the current Commonweal are ad rem. Here is the description of the installation of a new bishop in Ghana, in a Mass that took five hours of enormous fun. ‘Vatican II cleared the way for African Catholics to use their own music and dance in their worship, and also opened the way for charismatic renewal groups (There is an active one in Techimen), the use of tribal symbols and the bright colours favoured in Africa. It’s hard to imagine how the Church’s remarkable growth in Africa could have happened without the council’s liturgical reforms. In Techimen that day, it seemed that the church had taken the teaching of the council and not only run with it but danced with it too.’ How pathetic are our speculations and fears as we contemplate the recent Vatican resumption of the dressing-up box and the rumours of the words of consecration being put into Latin!
‘By 2025, there will be 600 million Christians in Africa, but only 250 in North America. By mid-century, 30% of Chinese people will be Christians. These demographic shifts are vivid evidence of Karl Rahner’s observation that Vatican II marks the emergence of the Weltkirche or world-church…what Christian theology will look like when freed from its cultural bonds is a big question.’













































A NEW SECULARITY

‘Even in apologetic terms, it seems wiser for theology to risk rejection of Christian claims for the right reason—and not because of a truncated or excessively abstract intellectual position.’ ‘The Resurrection Effect: transforming Christian life and thought’ by Anthony J.Kelly, Orbis 2008

Recently, Stefan Reynolds, who was staying with us unfolded for me a very striking idea, one that resonated with me at the most live points in my thinking. The idea was this. The classical theologians, such as Ratzinger and Balthasar, have, as the human base of their theology, the Bible and a whole mass of reflections on the Bible. For them, faith in search of understanding goes to this source as their terra firma. They do not draw on a world outside the Bible for their basic images, symbols, culture. It is the Bible that is to come alive in explication of salvation through and in Christ. It is the Old Testament that the New elucidates.

Let me be more precise. The more these theologians are concerned with the very substance of salvation, with what being saved consists in, the more strictly confined they are to the Bible to make clear and appealing what they have to say about the human condition and its transformation by Christ. And yet the closer you come to the risen Jesus, the more cosmic becomes your perspective.

Now what my friend was suggesting was that outside the Bible there is to be found the rudiments of a spiritual culture, of a meta-anthropology, unknown or at least not consulted by Ratzinger and Balthasar as the prime human datum. And my friend was claiming far more for this alternative anthropological base: namely that, being much more attuned to modern consciousness than is the Bible, it can make manifest the beauty and humanity of our transformation in Christ, more deeply human, and vividly than does Holy Writ. And as my friend talked, with some passion, I found that I do, in fact, draw on extra-biblical sources more deeply and fruitfully than on the Bible.

Let me ta this stage make a check-list of these sources. The massive work of Rene Girard for starters. There is nothing in the theology of Balthasar like the way Girard finds Christ in Dostoevsky, Nietzsche in a way, a whole slew of literature both novelistic and dramatic. Next, for me, come Focusing or Biospirituality, that enables me to discern and speak out of what I call a soft spot of tenderness to myself and to others, an expansive tenderness. How much more closely this speaks of the love of God and neighbour as the perceived grammar of the soul than does the Bible, certainly than does the Bible theologically interpreted, this regarded, I hasten to add, as the exclusive available human ground. It is ‘the Bible only’, not the Bible as humanity in the raw—for God’s sake, The Song of Songs, David and Jonathan etc –that I am critical of, the Bible as salvation’s anthropology. Back to my list. Next, Eckhart Tolle and all the other teachers who embody what has been well called the Awakening West. Then the contemporary sources of self-understanding in relation to the ground of being, such as the Enneagram and the Myers-Briggs inventory

I know that there are more. But even the ones I have listed come together to form a very incomplete ‘organon’ of spiritual self-understanding, that has about it a vividness, a closeness to the nerve of being conscious today, that, although very patchy when compared with the huge array of biblical illustration, gives the unmistakable feeling of must-have, and, above all, making a theological system confined to the world of the Bible seem—provincial?

And of course there is the phenomenology of Husserl, that transforms data into the given-to-us, brilliantly used by Anthony Kelly (Catholic University of Australia) to show in all his immediate splendour Jesus the risen man.

The feeling I get when I read Ratzinger and Balthasar is the question ‘are they reading these people, at least with immediate enthusiasm, do they feel what I am coming to know? I use the word provincial, and it is rude of me, but I hope I convey what I mean. I recall John L.Allen in his life of Ratzinger—which he seems to have forgotten about in his recent, dull and proper account of ‘the new pope’—interviewed the German theologians who were in Ratzinger’s set, who, asked whether they recommended his books to students, answered no, he’s a brilliant theologian but not that extra bit interesting.

I have just read a brilliant piece by Robert Bellah on Charles Taylor, and what he is saying Taylor does for us is this. Modern secularity has emancipated itself from Christian culture, that is to say, not from Christianity but from a social situation in which Christianity was not only available for people to choose and become saints in, but was the way you had to be to be civilized, Christianity as the criterion of decent living. Now to be shot of that sort of Christianity was ‘a good thing’, a becoming free of that most constricting thing, Christianity as imposed—one thinks of the nightmare of Franco’s Spain. The secularity that secedes from Christian culture enjoys something of that freedom which a Christian saint enjoys, as a saint and not as a ‘good Christian.’

Now I think there is a connection between this secularity as opposed to membership of a Christian society, a secularity with some freedom of spirit, and the condition I am writing about, of being able to understand myself and life and the world, the better for not being limited to the Bible for my self-elucidation. The freedom to cast in other and deeper waters is a beautiful thing that I feel the lack of in the biblically limited theologian. I’ve always had this feeling that Ratzinger is ‘provincial’, and now I would add ‘and his province is the Bible.’

Self-recognition in another mirror
Than that provided by our holy writ
More accurate about our under terror
The sense now of a deeper, truer fit.

Not only is the self accommodated
But Jesus too and what he does to us
And it’s as though for this he has long waited
To be immediately glorious.

Then suddenly the Bible is too narrow
For him and us and our condition
To show me what he is, my insight’s arrow
On its true make where something new is won.

While high authority in this perspective
Looks insecure and nervously corrective.

Maybe this shift I am experiencing to an extra-biblical inspiration for receiving the benefit of Jesus has something to do with the Nietzsche disturbance, that ‘profound and ancient trust turned to doubt’ that he detected today. It does fit really. What is happening is that ‘the soul of man’ is awaking to the fact that it is only in a cultured embodiment that it has been trustful . The trust is something imposed by the culture, itself loosely Christian in memory. We put on these clothes in which we look trustingly at the unknown. But now the clothes come off, and the soul shivers.

It is true that what I have been describing is not the loss of all cultural clothes in which we once trusted, only the loss of biblical clothes. Still, biblical clothes are being discarded not in favour of new clothes but, as it were, of a new and frightening immediacy to ourselves—and remember the Tolle moment!—as we confront the unknown. There is this new sense of immediacy as I invoke the Tolle moment, or the felt sense in Focusing, or self-exposure in the Enneagram, or my subjection to a world of insistent mutual imitation from which a transforming love would free me. In these facilitators, rather than in that of the Bible.

Perhaps the point is that these alternative ways of being self-immediate are saying that it’s up to me, not to the God of the Bible. ‘Up to me’ comes to the same thing as ‘no longer trusting a power not me.’ But once I say that it is up to me, I invoke, nakedly, the unknown. This may be what Taylor means by a new secularity.

And of course we have to factor in here the chronic crisis of authority set up in the church by the encyclical Humanae Vitae, for a crisis of authority in the one church that claims it in a unique way ministers to the deep fear to which Nietzsche came to point, as ‘a profound and ancient trust turned to doubt.’ This is all of a piece with the fact that authority in Rome is so moved by the fear of losing control, that, in a recent outright attack on the standard history of Vatican II by an official of the Secretariat of State, the author is driven to the preposterous expedient of discrediting the minutes of the last General Council of the Church. The author is Archbishop Agostino Marchetto, and his book had a launch in Rome on 17 June 2005. It consisted in a systematic attack on the afore-mentioned History, and was said to give ‘the Holy See’s point of view on that milestone event.’ This points, somewhat polemically, to a crisis in the church, which not surprisingly reflects the crisis of our time.

2

‘When modern science began, when the Enlightenment began, then the theologians began to reassure one another about their certainties.’ The second part of this essay applies the wisdom of Bernard Lonergan, evident in this statement.

Truth is served, and charity maintained, only when the diagnosis of our time is deep and wide and comes up with general statements that are apposite. An example of this kind of diagnosis is Lonergan’s notion of the classical in our self-analysis. That mentality is classical for which the word culture does not provoke the question ‘whose culture? Of ‘what culture? but refers to something that the educated have and the uneducated lack, culture as the happy possession of the cultured. Today, however, there are many cultures. The fascinating thought occurs to me that Girard uses the word culture to indicate a mid-point between the old, universal meaning, and the new and multiple one. For he talks about ‘the culture’and means what theology means by ‘the world’, the world under the reign of death that Jesus has effectively challenged for us. Between ‘culture’, the privilege of the educated, and ‘cultures’ that are innumerable, is ‘the culture’ that you or I or anyone in the world are in and are addressed by the challenge of the Good News of emancipation from it. We are resistant to the Gospel for the real reason, as I say in my opening quote: it badly upsets us.

Now that mentality is classical which not only is still understanding of ‘culture’ in the old universalist way but mistakes its certainties for the deeper certainty of faith itself. ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’ translates straight into the dogmas of the church as generally understood. And the passion and militancy of faith is attached to its formulas as themselves dictating the way we are to think if we wish to remain faithful.

It was not for nothing that Pope John opened his Council with the statement ‘the faith is one thing, the way it is expressed is another.’ A mentality that has never been at ease with the Council is in denial of that distinction, and so puts the whole weight of belief into its classic formulas.

Behind this way of thinking is the classical, or, better, the classicist mentality. And we need a clear understanding of how this becomes obsolete. It becomes obsolete when it ceases to speak to us as we consciously are. It becomes obsolete not through some itch for novelty, though of course the itch, in the intelligent, exploits the development in the observed process of ongoing life and which Eliot called a changing sensibility.

Theologians tend to downplay the Zeitgeist. But of course there is the spirit of a time, the feeling of what it like really—and boringly and horrifically and gloriously, to cite Eliot—being alive now. The zeitgeist that is rightly criticised is this sense of now regarded as something easily tapped and appealed to by politicians.

So, back to the ‘classicist’ way of thinking. Here is a good statement by Lonergan. Referring to the alleged crisis of faith that believers today are going through, he says that it is ‘a crisis not of faith but of culture. There has been no new revelation from on high to replace the revelation given through Jesus Christ. There has been written no new Bible and there has been founded no new church to link us with him. But Catholic philosophy and Catholic theology are matters, not merely of revelation and faith, but also of culture. Both have been fully and deeply involved in classical culture,’ and ‘that culture’, adds Nicholas Lash, ‘has now, irretrievably, broken down.’ Lash is not going further than Lonergan here, as I know from a long acquaintance with both.

This description is devastating in its implications. For take this classicist mentality and imagine it exercised not only by a politician or by an art critic but by one concerned with God’s self-disclosure to us in Jesus crucified and risen and Spirit-imparting, the believer as theologian in other words. Now the classicist mentality as a preferred way to think about politics or art or just life in general is the way one thinks one’s faith. Then the feeling of thinking universally enjoyed by the person becomes the privileged medium of the universality of God’s love in Christ, and commitment to God in Christ becomes the commitment to its formulas. And now take a further step. Suppose the ‘person’ we are thinking about is the pope, he whom God is believed to have appointed to confirm the faith of his brethren’ (gospel ref here) Here the attraction of classicism can seem overwhelming, enhanced daily by the the sight of the Bernini Colonnade.

Now comes the most tricky part. Vatican II was a huge graduation into historical thinking on the part of its participants, themselves schooled for this by ‘periti’ or experts, theologians the most challenging of whom had been severely disciplined by the Holy Office for the way the were doing theology. With Vatican II, they cane into their own. Not least of them was Joseph Ratzinger. Thus the Council, not only on the floor but, more importantly, in several working parties, was a schooling of the world’s bishops in thinking historically—of which relativism is the abuse—about the grand themes of Catholic truth. They came up with ‘decrees’ that were voted-in nearly unanimously. One American bishop said to John Todd, my oldest friend in the world, ‘some of the theology was above our heads, but we saw that the periti were on the side of freedom and the curial people were negative about freedom, so we voted for freedom. A candid admission that could be used, obviously against me.

Now comes the crucial question. How is a mind still wedded to classicist thinking going to judge an extensive product of historical thinking? And how is it so to judge, knowing that it has a papal magisterium? Inevitably, the ecclesial authority vested in those who exercise this judgment will reinforce the classicism with which they judge this extensive product of historical thinking? But, to reiterate, how is this entrenched classicist approach going to interpret the monumental documents with which it is faced? Well first of all, it will take them as documents solemnly given to the world as the teaching of the church, they will demand unequivocal respect for them. How is this respect to be paid by the classicist mentality to these documents other than to ‘classicize’ them? This means to read them not as the record of a profound change of mind from the ‘siege mentality’ of the post-Tridentine church into a changed way of being the church we always were, but as a set of statements about the various topics that certainly did not contradict anything previously believed, but did cry out ‘it all looks new!’ This cry, which was for Pope John aggiornamento—which means attunement to the Zeitgeist deeply understood as what it feels like to be a Catholic Christian today, was not heard, could not be heard, by a classicist mind. Such a mind reads the documents with an inbuilt filter that lets through the live, vibrant elements, and leaves behind ‘a truth that has not changed: only its life in us has: only it has come to life in our minds with the conversion from a static classicist way of thinking into a historical way that has irreversibly replaced it.

Now let me call upon the reader’s patience. I ask you to read the following statement by Pope Benedict, and see whether it is, in the light of my analysis, more or less predictable.

Problems in the implementation of the Council arose from the fact that two contrary hermeneutics came face to face and quarrelled with each other. One caused confusion, the other, silently but more and more visibly, bore and is bearing fruit. On the one hand, there is an interpretation that I would call ‘a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture’..on the other, there is the ‘hermeneutic of reform’, of renewal in the continuity of the one subject-Church which the Lord has given to us. She is a subject which increases in time and develops, yet always remaining the same, the one subject of the journeying People of God. The hermeneutic of discontinuity risks ending in a split between the pre-conciliar Church and the post-conciliar Church. It asserts that the texts of the Council as such do not yet express the true spirit of the Council. It claims that they are the result of compromises in which, to reach unanimity, it was found necessary to keep and reconfirm many old things that are now pointless. However, the true spirit of the Council is not to be found in these compromises, they assert, but instead in the impulses toward the new that are contained in the texts. These innovations alone were supposed to represent the true spirit of the Council, and starting from and in conformity with them, it would be possible to move ahead. Precisely because the texts would only imperfectly reflect the true spirit of the Council and its newness, it would be necessary to go courageously beyond the texts and make room for the newness in which the Council’s deepest intention would be expressed, even if it were still vague. In a word: it would be necessary not to follow the texts of the Council but its spirit. (quoted from the website Holy See.)

This is just what a good history of the Council looks like to a mind that is still firmly ensconced in the classicist way of thinking, for which the true is the eternally fixed, the new an innovation. Absent from this mind is historical consciousness for which, as Newman said, to live is to change and to have lived much is to have changed often. And what a jumble this fitting of a live text into this mould involves! What you have just read is not good prose.

Now once this ‘move’ by the classical mind faced with a history-conscious document has been made and held to be the true understanding of the documents, then the protest at this on the part of the short-changed historical approach can only be heard as a ‘liberal’ as opposed to a ‘solid’ understanding. The protest of the history-conscious mind at its evisceration by the classicist is going to be heard by the classicist as rampant liberalism. How thoroughly this misreading of the history-conscious mind by the classical has gone is shown by a recent statement by the eminent theologian Avery Dulles in which he characterises the ‘two approaches’ to Vatican II in a way that describes the protest of the history-centred mind at its evisceration as a notion—I don’t have the text here—of the church that has no fixed dogmas and is free to go along with any movements of a promising kind. This is a travesty of the Alberigo position. Still, this resorting to caricature on the part of a brilliant but still classical mind is a rather powerful acknowledgment of the position being so caricatured. I have often found that the last ditch defence of a position is to caricature the opposite. For instance, I spent half a lifetime trying to convince my beloved mentor Illtyd Trethowan that the Aristotelian idea of ‘agent intellect’ was a brilliant description of having an insight, but he persisted in seeing the theory as positing a clumsy mental machine for turning sense-data into concepts.

But how this huge misunderstanding is to be remedied, and Vatican II allowed its own voice again in our time, is a matter for dialogue between human beings, not, as with science, the opportunity of error to reveal itself and accept dismissal. This dialogue has to be thought of with real fleshly protagonists: the pope, say, and the Catholic Christian who has and grows in historical consciousness. It is at this point that I find myself drawing on one important element in my own adventure into new secularity, Focusing or Biospirituality.

What then of the new secularity to which so much is pointing, inexorable as is the preference for a spirituality that nourishes, when confronted with the classicist mentality convinced that it is upholding the true faith? What a confrontation! It is almost painful to think about, because it sends each of the participants down to the roots of their being. A Catholic who would be spiritually conscious today has surely to embrace this pain.

And it has to speak to the pain in the one who holds the supreme authority in the church. A precious discovery I am making these days is that in any situation of conflict and ready misunderstanding, there is a point, sometimes reached, where an appreciative self-observation—to quote our recent retreat-master—of myself in painful conflict (perhaps only imagined, not confrontational) I come to feel the other as ‘in the same boat.’ In the same boat of conflict and confusion and pride and misery that is the human condition.

The great danger in confronting authority consists in unawareness of the dynamic I am describing. For then, the classicist mentality I am confronting induces in me the imitation of itself—to invoke the basic insight into mimesis, the key to another of my spiritual aids. The classicism of the pope evokes the counter-classicism of the protesting one. And did not Kierkegaard point out that when the protest at Rome became Protestantism, it acquired an authoritarian quality by imitation—certainly at Geneva.

The statement that love, perfected, casts out fear needs to emphasize the word ‘perfected’. Mutual fear, accepted as mimetic, is the inextricable knot that only the Spirit—and Our Lady ‘the untier of knots’—can resolve.

Christianity, after all, is aggressively historical. It speaks of an empty tomb, and of witnesses to the transformed and deathless condition of the crucified leader. It became dangerously near to losing its historicity when a powerful pope transformed its key idea of itself from the sacramental to the juridical in the 11the century. Less gently, Arnold Toynbee said that Gregory VII ‘lifted the papacy out of the ignominy into which it had sunk, and set it firmly on the wrong course.’ A splendid new book, ‘The Resurrection Effect’, says ‘Even in apologetic terms, it seems wiser for theology to risk rejection of Christian claims for the right reason—and not because of a truncated or excessively abstract intellectual position.’(p. 23) ‘The right reason’ for rejecting the Christian claim is the reluctance of the world of sin in us to accept the challenge and dislocation of the cross and resurrection. The same author repeats this idea, saying ‘Apologetics is at its most persuasive when Christian faith risks being rejected for the right reasons (p.78) Non-historical orthodoxy—equals classicism in theology—offers its defence of Christianity which takes the form of ‘a sound philosophy,’ the half-baked Thomism that was imposed until Vatican II derailed it under the influence of the periti who had suffered it, in the form of censorship and censure, for years.. But Paul is quite explicit here: he came to the Galatians not with a sound philosophy but ‘knowing nothing but Jesus and him crucified’—a pathetic sales pitch, but the only really convincing one`
The non-historical orthodoxy that the church outgrew at Vatican II is now becoming orthodoxy, while its opponents, animated by the creative theology that Vatican II embodies, are now dismissed as liberals with the itch for the new. So, implicitly, to describe people like Congar, de Lubac, Chenu, and Ratzinger, is a calumny.

It is time to call a halt. A new secularity such as I have been sketching, finds its focus, surprisingly, in history, an historic dislocation of the values of our sinful world. We must bring the church back, or rather forward, to the glimpse it had of itself at Vatican II. Christianity at its most historical touches the modern world at its most desperate.

CODA
But are you not in this essay contradicting yourself? On the one hand, you are appealing to our access to the unknown that is not confined to the Bible and its theology. But now you are appealing to the Bible in its focus, Jesus risen from the dead. Just what are you doing?

I am going back to our beginning as humans. Our emergence from the animal is marked by desire as it supervenes on and sublates instinct, and desire is mimetic: we see our own in each other, and we behave accordingly, that is, rivalistically—with, however, the other possibility: admiring love. In this dialectic is our language: it is universal. Wherever we go in humanity we find, as Michel Foucault says, people without power over others seeking it or people who have it holding it. To take a big leap, what manifests the provincialism of the present Roman position is that it shows power nervously insisting on itself. For it is in the other option of mimesis, admiring love, that our universal human nature finds its salvation: the model is a Jewish teacher, killed by envy and risen from the dead in a condition of divine vindication minus human vindictiveness and manifest thus to his disciples who, riveted, his tomb found empty, by the identity between the man of earth and the man of heaven, are enraptured and, in the supreme historic instance of mimesis, became, as he is, people who have died into a deathless life beyond life that we call eternal life, the life of the church.
CODA 2
Some gleanings from the current Commonweal are ad rem. Here is the description of the installation of a new bishop in Ghana, in a Mass that took five hours of enormous fun. ‘Vatican II cleared the way for African Catholics to use their own music and dance in their worship, and also opened the way for charismatic renewal groups (There is an active one in Techimen), the use of tribal symbols and the bright colours favoured in Africa. It’s hard to imagine how the Church’s remarkable growth in Africa could have happened without the council’s liturgical reforms. In Techimen that day, it seemed that the church had taken the teaching of the council and not only run with it but danced with it too.’ How pathetic are our speculations and fears as we contemplate the recent Vatican resumption of the dressing-up box and the rumours of the words of consecration being put into Latin!
‘By 2025, there will be 600 million Christians in Africa, but only 250 in North America. By mid-century, 30% of Chinese people will be Christians. These demographic shifts are vivid evidence of Karl Rahner’s observation that Vatican II marks the emergence of the Weltkirche or world-church…what Christian theology will look like when freed from its cultural bonds is a big question.’

CALVI

ON THE CONTINUING ENQUIRY INTO THE DEATH OF
ROBERTO CALVI


Who desperately needed that man dead
But those whose interests his dealings served
Who would be near the church’s only head?
There will be some who so have long observed.

Why has this come to me in time of prayer?
Because my house swept clean is cleared of lies
But I don’t trust myself in truth to care
And not to join the force that crucifies

And gloats over the church’s head exposed.
The reaches of self-righteousness are deep,
I have heard, though, a quiet interposed,
An other who its counselling will keep.

Now burst upon me Jesus and disperse
The luxury of my indignant curse!


‘The purpose of the money channelled by Calvi in his network of secret accounts has never been demonstrated’, Mr Willan told the Tablet, though he said clues pointed to secret funding of the global anti-Communist struggle, allegedly encouraged by the CIA, such as Poland’s Solidarity movement and right-wing regimes in South America.
From the current Tablet


APOLOGY

Dare I say darling to return to you
A mind distracted with discovery
Impelled by you in search of what is true
Not just for the emolument of me.

You play with me as I sit down to pray
And suddenly the glimpse of a solution
Will tantalize me with the need to say
Words against muddle and its old pollution,

And this feels just like what has sat me down
Squarely for the descent into the void
Between my happiness and my old frown
Of puzzlement upon your sea still buoyed.

And while I glory in the incomplete
There’s something in me that just wants you neat.
THE CONVENIENCE OF DEATH AND THE SHOCK OF THE
EMPTY TOMB

(Calvi speaks)

I did it all for you—now you protect me
Or else I spill the beans, and through and through:
The powerful reacted circumspectly
And someone must have wrestled with the true

State of affairs, and done accordingly
As the four knights who rose from the king’s table
And rode off to the coast and took to sea
To do what they as patriots were able

And kill the priest who knew too much to live
Who by the way, when he met with the pope,
Was fobbed off like Romero—no reprieve
From church that chooses power in place of hope.

God how it all connects once you begin
To count the wages of a covered sin.


How life is modelled on the risen one
I knew far better that I thought I knew:
Convenience of death, with this undone,
Death as annihilation could come through.

Convenience of death the empty tomb
Shattered and threw them each against the wall
Of nothing, so that all the psalmist’s gloom
Was real, but then Jesus came, was all.

And this is how I knew that time was mine
In a new way the other side of death
I’d walk abound, drinking this heady wine
Of gratitude to you for every breath.

This toy inflatable, the stopper pulled
With death no longer, I otherwise schooled.

Lost Word

Once we have ascertained that there is in the church a fear to speak out, to speak out of the faith that is in us, and that this has something to do with what is arguably a clinging to power in a time of great insecurity, and that the history of the Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council shows to have been and still to be the refusal of power in the papacy to yield to the urgent solicitation of the church in council and since, the question presses on us: where do we go from here? Of course we go to the Gospel with its persistent and clear injunctions, but there is needed an act of self-understanding, individual and shared, that comes far closer to what you and I are feeling in the church today; feeling in the church as we look at it, and as we are it. The Gospel tells us that ‘love, perfected, casts out fear’ but we need a self-understanding that sees these two forces, of love and fear, in their immediately felt contention. What does fear giving way to love look like?

I keep coming back to Tolle, to the wearying of my colleagues, but I continue to be drawn to a conscious moment, that I have not see anywhere else in writing, at which fear was summoned from its roots in the will to live, threatened, it felt, with annihilation, taught somehow not to resist, the self not to insist on itself, and in obedience self-surrendering, followed by a sleep whence he awoke to a world in light and love, wherein he has lived and taught ever since. Here, fear in its essence gives way to love in its essence.

So at least we have the model, the paradigm. How might it be addressed to fear in the church? For a start, a further precision can be made concerning this fear. It is something more than the fear for my life which rushes to the surface in a perceived irregularity on a flight, for instance. The threat encountered or imagined is to my spiritual security, for which the church stands. Further, my spiritual security is wedded, by church authority, to obedience to it—not only as a monk, on the pay-roll as it were, but in any serious Catholic. But the not-so-clear bottom line is that the spiritual security of the authority itself can feel threatened.

An unimaginable moment of truth would occur were I, ‘focused’ on myself as threatened by authority as power, self-pitying in this virile way, suddenly were to see that the overbearing authority is in the same boat.’ Then my tenderness, my soft spot, extends to embrace the oveweaning authority as a fellow-sufferer of the insecurity that is engendered when spiritual authority turned into power finds itself, as power, threatened with the loss of power.

Is this such an apocalyptic moment? Was it not perhaps trying to happen at Vatican II with the ceaseless and relentless confrontation between the voice of reform and the voice of the curia, of power, not so much on the floor as in the working groups. Then the stage was set for the spread of tenderness from the soft spot to happen not only in the individual concerned, in each one’s moment in prayer and truth, but on the floor! There was a will, on the part of those seeking reform, not just to win as a majority, but to ‘gain your brother’ as Jesus says a propos of a quarrel. But for such a resolution to become public would be ‘something else’, as they say. Still, we have to think persistently of this ideal moment as a thing to work toward, and working toward which is working creatively on this fear that, as Alison said to me recently, is corroding faith in the church; faith, in the church, and faith in the church.

How, though, is this work against fear to go on? Prayer has to be converted from pious egoism to that ‘drop into nothing’ that Abbot Chapman taught us in his Spiritual Letters.. And the drop into nothing is ‘sympathetic’ with the extension of tenderness toward the other. Tolle has a useful formula here: if the relationship of me with me were to cease, all my relationships would be love-relationships. Nietzsche says ‘when were’re alone we’re thinking about others: when we’re with others, we’re thinking about ourselves.

But have we got to the bottom of this dynamic of fear that I have spoken of, fear, in authority, of losing power, and fear, in the ruled, of the etermal sanctions of authority. But the mention of Nietzsche suggests that we trace the threat much deeper.

In one sentence, written ten years after The Gay Science with its story of the Maman in search of a lost God, Nietzsche referred to ‘some ancient and profound trust, that has turned to doubt.’This sends shivers down the spine. He is suggesting that we have always had, until now, a cultural access to the beyond, and that this may be going. Just suppose that the dynamic of church authority and church obedience that we have been looking at had, underneath it, an incursion of self-doubt new to humanity at this time. Every conflict that we have known in the church for the whole of its history has presupposed this ‘trust in the beyond’, of which Nietzsche speaks. If that is giving way, what is the dynamic of authority and power and fear in church that hitherto has always presupposed its existence?

Well, for a start, this shared loss of trust is shared: church authority and church obedience are alike in it. It will be an awful thing if authority came to think of itself as offering us, through obedience, the freedom from that terrible new doubt of humanity that is inflicting authority itself. They may be doing this without knowing it, and this state of affairs, authority and the governed undergoing a new and unique breakdown of humanity itself, will be an awful sickness of the soul.

Is there anything that can save us from this new doubt in our humanity in the world, what is called Schellung des Menschen im Kosmos? Simply and emphatically, yes: the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. But this wonderful fact in our consciousness has to undergo radical surgery if it is to come out of the swaddling-bands of an old and tired rhetoric. I have already, in this note, suggested how this can be done. The person who has, with much pain and bewilderment, come unstuck from the ego in which our culture has given him every encouragement to invest everything and become himself for the first time conscious without thought, and, resisting nothing, surrendered and come alive as never before, has died into a life-as-never-before, and, this is what it is to have died with Christ and been reborn, at least it is the shape of it, it is the sense of it, and to have this experience is to come much closer to the risen Christ than through a pious repetition of the creedal formula, trying to believe it.

It has only just occurred to me to put together the Tolle terror sucked into the void and the plight of us today as stated in that terrible sentence of Nietzsche. Does even this new doubt in our cultural access to the beyond deprive of its spiritual power the self divested of itself as hitherto known? I don’t think so.

And if we now go on to understand that with Jesus the ego has names, of Caiaphas, Judas, Peter, Pilate, and nails and a cross, and a body nailed to it and killed into our new life, this unassailableness of our transformation by all—as Paul insists in that amazing passage in Romans 8—that the world can do to it.

Tolle’s status as a teacher is now considerable. He can hold a large crowd of people in a state of consciousness that, it seems, has in it a taste of the inner silence, free of what he calls mental noise, of contemplative attention. His book—the first of three—‘The Power of Now’ is translated into over thirty languages, and the sales are still growing. His publisher has said that this is the first author he has ever published
who never asks after his sales. His avowed philosophy is Buddhism, and one of the things we should by now be clear about is that the relationship between Buddhism and Christianity is one of mutual enrichment, although Cardinal Ratzinger, as Prefect of the CDF, described the current practice of Zen meditation techniques as auto-erotic, but this is not surprising when one reflects on the outright condemnation of the Enneagram, at which Bishop de Roo, the only living bishop who as a bishop at Vatican II, is now a qualified and accredited teacher of the method is, one would think, the guarantee of its orthodoxy. He has a book on the Enneagram and biblical characters, and when I mentioned the condemnation in a conversation I had with him a few years ago, he said quietly, ‘they are trying to impose a very narrow theology of their own.’ We only had half-an-hour together, and it was like returning to Vatican II in a time-warp.

I don’t think I am digressing. That conversation gave me a taste of another consciousness recognizably Catholic, in contrast with what is now the norm where the church is the subject of discussion has only just occurred to me. One thing he said, I remember, was ‘I thought contraception was settled, that it didn’t come up in confession any more.’

There is a caveat here. Recently Bishop O’Donaghue of Lancaster wrote a book that is much discussed, describing the spiritual state of Catholics in England. It was very gloomy: no real sense of the Real Presence in the Eucharist, and many other salient items of the Catholic mind in disarray. I haven’t studied the text, and I seriously need to. My question would be, is he saying that this is the result of the Council, or is it the result of the often remarked failure of the bishops who returned from the Council to communicate to the faithful what they had enthusiastically voted-in, with majorities that were virtual unanimities. One instance of this failure is the big convention of clergy and laity in Liverpool over twenty years ago that came up with a statement ‘An Easter People’, about which our then Abbot John Roberts, not a man given to enthusiasms, was most enthusiastic. There was no real response to this on the part of the bishops. Thus one attempt, by priests and people, to put the Council into practice, failed completely, which suggests that the gravamen of O’Donaghue’s statement should be attached not to the Council but to the failure to communicate it.

I am still recalling the contrast between how it feels in the church now and how it felt in my half-hour with Bishop de Roo. There is something dreadful about fear that has become a habit.

And a habit at this time in the history of western culture, whose loss of grip on absolutes this pope deplores with good reason, for is this not the new doubt to which Nietzsche so chillingly refers?

It surely is appropriate to ask a question here. Is there any connection between this spiritual malaise in the west and the absence of any reform on the part of the Roman Curia such as the Council called for? Is there some next move that is in that quarter? Certainly there is no lack of leading theologians who are of this opInion, to cite one of whom lays me open to the charge of nepotism. Has not the Council been killed by the resumption, on the part of the Curia, of its manner of choosing bishops throughout the world? I remember that, back in the seventies, a curial official was quoted saying, disarmingly, ‘we’ve got the appointment of bishops back on track.’ ‘Back on track’ meant the replacement of the then Apostolic Delegate in America, Jadot, who was known for the way he sounded opinion, right across the board. During the last pontificate, the church has been centralised as never before in its history, this centrality reinforced by instant communication which ‘turned the church into a travesty of its past’ according to MadeleinE Bunting, a Catholic.

In sum, and in brief, the more persuaded one becomes of ‘the Nietzsche effect’, the new doubt, the more clearly we are to see the role of the Gospel in this regard. It is to save secularity from a world-corrosive secularism.

MY ARTICLE SENT TO THE TABLET

Here is the finished product, no reply from the Tablet so far.

PICASSO’S PARENTS AND THE KITCHEN TABLE

There is such a thing as ground gained in the way we understand ourselves as humans, of shared insights that cannot be gone back on. What immediately springs to mind is the unaccepability of slavery, leading to its widespread abolition. And here are two other examples of ground gained: the insight that men and women are equally human, equal in fact, and that homosexuality is simply the way a minority of men and women are, and cannot be regarded as deviant.

Now Christian faith, claiming as it does to be our salvation, has to engage with both these insights into the human condition. More precisely, it has to allow them to impinge on its own order as church, to take them on board as it takes on board all who seek salvation in the church. In both these matters, people are involved at their most passionately and feelingly human, so taking on board the equality of women and the integrity of homosexuals in an institution that is worldwide and two millennia old—far older if we go to its Hebraic roots—that, for the greater part of its history, has not known either, is going to be ‘messy’, as Rowan Williams often says.

Now there is a crucial difference in the way that these two human themes impinge on these bodies, owing to a difference in the respective authority structures. The Anglican Communion has a very loose authority structure, the Catholic a tight one. So in the Anglican Communion the problems created are let rip, while in the Catholic Church they tend to go under wraps.

But under the wraps, there is this persistent and, hopefully, restless habit we call theology. In the Anglican Communion theology accentuates the problem and contributes to the ‘let rip’ factor, and what I want to look at is Catholic theology under wraps but insistent as theology is everywhere.

So let us look at what happens under the wraps. First with regard to the impinging of womens’ claim to full participation in the shape of a claim to holy orders, some years ago Catholic scripture scholars were canvassed by the Vatican for an opinion on the scriptural warrant for denying the priesthood to women, and the reply was negative. The only attempt at a rational defense was the argument that a priest had to bear a physical resemblance to Christ, and this was dismissed as it deserved.(1) So much for the theological opinion, but it is under wraps as far as public debate is concerned. At one point Cardinal Ratzinger, as prefect of the CDF, said that Pope John Paul’s vehement denial of ordination to women amounted to an infallible pronouncement, but no theologian believes that infallibility can be delegated in this way.

Now to the other matter, the neuralgic one of the homosexual in the church. What is under wraps here? Our theology is faced with a mass of new data. First, there is the collapse, at least where ground is being gained’ irrevocably, of the taboo on this condition whose wreckage of human lives is now documented and abominated. The pink triangle earned a terrible fate in Hitler’s death-camps, described in a small book by a victim (2) Now the theological opinion that homosexuality is a disorder depends, to a great extent, on the taboo, so that as the taboo goes out the opinion is exposed as an opinion, and feels the draught. The recently compiled Catechism of the Catholic Church is, in the section on homosexuality, candidly vulnerable (2357-2359) It starts by saying that we do not know the cause of this condition, that it is not chosen, and that, while not itself sinful, it nevertheless inclines a person to actions that are. That is quite a ‘nevertheless’!A theological opinion that there is a not-sinful inclination to actions that are gravely so has no future in this tiresome habit, searching and restless theology, especially as there is now widespread agreement among psychiatrists that homosexuality is innate rather than psychologically induced by parents and so forth. It has been struck off the list of deviances by the psychiatric associations of both this country and the United States.

Nor does the matter end there. The notion of a disordered radical desire finds itself on a collision course with the insistence of the Council of Trent, against the Lutheran doctrine that original sin corrupts us at root, at the spring of desire. Here is what the council has to say about ‘concupiscence’ which may be paraphrased as natural sexual desire in a sinful world.‘This concupiscence the Apostle sometimes calls sin (Rm 7: 14, 17, 20) but the holy council declares that the Catholic Church has never understood it to be called sin in the sense of being truly and properly such in those who have been regenerated, but in the sense that it is a result of sin and inclines to sin. If anyone holds a contrary view, let him be anathema.’ Dz 742. Here, in the vital decree on justification, the church in council confronts what at least was taken to be the key doctrine of Luther to the effect that man is radically corrupted by original sin, so that desire is infected at its very roots, and, bearing the name of concupiscence, is, for the Lutheran doctrine, what original sin is, corrupt desire. Against this the council makes the statement I have just quoted. The council is saying that concupiscence, natural desire, is not sin—though Paul can be misread as saying it is—but an inclination to sin. And this inclination, the council insists, does not have to be acted upon; it can be resisted with the grace of God: I don’t have to seduce this person.

But now let us ask the fathers in council: what about a sexual desire which, for a minority of persons, is experienced as natural for them, a judgment now borne out by a virtual unanimity on the part of the human sciences?Is this a desire that does not have to be acted upon, as is the desire to seduce a married person? Does God impose this abstention, as he imposes chastity on the married and the single, as an acceptable sacrifice? That phrase has given the title to a collection of studies by a group of leading Anglican theologians (to be cited, surely, at the coming Lambeth Conference) that is admirably comprehensive and is prefaced by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who opens his introduction with the rhetorical question: an acceptable sacrifice? and answers it with an emphatic No. That is not the God he serves, a God who has required great sacrifices from his people and ourselves in the cause of justice against Apartheid.

I remember, in theology class when I was a student, that we were told that the state of original sin is not in ‘concupiscence’ but in the absence of ‘original justice’ which Adam was thought to have had ‘before he sinned.’ And while we’re on Adam, when the Catechism expounds the teaching on original sin, it confines itself to the story of the Fall—with the weak admission that it is ‘figurative’—and so avoids the knotty question of what original sin is in us, in desire that ‘moves us about our day’.Although. it would be quite unfair to suggest that this omission was in order not to be saddled with the teaching on desire when it came to homosexuality, in fact the omission does make it less painful to call the homosexual condition a disorder. (3)

What strikes me about the Catechism’s treatment of homosexuality is how self-exposing it is in admitting, as I have said, that we do not know its cause and that it is not chosen. This is impressive, in the oldest institution in a world that has lived for centuries under the taboo, and no Englishman can forget the wrecked life of Oscar Wilde. When at his trial it was stated that he had thought of becoming a Catholic, the judge commented, ‘I think, Mr Wilde, that that is the only church that would accept you’ thus paying the old Catholica the greatest compliment, the kind that is not intended.

It will be helpful, finally, to consider the dynamics of the interaction between the two Christian bodies in regard to the present crisis in Anglicanism over women bishops.

Since, as I have argued, the Anglican Communion is suffering the im- pact of the two insights on church order, which in our church is happening unacknowledged, honesty and integrity would seem to require some recognition, on our part, of their plight and its cause which we share. What form such recognition could possibly take, it is difficult to say. But to say to them, as Cardinal Kasper, who presides over church unity issues, did, ‘You are making unity between us more difficult’ is to show no awareness of the problem we share. To recall the fine book ‘Finding the Voice of the Church’ by George Dennis O’Brien, (4) that surely is the voice, not of the Church but of a scolding parent. A dear friend of mine has just compared it to how we might imagine the parents of Picasso reacting to the boy’s art-stuff all over the kitchen table. Naughty Pablo! This has given me my title.

In conclusion, it is nice to know that one’s opinion is shared. Here is Madeleine Bunting, who is herself a Catholic,in today’s Guardian ‘While Anglicanism’s travails are laid bare for the bloggers to pour scorn on, the Catholic Church has become a parody of its past, a ruthlessly centralised authoritarian structure in which all the debates troubling Lambeth are simply being postponed. As one priest put it to me, that is also a massive task.’


1: It is probably improper to put into print the reaction I heard from one priest in America: ‘I thought the priest had to be like Jesus, not pee like Jesus!’

2:‘The Men with the Pink Triangle’ by Heinz Heger 1972 GMP Publishers.

3: I was so appalled at the cognitive dissonance likely to be set up in children who learn evolution in science lessons and a fairy story in catechism class, that I wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger describing this as pastorally irresponsible. I still cherish the reply I received six months later, that ‘your courteous transmission will receive the attention it deserves.’

4:: University of Notre Dame Press 2007

PRAYER JOURNAL

DAY 2, SAME TEXTS


Is 30: 18-25. Yahweh is waiting…to take pity on you. Why waiting? Till you give him a chance. We all wait on the rising chance of God.

Eph. 1: 3-13. Blessed be God… he chose us in Christ before the world was made…marking us out for himself…you have been stamped with the seal of the Holy Spirit. What a preposterous piece of self-importance! But the really preposterous thing is that Jesus is the focus of the ineffable unknown. Once that is seen--and the whole faith of Paul is rooted in it, he was bowled over by it when it said ‘why do you persecute me?’—then we in all our peculiarity are tumbled in to God’s self-showing in that man.

Jn 15: 9-13. I have loved you as the Father has loved me…Remain in my love. Jesus is the loved one of all time. No one has ever felt loved as he did, and everyone feels ‘if I were ever loved I could change the world.’ It is the terrible plight of our time, people don’t feel loved and so they stuff themselves with ego stuff, all that our technology can buy. How shall Jesus spread the contagion of the most-loved human? That is the Contagion of Jesus, gives me my title.

Lk 19:41-42. If you had only recognized the way to peace.’ How on earth can the city recognize the way to peace? Well, there’s Tolle, whose way to peace has been translated into over thirty languages, and in any case it’s the Buddhists who are to teach us Christians to be peace-people. Poor Rowan Williams at Lambeth, with all the caterwauling around him. He made a retreat at Worth Abbey last week, and one of the monks said to me ‘I’ve never seen such holiness in a man.’ Here’s the sonnet I’m sending him.

LAMBETH 08

I love it there where, formless, forms are born
Some insight into the deep mind of God
Where all is new and no one is forlorn
Now heard in the beginning was the Word.

Where ignorant armies clash by night, in prayer
Enemies are their souls known tenderly
In a soft spot where I am all aware
The only word my breathing that is free.

Rowan I pray you now who are the centre
About whom many create mental noise
And where you are is where I know to enter
And see them children fighting over toys.

And while men fight for their demanding norms
How joyous is the birthplace of the forms.

LAMBETH 2008

FOR LAMBETH 2008

Come to my house all you comfortable people*
Leave your stiff minds with ready thoughts outside
With those who huddle under the same steeple
Resist the huge and ever-flowing tide.

The soft spot is in fact a roomy place
Although to have it be so is a pain
Quite unsustainable without your grace
Who on a cross invert our loss and gain

To make your heart this place for all the nations
To come to peace in through your holy church
Has still to learn this grace is not in rations
But the response to the world’s deepest search.

To let the hateful one into that place
Needs humour, the last mystery of grace.

*from the rock opera ‘Tommy’. Tommy, age 7, at a Butlin’s holiday camp, goes to his mother in the night for comfort and finds her in bed with a lover, the two of them interrupted by her RAF husband unexpectedly back on leave, whom the lover kills. The boy is traumatised and becomes catatonic, deaf and dumb, resists all therapy. He becomes a winner at the pin-ball machine and, on receiving an award, suddenly comes out with this beautiful lyric.

PRAYER JOURNAL

I am starting a prayer journal.

LK 19:41-42
Don’t think of the magisterial Jesus deploring his rejection by his people; think of the young radical on fire with love wanting to show the way of love to the religious establishment, so in-place with all its rituals and its brokerage of spiritual power. If only you could listen to what is in me…if only…and the trade goes on, regardless, the old routine of religion. This Jesus came to me as I read this.

1 Jn 4: 7-11
And indeed it is not we who loved God, as though we invented love that is God! It is because God is love that he loved us not we him. What a noisy self-important thing our love for God looks like as I confront this simple statement of the essences of things. Love is why there is anything rather than nothing. Love insists ‘Let there be light!’ and there is the Big Bang. But beware of shortcircuiting, process-skipping as the Focusing people call it here, for this is having the ego lend a hand to God’s affair. God is love. Love says ‘let there be light’ and so light is a mystery. Creative love has something to do with light being both in our physical world explored by the scientist and in the other world, the infinite unknown, giving ambiguous signals.

Thank you Thelma Hall* for giving me a way to have God interrupt my creative efforts. I’ll go through your examples and so give my ‘soft spot’ a fuller context. Light treats the scientist to a trick of love perhaps. Measure its speed and it goes no faster forward from a train moving at the speed of light than from a stationary one. With its speed, it behaves as an absolute in a universe where there are no absolutes except the laws of physics, but these only serve to make the comprehensibility of the universe the most incomprehensible thing about it, as Einstein said.

There’s nothing sentimental about the love that creates light. As I write a sentence like that, I feel the truth in the palms of my hands escaping their grasp. It’s a real bodily feeling! Odd!

* The wonderful little book, ‘Too Deep for Words: Rediscovering Lectio Divina with 500 scripture texts for prayer’. by Thelma Hall, first published 1985..

resurrection

RESURRECTION

The end of time had come about—for him,
That was an idea uninventable
Threw all our calculations out of trim,
With it the mind, exclusively, was full.

It came to Saul and turned him into Paul
Who had to talk about it till he died,
He saw a world just waiting for the call
That was to bring all to the Crucified.

When in the dock, he said to them: I’m here
About the resurrection of the dead,
A teaching some believed, others ‘No fear!’
But he meant him, the hugely held instead.

Resurrection! I hear the word resound,
I’m still trying to get it that way round.



He showed himself as who we are to be
And they adored, now silent all the strife
And didn’t he keep saying ‘I am he!’
I am the resurrection and the life.

John only made explicit what was pent
Up in the other stories of the man
Whom the unknown into our time had sent
For us to crucify, and life began.

And now I have to ask myself of this
When I consult what I call my soft spot
The body’s quiet hint of wordless bliss:
Is this the place where I am God-begot?

Now hear him the persona of the psalms
And so my answer comes, the spirit calms.



Sebastian Moore
12.7.08






THE EMPTY TOMB IN FOCUS

What would the empty tomb have looked like if you knew, as they did from the way he had manifested himself to them, that the final resurrection at the end of time had happened for him, with him? No longer the mystery of the vanished body but a bit of eternity in our world. The overwhelming self-manifestation of the risen one ran instantly back along the track of memory to the tomb found empty. The empty tomb, looked at pie-eyed, yields nothing, as Rowan Williams said years ago. Looked at with eyes that have seen him as our future, it looked like…John the visionary, John who really saw, gives us something of that look, when the Beloved Disciple saw the grave-clothes ‘and believed—he had not realised that he, Jesus, had to be raised from the dead.’ And by the way, the raising of Lazarus to life again as we know it was meant as a contrast with the resurrection.

PRAYING THIS

If what I have before me is the end
Of man, then memory becomes desire
Rooted in him who takes flesh as our friend
To say with Paul and all the saints: think higher

Where Jesus is with our life hid in God
From ego with its boredom and its pain
And our belief in him only feels odd
Until we learn to sink and live again.

There is a transposition we must make
Of holy words into a praying state
That we may sink into if we will take
The risk of letting go of our mind’s weight.

And I learn at long last how I slow down
And feel undoing a long-standing frown.

FOR LAMBETH 2008

Come to my house all you comfortable people*
Leave your stiff minds with ready thoughts outside
With those who huddle under the same steeple
Resist the huge and ever-flowing tide.

The soft spot is in fact a roomy place
Although to have it be so is a pain
Quite unsustainable without your grace
Who on a cross invert our loss and gain

To make your heart this place for all the nations
To come to peace in through your holy church
Has still to learn this grace is not in rations
But the response to the world’s deepest search.

To let the hateful one into that place
Needs humour, the last mystery of grace.

*from the rock opera ‘Tommy’. Tommy, age 7, at a Butlin’s holiday camp, goes to his mother in the night for comfort and finds her in bed with a lover, the two of them interrupted by her RAF husband unexpectedly back on leave, whom the lover kills. The boy is traumatised and becomes catatonic, deaf and dumb, resists all therapy. He becomes a winner at the pin-ball machine and, on receiving an award, suddenly comes out with this beautiful lyric.

PICASSO’S PARENTS AND THE KITCHEN TABLE

There is such a thing as ground gained in the way we understand ourselves as humans, of shared insights that cannot be gone back on. What immediately springs to mind is the unaccepability of slavery, leading to its widespread abolition. And here are two other examples of ground gained: the insight that men and women are equally human, equal in fact, and that homosexuality is simply the way a minority of men and women are, and cannot be regarded as deviant.

Now Christian faith, claiming as it does to be our salvation, has to engage with both these insights into the human condition. More precisely, it has to allow them to impinge on its own order as church, to take them on board as it takes on board all who seek salvation in the church. In both these matters, people are involved at their most passionately and feelingly human, so taking on board the equality of women and the integrity of homosexuals in an institution that is worldwide and two millennia old—far older if we go to its Hebraic roots—that, for the greater part of its history, has not known either, is going to be ‘messy’, as Rowan Williams often says.

Now there is a crucial difference in the way that these two human themes impinge on these bodies, owing to a difference in the respective authority structures. The Anglican Communion has a very loose authority structure, the Catholic a tight one. So in the Anglican Communion the problems created are let rip, while in the Catholic Church they tend to go under wraps.

But under the wraps, there is this persistent and, hopefully, restless habit we call theology. In the Anglican Communion theology accentuates the problem and contributes to the ‘let rip’ factor, and what I want to look at is Catholic theology under wraps but insistent as theology is everywhere.

So let us look at what happens under the wraps. First with regard to the impinging of womens’ claim to full participation in the shape of a claim to holy orders, some years ago Catholic scripture scholars were canvassed by the Vatican for an opinion on the scriptural warrant for denying the priesthood to women, and the reply was negative. The only attempt at a rational defense was the argument that a priest had to bear a physical resemblance to Christ, and this was dismissed as it deserved.(1)) So much for the theological opinion, but it is underwraps as far as public debate is concerned. At one point Cardinal Ratzinger, as prefect of the CDF, said that Pope John Paul’s vehement denial of ordination to women amounted to an infallible pronouncement, but no theologian believes that infallibility can be delegated in this way.

Now to the other matter, the neuralgic one of the homosexual in the church. What is under wraps here? Our theology is faced with a mass of new data. First, there is the collapse, at least where ‘ground is being gained’ irrevocably, of the taboo on this condition whose wreckage of human lives is now documented and abominated. The pink triangle earned a terrible fate in Hitler’s death-camps, described in a small book by a victim (2) Now the theological opinion that homosexuality is a disorder depends, to a great extent, on the taboo, so that as the taboo goes out the opinion is exposed as an opnion, and feels the draught. The recently compiled Catechism of the Catholic Church is, in the section on homosexuality, candidly vulnerable. It starts by saying that we do not know the cause of this condition, that it is not chosen, and that, while not itself sinful, it nevertheless inclines a person to actions that are. That is quite a ‘nevertheless’!A theological opinion that there is a not-sinful inclination to actions that are gravely so has no future in this tiresome habit, searching and restless theology, especially as there is now widespread agreement among psychiatrists that homosexuality is innate rather than psychologically induced by parents and so forth. It has been struck off the list of deviances by the psychiatric associations of both this country and the United States.

Nor does the matter end there. The notion of a disordered radical desire finds itself on a collision course with the insistence of the Council of Trent, against the Lutheran doctrine that original sin corrupts us at root, at the spring of desire, that ‘although Paul sometimes uses language that implies this, the church rejects it.’(3) And I remember, in theology class when I was a student, that we were told that the state of original sin is not in ‘concupiscence’ but in the absence of ‘original justice’ which Adam was thought to have had ‘ before he sinned.’ And while we’re on Adam, when the Catechism expounds the teaching on original sin, it clings to the story of the Fall—with the weak admission that it is ‘figurative’—and so avoids the knotty question of what original sin is in us, in the desire that ‘moves us about our day’.Although. it would be quite unfair to suggest that this omission was in order not to be saddled with the teaching on desire when it came to homosexuality, in fact the omission does make it less painful to call the homosexual condition a disorder. (4)

What strikes me about the Catechism’s treatment of homosexuality is how self-exposing it is in admitting, as I have said, that we do not know its cause and that it is not chosen. This is impressive, in the oldest institution in a world that has lived for centuries under the taboo, and no Englishman can forget the wrecked life of Oscar Wilde. When at his trial it was stated that he had thought of becoming a Catholic, the judge commented, ‘I think, Mr Wilde, that that is the only church that would accept you’ thus paying the old Catholica the greatest compliment, the kind that is not intended.

It will be helpful, finally, to consider the dynamics of the interaction between the two Christian bodies in regard to the present crisis in Anglicanism over women bishops.

Since, as I have argued, the Anglican Communion is suffering the im- pact of the two insights on church order, which in our church is happening unacknowledged, honesty and integrity would seem to require some recognition, on our part, of their plight and its cause which we share. What form such recognition could possibly take, it is difficult to say. But to say to them, as Cardinal Kasper, who presides over church unity issues, did, ‘You are making unity between us more difficult’ is to show no awareness of the problem we share. To recall the fine book ‘Finding the Voice of the Church’ by George Dennis O’Brien, (5) that surely is the voice, not of the Church but that of a scolding parent. A dear friend of mine has just compared it to how we might imagine the parents of Picasso reacting to the boy’s art-stuff all over the kitchen table. Naughty Pablo! This has given me my title.

In conclusion, it is nice to know that one’s opinion is shared. Here is Madeleine Bunting in today’s Guardian, who is in fact a Catholic. ‘While Anglicanism’s travails are laid bare for the bloggers to pour scorn on, the Catholic Church has become a parody of its past, a ruthlessly centralised authoritarian structure in which all the debates troubling Lambeth are simply being postponed. As one priest put it to me, that is also a massive task.’


1: It is probably improper to put into print the reaction I heard from one priest in America: ‘I thought the priest had to be like Jesus, not pee like Jesus!’

2:‘The Men with the Pink Triangle’ by Heinz Heger 1972 GMP Publishers.

3::I don’t have the reference for this, but it comes in two books by James Alison, ‘The Joy of Being Wrong’ and ‘Faith Beyond Resentment’ where it is cited in full. It comes in the decree of Faith and Justication.

4:I was so appalled at the cognitive dissonance likely to be set up in children who learn evolution in science lessons and a fairy story in catechism class, that I wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger describing this as pastorally irresponsible. I still cherish the reply I received six months later, that ‘your courteous transmission will receive the attention it deserves.’

5: University of Notre Dame Press 2007

Liminal

ON LEARNING TO THINK AND SPEAK LIMINALLY

There is a language for inner prayer, movement of the heart, at the edge of reason, liminal thinking and speaking. It is language pushing toward the infinite: whether this is the certainty, that came with my ‘moment’, that ‘I’ll give you anything you want’—the ‘anything is liminal, the limitless in prospect, the whateverof a moment of inspired generosity. Then there is Abbot Chapman’s ‘an act of attention to God is an act of inattention to everything else’. What happened in my ‘moment’ was that this act of inattention to everything was a dropping into nothing that Tolle knew in his moment. ‘Inattention to everything’ became focused in the attraction to being nothing, the void. ‘Resist nothing’ was the injunction Tolle heard as he felt himself being pulled, terrified, into the void. It means, ‘as you become engulfed, swallowed up like Jonah in the whale, offer no resistance to what now you will see as threatening your very you-ness.

This ‘resist nothing’ is a liminal injunction. ‘I would give you anything’ is also liminal, on the edge of the more and more and more that I would give. ‘Inattention to everything’ is liminal, for here the inattention to everything suddenly—for me—felt like attraction to the not-anything, the void where all the forms are born.

The Tolle moment is the clearest liminal moment that I know. Slowly, after reading of it, I came to see it as presenting in the most luminous and lucid way my moment at the edge, my liminal moment, where I was dropping into ‘nothing’—Chapman talks of ‘nothing in particular—which is God of course.’ As I said ‘I would give him anything’ I felt that layer upon layer of pretences at me was pealing away, and I said, with each, ‘yes, that too, have that too!’

I want to say that this moment is attending on so many people today, only they don’t come to it because, as Tolle says, ‘your mind is making too much noise.’ Chapman is instinctively liminal—‘attending to nothing in particular, which is God of course.’ The year I joined the monastery, 1938, there was a concerted effort to get the book condemned in Rome and put on the Index of Prohibited Books. We had a good friend at court who squelched that. Now the book, ‘The Spiritual Letters of Dom John Chapman’ is a classic.

I want some sort of an ‘institute’ for the promotion of invitation to that moment which can be the beginning of new life for someone, whose relevance to the gospel proclamation is obvious. Does it not show up the hollowness of so much of the gospel proclamation, especially when it comes from an authority very concerned with its prestige.

Any offers for the naming of this institute? The Liminality Institute? I don’t think so. But do give it a whirl!






THE CHURCH SEEN NOT IN A NEW AWARENESS

Implied postponement of a main agenda
Is what one feels about the church these days,
The borrower attendant on the lender
A dangerous normality of maze.

Italians do not think historically
Is what I hear and do in part believe it
At least it would with my surmises tally
And are we really ready to receive it?

The Council was unique: never before
Had the deliberations been the point,
Recorded history thus comes to the fore:
This lost to it, church time is out of joint.

This is my mind: call it subliminal
The church in a continual traffic stall.


I only want what you are saying to me
In what I hear in that peculiar way
That makes my mind unusually roomy
And is the closest that it knows to pray.

To speak of this I need subliminal
Awareness, as one says ‘the tap half on’
Never distant from a willed gift of all
Something you only know what it is gone.

It is an invitation to whoever
May feel it sometimes when one tries to pray
The clearest opposite of being clever
To do with happiness in a new way.

And only you protect this from cliché
And keep it near the steady will to pray.



SM
14.6.08









TO A FRIEND

My soft spot is the tender heart of Jesus
That orchestrates in a triunity
And in ways indecipherable frees us
From consciousness in which we never see.

The soft spot independently is known
To you my friend in silent Quaker peace
For which you had to leave the church agroan
With dogmas that would give you no release.

You ask me how I stayed: I say, the spot
We shared that I found in monastic prayer:
God’s natural child and the child God-begot
Meet now on an occasion so rare.

Of the spot, though, between us, there’s no doubt,
It’s not a thing we would argue about.


SM
15.6.08

























DIMENSION


In the dimension where it first was felt
Divine and human all at one for me
Who now have only to let this heart melt
Into a now aware and really see.

The time when you broke in, still how it is
Is there for me to mind at any time
And make your nothing out of mine and his,
It left my life hence under the sublime.

This you-dimension! It just opened up
Instantly as the scripture spoke to me
Of heavenly inheritance the cup
Of blessing with no death, eternity.

Your wavelength God in Christ, it is so rare
It shoots into me in or out of prayer.






























SOME IDEAS FOR FREDDIE LEWIS
Our desperate need today is for a new consciousness, a new awareness. Not a sharper or a clearer or a better awareness, or an awareness of more, but a new awareness. In all our experience, there is the experiencer, the you you never notice open to God in the silence that the new atheists are filling with the mental noise of their ideas. The teaching of Jesus, his eight beatitudes, are statements to which the new awareness says, ‘Of course!’ Our culture, perhaps our country especially, is deafened by our wants so that we cannot hear our need.

There are a few people we know about who have stumbled, tumbled, into this new self-awareness, Eckhart Tolle as a sudden blissful alternative to suicide. But what he had to reach in this dramatic way waits on you, in an ordinary way. Take the words ‘be still, and know that I am God!’ and say this to yourself slowly, pausing at the comma.

When someone said to Tolle, ‘I want what you have: can you give it to me or show me how to get it?’he replied ‘you have it already. You just can’t feel it because your mind is making too much noise. That answer grew into the book that you are holding in your hands.’

The book he refers to is ‘The Power of Now.’ It is ten years old and is still a best seller, translated into over thirty languages. Here’s a useful quote from his new edition. ‘The more the dysfunction of the human mind plays itself out on the world stage, clearly visible to everyone in the daily television news reports, the greater the number of people who realise the urgent need of a radical change in human consciousness if humanity is not to destroy both itself and the planet. ‘Mumbojumbo’ was all that Time Magazine could see in a book that countless people around the globe find life changing.’ In this introduction, he is praising his own book, but it doesn’t read like that, and the publisher said to someone I know, ‘he’s the only author I’ve ever published who never asks about his sales.’

Do not resist the suchness
of just now being you
murmuring ‘much-of-a-muchness’
and staying in the stew

The mind all in the media
hears only mental noise
with its encylopedia
of all that now destroys.

In all that we experience
is the experiencer
that has no known appearance
behind the him or her.

The world today is deafening
quite deafened to within:
is this the final evening
of our old world of sin
LOVE YOUR ENEMIES AND ENJOY IT

Our desperate need today is for a new consciousness, a new awareness. Not a sharper or a clearer or a better awareness, or an awareness of more, but a new awareness. In all our experience, there is the experiencer, the you you never notice, open to God in the silence that the new atheists are filling with the mental noise of their angry words. Feel your silence, and you might even find yourself praying for them, poor men.

When Jesus says ‘love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you!’and you take this straight, it involves a huge effort of will, a decision through clenched teeth. But for the new awareness this is an invitation to relax, it means resilience, moving in harmony with the sun that rises on all, is not fussy as in ‘Under Milk Wood’, ‘and if you let the sun in, see that he wipes his boots!’

There are a few people we know about who have stumbled, tumbled, into this new self-awareness. Eckhart Tolle got it as a sudden blissful alternative to suicide. But what he had to reach in this dramatic way waits on you, in an ordinary way. Take the words ‘be still, and know that I am God!’ and say this to yourself slowly, pausing at the comma. For the first time, notice in your experience the experiencer, you. The purpose of having a stretch of prayer-time or lectio, is to give the new consciousness a chance to become stronger, more available to you at any time. In prayer, you give the new awareness a chance to become a tenderness, to become ‘the soft spot’ and this is likely to be there when something annoying happens.

One of the fruits of the new awareness is that you can look at outlandish behaviour on the part of public figures without that awful indignation that stops all real thinking. When the top cardinal in the Vatican liturgy department, in an interview in London, replies that there shall be a Tridentine Mass, ‘not in some parishes but in all parishes’, don’t explode! Treat it as burlesque. There is a way of relaxation open to you that has its roots in the eternity that loves you into being. So go with the flow, and let the cardinal go too..

















Who would the mind be wherein all agrees
The providential shape of everything
In a will we can only know to please
To whom all worship in us is to sing?

To speak of this with no sense of the void
Trivialises the unspeakable
And does not realise that he has destroyed
What he believes and will not be its fool.

New consciousness abuts onto this Mind
And feels it where the heart is, tenderly
Content to the big picture to stay blind
Because he knows that one day he will see

As I am told I shall by my belief:
New consciousness is this, but as relief.



How unimportant is what they are up to
I take upon myself and turn to you
To understand where I may stand on tiptoe
And wonder what shall be your something new.

Theology whose ingenuity
Does have a place for sleathing their design
But this has to be watched continually,
The bloodhound in me ready to resign

For I’ve discerned the will to defeat Rome
With losing out on love born of desire,
The ego had to switch and find a home
In mind that has to climb and so get higher.

O breath come slower as I wrestle with
Myself hounded and hunted by my myth.

Sea Change

THE CHURCH IN A SEA-CHANGE

With Vatican II, the church in council underwent a sea-change, that did not deny any of its teaching but had to do with a new way of being the church. To make this change tantamount to a denial of tradition, and then to become negative toward it, is to muddy the waters. It is just such a confusion that we find in Rome these days.

What of this sea-change? That’s a piece of rhetoric if ever there was one. What did happen at Vatican II? Well, perhaps it was just a reflection of the sixties. Can we trust ourselves now to what we felt then? But what we have to go on now is very much more than a nostalgic memory. The events in Rome during those three years have been the subject of a massive History of the Council, which for historians is a standard work, by a team of world-class scholars assembled and ‘marshalled’ by Giuseppe Alberigo. And like any piece of good historical writing, it records the interactions of the people involved. It shows these in detail, but from the detail the reader discerns what Lonergan calls schemes of recurrence, and these have a story. It is a story of repeated opposition to proposals coming from the floor of the council—via an ad hoc body called Consilium, note the s—on the part of the Curia. I have to confess that I have not read this massive history, but its validity as an account of what was really going on has passed muster with the vast majority of scholars, and the work has been ranked with the classic history of Trent. Of course you can say that the bishops, with their periti or experts, who were pleading for attention, were themselves infected with the naïve optimism of the period. But what about the periti? We know that they had a huge influence on the bishops, many of whom were busy rulers and builders of schools: so were they children of the sixties? Of course they were, they were alive and conscious, but my recollection about people like Congar and de Lubac was that they were recovering things long past in the church’s memory. A shallow ‘scholastic’ manual theology, imposed by authority that stopped us publishing, was being challenged by the supernatural dimension as understood by Aquinas with his roots in Augustine. It was a very exciting time to be a Catholic in, and the excitement was coming not from ‘the sixties’ except as a vehicle of opportunity. It was coming from real theology, for a change. It was the excitement of people like myself at the prospect of what we were learning from ancient authors acquiring droit de cite in the leadership of the church. What was afoot was not an ancient wisdom represented by authority reluctant to take on board new ideas, but an ancient bureaucracy with an authority-by-numbers theology, that was being challenged by the theology we had learned to pray in from the Fathers of the Church. I remember Mgr Francis Davies, a very learned theologian, saying to me at the time, ‘wonderful things are now possible in Rome!’ by ‘wonderful things’ he meant the things he had learned and taught to pray through. He saw the end of control by a policing theology and the consequent possible emergence of a new authority and voice. The situation was characterised negatively by the theologian Christoph Schonborn, who said, a few years ago, ‘the church was captured by the theologians, and now we must take it back,’ but who are the ‘we’ who are to do this if not theologians of another school?

One of these is Avery Dulles, and he, I must admit, constitutes a problem. For he has authored a classic work on ‘models of the Church’ which made explicit the fact that the centralised model we have got used to, comparatively recently with the technology of easy and rapid communication, was not the only model. And this was clearly the mind that emerged at the council

I was in America from 1970 until 1992, with the dual role, in two Catholic Universities, of undergraduate theology teacher and campus minister. Thus I experienced Catholic America at its most conscious in the years following the council. The American tendency to polarise was already showing itself: on the one hand there was an ‘anything goes’ liturgically on campus—at Marquette there were several alternative canons of the Mass, written by bright young Jesuits, still keeping up the sixties. Interestingly the opposition was not showing up on campus but in the wider world, and this took the form of disgust at shallow improvisation in the Mass. There was, I see in retrospect, a scapegoat—there always is, wise old Girard!—and the scapegoat was ‘theologians.’ I remember one incident when Ratzinger, the well-known Prefect of the Holy Office, new named the CDF, was invited to speak at a well-publicised meeting of Catholics of ‘the right’ who were bused-in for the occasion. Ratzinger opened his talk by recalling a painting he had seen recently, of a stag being mauled by wolves, while a pack of hounds were rescuing the state from the predators. He said that this remindid him of his role as Prefect, to protect the vulnerable faithful from the ravages of the theologians. This was greeted with rapturous applause: the sacrifice was well-staged.

Now it would be unfair to make much capital of this very emotive occasion. Still the conduct of the office of Prefect during his long tenure deserves the name of violent, certainly as regards the New Ways Ministry for gays and lesbians. Their has never been anything like this in recent church history, except the conduct of the Holy Office under Pius X, which was cited by the Advocatus Diaboli—a role abolished by John Paul II—at the canonisation process for Pius.

Comment is also called for by the claim of Dulles in favour of the recentralisation of the church in Rome under John Paul, as regards the appointment of bishops. What recentralisation did here was to create a world episcopate whose members depended, for their appointment, on a subject’s agreement with the pope on Humanae Vitae, the most controversial papal document ever written. As a result of this centralising policy—or rather simply fact, the pope had little to do with it, he merely let the curia get on with it—was that when the scandal of sexual child-abuse broke on the church in America, the bishops, harried by the press, hastily convened at Dallas, and with the press breathing down their necks were rushed into a policy of ‘zero-tolerance’ which, while it recognized at last the victims of abuse, left unprotected the victim of accusation, and this ran aground on Canon Law. So much for a Rome-centred world episcopate.

When Ratzinger was made pope, there was, understandably, great interest in the question ‘would he behave as Pope the way he had behaved during his long period as Prefect. The answer, overwhelmingly, has been a surprised and delighted No. The severity has gone.

But what is still there is something that only specialists notice. It is his professed attitude to Vatican II, observed not in pronouncements but in publicly available writings. And these are disturbing. As an example—and no one in the press is likely to pick this up—is the pope’s coolness towards the work of Giuseppe Alberigo, the architect of the great History of Vatican II. His remarks are notably negative, and this is one of the themes in the final, third section, of ‘Theology for Pilgrims’ by Nicholas Lash, recently published. Alberigo was the architect of this massive work that has been classed with Jedin’s History of the Council of Trent. It was altogether far beyond the scope of any single author. However, before he died, Alberigo wrote a ‘short history’, which of course lays him open to being charged with a liberal bias, in the way that the total massive work could hardly be. But would an author of that manifest importance in the ecclesial conversation have gone back on the complexity of the original to give it a notable liberal bias? This would have been to caricature his own work, which is a long story of the relentless attempt on the part of the Curia to render the council innocuous.

A recent conversation with Lash is worth recording. I started by saying that the Church at Vatican II underwent a sea-change that did not drop any of the traditional teaching. And it is difficult for authority to note and act on a sea-change. ‘Too kind?’ I asked. ‘Yes, a little’ he replied, and went on to say something like this: Thought happens. It happens in history, and it is as happening, and as having happened, that thought, the mind of a person or a community, has to be recognized.

Now Vatican II is unique in the whole history of the church, in that its deliberations, its disputes, its interactions, all constitute Catholic thought on the move; more specifically, Catholic thought changing, developing, finding a common mind, registering a dissenting minority and not ironing it out. It is as though what is going on all the time with an institution as it faces new ideas and challenges, as it takes cognisance anew of the time in which it is living, was happening in one place and over one time. This only differs from thought in time generally, from thought as it always is in time, in being concentrated, speeded-up by a time limit, and—and this is of supreme importance—constituting the written history of the proceedings as the vital text of the Council.

Now here a very interesting confusion is liable to arise. Someone is going to say: this emphasis on the council as event, as a sea-change in the mind of the church assembled, is distracting us from what’s actually in the documents that the council produced with something near unanimity. They are what is important. We should shift the emphasis from the event to the documents themselves. They are there for us, well-edited and attractively produced. What is missed by this suggestion is that in order to understand the documents themselves we need to understand what was happening in the debate and discussion that led to them. But you’re not going to understand this vital point unless you understand that the discussion of deep matters such as constitute the episcopal end of the church trying to make up its mind, this discussion is itself the event, is itself truth-emergence in event, so that the understanding of the discussion is vital for the understanding of the final product. To take our attention off the event in order to get down to its product, the documents, is simply not to understand the matter.

It is not all that subtle as a matter. If my community had an important chapter meeting from which I was absent, when I get back I want to know ‘what happened.’ ‘What happened’ refers at once to what was decided and how the decision was reached, and when I ask what happened I have both these things simultaneously in mind. The matter only becomes mind-stretching when the matter concerned is not,whether to make a monastic foundation in Patagonia, but how the church has to think about a matter whose content is the Word made flesh and given into the minds of men and women. Then, to brush aside the minutes as unimportant deserves a very severe name indeed. It is too like frivolity for comfort, concerning the truth we live by and has been died for by people of whom we are in awe.

Yet this confusion is taking place in our day, when prominent men in Rome, perhaps even the pope, are enjoining this very shift of emphasis from the Council as even to the Council as documented. Especially is this the case with this Council, that was preceded, not too long before, by what Eamon Duffy calls the Age of Intransigence. Church Authority was engaged in the huge task of releasing the voice of the Church from the travesty of it by an unappealing authoritarianism. To get that one wrong would be lamentable.

In short there is a danger that a scholarly epistemological blunder that misunderstands a crucial moment in the church’s history will leave unhampered the immemorial tendency of power to keep authority in the Church centralised and, in the end, powerless over the hearts of men and women, leaving them to seek nourishment in lesser pastures. It is worth repeating what might be called an algorithm of the curial mind formulated by Acton, for which I cannot find the reference. First they subjected the scriptures to the Church. Then they subjected the ancient Church to the modern Church. Then they subjected the modern church to the pope. In the end, they subjected the pope to themselves.

An example of what we are let in for by this papal maintenance of a despotic curia comes in today’s paper, in which I learn that by a recent decree of Cardinal Hoy of the Liturgy Department, the Tridentine Mass is to be taught to all seminarians. He was interviewed after he had himself celebrated the Tridentine Mass in Westminster Cathedral, and when the interviewer asked, ‘does this mean that the Tridentine Rite will be available in some parishes? He replied, ‘not some parishes. All parishes.’ The confident tone of this rejoinder shows an authority that is out of touch with the pastoral situation he is addressing, but the point is that the Curia still feels free to make statements of this kind, and to point this out is the main purpose of this essay. The Curia has lost the plot. But have they also lost the pope? Or has the pope lost control?

Just to whet the appetite for the sort of thinking that does one no good, the same page of the Sunday Telegraph features a solemn gay wedding, using the traditional marriage service ‘with bridesmaids’, of two priests in one of the oldest of our London churches. This is giving a bad name to the hardwon Anglican tolerance of civil partnerships that is in advance of official Catholic moral teaching that has still to come upon a moral theology that takes sex and relationships in one breath. Had the priest at St Bartholomew’s taken the trouble, he could have discovered a tradition dating from the Middle Ages of church-blessed friendships in Christ, well researched in a book called, I think, ‘Friends’ by an author whose name escapes me. Instead they have chosen to flout tradition and harden the hearts that are headed for schism.

But these two instances, on one page, of the grotesque in Christian liturgical tradition, are surely telling us something radical about Christianity in worship in this sad time for Christian belief in England today. Antony Flew, in his new book on the recovery of God after a lifetime as the Grand Old Man of British philosophic atheism, says that ‘in the United Kingdom, Christianity has virtually disappeared.’ In this context, the present occasional excess on the part of the Curia appears surreal. The recent event in Westminster is not the only example of these excesses. A few months ago, the secretary of the curial department headed by Hoyo, accused the bishops who commented on the recent Motu Proprio of ‘pride, the deadliest of sins.’ If the pope hasn’t lost the plot, he seems to have lost control.

CRISIS

THOUGHTS FOR A GLOBAL CRISIS

This essay has two sections. In the first, I try to spell out what I and many others see as the chief need of our time. In the second, I seek to name the forces that exist, both ancient and modern, that are to meet this need.

THE NEED FOR A NEW CONSCIOUSNESS

The most radical need of our time is, not surprisingly, in the matter of consciousness, of the self, aware, that is self-aware. Absolutely everything depends on how we experience the world and ourselves in it. When we consider the planetary crisis that, according to the great majority of scientists ecological and otherwise, we are bringing upon ourselves in the not too distant future, the first question that comes is, ‘how are we going to face it, even more, to prepare our children to face it?’ Awesome changes of lifestyle are going to be required, to shift out of a culture that has presumed the planet to one that befriends it. And this involves a change in consciousness of the most radical kind. And after all, it would have been more natural to befriend our habitat from the beginning. George Santayana thought that Plato had started us off on our present habitat-indifferent course.

But this new consciousness does not depend for its definition on the idea of adjusting to new needs and lacks. By something that looks to me like a gift of the Spirit, this new consciousness is being experienced here and now as a good way to feel and to be. It was stumbled into by Eckhart Tolle who, in the course of a night on the brink of suicide, underwent something like the excision of the ego, that exposed him to a world incandescent with meaning, wherein he has lived, and taught, ever since—we’re talking about ten years. In the course of the resultant book, he says repeatedly that we shall have to view the world this way if we are to survive it in its coming changes. This is what I meant when I said that the new consciousness does not depend for its definition on the requirement to adjust to planetary change: the new consciousness is being given, irrespective of this need, simply as an awakening: a few years ago I picked up a book ‘The Awakening West’ in which Tolle and half-a-dozen others are interviewed, all people who have come into what already deserves to be called the new consciousness. By a dangerous misnomer, to which religious believers are especially prone, this new consciousness is classed and dismissed as ‘new age rhetoric.’ In reality, the presence or absence of a call to it is how we can judge the relevance of this or that religious teaching.

Tolle gives us the clue to the nature of the new consciousness. When someone said to him, ‘I want what you have. Can you give it me?’ his reply was ‘you already have it. You do not feel it, because your mind is making too much noise.’ It was this answer that started his book, ‘The Power of Now’ which Time Magazine described as mumbo-jumbo.

The auditory image of mental noise is uncannily accurate as a description of the lost state of our civilization, for it suggests the drowning of an inner silence by the noise of talking to oneself: and this is what is wrong with us today. We are encouraged by the continual action of the mass-media to care for ‘me’ as a being voraciously needful of the very things that the media supply. It is no exaggeration to say that we are encouraged to idolise the me, to fight for its rights, to stimulate it with drink and drugs, building up the assumption that the body unstimulated is uninteresting whereas in fact the opposite is the case. One of the skills now on offer—which will be the theme of my second section—is called Focusing, and it consists in letting the body speak with the voice of the self.

It is of such an inward speaking that our media-oppressed culture is the silencing. And surely when the Dalai Lama tells the crowd he addresses that ‘there is no substantial self’, it is this idolized self that he declares non-existent. We are not to bother with his Buddhist doctrine that appears to us to deny the self altogether. The point is that the man is a strong ally in the battle for authenticity in an age of pseudo-selves.

One of the most dangerous forces in the cause of the pseudo-self is a phenomenon prevalent in America that goes under the name of the culture-wars. This consists in aggressive self-identification with one side against another in whatever conflict is chosen. We should speak rather of the ego’s wars, of the noisy delusion that is making our inner silence inaudible. Let this brief sketch suffice for section one of my essay.

REMEDIES

Here there is embarrass de richesse. The first, for me, is Focusing or Biospirituality. Copiously featured in Google, it is being taught worldwide to children of five upwards. It consists in acquiring a skill, suited to yourself, for listening to the body. The basic method is to ask yourself, ‘what just now stands between me and being at ease with myself?’ and then the quiet self-attention that may let in a surprising image. In the short paperback whereby he introduces it, Eugene Gendlin makes the valuable observation that in rapidly changing times such as ours there are going to be new feelings, feelings never had before that result on changed circumstances of evolution. Ed McMahon, a priest who with Fr Peter Campbell heads the movement, is fond of the saying by Carl Rogers: the only security to grow in is the stability of change. The best introduction that I know to Focusing is ‘Beyond the Myth of Dominance’ by Edwin.M.McMahon.

This sends me straight to the anthropological revolution brought about by Rene Girard. A book just published, out of Tasmania (Sheer Grace by Drasko Dizdar) is a companion to our liturgical celebration based on the hypothesis of Girard, of the race-memory of a shared killing that saved us from extinction in a war of all against all, and that was willingly undergone by Jesus who ‘extended his arms on a cross and put an end to death and revealed the resurrection.’ This massive formula is translated from the rhetoric in which it had been encased and encrusted, into what we are coming to know in a new consciousness of our condition as, in the end, beings loved into being by the source of being. What the formula is describing is ‘set us free to be who radically we are, loved into being all the way.

The new consciousness has as its law the saying of Jesus ‘to him that hath shall be given, from him that hath not shall be taken even what he hath.’ In a time of axial shift, those who catch on will get more and more, insight upon insight, grace on grace, while those who cling to the old order will lose even what they have as the old order goes under. I got this interpretation from Gil Bailie who does wonderful work for the Girardian revolution. I might equally have got it from the Focusing people. Cf ‘Violence Unveiled’.

The most countercultural thing Jesus ever said was ‘love your enemies and pray for those that persecute you.’ What the new consciousness does is to recognize this practice on the part of the body as a matter of its own wellbeing. Sometimes, when I have a quarrel with someone, I am able to go into myself and recall just how mad at the person I am, only to say compassionately to myself, ‘you poor thing, really steamed up aren’t you!’ That self-pity, I find, includes the image of the hostile other, and a phrase such as ‘in the same boat’ comes to mind, and I let it in, and mentally I come into a solidarity with the person. In traditional language, we are reconciled in the Body of Christ.

Here is a good piece of writing from James Alison on this.

‘I have prayed for and tried to look on certain people in my own experience with whom I have been locked into what seemed at first glance righteous hatred, I have found that the veriest glimpse of the tiniest iota of affection towards them produced a huge harvest of self-acceptance and peace within me. I could have prayed for years to be able to forgive myself and not got anywhere at all: it was in being able to let the other go, forgive the other, that I began to be able to forgive myself.It is for this reason that I think that telling people that they need to forgive themselves is to place a terrible burden on them. It is to direct them to fruitless introspection and breast-beating, since none of us has direct access to what makes us conscious. The only way to forgive yourself is projectively, which is to say, in another person. As you forgive another, so you will find yourself being let go.’ (Unpublished lecture, emphasis mine)

Clearly our ability to respond to alarming changes in our environment depends on our solidarity as humans. The thought of tackling this situation alone is absurd. It is the human species that is being threatened with water-shortages and other calamities, and it will be as the human community that we are to address this invasion. It was the human species that came close to extinction some 70,000 years ago through mutual violence, and it is a human community that began to emerge as we climaxed in Jesus and came with him through crucifixion into being the Body of Christ in the Spirit. We must pay attention to those moments in our experience when it became evident that we are a community in love, loved into being as we are. W.H.Auden knew one of such moments and celebrated it in a poem called Summer on the Lawn (1933) In his edition of the poetry, he has a note explaining how, alone after a conversation among teacher friends, he ‘knew’ the truth of ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’ ‘because I was doing it.’ From that moment his poetry changed into a positive way of looking at today’s world, without the cultural nostalgia found in the other giants, Pound and Eliot. Surely Marshall Rosenberg knew such a moment, to be able to say with such passion that our supreme bliss is to be the source of bliss in another or others, and to found on this belief a method of conflict resolution that takes him to the worst trouble-spots. Interestingly, his method is to get both sides of a bitter conflict to admit to each other what they are afraid of—and how odd that I haven’t mentioned fear as the root of the desperate situations into which we get ourselves. The Johannine saying that love, perfected, casts out fear we piously and inefficaciously assent to, not realising its truth, that love and fear, and not love and hate, are our real opposites.

The significant overcoming of fear by love calls for celebration as does the crucifixion of Jesus and its immense sequel. It inspires the lovely phrase of Rowan Williams, ‘the festive abrogation of rivalry, the social miracle.’

To bring this disquisition back into focus, let me say what its focus is. It is, that people are brought together not only by being called, but as the fulfilment within each of what is the heart of each one’s being. Alison, in the passage I have quoted, is making the point that telling someone to forgive himself is cruel because this concentrates on the self and drives the evil further in, whereas the self’s flourishing is enemy-embracing, so that the thought of an enemy, however negative, has to be present when I am engaged in the act of focused forgiveness. The reason it is this way is, as he says, that none of us has direct access to what makes us conscious. The notion of altruism is mistaken, because it assumes that naturally we don’t love each other. It is the hypothesis of Girard that we come into being as interdividual, our mutual connection mimetic desire which in our history has been rivalistic and violent and which still is ‘love trying to happen’, an axiom I have always used, which has earned for me the displeasure of the CDF.
Is there a shock of love for everyone
That would make a creator evident
Of whom the crucifixion of the Son
Would be the revelation, something meant.

Sink deeply into me and find a killing,
Deep into history and find the same:
What is the unimaginable willing
That took it and received from this the name

That is above all names that we can know
And search among in vain to find our peace:
The dangerous memory of the heart aglow,
Seeing him risen is the heart’s release

To love indeed all who are on the earth
And suffer till they come to this new birth.
THE RECKONING


Body inhabited and unacknowledged
Though ‘sweet spontaneous earth’* the poet sang,
Our only sociality en-colleged,
Unheard within our psyche the Big Bang.

Our world for us has only been a stage
On which the human drama was performed:
What to expect of planetary rage
Whereby we now expect soon to be stormed?

Yet on this stage our God we crucified:
What of his resurrection for the earth
About which we have resolutely lied,
May we expect, after all this, rebirth?

It will not do to say, only you know!
We must believe, though, that you love us so.


*e.e.cummings who gave us the lovely lines:
i like my body when it is with your
body it is so quite new a thing


‘Spain was spared the witch-burning craze so prevalent in Northern Europe, since the Inquisition did not regard witchcraft as a reality, and Galileo considered moving to Spain as the Inquisition and Spanish academic establishment roundly endorsed his scientific theories.’
Dr Fernando Cervantes

SACRIFICE 4

HOW CHRISTIANITY STARTED

What started Christianity was that the disciples of Jesus of Nazareth underwent the sacrifice of their leader at the hands of the powers of this world, religious and secular. Jesus who, restored to them incomprehensibly alive and leaving his tomb empty (1), thus showed all the violent sacrifices on which the world order survives, and religion with it, to be obsolete ‘once and for all’(2) for a humanity animated by the Spirit, the Philadelphia of God. They were minded of this sacrifice, of which the victim reveals himself as active in place of the passivity expected of the victim, hence as priest with an eternal priesthood shared in by all believers, revealing what we call sacrifice as murder in disguise, to celebrate with bread and wine as his body and blood, thus using our oldest and only universal ritual to be the ritual of the new humanity. What gives us deep cause for wonder is how late we have come to appreciate this divine making-obsolete of sacrifice and its language (3)—it is only recently that the word has been called the most treacherous in the Christian vocabulary—though his empty tomb has always been with us and the ritual he gave us regularly performed. It is only lately that we have come to see ourselves as radically yet needlessly violent in the way we keep our world in order, and the church as the challenge to this order, with which it is continually compromising itself starting with the adoption of Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire. It is with the discovery of violence, and of religion as shot-through with violence, that we are coming now to appropriate at new depth the faith that was born with Calvary and Easter. ‘When we eat this bread and drink this cup, we proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes in glory.’ (1Cor. 11:26)

(1)Recent scholarship on the part of Martin Hengel and Larry Hurtado is drawing attention to something in the earliest texts that suggests a revolution in consciousness, ‘nuclear’, ‘like an earthquake’ attributed by the writers to the self-manifestation of Jesus risen from the dead. We must learn to be astonished at the triumphant certainty in the early Christian hymn quoted in Philippians 2, 11 Where is this ‘coming from’?

(2)the phrase used in the Letter to the Hebrews.

(3) The theology I was taught in Rome sixty years ago cheerfully informed me that the sacrifice of Jesus took two forms, one bloody, the other unbloody. The church was doing theology in its sleep.

For a just published book showing how we celebrate the Christian revolution in liturgy, see ‘Sheer Grace: Living The Mystery of God’ by Drasko Dizdar, Paulist Press


















*The crucial description of the sacrifice of Jesus in the Letter to the Hebrews.
Suggested reading: ‘Sheer Grace, Living the Mystery of God’, by Drasko Dizdar, Paulist Pr

APOLOGIA 2

MORE FROM ZIZIOULAS

Being a person implies being free from necessity. We see the claim to free self-affirmation in modern art, to which the medium does not represent necessity constraining freedom. This lead Dostoevsky to say that personhood makes a challenge to affirm myself absolutely which, upheld in the circumstances of existence, is suicidal. In God alone does the problem not arise, God who affirms himself in his Son in the likeness of whom he creates out of nothing.

The revelation in Christ speaks to this condition, in that it offers me the opportunity to dare God and risk annihilation, which turns out differently: the God in whom I lose myself transforms me, in this loss, into a personal existence that is free of the myth of dominance, the kill-or-be-killed state of the person insisting on himself against necessity. In the transformed existence, the person is like God in his free self-affirmation in the Son and the Spirit.

Thus there are only two options for being a person: daring of God suicidally, or surrendering my very existence to God and being made like God who affirms himself in the relations of Son and Spirit—the Spirit resolving the seeming contradiction in the Father begetting his own likeness (I only understand this is an intuitive way that I pick up from Florensky.) We have only the two options: to be like God my way and suicidally, or to be like God God’s way and happily for those I meet.

The big thing is that the would be absolute self loses itself in the Absolute self who trinitarianises, the thus transformed self being relational as the absolute self is in three persons.

This process, of course, is what the disciples of Jesus were plunged in when he was arrested and they fled and denied and betrayed and were called out of the moral suicide that this entailed into the sight of the victim risen to the new life beyond the myth of dominance to be persons in the relationality of God, to suffer and transform a world immersed in the myth of dominance, and continuously form the church, the risen Body of the victim vindicated beyond vindictiveness.

My discovery of prayer in early September 1944 was a surrender to an extinction of the self I had grown used to in layer upon layer of pretence, into a happiness that I had never known, to which I have been massively unfaithful, always to be recalled. I told this last night to two fugitives, not from justice but from being witnesses to a killing, in a sleaze of drugs and drink in a northern city. One of them had asked me ‘how d’you know there’s a God?’ That’s the only answer I ever give. It’s the only one I have.

LITANY

A NEW LITANY OF THE CROSS
In the cross is looking again at your neighbour in hope.
In the cross is the ‘Tolle moment’ of falling into the void resisting nothing.
In the cross is dissatisfaction with the status quo at the awakening of new possibilities.
In the cross shines Jesus the non-vindictive vindicated victim as my prayer model if I am a minority.
In the cross is a human future where everything human spells hopelessness.
In the cross is the risk of love.
In the cross is emancipation from routine and its enslavement.
In the cross is a partner seen as a new chance for love.
In the cross is the possibility to love again.
In the cross is our liberation from all the oppressions to which we are prone
In the cross is tolerance, the overcoming of intolerance.
In the cross is the huge chance of God.
In the cross is victimhood vindicated and freed of vindictiveness.
In the cross is victimhood not arrested at vindication.
In the cross is the oppression of a people suffered in a way of solidarity and change.
In the cross the immemorial oppression of women is suffered in a solidarity of liberation.
In the cross is life in suffering that otherwise perpetuates the reign of death.
In the cross is the whole transit of people through pain into solidarity and love.
In the cross is the story of Jesus happening again toward its joyous outcome.
In the cross is silence in prayer and the chance of falling into the void where all forms are born.
In the cross Jesus meets with the Buddha as desire is silenced into love.
In the cross, Islam, long feared by the church but drawn to Jesus and Mary, is reconciled.
To the cross, Jewry whose persecution is the church’s deepest shame, is invited beyond vindication into the fraternity of God.
In the cross is all the victimhood that ever was, vindicated and freed of all resentment.
In the cross is the Transfiguration, vision of a new heaven and a new earth.
In the cross is Apocalypse Now and forever.
In the cross is Christian tyranny undermined.
In the cross is all suffering become unvengeful and transforming.
In the cross is enmity become the love of the enemy.
In the cross is the whole trajectory of the human, the drama of desire resolved in God its author.
In the cross is the death of the Lord remembered as long as there is time, in the conviviality of the church.
In the cross is my suffering as God’s opportunity.
In the cross is the festive abrogation of rivalry, the social miracle.
In the cross is new light seen in the eyes of enemies.
In the cross I see as suffering what I just took for life.
The cross is set up as Jesus answers yes to the question of the High Priest, are you the Son: on the cross, God passes judgment on religion.
On the cross is Gaia, our earth mother, in this terrible end time.

EASTER 08

EASTER 2008

Vindication with no vindictiveness
Is beautiful, but it cannot be known
The body still there to embalm and bless
And show the murderer who must atone

The new robs death of power to keep the dead
Visible to accuse and keep unlove
The norm: but now the breaking of the bread
Him vanished for the heart at last to move

And know the world a stranger minus death
With love the only order in its place
For prayer to taste upon a steady breath
That is the body’s metaphor of grace

That’s not dependent on tired rhetoric
Knows death dissolved, with life no longer sick.


The dead keep our vindictiveness alive
So Jesus unvindictive vindicated
Nullifies death just where it has to thrive:
His is a consummation long awaited

Where death is undone, not in rhetoric
But in emotional reality
Shows what we call reality as sick:
Jesus I love you showing this to me

In a connection that must now amaze
Of deathlessness with non-vindictiveness
That robs death of its power to void our praise
Of substance, our eternity of yes

Whose grammar is the oldest bond we know,
This meal your flesh and blood on which to grow.

The truth that pierces me this Easter and that I’m trying to express in these sonnets is that Jesus risen represents that wholly new and unprecedented thing, vindication with love—the burning heart on the way to Emmaus—in place of vindictive justice. This absence of vindictiveness from vindication sears the soul and takes the terror out of death, I’m not quite sure how, but I know it does and try to put this conviction into this piece of didactic verse.

Two good words: ‘The priority of joy is a minority report filed by Christians and children.’ And: ‘Jesus is the song of the world.’: A boy of twelve in catechism class.
Sebastian Moore
EASTER STANZAS

Death the divider now no more
We find open heaven’s door

To each other, all is well
Our alternative to hell.

Think at Mass of death removed
Happy feast with people loved.

Religion has kept us mean,
Late our lover’s table seen

At Eucharist we rub our eyes
At the long delayed surprise

Walk in darkness till we see
Who he now can only be

Who, once killed, could only rise
Rub the death-dust from these eyes

Who proclaim that death is gone
With the murdered risen Son.

Feast no longer death-defiant
His with us on love reliant

With our food and drink transformed
Flesh and blood death’s kingdom stormed.



He takes our original ritual, the shared meal, through all the cruel violence in which we disown it, of which he consents to be the victim, signifying this consent by declaring the br ead and wine his own body and blood, thus making his ritual the ritual and sign of his church until the end of time. There is thus a serenity of the Mass when its meaning is outspsoken and clear, the victim vindicated beyond vengeance, for us to participate in its all-forgiving force, we his body.


Sebastian Moore
Easter 08





THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS

In Christ our dead are now without reproach,
We failed them, but they are as he is now
Whose presence in the Mass does not encroach
But is our world, whose word is to allow.

Our victim vindicated unvindictive
Models the dead who ever were and are,
His ritual with us is unrestrictive
Undoes what all the church can do to bar.

Serenity of Easter Eucharist
Makes live the body of the risen one
With all our dead whom thought alone has missed
Of saints communion in the risen Son.

Now the communication of the dead
Is tongued with fire* in breaking of the bread.


*Stolen from Eliot’s Little Gidding: ‘The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.’



























ON THE PROSPECT OF AN EDITORIAL REJECTION


Your ways let me find more enjoyable
By far as they are far beyond my own
As ego in me dreads to be the fool
Bursting the bubble of me at full-blown.

Let me not be prepared against surprise
That in your strategy there has to be
For me to be dismantled spirit-wise
Touched as by you alone to make me free.

And now in silence give this exercise
A chance to happen in me in your way
And not my own all buried in surmise:
This disappointment of me has to pray

And pray to let you Jesus play with me
And tap in me some hidden source of glee.

or

Now let it be according to your will
And not to my device to keep me still.

or

At this frontier of care and do not care
Have mercy on me is the proper prayer.

or

But mercifully you are beautiful
And make it worth my while to play the fool.





note
The reformed Mass does not stop at the consecration as the old one did. It flows on with the consecratory prayer, into the communion, and this leaves you in not doubt that this is a unique ritual meal. It is his ritual, as the story of the Emmaus journey, read at Mass today, is his ritual. It may be a little donnish to speak, as Nicholas Lash does, of a reading party ending in a picnic, but this gives the generic shape. The presiding priest keeps this party wholly unique and special.


THE SELF OBSERVED

Let me not seek an echo of my low
Self-esteem in the disesteem of others,
This ugliest of all the winds that blow
Across our lives undoing us as brothers.

That is why I prepare to be ignored
Thus thinking ill of him who would be so,
Anticipated absence of the word
Composing this drear symphony of woe

Seeing ourselves as victims of the world
We never think we are here to transform
Under the banner of his love unfurled
Who changes victimhood in his great storm

Of mercy on me who hate easily,
Sweet Jesus do your mercy thing in me.

Or—better theology but worse poetry

Of Passion vindicated not vindictive
Eradicating victimage addictive.


























SEE I MAKE ALL THINGS NEW

The victim of our cult, disposable,
Says of his body, tortured and destroyed,
‘My body’, breaks the sacrificial rule
In our one rite that no one may avoid.

How did he break the rule? With the word ‘my’:
How did he say it? Over broken bread—
Can you not see, do you not have to cry
Out against holy mutterings instead

Of his pellucid action, the shared meal
Articulates his torn and tortured flesh
In food and drink he dares to call our real
And gives us in a world deathless and fresh.

Our sacrifice this priest stood on its head
And did so in the breaking of the bread.

The first thing I learned from Rene Girard about human sacrifice was that the humanity of the victim has to be concealed. Iphigeneia has to be blindfolded lest the people see her eyes, and the same is done with the victim of a firing-squad. Jesus breaks this fundamental rule, in saying ‘my Body for you!’ When I understood this, the Letter to the Hebrews came alive for me and I knew why I loved the words ‘Christ the High Priest of the things to come.’ The priesthood of this victim makes all things new, it isn’t just a charming theological conceit.

SACRIFICE 3

PASSIONATE HUNGER

I am the bread of life, my ritual
As old as you, animal of desire
Who hunger in a manner spiritual
My baking in the first creative fire.

Eat me and you will live as I too live
Lifted to draw all things to me again
My flesh your food on which you think to thrive
Until I show the passion and the pain

Of a new birth to be and celebrate
Once joined my Passion to your elemental
Hunger first born on earth that has to wait
On consummation that is unjudgmental.

Hunger anticipates theology
That learns to celebrate it and know me.



If I believe and pray I may receive
A passionate desire to know the unknown
That my heart’s heaviness will still relieve
With certainty that I am not alone.

This passionate desire of faith to know
Will animate a live theology
And only the believer will bestow
A concentration on the texts that see.

Even the soundly educated man
May miss a piece of homework little known
That will destabilize a scholar’s plan
With the first flash of revelation

And change the resurrection from a dream
To fact to shatter a long-settled scheme.












ETERNAL PRIESTHOOD OF HUMANITY

Victim protagonist eternal priest
I love your body for it is my own
Nourished by yours, an everlasting feast
In which alone I never am alone.

Destabilizer of the only order
Otherwise known, the myth of dominance
Which you expose, for you declare its border
Broken into your trinity to dance.

How can I have come to know otherwise
That all my sin is shaken out of me
Undoing of a world that crucifies
And eats and drinks its victim to be free.

No new religion, but religion’s end
Is how I know my stubborn will to bend.































Christianity started with the destabilizing of the sacrificial order through the encounter with the victim risen as protagonist—such as sacrificial victims could never be—and therefore priest with a priesthood that all may share by being baptized into his death and raising to God’s right hand. We have to understand, as radically as we can, the sacrificial order thus destabilized and made null in the beyond-sacrifice of this victim which does not belong to the category of sacrifice which grounds the order that this victim-protagonist destabilizes and makes obsolete. This order is the reign of sin, the myth of dominance, for the myth of dominance is based on power as something we have to acquire over each other as opposed to loving one another, which is the new order in Christ. Utopia, incidentally, is the notion that this state of universal love is attainable by force and imposition on a complex sinful needful humanity. We today are in the wreckage of utopias, which is of course a state of affairs that is sensitive to the Christian, resurrection-grounded, destabilizing of the myth of dominance which Utopia attempts to overcome by power exercised by a charismatic leader or an illiterate one like George Bush. In the ravages of today that is the wreckage of Utopias, the beautiful reality, represented by a sleepy church, is of the risen victim-protagonist-priest of the thus constituted priesthood of all believers—as opposed to people assembled by the imposition of the myth of dominance.

It is almost incredible, nearly incredible, that what it means to become a Catholic, a believer in the eternal victim-protagonist-priest-destabilization, is fully articulated ritually in the oldest universal ritual of food and drink identified with the destabilizing all-changing victim-protagonist, to repeat, what it means to become a Catholic, is to accept the resurrection-shaped faith in the new humanity. It just occurred to me, discussing this with a recent convert, that there is a sense of belonging-with-others that is directly consequent upon a mystical awareness of God, such as Auden experienced in the summer of ’33.

The very understandable fallacy of ANWilson is to miss the real origin of the radical destabilising of a sinful by a new priestly order, are to assume instead that Jesus is believed to have founded a new religion whose credibility consists in the accuracy of the gospel story or stories. Jesus did not start a new religion. His teaching, life and death as victim-destabilizer initiated a new humanity whose growth in the world is subject to all the vicissitudes of hamanity , and this is not utopian.

I have always been amazed by the certainty with which it was first believed that baptism into that death and rising wiped out all your sins. It was believed, because the huge destabilizing of religion as organised dominance was an experienced social fact. The birth of the church is the destabilizing beyond-sacrifice experienced and ecstatically shared. I repeat, there is a social dimension to the mystical that the church represents and has continually to reinvent herself to realise.

For Christianity to be believable as revelatory and true, it is not necessary that the gospels be accurate as history. On the contrary, it is compatible with the fact that the gospels are compositions designed by believers to ‘sell’ Jesus as the saviour, written a generation after the event and reflecting the preferred notions of different communities. The only controlling force is an encounter with Jesus after his death that corresponds to no imaginable account of a visitation of the dead. Round these visions, compounded with the memory of the teacher in his life among them, there is a community. One point of light in this presentation is a reported action with bread and wine connected by Jesus with his coming death on a cross and post-crucial self-manifestation.

The notion that the mind of the believer is fixed on a quasi-biography of the man from stable to cross, with no mistakes about his birthplace or census taken by Rome or the Magi or the star, sells short the real mind of the praying and living of the Christian community. That mind is not, as ANWilson implies, a curiosity shop of angels and shepherds and a guiding star. The only requirement in history is the crucifixion under Pontius Pilate and what came out of this for the small group of followers. Jesus executed by the powers that be manifests himself afterwards in a way that gathers people together in a way that is entirely new, a way not of mutual fear but of mutual love. Joining the church is not joining an organization but coming into a new togetherness of people. It is significant that those to whom he showed himself risen had seen each other in all their fear and shame. His arrest and execution exposed them to each other at their worst, so that when they met him risen they found themselves together in a new way. This is what it means to be the church, this and not belonging to an organization. The convert does not ‘join the church’. He or she becomes church, comes into a new closeness to others that stems from closeness to God. The convert joins the human race as God sees it. The convert does not add being-church to his other possessions, his car, his computer, his membership of a club. I suspect that people today find this difficult., but without it none of our relationships, sexual and otherwise, make sense. A therapist once asked me, ‘do you have a self that is neither bully nor victim?’ and I was embarrassed, and I still value that memory as touching a live nerve that Jesus touches. Girard says that we are, through-and-through, imitators of each other. Well Jesus, risen after his murder and vindicated and not vindictive, is the model whose imitation makes us lovers not fearers.














Vindicated without vindictiveness
He is our model for together being
Without our usual mutual duress,
A sheer bliss beyond fighting and its fleeing.

I’m told the greatest happiness we have
Is in originating joy in others:
Well, Jesus offers this, but are we brave
Enough to see them as our sisters, brothers?

To want God is to want to be a friend
To be with others in a new connection
That would be of all rivalry the end:
But for the ego this is vivisection!

And John wrote ‘we have passed from death to life
By being brothers amid all our strife.’































TOO HUMAN FOR US

Jesus is too human for us. I tumbled onto this idea simultaneously with a woman in Northern Ireland who is teaching sixth-formers. He is too human for us, and we kill him for it, and, being excessively human, he translates his murdered body into the most human thing we ever do and have done from the start of our existence as this new animal, the ritual sharing of food and drink. And in this ritual, there resonates our whole religious history summed up in the word sacrifice which has been described as the most treacherous word in the Christian vocabulary because it awakes the whole history of our attempt to appease the unknown—who now, however through the too-human Jesus, is revealed as our loving Father—in the Spirit of course because how else do we get together the utterly beyond and the too-human?

And it’s all there, in the blank entered in prayer and a kind of reading that lets the scripture dismantle the ego with all its fears. In the blank of prayer, however this works for you, the beyond and the too human come together in the Spirit.

It is quite self-evident to the people that Schleiermacher calls the cultured despisers of religion that dogma is added to Jesus, superimposed on the original rabbi. And it’s not true. The first followers of Jesus were dragged into the desolation of what Girard calls ‘l’horreur humaine de la crucifixion’ into the encounters epitomised in the Emmaus story where he vanishes at the breaking of the bread.

No, dogma is not imposed on Jesus. It comes out of his involvement of us in the beyond, in the too human, and in the connection that is the life of the church. In other words, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. We have always to de-rigmarole this precious formula., for our preaching and teaching so easily relapses into what an American Jesuit friend of mine used to refer to as ‘the bland leading the bland.’ I find myself dreaming up a kind of mental obligato to the ‘Glory be’ that ends every psalm. Glory to you, beyond all, under all, in all.


PTO













A NEW COSMOLOGY

John Archibald Wheeler, the world-famous American astrophysicist, just died, age 96, his obituary in today’s Guardian. He is famous for a lot of work that led to the atom bomb. And he discovered, and named, the well-known ‘black holes’ which are vast objects within which the laws of physics do not exist. He called his autobiography ‘Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam.’

But the obituary hardly touches what he was talked-about for in America while I was over there, namely a new cosmology that borders on theology. This was the idea that the universe is most elegantly understood as geared to the production of intelligent life. At a supper party in Washington, I found myself next to the wife of the head of Theoretics at NASA, and she said to me, a propos of Wheeler’s cosmology, ‘it’s the end of the Copernican Era.’ The Copernican Era demolished the earth-centred cosmology that we were all in, and made us, as Sir James Jeans put it, a particle of dust in a limitless cosmic waste. Obviously, if you see the universe as having intelligent consciousness for its purpose, then we are cosmically significant after all. That’s what Mrs O’Keefe meant, it’s made me think a lot. I remember a scientist of this persuasion saying that consciousness is the universe on the inside thinking about itself.

The obituary only touches this at the very end, as follows:

In 2oo2, he wrote: “How come the universe? How come us? How come anything?” although Einstein had once asked him whether, if no one looked at it, the moon continued to exist, Wheeler’s answer to his “how come?” question was, “that’s us.”

Which gets me kind of praying.



Sebastian Moore
16.4.08

SACRIFICE 2

APOLOGIA

I cannot tell you how my blank in prayer
Has come to be tied into Jesus mine
As though there is a midpoint, call it care,
That validates for me the given sign.

We talk of wishful thinking, but this is
A case of praying coupled with desire
That comes to rest in presence that is his,
A warmth that comes from the consuming fire.

When I imagine the first gatherings
Of Jesus people, they are trying to square
A presence of him with the word that sings
In Jewish hearts always and everywhere

As when I pray, the unknown resonates
With him on whom the memory of me waits

Two scholars are worth exploring, Larry Hurtado and Martin Hengel—particularly the latter’s ‘The Son of God.’ And try Google. They find strong traces, in the earliest layer of the Christian witness, of a sense of Jesus that seemed to compete with who God was for them as Jews. Both writers find a quasi-nuclear explosion of consciousness in the beginning, which would undo the conventional distinction between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith, on which A.N.Wilson’s popular ‘Jesus’ depends.

In his novel, Barabbas, Par Lagerkvist envisages the early charismatic assemblies all ecstatic with Jesus Lord, and occasionally recalling their one only God as Jews. The novelist’s instinct catches what it must have been like. Of course it is endlessly debatable whether this was autosuggestion on the part of the community, and I can’t really say why I don’t believe this, because that depends on what I do believe! And there is what has been called the stubborn historicity of the empty tomb.

Now that the church’s teaching on sexuality is being found unsatisfactory—and I don’t mean that it doesn’t fit in with our desires—I find it necessary to return to the basis of my belief. With regard to sexual teaching, the present Catechism says that same-sex partnerships ‘do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity.’ (p. 505) This lumps together the adjectives genuine, affective, and sexual, as though they were all doing the same job, namely describing attitudes, whereas the adjective sexual simply means that the partners are of the opposite sex. This is rather like saying ‘she arrived in a sedan chair and floods of tears’, and would not pass for moral reasoning with an examiner. Now of course the oppositeness of gender forces two heterosexuals to recognize the otherness, each, of the other, whereas two homosexual partners are not aided by nature to recognise this otherness. It is surely significant that the one moral theologian, Andre Guindon, who recognized this as the problem of homosexual congress, placing on friendship the onus of giving space to the other, was given such a rough ride by the CDF that his health was endangered. The CDF did not want this problem explored, and this attitude is not that of a teacher but of a lawgiver.

And while we’re about it, how about the following: ‘both the Magisterium of the Church, in the course of a constant tradition, and the moral sense of the faithful have been in no doubt and have firmly maintained that masturbation is an intrinsically and gravely disordered action.’ This is a quote from the CDF statement ‘Persona humana.’ (Catechism ..503)





































ATTEMPTED INSIGHT

Were there people around who, uttering Christic praises about him at the right hand of God etc—Stephen for Gods sake!--and who remembered him as a person in the ordinary way? Of course there were. What about the Emmaus pair. Now such people, having-together the heavenly and the earthly man, could only put them together by saying that he had to go through all that to become this. And this vivid sense of appropriateness would have been there as a sense of the co-presence of the earthly and the heavenly man. How did the Tolle experience, identified-with, get me looking at the heavenly Jesus and letting the air out of the inflatable toy of my ego’s remembered Jesus. Barth could not see how the heavenly Jesus could work as model though he passionately believed he does. I think I see how. Tolle gives me the image of the inflatable toy of the ego, and I applied it to me looking at Jesus risen and letting my ego’s Jesus fade away. As Paul says that some of us have known in the flesh but now no longer—this from Paul who never did.

How have we been bullied out of these certainties by a fashionable agnosticism about the historical Jesus? What Paul did for Jesus was wondereful and Antony Flew, the old atheist cha nging his mind, sees this. Paul transjudaizes Jesus. He keeps him provincial and of-a-people in that way. The history of church-Jewish relations has been so dreadful that it is virtually impossible for a Jew to see in Christ his own transformation, although in many individuals this has happened. Rabbi Zolli for instance, and in the spectacular circumstances of Pius XII and the whole Nazi record.

Ingenuously and enjoyably, Flew points out that Jesus and Paul make a wonderful combination. But somehow this clarification of the Christian-Jewish thing is connected with the idea that there must have been people around who, ecstatic for the Jesus of charismatic assemblies, had known him as he was—Paul says so, he spells this out, as I’ve just said.

Now somehow this realization, for there having been a consciousness that ‘knew Jesus both ways’, has a vital role in the universalising of Jesus;. The step from the dual awareness on the part of those people into the so-confident ‘Jesus Christ, yesterday, today and the same forever!’ is perspicuous but I don’t quite see it, I only feel it. It’s as though—and here’s the point!—the transjudaizing of Jesus took place in a Jewish consciousness and there became ‘yesterday, today, and the same forever.

The Jesus who becomes universal that way is the cosmic Christ! I just read the obituary of J.A.Wheeler, his cosmology that has the universe geared to the production of intelligent life, well, this comes in just now. It all comes together. Jesus—‘with his deliberate Galilean provincialism, lightfooted and clothed in light--transjudaized. And the bloody old church makes this read ‘de-Judaized’ of course, Rome, about as sensitive as Godzilla with Bambi. And they don’t have the guts, to admit the church’s indisputable role in preparing the way for Hitler. No guts, as with the sexual issue, a public tender-mindedness about itself that is making the church a laughing-stock. The standard ‘apology’ of the pope in the plane going to America, never a hint that the sex-abuse crisis comes from anything systemic in us, that all the world can now see. This humiliation of the church is the price of the appearing of Jesus as cosmic to our time!

A consciousness that holds together Jesus as he was and Jesus as he now is makes a mark on history that is indelible, being a moment of breaking out of history’s imprisonment. There is inscribed in such a consciousness the transition of Jesus from the role of scapegoat-victim accepted in obedience to a higher order, sweated-out in Gethsemani, into a divine vindication that dissolves vindictiveness in love. This transition inscribed in one consciousness is registered by history as ‘a dangerous memory’, the dangerous memory of the prisoner who dissolved the myth of dominance, the original sin that history is under. Michel Foucault is illuminating here, when he points out that wherever you alight in history you find people who have power holding onto it and people who lack power striving to obtain it. A moment of emancipation from this, the Jesus pivotal moment of Gethsemani, and inserted in the faithful consciousness has been aptly called a dangerous memory. This memory is indelibly registered in the annals of the prison that history is. Somehow the church has this dangerous memory whose nostalgia creates martyrs.

This may have some connection with the following insight of Zizioulas, that ‘there is the tragedy of our longing for a true personhood that we sense that we do not possess. When we recognize this tragedy, we know that we cannot transpose our concept of person to the being of God. It is the reverse of what we should do, namely allow God’s way of being to reveal true personhood.’ Perhaps Jesus does this, and lets us into his moment of freedom, baptized into his death for life in God.





















FREEDOM WITH HISTORY

Old history records one who gets out
Deliberately scapegoated, a ruse
That called upon divinity to rout
The reign of death that no one may refuse.

A mind combining his before and after
Has etched in it the way that he made free
To take the worst of us into its laughter
Indelible in history’s memory.

Murder accepted in the heart of love
Vindicated with no vindictiveness
The victim burns the heart, this way to prove
The one way out from history’s duress

And name a bond no power on earth can sever
With yesterday, today, the same forever.


Jesus it still hurts over that review
Received in silence and no publication
But sudden joy at seeing something new
Presents itself to me in compensation.

Be happy, antidote to being hurt
You are allowing, so I breathe again
You are more generous with mental dirt
And curative of self-inflicted pain.

Now I can revel in the thought that minds
There must have been to know your being both
As man and more, and feel this thought unbinds
The thongs of history and settled sloth

And feel the power these at last to sever
With ‘yesterday, today, the same forever!’

SACRIFICE

APOLOGIA

I cannot tell you how my blank in prayer
Has come to be tied into Jesus mine
As though there is a midpoint, call it care,
That validates for me the given sign.

We talk of wishful thinking, but this is
A case of praying coupled with desire
That comes to rest in presence that is his,
A warmth that comes from the consuming fire.

When I imagine the first gatherings
Of Jesus people, they are trying to square
A presence of him with the word that sings
In Jewish hearts always and everywhere

As when I pray, the unknown resonates
With him on whom the memory of me waits

Two scholars are worth exploring, Larry Hurtado and Martin Hengel—particularly the latter’s ‘The Son of God.’ And try Google. They find strong traces, in the earliest layer of the Christian witness, of a sense of Jesus that seemed to compete with who God was for them as Jews. Both writers find a quasi-nuclear explosion of consciousness in the beginning, which would undo the conventional distinction between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith, on which A.N.Wilson’s popular ‘Jesus’ depends.

In his novel, Barabbas, Par Lagerkvist envisages the early charismatic assemblies all ecstatic with Jesus Lord, and occasionally recalling their one only God as Jews. The novelist’s instinct catches what it must have been like. Of course it is endlessly debatable whether this was autosuggestion on the part of the community, and I can’t really say why I don’t believe this, because that depends on what I do believe! And there is what has been called the stubborn historicity of the empty tomb.

Now that the church’s teaching on sexuality is being found unsatisfactory—and I don’t mean that it doesn’t fit in with our desires—I find it necessary to return to the basis of my belief. With regard to sexual teaching, the present Catechism says that same-sex partnerships ‘do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity.’ (p. 505) This lumps together the adjectives genuine, affective, and sexual, as though they were all doing the same job, namely describing attitudes, whereas the adjective sexual simply means that the partners are of the opposite sex. This is rather like saying ‘she arrived in a sedan chair and floods of tears’, and would not pass for moral reasoning with an examiner. Now of course the oppositeness of gender forces two heterosexuals to recognize the otherness, each, of the other, whereas two homosexual partners are not aided by nature to recognise this otherness. It is surely significant that the one moral theologian, Andre Guindon, who recognized this as the problem of homosexual congress, placing on friendship the onus of giving space to the other, was given such a rough ride by the CDF that his health was endangered. The CDF did not want this problem explored, and this attitude is not that of a teacher but of a lawgiver.

And while we’re about it, how about the following: ‘both the Magisterium of the Church, in the course of a constant tradition, and the moral sense of the faithful have been in no doubt and have firmly maintained that masturbation is an intrinsically and gravely disordered action.’ This is a quote from the CDF statement ‘Persona humana.’ (Catechism ..503)





































ATTEMPTED INSIGHT

Were there people around who, uttering Christic praises about him at the right hand of God etc—Stephen for Gods sake!--and who remembered him as a person in the ordinary way? Of course there were. What about the Emmaus pair. Now such people, having-together the heavenly and the earthly man, could only put them together by saying that he had to go through all that to become this. And this vivid sense of appropriateness would have been there as a sense of the co-presence of the earthly and the heavenly man. How did the Tolle experience, identified-with, get me looking at the heavenly Jesus and letting the air out of the inflatable toy of my ego’s remembered Jesus. Barth could not see how the heavenly Jesus could work as model though he passionately believed he does. I think I see how. Tolle gives me the image of the inflatable toy of the ego, and I applied it to me looking at Jesus risen and letting my ego’s Jesus fade away. As Paul says that some of us have known in the flesh but now no longer—this from Paul who never did.

How have we been bullied out of these certainties by a fashionable agnosticism about the historical Jesus? What Paul did for Jesus was wondereful and Antony Flew, the old atheist cha nging his mind, sees this. Paul transjudaizes Jesus. He keeps him provincial and of-a-people in that way. The history of church-Jewish relations has been so dreadful that it is virtually impossible for a Jew to see in Christ his own transformation, although in many individuals this has happened. Rabbi Zolli for instance, and in the spectacular circumstances of Pius XII and the whole Nazi record.

Ingenuously and enjoyably, Flew points out that Jesus and Paul make a wonderful combination. But somehow this clarification of the Christian-Jewish thing is connected with the idea that there must have been people around who, ecstatic for the Jesus of charismatic assemblies, had known him as he was—Paul says so, he spells this out, as I’ve just said.

Now somehow this realization, for there having been a consciousness that ‘knew Jesus both ways’, has a vital role in the universalising of Jesus;. The step from the dual awareness on the part of those people into the so-confident ‘Jesus Christ, yesterday, today and the same forever!’ is perspicuous but I don’t quite see it, I only feel it. It’s as though—and here’s the point!—the transjudaizing of Jesus took place in a Jewish consciousness and there became ‘yesterday, today, and the same forever.

The Jesus who becomes universal that way is the cosmic Christ! I just read the obituary of J.A.Wheeler, his cosmology that has the universe geared to the production of intelligent life, well, this comes in just now. It all comes together. Jesus—‘with his deliberate Galilean provincialism, lightfooted and clothed in light--transjudaized. And the bloody old church makes this read ‘de-Judaized’ of course, Rome, about as sensitive as Godzilla with Bambi. And they don’t have the guts, to admit the church’s indisputable role in preparing the way for Hitler. No guts, as with the sexual issue, a public tender-mindedness about itself that is making the church a laughing-stock. The standard ‘apology’ of the pope in the plane going to America, never a hint that the sex-abuse crisis comes from anything systemic in us, that all the world can now see. This humiliation of the church is the price of the appearing of Jesus as cosmic to our time!

A consciousness that holds together Jesus as he was and Jesus as he now is makes a mark on history that is indelible, being a moment of breaking out of history’s imprisonment. There is inscribed in such a consciousness the transition of Jesus from the role of scapegoat-victim accepted in obedience to a higher order, sweated-out in Gethsemani, into a divine vindication that dissolves vindictiveness in love. This transition inscribed in one consciousness is registered by history as ‘a dangerous memory’, the dangerous memory of the prisoner who dissolved the myth of dominance, the original sin that history is under. Michel Foucault is illuminating here, when he points out that wherever you alight in history you find people who have power holding onto it and people who lack power striving to obtain it. A moment of emancipation from this, the Jesus pivotal moment of Gethsemani, and inserted in the faithful consciousness has been aptly called a dangerous memory. This memory is indelibly registered in the annals of the prison that history is. Somehow the church has this dangerous memory whose nostalgia creates martyrs.

This may have some connection with the following insight of Zizioulas, that ‘there is the tragedy of our longing for a true personhood that we sense that we do not possess. When we recognize this tragedy, we know that we cannot transpose our concept of person to the being of God. It is the reverse of what we should do, namely allow God’s way of being to reveal true personhood.’ Perhaps Jesus does this, and lets us into his moment of freedom, baptized into his death for life in God.





















FREEDOM WITH HISTORY

Old history records one who gets out
Deliberately scapegoated, a ruse
That called upon divinity to rout
The reign of death that no one may refuse.

A mind combining his before and after
Has etched in it the way that he made free
To take the worst of us into its laughter
Indelible in history’s memory.

Murder accepted in the heart of love
Vindicated with no vindictiveness
The victim burns the heart, this way to prove
The one way out from history’s duress

And name a bond no power on earth can sever
With yesterday, today, the same forever.


Jesus it still hurts over that review
Received in silence and no publication
But sudden joy at seeing something new
Presents itself to me in compensation.

Be happy, antidote to being hurt
You are allowing, so I breathe again
You are more generous with mental dirt
And curative of self-inflicted pain.

Now I can revel in the thought that minds
There must have been to know your being both
As man and more, and feel this thought unbinds
The thongs of history and settled sloth

And feel the power these at last to sever
With ‘yesterday, today, the same forever!’

APOLOGIA

APOLOGIA

I cannot tell you how my blank in prayer
Has come to be tied into Jesus mine
As though there is a midpoint, call it care,
That validates for me the given sign.

We talk of wishful thinking, but this is
A case of praying coupled with desire
That comes to rest in presence that is his,
A warmth that comes from the consuming fire.

When I imagine the first gatherings
Of Jesus people, they are trying to square
A presence of him with the word that sings
In Jewish hearts always and everywhere

As when I pray, the unknown resonates
With him on whom the memory of me waits

Two scholars are worth exploring, Larry Hurtado and Martin Hengel—particularly the latter’s ‘The Son of God.’ And try Google. They find strong traces, in the earliest layer of the Christian witness, of a sense of Jesus that seemed to compete with who God was for them as Jews. Both writers find a quasi-nuclear explosion of consciousness in the beginning, which would undo the conventional distinction between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith, on which A.N.Wilson’s popular ‘Jesus’ depends.

In his novel, Barabbas, Par Lagerkvist envisages the early charismatic assemblies all ecstatic with Jesus Lord, and occasionally recalling their one only God as Jews. The novelist’s instinct catches what it must have been like. Of course it is endlessly debatable whether this was autosuggestion on the part of the community, and I can’t really say why I don’t believe this, because that depends on what I do believe! And there is what has been called the stubborn historicity of the empty tomb.

Now that the church’s teaching on sexuality is being found unsatisfactory—and I don’t mean that it doesn’t fit in with our desires—I find it necessary to return to the basis of my belief. With regard to sexual teaching, the present Catechism says that same-sex partnerships ‘do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity.’ (p. 505) This lumps together the adjectives genuine, affective, and sexual, as though they were all doing the same job, namely describing attitudes, whereas the adjective sexual simply means that the partners are of the opposite sex. This is rather like saying ‘she arrived in a sedan chair and floods of tears’, and would not pass for moral reasoning with an examiner. Now of course the oppositeness of gender forces two heterosexuals to recognize the otherness, each, of the other, whereas two homosexual partners are not aided by nature to recognise this otherness. It is surely significant that the one moral theologian, Andre Guindon, who recognized this as the problem of homosexual congress, placing on friendship the onus of giving space to the other, was given such a rough ride by the CDF that his health was endangered. The CDF did not want this problem explored, and this attitude is not that of a teacher but of a lawgiver.

And while we’re about it, how about the following: ‘both the Magisterium of the Church, in the course of a constant tradition, and the moral sense of the faithful have been in no doubt and have firmly maintained that masturbation is an intrinsically and gravely disordered action.’ This is a quote from the CDF statement ‘Persona humana.’ (Catechism ..503)





































ATTEMPTED INSIGHT

Were there people around who, uttering Christic praises about him at the right hand of God etc—Stephen for Gods sake!--and who remembered him as a person in the ordinary way? Of course there were. What about the Emmaus pair. Now such people, having-together the heavenly and the earthly man, could only put them together by saying that he had to go through all that to become this. And this vivid sense of appropriateness would have been there as a sense of the co-presence of the earthly and the heavenly man. How did the Tolle experience, identified-with, get me looking at the heavenly Jesus and letting the air out of the inflatable toy of my ego’s remembered Jesus. Barth could not see how the heavenly Jesus could work as model though he passionately believed he does. I think I see how. Tolle gives me the image of the inflatable toy of the ego, and I applied it to me looking at Jesus risen and letting my ego’s Jesus fade away. As Paul says that some of us have known in the flesh but now no longer—this from Paul who never did.

How have we been bullied out of these certainties by a fashionable agnosticism about the historical Jesus? What Paul did for Jesus was wondereful and Antony Flew, the old atheist cha nging his mind, sees this. Paul transjudaizes Jesus. He keeps him provincial and of-a-people in that way. The history of church-Jewish relations has been so dreadful that it is virtually impossible for a Jew to see in Christ his own transformation, although in many individuals this has happened. Rabbi Zolli for instance, and in the spectacular circumstances of Pius XII and the whole Nazi record.

Ingenuously and enjoyably, Flew points out that Jesus and Paul make a wonderful combination. But somehow this clarification of the Christian-Jewish thing is connected with the idea that there must have been people around who, ecstatic for the Jesus of charismatic assemblies, had known him as he was—Paul says so, he spells this out, as I’ve just said.

Now somehow this realization, for there having been a consciousness that ‘knew Jesus both ways’, has a vital role in the universalising of Jesus;. The step from the dual awareness on the part of those people into the so-confident ‘Jesus Christ, yesterday, today and the same forever!’ is perspicuous but I don’t quite see it, I only feel it. It’s as though—and here’s the point!—the transjudaizing of Jesus took place in a Jewish consciousness and there became ‘yesterday, today, and the same forever.

The Jesus who becomes universal that way is the cosmic Christ! I just read the obituary of J.A.Wheeler, his cosmology that has the universe geared to the production of intelligent life, well, this comes in just now. It all comes together. Jesus—‘with his deliberate Galilean provincialism, lightfooted and clothed in light--transjudaized. And the bloody old church makes this read ‘de-Judaized’ of course, Rome, about as sensitive as Godzilla with Bambi. And they don’t have the guts, to admit the church’s indisputable role in preparing the way for Hitler. No guts, as with the sexual issue, a public tender-mindedness about itself that is making the church a laughing-stock. The standard ‘apology’ of the pope in the plane going to America, never a hint that the sex-abuse crisis comes from anything systemic in us, that all the world can now see. This humiliation of the church is the price of the appearing of Jesus as cosmic to our time!

A consciousness that holds together Jesus as he was and Jesus as he now is makes a mark on history that is indelible, being a moment of breaking out of history’s imprisonment. There is inscribed in such a consciousness the transition of Jesus from the role of scapegoat-victim accepted in obedience to a higher order, sweated-out in Gethsemani, into a divine vindication that dissolves vindictiveness in love. This transition inscribed in one consciousness is registered by history as ‘a dangerous memory’, the dangerous memory of the prisoner who dissolved the myth of dominance, the original sin that history is under. Michel Foucault is illuminating here, when he points out that wherever you alight in history you find people who have power holding onto it and people who lack power striving to obtain it. A moment of emancipation from this, the Jesus pivotal moment of Gethsemani, and inserted in the faithful consciousness has been aptly called a dangerous memory. This memory is indelibly registered in the annals of the prison that history is. Somehow the church has this dangerous memory whose nostalgia creates martyrs.

This may have some connection with the following insight of Zizioulas, that ‘there is the tragedy of our longing for a true personhood that we sense that we do not possess. When we recognize this tragedy, we know that we cannot transpose our concept of person to the being of God. It is the reverse of what we should do, namely allow God’s way of being to reveal true personhood.’ Perhaps Jesus does this, and lets us into his moment of freedom, baptized into his death for life in God.





















FREEDOM WITH HISTORY

Old history records one who gets out
Deliberately scapegoated, a ruse
That called upon divinity to rout
The reign of death that no one may refuse.

A mind combining his before and after
Has etched in it the way that he made free
To take the worst of us into its laughter
Indelible in history’s memory.

Murder accepted in the heart of love
Vindicated with no vindictiveness
The victim burns the heart, this way to prove
The one way out from history’s duress

And name a bond no power on earth can sever
With yesterday, today, the same forever.


Jesus it still hurts over that review
Received in silence and no publication
But sudden joy at seeing something new
Presents itself to me in compensation.

Be happy, antidote to being hurt
You are allowing, so I breathe again
You are more generous with mental dirt
And curative of self-inflicted pain.

Now I can revel in the thought that minds
There must have been to know your being both
As man and more, and feel this thought unbinds
The thongs of history and settled sloth

And feel the power these at last to sever
With ‘yesterday, today, the same forever!’

APOLOGIA 2

WHAT A PERSON REALLY IS
AND HOW TO THINK THE TRINITY
TO UNDERSTAND IT AS OUR BLISS
AND BRING TO PORT A MIND AT SEA


Zizioulas is a Greek Orthodox theologian who has an idea about the Trinity that is seminal, radical, the ground for a whole new approach, I think. It concerns the idea of ‘person’ that is taken, unfortunately, as key in trinitarian theology, and Zizioulas finds in it not the key but a source of confusion. The confusion consists in thinking of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, that the convenient shorthand describes as ‘the three persons’ and then going on to work on that word ‘person’ trying to show that divine persons are different--very different, but still the word ‘person’, with its inescapable human reference, remains, to be doctored and adapted to its mysterious use in talking about God. This is cumbersome and draws attention to itself and away from what the three persons are doing in us. The most helpful hint we have of it is that of the Cappodician Fathers in the fourth century who equate the divine persons, each , with its relationship to the others, a rather elegant dance in which the person vanish into one another, the Son being nothing but ‘to-the-father’ with no self of his own, and so on round and round, and we need a third for it to go round and round.

But what has this got to do with our transformation through the death and resurrection of Jesus? It has been said that were the church to declare that the doctrine of the Trinity had been superceded, like Limbo, it wouldn’t make any difference to the ordinary believer’s thinking.

It’s those ‘persons’ and what we put them through to adapt the too-solid-word to a celestial game…

Now Zizioulas puts a stick of bombs under all this. He says that the divine reality is absolutely beyond what we can think of as a person and, in a powerful follow-through, that my transformation, and our transformation by this reality entails shedding my sense of myself as a person. And lest we conclude from this to an impersonal Nirvana, this transformation intensifies my personhood in the direction of relationality. In the grace of the Holy Spirit, I become to others so completely that I am to give my life for them as Jesus did for me. No one is going to be able to say about the Trinity thus transformatively understood, ‘what’s this got to do with our and the world’s salvation. It is the world’s salvation. It is the transformation of person to and for each other in the action we know as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

So I learn to think of prayer as a quiet, Spirit-schooled surrender to the Father in the Spirit of the Son in which I gradually shed what I think of as myself—which has nothing to do with anybody else, look at Boethius’ disastrous definition of a person as ‘the individual substance of rational nature’!—so that prayer-life is a slow transformation of us from selves into inter-selves, in Girardian terms, this would be the transformation of the mimetic interdividual condition in which we are born, into being members of the Body of Christ.

And the live nerve of this transformation is touched, for me, by that daring idea of Zizioulas: don’t think of ‘three persons that I’m trying to understand’ with the idea of person as my hard currency. It isn’t hard currency, not with the Father and the Son in the Spirit who are changing me from the person I think I am—with nothing to do with others—into a thereness to and for others.

What is astonishing about the discovery of Eckaahart Tolle is, that he was given a taste—if a taste can be overwhelming!—of himself-in-transition that consisted in confronting who he though he was and being divested of this idea of himself and set in a pattern of human relationship which he has been living and teaching or years.This divesting was done, not with the ‘long and lingering-out sweet skill’ that Augustine underwent, but as the brutal implication of a dialogue with himself which ran as follows.
T: I can no longer live with myself.
Q: That’s an odd thing to say. Are there two of me? Perhaps only one of them is real. Then comes the moment of terror, when he is conscious as never before but without thought, then comes the word ‘Resist nothing!’ Then he surrenders and falls asleep, to wake to the song of a bird, the most exquisite sound he has ever heard.and ever since that moment, he has lived in the world as God sees it.

He calls himself a Buddhist, but he quotes Jesus more than any other authority.

I am riveted by the correspondence between the Tolle transformation and transformation as implied by Zizioulas. If anyone, after reading Zizioulas, comments ‘that’s all very well, but how on earth is the ego lost to a transformation?’ I point to those first pages of the Power of Now. That’s how!

Surely this feeds straight into the Christian-Buddhist dialogue that has been the lifework of the Jesuit William Johnston. The ‘three persons’ enter the dialogue not in the manner of a committee-meeting, but as the articulation of Enlightenment, of transformation , as salvation by the blood of Christ into the risen life in the Spirit. The notion of conversion is misleading here. Pursued, it brings in the three persons with their Christian baggage. Touch the nerve with Zizioulas, and the scene changes: Christianity emerges as much the richer for its huge simplification by Zizioulas, the relieving of the Christian mind of the dogmatic baggage of having to think about. ‘three persons’. This wants a lot of working out, but I hope I convey the idea.

Zizioulas was made a bishop for his intelligence of faith How very unwestern!




Thank you for sickness of the mind in prayer
Which woken out of proved a miracle
In which you are incomparably there
And we together, life at its brim ful.

I had mistaken you for persons three,
I never saw you, beyond-person, one
Who utterly conclude what I call me
In the forgiven murder of your Son.

You beyond-person make us persons to
Each other in his Body, Passion done,
That’s how it works, your being shivers through
The whole of us, that is how we are one

As you are, not by us, three persons fitted
With ingenuity never outwitted.

Apologia

I cannot tell you how my blank in prayer
Has come to be tied into Jesus mine
As though there is a midpoint, call it care,
That validates for me the given sign.

We talk of wishful thinking, but this is
A case of praying coupled with desire
That comes to rest in presence that is his,
A warmth that comes from the consuming fire.

When I imagine the first gatherings
Of Jesus people, they are trying to square
A presence of him with the word that sings
In Jewish hearts always and everywhere

As when I pray, the unknown resonates
With him on whom the memory of me waits

Two scholars are worth exploring, Larry Hurtado and Martin Hengel—particularly the latter’s The Son of God. And try Google. They find strong traces, in the earliest layer of the Christian witness, of a sense of Jesus that seemed to compete with who God was for them as Jews. Both writers find a quasi-nuclear explosion of consciousness in the beginning, which would undo the conventional distinction between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith, on which A. N. Wilson’s popular Jesus depends.

In his novel, Barabbas, Par Lagerkvist envisages the early charismatic assemblies all ecstatic with Jesus Lord, and occasionally recalling their one only God as Jews. The novelist’s instinct catches what it must have been like. Of course it is endlessly debatable whether this was autosuggestion on the part of the community, and I can’t really say why I don’t believe this, because that depends on what I do believe! And there is what has been called the stubborn historicity of the empty tomb.

Jesus is too Human for Us

Dear Fiona,

In the course of my teasing out of meaning with the Eucharist, I found myself saying that perhaps (why perhaps?) Jesus is too human for us, and there is a humanity in his aligning of his atrocious ordeal with our worldwide and world-old ritual of food and drink shared, that shows this. That is why my heart leapt when I read in your wonderful article that ‘we are infinitely less human than Jesus.’ That absolutely primary identification of the crucified body with food and drink, has something about this that evades us as we theologize it. Paradoxically, the eucharistic sermon in John 6 is nearer to it than is the idea of transubstantiation. I say ‘paradoxically’, because John 6 is more theologized: it’s theologising the historical Jesus—but the whole ‘historical Jesus: Christ of faith’ business is being rubbished by a better scholarship represented by Marin Hengel and Larry W Hurtado. So back to the point: we are getting nearer, ‘warmer’, as in a treasure-hunt, when we hear Jesus saying, and repeating, ‘you’ve got to eat me and drink me if you’re to be alive as I am.’

Now the moment you ask ‘how can this loaf be, really, the Body of Christ?’ you are taking a step away from the primal Jesus ritual. There’s nothing wrong with philosophizing and abstraction as such: dump it and you dump Catholic theology. But here, at this live nerve of his ritual, the Jesus formula ‘my body for you’—at supper—and ‘you’ve got to eat me and drink me, my flesh for the life of the world’—in synagogue, we are considering the mystery itself in its too-human-for-us reality, missing which—whether in a Catholic ‘looking and wondering’ direction or in a Protestant trivialising of the Lord’s Supper—well, we miss out!

P J Fitzpatrick’s book is unique, in that he grasps, or at least attempts, the Jesus fusion of himself-in-passion-resurrection with the breaking of bread. To grasp it he has to develop an understanding of ritual as the nerve of our life together as humans. Ritual at its most elemental and primitive is what Jesus uses to express himself in his ultimate self-revelation on a cross. The two poles, of the primitive and the divine, carry the energy of the mystery.

I think it’s significant that the one thing that all the members of our Catholic Theology Society agreed on at last year’s conference is that, contra Trent, transubstantiation is not the ‘most apt’ word, on the contrary it is, according to Herbert McCabe an ardent Thomist, dangerously misleading. I don’t think I am depending on their authority, except as confirmatory of the insight I am trying here to express.

Surely this elusive fact, that you point to when you say that we are infinitely less human than Jesus, and that I point to when I say that Jesus is too human for us underlies, throbs within, all the present debate about the reform of the Liturgy. Of course I may be wrong, but I don’t think Ratzinger gets it, and I think he is muddying the waters by his quite explicit disapproval of the Missa Normativa, and of his reminder to the reader, to the latter’s astonishment he finds, that this does not come out of the Council but is a subsequent papal ruling. .

Also there just may apply here the insight of Nicholas Boyle into the work of Urs von Balthasar. Boyle is a world-class Germanist or student of German culture, and he finds in the high German intelligence a tendency to mistake its universality for a truly universal vision. National Socialism’s theory of the Master-race is only a crude form of this mistaken Weltanschauung.

For an ampler expression of this disquiet, do get my nephew Nicholas Lash’s new book to come out on the 21^st of this month: Nicholas Lash: A Theology for Pilgrims.

Sebastian

How is our victim the protagonist
Under the Angel of the Agony
Whence he emerged, eternal, the High Priest
For us betrayers privileged to see

With bread and wine assembled the two poles
Of the elemental and the divine
To be the lightening of hungry souls
Our universal all-attracting sign

To shine over the chaos of the church
Lost in its rituals and their disputes
But still the lodestar for our hungry search
With ears attuned to what no mind confutes.

Between the poles the current is till there
To be picked up by faith tuned-in to prayer.

Argument is not talking to yourself
In a convincing tone for all to hear
And not put all your dogmas on the shelf
But listen carefully and then come here!

So the authorities within the church
Are prone to think, lamenting the deaf ears
Of men and women she leaves in the lurch
To stay a pretty to all their monstrous fears.

The church’s voice is meant to speak to those
Who feel that if for once they had been loved
They would change all, the multifoliate rose
Of Paradise, the hearts distinctly moved.

But O how rare is a voice that listens
Dispels our fears whose false fire glistens.

On John's Gospel Chapter Six

You said, ‘my flesh is food, my blood your drink,’
They found this a hard saying, what of us
Who are bewildered as to how to think
But know you as our victim glorious?

And you went on, ‘what will you think when I
Return to being by my Father’s side,’
But in the meantime you will crucify
Me as the victim of our human pride.

And that’s how you returned to where you were
And where were we who left you and betrayed?
Nowhere until we saw you, heart to stir
And for the first time we were not afraid,

So with fear gone we know your Eucharist
As meaning that we otherwise have missed.

You are too human with the bread and wine
Identified with your own flesh and blood
Conjoin the primitive with the divine
Elude us far too clever for our good

Who are forgetful of our origin
The animal becoming ritual
For love to fall from into power and sin
Amid whose clamour who can hear you call

As they did when he told them: take and eat
My body for you soon to be your dread
To flee from, on a journey then to meet
And know you in the breaking of the bread.

God and near animal, between these poles
The current flows above us clever moles.

The Clerical Would-be Sin

It was so clear to Cardinal Ratzinger, a highly intelligent, well-read and theologically sophisticated man, that the Evangelicals in the Anglican Communion were right on homosexuality, that he publicly put the Church of Rome on their side, earning the strong rebuke of Cardinal Kasper. The question is: how could the collapse of the old taboo, that is effortlessly taken on board by a growing number of people in the west, not even touch the mind of a pope enough to advise caution? Surely we have to posit another factor than being out of touch with the culture we westerners are in. Something like repressed homosexuality. But this makes for a dangerous state of affairs. A milieu like the Vatican, which is very conscious of homosexuality and contains repressed homosexuals, is in an extraordinary position where the collapse of the taboo is rendering homosexuality a ‘normal’ phenomenon for a growing number of people who are not experiencing any inclination towards it.

And, much more than this, the Catholic clerical mind has a long history of penalising homosexuality, going back to the mystical Peter Damian, adviser to Pope Gregory VII in his reform. Surely the certainty that homosexuality is a disorder is powered by the long-standing ecclesiastical experience of it as a sin, namely as the sin of a broken vow or at least promise of celibacy.

Interestingly, I have already observed this from the start of my interest in the problem for the church, when I said that the official teaching on homosexuality is a tacit exporting of the teaching from the celibate world where it is correct, to the world at large.

That is a very simple mistake. But what I am trying to look at now is the same confusion taking place emotionally in the public reaction of the pope himself which is betraying a clerical unease with homosexuality. If the pope is heard by homosexuals as saying ‘what you are doing is what for us is a sin’, then we have a peculiar situation indeed—talk of washing dirty linen in public!

The very energy with which Ratzinger can address this question becomes increasingly suspect. His treatment of Nugent and Gramisch in their ‘New Ways Ministry’ led Paul Collins the well-known Australian ‘radio priest’ to say that it was hard to withhold the description ‘vicious.’

The dentist’s drill is finding a nerve, and this situation has to be somehow defused. Can this be done, though, other than by changing the teaching on same-sex partnerships? And when I think of O’Brien’s book Finding the Voice of the Church, what kind of a voice are homosexuals hearing, the voice that says ‘what you are doing is for us a sin.’ O dear!

On the Prospect of an Editorial Rejection

Your ways let me find more enjoyable
By far as they are far beyond my own
As ego in me dreads to be the fool
Bursting the bubble of me at full-blown.

Let me not be prepared against surprise
That in your strategy there has to be
For me to be dismantled spirit-wise
Touched as by you alone to make me free.

And now in silence give this exercise
A chance to happen in me in your way
And not my own all buried in surmise:
This disappointment of me has to pray

And pray to let you Jesus play with me
And tap in me some hidden source of glee.

or

Now let it be according to your will
And not to my device to keep me still.

or

At this frontier of care and do not care
Have mercy on me is the proper prayer.

or

But mercifully you are beautiful
And make it worth my while to play the fool.

Two Exercises in the Will

How blessed is the present incomplete
A script rejected with no reason why
With resurrection no sense of defeat
And change and growth the one reality.

And how I think of him who has refused
The tidiness he seeks and does not find,
Contempt perhaps of what he finds confused:
We only think we know another mind

And to what purpose: it’s the other’s silence
That riles, some opposite of understanding
Yes that’s it, two of us as separate islands
A situation tediously demanding.

The trouble is, I would rather not know,
I save myself the pain of a new blow.

The celebration of a sacrifice
Exposed as murder and forgiven so
The bread and wine luminous to the eyes
Of faith awakened lovingly to know

The mind that knew his pain to celebrate
Such was the intimacy with his Father
Made luminous his now impending fate
Choice at Gethsemani, the fearful rather.

Can I know, though, what it is to prefer
You the unknown with pain immediate
But this is what your grace is there to stir
Desire in me for this more blissful state.

Did he not say, my flesh is food indeed?
Of how much is his will that I be freed!

Easter Confession

Jesus hard focus of our transformation
Of mind and heart in spirit and in power,
It’s not just an idea, the Incarnation,
But you yourself, and you have known your hour.

The cost? To make a total preference
For your will over injured amour-propre,
Body confirming this with a felt sense
All of me here and coming to a stop.

Is transformation then the medium
In which you come alive to the live soul
Grounded in first desire to succumb
To you the word and reason of the whole?

Yes—to Catholica, you focus there
Often corrupt and silly, home to prayer.

Every Easter is Different

Every Easter is different, newly risen our universal victim, vindicated beyond vindictiveness, our victim as protagonist and priest of love, the Spirit let loose in the soul of humanity.

The Spirit is the only power over power, but how power clings to itself, whether in Zimbabwe or Rome or Downside or Sebastian. And indeed each of us knows power at first hand: it’s what we call the ego, and how it clings! But we must believe that it can come unstuck, and does so every time you swallow your pride that takes offence and builds a fence around the citadel of ego. Thank God for Lectio Divina and Abbot Chapman and all the dodges we have for coming unstuck and letting new life in to blow away the cobwebs of old power. When Chapman wrote that an act of attention to God is an act of inattention to everything there is, he was teaching us to tap this resource for the Spirit that is let loose in our hearts so that we can cry out ‘Abba, Father’ to the unknown God.

But the point of entry is the point where we want to take offence, which is the point where we relax into the now of God, so infinitely preferable to the jerry-building of the ego. Let us all pray to experience this huge preference that transforms our Easter from dependence on a tired old rhetoric about ‘our captive freed.’ She can be freed in you, in me, in Zimbabwe, in Rome, and those who work for her always have a smile of encouragement for us.

Does not the ego’s Jesus have to die
If he is to be all he is in me
And so I have to want to crucify
And with his gathered murderers agree.

He called on two disciples to assent*
To his death at the hands of sinful men:
The transformation of our will’s intent
Is violent, as crucifixion then.

The violence that grace does to the soul
Which, mortal, is fast-wedded to self-will
Kills Jesus, who surrendered his life whole
And shed humanity God’s void to fill.

To be misunderstood could be my bliss
Admission of the everlasting kiss.

Or

And certainly I must be violent
With ego so inalienably bent.

*The two disciples on the road to Emmaus.

I am trying to deal with the problem set by Paul when he says we have to crucify the flesh (the ego of course, not what we today mean by the flesh). I mean, that we have to renounce, and vigorously, our ego. But why does Paul use for this vigorous action the word for what they did to Jesus? Perhaps the answer is that in this life, in life as we know it, the ego is alive and well, and has to be, self-esteem is a good and necessary thing. So life wholly beyond the ego has to be life beyond life as we know it, so Jesus, the model of life beyond the ego, had to die to become all that he is and show himself to draw us on.

Easter 2008

Vindication with no vindictiveness
Is beautiful, but it cannot be known
The body still there to embalm and bless
And show the murderer who must atone.

The new robs death of power to keep the dead
Visible to accuse and keep unlove
The norm: but now the breaking of the bread
Him vanished for the heart at last to move

And know the world a stranger minus death
With love the only order in its place
For prayer to taste upon a steady breath
That is the body’s metaphor of grace

That’s not dependent on tired rhetoric
Knows death dissolved, with life no longer sick.

The dead keep our vindictiveness alive
So Jesus unvindictive vindicated
Nullifies death just where it has to thrive:
His is a consummation long awaited

Where death is undone, not in rhetoric
But in emotional reality
Shows what we call reality as sick:
Jesus I love you showing this to me

In a connection that must now amaze
Of deathlessness with non-vindictiveness
That robs death of its power to void our praise
Of substance, our eternity of yes

Whose grammar is the oldest bond we know,
This meal your flesh and blood on which to grow.

The truth that pierces me this Easter and that I’m trying to express in these sonnets is that Jesus risen represents that wholly new and unprecedented thing, vindication with love—the burning heart on the way to Emmaus—in place of vindictive justice. This absence of vindictiveness from vindication sears the soul and takes the terror out of death, I’m not quite sure how, but I know it does and try to put this conviction into this piece of didactic verse.

The reformed Mass does not stop at the consecration as the old one did. It flows on with the consecratory prayer, into the communion, and this leaves you in not doubt that this is a unique ritual meal. It is his ritual, as the story of the Emmaus journey, read at Mass today, is his ritual. It may be a little donnish to speak, as Nicholas Lash does, of a reading party ending in a picnic, but this gives the generic shape. The presiding priest keeps this party wholly unique and special.

Easter Stanzas

Death the divider now no more
We find open heaven’s door

To each other, all is well
Our alternative to hell.

Think at Mass of death removed
Happy feast with people loved.

Religion has kept us mean,
Late our lover’s table seen

At Eucharist we rub our eyes
At the long delayed surprise

Walk in darkness till we see
Who he now can only be

Who, once killed, could only rise
Rub the death-dust from these eyes

Who proclaim that death is gone
With the murdered risen Son.

Feast no longer death-defiant
His with us on love reliant

With our food and drink transformed
Flesh and blood death’s kingdom stormed.

He takes our original ritual, the shared meal, through all the cruel violence in which we disown it, of which he consents to be the victim, signifying this consent by declaring the bread and wine his own body and blood, thus making his ritual the ritual and sign of his church until the end of time. There is thus a serenity of the Mass when its meaning is outspoken and clear, the victim vindicated beyond vengeance, for us to participate in its all-forgiving force, we his body.

The Communion of Saints

In Christ our dead are now without reproach,
We failed them, but they are as he is now
Whose presence in the Mass does not encroach
But is our world, whose word is to allow.

Our victim vindicated unvindictive
Models the dead who ever were and are,
His ritual with us is unrestrictive
Undoes what all the church can do to bar.

Serenity of Easter Eucharist
Makes live the body of the risen one
With all our dead whom thought alone has missed
Of saints communion in the risen Son.

Now the communication of the dead
Is tongued with fire* in breaking of the bread.

*Stolen from Eliot’s Little Gidding: ‘The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.’

The Self Observed

Let me not seek an echo of my low
Self-esteem in the disesteem of others,
This ugliest of all the winds that blow
Across our lives undoing us as brothers.

That is why I prepare to be ignored
Thus thinking ill of him who would be so,
Anticipated absence of the word
Composing this drear symphony of woe

Seeing ourselves as victims of the world
We never think we are here to transform
Under the banner of his love unfurled
Who changes victimhood in his great storm

Of mercy on me who hate easily,
Sweet Jesus do your mercy thing in me.

Or—better theology but worse poetry

Of Passion vindicated not vindictive
Eradicating victimage addictive.

See I Make All Things New

The victim of our cult, disposable,
Says of his body, tortured and destroyed,
‘My body’, breaks the sacrificial rule
In our one rite that no one may avoid.

How did he break the rule? With the word ‘my’:
How did he say it? Over broken bread—
Can you not see, do you not have to cry
Out against holy mutterings instead

Of his pellucid action, the shared meal
Articulates his torn and tortured flesh
In food and drink he dares to call our real
And gives us in a world deathless and fresh.

Our sacrifice this priest stood on its head
And did so in the breaking of the bread.

The first thing I learned from Rene Girard about human sacrifice was that the humanity of the victim has to be concealed. Iphigenia has to be blindfolded lest the people see her eyes, and the same is done with the victim of a firing-squad. Jesus breaks this fundamental rule, in saying ‘my Body for you!’ When I understood this, the Letter to the Hebrews came alive for me and I knew why I loved the words ‘Christ the High Priest of the things to come.’ The priesthood of this victim makes all things new, it isn’t just a charming theological conceit.

Eucharist and Sacrifice

Dear Dr Lynch,

Thank you so much for your letter in the Tablet. Here are some reflections, to try your patience!

The crucifixion was a human sacrifice offered by the powers of this world religious and secular, whose rule has death as its instrument, its baton as one Jewish writer calls it, under the aegis of Caiaphas the High Priest. This sacrifice of our humanity to the powers that be is, by its victim, stood on its head, in such wise that the victim, in defiance of the prime requirement for sacrifice, of the non-personhood, the thingness of the victim (cf the blindfolding of Iphigenia lest the people see her eyes) is protagonist and priest. As priest, he has his ritual, with bread and wine, which he declares to be his body and his blood for us to share in. His commentary on this action is given in the Eucharistic sermon in John’s Gospel 6, in which he says ‘unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have (his) life in you’, and goes on to accentuate the meal-character of what he is advancing by insisting ‘my flesh is food indeed, my blood is drink indeed.’ If that statement is not eucharistic realism, nothing is!

The shared meal is his way of uniting our feeble attempts at love with his huge action in which he stands the whole sacrificial cult of humanity on its head by being, as its victim, the protagonist and priest, with the priesthood in which all are to share. And the ritual in which he chooses to express all this is the one ritual that is worldwide and world-old, the shared meal. Liturgical reformers, in so far as they are ignorant of the huge human fact of the meal as our one worldwide and world-old ritual, cannot see how aptly Jesus uses it to bring us into his action that turns our bloody sacrifice upside-down with its victim as priest in whose priesthood all are to share. The role of the ministerial priest is to secure his ritual against the banality to which its very universality exposes it. We must so deeply consider meal as ritual that it is to the meal that we go to keep the Mass his sacrifice. I love to think that the brighter students might enjoy the play together of sacrifice, with-the-victim-as-priest, and the ritual as old as human time, more radically human that the messing around with slaughtered beasts substituting for humans as religion becomes ‘civilized’. I mean, for God’s sake, what happens to our anxiety about ‘not forgetting that the Mass is a sacrifice’ when we feed-in the statement of a contemporary theologian that ‘sacrifice is the most treacherous of all the words in the Christian vocabulary’?* the stakes are raised, the ante is upped, when the main word involved is destabilized, to have the theologian playing croquet with a flamingo for mallet. What is rather gorgeous is that the whole thing is dramatically simplified when we see Jesus, the victim-priest, throwing a party to celebrate his and our emancipation from bloody old religion. Needless to say, the introduction to this insight is to get as deeply as we dare into Gethsemani, where the mind of our pioneer in faith had to be forged.

I find myself repeating myself, always a sign, I find, that I am onto something (!) so bear with me!

In saying what he says at the supper, he shows us his way of drawing us into himself as priestly victim, so that we become what we eat and drink, not only turning it into ourselves as we do with all food and drink but turning us into it, as Augustine intuited when he heard, ‘I am the food of grown people…’

A great deal is involved here and comes together, and the hard focus is the victim-protagonist-priest, a ritual with bread and wine being his way, unique in the history of religion everywhere, of drawing what we can manage of selfless love into his huge priestly victimhood. To our oldest and our only universal ritual—we don’t all marry but we all eat and drink together—he gives a significance without parallel in religion, the scandal of the sermon in John 6. To this universal ritual of food and drink shared, he gives unique significance in identifying these with his own flesh and blood crucified.

And how does Jesus show himself as victim who breaks the rule of the victim, whose essence is passivity, non-personhood, nobody-ness (Iphigenia blindfolded lest the people see her eyes), magnificently in being on the contrary the protagonist and priest of his sacrifice, saying in John ‘you do not take my life, I lay it down of myself.’ And when, over the bread, he says ‘my body, and, over the cup, ‘my blood.’ we have to get deeper and deeper into this vision of the speaking and sharing victim-protagonist. We have to let Jesus dismantle all our cultic sacrificial categories in giving us the food of grown men and women that transforms us into him our true self.

This is one of those extraordinary Jesus-realities that I keep discovering anew. I keep having to say, ‘it’s only just occurred to me that…’ For instance, it’s only just occurred to me that, while I have for a long time seen that a theory that de-emphasizes the meal is wrong, it has only just now come to me that this victim shows himself as protagonist-priest in saying, of the bread, ‘my body’!

The big question, surely, is: how are we to connect the fact that the crucifixion -death-self-manifestation-as-risen reveals the murderous nature of all slaughter-sacrificing whether human or, as substitute, animal, forgives (baptising into this death-into-life), this and all sin taken up as we are into the victim vindicated into forgiving—how to connect all this with the sacramental ‘how’ of the Eucharist. For there is a connection. At least negatively, sacrifice confusedly conceived fits into a bad theology of sacrament as disguise not sign. Confusion one fits into confusion two! But positively—I am more and more convinced—a Calvary that really, prayer-in-faith-wise, saves us, cries out for a sign that really signifies—is ‘food indeed!’ Conversely, A Calvary that only saves dogmatically hides sin with a sacrament that disguises. And yet, fifty years ago, it struck me as odd that, while sacraments work by showing, the top sacrament works by concealing!!

How Jesus exposes his murder that calls itself sacrifice under Caiaphas (‘they don’t know what they are doing!’ pairs intriguingly with Caiaphas’ ‘you know nothing!) and forgives and draws into his risen body, and how what we are given to eat and drink are his body and blood, these two ‘how’s chime sonorously, with the same eloquence.

The celebration of a sacrifice
Exposed as murder and forgiven so
The bread and wine luminous to the eyes
Of faith awakened lovingly to know

The mind that knew his pain to celebrate
Such was the intimacy with his Father
Made luminous his now impending fate
Choice at Gethsemani, the fearful rather.

Can I know, though, what it is to prefer
You the unknown with pain immediate
But this is what your grace is there to stir
Desire in me for this more blissful state.

Did he not say, my flesh is food indeed?
Of how much is his will that I be freed!

At the end of your encouraging letter you say: ‘Yet it is only when the notion of sacrifice is restored that the Mass can be seen to be what it is, not something that we do, but something that God does.’ Hear! hear! But how much you are saying! What God alone can do and does is the revelatory feat of disclosing all our slaughter-rituals, human, and, by way of practical euphemism, animal (Jesus puts our history into reverse here, and takes our lamb-slaughter back to a human origin, himself) as murder, forgiving this murder in the person of his Son who, risen, draws all to himself assimilating them baptismally to his death and rising into glory drawing into this huge attraction all the saints and sinners of history. All this is what you imply for me in ‘restoring the notion of sacrifice as what God does.’

Do they understand this in Rome? There are serious grounds for doubt here, and I’m not referring only to the recent extravagances in ecclesiastical fancy-dress.

In conclusion, might there be a hitherto undiscovered salvific name for what Calvary does with our standard method of securing peace of a sort by the sacrifice of a scapegoat? A salvific name, indeed, such that—to be even more ambitious—the victim in whom this transcending of our scapegoating is achieved would want to be participated in with the oldest and only universal ritual we have, the ritual meal. And just as his sacrifice stands our sacrificing on its head and transforms it into a revelatory new humanity, our participation in it would stand the action of food and drink on its head so that this food transforms us into itself. The Eucharist is his special ritual, and the elucidation of it is his, ‘you are to eat my flesh and drink my blood and so have life in me. I who re-form all religion in my religiously sacrificed and, against religion’s claim on God, vindicated as are vindicated religions victims into a love that dissolves vindictiveness and the righteousness it represents. One gets a glimpse of what might be meant by Paul’s saying in Romans that the righteousness of God is revealed on the cross.

Is it enough to say, with Plato—I’m thinking of Gerry O’Collins article in the current Tablet—‘that is what is bound to happen to a loving person’? And then, is it enough to say, ‘but in this case, God vindicated the victim by raising him from the dead’. What is missing is the participation that this invites, the boundless love of a human flourishing out of anguish. When the risen one on the road to Emmaus says, ‘did not the Christ have to suffer all this?’ he is pointing to something much more than Plato is pointing to in this astonishingly circumstantial account. ‘The just man, then, as we have pictured him, will be scourged, tortured, and imprisoned, his eyes will be put out, and after enduring every humiliation, he will be crucified.’ The stranger on the Emmaus Road is inviting us to the Sacrum Convivium.

I do recommend the March number of New Blackfriars, in which our best British theologians have a go at the liturgy, using as their annual conference book On Breaking of Bread by P. J. Fitzpatrick. This is by far the best book on the Mass that I have ever read, with enormous erudition in a friendly conversational style that a bright sixth-former could enjoy.

The older I get, the more impatient I become with mystification, and it has been a pleasure to try to clarify my mind in response to your very ‘motivating’ letter!

Sebastian Moore
Feast of the Annunciation, 2008

CODA

Perhaps ‘the sacrifice of the Mass’ has slipped from people’s minds because it is incoherent. It sticks together the mind of the self-giving victim and the violence done him and the absence of violence at the altar—I remember from early theological studies in Rome the horrific phrase sacrificium incruentum. What the phrase ‘the sacrifice of the Mass’ does not convey is the sacrifice that ends sacrifice in God’s love. It does not convey the victim self-giving in a sacred convivium. And of course it says nothing about eating him and drinking, even though this is his language both at the supper and in the synagogue. One could go on and suggest that the implicit maintenance, by the phrase, of accepted violence reflects the violence that the church does to many of her subjects, for instance—and only for instance!—gays and lesbians, whose wrongly acceptable victim status is obviously relevant here. Interesting in this context is the title of a recent Anglican theological symposium on the homosexuality issue, entitled ‘An Acceptable Sacrifice?’ in a preface to which Archbishop Tutu says that homosexuality is emphatically not an acceptable sacrifice. But please, I don’t want to get side-tracked into this, simply because it is a sidetrack, a damaging implication, but not the point. And while I’m back on the point, is transubstantiation perhaps a cover-story for this muddled idea of sacrifice? The pope suggests ‘true being’ for ‘substance’, but what kind of a concept is this? Is it philosophical, and if so where are the philosophers to recognize it? It seems to be a kind of platonic essence protected by theology for its own explanatory purpose. Cardinal Como attempts something similar. Always I come back to the point, that the true statement of Eucharistic realism is our Lord’s: eat my flesh and drink my blood, because my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. How extraordinary it is that to achieve our realism we have to leave out eating and drinking, or a least leave it merely implied.

At the end of your letter you say, ‘yet it is only when the notion of sacrifice is restored that the Mass can be seen to be what it is, not something we do, but something that God does.’ Hear hear! But how much you are saying! What God alone can do and does is the revelatory feat of disclosing all our slaughter-rituals, human, and, by way of practical euphemism, animal, as murder, forgiving this murder in the person of his Son who, risen, draws all to himself assimilating the baptised to his death-and-rising, drawing into this huge attraction all the saints and sinners of history. All this is what you imply for me in ‘restoring the notion of sacrifice…as what God does.’

*Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament:A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence, Liturgical Press, Collegeville, 1995

VICTIM PROTAGONIST

To be the High Priest of good things to come*
You sweated for in your Gethsemani
Where you were animal, the victim dumb
That stood for victimized humanity

Upon a cross where your blood cried out for
Our victims since the human time began:
Dead, you arose, and there were those who saw
And knew the Supper of the Son of Man

Whose flesh you said fearlessly we must eat
Enacting our first human ritual
With you as priest before the Mercy-seat
And we changed into you, God all in all.

Victim protagonist, to eat your flesh
Is to become you, our stale world made fresh.

* ‘Christ the High Priest of good things to come,’ is the magnificent expression in the Letter to the Hebrews.

******************

Jesus says, ‘I am the living bread.’ What is ‘living bread’? Your fathers ate the manna and are dead: eat this bread and you live forever. To catch the realism of Jesus, we have to think elementally. The food we share—yes, sharing is of the essence, no man is an island!—keeps us alive against death which in the end prevails. The living bread is, in strict contrast, bread that we eat to become forever alive. But how? Not that this bread has a magic property to make you immortal. No: this bread is me, and eating it you live as I live.

Surely the energy, the dynamic of the thought here, is in what bread means. It means life, our life together; it is the stuff of our worldwide world-old ritual. Put ‘bread’ and ‘meaning’ together, think bread that means. It means life, life that will die. But this bread, ‘the bread that I will give,’ means me, your life. ‘I am the living bread’, the mind that speaks is launched, and in its momentum things become identical with each other in a seemingly chaotic way, e.g. ‘and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.’ So here ‘bread’ means ‘flesh’, and you can’t think ‘flesh for the life of the world’ without the crucifixion where the flesh is given for all. So ‘bread’ is ‘flesh’, and his flesh is living bread, eating which we become alive in him—‘unless you eat this bread you do not have life in you, the life I’m talking about now, my life, bread for the world.

The language is an extravaganza of meanings where things become interchangeable, a kaleidoscope of meanings. And the scene is set for standard Johannine irony, as the people get him wrong and are disgusted at the thought of eating his flesh. Then he asks the disciples, ‘well, are you disgusted?’ Peter dodges the question by asking ‘to whom should we go?’ thus he hovers over the void where faith is to be born, straight faith as a naked commitment of ‘us’ to ‘you.’ And then, over the void, comes a liberty with language that excels all the others in seeming to ‘take a break.’ ‘The words I speak are spirit and truth. The flesh is no use.’ ‘The flesh’ that has been the cause of all the trouble with our understanding! But his words are ‘spirit and life’, and in this spirit his flesh is bread for the world.

Now mark the dynamic of his eucharistic realism: it consists in evoking life at its most earthy, where we eat to live, and, relying on the basic meaning of bread as life ritually affirmed—the notion of ritual is vital here, bread is life in ritual, not chemistry, keep it human, keep it basic, keep it us-together-celebrating-life, keep it where Jesus keeps it, food and death, then living bread. And then, the equation of bread with life, with him as living bread, the equation: the bread that I will give—how?—is my flesh for the life of the world, and only then, with bread and flesh shockingly identified, everything is made to depend on how you understand, that is, in the Spirit. His realism is done by shock and its deliteralising by the Spirit—which means the super-real.

Now the realism secured by transubstantiation avoids the shock by creating a new word, called ‘substance’, under whose aegis the change from ‘bread’ to ‘body’ is effected. The difference between Jesus’ realism and that of Aquinas is, that Jesus invokes the infinite transforming power of the Spirit under whose aegis the change is effected, whereas Aquinas evokes, not the Spirit but a feat of philosophical gymnastics. And, with only this behind you instead of the Creator Spiritus, Aquinas goes on to explain that the idea of eating a man’s flesh is abhorrent and the sacrament saves us this horror. But, with only the act of mental ingenuity and not the creator spirit to sustain us, the implication slips in that the sacrament is cannibalism in disguise!

But we’re not quite done yet in our exposition of Jesus’ realism. We have to ask, how are we able to say that bread is life: it is life, not dough leavened into bread. We are naming it not by its chemistry but by its meaning. And what lets us do this? The ritual in which we celebrate bread as our life. Talking with my adult study group in the States, I quoted Kierkegaard saying that the fact of hunger implies the fact of food, and one woman, a scientist, said ‘that doesn’t follow at all. Hunger is simply a tissue deficit!’ She was refusing the ritualistic conversion of this into meaning. On this conversion, reinforced with the Spirit, the Eucharistic realism of Jesus depends. Get used to this difference between the two realisms, and transubstantiation becomes an unwelcome intruder, a substitution of mental ingenuity for the power of the Spirit.

But the Holy Spirit does not abandon a mistaken theology, especially if accompanied by fervent prayer!

Lovely you Holy Spirit feminine
Adapt as women do to human error
Only later suggest a better line
Letting me see myself with you the mirror

And it is you I never understood
The underside of my impassioned thought
Deadens the taste for what is truly food
In all the overseasoning of ought.

Thomas would weep, head on the tabernacle*
The huge mind searching for its own solution
And you were there, the way he chose to tackle
A problem, for that wearied mind a cushion.

Heresy our forgotten loss of humour,
You alone can deflate the proud mind’s tumour.

*Aquinas made a big mistake in regarding the Eucharist, the top sacrament, not only as sign (which a sacrament is) but as a disguise (which a sacrament is not) but the Holy Spirit was present to that great holy mind even when it was asking the wrong question.

TRIDUUM

Dear Joe, thanks for your comment. I haven't learned how to work this thing, but we are nicely in synch I think! Cheer up us! Seb.

A Catholic Statement

The church is the home of eternal truth, crucified and risen. It is also the home of long-enduring errors. For most of its two millennia, it tolerated abstention from the bread of life for most people, and a liturgy that disguised rather than revealed. Karl Rahner, a theologian of undoubted orthodoxy, spoke of the dark intellectual history of the church, in which people have been crucified on absolutes that have turned out not to be absolutes. When Father Bernard Lonergan, my teacher whose orthodoxy was never in doubt, was sent to teach theology at the Gregorian University, he said the science was seven hundred years out of date. I have seen in my time a massive revision in teaching and attitudes, not least of the worship of the church, and I now see with some distress the attempts of authority to discredit this.

To be a Catholic is to find none of this surprising. It is to know that there is the Holy Spirit of Jesus, who creates saints and martyrs known and unknown, many of whom may have known only an impoverished liturgy and theology. It is to be in touch with what I am learning to call a live nerve of truth that always surprises, being the nerve that connects the agony of Gethsemani with the Sacrum Convivium celebrated by Thomas Aquinas. It is in short to know the signs of eternal life in this world of time and change, and to be undisturbed at the encroachments of man’s enormities. It is to be rooted in truth at a level that makes the mind astonishingly resilient and tolerant of idiocies and distortions, a serenity deeper than words. The barque of Peter is not promised average seas and good stabilizers. He said, ‘in the world you will have trouble. But take courage, I have overcome the world.’

The grounding of a high Christology
Lies in the first layer of discipleship
For if our faith is true, then history
Will have relaxed just here its iron grip.*

The truth is in the live nerve of the Mass
Felt in the heart of the great agony
That took in all there was would come to pass
There in a garden in Gethsemani.

And now throughout the world the downward way
From all life’s anguishes into the void
Is his whose Spirit shows us how to pray
In Calvary’s live nerve, all sin destroyed.

The agony has its own ecstasy
The sacred banquet of the newly free.

**********

The word Tridentine has now come into the conversation, and a few observations occur to me.

Trent tackled the sacrifice of the Mass and the real presence in the Eucharist in two separate sessions, some time apart. Why? Surely because they were thought of as two different topics. Understandably, because, in the long established usage of the church, the people didn’t go to communion at Mass; they didn’t normally go to communion at all; it had to be ‘at least once a year’. Thus the Sacrifice of the Mass stood alone as a mysterious event which somehow re-enacted the sacrifice of Calvary. How? A whole string of words had to be come up with, to ‘get it right’. It didn’t repeat Calvary, but on the other hand it didn’t merely recall it. My years as a student saw a plethora of attempts, in a number of books, to ‘get it right’, and an old professor I knew in Rome counted forty-eight of these theories.

Is it not now—at very long last!—clear that the whole problem arose from the practice of the church that separated the doing of the Mass from the distribution of the sacrament. And the doing was highly mysterious for this reason; because it wasn’t what Jesus did, saying ‘take, eat, my body for you.’ So you have two separate things, the doing (one session of the Council) and the distributing (another) How the Mass did Calvary was one thing. And the resultant, bread-transformed, was another. And both were mysterious in a very non-sacramental way: the doing a ‘blessed mutter’ that no one heard or understood, the resultant presence demanding a philosophical neologism, transubstantiation, that even Herbert McCabe, an ardent Thomist, described as ‘dangerously misleading.’

But how the Mass is Calvary, and how the bread and wine really are the body and the blood, are one and the same question, and the answer is in the words of the him we believe to be the Word Incarnate.

What makes this matter rather piquant is that the last pope wrote ‘the mass is essentially a meal’ with the italics his (Mane nobiscum), while his successor has said repeatedly that the notion of the mass as a meal is the fundamental mistake of the people behind the liturgical reforms, of which he openly disapproves.

The Mass is His ritual, into which he put all His meaning for us, which is God incarnate slain by us and for us and risen for us to be his Body. Let us stop dividing him up between blessed mutter and bad Aristotle, and come before him again, in sorrow for so much, and praying to be brought again to our senses, and into a true sensus fidelium.

Formula for the World's Religions

Adamic or fallen humanity is ruled by the myth of dominance, that is to say, with Michel Foucault, that everyone is in a process of gaining or losing power over another or others, or is in a group thus so involved. The divine remedy for this is beyond-draconian. It is to display for us God’s Son, stripped naked on a cross and bereft of power over others in every conceivable way, and as such representative of the powerlessness in us all. This self-disclosure of the Son of God powerless is completed by the Son risen from the dead and manifest to a few disciples instilling a contagion, the Spirit, which brings out in people the Jesus sonship, freed of the myth of dominance - that is, the reign of death - into a community that, because it is filial, consists of brothers and sisters. And the ritual whereby this community knows and celebrates itself as free is the only universal and old-as-us ritual that we have: the shared meal that has the crucified body and the shed blood for food and drink. This quite amazing blend of the image of divinely achieved humanity - the banquet - with religion in its most gruesome form which it sheds into the sign of bread and wine is the triumph of God’s self-disclosure to us mortals. The actual passage from the bloody resolution of ‘the most treacherous word in the Christian vocabulary’ is discernible, traceable, in the experienced ‘sinking’ of conflict into resolution in the practice of contemplative prayer in a large variety of forms. There is mapped out in us, if we discover it, the way taken from the cross to the table of mutual love - which is hardly surprising since we are the creation of the God who saves us.

The attempt, however, to say all this in the traditional language of religion, one of whose favourite and most treacherous words is ‘sacrifice’, runs, predictably, into all the problems that this word, especially, contains. The temptation is to say that sacrifice in the religious sense is obsolete, and this leaves the problem it contains unsolved, the problem being that sacrifice is made both by Jesus and Caiaphas, by the saint and by MI5 and the rest of our security institutions. In war, this sacrifice is called ‘acceptable losses’, of whom my brother, Captain of the submarine Rainbow, was one.

The myth of dominance is counteracted by all the practices like Focusing - whose key-work is entitled Beyond the Myth of Dominance by Edwin McMahon and it corresponds to Vipassana in Zen Buddhism, self-observation in conflict with others - and the ‘inner descent’ into the void where all the forms are born, discovered by Eckhart Tolle on the verge of suicide. It follows from this that ‘the way’ is shown to people far outside the Christian borders.

Now who will doubt that this universal brother or sister condition is to be aspired toward? What more is said when this is said to be of divine revelation? The answer is that if it is of divine revelation, if the Christian story is as told, then in respect of the filial-fraternal pattern we are ‘in the default mode.’ If we ignore ourselves as thus revealed to ourselves from deeper than words, we pay for it, even in fearsome ways. The nightmare of the Nazi death-camps is what we get if we refuse to believe that we are created to love one another.

The sacrificial crisis of our kind*
Was undergone by God’s Son on a cross
For him irrevocably thence to find
The way down to our supper with his gloss,

And that way down we find inscribed in us
From conflict to the void where forms are born
Available not to the curious
But only to the genuinely torn.

From torn to tender is the royal road
Once trodden by the Son who harrowed hell
But there for those who never heard the word
That says out of our depths that all is well.

And in the meantime there is history
Cosmic, galactic, wherein who are we?

*'There is no doubt that sacrifice is the most treacherous word in the Christian vocabulary' (Louis-Marie Chauvet). The word is used by Jesus about himself, and by Caiaphas about Jesus - and by all the authorities in war who talk of ‘acceptable losses’. Consider Wilfred Owen’s lines, used by Britten in his War Requiem, ‘But the old man would not, but slew his son / And half the seed of Europe, one by one.’

Now I learn to say thank you to the void
I sink into and do not think of it
And find myself mysteriously buoyed
In the high places given us to sit.

I am the void’s ambassador, as Paul
Found that he was, addressing the young church:
Be reconciled to God who now is all
And you will have direction for your search.

Him crucified was all he had to say
But then he found himself to say much more
For he was showing a new way to pray*
Inwardly with the thanks that asks for more.

He found and taught the way down from the cross
To silent happiness where all is loss.

*'We do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit prays in us, with ineffable groanings for the Church.'

Reform of the Reform?

Bread broken and shared, wine blessed and shared, is a meal. Period. But we learn from Jungmann, who is the chief authority, that very soon the emphasis shifted from the rite as meal to the rite as defined by the solemn prayer of thanksgiving, and it is on this early shift that the pope’s strong disagreement with a meal-centred theology is based.

But surely it is clear that the finding in the Eucharistic Prayer, of what Ratzinger brilliantly calls a transformation of existence - even of death - into thanksgiving, is simply the discovery of what in this meal is wholly special and indeed unique. It is not a de-emphasizing of the fact that it is a meal. This de-emphasizing is a further stage, and it has been reached when the Eucharistic Prayer is being described as a quasi-holy-place and named as the Holy of Holies, to be entered by the priest alone, with the people as outsiders or spectators. This development does not follow from, is not pre-contained in, the experienced transformativeness of the Eucharistic Prayer. On the contrary, it would naturally resonate in the hearts of the people in whose name the priest is giving thanks. For its failure to do this, we have to look to another source, and the most likely one is the amazing phenomenon whereby the faith that created martyrs became the state religion. For with this, to be a Christian is no longer necessarily to be a disciple, but to be a decent citizen.

In an important article, Benedict XVI and the Eucharist (1), Eamon Duffy writes. ‘It seemed therefore that the Eucharist’s basic structure was unequivocally that of a meal, and this was the position adopted by Guardini and most other theorists of liturgical reform from the 1930s onwards. Immediately however, the dogmatic theologians detected a problem. Was not this precisely the position Luther had adopted in renaming the Mass the Lord’s Supper, and hence, was not this the view condemned at Trent? Did not an account of the Mass as in essence a meal reduce or obliterate its sacrificial character?’

Ratzinger’s answer is unequivocally yes. He argues that ‘the Eucharistic thesis [that it is thanksgiving and not meal that defines the Mass] is able to put the dogmatic and liturgical levels in touch with each other. For the Eucharistic thanksgiving is the form (this, and not the meal, he means) in which Jesus at his Last Supper attached sacrificial meaning to his death, and identified the elements of bread and wine with his flesh and blood given for the forgiveness of sins…the Eucharistic words of Jesus are the transformation of existence - even of death - into thanksgiving.’(1) This is beautiful. Ratzinger is saying that that which identifies the bread and wine with Jesus’ body and blood - which of course is the crucial step - and makes a feeling-sense of this identification, makes doxological sense if you like, is the prayer that is celebrating the victory over death, a paean of life beyond life as we know it. This is Ratzinger, and I’m with it all the way. But why does this transformation of existence, even of death, into thanksgiving, into Eucharist, in a uniquely appropriate doxology, which gives us at last, yes, the sacrifice convincingly in bread and wine, have to reduce to secondary status the fact that what we have here is food and drink shared, the new convivium, indeed the Supper of the Lamb, the sacred meal that is the cult of Christians? It doesn’t follow, surely.

And so much is at stake here. The language in which, indeed, liturgy and doctrine are in touch with each other so that we have take-of, does take off - and leave the wondering people behind! It is indeed an endlessly fascinating problem - it has exercised me most of my thinking life - as to how we get, in a way of feeling, from the bread and wine to the awesome reality of Calvary made luminous by Easter, and the alchemy that Ratzinger finds in the thanksgiving prayer really pulls this off I think, it gets me thinking-together these chosen foodstuffs of his ritual and a new earth, but saying how this makes sense, how this conjoins bread-and-wine and a new world born on the cross, does not swallow up the bread and wine as food and drink, as meal, about which all these wonderful things are being said, the doxologically sacred meal.

Ratzinger has said that the notion of the Eucharist is a meal is the fundamental mistake of the new reformers such as Guardini (who did much to save the soul of German Catholic youth from the ravages of the Third Reich). Duffy describes his solution, which is to jettison the idea of the meal as what the Mass is, as draconian. Is not this draconian solution based on a confusion between the natural coming-to-the-fore of the rite in the solemn thanksgiving with the subsequent interpretation of this development as making of the great prayer a quasi-Holy-of-Holies to be entered by the priest alone, the people outside?

Once this confusion is overcome, it makes perfect sense to see the Mass as a ritual meal in which the participants, with understanding faith, hear the celebrant utter the great prayer that ‘transforms existence - even-death into thanksgiving.’ The fact that this is not often a description of what happens with the reformed rite leads me to a radical question: is Jesus too human for us? Choosing as the ritual of his passage our oldest and the only universal symbol, the meal shared, he exposes that most human thing to our banality.

And it is just here that there occurs to me what Alexander Schmemann, the great Orthodox theologian, names as the ‘Eucharistic Crisis, eastern and western’, ‘the loss of the Assembly.’ The Assembly is lost in the beautiful words that are lost on the Assembly.

Over a century ago, Gregory Dix, in The Shape of the Liturgy, pointed out that with the Christianising of the Empire, being a Christian changed from being a disciple, with one’s life at risk, to being a respectable citizen. One effect of this, he said, would surely have been that full participation in the rite fell to the celebrant, the professional as it were. As the bishops changed from martyrs to people with competence and power, so the people changed from communicants to ‘the people at Mass’, their Easter Duties’ being to communicate once a year. I remember as a pious child being surprised at this Commandment of the Church. Only once a year? Another surprise, that came much later as I was ‘doing my theology’, was that one of the demands voiced by the Pilgrimage of Grace under Henry VIII was a return to the old Mass at which only the priest communicated, this latter detail being specified.

Now let us take a big leap, to the innovative advocacy of frequent communion by Pius X, the full significance of which has only just dawned on me. It is not only saying ‘the more the better’, a good prescription for spiritual health. It also means the normality of the congregation communicating at the Mass, which makes the Mass more evidently a ritual meal, though one of unique moment.

And now another connection begins to appear, between ‘the Mass not evidently a ritual meal’ and ‘the Mass clericalised.’ If the old rite does mark the beginning of the clericalising of the liturgy, then to advocate its restoration is to advocate a re-clericalising; and after all, in the old rite the celebrant does play all the roles.

This leads me to invoke, in conclusion, a ground-breaking book on the Mass that appeared in 1993, On Breaking of Bread by P.F.Fitzpatrick (Cambridge University Press), a priest I came to know well. This was, far and away, the best book on the Mass that I had ever read - and I read the lot in those days! - and this goes for everyone to whom I have recommended it. The book is ground-breaking in that it discloses the role of ritual in our lives at a depth that we are not normally conscious of. The Mass is, most radically, a ritual. It is His ritual. A ritual what? A ritual meal. Let the author speak for himself.

‘Do this in memory of me’: Luke’s Gospel agrees with Paul’s account in First Corinthians in having Jesus give that command to those who were eating with him at the Last Supper. The early testimony of Justin Martyr (c. 180 AD), which also records it, shows that the story was taken then by Christians as including a command to carry out a ritual eating and drinking. What Aquinas has to say about Christ’s choice of the occasion is worth setting down at the start of this section [on the way of ritual]:

The last things to be said, especially by friends who are about to leave us, are those that are best remembered. At such a time, our love for our friends is greatest; and what we love most is what sinks deepest into our hearts (2).

This leads me to my conclusion. I am with the Pope in seeing that the Great Prayer ‘transforms existence - even death into thanksgiving,’ and I find this extraordinarily beautiful. I am not with him in saying that this makes the Prayer, and not the sharing, say what the Mass is.

(1) p. 202 of an article, Benedict XVI and the Eucharist by Eamon Duffy, New Blackfriars March 2007

(2) Summa Theologiae 3.73.5

What is my fear?

Jesus for me, face to face with my fear
Where I can pray me quietly in you,
I never feared that there was nothing there
Since you came to me so entirely new.

Annihilation, do I fear that?
Yes sometimes, when I fear to fall asleep
But as I pray, that’s not where I am at:
What is the way you showed into the deep?

Is it of losing me or losing you?
Tough question that, it has me at a loss
Entering which I feel myself anew
In you my eros raised up on a cross,

And there you bring me to a deeper fear
Of my own world at having you too near.

Purgatorio

What is it now to pray about the dead
Not as some are, we say, who have no hope,
Do we see ours as being well ahead
Of us whose life is limited in scope?

Surely if Jesus risen is who he
Could not be as we knew him here below,
This is our Christian immortality
And it is something that our faith should know,

And I recall that once my mother so
Flashed upon me unrecognizable
Except as saying to me ‘freely go!’
The dead in Christ have our life to the full.

Communion of saints, not a dead letter
For dead November: prayer in faith knows better.



You were a happiness that I was in
And I gave way to this in layer by layer
Of anti-happiness that we call sin:
In other words, I came on inner prayer.

And then I wanted to read all about it
This inner bliss the theme of other souls
And what I read I understood, it shouted
At deaf confusion in holy roles.

A drawn-out love-affair with the unknown
Has be a beginning and of course no end,
One seed found soil wherein it could be sewn
Grows heavenwards against the ego’s bend.

Dying to self is partially successful
And happens, God knows how, in life all-stressful.

Telegraphic Thoughts

1: Is there not a coincidence between
His need to die and ours to kill, all mean?

2: When the two came together, there burst forth
The truth of us and our astounding worth.

3: Perhaps the Holy Spirit is behind
New partnerships to end an ancient bind.

4: If Gaia is the Mother of the Son
This animal has only just begun.

5: He had to die to be all that he is,
We likewise, and our dying now is his.

6: Our victim not disposed of, we were shocked
Into our death, its secret now unlocked.

7: He came first so he could be risen in us
Old ego’s prisoners now joyful sinners.

8: Today an awful sense of us all earth
To swallow us for all that we are worth.

9: But if we crucified her, killing you
Who never die, are we to be made new?

10: If we have put our planet on his cross
His power is in us to make good our loss.

11: But if he is the truth to set us free
Beware of ecumenical p.c.

12: Pray to the saints, whatever people say
Who push ecumenism all the way.

13: And Mary now entitled as our Gaia
Refutes in this new title her denier.

14: To die in Christ is not a pious gloss
For people at a funeral at a loss.

15: With the mind scientized into deep schism
Beware of planetary terrorism.

De Mortuis

What now suddenly strikes me is that the great insight I got from Tolle was that there is life after death in this life. I saw this life-after-death as a state I could be in with my inner eye fixed on the risen Jesus, in which I pull the stopper out of the inflated toy of the ego and thus let Jesus die in me into his fullness in which I participate. I would walk through our grounds letting this happen. I started writing a book called Life After Death In This Life — The Paschal Breakthrough.

What is now surprising me is that I never thought of this as having implications for how we think of death and of the dead. Of course there is an implication about my death, but this is not a challenging one. Presumably death will find me shorn of the ego and its multiple ties of concern, as described in the first of the Duino Elegies of Rilke. But much more challenging is what ‘the paschal breakthrough’ implies for the way we think of the dead.

The state of the dead, we believe in our stated formula, is modelled on the risen Jesus. As he died and rose to life in God, so we in Baptism do. The reason why this formula sounds so convenient and perfunctory is that it is quite without interiority.

We have to apply to the dead what we say about Jesus ‘the pioneer of our faith.’ And what we have to say about Jesus is that, risen, he is who he really is, made manifest to the disciples in a way that, according to Hurtado and Hengel, prompted immediate adoration. Similarly, then, the dead are to be thought of as ‘now who they truly are’, a reality far beyond the person we came to know and love. Some French mystical type of writer quoted to me said that Jesus was the only wholly someone! And it does make sense to think of the life after death of our pioneer of faith as a sort of absolute of the person’s becoming all of himself after death. Do we have here a superhuman ‘I’ that is ‘of the Father in the Spirit’? for I remember that, pondering on Hengel’s book The Son of God, I saw that the trinitarian godhead is not first known by speculation about the Logos but comes out of the very Jewish idea of the son, Jesus as the Jewish Son of God par excellence. This Son came into his own when we had killed him, and makes intelligible to us our killing of him as the working-out (the ‘working-off’?) of our mimetically based violence.

Still, what death did for Jesus, just because it lets him be as the co-equal Son, must not be understood as exceptional in a way that stops us seeing its modelling, exemplary character. What shows him to be God incarnate shows us to be ‘Sons in the Son.’ And isn’t it odd that phrases like that became clichés to be heard with a yawn, whereas actually the phrase names the very grounding of that knowable-to-us character of the dead that we call the Communion of Saints.

To believe in Jesus, ‘Son of God in power with the resurrection from the dead in the sanctifying Spirit’ is to believe that our dead are now their real selves as they could not be in life. It is to believe that some of our dead have been so outstandingly ego-free in life that they are to be honoured and prayed to ‘in heaven.’ It is surely shocking that the late pope abolished the role of the devil’s advocate in the process of canonisation, for the purpose of this character is to urge things in the candidate’s life That were anything but ego-free. For example, Escriva the founder of Opus Dei.

There is a foundation, in contemplative thinking, for seeing the dead in a condition that is advantageous over us and thus prayable to, and ‘for’ of course! For we haven’t a clue as to the way they are, except that they are their true selves as opposed to the selves-in-hiding that we all are now.

In sum. As Jesus, now raised, is all of himself as the Son of the Most High, so our dead are, or rather are becoming, all of themselves in him.

‘Or rather…’ Surely the value of the doctrine of Purgatory is that it injects a healthy realism into a vague funeral parlour optimism. Because of who Jesus was, death brought him straight into the luminous reality of his Godhead. It will bring out the true self in us, but gradually.

Are the experiences of mediums to be discounted? How can they, and why should they? The church’s proper scepticism about séances as a practice does not ground the conclusion that the dead do not communicate in this way—especially as the evidence we have does suggest that the dead are having difficulty with being dead, which is exactly what a theology of Purgatory would expect. Rilke again.

The vision of the dead in a process of transformation, revealed to St Catherine of Genoa and immortalised by Dante in the Purgatorio, is exactly what is implied if we consider that death, which is immediately transformative in the case of Jesus as the universal pioneer self-giving victim, is transformative for all who follow him not immediately but by degrees. One of those jabs of nostalgia that conclude the Waste Land of Eliot is poi s’scose nel fuoco che gli affina, ‘then he leapt back into the fire that refines them’ from the Purgatorio. ‘Eternal fire’ would be the lot of those who forever refuse to die, as depicted by William Golding in Pincher Martin which he described in an interview as a Catholic novel of damnation.

I suspect that this was the vision of Moment of Truth’ by Ladislas Boros (Google please!) a work of theology popular in the sixties.

Surely the cult of the saints, prayers for the dead, the whole range of Catholicism abominated by the Thirty-nine Articles, and tacitly dropped by Catholics in a mistaken ecumenism, need to be, not so much restored as recovered as a beautiful ‘fit’ for all of us who, in varying degrees, go with Jesus beyond the demands of ego, and follow him more or less immediately in dying to them, the ‘more’ being the ones we honour as saints, the ‘less’ the Holy Souls. All Saints on November first, All Souls on the second.

It will be reinvigorating of our faith in respect of our dead friends and our favourite saints, a recovery long overdue. Truly and vividly to pray to the saints and for the dead will be an important recovery from a state of ecumenical political correctness.

Sermon: Now is the time to think of the dead, achieved and still in purgation. Only now we are able to do so with a much better paradigm: Jesus, the pioneer of our faith, died for us and thus came immediately into the risen state where he is all that he is and could not yet be while on earth. Those who follow him, they too, become all that they are and could not be on earth, all bound up with ego and its claims, so that they are being reconciled to being dead in degrees of purgation. The 39 Articles, that curious code of English Protestant good manners, denounces praying for the dead and to the saints. We have to recover an essential part of our faith that has been the victim of ecumenical political correctness.

They knew he’d had to die

They knew he’d had to die once he had shown them
Himself alive as he had never been
Able to be while he had only known them
As they him in the flesh that is too mean.

Some scholars now are finding primitive
Evidence of a high Christology:
If the discipleship adored him live
Theology rubs sleep-dust from its eye

And knows its origin in flesh awake
To its eternity in sacrifice
Wherein to give is equally to take
And value is the vanishing of price.

In planetary change the waking west
Loses its visibility in rest.

This is exploring the implications of a new question: what might it have felt like to undergo, on seeing Jesus risen, a divine interruption of the natural desire, very strong in this bereavement, for him not to have died.

Two scholars, Larry W. Hurtado, and Martin Hengel, are finding evidence in the earliest Christian texts, of a quasi-nuclear explosion of consciousness that may have come from ‘seeing him.’ This undermines the almost universal assumption that belief in the divinity of Jesus could not have originated in a strictly monotheistic Jewish sect but came via Paul from the Greco-Roman world. This is rather exciting.

Longer explanation of the sonnet. The birth of human consciousness in the animal is remembered in the resurrection. Rene Girard uncovered this birth moment in a momentous rediscovery of its Christian climax. The end shows the beginning. For when the disciples of Jesus had their fantasy that he had not died interrupted by him alive beyond our limits, this vision revised us back to our origin where desire, come to birth in the womb of instinct, faces its future as the mimetic drama whose options are love and self-destructive violence.

That Jesus had to die was not something known only by a theological rationalising of an otherwise purposeless death: rather the victim of that death spoke—as victims are not allowed to do they are blindfolded so that their eyes can’t speak—his necessity to die as the resolution of the violence implicit in human origins. ‘Les origines sont a jamais perdus’, Certeau said, ‘our origins are forever lost to us, but they are lost only to be recovered in the resurrection, that rude divine interruption of our fantasying refusal to accept murder as our alternative to being swept up in the everlasting ams, murder that becomes climactic in the Passion of Christ.

‘Necessity’ is the pulse that throbs in all our self-understanding. It was its implied denial of freedom in him who ‘had to die’ in the visionary sense in which he ‘had to die’, the sense that was made known in the divine interruption of the natural refusal to accept this as the destiny of an inspiring teacher and leader into the abyss.

It’s not too bad in prose either!

Christian-Buddhist Dialogue

There is a well-known Buddhist saying, ‘if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!’ The meaning is, that the enthusiastic disciple comes to idolize the Buddha from whom he is learning to live, so, if you find yourself imagining, excitedly, your teacher, kill this image and go into the void, the loss of ego that he teaches in the great Fire Sermon.

Now with the disciple of Jesus, there is a different situation. For unlike the disciple of the Buddha, the disciple of Jesus has been taught that Jesus himself is the way. As this pope’s new book makes clear, the message of Jesus is ‘You have heard it said of old, but I say…’ The teaching finds its focus in the teacher. The disciple is encouraged, by the teacher, to pin his hopes on him, he is to follow him wherever he is going. And where is that? A horrible fiasco. Unlike the Buddha, who died in the normal way, Jesus was the victim of a lynch-death supported by the authorities of the time, priestly and secular.

Now let us set side by side the situation of the disciple of the Buddha and that of Jesus’ disciple. The Buddha’s disciple has never been encouraged to idolise him. And the instruction ‘if you meet him, kill him!’ is simply emphasizing this non-centrality of the teacher. Jesus’ disciple, on the other hand, has been encouraged to focus on the teacher, so that when the whole movement comes to this horrible end, there is every incentive to imagine Jesus as he was and pretend that the dreadful has not happened. It can’t have!

So the centring of the disciple on the teacher is, in the case of the Buddha, something never encouraged, the discouragement playfully emphasised by the injunction to ‘kill him’, while in the case of Jesus it is something encouraged and then bitterly disappointed. The difference is, that the the urge to focus on the leader, gently discouraged by the Buddha, is in the case of Jesus massively reinforced by the experience of bereavement that always and everywhere has the bereaved imagining it has not happened, and keeping the beloved alive with all the resources of imagination.

Now it is self-evident to the sceptic that this refusal to believe Jesus was dead is what found expression in the belief that he was ‘risen.’ There are serious objections to this suggestion, but they are not my present concern. My concern is to show that if Jesus did show himself to the disciples in a way that has given us a world-changing faith, this showing would have done something to their keeping Jesus alive that would have displaced it in favour of a new enlightenment with a Jesus nearly unrecognizable, the Jesus they had to proclaim as ‘the firstborn of the dead.’

But the point is that this new enlightenment entailed a vigorous letting-go of the Jesus of imagination, what I call the ego’s Jesus. Tolle says that one should not, in meditation, imagine Jesus, and Abbot Chapman says that when you are being carried by Jesus you don’t see his face.

For me, Buddhism and Christianity are in harmony, in that both entail this huge letting-go of the ego and its whole world. For years, teachers like William Johnson SJ have been saying that Buddhism and Christianity do not compete, and it is only a fundamentalist Christianity that wants them to. Fundamentalism clings to the ego’s Jesus and will not let him die for the real Jesus to rise in us and address a world in mortal anguish.

I keep returning to the question: What did ‘seeing him’ do to the urge to keep him alive? It’s an unusual question, and none the less vital for that. If you take the sceptic’s answer, ‘it encouraged it, it was the urge let rip!’ can you at least concede that this is monumentally dull? It dissociates Christianity from the Spirit’s calling on our time to ‘let go’, to ‘resist nothing’, of which the risen Jesus is the pioneer. Time Magazine reviewed Tolle’s ‘The Power of Now’ and pronounced it mumbo-jumbo, and this is what it is for the ego and its warring and dying world.

Jesus himself said he had to die, and saw his death as the dying of a seed to ‘bear much fruit’, and this theme pervades the last discourses in John’s Gospel. ‘It is expedient for you that I go’—and this ‘go’ is not funeral parlour language, ‘think of me as having gone into the next room.’ It refers to a horrendous death, and implies that this is the dying that the world needs, the death of the universal scapegoat-victim of the violence that is now world-suicidal. There is a heavy human implication in the Johannine version of the necessary death of the Jesus-image. It is not only mystical. It is political.

But its shape is mystical, the shape is the transformation of the human by the more-than-human Spirit. It was said of Thomas Merton and the Dalai Lama after their conversation that they smiled like two cats that had shared a saucer of cream. Conversely, I am encouraged by the Buddhist monks in Burma protesting against that awful regime.

-----------------------------

What do we mean by ‘God’ when we say that Buddhism does not have a God? We mean, presumably, a being we think of as not human and infinitely powerful. Buddhism does not have such a being in its system. It is human-centred.

But /this God, that Buddhism is said not to have, we Christians do not have either. This is the God of which Dawkins writes, who fundamentalists say exists and he says doesn’t. But there is no such God. More precisely, a God conceived of as ‘another being’, an entity over-against us, has been characterised by Le Senne as ‘Dieu sans nous’, about whom we can say thing that are nothing do do with us. This is a travesty of the God in whom Christian faith believes.

To speak of God, we must remember that Jews are not allowed by their scriptures to speak his name; they have only the tetragram to /refer to our total non-goundedness in ourselves. What we mean by God is the reminder that we are not the ground of our own being, that we are dependent on a reality that is totally incomprehensible.

My risen one does not appear to me
He rises in me as I let him go
Into the death that is to set us free
To walk in Spirit’s original flow.

How did I know, reading of one who pulled
The stopper out of the inflatable
Toy of the ego, that I am thus schooled
To be with him my risen one, love’s fool?

Enlightenment is one, it calls on us
Through Jesus and the Buddha, we the slaves
Of ego utterly injurious
As climate change approaches with its waves.

Jesus himself said that he had to die
In us unknowing who cried ‘Crucify!’

Shameless

I find that I look forward to my prayer,
Desire is for desire most of all,
Memory shops around in when and where
For something that will totally enthral.

I said I’d give you anything you want,
Those were the first words of inbreaking life
Have nothing more to do with can and can’t
And circle round a huge if only if.

You had to be and die and rise for me:
What can I do about this bias which
Informs my thinking through your history
O you the ultimate that must bewitch!

Lovers are shameless, of themselves the fools:
The will that makes me, is it this that rules?