NEWBEC Bulletin – AUGUST 2007

Unity in Diversity (5 August 2007)

“I will pray the Father, and he will send you another Counsellor, to be with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth…(who) dwells with you, and will be in you” (John, 14:16-17). In his farewell discourse in John’s gospel, Jesus tells his disciples something surprising and, to us, counter-intuitive: it is better for Jesus to leave his disciples than for him to stay physically with them. How can this be? Do we not long for the presence of Jesus? Our going on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, for example, is nothing if not an attempt at getting close to the physical Jesus, the man who walked the streets of Galilee and Jerusalem 2000 year ago. Jesus however tells us that his departure from this world is a blessing: it prepares the way for the gift of the Counsellor, the Holy Spirit, to be poured out on to the world. Only when Jesus leaves can we be given the full revelation of who God is: the Father, source of all, the Son, who expresses the love of God, and finally the Spirit, the life of God that continues to be poured into us.
The mystery of the Trinity tells us that the One God whom we profess is a reality that exceeds all our notions and expectations, including the notion of what “One” might mean. Whatever we may understand of God through revelation is never exhaustive of God: we cannot comprehend God, for we can never hope to grasp the infinite. The great doctor of the Church, St Augustine, was pondering the doctrine of the Trinity while walking on a beach when he came across a child scooping up the ocean’s water and emptying it into a hole in the sand. Augustine told the child that trying to empty the ocean was pointless, whereupon the child said to him, “No more pointless than your trying to understand the Trinity.” It is futile for us to endeavour to encompass the infinity of God within the confines of our limited human minds.
The mystery of the Trinity engenders in us a sense of humility regarding what we may know about God, about God’s purpose and ways of engaging with the world, and about being human. It is a great temptation for any human community to think that it has grasped the whole truth about God, or God’s purpose for the world, or what humans must do to be in right relationship with God. If we can back away from making such absolute claims (and we must, or we fall into a kind of idolatry that gives human reason and endeavour the absolute status that belongs to God alone), we can begin to appreciate the good to be found in ways of thinking, believing, praying, and sheer living that are not our own. Diversity then becomes not a threat to be feared and crushed, or even a fact to be merely tolerated; rather it will be seen as a gift for which we are to be grateful, for it is in our diversity that we can see the working of the Spirit, who blows where the Spirit wills.

Unity in Diversity (12 August 2007)

There is much talk these days of reinforcing “Catholic identity”, supposedly a set of external markers that reflect certain internal values. One recent headline in a newspaper read: “Pope to Chavez: Preserve Catholic Identity” – a reference to the Holy Father’s concern that the government in Venezuela may be undermining certain Catholic values in public life.
Careless talk about identity can lead to the Church becoming an institution of exclusion rather than a sacrament of God’s inclusive love. The politics of identity tends to be played by embattled minorities to preserve not just some abstract notion of identity, but their very existence. Ethnic groups begin to fret about identity, and set themselves apart from other groups, only when they feel that their existence as a distinctive group, or the position in society that they have held by virtue of their ethnicity, is being threatened. When the Church plays the same game, it can be tempted to identify itself with a list of moral issues or liturgical norms or legalistic requirements. The trouble with such lists is that they always exclude more than they include, and can blur the distinction between what is central and what may be peripheral. Catholic politicians who do not oppose abortion or stem-cell research are routinely told they should not receive communion; why are politicians who do nothing to alleviate the plight of the poor and the oppressed never told the same thing?
If the Catholic Church has an identity to preserve, it should be precisely that of being Catholic, i.e. universal. The words “Catholic” and “Church” are used together for the first time in a letter written by St Ignatius of Antioch to the Smyrnaeans in A.D. 110: “Wherever the bishop shall appear, there let the people be, even as where Jesus may be, there is the Universal Church [in Greek, he katholike ekklesia].” The Church is Catholic because of the presence of Jesus, manifested in a multiplicity of ways: the company of believers who are in their common life of faith and mutual self-giving the Body of Christ; the Body of Christ manifested in every celebration of the Eucharist; and the presence of Jesus made real in the unceasing gift of the Spirit, who bears witness to Jesus (John 15:26) and glorifies him (John 16:14).
The Church should never react as though it were an embattled minority that must struggle to preserve itself by being frozen in certain attitudes and appearances. A nostalgic longing for the marks of an imagined glorious past, for example, whether it be the Latin language, or the “smells and bells” of a Baroque liturgy, is nothing but a manifestation of a lack of faith.
We have to be a Church that looks forward in hope, trusting in the presence of Jesus and in the activity of the Holy Spirit. The language we use when we pray, the cultural style of our liturgy, the way we present the Good News of the love of God to the world - these need conform only to one rule, the one purpose of all the laws and all the works of the Church: “propter nos homines et propter nostram salutem” – for us, and for our salvation.

Unity in Diversity (19 August 2007)

Just before and immediately after his Transfiguration in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus speaks to his disciples of his coming Passion, but the disciples have no idea what he’s going on about. On the road from Jerusalem, passing through Galilee on the way to Capernaum, Jesus speaks to his disciples about his imminent Passion for the third time, again to their total mystification. When they arrive in Capernaum, he asks them what they were speaking about on the road. “But they were silent; for on the way they had discussed with one another who was the greatest” (Mark 9:33-37).
Whenever I hear Roman Catholics comparing other ecclesial communities unfavourably with the Catholic Church, or making remarks about our possession of the Real Presence or of Apostolic Succession, as opposed to the “mere memorial meal” or “invalid orders” of other churches, I cannot help thinking of this incident in Mark’s gospel. How are we different from the bickering apostles? Jesus is moving towards Jerusalem and his Passion, the world suffers and groans aloud for the Good News of God’s love, while we are busily engaged in a discussion of who comes first, who is the greatest. If we were discussing who should be excluded from the Eucharist (Protestants? Divorced people? Liberal politicians?) and Jesus were to appear among us and ask us what we were talking about, I suspect we would be ashamed like the disciples, and be silent.
In his bull of 1302, Unam Sanctam, Pope Boniface VIII wrote, “Outside this Church there is no salvation and no remission of sins…We declare, say, define, and pronounce that it is absolutely necessary for the salvation of every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff.” We no longer baptize Anglicans or Lutherans who wish to become Roman Catholics, thereby acknowledging the sacramental efficacy of such Churches, but many of us still have a long way to go in our journey away from Boniface to a greater appreciation of God’s presence in Churches other than our own. In contrast to his distant predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI has written, “The Church should not be proclaiming herself but God…It is no accident that Jesus’ words, ‘the first shall be last and the last first’, occur more than once in the Gospel tradition. They are like a mirror constantly focused on us all.”
Only if we leave behind our bickering and our claims, and take our place as the “last”, will we finally be able to build a Christian community that can celebrate our different traditions and histories while together proclaiming the God whose unconditional love is made visible in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus whom we all call Lord. Instead of looking back at the disputes and rigid positions of the past, the Churches must learn to trust in the God who is revealed as self-giving love, and who takes unimaginable risks for the sake of that love. We need to leap forward in faith, daring to share what our forebears would have kept to themselves, willing to take on risks just as the Son of God was willing to take on death and corruption for the sake of love. If we just keep looking back as Lot’s wife did, we might end up as a pillar of salt rather than the salt of the earth that Jesus calls us to be.

Unity in Diversity (26 August 2007)

Irenaeus of Lyons, the second-century Father of the Church, saw Christian salvation not so much as a restoration of a perfection that had been lost but as the ongoing process of our Creation in the image and likeness of God. The perfect person will be made up of body, soul, and the Spirit of God. Without the Spirit, the human person is only made in God’s image, but not his likeness or similitude (Adversus Haereses V, 6:1). However, the Spirit does not “take” automatically or immediately: our human nature must become accustomed to being joined so closely to the Spirit. More surprisingly, the Spirit also needs time before getting used to dwelling in us: “wherefore He did also descend upon the Son of God, made the Son of man, becoming accustomed in fellowship with Him to dwell in the human race, to rest with human beings, and to dwell in the workmanship of God, working the will of the Father in them, and renewing them from their old habits into the newness of Christ” (Adversus Haereses III, 17:1).
Looking at the world through Irenaeus’ lenses, we see the Spirit actively pervading and moving all of Creation. “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). Creation is not a random act by God that later has grace infused into it: the very act of Creation, the very fact of being a created being, is itself grace, the gift of God’s life and love. The sheer variety, the breadth and depth, the immense diversity of the world and of human endeavour and longing are all embraced by the Spirit, who unceasingly witnesses to and glorifies the Son: “For Christ plays in ten thousand places,/ Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his/ To the Father through the features of men's faces,” as the Jesuit poet and priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins, writes in a sonnet. The invisible God is to be seen in his Creation, and the sheer variety and unpredictability of that Creation are a clue to the inexhaustible mystery of God.
In the great diversity of faiths and cultures, all expressions of the human search for meaning, we can discern the Spirit of God who moved over the face of the waters of chaos and formlessness (Genesis 1:2), and who works to bring all of us to final perfection. Our sense of community with one another, crossing the boundaries of faith and culture and race, is founded on this common sharing in the grace of Creation. We grow towards the perfection meant for us by God in fits and starts, still getting accustomed to the Spirit dwelling in us, still getting things wrong, whether we are Catholics, Muslims, Buddhists or atheists. Our common hope, whether we know it or not, is that nothing, “neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39).