Being Catholic Today

Being Catholic Today Laurence McTaggart Subtitle: Faith, Doubt and Everyday Life. An inviting dialogue for exploring and understanding the Catholic faith today.Laurence McTaggart knows that many people have been hurt by the Catholic church, are confused by it or disagree with it. A Benedictine Monk, he aims to give a message of peace and reconciliation to those disaffected while encouraging other Catholics and those considering the faith.By exploring the Church’s teaching and the issues that arise from it, McTaggart presents a dialogue rather than a bombast of doctrine. While he tackles many subjects that have traditionally been taboo (such as suicide), his tone is sensitive and encouraging. Being Catholic Today Faith, Doubt and Everyday Life Laurence McTaggart OSB Copyright (#ulink_0a9b57d6-824e-5e55-8c51-0cf76f63f64e) Element an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk) First published in Great Britain in 2000 by Fount Copyright © 2000 Laurence McTaggart Laurence McTaggart asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work Scripture quotations are taken from the Jerusalem Bible, © 1966 Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd and Doubleday A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books. Source ISBN: 9780007121793 Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2012 ISBN: 9780007404452 Version: 2016-02-25 for Dick and Marie-Th?r?se Mardon with thanks and love Table of Contents Cover Page (#ua6b8ce54-579a-50d2-873e-86963fcfd27b) Title Page (#ua738f541-a7fb-556c-979c-5ce6ea7dd12d) Copyright (#uafb6c4f6-cc05-5f31-8f79-8bcdf9fec45a) PREFACE (#u1e17c88d-9793-54fa-be19-dbf40623a8a4) INTRODUCTION Being Catholic (#u48ef7812-71c1-5a78-8804-d2f2f8d63c73) PART 1 LAYING THE FOUNDATION (#u4b948846-328d-5f6a-9e23-295b2e5998a9) Chapter 1 RIGHT WAY DOWN (#u1018a41c-170c-5c38-8732-8fae581f0277) Chapter 2 WORD MADE FLESH (#u7948e119-1ffa-5f7d-8c8e-c44bf0be2ab0) Chapter 3 WILL GOD PUNISH YOU? (#u57f3e1f8-47b2-55e1-9aa4-399ceae82d14) Chapter 4 A BETTER IDEA (#ub5c7e84b-6200-56a4-85f2-2d32f618032d) Chapter 5 THICKER THAN WATER (#u960626f9-2040-52c4-945d-48f35df291a6) PART 2 THE LIFE WE LIVE (#u1636d088-a94a-52e7-91f9-a7357a071604) Chapter 6 GET REAL (#u1b8e1400-987d-5069-b351-05f27a3fe335) Chapter 7 THE MISSING LINK (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 8 HOW TO BE BAD AT PRAYER (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 9 SHADOW BOXING (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 10 EYE OF THE NEEDLE (#litres_trial_promo) PART 3 THE CHURCH AND US (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 11 MEETING CHRIST (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 12 HOW TO DISAGREE WITH THE POPE (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 13 WALKING CALMLY (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 14 LOST FOR EVER? (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 15 OUT OF COMMUNION (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 16 OTHER SHEEP (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 17 INTERCOMMUNION (#litres_trial_promo) PART 4 ISSUES FOR TODAY (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 18 THE BETTER PART (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 19 WORTH A MASS? (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 20 LIVING IN SIN (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 21 SUICIDE (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 22 BLUE PIGS (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 23 ON THE SHELF (#litres_trial_promo) AFTERWORD Being Catholic Today (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) PREFACE (#ulink_be203c9f-6fb0-5d75-a4ba-81f0f4f886f9) Do not be afraid. Isaiah 41:14 You may think this is a book, but it’s more a conversation. I’m not attempting to settle any of the problems of being a Catholic today, nor will I give any definitive account of what it means to be Catholic. Maybe those would be good things to do, but they are beyond any one person to achieve on his or her own. So, instead, I offer you one half of a conversation for you to react to as you wish. Parts you may like, and parts you may think are rubbish. Parts may even offend, in which case I ask your pardon as that was not my intention. You may also think of things I have not talked about which matter to you very much. Treat, if you will, what follows as one Catholic trying to say what his faith is in today’s world. It is part of the human condition to be confused and challenged, by faith and by the life we lead. We also yearn for sense and for vision. To find it, we have to share with each other, without too much fear. In what follows, I am trying to share what sense I have made of life so far. Indeed, the Church is made up of a lot of very different people united by one hope, of finding God and staying with him. Let us enjoy each other’s company for a while, and then part, if not in agreement on everything, then at least having found a new friend with whom to talk. Conversations often ramble, so feel free to move around and skip bits that don’t appeal to you. But a key point that I want to make is that the many problems we face in the Catholic Church have to be understood not just in the context of the faith, but as part of the faith. The problems are what it is to be Catholic today, part of a human community that needs the redemption of God, and that tries to celebrate it in our lives as best we can. So the first few chapters are about faith and the Catholic faith, and I hope they illuminate the later ones. Just a word of thanks to some of the people who have encouraged me with this book: my father Andrew, Fr. Bede Leach, Madeleine Judd, Andrew and Nicola Higgins, Fr. Dominic Milroy, Mark Detre, Fr. Patrick Barry, Ed Walton, Anna Reid and Fr. Roger Barralet, to name just a few. None of us stands alone before God, and I am blessed in the people I have with me, and most of all in my mother, Violet, who has gone before to encourage. The mistakes are all mine, of course. We all make mistakes, and that is what the Church is for: a place where we can go wrong in safety and in good company, sure of forgiveness. INTRODUCTION Being Catholic (#ulink_ebe380de-a2c7-59ba-ab12-95bc1c503976) They have found pardon in the wilderness. Jeremiah 21:2 A bad day Everything seemed to be going well. The train was on time, and I had a table to myself to spread out sandwiches and books. In fact, the carriage was almost empty, and mobile phones went off less than twice a minute. So why, I wondered, did he sit next to me? ‘Which parish are you from, Father?’ ‘I’m a monk, actually.’ Of course he turns out to be a Catholic, so what else can we talk about? He wants to know about his children, two sons. One is something in the City, the other is on a long-haired traverse of the Antipodes. He is not sure which is more of a disappointment. They don’t go to Mass, you see. He did everything God could have asked of him, and even paid for an independent Catholic education. Finally, he told them that they were in danger of losing their souls unless they submitted to the tedium of weekly Sunday Mass. He was surprised to find this did not move them. ‘Now, Father,’ he asked, ‘are they not doomed to hell?’ I found that rather an odd question from a parent, and not at all easy to answer. He interpreted, rightly, that my silence was temporizing. I was obviously about to say that things are not that simple: typical, liberal wool-gathering. What would you have said that might have satisfied him? I’ll tell you later what I said (see chapter 14), and you can decide if you would do any better. But for now, I would just like to log two issues for the future. First, people can say the oddest things from the best of motives. After all, the man was worried about his children. Second, nothing that matters in life and religion is ever simple. Maybe both those ideas are totally obvious. But you try living by them. In practice, we ask questions in fear or doubt, and answer with anxiety or aggression. There is a thought too that religious matters should be fairly easy to understand. ‘Why can’t those bigoted people just read what Jesus has to say about the hypocrisy of the Pharisees?’ Or, ‘Why can’t those people for whom anything goes just keep the rules that God has given in the Church?’ The answer to both questions is that we are all people, and people are like that. If you are a person too, then read on, because we shall see that this is exactly the problem that God has faced in and through Jesus: how to redeem us without destroying what he has made us to be. But first, the doomed journey continued. At Edinburgh station I escaped, and stood watching the departure board in a recuperative daydream. I had forgotten the bruising encounter, forgotten that I was in a clerical shirt, forgotten everything except that I was halfway home for a week’s holiday. Not for long – the voice was loud and insistent, ‘Father, Father!’ The man was standing in front of me with his face close to mine, and it dawned on me that it was me he was talking to. His name was Ian, and his general appearance such that I was not going to be anything but polite. He wanted to know about Lazarus. ‘Who?’ Lazarus, he explained as though to an idiot, was the man Jesus raised from the dead. Had he gone to heaven on dying or not? Because if he had, and Jesus then brought him back to earth by resurrection, he must have been a bit ****ed off with Our Lord. I replied with honesty that I had not thought about the problem before. This he found hard to take. I was a priest, I had done all that study, and I could not answer an obvious question. ‘And another thing, Father …’ Several more questions followed, until Ian had to go and catch his train to get to Glasgow in time for his criminal trial for robbery with violence. He expected about ten years minimum. He wrung my hand and begged me to pray for him every day, especially to Our Lady, who always looked after him. In our short time together I did learn that he thought the Church was a great thing, would be lost without it, and hadn’t been near a church since his marriage to a pregnant seventeen-year-old, which ended after he was sent to jail for beating her up a few months later. But he was proud to be Catholic, read his Bible and thought hard about all kinds of issues. He was also very sad about the death of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who, he said, was his model for Christian living. After that, I gave up, really, and was not at all surprised when a youngish man in clerical collar and neat white jacket sat next to me on the Inverness train, and struck up a conversation. We had a very pleasant talk; he was not fully informed on Lazarus either, but we agreed on many things. One exception was his vitriolic opposition to the ordination of women (I am not vitriolic). But we were one on sacraments and most of the Catholic tradition. He was a great admirer of Pope John Paul II and his strong stance on moral and doctrinal issues. I asked him, in that case, why he did not become a Catholic. He was, you see, a member of the Anglican Communion. He replied, rather tartly, that he already was a Catholic, but that he did not feel able to become a Roman Catholic, and became rather tetchy. Further enquiry revealed that he felt he had a duty to look after his parishioners, who were largely of the same mind, and to ‘pope’ would be to abandon them. He had decided that to stay within the Anglican Church would be an effective witness to its catholic and apostolic roots. Perhaps I should explain the problem. The Reformation in this country, starting in the sixteenth century and continuing until the late seventeenth, was not a straightforward affair, and there were always some who followed the break with Rome and papal authority, but wished to retain the Catholic doctrinal heritage: sacraments, a strong view of priesthood etc. Others wanted to adopt a fully Protestant view of the church and its life. Historically, this resulted in the compromise of a broad Anglican church, with a liturgy and structure that allowed both tendencies, ‘high’ and ‘low’, to live side by side. The more ‘catholic’ Anglicans tend to attach much weight to being catholic and apostolic, but still reject a strong papacy and, usually, more ‘modern’ doctrines, such as papal infallibility and the Immaculate Conception. At the same time, English Roman Catholics (I’ve run out of adjectives that satisfy everyone, but you know what I mean) tend, with justification, to be jealous of their identity as Catholic, kept through times of persecution, and say that you are either in communion with Rome or you are not Catholic. Beats me So, what does it mean to be catholic? What does it mean to be Catholic? Is there a difference? And why should it matter anyway? We have just met three people with different answers to all those questions. For the anguished clergyman, to be Catholic is to have beliefs that can be traced back to the apostolic church of the first century and to the words of Jesus. For the angry father, it is to belong to an organization established by Christ, and to keep the commandments it has given in his name. For the delinquent, it is to know that the Church is there, and that this means that God is with him somehow. The father would say that the vicar is catholic, perhaps, but not Catholic; the vicar would say that the father holds on to superstitions that have nothing to do with pure Catholicism; Ian, if he could articulate his thought, would say that both are stuck in irrelevant sidelines. Jesus gives us a fairly hefty clue to our dilemma: Go and learn the meaning of the words: I want mercy and not sacrifice. Indeed, I have come to call the righteous, not sinners. Matthew 9:13 I’m sorry, I’ll read that again: Go and learn the meaning of the words: I want mercy and not sacrifice. Indeed, I have come to call not the righteous, but sinners. It is surely possible to assume that being Catholic is something to do with answering that call. My three acquaintances would each acknowledge that. Every catholic, or Catholic, is motivated by the call of Christ to follow him, or else they are not Catholic, or even catholic, at all. This does not mean that the call leads only into the Roman Catholic Church, and that people outside are not called, or do not respond fully to that call. Nor is it to say that, if the ‘call’ is there, it does not matter about how you act or think or what you believe, and certainly not whether you belong to any particular ‘visible’ church. Such questions lie ahead of us. But Jesus’ words imply a set of priorities. The context of the saying is important. He has been asked by the Pharisees why he eats with ‘tax collectors and sinners’. Tax collectors were in the employ of the occupying Romans, and thus doubly unpopular as traitors to their nation and its religion. Pharisees aimed to keep the Law of Moses and the various Jewish traditions in their entirety. A sinner was, in the view of the Pharisees, anybody who was not a Pharisee. There are plenty of sinners around today, and also no lack of Pharisees. Which are you? Or are you a bit of both? Here is a simple and relatively harmless example, but a surprisingly common one. A lady comes to confession. She doesn’t have much to mention, a few cross words and the like. But she failed to go to Mass for three Sundays in a row. She knows this is so bad, she thinks it is a mortal sin. It is tempting to comfort her: ‘Lots of people don’t go to Mass at all for years, most people miss from time to time.’ But that would be wrong because, for her, this clearly matters. So, I ask why she stayed away, and am shocked to the core by her answer. I am shocked because it reveals a far greater, more deadly fault. She missed Mass because she was confined to bed by influenza. Maybe one should laugh, tell her not to be so silly; how can you be expected to go to Mass if you are ill? After all, the sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath. But that is the greater fault, and I stand indicted, along with all of you and the whole Church. This simple, obvious, common-sense message that we are only expected to attend Sunday Mass if it is physically and morally possible has been obscured. How? And why? The answer is manifold. A ‘liberal’ might say that the Church has become full of legalistic misunderstandings. Following church rules is invested with a kind of magic: do this, and you will be all right. Jesus has some tough things to say about people who rely on external observances, and about those teachers who lay heavy burdens on the poor in spirit. It is only now, one might say, after the Second Vatican Council, that we are recovering the real intentions of Christ, losing the sterile additions, superstitions and clericalism of the Middle Ages and Counter-Reformation, and so coming to a true freedom. The hierarchy resists this, at the price of making old ladies think they will go to hell if they have the flu, and thus miss Mass. That is an absurd overstatement, but you might know Catholics who would hold it. Nor is the position far off stating the fears of ‘conservatives’ who, after the Second Vatican Council, have seen so much bewildering change. One old priest told me that he thought John Paul II has done a fine job of teaching, that the task of the next Pope will be to enforce that teaching. ‘Enforce’ is a word of the ‘bad old days’ for some, and for others a hope of the future. One hope I have for this book is that you as the reader will be able to see the rules and practices in context, and in proportion. If that sounds a bit too ‘liberal’ to you, then reflect that it is often easier to follow instructions when you know what they mean. So let’s start with a basic statement of what the Church is for, and from an impeccable source: Christ…united himself with each person. The Church therefore sees its fundamental task in enabling that union to be brought about and renewed continually. The Church wishes to serve this single end: that each person may be able to find Christ, in order that Christ may walk with each person the path of life, with the power of the truth about humanity and the world that is contained in the mystery of the Incarnation and the Redemption and with the power of the love that is radiated by that truth. John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis. 13 A bargain ‘That Christ may walk with each person the path of life.’ Let’s take this, and this alone, as a starting point for reflection and, leaving issues and worries aside, see what God has to say to us in it. We might find that some problems begin to look different. But there is a condition for reading on. If you agree, then let’s go ahead. Let go of what you know, especially if you are a conservative or a liberal who has all the answers. If, like the rest of us, you are merely confused or curious, take a risk. Come to God, the Father revealed in Christ, with hands empty of all but fears and loves. He will grant a context. There is absolutely no point examining God as though he is a laboratory specimen. If you wish to hear his word, you have to be prepared for the consequences. And, if you do not wish to be a Pharisee, let us begin as sinners. PART 1 LAYING THE FOUNDATION (#ulink_6858fb66-3e54-5de5-b971-1fce95c7f0be) Chapter 1 RIGHT WAY DOWN (#ulink_4418c635-31c6-538a-9662-86688caad5ca) Let me hear your voice; for your voice is sweet and your face is beautiful. Song of Songs 2:14 Not long ago, my father moved into a new house, a converted steading in a rather remote Scottish valley. On holiday, I helped him with some of the unpacking and decorating. The key task was to get the kitchen done, so that we could eat. In a very short time, surprisingly short, I learnt how to assemble kitchen units from flat packs. The next lesson was how to take them apart again. It was plain to me that these things were designed by warped minds, inventing devious ways of joining bits of chipboard together, and delighting in the failure of ordinary rational people to work out what had gone wrong when there were not enough bolts and screws. Two corner units later, the truth dawned that all the bits were shaped and arranged so as to make things easy. What had looked like a confusing array of parts fell naturally into an intelligible whole if one simply followed the instructions provided. For example, the odd L-shaped bolts, far from being menacing, took away the need to make mortice joints in the wood. They meant that even I, with no experience or expertise, could assemble the units, given time, patience and a willingness to imitate the diagrams. It was a mistake even to put the pictures into words: ‘put all the L-shaped bolts into the 8mm round holes at the top and bottom corners of the inside faces of the …’ The description lost clarity, added confusion. You just made the bits and pieces look like the picture provided. It is this easy to be a Christian, to resolve any issue of faith or of practice. The hard part is learning to do it the easy way. How often, for example, have you heard or read the following? Come to me all you who labour and are overburdened, and I will give you rest. Shoulder my yoke and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. Yes, my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. Matthew 11:28 If we could do that, there would be no problems we could not face. The trouble is that we tend to flounder around with partial ideas, half concepts, fears and anxieties, like somebody trying to assemble a kitchen unit who does not know what the different parts are for. The claim of the Gospel is very straightforward. In Jesus Christ we have our diagram; if we can configure ourselves so as to look like him then, in any situation, life will get better. Or, if it does not get any better, it will make more sense: you will find rest for your souls. Such is the promise of God in Jesus. You have to decide for yourself if it is true in your life, and why it is or why it might not be. The Gospel may well be false, a delusion. But if we are to reject it, we must be sure that it is the Gospel that we reject, and not something else. If we seek to live by it, we need to know that it is truly Christ to whom we are coming. This may seem obvious, but it is important to say it, because Catholicism is so massive, so complex, and thus so misunderstood. In this chapter, let’s keep things simple, and think a little about what it means to believe the Gospel. Waving not drowning One of the reasons English is such a rich language is that it is an amalgam of many other languages. This is especially true of so-called American English. From the fusion of Anglo-Saxon and Norman French at the turn of the first millennium we have a dual vocabulary for many things. A rich man is also wealthy; but if bereft, he is also desolate. It can cause problems, however. In talking about God, we want to talk about faith. That comes from the Romance or Latin side. But there is also the word belief. Can these be used interchangeably? In terms of grammar, no. We can say, ‘I believe in God,’ but not, ‘I faith God.’ This draws attention to a number of meanings of the word ‘belief’ that need to be watched. You know it is raining, are of the opinion that it will stop soon. Belief tends to be seen as halfway between the two. It is not certain, but nor is it merely opinion. Opinion is for things we cannot really prove, whereas belief is not relinquished so easily. Such was the treatment of faith by the medieval theologians, and it has largely stuck. Sometimes, though, people ask of any given doctrine if they have to believe it to be Catholics. This can be an unhelpful way of seeing faith: essentially as holding a number of statements to be true. If you believe propositions a, b, c, and so on, then you will go to heaven. We will come back to some difficulties in chapter 12, ‘How to Disagree with the Pope’. For now, it is enough to point out that religion is not the same as a bunch of views about metaphysics and history, though these are involved in it. It is about God, about you, and about how those two relate in respect to others. This may turn out to be quite good news. For a richer idea of what faith is about, let us look at a familiar Gospel story. Like many other stories, it is not as simple as it looks. But then, that’s life. Jesus made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side while he would send the crowds away. After sending the crowds away he went up into the hills by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone, while the boat, by now far out on the lake, was battling with a heavy sea, for there was a head-wind. In the fourth watch of the night he went towards them, walking on the lake, and when the disciples saw him walking on the lake they were terrified. ‘It is a ghost,’ they said, and cried out in fear. But at once Jesus called out to them, saying, ‘Courage! It is I! Do not be afraid.’ It was Peter who answered. ‘Lord,’ he said, ‘if it is you, tell me to come to you across the water.’ ‘Come,’ said Jesus. Then Peter got out of the boat and started walking towards Jesus across the water, but as soon as he felt the force of the wind, he took fright and began to sink. ‘Lord! Save me!’ he cried. Jesus put out his hand at once and touched him. ‘Man of little faith,’ he said, ‘why did you doubt?’ And as they got into the boat, the wind dropped. The men in the boat bowed down before him and said, ‘Truly, you are the Son of God.’ Matthew 14:22–33 St Peter spends much of his time in the Gospels getting things wrong. Before Christ’s arrest, he promises to follow him even to the death, but ends up denying to the authorities that he ever knew Jesus. Most people draw some consolation from this. Peter is quite like us: a real faith, but a weak faith; a real hope, but an anxious hope; a real love of Christ, but a fearful love. Christianity looks great, and even attractive, but then so difficult as well. But let’s be honest, and give Peter some credit. Would you have even got out of the boat? Perhaps you would not have got into the boat in the first place on such a stormy night? Peter errs almost always out of a misdirected enthusiasm, too much warmth. That is not something of which I can be accused very often. Perhaps you are better. But then, what are you warm about? Are you passionate in the cause of women’s ordination, or for the admission of remarried divorcees to communion? Do you get hot under the collar about vacuous musical moanings in church, or fired up at the thought of young people living ‘in sin’? This is why I have laboured the point about belief not being in the first instance about propositions. None of these initially motivated Peter. To stretch the analogy, he did not engage in a rational process. He did not think anything like: ‘Jesus is the Son of God. Faith in him can move mountains. Therefore, if I believe all that he says, I will be able to walk on water. So, off I go. Oh no, but it’s very windy and the water is very wet. Surely I can’t really float. Help, Lord, I’m sinking.’ In fact, in this story at any rate, Peter did not think at all. He saw and recognized Christ, and just moved. The sight of Jesus drove all from his mind, including some quite important facts. So, then, how like Peter are you? Are you so full of joy at the sight of Jesus that you forget what lies between you, what keeps you apart from him? What made Peter disregard the wind and the waves, as well as the obvious facts about water and heavy human beings? What gave him that joy, that attraction? It was not faith, or hope, or love, but something much more interesting. It was his need, the clarity with which he felt it, the honesty with which he acknowledged it. Peter walked on water because in Christ he found someone who could and would put out his hand and hold him. Rather than pillory Peter for his lack of faith, we should praise him for the strength of his doubt: doubt of God, doubt of himself. Because that is where we start too, and where we will stay unless we can understand that we do not believe, we do not hope, and we do not love our Lord. If you insist that you do believe, then Jesus can do nothing for you, because you do not need him. He cannot find you if you continue to insist that you are not lost. Maybe you think that is going a bit far. But please remember our bargain. We agreed not to be Pharisees, but sinners, because we wanted to hear and understand anew the call of Christ. If we do, then something rather marvellous happens. We receive a gift, the gift of a hopeful and loving faith. If you don’t believe me, then try the Pope: Anyone who wishes to understand themselves thoroughly – and not just in accordance with immediate, partial, superficial and even illusory standards and measures of his being – they must with their unrest, uncertainty and even their weakness and sinfulness, with their life and death, draw near to Christ … John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis, 10 So here is the only prerequisite for coming to know Jesus as your Saviour. If you want to have faith, this is the secret. Neglect all you know or don’t know about God. Abandon attempts to reconcile the contradictions of the Alexandrian interpretation of the hypostatic union, or to understand transubstantiation. Forget everything except your unrest, your uncertainty, your weakness and your sinfulness. Dwell with them for as long as you can stand it. Then just suppose, as a hypothesis, that you are loved to a depth you cannot imagine. Your lover will die for you, lives for you. This takes us far beyond the merely intellectual. In the same passage, John Paul II says that if this profound process takes place within you, you will bear fruit not only of adoration of God, but also of deep wonder at yourself and how precious you must be in his eyes. The name for such deep amazement at your worth and dignity is the Gospel, that is to say: the Good News. It is also called Christianity. Redemptor Hominis, 10; slightly paraphrased You may not find this way of working very helpful as an immediate experience. But the Pope’s point stands that faith begins in a sense of how much we need, and then astonishment at the suggestion that Jesus is prepared to fulfil that need. It is good theology as well as a way of praying. If you disagree, try living without love. Or, from God’s point of view, try compelling someone else to live without love (except don’t, of course!). Peter fails because he stops at doubt. His need brings panic; he must cross over to Christ. He ignores the truth that Jesus is coming to him, just as he ignores the comparatively irrelevant Archimedean principle (he’ll sink). But there is no necessity to leave the boat, because when Jesus arrives the wind will drop and the waves become calm. Don’t just do something, sit there! This is the truly amazing part of the Gospel, and the easiest to forget: that God moves long before we do. Before we can call, he is there. Before we can repent, he has forgiven. We will see this again in later chapters, so I will leave its expansion to those applications. For now, it simply means that there is no place to which Jesus cannot follow you. The reason is that, because of his love for you, there is no place where he does not want to follow you, just to be with you, and to draw you back to the Father. Man of little faith, why did you doubt? Doubt everything you like – yourself, your strength, your worthiness, even God and his love. Faith does not erase those doubts, because they are truth, truth about us. Faith adds another, contradictory fact, a fact about God: the Lord is coming to save. What about the creed? If this is what faith is about, then it shows us how important the Creed is, and what the teaching of the Church’s magisterium is for. Doctrines are vital because they attempt to encapsulate and apply the content of the Gospel. They derive their significance from the personal contact with Christ which is that content; the wonder or amazement of which John Paul II has spoken. This can be demonstrated from the simple experience of the Church’s history and life. For example, as we will see below, the only way to express adequately in human language the intensity with which Jesus gives himself to us in the Eucharist is to talk of eating his Body and drinking his Blood; and to mean that, literally. Less controversially, when discussing the nature of Christ, the early theologians insisted that Christ was fully human, because ‘what was not assumed by God in Christ was not saved’, and the Christian hope is of salvation of the whole human person. The Pope and the bishops have the task of interpreting human need and divine response in each age and all circumstances. This is a sufficiently daunting commission to encourage one to have sympathy with them. Even more so, when one realizes that they do so, and can do so, only in union with the whole Body of Christ; including you and me. This tells us, further, how to interpret the Church’s teaching. Any given doctrine is not the result of speculation, but is forced on us to express our faith. So, in turn, we say that we believe the doctrine, that is, say it is true, because the doctrine says what we mean by putting our faith in God, revealed in Christ. Conversely, pick a doctrine, and we can try to work out what it really means in the light of the Gospel it expresses. Take murder. The Church agrees with many others that in most instances it is wrong to kill. Why? Because each human life has an equal value in God’s sight. Conversely, I am loved by God in and for myself, regardless of how tall I am or what I do. Hence, you are too. So it would not be consistent with the good news of my own life to take yours. If only life were that simple all the time. We are nearly ready to tackle some real problems. But first, we need a few doctrines to provide ammunition, protection and shorthand. In the next few chapters, we shall look more closely at the figure approaching across the storm-tossed waters. Who is he, and what does he have to do with us? Chapter 2 WORD MADE FLESH (#ulink_81c32567-a8ef-528d-b1d7-8cf24501b09e) Our God comes, he keeps silence no longer. Psalm 50:3. Grail translation In this chapter, we are going to look at the central doctrine of the Christian faith, the doctrine of the Incarnation. The essential idea is that Jesus Christ was both truly God and truly Man. As we approach this doctrine we are faced with a number of difficulties. One is the seeming contradiction in saying that the same person can be omnipotent (divine) and hungry (human). Another has arisen more recently but is just as acute – that Jesus was (or should I say ‘is’; that’s another problem!) a man and not a woman. The Incarnation seems to feed into Christian chauvinism, the devaluing of women, and, historically, probably has done so. Once again, I ask you to take it on trust that these issues have resolutions, and suggest that the way forward is not to keep banging our heads on intractables or waving a number of political flags in either direction. Let’s try to get to the heart of the matter, and then see. Having put down any weapons, let’s listen to a story from the Mass, slightly edited. You formed us in your own likeness, and set us over the whole world, to serve you, our Creator, and to rule over all creatures. Even when we disobeyed you and lost your friendship, you did not abandon us to the power of death, but helped us all to seek and find you. Again and again, you offered us a covenant, and through the prophets taught us to hope for salvation. Roman Missal, n. 118, Eucharistic Prayer IV We can read this in a number of ways. One approach is to take it personally. We all have in us a sense of being and of reason and love, which is the likeness to God. We also have a sense of difference from plants and other animals, a sense of understanding and control. We also have the sad knowledge of what we have done with that sense and the power that comes with it. You also know in yourself, if you are honest, ways and examples of lost love and friendship, instances in which you are not what you could be, best intentions frustrated. But there is also hope, which gets you up in the morning, makes you try again; possibilities of reform, of forgiveness. Either of these senses, of sin and of grace, can be to the fore or fade out of sight from time to time, but recognizing the idea of them is enough for now. A very good way of praying is to take that text above, put it in the first person singular, ‘I’, and the present tense: you do not abandon me to the power of death. The story is also a history. It is told, mostly, in the documents that make up the Old Testament, the first, and longer, half of the Christian Bible. On the face of it, some may think that there’s little point in having the Old Testament. If you open it at random, there is a fair chance you will find something incomprehensible or irrelevant. Some of it is downright irreligious, or even shocking; for example, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in the name of God, described in the books of Joshua and Judges. There were quite influential movements in the first years of Christianity which said the Old Testament should be ditched. Not only was it disedifying and even scandalous in parts, but with the coming of Christ it had become, literally, history, to be replaced by the New. The main group were called Marcionites, after their leader, and they failed because they were discredited by a far bigger mistake, of which more in a moment. But there is something reassuring about the realism of the Old Testament. It has three main sections: the history and law books, such as I Kings or Exodus; the Prophets, such as Isaiah or Jeremiah; and the ‘writings’, a miscellaneous collection including the Psalms, Proverbs and the Song of Songs. There is virtually no human aspiration, hope, virtue, failure, betrayal, emotion or drama that cannot be found in there somewhere. Early monks used to make the same claim of the Psalms alone. Once noticed, this fact is significant. There would be something odd about a religion that addressed only what is true and noble in us. Not just odd, but totally abstract, even useless. Think back to Peter, and his raw need for God. That need comes from sin, from weakness, from a damaging history. The Old Testament tells your story and mine in the form of the story and prayers of Israel. That is as far as we have got up to now; the realization of doubt and emptiness, and the instinct that there is an alternative. Plus the not altogether comfortable hypothesis that we are loved by a God who is about to do something about all three. Here we have the full and richer purpose of the Old Testament in Christian scripture and life, expressed in the continuation of the prayer with which we began: Father, you so loved the world that in the fullness of time you sent your only Son to be our Saviour. He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, and born of the Virgin Mary, a man like us in all things but sin. To the poor he proclaimed the good news of salvation, to prisoners freedom, and to those in sorrow, joy. Roman Missal, Eucharistic Prayer IV The Old Testament tells the story of the preparation in history for this event, in the calling of Israel to be the people within which a saviour for the world could be born and reared. We can read of the slow formation and revelation of religious and other traditions from which the ‘good news of salvation’ could be derived. For, if one stops to think about it, the message of salvation could not be proclaimed without actions and words. Further, words and actions need a context, a time and a place, and an audience rooted in that context to become comprehensible. They also need a context within which to become compelling. It is vital to recall the kind of context that is meant here. It is not simply a matter of an agreed set of words, and a grammar for what they mean in combination. Here is an example to try to indicate what the ‘extra’ element is. It is from a prayer spoken by a prophet eight centuries before Christ: With shepherd’s crook lead your people to pasture, the flock that is your heritage, living confined in a forest with meadow land all around. Let them pasture in Bashan and Gilead as in the days of old. As in the days when you came out of Egypt grant us to see wonders … Once more have pity on us, tread down our faults, to the bottom of the sea throw all our sins. Micah 7:14–15, 19 I defy anyone with insight into themselves not to empathize with the hope of that prayer. This is the context I mean, the gradual forming of human history to expect and receive God’s response to our plight. Jesus had a simple proclamation, that in his life the time was fulfilled, and the response had begun. ‘Today these words are being fulfilled, even as you listen’ (Luke 4:21). Watch my lips In the course of this chapter I have left quite a few hostages of some importance. The last extract from the Fourth Eucharistic Prayer mentions the virgin birth, the Trinity and social justice, among other things. There was also a rash promise to explain the Incarnation. The latter is really quite simple in the Old Testament context. For we have here the issue of how God can give us his message. Again and again he sends prophets, and tugs at our hope; to little avail. The issue is not just historical, since the salvation history closely mirrors our everyday experience of up and down (or, even worse, just along a flat, uninspiring road). What can he do, to tell us of his love? An image: my attempts to build a corner unit. There is a need to assemble it so that there will be supper, and also an instinct that I can assemble the thing. It looks easy, and a muddled process of sticking things together results two times out of five in an imitation of the real thing. There is a gradual process of revelation as the various bits and planks acquire a meaning and purpose that I can understand, though much remains mysterious. Then a pattern is provided to copy. So there is the humanity of Jesus, one like us in all things but sin. Here the analogy breaks down, and we move into the realm of faith. But it is not the open credulity or frenzied legalism kind of faith. In Christ we have our pattern and model. On its own, this just makes it worse. Already we had such things in the law and the prophets, and that did not help. In Peter’s terms (see chapter 1), Jesus is still far off across a forbidding ocean of divine demand and human failure. One uniquely good man is not enough to express God’s message; so much is proved by what we did and do to that one good man and his memory. What else is needed? In the beginning was the Word: the Word was with God, and the Word was God … All that came to be had life in him and that life is our light, a light that shines in the dark, a light that darkness could not overpower. The Word was made flesh, he lived among us, and we saw his glory, the glory that is his as the only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth … From his fullness we have, all of us, received, grace upon grace. No one has ever seen God; it is the only Son, who is nearest to the Father’s heart, who has made him known. John 1:1, 3–5, 14, 16–18 After centuries of trying to tell us, God the Father decided to show us. Here is the incredible fact at the centre of our faith, that God himself has come to save in Christ. It is incredible on two levels. First, theology: what is the difference between Son and Father, why is the Son called ‘Word’, how are they both God, how can God become man, etc. These are all easy compared to the second level: why would God want to become one of us, hopeless, little betraying things? What a risk, and what a failure, because we did and do not receive him, but slay him on the Cross and in ourselves and each other. Why? We already have the answer, but it is almost too deeply threatening. God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not be lost but may have eternal life. For God sent his Son into the world not to condemn the world, but so that through him the world might be saved. John 3:16–17 The Incarnation cannot be explained, because it is wholly gratuitous. There is no reason on earth for it, apart from you. But we can understand a little what it implies. Remember the Marcionites? Their key fault was to be associated with a group which could not accept that the Word had become flesh. Christ did not really hunger, sleep or suffer. He only pretended to do so, in order to teach us various things, such as the value of a noble steadfastness in the face of difficulty. He did not rise from the dead, because he did not die; he only seemed to. This suggestion is called docetism, from a Greek word meaning ‘to seem’, and the group tend to be called Gnostics, because they thought that Jesus had imparted a saving knowledge (gnosis, in Greek). This knowledge was like a set of passwords that would lead us to God past all obstacles, earthly and demonic. What Gnostics could not stand was matter, especially bodies. Real reality, they would say, is spiritual, untainted by the flesh. There is no need to spell out the baleful influence of such thinking on Christian life, and sometimes even doctrine. Jesus said once, ‘the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak’ (Matthew 26:42). The Gnostics went further and said that the flesh is bad, evil. Some went so far as to say that there are two powers: God, who made the soul, and a wicked demi-god who trapped us in flesh. This is not Christian, and we shall see why in later chapters. The Incarnation affirms once and for all the Genesis message that the creation is good, is loved by God. The aim of Christ is not to free us from matter, but to free us for it. It is we who are alienated from ourselves, spirit and body. But, ‘if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, then he who raised Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit living in you’ (Romans 8:11). The reason Gnostics found the Old Testament so difficult was that it is so earthy, so everyday. Pots and pans were not just boring, but revolting to them. The Incarnation says the opposite, that God delights to be with us so much that he became one of us. The Second Vatican Council put it like this (the full passage is given at the end of the chapter): Christ the Lord, who is the ‘image of the invisible God’, worked with human hands, he thought with a human mind. He acted with a human will, and with a human heart he loved. Gaudium et Spes, 22; the scriptural quotation is from St Paul, Colossians 1:15 In Christ, the invisible God found an image. God was invisible because he is beyond our imagining, but also because we have forgotten what he looks like. We have lost the image in ourselves. In Jesus, the words of God took flesh, in a practical demonstration. Our assumptions tend to play this down; we assume that at any moment, the divinity was on top. But to take the Incarnation seriously is to say that Jesus could have died at the age of four from yellow fever. Has it ever struck you how little the Gospels tell us about the life of Christ? There have been plenty of novels and films to fill the gap: most of those in the first few centuries were written by Gnostics, silly stories about Jesus zapping his childhood friends (wish I could), and so were rejected by the Church. In the genuine scriptures of the New Testament we have two nativity stories, and that is it until Jesus is about thirty. There is only one exception, in Luke’s Gospel, where Jesus goes missing on a visit to Jerusalem, and is found in the Temple, giving the learned priests a run for their money. It is a rather charming picture of an ordinary family event: a lost child, panic, reproaches and answering back. The Gospels tell us nothing of the boyhood of the Saviour because he was just another kid. Maybe you find all this shocking. It is indeed shocking, but because it is the full revelation of God’s love, not because it is blasphemy. If Jesus was not fully man, then he did not show us what humanity could be. If he did not live as we do, then God has no interest in our lives. If he did not die, then our own deaths are the end, there will be no rising. God stands, unruffled, on the stormy lake and taunts us with advice on how to bail out the water. But that is how we think, not how God thinks, which is just as well. So now we have the Son of God and us, all in the same boat. From this we can come to understand most of what we want to know about being Catholic. It is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of man truly becomes clear. Christ the Lord, Christ the new Adam, in the very revelation of the mystery of the Father and of his love, fully reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high calling. He who is the ‘image of the invisible God’, is himself the perfect man who has restored in the children of Adam that likeness to God which had been disfigured ever since the first sin. Human nature, by the very fact that it was assumed, not absorbed, in him, has been raised in us also to a dignity beyond compare. For, by his incarnation, he, the Son of God, has in a certain way united himself with each man. He worked with human hands, he thought with a human mind. He acted with a human will, and with a human heart he loved. Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes, 22 It is time to say what that might mean for us, and for him. First, however, there is a possible apprehension that needs to be cleared up. Chapter 3 WILL GOD PUNISH YOU? (#ulink_6f80a569-5402-5a6e-a2c3-32241c2bd6f1) Death was not God’s doing. Wisdom 1:13 From time to time you hear people say that the problem with the Church now is that nobody believes in sin any more. It has all become a sickly soup of love and forgiveness. What about the wrath of God? What about the fires of hell and of purgatory? Surely, if you do bad, you are punished, and if you do good, you are rewarded. Justice, love and peace are all very well, but the world also contains oppression, hate and violence. We do wrong either to ourselves, or to each other. Such people have a point. If the Gospel is all about things going right, and people full of Christian charity and nothing else, then it has very little to do with any of us. The tendency to think that God forgives everything really, in the end, is to an extent connected with wish-fulfilment, the desire to live in a perfect world, undisturbed. But, on the other hand, it seems strange, to say the least, that the God who is love might condemn anyone he has made to eternal and final suffering in punishment for offences which, in the perspective of infinite goodness, are maybe not that big. Not so fast On this question, Jesus has a very unwelcome thing to say. His view is almost impossible to explain away; though, of course, that has not stopped people from trying. When you read it, you can see the temptation to marshal the technology of literary and historical criticism to prove that Jesus did not actually say it. But I think his statement, grim as it looks, has much to tell us about the full richness of the Good News. It is worth taking it on the chin, and examining ourselves and our reaction to it. Here it is, from St Mark’s account: I tell you solemnly, all men’s sins will be forgiven, and all their blasphemies; but let anyone blaspheme against the Holy Spirit and he will never have forgiveness; he is guilty of an eternal sin. Mark 3:28–30 Mark tells us that Jesus said this because some scribes were attributing his miracles to demonic possession. The statement might almost confirm their suspicions. There is, according to Jesus, a special reserved sin that will not be forgiven, no matter how sorry you are, and how much you repent. Worried? You should be. For it seems that after baptism, and a sacramental life of eucharist and reconciliation, you can finally and truly blow it. Murders, genocides, can all be forgiven; but let anyone speak against the Holy Spirit, and he, or she, is lost for ever. God is more touchy about his honour than about the lives of his children. At least, however, we can be assured that the Christian tradition does contain some tough and uncompromising claims about sin and punishment. It may also be clear from your own reaction to the text why hell, damnation and sin have so dropped out of the contemporary religious vocabulary. Perhaps, for example, you are the rare person who reads the above saying with warm feelings of approval and agreement. Presumably you do not feel it applies to you! Maybe you think Jesus has said this to try and spur us into repentance and a safely good life, in case we fall into the dreadful pit. So, are we meant to live Christian lives motivated by fear of punishment alone, and a scrupulous, ritualistic fetish for moral cleanliness? This may be true, though I hope not! It is certainly not the Gospel as expounded in the old Penny Catechism: God made me to know him, love him and serve him in this world, and to be happy with him for ever in the next. Question 2 The ‘s’ word If you really know God, you know that he is God, not The Godfather. St Benedict, in his Rule for Monks, describes coming to know God as a growth from servile fear to the love of sons and daughters, the perfect love that casts out fear. For him, it is a growth in humility. This virtue has two parts. The first is the recognition of weakness and sin within us. The second is the realization that goodness and beauty is there too. Each part is useless without the other. On its own, the first is false modesty, or unctuous hypocrisy. The second without the first is conceit, a comforting internal deafness to what we do not want to know. Both parts together involve living in the truth, the exclusion of false gloom or over-optimism. It is also the only way to understand how Jesus’ preaching of the gospel of repentance is good news to us. If we say we have no sin in us, we are deceiving ourselves and refusing to admit the truth; but if we acknowledge our sins, then God who is faithful and just will forgive our sins and purify us from everything that is wrong. 1 John 1:8–9 For a Christian, talk of sin is immediately the acknowledgement of grace and forgiveness because ‘what proves that God loves us is that Christ died for us while we were still sinners’ (Romans 5:8). On the other hand, talk of God’s love makes no sense without at least some sense of our darker side, the things in us that he wants to heal and change so that he can truly share with us love for love. Hence, fear of punishment cannot be the fundamental motivation for a mature Christian. But there is another way of taking Jesus’ words about an eternal sin with immediate approval. If you look around the world, there is plenty going on that should surely be unforgivable. It does not seem right that the likes of Hitler or Stalin should jump any queues into heaven ahead of, say, those millions who were killed trying to stop the evils perpetrated by them. If God waves a wand or puts a blind over his eyes with truly wicked people, and sees Christ instead of them and so lets them into eternal bliss, then this makes his love for you and me, who struggle on and do as little harm as we can, rather unreal. Salvation becomes like a debased coinage, without value because it has no cost. It must be correct, then, that a person can put him or herself beyond the possibility of forgiveness. It is like a relationship fractured to the degree that ‘I’m sorry’ can no longer heal. So who gets it? But, if you are inclined to agree with this, be careful. Jesus has another uncomfortable truth to tell us: Two men went up to the Temple to pray, one a Pharisee, and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood there and said this prayer to himself, ‘I thank you, God, that I am not grasping, unjust, adulterous like the rest of mankind, and particularly that I am not like this tax collector here. I fast twice a week; I pay tithes on all I get.’ The tax collector stood some distance away, not daring even to raise his eyes to heaven; but he beat his breast and said, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner.’ This man, I tell you, went home again at rights with God; the other did not. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the man who humbles himself will be exalted. Luke 18:9–14 The point at present is that, even if the tax collector had not said his truly humble prayer, the Pharisee is at fault. His prayer is superficially humble, in that he does thank God for the gifts within him. But it is only half the truth. In fact he uses his virtue as a condemnation of the tax collector. Any demand on our part that God be fair, and punish those evil-doers as they deserve, either condemns us to the same fate (be honest!) or puts us in the shoes of the Pharisee, whose prayer of thanksgiving was counted as sin. So maybe Hitler is in the hottest part of hell. But it is not for us to say that; unless, perhaps, you want to join him. Let us assume, therefore, a certain resistance to the idea of an eternal sin, and move forward to what Jesus might mean by it. The idea itself is not hard to understand. A woman discovers that her husband has been having an affair with her best friend for the last ten years. How does she react? What is the next step? It depends, of course, on her, her husband, and their relationship. She might just walk out. She might confront him and threaten divorce unless he stays faithful to her. She may file for divorce and seek a punitive financial settlement. She might take his shotgun and murder them both. She may do nothing at all, turn a blind eye, or even collude for the sake of children, reputation or security. Most people, though, would understand if she felt that life could not be as it was before, however much he repents or makes it up to her. A basic trust has gone, and the slate will never again be clean. We have nearly all had close relationships that have broken up – often for some reason we do not really know – or just drifted apart. Young couples sometimes insist that they are splitting up in order to ‘stay good friends’. Sometimes they can, but usually they don’t. Most of us have had the horrible experience of saying something that really lost somebody’s trust; even without meaning to, the wounding thing is out. It can take a long time to rebuild, and the foundation is never what it was, wish as we may. Human life is full of eternal sins, clocks that will not go back. In contemporary Britain, some criminal offences are eternal in the sense that once committed, they can never be forgotten. Most people agree, for example, that paedophiles may be punished for seeking to work with children. Killers released early on parole sometimes have to be protected from the vengeful public. It seems that human society, to protect itself, has to cast some of its members into the outer darkness. If the idea of an eternal sin makes some sense, the claim that in the sight of God there are points of no return perhaps does not. Take the maltreated and deceived wife. What if she had a perfect love for her husband? She might know him very well, understand some fact of his character or history that made him unable to cope with fidelity. She might realize how much he needed her there to return to. She might reflect that no husband is ideal, and put the blame on her friend. In other words, she might do all the things we would expect of the loving Father. God is love. He sees our weakness, understands its roots, knows what we can and cannot help. He notes our attempts to repent, and stands, like the father in the parable of the Prodigal Son, on the road waiting for us. He knows we are fallen, none better, and he knows we are tempted by a former angel of light. And did he not wipe it all away in the death of his Son? All shall have prizes? This is a childish way of thinking, precisely what Jesus wants us to abandon. It is like the mad queen in Lewis Carroll’s story who exclaims after a game, ‘All have won, and all shall have prizes!’ Suppose our offended lady does all those things, and puts up with the errant behaviour, while seeking always to draw her husband from it. He is still unfaithful, and he is still, despite all protestations, someone who has been unfaithful. But because she is a good lady, on one view, she treats him still as if he were entirely hers, heart and soul. Some people think that this is what God does with us. He looks at our sins and instead of the guilty sinner, sees his Son. He counts us as righteous; this is the ‘good news’ that God loves us always despite our sins. He casts them into a bottomless sea, and forgets them. So let us imagine heaven on that basis. We all have the full vision of God, we live in some kind of state surrounded by the light and love of the Trinity; all is for us. We are still sinners, of course, but that is all paid for. We are like compulsive gamblers, and God has agreed to pay all our gambling debts, content that we are having fun. Would this be eternal blessedness, paradise? It sounds to me to be more like this world, and what we have made of it. Or maybe just hell on earth. Sheep may safely graze, and wolves may safely prey on them. The lion lies down with the lamb and eats it for lunch. The infant plays over the viper’s hole and is bitten. The Father takes no notice; his children make of each other a living torment, and the God of love says that all is well. I will not labour this point, but simply recall what we are really promised: The wolf lives with the lamb, the panther lies down with the kid, calf and lion cub feed together with a little boy to lead them. The cow and the bear make friends, their young lie down together. The lion eats straw like the ox. The infant plays over the cobra’s hole; into the viper’s lair the young child puts his hand. They do no hurt, no harm, on all my holy mountain, for the country is filled with the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters swell the sea. Isaiah 11:6–9 Jesus Christ does not offer a game of ‘let’s pretend’. He offers you the real possibility of being freed from your sins. In which case, there is the real possibility that you will refuse his offer. He will not turn the blind eye, for your sake. His promise is to do what no human alone can do, which is to restore the basic trust that was lost, to make all creation new, so as to have you back with him, whole and entire. In this light, we can understand what Jesus is talking about. The eternal sin, blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, is not a stone cast at the honour of a touchy God. It is your refusal of his offer to give you his love, to teach you how to love him, and your neighbour, let alone your enemies; the offer to fill you with his Holy Spirit. God will not punish you. But you might; in fact, you do. I’ll try to explain in the next chapter. Chapter 4 A BETTER IDEA (#ulink_f620e6f3-ef44-5f58-af30-48ffe158cc72) Has the Lord lost patience? Is that his way? Micah 2:7 Of course, it would be very easy for God to punish us. He is the Creator of all things, sustaining in being all that is seen and even more that is unseen. At any moment he could destroy you, rewrite history so that you never were. He could do things undreamed of by even the most expert ethnic cleanser. It would be equally easy for him to free you from your sins, make you perfect, just like that. But he is not going to do either of those things, obvious as they might seem. He has a better idea altogether, though much more difficult and perhaps impossible: Such is the richness of the grace he has showered on us in all wisdom and insight. He has let us know the mystery of his purpose, the hidden plan he so kindly made in Christ from the beginning to act upon when the times had run their course to an end. Ephesians 1:8–9 So, what is this plan, and why is it hidden? The two questions have one answer. Let us think for a moment about God as the Creator of heaven and earth. It is hard to imagine what this means. We are familiar with making things, be they kitchen units or works of art and poetry. Parents have the most sublime experience of all in the creation of a completely new person. When we create, it involves assembling or rearranging bits of matter, or thoughts. God, in contrast, created everything out of nothing. This involves two ideas. First, God started it all off: ‘Let there be light’, and so on. On its own, however, this idea does not capture much. God would be like the Queen, in the United Kingdom, smashing a bottle against a ship to launch it, blessing all who sail in it, and that’s that. The full truth is rather less comfortable, because it brings God very, very near. You do not need the Queen to launch the ship, though she does do it very well. It could be anyone sober enough to heft the bottle in the right direction. It could also be a machine suitably programmed. Or, why bother with an intervention? Just let the ship slide. In the same way, God the Creator need not be at all like the Father revealed in his Word by the Holy Spirit. It could be any kind of god with sufficient strength to give the big push. Or, the universe might just have happened. The notion of a Creator might just be a useful myth to take us beyond the boundaries of the language of science, the kind of confusion that comes from perplexing questions like ‘what was there before there was anything?’ The idea of the Christian doctrine of creation is this: behind every happening, every thing, every thought, every action, all movements, is the creating power of God. In gaps between nanoseconds, he sustains it in being. There is only one force in the world, which is the action of God. Nothing happens otherwise. Hold on, though. Aren’t we free beings, with choice? What about all the catastrophes and natural disasters; am I saying that God wills those? Am I saying that God is responsible for evil actions by tyrants and people like us? In asking these questions, we are coming to understand what sin is. A sinful act is not sinful primarily because it offends God, or because it infringes some abstract law code. It is sinful because it is an exercise of the power to act, given by God, in an evil way, a way that counts against God’s purpose in creating us. Philosophers have argued for centuries – and there is no reason for them to stop – about how it is possible for an all-powerful Creator to have made free creatures. Surely in some remote way, he still has control. This is the nasty bit that hurts. There is nothing in creation that can withstand the power of God, except for one thing, which is a human being saying ‘no’. Why? Because that is how God made it. For some reason, known only to himself, he wanted to make little beings that would accept his love and love him in return. So he gave us the ability to move, act and think for ourselves. If God were like us, he might wish he had not bothered. Another doctrine It is from thinking like this, however, that we get a glimpse of the inner reality of God. The argument is tricky, and largely unconvincing, because the subject is too big. Nobody expects to be able to divide one by zero, and so we should not be surprised at the mystery and complexity of the doctrine of the Trinity. It is just trying to do what every doctrine does: express in intelligible sentences something that cannot be said, but that our need tells us to be so. Before I state the doctrine, a short passage from the writings of John Paul II illustrates the starting point: Man cannot live without love. He remains a being which is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it. Redemptor Hominis, 10 Mothers and fathers have a particular insight into this truth, that we find fullness of life in giving life, in nurturing it, and in setting it free. The question here is why we are like that. God could have made little things that would freely love him in an one-to-one way. I love God, you love God, she loves God … isolated cells of devotion. But I love you, too (quite easy, really, if we have not met!); and you love so-and-so, and he loves you, or loves you not. Once you think of it, this is a staggering fact, the most important thing about human beings. The ancient philosophers used to say ‘man is a political animal’, meaning that we are intrinsically, and by nature, interactive in relation to others. If you have never thought about that, think about it now. Nor is it simply true of humanity; the whole creation is promiscuously interactional, though maybe only we have the ability to choose it, or resist it. It need not have been so, except that God said, ‘Let us make man in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves, and let them be masters of the fish of the sea, the birds of heaven, the cattle, all the wild beasts and all the reptiles that crawl upon the earth.’ God created man in the image of himself, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them. Genesis 1:26–27 The author of Genesis was so struck by our relational nature that he went as far as can be gone, and said that we are so because God is so, and he made us so because he wanted us to be like him in love. In our nature is found a reflection of the nature of God. A shorthand idea is needed to express what is meant by something relational by nature with a power to choose. If we call this entity a ‘person’, then we have acquired the first vital concept for expressing a Trinitarian faith. God is personal in this sense. We know this because we are persons, but by creation, and hence by the will of an interactive Creator. The second concept follows rather less obviously. I have suggested that creation need not have been interactional at all. It could have been like a tall building divided into one-room flats, each one with a window to the east. We could each have been in different rooms, all looking at the sun, but without awareness of each other, or any means to relate to each other, even if we wanted to. The ancient idea of man as the image of God can then be pressed further. ‘Male and female he created them.’ Humanity is not totally expressed by just the men or just the women, it is a plurality as well as a unity. Nature did not have to be divisible into partitions: we could all have been androgynous, or even non-sexual in nature. That stamp came from God. The Creator is a unity and a plurality. One can go further than this still. The image of God, a humanity that is male and female, is part of the interactivity in all of creation. It is not just that men love God and women love God. Human persons were created also to love each other. In the love between a man and a woman, they can give life, share with God in creating a new person. A traditional description of the Holy Spirit comes from this way of thinking: he is the vinculum amoris, the chain of love between Father and Son. Again, we reflect our Creator; two distinct types of person, and their love for each other, giving rise to creation of life. Be warned that it is very easy indeed to talk complete rubbish about the Trinity. And it is all rather difficult, even impossible, to understand (and hence to explain!) Like all other doctrines, we are putting into clumsy human words something revealed in Christ, and foreshadowed in the Old Testament. Getting the formulation true to the Christian experience of salvation took many centuries and, sadly, much controversy. If confused, we can take refuge in the Creed that was produced, and which we still say each Sunday. But the doctrine of the Trinity, that God is one God in three Persons, is not a speculation. It comes from making sense of what Christ has done for us, which he himself expressed as a command to baptize ‘in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’ (Matthew 28:19). The cunning plan If you are feeling completely lost, that is not necessarily bad. Remember that we are awash anyway in the boat on the stormy sea, and have just been joined by Jesus. It is time to say what God’s better idea for us might be. The aim is entirely simple and can be put in a very few words. Nothing does better than the special formula from the Third Eucharistic Prayer which we use at funerals: We hope to share in your glory when every tear will be wiped away. On that day we shall see you, our God, as you are. We shall become like you and praise you for ever through Christ our Lord, from whom all good things come. God’s solution to our needs and troubles is to restore us to his image. We need to think a little about the problems he faces in doing this. The immediate one is sin. But what is sin? You might have been brought up on lists of sins, some of them attractively mysterious. Don’t lie, don’t be rude, don’t hate, don’t commit adultery. All of these are indeed sinful, but the true nature of sin is something deeper. It is not simply that God gets angry if you do or say the wrong thing. Sin, fundamentally, is a refusal to relate to God. No matter how much he loves us, he can give us nothing if we will not accept it. The consequences of this are dire. Imagine a human family in which all the people have decided that the mother is out to poison them. Food is not safe if it is given by her, but it is all right if it is taken for yourself. So each member has to grab what they want for themselves, and as early in the cooking process as possible so that it is not too poisonous. The result is a considerable amount of indigestion and stomach ache, the personal consequences of sin. In addition, the brothers and sisters come to distrust each other, each wishing to get the food first, and never sure if the others are not tricking them. Life becomes, in the words of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, ‘nasty, brutish and short’. Here we have the social consequences of sin, the way a personal refusal of God spreads to a refusal of others. In the end, as more children are born into the household, they pick up without choice the habits of their parents and other relations. We have a fallen society with no hope of redemption within itself. Here is one part of the redemption in Christ, the teaching and example which reveals the love of God, whose full depth is shown in the sacrifice of the Cross. He is like someone coming into the dysfunctional family who dares to eat food from the mother’s hand. But in order for the example to persuade, he has to be like them. There is no use having an exemplar whom we suspect of being immune to the poison. This is why the docetic Gnostics mentioned in chapter 2 were so dangerously wrong when they thought that God could not really have become human in Jesus, that there must have been some special ‘get-out’ clause or immunity for Christ. It is the same point that lies behind the temptation of Jesus in the desert: ‘If you are the Son of God, turn this stone into a loaf’ (Luke 4:4). Precisely because he is the Son of God, Jesus was prepared to lay his power aside so as to convince us of his love. But sin goes deeper than that. Traditionally, the Church has talked about Original Sin, an idea which is understandably unpopular. The story is that the first sin of Adam and Eve was passed down all the generations as a hereditary curse, rather in the same way as big ears or a snub nose like mine. Theologians, especially St Augustine, noted the rage of tiny infants when disappointed of food or attention, and saw this as a mark of the fatal inheritance. But once it was realized that Adam and Eve may not have existed as such, the doctrine began to lose credibility. Nobody would put much research money into a quest for a putative ‘sin’ gene in human cells. The language surrounding original sin may not hold much water any longer, but the central idea, the faith the doctrine attempts to express, has something going for it. Anyone who has undergone any form of psychotherapy discovers how basic and elemental are some of our destructive impulses. We learn more each day about the subtle interactions of genes and environments, behaviour and cognition. If you think that is all hocus-pocus, then I would point to the fact that very few of us get close to imitating Christ. We may start to take God’s love, but what do we do with it then? Take the Sermon on the Mount: ‘be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect’ (Matthew 5:48). How are you doing? How much longer will you need? Our fallen state is a universal experience. The radical Christian message is about how deep that fall has gone. We know this because we know how far God has gone in Christ to restore us to his image. The full damage of sin happens on the level of our basic nature. This is the basic content of the doctrine of Original Sin. All of us are damaged in nature, and pass that on. We know this, because the Word became flesh to rescue us. The remedy is on the same scale and level as the disease. One way to put it is like this. Our nature is relational, we are persons. In denying ourselves the love of God, we deny ourselves the material with which to love each other. In doing this, we block off part of God’s creative love from the whole world, as though we are standing in each other’s light causing mini-eclipses. The love which most reflects God’s, that of woman and man creating a child, is also affected, and thus there is a lack in the creative power passed on by them. It is like a dry field. Each of us is standing holding an umbrella, so that no matter how much it rains, the field remains parched. It may as well be drought. After a while, weedy, malnourished seedlings give rise to malnourished plants. That is what we have done to ourselves, to each other and to the whole creation. And so we become imperfect copies of the image of God. What happens in Christ is that God takes on our nature. So what? So two things. First, human nature is exalted by the exchange. As the Vatican II passage already quoted makes clear, ‘Human nature, by the fact that it was assumed, not absorbed, in him, has been raised in us also to a dignity beyond compare’ (Gaudium et Spes, 22). For the first time in many years, there is a human being living in love with the Father. Jesus relates fully to the Father, so he can relate fully to other human beings. Because our nature is relational, connecting us all together in chains of love or of hate, Jesus’ nature affects the rest of us. In him, the human and divine meet in amity and in union, and so if we relate to Jesus, we also relate to the Father. One such relationship can begin to leaven the whole world, because of the fact that we are all interacting across space and time. That is our shared nature, now shared with him. But secondly, a human being has at last said a full ‘yes’ to God. This is not just an example, it is an opening of the world to the power of the Creator. It is also a ‘yes’ said by the Son of God, a loving return of love for love that is the Holy Spirit unleashed on the creation to mend and to heal. The purpose of creation is at last fulfilled and man and God are made one. Nor is this simply a unity at a level where nothing goes wrong. It is easy to live in love when all is rosy and bright. But Jesus plumbs the full depths of human misery, as well as sharing our joys. For this reason, the Cross has central importance in Christianity. Note, as well, what love it is of which we are speaking. On the Cross the Father and Son exchange the love of the Trinity; it is this image to which we are restored. Our life, from now, can be part of the life of God. To paraphrase St Paul: Out of the Father’s infinite glory, he has offered you the power, through his Holy Spirit, for your hidden self to grow strong, so that Christ may live in your hearts through faith, and then, planted on love and built on love you will with all the saints have strength to grasp the breadth and the length, the height and the depth; until, knowing the love of Christ, which is beyond all knowledge, you are filled with the utter fullness of God. Ephesians 3:16–18 God has done what we could never do, but in such a way that it was done by one of us. This is, perhaps, a better idea than punishing you. We now have to ask how it actually comes about in our lives, and try to discover how to avoid stopping it. Here are some texts which further illustrate some of the ideas contained in this chapter: The light does not fail because of those who have blinded themselves; it remains the same, while the blinded are plunged in darkness by their own fault. Light never forces itself on anyone, nor does God use compulsion on anyone who refuses to accept his artistry. St Irenaeus, Against the Heretics, VI.39.3 Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God, became our reconciliation with the Father. He it was, and he alone, who satisfied the Father’s eternal love, that fatherhood that from the beginning found expression in creating the world, giving man all the riches of creation, and making him ‘little less than God’ (Psalm 8:6), in that he was created ‘in the image and in the likeness of God’ (Genesis 1:26). He and he alone also satisfied that fatherhood of God and that love which man in a way rejected … The redemption of the world – this tremendous mystery of love in which creation is renewed – is, at its deepest root, the fullness of justice in a human Heart – the Heart of the First-born Son – in order that it may become justice in the hearts of many human beings, predestined from eternity in the First-born Son to be children of God, and called to grace, called to love. John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis, 9 In his intimate life, God ‘is love’, the essential love shared by the three divine Persons: personal love is the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of the Father and the Son. Therefore he ‘searches even the depths of God’ (1 Corinthians 2:10), as uncreated Love-Gift. It can be said that in the Holy Spirit the intimate life of the Triune God becomes totally gift, an exchange of mutual love between the divine Persons, and that through the Holy Spirit God exists in the mode of gift. It is the Holy Spirit who is the personal expression of this self-giving, of this being-love. He is Person-Love. He is Person-Gift. Here we have an inexpressible deepening of the concept of person in God, which only divine revelation makes known to us. At the same time, the Holy Spirit, being consubstantial with the Father and the Son in divinity, is love and uncreated gift from which derives as from its source all giving of gifts vis-?-vis creatures (created gift): the gift of existence to all things through creation; the gift of grace to human beings through the whole economy of salvation. John Paul II, Dominum et Vivificantem, 10 By calling God ‘Father’, the language of faith indicates two main things: that God is the first origin of everything and transcendent authority; and that he is at the same time goodness and loving care for all his children. God’s parental tenderness can also be expressed by the image of motherhood, which emphasizes God’s immanence, the intimacy between Creator and creature. The language of faith thus draws on the human experience of parents, who are in a way the first representatives of God for man. But this experience also tells us that human parents are fallible and can disfigure the face of fatherhood and motherhood. We ought therefore to recall that God transcends the human distinction between the sexes. He is neither man nor woman: he is God. He also transcends human fatherhood and motherhood, although he is their origin and standard: no one is father as God is Father. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 239 Chapter 5 THICKER THAN WATER (#ulink_d70e62ca-35fe-579c-a6cd-e23404847602) Then I shall give you the gift of my love. Song of Songs 7:13 The last two chapters contained a lot of ideas and perhaps you found them rather abstract. That is a challenge with doctrines, and an important fact about them. No teaching of the Church is meant to stand alone. Each one is meant to be applied in life, each one has a bearing on our need of God and his answer to that need. If you are becoming impatient for answers to pressing questions of ‘real life’, please bear with me a little longer. Life will get real soon enough, and we must gather enough resources to cope with it. It is a little surprising that the Church has not attempted to define how we are saved by Christ. You can find plenty of models and theories, but no formal definition in the same way as the Trinity or the nature of Christ is defined. Most of the doctrines we have were evolved to support the claim that we are saved in Christ. For example, the dogma of the Assumption is all about Mary as Mother of God. This ancient title was thought up to bring home the divinity of Christ in popular Marian devotion. By bearing the God-child, Mary’s body was made specially holy. From earliest times, some Christians had believed that Mary was assumed into heaven (hence the marked lack of Marian relics), and Pope Pius XII chose to promulgate this officially at a time when many people were coming to wonder if Jesus was anything more than a gifted guru, a very holy man with good ideas. The special status of Mary was intended to underscore the very special status of her son. The Assumption can seem to non-Catholics, and indeed to some Catholics, to be a bit of window-dressing: not really necessary, and a matter of taste to take or leave. But not so the claim of salvation. This is central to our faith. In fact, it is our faith; everything else is just corollary. Yet Christians have never been able to do more than come up with images and stories to try and describe this most important part of our religion. In some ways this is a failure, but in other ways it is quite encouraging. The reconciliation between God and human beings in Christ goes deeper than words can. It penetrates our human nature beyond sin and fall. Our doctrines are like the symptomatic description of a cold: sneezing, temperature, a tendency to be other than our usual, pleasant selves. Invisible to us is the action of the virus, and of the antibodies. The analogy breaks down because we can now describe viruses and antibodies. Perhaps it is more like trying to convey the meaning of a sentence without saying the sentence; we can never get behind words and symbols. The earliest images and metaphors were very simple. The Cross was seen as the location of a great battle between Christ and the devil. In the resurrection we see the victory of Christ, who, like a modern marine detachment, has attacked the terrorist hideout and freed the hostages. The devil attacks Jesus, fooled by his human nature, only to be overwhelmed by the divine power concealed within. Such a way of thinking appeals to us strongly, since we naturally identify with stories. Writers such as Tolkien, Lewis and Stephen Donaldson give us the same myth in different terms. It closely relates to our own experiences of life as a struggle, sometimes with forces within us we do not understand or like very much. The idea is sometimes more subtle. To say we are captive to the devil accords with part of our experience. But our sense of freedom and of choice leads to the idea that we also are in rebellion against God. As such, we incur the need for forgiveness so that we can escape due punishment. The debt we owe is too great for us to pay, and so God pays it in Christ taking upon himself the just deserts of our offences. It can be put more acceptably by saying that Jesus makes the sacrifice necessary to all true forgiveness. We also, however, have a sense of helpless choosing; that we know we will do the same bad thing over and over again. This is so despite all we know about God, Christ and ourselves. St Paul puts the problem in a way almost everyone can relate to from time to time: I cannot understand my own behaviour I fail to carry out the things I want to do, and I find myself doing the very things I hate. When I act against my own will, that means I have a self that acknowledges that the Law is good, and so the thing behaving in that way is not my self but sin living in me … with the result that instead of doing the good things I want to do, I carry out the sinful things I do not want … In short, it is I who with my reason serve the Law of God, and no less I who serve in my unspiritual self the law of sin. Romans 7:14–25 Paul’s predicament is that of someone who would dearly love to be able to swim the English Channel. Exercises, practices, diets cannot alter a basic inability to swim for twenty-odd miles. He just cannot do it. Nor can I, and nor can you, I would guess. Such a way of thinking leads to saying that there is something damaged about our very human nature. We know perfectly well what we are called to by God, but our daily experience can be more like that of fish trying to build a space rocket: just not what we are made for. A more theologically respectable way of putting it would be to say that the image of God has been wiped out, or at least defaced, in us. Where we should reflect a true picture of God’s love, we produce a dim and scattered chaos. It is possible, though, to get this very wrong. One can think, for example, that the spirit is willing, while the flesh is weak. This truth is taken too far if we mean that we are good spirits trapped in a body of sin. St Paul sometimes says things like this, but not in this meaning. For him, the whole human, soul and body, is fallen; not something anyone with honest insight into themselves would dispute. If our whole nature was fallen, our whole nature is restored in Christ. This is why the Church has always insisted on the full and real humanity of Jesus. The idea is that by contact with his divine nature, the human nature was revivified and restored. Some thinkers took this further to say that we become divinized in Christ, though it is never easy to say what that means. Christ became what we are, so that we may become what he is. Pressing the idea leads us to horrible complexities about Christ’s human soul, and how to square his real human knowledge with his real divine omniscience. Fortunately we do not have to solve any of these; my money is on those fish beating us to it if we try. Each of the views outlined has its own problems and inconsistencies. The devil does not seem any less vigorous now than he was before; indeed, advancing human technology seems to give him a positive advantage. That God should slay his own Son to satisfy his just vengeance does not encourage one to approach the throne of grace. Jesus bearing the pain of our forgiveness is touching, but not always relevant if we ignore it, while his exalting of our nature seems to make our actions irrelevant. But I hope it is also clear that each of the views contains insight into our condition. For example, the satisfaction ‘theory’ in itself shows our reluctance to take seriously the parable of the Prodigal Son. A problem these views have in common, perhaps, is that they are quite abstract. Undoubtedly we have a human nature, but it is not very tangible in itself. What is tangible is our collection of broken loves and fallen promises. Troops mopping up resistance after the decisive battle are just as vulnerable to individual bullets as they were before the victory. Knowing our forgiveness, we still sin. The question of what incarnation, death and resurrection have to do with us today still needs to be asked. Part of an answer can be gained from looking at where we start. Most of us live more or less scattered lives in less or more satisfactory relations with other scattered livers. What do we miss? One vital thing is the realization of our state. I have described this state as one of need, of dissatisfaction, of incompleteness, of fear, frustration, boredom, loss, sorrow, whatever. The acknowledgement of this state I have called faith, though it so often looks like doubt. The second thing is the sense that the emptiness is not all there is, or all there might be. We still try to get on with each other, and regret the times when we do not. This sense is called hope. The last ingredient is a foundation to both, a still point against which we can rest whatever may happen. It may not surprise you if I call this love. Imagine that you are the cook for a large group of people. They live in the middle of a desert and are very hungry. You are sorry for them and do your best to feed them. It involves spending most of the day gathering the small plants and roots that grow in the rocks, and the nights digging for water in which to soak them so they are soft enough to eat. There are just enough stringy weeds, but only just. You do your best, but it is still not what they need, let alone what they want. So relations are strained. You have come to resent their demands as much as they resent your failure to satisfy them. One night a mysterious stranger appears and puts in your hand a cardboard box full of cheese and pickle sandwiches. You are so famished you eat them all, and then the box. He comes the next night, and you wolf the lot. Now you can have sandwiches, you don’t want roots and plants, and you eat the box only to hide the evidence. And so you no longer find food for other people with the same zest; you are not hungry like they are. Some time later, now you are better fed, you spare a glance for the nocturnal stranger. He has changed recently: more haggard about the eyes, thin about the wrists. This will not do! You cannot have him starving to death, worn out with fetching food; no more sandwiches if he dies. You offer him a sandwich: ‘Why don’t you have one?’ He looks at you and answers, ‘Because they are for you.’ And then you understand. It is the same with our lack of love. We cannot love as we should, as others need. We do not love ourselves even. But this is exactly where we are made in the image and likeness of God, in our ability to relate to other persons; or, more precisely, in our inability not to interact. The blessing has become a curse, as our inner loss spreads. We do not have enough for ourselves, still less for others. But then, in the middle of the fallen world a man speaks words the like of which men and women were created to speak: I am the bread of life. Anyone who comes to me will never be hungry; anyone who believes in me will never thirst … Your fathers ate the manna in the desert and they are dead; but this is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that you can eat it and not die. I am the living bread that has come down from heaven. Anyone who eats this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I shall give is my flesh for the life of the world. John 6:35, 50–51 Jesus offers you love, for you, and for you to pass on. He gives what was lacking, the real food we long for from God and from each other. He stands in the middle of the human race and hands out his bread to all who will take it. Thus we can talk of the raising of our nature; there is a relating ‘I’ among us who loves as we should love. We can take his food, gorge on it, and then learn to imitate his sacrifice. It is not simply a matter of example. Let us think a little about that sacrifice. The bread is not quite how we would like it; not in nice soft white slices. It is a rough and broken bread, ‘my flesh for the life of the world’. The agony of the Cross is not an obvious sign of the love of God. But Christ’s love is so full, and so different from ours, because it was taken even to the last resort: ‘Father, forgive them, they do not know what they are doing.’ We have to appreciate the depth of choice involved in the Passion of Jesus. At any point he could have answered his taunters and saved himself. At any point he could have summoned the power that stilled storms and gave sight to the blind. At any point, God could have intervened in tiny, invisible ways to prevent the situation becoming humanly inevitable. He did not, for the same reason that he will not just punish us, or scrap the whole world and start again. Christ resisting his Cross would have been an act of self-defence, of aggression such as we do every day. He could have defended himself, with swords or thunderbolts, but at the expense of those around him. This is what makes the difference. His love consists of a total giving of himself, unmixed with anything else, any other interest, any other motive. It is the love which the Father and Son share in the Holy Spirit, the same love which overflowed in the creation of you and me and the whole world, and the same love we were meant to show to each other in him and to him in each other. But we say ‘no’ to God and to ourselves and to others in a thousand little ways each day. Christ fulfilled the will of God, gave to the Father a total ‘yes’ because at each stage he responded with the gift of love. At last, there was a part of creation which no longer held up God’s grace with resistance. All we have to do is get in touch with Christ, and keep in touch. The Church exists simply as a way of doing this, so that Christ walks with each person the path of life. In some senses, it is the way of doing this. Catholics believe that in the Church, God gives us the love of Christ, and a community in which to share it. The theological term for this is ‘sacrament’. Before we think about sacraments, however, it is time to make concrete some of the doctrines we have looked at. We now have sufficient resources to make some sense of everyday life. PART 2 THE LIFE WE LIVE (#ulink_6273a85a-d2e7-5641-bd41-8c6c32054495) Chapter 6 GET REAL (#ulink_b02192cf-a163-5bc0-9f80-e53d75531cf5) But they give solidity to the created world. Ecclesiasticus 38:34 The aim of this chapter is to show how the doctrines we have been exploring can impact on the way we see everyday life. The Gospel is about Jesus Christ, the God who lives with us. Let us begin with the part of life which is perhaps the least likely candidate for finding God: the daily drudge of working (or, worse, not working) for our living. The modern period has witnessed a large degree of confusion about the purpose and value of work. In the ancient world, things were much simpler. Greek culture, for example, thrived on the institution of slavery, which left a large leisured class able to enjoy the delights of politics, the theatre and warfare. Such a way of organizing society was not simply convenient, it actually reflected what were perceived as fundamental facts about human beings. It was not just the case that slaves were people who had fallen on hard times, or were the captives of vanquished enemies. People became slaves because they were that type of people, understood as almost a separate species. As Aristotle put it, ‘The natural slave is one qualified to be, and therefore is, the property of another or who is only so far a human being as to understand reason without himself possessing it’ (Politics, 1.5). It is hardly necessary to trace the path of such thinking through history. Perhaps the clearest expression is in the eighteenth-century description of those who did no work at all as ‘people of quality’. Nor is it fair to blame the Greeks. Aristotle was cited only because he gives such a bald statement of what is so easily assumed. The same perceptions would have been found in ancient – Old Testament – Israel. Even in this economically very simple, agricultural society, wealth, and the consequent ability to have servants and be freed from daily drudge, was seen as a sign of righteousness and of blessing. Though the wicked may prosper for a short while, the psalmist assures us that this is done on credit, and that we shall soon see his widow and children begging in the streets. When Job is suddenly cast into utter destitution, the only explanation his comforters can find is that he must somehow have sinned without knowing it. It is but a step from saying that riches are a sign of God’s favour to saying that rich people are the people that God likes. Such thinking underlies the Pharisees’ statement about Jesus in St John’s Gospel that ‘as for this man, we do not even know where he comes from’. Which is simply a way of saying that he obviously does not come from the right place, the right people. The market place We have to face the fact that for most people, the word ‘work’ is synonymous with that of ‘toil’. There are two opposing tendencies, which to some degree are present in everyone. One is to minimize work as much as possible, to adopt the attitude of one who ‘clocks’ on and off with little regard for what is done in between, and little sense of purpose in it. The other is to be workaholic, to be someone who cannot stop, who stays late at work or even brings it home at weekends. In some senses, work has become his, or her, life. It would be unwise to rhapsodize about the supreme Christian value of work unless it is taken on board that work is for many a kind of trap, in either futility or the hectic pursuit of rewards that the pursuer then has no time to enjoy. An example of the first is the treadmill of industrial production so well documented in Victorian social fiction, and still to be seen in the sweatshops of emerging Asian economies, while the second is a phenomenon recognizable to many a tired commuter. What is it that lies at the root of these problems, that has made work a more deadly enemy of the soul than idleness? Perhaps it might be summed up in the word ‘alienation’. The issue can be put very simply. Some people have work which is obviously fulfilling. Take doctors, for example. They spend their day either curing people or helping them to bear their suffering. At the same time they do much to support friends and relatives of the sick, and provide a genuine and real witness of love in society. Their work contributes, and they see the result. While most doctors would seek to diminish the rosy glow about their profession, it remains an example of what the Second Vatican Council had in mind when it said: When men and women provide for themselves and their families in such a way as to be of service to the community as well, they can rightly look upon their work as a prolongation of the work of their creator, a service to their fellow men, and their personal contribution to the fulfilment in history of the divine plan. Gaudium et Spes, 34 The same could easily be said of teachers, social workers and many others. But again, if we look around at the majority, it just does not seem to apply. How does a man in a production line turning out, say, sports cars, contribute to society? You might say that he provides necessary means of transport. But who buys sports cars? Not many people, and certainly not the men who make them. A rather disproportionate amount of society’s resources of labour and materials thus goes towards providing a particular, and perhaps unnecessary, means of transport for rather a few people. If we raise the stakes, as Gaudium et Spes Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/laurence-mctaggart/being-catholic-today/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.