Sebastian Moore Blog

Sunday, 12 October 2008
this THE CALL

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

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

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

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

HOW CAN JESUS OF NAZARETH BE COSMIC?

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

THE ORIGINAL DUALISM

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

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

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

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

IN AN ANXIOUS TIME

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now look at the Eliot passage again. Just where you cling to your anxiety is
where you may suddenly let go. Just where you can feel yourself clinging is
where you dont have to cling, you can uncling and surrender to what is
trying to happen in you, where you are passive.

Now read Tolle at the beginning of his book, when he realises that there is
only one me, alone and terrified. Then the key words, unique in all spiritual
literature I think: resist nothing! Dont insist on yourself, let yourself be
annihilated. The moment of release from fear, classically described by Eliot
as coming at the point of intersection of the timeless (I) with time (me)
This moment is given neat in the Tolle description, and is what I am trying
to enter in this time of stress.

is me, and there is only me
Posted by sebastian moore at 23:30 2 comments
Friday, 3 October 2008
PROPHETIC MOMENT?
A PROPHETIC MOMENT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sebastian Moore
Feast of St Francis, 2008
Sunday, 28 September 2008
NEW SECULARITY
A NEW SECULARITY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now once this move by the classical mind faced with a history-conscious
document has been made and held to be the true understanding of the
documents, then the protest at this on the part of the short-changed
historical approach can only be heard as a liberal as opposed to a solid
understanding. The protest of the history-conscious mind at its evisceration
by the classicist is going to be heard by the classicist as rampant liberalism.
How thoroughly this misreading of the history-conscious mind by the
classical has gone is shown by a recent statement by the eminent theologian
Avery Dulles in which he characterises the two approaches to Vatican II in
a way that describes the protest of the history-centred mind at its
evisceration as a notionI dont have the text hereof the church that has
no fixed dogmas and is free to go along with any movements of a promising
kind. This is a travesty of the Alberigo position. Still, this resorting to
caricature on the part of a brilliant but still classical mind is a rather
powerful acknowledgment of the position being so caricatured. I have often
found that the last ditch defence of a position is to caricature the opposite.
For instance, I spent half a lifetime trying to convince my beloved mentor
Illtyd Trethowan that the Aristotelian idea of agent intellect was a
brilliant description of having an insight, but he persisted in seeing the
theory as positing a clumsy mental machine for turning sense-data into
concepts.

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

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

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

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

The statement that love, perfected, casts out fear needs to emphasize the
word perfected. Mutual fear, accepted as mimetic, is the inextricable knot
that only the Spiritand Our Lady the untier of knotscan resolve.

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

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

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

I am going back to our beginning as humans. Our emergence from the animal
is marked by desire as it supervenes on and sublates instinct, and desire is
mimetic: we see our own in each other, and we behave accordingly, that is,
rivalisticallywith, however, the other possibility: admiring love. In this
dialectic is our language: it is universal. Wherever we go in humanity we
find, as Michel Foucault says, people without power over others seeking it or
people who have it holding it. To take a big leap, what manifests the
provincialism of the present Roman position is that it shows power nervously
insisting on itself. For it is in the other option of mimesis, admiring love,
that our universal human nature finds its salvation: the model is a Jewish
teacher, killed by envy and risen from the dead in a condition of divine
vindication minus human vindictiveness and manifest thus to his disciples
who, riveted, his tomb found empty, by the identity between the man of
earth and the man of heaven, are enraptured and, in the supreme historic
instance of mimesis, became, as he is, people who have died into a
deathless life beyond life that we call eternal life, the life of the church.
CODA 2
Some gleanings from the current Commonweal are ad rem. Here is the
description of the installation of a new bishop in Ghana, in a Mass that took
five hours of enormous fun. Vatican II cleared the way for African Catholics
to use their own music and dance in their worship, and also opened the way
for charismatic renewal groups (There is an active one in Techimen), the
use of tribal symbols and the bright colours favoured in Africa. Its hard to
imagine how the Churchs remarkable growth in Africa could have happened
without the councils liturgical reforms. In Techimen that day, it seemed
that the church had taken the teaching of the council and not only run with
it but danced with it too. How pathetic are our speculations and fears as
we contemplate the recent Vatican resumption of the dressing-up box and
the rumours of the words of consecration being put into Latin!
By 2025, there will be 600 million Christians in Africa, but only 250 in North
America. By mid-century, 30% of Chinese people will be Christians. These
demographic shifts are vivid evidence of Karl Rahners observation that
Vatican II marks the emergence of the Weltkirche or world-churchwhat
Christian theology will look like when freed from its cultural bonds is a big
question.
Thursday, 11 September 2008
CALVI
ON THE CONTINUING ENQUIRY INTO THE DEATH OF
ROBERTO CALVI

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

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

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

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

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

APOLOGY

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

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

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

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

(Calvi speaks)

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

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

And kill the priest who knew too much to live
Who by the way, when he met with the pope,
Was fobbed off like Romerono reprieve
From church that chooses power in place of hope.

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

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

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

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

This toy inflatable, the stopper pulled
With death no longer, I otherwise schooled.
Lost Word
Once we have ascertained that there is in the church a fear to speak out, to
speak out of the faith that is in us, and that this has something to do with
what is arguably a clinging to power in a time of great insecurity, and that
the history of the Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council shows to
have been and still to be the refusal of power in the papacy to yield to the
urgent solicitation of the church in council and since, the question presses
on us: where do we go from here? Of course we go to the Gospel with its
persistent and clear injunctions, but there is needed an act of self-
understanding, individual and shared, that comes far closer to what you and
I are feeling in the church today; feeling in the church as we look at it, and
as we are it. The Gospel tells us that love, perfected, casts out fear but
we need a self-understanding that sees these two forces, of love and fear,
in their immediately felt contention. What does fear giving way to love look
like?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It has only just occurred to me to put together the Tolle terror sucked into
the void and the plight of us today as stated in that terrible sentence of
Nietzsche. Does even this new doubt in our cultural access to the beyond
deprive of its spiritual power the self divested of itself as hitherto known? I
dont think so.

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

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

I dont think I am digressing. That conversation gave me a taste of another
consciousness recognizably Catholic, in contrast with what is now the norm
where the church is the subject of discussion has only just occurred to me.
One thing he said, I remember, was I thought contraception was settled,
that it didnt come up in confession any more.

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

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

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

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

In sum, and in brief, the more persuaded one becomes of the Nietzsche
effect, the new doubt, the more clearly we are to see the role of the
Gospel in this regard. It is to save secularity from a world-corrosive
secularism.
Wednesday, 16 July 2008
MY ARTICLE SENT TO THE TABLET
Here is the finished product, no reply from the Tablet so far.

PICASSOS PARENTS AND THE KITCHEN TABLE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4:: University of Notre Dame Press 2007
PRAYER JOURNAL
DAY 2, SAME TEXTS

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

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

Jn 15: 9-13. I have loved you as the Father has loved meRemain in my
love. Jesus is the loved one of all time. No one has ever felt loved as he did,
and everyone feels if I were ever loved I could change the world. It is the
terrible plight of our time, people dont feel loved and so they stuff
themselves with ego stuff, all that our technology can buy. How shall Jesus
spread the contagion of the most-loved human? That is the Contagion of
Jesus, gives me my title.

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

LAMBETH 08

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

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

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

And while men fight for their demanding norms
How joyous is the birthplace of the forms.
LAMBETH 2008
FOR LAMBETH 2008

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

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

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

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

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

LK 19:41-42
Dont think of the magisterial Jesus deploring his rejection by his people;
think of the young radical on fire with love wanting to show the way of love
to the religious establishment, so in-place with all its rituals and its
brokerage of spiritual power. If only you could listen to what is in meif
onlyand the trade goes on, regardless, the old routine of religion. This
Jesus came to me as I read this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He showed himself as who we are to be
And they adored, now silent all the strife
And didnt he keep saying I am he!
I am the resurrection and the life.

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

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

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

Sebastian Moore
12.7.08

THE EMPTY TOMB IN FOCUS

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

PRAYING THIS

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

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

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

And I learn at long last how I slow down
And feel undoing a long-standing frown.
FOR LAMBETH 2008
Come to my house all you comfortable people*
Leave your stiff minds with ready thoughts outside
With those who huddle under the same steeple
Resist the huge and ever-flowing tide.

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

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

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

*from the rock opera Tommy. Tommy, age 7, at a Butlins holiday camp,
goes to his mother in the night for comfort and finds her in bed with a lover,
the two of them interrupted by her RAF husband unexpectedly back on
leave, whom the lover kills. The boy is traumatised and becomes catatonic,
deaf and dumb, resists all therapy. He becomes a winner at the pin-ball
machine and, on receiving an award, suddenly comes out with this beautiful
lyric.
PICASSOS PARENTS AND THE KITCHEN
TABLE
There is such a thing as ground gained in the way we understand ourselves
as humans, of shared insights that cannot be gone back on. What
immediately springs to mind is the unaccepability of slavery, leading to its
widespread abolition. And here are two other examples of ground gained:
the insight that men and women are equally human, equal in fact, and that
homosexuality is simply the way a minority of men and women are, and
cannot be regarded as deviant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3::I dont have the reference for this, but it comes in two books by James
Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong and Faith Beyond Resentment where it is
cited in full. It comes in the decree of Faith and Justication.

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

5: University of Notre Dame Press 2007
Tuesday, 17 June 2008
Liminal
ON LEARNING TO THINK AND SPEAK LIMINALLY

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

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

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

I want to say that this moment is attending on so many people today, only
they dont come to it because, as Tolle says, your mind is making too much
noise. Chapman is instinctively liminalattending to nothing in particular,
which is God of course. The year I joined the monastery, 1938, there was a
concerted effort to get the book condemned in Rome and put on the Index
of Prohibited Books. We had a good friend at court who squelched that. Now
the book, The Spiritual Letters of Dom John Chapman is a classic.

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

Any offers for the naming of this institute? The Liminality Institute? I dont
think so. But do give it a whirl!

THE CHURCH SEEN NOT IN A NEW AWARENESS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SM
14.6.08

TO A FRIEND

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

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

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

Of the spot, though, between us, theres no doubt,
Its not a thing we would argue about.

SM
15.6.08

DIMENSION

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

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

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

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

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

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

When someone said to Tolle, I want what you have: can you give it to me or
show me how to get it?he replied you have it already. You just cant feel it
because your mind is making too much noise. That answer grew into the
book that you are holding in your hands.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

O breath come slower as I wrestle with
Myself hounded and hunted by my myth.
Sea Change
THE CHURCH IN A SEA-CHANGE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Sunday, 12 October 2008

this THE CALL

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