Gustavo Gutierrez, quoting St. Bernard, says we must drink from our own wells. The fount of living water is within us. The problem is the Church. It does not encourage us to be anything other than consumers of the Sacraments. I do not want to downplay the importance of the Sacraments but if they are what they are claimed to be, and if they work ex opere operato, then how come that priests and religious can receive the Eucharist day after day, every day of their lives without being transformed. The Church encourages people to remain at the synthetic conventional stage of faith; to accept what ‘they’ say; to be religious consumers of comforting and undemanding platitudes; to be cultivators of the inner gardens of their souls. It does not lead them out into the desert; show them how to be strangers in a strange land, how to find the inner well of living water which will nourish their journey both into and out from the centre of their being.
The Church has externalised the journey we all have to make. It has placed the goal outside us and beyond even this life. Only in Heaven, it tells us, do we come to the end of all our searching, discover who we really are in the discovery of the transcendent God. Until then we must make do with words and symbols, we must live and act in the blindness of faith. Knowledge is the knowledge of stories handed down for generations. It is second-hand abstract concepts passed on by people who are often more concerned with the niceties of logic and the problems of hermeneutics than with living reality. You cannot know. You will never know until you die. That is why you have to accept what we say. Such pride and arrogance! What a distance we have come from the New Testament.
Only if we can find the Spirit within will we be able to face up to the problem of alienation which all who really search for God must feel in this society of ours. Only when we can hear the inner song will we be able to dance to a different tune and it is only when we are dancing, caught up in the music, that we can draw others after us.