Phronema

Christianity is in a mess at the moment.  Those who believe with any sort of passion and really try to live their religion tend in the main to be fundamentalists and one is always wary of fundamentalism, of whatever flavour.  Why?  Because, I think, it is just not possible to have absolute certainty.  It is arrogant to say that what I believe is true.  It implies, even if it is not stated, that all others are wrong.  There are many people, of course, who are filled with doubts and uncertainties, who dearly wish not to doubt but to be sure and have something solid, clear and explicit to which they can adhere and by which they can judge all the other claimants for belief.  These are sort of people who are attracted to fundamentalism and to the Catholic Church.

The Catholic Church in the past claimed absolute authority, it still does but not with anything like the assurance or the general acceptance of former times.  It avoided the fundamentalist position by allowing neither scripture nor the teaching authority of the Church to become an absolute.  Each is tempered and interpreted by the other; both are seen in the light of what has always been traditionally believed.  

The Church is no stranger to crises or to challenges to its authority.  From the very beginning it has had to face other interpretations, which it called heresies.  Sometimes the struggle was long and bitter.  Sometimes the alternatives were more appealing, more warmly human, more idealistic than the inflexible and, at times corrupt, institution.  But they were always ruthlessly put down and none of the good, and there was much good in many of them, was recognised.  The Church lived in a black and white world, an either…or world, with no shades of grey, nor the slightest compromise.  As time passed the challenge of these alternative Christianities faded; some disappeared, others were marginalised, still others split and argued amongst themselves.  None achieved anything like the breadth, the diversity of spiritualities, or the universal dominance, both within and without, of the Catholic Church.

But now the Christian churches, all of them including the Catholic Church are faltering.  How does one go about being a Christian in this world of ours today?  There is no clear cut answer.  Some see abortion as an evil so great that it justifies the murder of those who procure it.  Others could never justify the use of a condom, AIDS notwithstanding.  Some bishops see the expression of homosexual love as intrinsically evil while other bishops describe how the realisation of their homosexuality made them aware of the dimensions of love, including Christian love.  Some Christian groups throw themselves into the struggle for justice to liberate both the oppressed and the oppressor.  Others would deny the Church any role in politics.  The Catholic Church still upholds the ideal of celibacy as something wholesome and good while for years it refused to acknowledge the appalling abuses perpetrated by its priests.  

However, to an extent, these are peripheral questions.  They grab the headlines but for the majority they are not the stuff of daily life.  The underlying question is how does one go about being a Christian in a world where most are not Christians and those who are are not sure what that involves?  “But wait,“ I hear you cry.  “Of course we know what it means to be a Christian.  You keep the Commandments, go to Church every Sunday and say your prayers.  Everyone knows that.“  

True, many people do know just that but if that is all there is to being a Christian it is not surprising that, in the developed world at least, Christianity is declining.  Is this the religion that took the Mediterranean world by storm two thousand years ago?  How could anything so bland, dull and unexciting have been the impulse that led the martyrs to go singing to their deaths?  What was the secret of these early Christians which led them to put their lives on the line rather than compromise their faith?  Whatever it was we have lost it.  Now, rather than making converts, we inoculate our children against religion.  We expose them to bland platitudes in sermons, hypocrisy and double standards.  With our mouths we say one thing but the witness of our lives says another.  It is hardly surprising that they look the other way.

“Ah,“ you reply, “but Christianity is about faith which leads to salvation.“  I think Christianity in the past has been a religion fixed on death.  In the early days it was a serious commitment and included the possibility of martyrdom.  After Constantine and the establishment of Christianity this hankering for an absolute commitment persisted.  Many felt that it was not really possible to be a full-blooded Christian and live an ordinary worldly life.  In fact worldly and Christianity were contradictory terms.  In the Middle Ages the monastic life, with its withdrawal from the world was seen as the nearest it was possible to get in this life to life as it would be lived in Heaven.  Christianity was all about world denial, ordinary life denial, self-denial.

That too has changed and today the problem is the absence of God. An obscure sense of something missing pervades our secular age. What? We are not sure, only that there is a lack. There is suddenly an interest in religious experience. It has become academically respectable and is offered as a course by universities. And then there is an interest in meditation. Many, many people wish to learn how to meditate. Not necessarily because they are searching for God. After all, God is not there, not even as a possibility. But it might put them in touch with themselves. It might delineate what exactly is missing. In a strange way, the more keenly we experience the absence the more we come to understand what is missing. We need to look beyond religion.

 Why is the absence of God a problem? The Big Bang initiated time and space. Hydrogen is transmuted in the stars into the heavier elements of which we, and the world we live in, are composed. Tiny plankton are transmuted into mighty whales. People are born, live for a time and die. The process works fine and is not a problem except for us thinking reeds, le plus faible de la nature, as Pascal said. We wonder how the process came to be and then we wonder why. The ‘how’ we know a lot about and are learning more every day. The ‘why’ is another matter entirely. We don’t know why. Many believe, and nearly all the major religions teach, that God has something to do with the explanation. But what? The world and mankind is taken for granted. OK, God created it and us, but why he should do so is never made clear. It is simply accepted as a fact of life. Thomas Aquinas says that creation is an act of love. Love pours itself out. This may be true but it raises more problems than it solves. Traditionally the main problem has been the fact of evil. If God is all-powerful and if he loves us why does he allow evil? But equally difficult is the problem of the absence of God. If God made us to know and to love him, as the Catechism says, why is it impossible to do either of these things?

I used to think that St. John had it all sorted out. He said that no one has ever seen God but that in loving our neighbour we love God because God is love. He doesn’t say that in knowing our neighbour we know God although in the OT the two terms are often interchangeable. So how can loving our neighbour be loving God unless the act of loving itself is divine, is of the essence of God. In which case we need to ask what is love? 

But none of this solves the problem of the absence of God. Granted that in loving we may be loving God and granted too that God loves us, that his Spirit dwells within us, but none of this impinges on our consciousness. We are not aware that in loving we are engaged in a divine activity. Nor are we conscious of God’s love for us. When we pray our words fall into silence. When we sit, mute, attentive in the stillness for some sign of the loving presence within, or without, there is only an empty darkness. God is not there. Why? 

It is not possible fully to understand what it means to be human without having some understanding of God. At least we have an experiential understanding of what it means to be a person, but God, for the vast majority, is a matter of concepts and those concepts light years from the reality. ‘God may be loved but not thought,’ the Cloud of Unknowing says. So, it is possible to speak with authority only of one’s own experience. This is why the teaching of Jesus is so important. He spoke of what he knew. We too can only speak of what we know but, unlike Jesus, this does not include God.