I recently fulfilled an invitation I had received from the parish of The Holy Name Catholic Church in Newcastle (England). Me being invited to speak on Catholic property anywhere is something not to be missed. It was the second time I had this type of opportunity since my silencing — the other one being in the U.S. eleven years ago. The parish priest in this parish, in the heart of Newcastle, is Michael Campion, a Kilkenny man, and a wonderful person. In the large nameplate outside his church he has this statement: ‘Young or old, married or single or divorced – and whatever your gender – there is a place for you in our parish’. And the people told me it is by far the most ‘alive’ parish in the diocese.
The invitation to me came from the local Newman group, but it was strongly supported by Michael.
I gave two talks, an afternoon and an evening, and in both occasions the hall was full. After each talk there was lots of engagement with questions, comments and some personal stories. It was great.
What did I talk about? This is a brief outline of a forty five minute talk:
I spoke about Divine Presence, Jesus, the Scriptures as history or story, and how we might approach it in order to understand the truth contained in it.
The main people I drew my ideas from, and quoted at the talks, were Teilhard de Chardin, Anthony de Mello, Einstein, John Feehan, Tomas Halik and Michael Morwood.
I began, and continued to give reminders during my talk, with the words of de Mello “Anything we say about God is more unlike God than like God” The second basic idea, taken mainly from Halik; ‘every opinion, statement, dogma, etc, is time bound’. In other words, all knowledge needs to be open to fresh interpretation, using new imagery and language, so that it can be communicated properly to each new generation.
I said that, in my view, a big problem for the modern Church is that so much of its dogma comes from the early centuries and is preserved and handed down to us in the language and understanding of those times and does not make sense in our age. I gave the example of the creation story in Genesis which does not in any way fit in with what we now know about the universe and the fact that creation is an ongoing evolutionary reality. The dogmas around that Genesis story, with the notion of the angry God in the sky closing the gates of Heaven against all people because of the sin of our first parents, does not fit with our modern understanding that creation began over fourteen billion years ago, and humanity is on this earth around one hundred and fifty thousand years. If we take Genesis as an imaginative story based on the understanding of the time, it creates no problem, but if, as the early Church did, it is interpreted literally and dogmas for all time are based on it, we have a problem.
So, can we continue to say that Jesus came on earth to pay the price of humanity’s sin and turn aside the anger of God by dying a horrible death? I don’t think so. Which leaves the question, what was the meaning of the life of Jesus, to which I suggested, it was to preach The Kingdom of God, to show us how to live. And as a consequence I think there should be more emphasis on the life and teaching of Jesus rather than the major focus being on the manner of his death, which I absolutely believe was not to satisfy God, but rather was a result of the nature of his life and teaching, which was a threat to both religious and lay authorities of his time.
Original Sin, as outlined in that teaching, has to be problematic, which means in my view, we need to find some other way of explaining, and coming to terms with, the problem for evil which is still so prevalent in our time.
How long more can we continue to present the story of the Nativity of Jesus as a factual account of what happened, rather than what the scholars freely claim, but try to keep their insights from the ordinary believers, that it is a mythological story that originated in the first century as a way of making the Jesus story more credible to the non-Jewish believers who came from cultures and beliefs where frequent interaction between humans and gods was an accepted belief.
I just briefly touched on another idea that seems believable to me, and that I find stated by some of the scholars I am reading, though only from those on the fringes. That is, that Jesus was a Jew, and that he lived and died a Jew, not at all intending to start a new religion or church. I know, that in terms of church teaching, that seems a strange thing to say at first, but not if you think about it. Because we believe that Jesus was alive and present in the early developments of his followers, just as he is present to this day, and that his Spirit was guiding the later developments of the early centuries when the notion of church and priesthood began to emerge. But the dogmas declare that all of this about church and priesthood was laid down by Jesus before he died, and as such cannot be changed or developed.
And then, despite what de Mello said, I tried to say something about God, or, as I prefer to express it, the Divine. I quoted Einstein “the more I study science, the more I am amazed by the complexity of the universe, and the more I believe in the existence of a creator; humanity is part of a mysterious cosmic unity that has an inner power persistent through birth and death, an unfolding of greater complex life in which God is emerging”
The commonly accepted belief that science is in opposition to faith, and has blown it out of the water, no longer holds up, if it ever did. Increasingly now those who study cosmology and maybe more so quantum physics, are being overwhelmed by the mystery and wonder of what they are discovering, and are open to the same conclusion as Einstein.
Michael Morwood says: “The presence of God permeates everything that exists, holding everything in existence, in connection and in relationship. God is everywhere, and if God is everywhere, then God is here”.
A young couple, married less than a year, came to me after one of the talks asking how could they get to know God. I said to them that the Divine is powerfully present in their love for each other, and that presence would sustain them through all the ups and downs of their life. God is the energy of their love.
This was the way in which I presented, as best I could, the notion of God. We need to take the Divine down from that throne in the skies, and open ourselves to its presence in us and in all creation. And And in so far as we can do that, and develop an awareness of the presence of the Divine, it begins to throw a new light on so much that we were taught to believe. I am coming to understand that each one of us can say with some certainty that we are a son/daughter of the Divine, and we share the divine life. “In him we live and move and have our being”. And no nation, religion or whatever, can claim possession of the Divine presence. It is in the whole of creation.
Finally, a quote from Tomas Halik: “Faithfulness to the content of the faith is commitment to courageously, creatively, and responsibly revive and transform the forms of its expression so as to enable the content to be communicated in an intelligible and credible way. All attempts to shackle the freedom of the Spirit of God, to reduce the richness of his self-expression and to enclose it in a rigid, closed ideological system run the risk of the gravest sin: the sin against the Holy Spirit.”
I think that is something to ponder.
A personal note: there is a sadness in me, when I feel I just might have something more significant to say now than during the years of my preaching, that I have to go to England or the U.S. to find a Catholic door open to me. But then, on the other hand, if I was politically astute, maybe I would hold my tongue so that the locks might not be more firmly secured on the church doors!
